The Hidden Factor Behind Chronic Illness (No One’s Talking About) with Zach Bush, MD

When we look at all of the food snacks that are labeled healthy and natural and have fiber and fruits and veggies and stuff like that, can only think of one or two brands that have a glyphosate free res label on the front. Is there meaning to organic anymore for buying these things? Is organic lentils going to put me at less risk than regular lentils?

It's a yes, always organic. And the caveat to that is the work from the Environmental Working Group EWG. They have the Clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen.

Right.

The Clean 15 are ones that you probably don't need to spend the extra money on organic because the residues are not different. And so the conventional non organic methodologies or chemical agricultural technique for growing those foods doesn't leave the food with much more residues. Fortunately, some of those are my favorites, like avocado strawberries. You're basically just poisoning your child if you put a strawberry on the plate that's not organically grown. It's just the amount of residues are off the charts. Apples number two, usually behind it. But you can go to the Dirty Dozen and glance across that list. It does change a bit. So season to season, which one's on the top? But those 12 are pretty consistent. So once you get that in your head of like grocery shopping, like all right, Dirty Dozen, I'm always going organic, clean 15, I'll save the money. Go conventionally grown. So all of those make a difference.

Before we dive into today's episode, I wanted to say that wellness was never meant to be a solo journey. My name is Mona Sharma, celebrity nutritionist. And that's why I created the Rooted Academy. A space where we can cut through the noise and bring together real conversations, real support and real healing. If you're ready to be part of a wellness movement that actually guides you towards tangible changes that last, join us inside rooted by visiting monasharma.com this morning when I dropped 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. And 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?

Yeah. So this story really kind of got moving or 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 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 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 particulate 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 and 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's 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 boon. We're going to feed the whole world. So that's when we kind of rebranded the Midwest as the breadbasket to the world. And we were going to feed the world, end starvation, because American farmers 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 sending 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. That'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, et cetera. The solution to that, that nature does is 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 chemic 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 killed kills anything you touch it with. So very effective, 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 catchphrase that all the agronomists and the salesmen were using for Roundup. Even by the late 80s, we were starting to see the consequences of that. And that first consequences 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 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 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 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, adhd, obesity with the use of glyphosate. And yet, still a decade later, lawsuit after Lawsuit with thousands, maybe later.

Thousands, yeah.

What are the changes so far?

None. The epa, Environmental Protection Agency in the United States is required to do a public hearing every time they go to reapprove Roundup or other related chemicals. Our team and many others around the world have testified every one of those open hearings. They happen every two or three years. This last one that we attended, there was 196 science teams from around the world presenting data. They are showing that it's a carcinogen, showing it disrupts endocrine dysfunction, showing it disrupts immune system function. And at the end of it, the director of the panel from the epa, USDA that was there stood up and said, it turns out that all the science you're presenting is very interesting, but it has nothing to do with our regulatory process. We can't turn your science into a regulatory decision, but we appreciate things. So our question was, well, where's the form? Where's the regulatory form that we can fill out to turn the science and that. And she literally said there is no form. And so that's the kind of situation we're dealing with, which is a quote, unquote regulatory agency that seems to be tasked with watching for the safety of our food and environmental interactions. And yet they don't even have a regulatory process in place such that the scientists, not paid by them or anything else, could actually put into use the science that we've proven. So there's just these fundamental blocks of a lack of interest in the government to actually enact something that would equate to a wellness program. Ultimately, you have a government that is protecting special interests, and that's been decades in the making. And so this is not at all specific to the EPA or the USDA or food. It's really across the board. You have special interests shaping the way in which a corporatocracy has developed here in the United States. So the sad conclusion of that is not so much economic or industry. The sad conclusion is it's our children that are suffering under the weight of this failure to respond to the science. And for that, I think that the only path forward that we have found as a group is storytelling back to the consumer. We have to change the thing. We can't wait for any government to take responsibility for this. We have to take radical responsibility for our households, for our communities, for our schools and the rest.

Storytelling. That is something that makes you so unique, something I'm really. You know, any person who listens to you can feel a spark ignite of wanting to change You've obviously taken it to such a level to realize, like, you feel almost helpless, right. And so we start trickling back down. And, you know, in my world, the education that comes with educating parents and just people about where a food comes from, from, and the amount of frustration, you know, if you talk about the crops that are sprayed most with glyphosate, when it comes to wheat, corn, soy.

Yeah, soybean's probably king of them all. All the legumes are very high because they're used as a desiccant in addition to a weed killer. So your lentils, your chickpeas, soybeans, all of those need to be dry before they're harvested or else they mold and can't be transported at. We can't get to market. Especially in your more northern climates, northern United States, and very high in your. Your hometowns up in Canada there, an enormous amount of glyphosate residues are put into those foods to dry those crops at the end of the season before the winter sets in. So you got to get that crop out of the ground before the first snows hit. And so you're in this rush as a farmer and, you know, the change in growing seasons makes this even a higher risk situation for every farmer, is that the seasons are literally shifting with this climate change that we're in right now. And so more and more farmers are finding themselves suddenly forecast two weeks ahead of schedule that there's going to be a big storm coming in. But if they get out there and they spray their entire soybean crop with Roundup within 24 hours, that thing's looking dry, and they can get that thing harvested two days later and they save the crop. And so it's really out of the extreme vulnerability that we've put our farmers into financially, that these kind of damage control tactics are taken that end up putting really high residues into our food, and that's ultimately poisoning the whole world. And Japan, I think, was the very first country to completely ban the importation of any crops with Roundup residues in there and ultimately banned North American crops. And then Germany followed that. Other European countries started to follow that. And so they switched their red basket from the United States. Germany and others in Europe switched to Ukraine. And within a few years, the Ukraine war started. And we move in with BlackRock and buy up all of their farmland, are now transitioning all their farmland from organic to chemical agriculture. So this is a pattern that continues to happen, is that the relationship between soil, food and humans is the biggest power play on the planet. And if you can control that, you control humans, because that residue, that high residue in many of these crops that you mentioned are the things that undermine our brain's creative capacity. Our sense of identity is actually undermined. And that's what our lab has done the most work on, is really, instead of doing the correlations of you spray this much Roundup and you have this much disease, we've now spent the last 15 years detailing out every single cellular pathway that Roundup is directly affecting human cells and how that leads to disease subsequently. That gets pretty fascinating in the end because the very first injury that glyphosate does to the human cell is breaks the tight junctions, the gut lining and the blood brain barrier. The tight junctions look like Velcro. They're complex proteins that look like a hook in the eye of the Velcro. And so it takes billions of cells and knits them into a single cell membrane that we would call the gut lining. It's one cell layer thick, half the width of a human hair. And so you've got this cellophane like thing that's microscopically thin, is your barrier between the outside world and your bloodstream. And that thin barrier blows apart when glyphosate touches it. And so our lab is the first to really detail out that relationship between leaky gut and the presence of glyphosate in very tiny residues. We're now showing mitochondrial changes and tight junction changes as little as 2 parts per billion, which is the lower threshold of detection of this chemical. Where typical rainfall, you're up at 10 parts per billion, 20 parts per billion. Typical air, you're breathing, 10 parts per billion. So the air you're breathing, the rain that's falling, all has enough to start to undermine your tight junctions. And this is where again, this issue of soil to food to human to control gets really interesting. Is that when tight junctions break, what's literally happening at the physiologic biological level is you're losing your identity. And now you look at the mental health crisis and you look people's sense of identity today, very easy to control us if our tight junctions are all broken and we're leaking.

Yeah. Despite our best efforts. I want to take a quick break from today's episode to ask if you've ever felt overwhelmed by all the conflicting health advice out there. I get it. My name is Mona Sharma, celebrity nutritionist. And that's why I put together with my colleague, Dr. Mark Hyman, 12 essential wellness tips. The foundational principles we live by to Optimize energy, digestion and longevity. These are simple science backed and rooted in ancient healing traditions. Register now to get your copy of the 12 tips@monasharma.com 12 tips. So we're going to dive into the gut microbiome. But you know, you mentioned all of these foods that seem like these staple natural foods from nature that we should be able to trust. I'll never forget when I was pregnant before I really understood glyphosate, mothers were told to eat oats, lots of oats, every day. And then to help with your breast milk, eat more oats. And then learning that it was one of the most sprayed crops with glyphosate. Now if you go down any aisle at the grocery store, when we look at all of the food snacks that are labeled healthy and natural and have fiber and fruits and veggies and stuff like that, the first ingredient is oats. And I can only think of one or two brands that have a glyphosate free res label on the front. Is there meaning to organic anymore for buying these things? Is organic lentils gonna put me at less risk than regular lentils?

It is less risk. Your difference might be tenfold in the amount of residues that you're being exposed to. And that's a big difference. And so that's a logarithm of difference between your organic and non organic. So I would say yes or always organic. And the caveat to that is the work from the Environmental Working Group EWG. They have the Clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen.

Right.

The Clean 15 are ones that you probably don't need to spend the extra money on organic because the residues are not different. And so the conventional, you know, non organic methodologies or chemical agricultural technique for growing those foods doesn't leave the food with much more residues. Fortunately, some of those are my favorites, like avocados. So an avocado, organic, not organic, probably no difference at all. The residues are minimal either way.

Yeah.

Strawberries. You're basically just poisoning your child if you put a strawberry on the plate that's not organically grown.

Absolutely.

It's just the amount of residues are off the charts. Apples number two, usually behind it. But you can go to the Dirty Dozen and glance across that list. It does change a bit season to season. Which one's on the top. But those 12 are pretty consistent. So once you get that in your head of like grocery shopping, like, all right, Dirty Dozen, I'm always going organic, clean 15. I'll save the money. Go conventionally grown. So all of Those make a difference. But when we started, you know, the film that set out to show the relationship between glyphosate spraying and cancer rates in the United States specific to the Mississippi river, which is about 85% of our chemical residues end up in that one river. And the highest rates of cancer in the entire world are the last 90 miles of that river. And so all that water soluble toxin collected off of all of the land of the entire Midwest ending up in that last 90 miles between Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Louisiana and you got farmers that are on their fifth cancer before they die. It's just, you know, unbelievable loads. And those, those farmers in particular, but even just the general communities that are around there, it's just cancer, cancer, cancer. So we set out to tell that story and we were devastated when we watched the soil testing in our very first farm that we stopped at way up in the headwaters up in Minnesota, and we watched the organic soils performing way less well than the conventional soils that were chemically ag managed. And so that was the aha moment of like I thought the story was going to be go organic. The story has to be go beyond organic. And so for there we're looking at regenerative, permaculture, biodynamic farming practices. And there's a lot of variations of those from continent to continent, from people group to people group. But in general, this catch term of regenerative agriculture has caught some traction globally. Now in Africa and other large areas, it doesn't work. It doesn't make sense as a word, just like organic does and make any sense in most markets. So everything's organic that grows. So. So from a marketing standpoint, agroforestry is the big term that really fits across all continents. And biodynamic and farming kind of fits into that. So the point being, yes, pay attention to your clean 15 and your dirty dozen and become part of the deeper solution. We need super healthy soils. And there's nothing in the organic certification that says anything about soil nutrient density, food quality at all. All it says is a long list of things you don't do. I don't spray that, I don't spray that, I don't do that. It doesn't really inform the farmer on how to actually create healthy soil or nutrient dense food.

Right.

And that's where the regenerative movement is starting to get traction, is communities and individuals are really starting to demand that for their children. And to do that now you got to grow food in your backyard as your first step. And then you got to Know your farmers. And so that's your local farmers market. It's a CSA which could a community supported agriculture project where you usually sign up as a subscription to a farm box. And every week you get this incredible box of seasonally locally grown regenerative vegetables, fruits that are growing out of there. A lot of those farmers that are growing direct to consumer aren't paying the money understandably and maybe appropriately to the USDA for the organic certification. And so you just need to know the farmer. What's your inspiration? Go visit the farm and take the advantage that those farmers are in your community. Can we come in on Saturdays with our kids and get them exposed to the farm and show them how things are done? They can help you weed for two hours, you know, whatever that is. So I think that that's the opportunity we're looking at is go beyond the organic label and start to really get re engaged with soil itself.

I think the regenerative word is something that really matters. I hope we see more of that and more people understanding that. And I want to dive into that because you and I were at an event at one commune with Jeff and we're talking about farmers and the challenges that farmers fate may, the challenges that farmers are faced with. And growing up, you know, farmers in our house, we would believe they're our first line of defense when it comes to our healthcare. If we don't have food, we can't eat. And I'm sure for most of our listeners, most of us probably couldn't just land on a farm tomorrow and know how to run it, know how to grow things without using chemical pesticides. Can you talk to us about the state of farming today? Because I think people are understanding, yeah, get to know your farmers, go to the farmer's market and stuff like that. What is the, the impact of genuinely building relationship with these farmers who are struggling?

That's become my one word definition of regenerative agriculture or regenerative anything is relationship. And if we don't begin there and we start to say, well, regenerative farming is 15 seed cover crop, no plow seed drill. Now you're regenerative, which is what's happening around the world right now. And there's a new regenerative organic certification from Patagonia and Rodale Institute. We collaborated to create that ROC cert. And there's actually two hundred and fifty other certifications that are coming down the pipeline at farmers. And farmers are fed up with that. They're just exhausted of them. The burden of proof and the burden of, you know, metricing and reporting all falling on them is really just beyond, you know, fair. It's, we need industries, the cost, the, the time, the labor of making that insert. And so basically you're pushing little farmers out every single time. So every certification is going to be not good for the small farmer. And we're seeing about 6,000, 8,000 family farms go out of business every year in the United States now. And largely that's not due to just the cost of certs or whatever. It's due to a lack of secession and a lack of finance access or capital access. And the reason they can't access capital is that if they have run out of the Runway for chemical farming, which all the farms in the United States are now just one crop, one season away from failure. So 50% of farms are now one crop away from bankruptcy. 50% of our farms. And so that vulnerability has played out because the farmers have denuded their soil of life Force for 30 years under chemical agriculture, which means they have to basically have their land on ICU life support at increasing cost every single year. Every year there's less life because you sprayed more chemicals in and you treated the crops with more chemicals on top of. So you killed the biologic life force within the soil systems. And so now you need more ICU care. If you've ever been in three days in an intensive care unit, you know that's going to break your bank. You can spend a million dollars in a week on one patient in the icu. And that's what's happening in farms. You can spend a million dollars a year on soil inputs now on a single family farm trying to resurrect dead soil. And so that cost is driving farmers down. So why do they do it? Well, they're kind of stuck because the industries did a very good job of working with the US Government to create expectations or demands at the banking level for USDA crop insurance. And USDA crop insurance is not able to be provided to somebody who's jumping out of the conventional farming matrix. And so somebody who says, I'm going to do permaculture and really drive incredibly great product for my consumers. They can't get bank loans because they can't get USDA crop insurance. Their neighbors spraying the heck out of their environment and their food and everything else with chemicals that are killing our children, they'll get bank loans all day long. They take out banks, so they get a half a million dollar loan to put in seeds and buy all of their chemical inputs for the year. And pay for all the diesel for driving the trucks all over the ground. Diesel is the second largest chemical behind the herbicides and pesticides really on any farm. And so all of those inputs, half a million dollars and then the crop fails, no problem. USDA crops insurance, which is actually more like a subsidy than it is an insurance program. So they get a check and they're fine. The farmer who decides they're going to do the right thing, they're in the same drought, they might still get crop out of the ground because the regen of organic always does better in drought. But they might have a 30% less. That 30% less was their margin. They lose the farm. And so the farmers are doing the right thing, want to do the right thing, but are disadvantaged at each point of crop insurance, bank loans for the inputs. And ultimately a deeper problem now is ownership of their own land. A lot of farmers have had to sell their land and are now leasing the land back from other owners. And those owners are largely large multinational corporations that couldn't care less about the piece of land or the farmer. They're just using it either as a tax shelter or as a long term covered real estate play. And so the farmer is sitting there doing the right thing by the land and suddenly, well, it's the three year out or exit strategy for the fund. And so they just sold the land. So the farmer just doesn't get their lease removed. And so they spent three or five years getting their certification and now they're out of luck and they got to go find another piece of land and start all the way over. Because the certifications are for the land, not the farmer. And so these are some of the deep lesions we have that are keeping farmers taking 100% of the risk with no support from government or peoples. And that's why meet your farmer, know your farmer is critical. We got to rebuild this whole farming system from the ground up at the level of human relationship.

Zach, if this was front page news, which it should be, there would be more activism, there would be more awareness, there would be more people kind of making informed choices every single day. And it's not.

Yeah, I mean the fact is it is often on the front page news. Some, you know, the Monsanto, you know, things are always there. $260 million settlement for a cancer case, it's on our front pages and people are not changing their behavior. And so I don't think headlines or science change people. And I've just become very convinced over the years that that's the case. So what does change people is human story.

Yeah.

So for Farmers Footprint, which is our nonprofit front arm that's really reaching for our engagement with consumers, households, communities and farmers, it was farmer stories that were really changing the needle. And so we, our incredible film team, led by an extraordinary woman, Leah. Leah shot all over the place and created a whole series of short documentaries that are three to five minutes long, really digestible on social media and the like of farmers telling their family transformation when they change from chemical agriculture into these more holistic practices. And every one of them makes you cry. They just like the passion of these farmers, the dedication, the risks they took, the extremity of their situation that led to their decision to change their behavior and take all the risks in making the change. It usually has to do with their children ending up in jail or their child diagnosed with leukemia or some other horrible thing has happened in the family which is the trigger to make the change. And then they make this change and nature comes leaping up out of there and wraps her arms around these families. And these families find themselves in abundance just a few years later. And so that story of farmers saying I went from absolutely at the bottom to abundance in a three year period really caught traction. Especially those stories where we started to see that the farmers that were making the change back to good farming soil practices and then going direct to consumer relationship, we're inspiring the children to come back to the farm. And so the farmer that's been doing conventional farming and just selling commodities to the big market has no idea on how to build a brand, a logo, a website their kids do because their kids got sent off the farm and went and did this. And they know social media, they know marketing strategy. So we've seen a lot of kids come back to the farms to start these direct to consumer brands very successfully and are starting to take over these farms in big ways around the country. And so that next generation of kids who left the farm and are coming back to the farm, I think will be part of this revolution of regeneration.

I'm part of the Farmer's Footprint community.

Thank you.

If anyone listening, it's an incredible resource not only for information, there are workshops that they give tools in order to grow your own food. There are, there's so many different practitioners and farmers that you can hear from to continue to be inspired. So thank you for that.

Yeah, I would go ahead and just a second pump on that is, is that backyard gardening course. So this is gardening 101 for somebody who doesn't think they can grow a houseplant you know, and so this is how you go out back, dig up that monoculture that you have in the backyard called Kentucky bluegrass, put in a small strip of food and then grow that to a larger portion of your backyard every year. It's so simple and it's so inspiring. And if a child doesn't like vegetables, it's only because they've never grown a vegetable. And so watching your kids get engaged, watching the household taste real food a few times a year, even starts to change the way in which that household has a relationship back to nature. So super potent. It's a one on one course. It's super short time commitment to get through that knowledge base and it's just inspiring. It's the best.

The farmer's footprint is how I got my son to eat broccoli. Somebody had posted a time lapse video of how broccoli grows and my son wanted to grow broccoli. So we lived somewhere where there wasn't a garden. So we got a big planter and we grew our own broccoli that year. So yeah, testament to that.

James, is life.

You said a powerful word which is connection and connection to myself, but also to my community and to nature was such a big part of my healing. And talk about our connection to our soil. And you know what I'm recalling right now is I was on a trip to India and I was at a spice plantation. There was a woman there wearing a T shirt and it said in nature we trust. And this plantation was run by women. And they took us on a tour to understand how to grow the plants, how the herbs, how different spices would grow at different times of the year, and why the seasonal aspect was so important. Because the microorganisms that were within the soil could actually communicate to our system at different times of the year to support our immune system.

Yes.

This is before I became a nutritionist.

Yeah. The soil to human health is a direct relationship. So we now know that every human disease roots back to a disruption of the microbiome. The microbiome is a description of the soil system of the human body. There's certainly micro and macrobiome in soils globally and water systems, everything else. But as a catch term, as it's been used in the lay press and everything else, the microbiome is usually pointing back to the human soil system. So that's the gut skin. And now we know every single organ system in the body, even your brain, has a normal microbiome living within it to help nurse mate it into its optimal health. And that bacteria and fungal protozoa community is producing many, many useful things. Obviously nutrients, but also detox enzyme pathways, enzyme pathways for feeding and addressing inflammation, enzyme pathways that will kill cancer cells, all kinds of wonderful things, but they also produce the communication network. And so our supplement that we derived from fossil soils is called ion intelligence of nature being the whole story there. Nature builds its intelligence through biodiverse systems. So when you get enough species of bacteria, fungi, protozoa playing in the same environment, they each contribute to a massive communication network. And that communication network is something at biochemistry level called redox signaling. But it's really working like your cell phone. And so We've got roughly 6 billion cell phones on the planet right now or something. And so those 6 billion cell phones are absolutely useless as a communication tool if the wireless communication network's not there. And that wireless communication network is not coming from your cell, it's coming from the towers that, that are spaced out every couple kilometers if it's 4G, every couple blocks if it's 5G. So you got all these cell phone towers everywhere that are the wireless communication network that connects the cells together. Human biology works the same way, except it's way more magnificent. Instead of a few billion cell phones, you're 70 trillion human cells in a single body, coordinating relationship to around 14, quadrillion mitochondria inside, another 1.5 quadrillion bacteria outside the cells. And the numbers just go on and on. So you got this astronomically complicated system, and each of those cells, again, are not building the cell phone towers. The cell phone towers are made by the microbiome of soil and gut. And that system is building this redox system. And so you take 70 trillion cells into a single organism, if your wireless communication network is up. And so if you kill the soil, you lose the cell phone towers. Now all of your cells are isolated. Isolation of cells is the root of disease. We call it chronic inflammation, things like this. But it's ultimately. Sorry.

It's okay.

It's ultimately isolation.

Yeah. I heard you speak about the internal terrain of our body and how ion can support this. And it's been about five, four or five years now that my kids have been taking ion. It's something that I add to their morning water and to take to school every day. And I swear, for my son and for myself, I took us from experiencing issues with digestion to feeling a sense of normalcy after some time. Can you talk to us about what you've seen in the lab? Like, I would love to get in your Brain. The incredible team that you have who can see. When you found Ion and what it did to the human body, what did you see?

Miracles. None of us had ever seen anything like it. You know, collectively in our laboratory, our scientists had had, you know, cumulative 120 years of time under a microscope. And so we, we just assumed we were at the top. And Johns Hopkins University of Virginia, like we, we came from the best programs in the world.

Yeah.

And we'd been staring at microscopes. John Gilday built the microscopes of, of modern medicine. Like he's just a genius level coming out of Hopkins and everything else. We started seeing cells repair and that has never, never really been seen before when you see complex cellular systems. So we were just shocked to watch this happen because it's never been seen before to see complex cellular systems rebuilding three dimensional tissue. And the implications were huge. It was like, wait, if this can happen, then really anything can happen. And that started to answer how I had seen so many miracles happen in clinic and I'd seen them happen. Nice use in other places. How does the system suddenly self repair? How do you have phenomena like spontaneous remission where stage four cancer goes away in a day? The fact is the body is constantly healing. It's a healing machine beyond comprehension. But we've never seen that happen in a petri dish, because petri dishes are ultimately studying science in monoculture. And so you'd grow a single type of cell and then you study the heck out of that and pretend like you understand the whole. And the fact is, by the nature of it being a monoculture study, you are studying a fallacy, you are studying something that is a non natural system. So basically the last 70 years of science is all bunk. We don't have a single piece of truth in any of that because it was all monoculture study.

I'm so curious to know this. So many of us are visual people. If we saw how things function, this ecosystem inside of us, how it worked, if we were in tune with what it meant to have these holes in our microbiome because of our outside world, I think that we would probably be more engaged and in a world right now where we've really lost track with what it takes to heal. My biggest mission is to help people understand that their body can heal itself. That you are your healer, not the world around you. Not the fad, the protocol or this fantastical supplement that you've heard. But when I come across products like Ion, where the intention is to simply restore the, to restore the body, to enable the system to come back on track, to function at its best and then to see so many people kind of reap the rewards from it. This is where I want to really get the word out. You also have a product for pets also, which I think is so important because I think that's a necessity for so many of us. But I think that. Would you agree that nutrition science has kind of gone off track in the.

Same way, monoculture being the story again. So when we started to dumb down nutrition to mono nutrients, calcium or manganese or magnesium, said well, we need more magnesium in the diet and then we just create a bunch of magnesium, pour that into body or vitamin D. We need more vitamin D. So here's a 50,000 unit vitamin D capsule. I've seen health improve with vitamin D monoculture for a period of time. But if you don't start to change the environment around it, you start to imbalance the body. Vitamin D is a little bit lucky that the body actually takes that in an inactive form. So it's a little bit hard to overwhelm the body with vitamin D. It's probably not your best example, but magnesium would be an example. Your vitamin B's are probably your most potent example of an overdose. And so your B complex or your B vitamins are supposed to be quite traced in your food system. And then the USDA comes up with the thing, says well actually this is the minimum amount of vitamin B we should have. And since everything's processed food, our Americans aren't getting enough B. So we'll give them USB vitamin B complex. And those vitamin Bs are kind of the backbone of any kind of daily multivitamin. And so you got vitamin A's, you got vitamin B, you got a little C in there, you got some D and then maybe you got a touch of K in there. But that a D E K with megadose B is your typical multivitamin. And the stories are unfortunate around there. The first big clinical trial, the largest clinical trial ever done in in humans coming out of the United States was the Women's Health Initiative. Wih that study was 120,000 women studied for 25 year period. It was huge study, massively expensive to do, was the most definitive study we've had in nutrition science within the US and what it showed published years later because they didn't want this data to disrupt the industry, I think. But years after the data was collected, it was finally published that the daily multivitamin had increased mortality in these women by 9%, which was worse. Than smoking. And so We've known since 2010 that multivitamins are killing women. And yet every single commercial billboard, everything else, multivitamin this or that. And so mega dosing the body, whether it be with chemical herbicides or our supplements, this mononutrient approach to the body is really ineffective and, in fact, harmful. So what is ion, and why are we calling it a supplement? The only reason we're calling it supplement is because the FDA doesn't have a category called soil. So if we could call it your daily soil dose, that's what we would call it, because it's the only supplement on the market that doesn't do something to your cells. Every other one is like turning on, you know, gene compound, gene signaling pathways. It's disrupting other signaling pathways. Vitamin D is a potent steroid. You know, these are all turning lots of things on at the cell level. So that's why megadose, vitamin B or megadose anything, is ultimately going to be disrupting or imbalancing a complex symphony of a human cell system by using these megadoses. Ion doesn't do anything to the cells. It's just the cell phone tower. So it doesn't tell the cells to do anything, literally. So it's the most passive supplement on the marketplace because it's really not functioning as a supplement. It's functioning as a foundation of communication. And then the cells will do with that information what they will, which is always repair. And so it takes just seconds of the communication towers being up, and suddenly the tight junctions are being produced, protein synthesis, and not only protein synthesis, but the coordinated process of taking those 13 different proteins and turning them to complex Velcro shapes that are actually functionally active within minutes is what we were blowing our mind on the microscope. We didn't know that could happen that quick. We thought at best, like six days out from a cell repair of a deep injury to the tight junctions. To see it three, six minutes out completely back, not only to normal, but actually better than normal was defying logic for us. And so it took us years of doing this over and over and over again before we came to terms with the fact that human bodies are healing machines at a rate we can't imagine. We've just fundamentally lost communication. So that's happening at the sera level, but to your best example, the macro level is an autistic child. When this product hit the autistic community globally, miracles broke loose. Because the supplement's not doing anything to a child. It's not fixing autism. It's not doing anything to fix the microbiome. It's simply helping the systems of the bacteria in your gut speak to the cells inside your body, speak to the mitochondria inside of those cells. And so you're storing communication across these different cellular communities. And that relationship rebuilding leads to an instantaneous process of biology. And so a supplement that doesn't do anything in the human body is letting these children suddenly reveal how intelligent they are. And we saw children go from non verbal to suddenly speaking a full sentence in a week. They hadn't even ever said a word. And they know how to speak, not only how to say a word, but they never had to learn how to speak. They just spoke. And so this is going at the same thing that we see at the cellular level is you don't need to teach a cell how to build a complex protein. It's inherent within the cell. You don't need to teach a child how to speak. It's inherent within their experience of being human. When the communication cell phone towers go back on, the system does its most genius thing. And so watching it under a microscope or watching a child begin to speak to his mother for the first time is a supercharged moment of understanding the miracle of life. It is hyper intelligent, always ready to improve, always ready to heal.

It's these moments that remind us. It's like we have to make the shift back from thinking to knowing that we are capable of healing ourselves. And it's more stories like this. Thank you for shedding light on that. Because people need to hear the why outside of just seeing another bottle on their counter. And I don't hear a lot of doctors asking why certain people are deficient in vitamins. It becomes very prescriptive or in worst case scenarios, if there's, you know, symptoms or diagnoses that often come with prescription medication. Instead of understanding, well, why is there deficiency to begin with? And if we are that disconnected from nature and you talk about this ecosystem within us, as I understand that is connected to the ecosystem around us, we're completely disconnected.

Yeah. Isolation is described down at the physics level. So even before you have a biologic cell, it happens down at the atomic level of a single atomic. And it's the second law of thermodynamics. It says any system left in isolation increases its chaos. And so I think that's a good description of where we're at as a human species, but also as a planet, as we have fundamentally disrupted the communication networks that built complex community at the serial level and at the social levels. And with that disruption of communication comes isolation. With isolation comes chaos. And so we are seeing an increase in chaos in our children's mental health, in our economic policies and stability globally. We have the US dollar and other fiat currencies collapsing actively. We have governments going to war all over the world as kind of a last ditch effort to stimulate their economies. And that kind of mentality is just symptomatic ultimately of this deeper loss of relationship.

How interesting. So you just took this global ecosystem and all I'm thinking, as you know, again, I can always reference the ashram just from my own experience. I feel like Eastern medicine has known this all along. They take something so macro, but they bring it back into the internal state of being, recognizing that our internal state on more of an esoteric level is a reflection of our external world also. And so when we're taking down this like turbulence within us, hasn't Eastern medicine known this all along? It's, you know, bringing the body back on track in order for healing to take place, instead of constantly adding more or recognizing that we're getting sick because we feel, because we're disconnected, because we've lost our sense of self and connection to the world around us.

I would say every human knew this up until very recently, the last century really. And so only in the last 100 years do we lose track of that reality. If you look at any indigenous practice, whether it's the Celts or the Eastern Europe or Western Europe, herbalism, plant medicine, all of this was normal day to day activity. Every single culture used fermentation as a front line of dispense against disease. Every single culture developed, spent enough time outside that the plants would talk to them, to tell them what in their biosphere is there for medicinally. And so these long term relationships of largely women in nature was connecting the intuition of this. And so we point a lot to Eastern traditional healing arts as something different than Western. But in fact, the only reason that it looks that way is the Western blew apart that phenomenon so thoroughly and in fact demonized all of it by 1910, something called the Flood Flexner Report, which the Rockefellers had commissioned and had paid a single doctor to write this whole expose, quote unquote, on herbalism and kind of ancestral healing arts as woo woo, as kind of witchcraft. And so that one article that came out of the one large publication, the Flexner Report in 1910, was really the demise of the Western connection to their thousands of years of tradition of herbalism and natural medicine. And so it's all Peoples, all peoples, knew that this Earth was here to be our benefactor, not our enemy. And it's only in this last hundred years where we came to through the English language, define nature as everything in the firmament of the earth. Minerals, plants, animals, as opposed to humans or anything humans have made. That's Oxford English Dictionary. And so when we put not just outside of nature, but in other words, up opposition to nature, humans and everything humans have made, then you see us kind of express the western civilization as we do today. And the Eastern civilization simply didn't have a flexion report. They never damned their own 9,000 year history of Ayurvedic nutrition out of India, or Tai Chi and Qigong or any of these practices. Reiki out of Japan, or acupuncture out of Japan, China, Ireland, all having their own thousand plus year history of these techniques. And so being human is to know Earth. We lost our humanity when we disconnected from Earth. And so this raging inhumanity that we have within ourselves is expressed at every level of society, but I think really most viciously inside of ourselves. We are so mean to ourselves, we are so brutally judgmental on ourselves, we're so brutally unfortunately loving to ourselves. We tend to serve everyone outside of ourselves. Our jobs, our social groups, way before we take the time to slow our breath down. Drink something that's from the earth, sit down and smell the soil. You want an antidepressant, Go out in the woods, lay down on the floor. And that's what they do in Japan, that's what they do in a lot of European countries now it's called forest bathing. And they've now found this to be way more effective than any antidepressant ever put on the market is just go lay down in the woods 10 minutes a day and you'll, you'll be, your major brush will be gone. So it's just these stupid simple reintegrations of nature into our daily lives that have become such a rarity in the day to day life of so many in the Western Civ.

I'm smiling at stupid simple because I can feel, you know, a lot of people, I'm sure we, they listen. I myself can listen to a podcast. In my world especially now, we can get, it's very easily easy to get overwhelmed. There's so much information and a lot of that information I'm feeling is just further distraction. And I feel like a lot of this distraction and education that's going out there and maybe even a lot of the choices that we're making, they're all driven by fear. Fear of aging, fear of getting sick, fear of not having enough, fear of the next pandemic, fear of so many things. And maybe it is judgment that's causing us to drive from fear. But so, you know, through your story and how you shifted your career, did you have to move through that ego process of shifting out of judgment into a more compassionate space for yourself in terms of helping other people understand how they had to heal? Because what I don't want people to walk away from is listening to another podcast where somebody else has a protocol when what I hear you speaking to is more the intelligence that exists within people that they simply have to be willing to recognize. And in order to recognize, it's almost like there's a lot of work that has to come in quieting the judgment of the mind and the perceived ideas of what you've been brainwashed to thinking that you need to do. Whether it's two hours at the gym or the supplement protocol or I don't know, like, how do we make this shift? We can't hang out with Dak Bush every day.

Well, we created an eight week program that's called Journey, Journey of Intrinsic Health. Health with the message that health, like you said earlier, comes from within. It's the only place you can come because that's actually how you came to be. We talked about mitochondria inside of a human cell, 200 of them, unless it's a neuron, then there's 2,000, unless it's the egg of the woman. And then there's 600,000 nearly. You know, we're well over half a million mitochondria inside a single egg. It is the brightest thing that the universe does. Biology or life is inherently logarithms brighter than the sun. So the difference between physics and biology is the intensity of light per cubic centimeter. You have to have a concentration of light energy over nuclear power by another logarithm or two before you get to biology. And then to get to multi cellular life, like a tree or a human, you have to have a 10x again. And it was the mitochondria that allowed for that 10x to happen. Bacteria and fungi don't have mitochondria. They have to use fermentation rather than this respiratory process that the mitochondria use. So picture yourself 10,000 times more energy per cubic centimeter than the sun. That's what life takes to generate itself. And so when we start to look at where does health come from, it ultimately comes from a complex ecosystem that has mastered the ability to concentrate light energy per cubic centimeter. And that's a dance between the chlorophyll, which are little mitochondria inside of the tree, the soils and microbiome of the earth or the human gut, and then the mitochondria living beyond them. And it's the passage of the carbon battery of carbohydrates and fatty acids moving sunlight into higher and higher concentrations as you move from chlorophyll to microbiome to mitochondria into the human cell environment. And so the concentrated light energy is ultimately how you define life. And that's where your health comes from. And so our eight week program really focused on what are the daily routines. And it's not eight different biohacking tools. What are the daily routines that your body is naturally doing before human technology came along to really master this light concentration? And it comes down to a couple of really fundamental pieces. And the first one in our course, the first week is called Bio. And that week is all about becoming you. And what we have now sorted out through, you know, kind of our new understanding of 9,000 years of Chinese medicine is that at the fundamental foundation of disease is an emotional trauma and a stored emotion that blocks the communication network from happening. So step one on the journey to becoming more humane society and rediscovering our humanness is going to be releasing our emotional trauma. And so to do that, you have to forgive yourself. And once you've forgiven yourself, you have the opportunity to forgive other people around you, but it has to be gotten from within. So what that starts to look like is a deep apology to yourself. I am so sorry that I have put everybody else in front of you. I'm so sorry that I have made short term convenient decisions on what I would put into my body. I'm so sorry that I've covered my face with, you know, 126 carcinogens every day because I'm afraid of the beauty that I was created with. I was afraid it wasn't enough or whatnot. And so I'm so sorry that I have, you know, made short term decisions to, to underrepresent my truth at every single angle. Because I don't feel like I have a voice in circles or communities and so go through that list of apologies and really own that space to yourself. It's nobody else's fault. This is what you've chosen to do on a daily basis. And we can all say we've got a trauma path, or we can all map our trauma Patterns and all of this. But the fact is we have to begin at the I am sorry. And the speed at which forgiveness can come is so lovely. And so I believe that the new humanity is going to emerge from. From the speed of forgiveness. And I think it can happen instantaneously because I've seen it happen. I've seen people forgive themselves at the hospice bed and two days later not have cancer in their body. It has to begin at the reconnection to self.

Yeah, I love that you brought that up. I ended up getting into nlp, nlp, so I could just help my clients understand. I learned very quickly that people would book a call with me. They would want to know the perfect diet, supplements, exercise. And within a few minutes they would be met with tears when I asked them about how long. When's the last time in your life that you felt peace or happiness and joy? And I hope that listeners really take this in because how can you keep filling the body with things that you're trying to fill a void with without acknowledging that there's a sense of unhappiness or disappointment ease ultimately within you? I think a lot of people carry that suffering, even the source of judgment. Why do we judge other people so often? It often comes from our own feeling of feeling not enough in this world. And what a sad place to be. And I know that you've witnessed so many people. I'm really into the idea of quantum healing, the knowingness of the body to kind of recalibrate itself when you can get to a point of almost nothingness and what that feels like and peace that comes with that instead of the attachment that we have to everything in our world. So I love that you brought that off because it's really an opportunity for all of us listening to this to pull back, to pull back and maybe see how we can simplify to the stupidly simple things every day.

Yeah. And ultimately, to find yourself, you do have to be witnessed. And so even though it's an inside job of finding that apology and moving to forgiveness, it's very hard to have an objective viewpoint of who you are until you're witnessed. And what we've seen again and again is nature, is that perfect witness. And so it's hard to find a human that can see you because of the ego duel that happens there. But the tree that you lay down under can witness you. And when you make yourself vulnerable enough to be seen by the tree, healing is just around the corner.

We're going to start to wrapping things up. But I don't want you to suffer. Hey, Oscar, can you bring in. There's two honey packs over there. Can you just see? Zach, do you want beekeeper's honey?

Sure, I'll try. Yeah.

I may have made the mistake of burning palo santo, which I don't want to be harming you. No, it's a squeezable pack. There's either the stress or the pure honey. One of those. Just bring them in. Let's soothe your throat. He's got some water. All right. So there's a vitamin C with propolis. This should soothe. Try that.

Cool. Bee medicine. It's a good example of nature right there, right?

Absolutely. I'm pulling back more and more, Des. You just take a few moments. There's no rush.

Sure.

I find myself with my clients, understanding mitochondria and my own healing and even my heart palpitations, for crying out loud. I was on antibiotics every year from the age of three till about 16, two, three, or sometimes four times a year for chronic tonsillitis and strep throat. Until my mom with her arthritis found a functional medicine doctor. And then I haven't been on them ever since. Doctors never asked me about that. In my gut microbiome at the time of my heart palpitations, they didn't ask me about my digestion. They didn't ask me about my chronic anxiety, sadness, or depression at that time. But when I got years later, looking back at my time at the ashram, what I was doing was inviting light back into my body. Nature wasn't part of the protocol. Living was built into nature. Sunlight wasn't part of a morning ritual. It was just part of everyday livelihood. Eating food with high prana and life force energy with no ingredient labels was just a known part of healing. Conversation with others with no cell phones at the table was something that allowed us to connect to people year after year. And then, of course, tuning into our body and welcoming light through meditation or breath work, as you've mentioned, or even chanting or humming or singing or dancing. I really look back and I see that time. And the visual that I have is just light filling me up again. It was like this feeling of source energy. And last year, I had to remind myself that it shouldn't take going to the ashram to feel like I've connected to source. Source is around me every day, but I live in an environment that doesn't necessarily, you know, we're in a building hundreds of feet off the ground right now. I'm disconnected. We're out of sunshine. We're on our screens constantly. I'm not chanting every day. So it's up to us to invite these practices in our life to feel more light. Can you share that analogy of light with two things that I've heard you speak about? One with water, but also with the cancer patients that you've worked with?

Yeah, so the light energy again is the definition of life. So life is the concentration of light energy. So you're spot on. And we were used to these words of prana or chi and things like this now and kind of the zeitgeist of the culture in any community. And what we're really speaking to is life force. And so how much energy per cubic centimeter is there? And so the practices that were in all of these traditional religious practices, spiritual practices, et cetera, really revolved around the breath, the vibration of the body, and somatic movement. And so whether that was chanting or dance or mudras, this was all built in with this kind of inherent intelligence of this is what it would take to support a human body. And ultimately we're all spiritual beings. And nobody needs to go have a spiritual experience because you're going to have a spiritual experience for the rest of eons because you're a soul. And so the purpose of this short period that we call human life is to have a body. And that's where we're really missing it with this kind of neo spiritualism that's moving through the world right now as we are kind of trying to go have that consciousness experience from our plant medicine or from our yoga. Really what those practices were supposed to do was to get us into the body instead of escape the misery of the body or escape the misery of a monoculture society. And so we need to reverse that. We need to stop trying to escape, use spiritual escapism as a recreation. And we need to start manifesting a society from our spiritual experience. And so we need to reverse the polarity immediately. We need to build a society based on our experiences of our spiritual reality. And so you mentioned quantum healing. That would be my definition of quantum healing is remanifesting the biology from our long term, energetic spiritual reality. So the energetic spiritual reality is you have a soul that has a distinct identity within space, time and its connection to the whole. And so every time a patient goes across the veil at the end of life and then comes back from their near death experience, they tell stories of that sense of I am connected to everything, everything is oneness, but I am still me. And I know that I'm completely accepted. So that Experience of I am, I am outside of the body, I am inside the body, but I always am that I am. Identity is the template by which you created yourself in your mother's womb. So that massive brightness of a woman's egg, 600,000 mitochondria discharging light at the moment of conception, quantum entangles you with an identity at the soul level. And now you build a human body in which every single cell that will come out of that egg 70 trillion strong right from the get go, and then those will die and repeat their lifespan. Every two or three days, if it's the gut lining, every three months, if it's the liver, every seven years, if it's a brain cell, your body's constantly regenerating those 70 trillion cells to be new again stem cells and just normal cell proliferation. And so you're rebirthing and you're rebirthing and you're rebirthing day in, day in, day in, day out. You're rebirthing your body to that original identity. And so when you start to diminish that light within the human body through antibiotic use, which does one course of antibiotics increases your risk of major depression by about 24%. Two course of antibiotics, 52% increase in major depression in the next 12 months. So you start giving a kid antibiotics every year as you were experiencing. Anxiety and depression are inevitable. That is a direct result of the antibiosis. The antibiotic means against biosis. Biosis describes the interrelationships that make life possible. So when you take an antibiotic, you're disrupting the relationships by which life is made possible. And so they at least is truth in advertising, but we just didn't look up the word. And so when we could have put our children on antibiotics, we are just destroying the relationships within their body that make life possible. And so that's undermining their light energy per cubic centimeter. And the neurologic consequences show up very quickly, which is the anxiety disorders, sleep disorders, depression. The immune system shows up right there with allergies, immune dysfunction, hyper reactivity. And then right below that, you've got the chronic fatigue, chronic pain syndromes. And then you have the neurodegenerative conditions. ALS, MS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all of that is just less light per cubic centimeter. All of it is undermining the biosis of human life through an antibiotic culture that's pouring about 30 million pounds of antibiotics into our children through our doctor's offices every year in the United States. It equates to 890 prescriptions per every 1,000 peoples in the United States every year, 890 prescriptions for every 1,000. So 89% of the population being exposed to antibiotics by the numbers. The sad thing is that 30 million is dwarfed by the 300 million pounds of antibiotics that are put into our food system through herbicides and pesticides. So just a dismal amount of antibiosis going in our food and soil treatments, in our pharmaceutical management of human health, in our clinic, all the way down to the husbandry of our poultry and the high intensity production protein industry and everything else, feedlots, et cetera. And so we've got just currently, just in pesticides alone, around £4 billion a year. And so it's inevitable that our children and adults have major depression at the rates they do anxiety disorders and neurological everything else. And ultimately we drive it down to the point where we are today is as you put enough of that antibiotic into the system, you collapse fertility. And so by the early 2000s, we were seeing this explosion of fertility. We had no idea how bad it was going to get. Today, one in three males in all Western countries is infertile by sperm counts. One in three females, at least in Saudi recent numbers we're showing 67%. China, you're closer to that number. So somewhere two out of three women are infertile in many countries worldwide now by not enough light energy inside of the ovum. And so if the egg does not have 600,000 thriving mitochondria to create the light, she can't quantum entangle that soul. And so this is where we're at today is there's not enough energy to connect human biology to the spiritual reality that we stem from. And so this is a scary moment that we call extinction, where we uncouple humans from the real. I am the real identity that we all carry the soul level.

I don't think we're going to be big food or big pharma in our lifetime.

I don't think we will. I think that in 10 years we will have a completely different world that's going to be so beautiful we can't imagine.

And do you think that this is going to be led by us illuminating the world with our love and compassion and connection with each other?

Yes. I think we're about to forgive everything.

Yeah. And I say that because I'm sitting here gripping my legs, I can feel my blood pressure rise with, you know, the rise of these catastrophic things that are happening. And just mention children and the suffering that's there. And I don't think that getting angry is a proactive way to take action any longer. I think that if we can kind of lead with some compassion. So for our listeners who might be feeling overwhelmed and maybe who have the urge to get angry and get other people angry, can we kind of go through some of the key things, the key components that we've discussed today, the simple things that we can incorporate to our day to day life and how to live. So we've mentioned, you know, the importance of getting to know farmers and regenerative farming and farmers footprint and organic at the food level. We've mentioned sun gazing, stargazing, tree gazing every single day and our connection to nature and to soil. We've mentioned our connection to neighbors on a human level. And even you and I sharing this experience today, having these conversations and being solution based. I even think that your perspective over the future has changed in the past few years since we've spoken also. But what are some other simple things I'm sure people ask you all the time, what can I start doing? Whether it's the tight junctions within my gut microbiome that I want to heal, taking ion. What are some simple things that I need to know to return to nature, to heal?

It's as simple as the breath again. Slow down your breath right now. Slow it down and take a deep breath in. Let it all the way out. And then you'll realize you didn't actually take a deep breath in. Now take a deep breath in. All the way up, all the way up, all the way up. Hold it at the top, hold it and feel the CO2 rising in your bloodstream. This CO2 is so good for everything. Carbon dioxide in your bloodstream is a major stimulant to regeneration and release of all kinds of good things. And now let that breath go and let it just ease out of your body. Ease, ease, ease. All the way down, all the way down. Hold at the bottom. And now just gently release the breath to fill up at a very slow pace. Let the breath come into you instead of you pulling it into your body like water trickling down a stream. Let the oxygen flow into every cell in your body until you're at the top of a breath again. And then just gently let it out, Let it flow back out of you, deflating. And now feel the stillness at the bottom of that breath. And let the air just trickle back into you. Gentle inhale. And now if you're fortunate to have somebody in your environment, look them straight in the eye. Look at how much light you can see inside of that person.

Everything's brighter.

That's where the sunlight shines through. Look at somebody in the eyes and you'll find out they're 10,000 times brighter than the sun. If you look long enough in those eyes, you'll start to cry and you'll fall in love again, ultimately with yourself. And so it's as simple as slow down the breath, look somebody in the eye for a couple minutes. If you don't have somebody around you, you're blessed to have nature out there. So walk outside, go to a local park or streetscape and just lie down on your back and stare up through that branches of the tree, up at the sky. Feel what it feels like to have an earth at your back. She's got your back, she's got you. And there's a sky up there with a father, son up there that's pouring light energy to ignite life once again here. So put yourself between the mother and the father and let yourself be re nurtured into the child that you wish you had been before. And reparent yourself, reparent yourself through the breath, through the witnessing of somebody else's eyes, through the witnessing of the tree above you and the sky behind. And you're going to begin a journey and you're going to find something really spectacular, which is life is infinitely long when you slow down the breath and you can live 10 days for every day you live. If you slow that breath down and start to see the beauty in each other's eyes, the light within each human being tells maybe a reflection or ultimately an evidence of the light within yourself. And then let that start to be your warming center. Feel the heat within your belly. If you can't find it there, find it within your chest. And then let that body start to build heat again. And if you don't know how to build heat, just start breathing deeper and the temperature will rise and then start moving in different new ways outside nature, which might look a lot like dance around a campfire. We now know that when you look down in a campfire, and especially if you conjoin the experience with song or dance, you turn on stem cells, you turn on telomerase, which extends your capacity for cell replication and all kinds of beautiful things. And so it takes so little to get there. And so I would say start with the breath, connect to another human through the eyes or to nature beneath the tree and let yourself be seen. And if you really let yourself be seen, you'll start to regenerate the original design that you knit together in your mother's womb and you'll begin again.

Beautiful. Thank you for that. It feels like remembering. And if anyone tried that practice, if you notice tears coming to your eye, it feels like your soul's way of saying thank you. Like, oh, thank you. She remembered. She got out of her head and into her soul, and now we're back.

And she's got a body right now.

Yeah.

That's amazing. You're gifted with a human body right now, and there's nothing more miraculous than these bodies. And then if you're fortunate enough to have a female body, you've got this in spades. But both male and female, you have a silent place deep down in your core that would be called the womb. And in Chinese practices, it's called the dan qian, or the source of the soul or the seed of the soul. And that's the silent place within you. And that's where your creative force comes from. Whether you're creating a child within your womb or creating the next song or the lyrics or the next self expression, it's going to come from there. And so if you learn to live from there, the creative genius that's going to come out of you will be unstoppable as you start to create the world that we all want to live in.

Thank you. Yeah. I think at a time when, you know, I don't think I've ever been brought to my knees in sadness over witnessing what's happening in the world and then recently coming back into my body and this knowingness again, really the miracle of just having this vessel to go through life with and to experience. Just like witnessing children, Right, who are still in their knowingness, playing the note that they came into this world with unapologetically, and then remembering that, for myself, has been the greatest healing of all.

So thank you for that super potent amen.

All right. With some amazing viewers, sent in some questions. So, Maureen, if you're listening, she's a nurse practitioner. She's passionate about holistic wellness. What's your vision for the future of healthcare?

I think it's gone. That'll be the symptom of a healthy society where we no longer build schools and hospitals, but we instead build farms and communities that are connected to that soil. And in that, we eliminate the need for either the school or the hospital.

I pray for the day where you just. You're sent to a place to breathe and meditate and be with other people, maybe hold their hand. Virginia, she Sundays, what are three daily habits to really live a fully detoxed life. How can we keep up with this accumulation that we have?

Breath and hydration are your first one and two there. So you breathe out most of your toxins and then you will eliminate the rest through sweat, urine, feces. And so it's really the motion of life. If you picture, you know, really good running rivers, they can get, get the soil systems clean quickly, a lot of rain, a good running river, you can detox anything. And so bathing your body in original waters and so getting out in rivers, getting in, you know, natural lakes, ponds and oceans, get out in nature and bathe that body and then hydrate with real living, you know, water. And the easiest way to do that is eat your liquids. And so something like celery is a potent way to hydrate the body because it's living water that's been organified in the cells of the plant into that gel like quality that holds an enormous amount of electricity. Where's the water in your cup? Not much going on there as far as its electrical potential at all. And so most of the water we drink is actually quite dead and can actually dehydrate us rather than rehydrate us. And so that's where a little bit of salt and a little bit of lime inside the water so that you have living water. In the same way, eating your water through your vegetables is a really. And fruit is a very potent way to hydrate the body.

Beautiful food first. That makes sense because it's grown in sunlight. And can you have our own water just for a second in a world where, especially after the LA fires, if we're filtering, reverse osmosis spring water delivery, activating our water in the sun. What do you recommend?

Prayer. Just take some moment of intention moment of you. Because you're brighter than the sun. Your energy, energy field is enormous. It extends far beyond the human body. And so you wrap your hand around the glass and just recognize what it is. This is the fluid that communicates between the quantum field and biology. This is the connection force between my soul and my body is water. And so this is the translation between my soul and body. And therefore I'm going to give reverence to this connection to my original source, to my original identity, entity. And I'm going to put my love into this water. I'm going to change the structure of this water by just loving myself, realizing like, you know, today I'm doing something good for myself today I'm going to take a sip of this water. That's Been held within my own human hand. And I'm generating so much light energy that I can transform this into something that's medicinal for me. So not only is going to hydrate me, it's going to cure me. And so this water is now my medicine. And I'm going to drink that in gratitude.

Beautiful intention. Gosh. I do that for my kids, but not for me.

Yeah, right.

All right, one more from Stacy. I wanted to bring this one up because she's found some incredible healing through her elders. My mom's aging right now, and actually there's two parts of this. One is autoimmune, and one is the aging wisdom. So let's do the wisdom first. My mother's getting older, and doctors told her, you know, it's part of aging. Right. They're putting on more medications and stuff like that. When anyone who's had autoimmune disease, you have a deep connection to your body and what's going on and what feels good and what doesn't feel good. So for people who are understanding, maybe how to modify their diets, how to get into nature, is there anything else that they can understand about their wisdom, the wisdom of their body and healing autoimmune conditions? This is to Katarina.

Autoimmunity is a chronic expression of allergy. And so when your body becomes allergic, which means reactive to the outside world, it will eventually get confused as to what's outside and inside. And so that's the breakdown of that tight junction boundary, ultimately. And so we all started getting allergic in the early 1990s when we started desiccating our wheat and other crops with Roundup. And so suddenly the residues of these chemicals got very, very high on our food, and we used to start breaking those tight junctions. So leaky gut led almost immediately to gluten sensitivity or gluten allergy. And then the ultimate glute, gluten triggered autoimmune disease, which would be celiac disease. So all that happened 1991, 92, 93, started spraying the wheat in 1991. And so that pattern of losing the community, that boundary event, and losing the healthy relationship between outside, inside, is your foundation of autoimmune disease. And so the beginning of reversing that is rebuild your boundaries. And so you have to do that at each of the levels. You have to build it back at the cellular level. So get the cell phone towers back up and running. If you want to reintroduce your daily soil, take your daily soil dose with ion. That's going to within minutes Start to knit things together at the cellular level. But then you have to do the emotional layer. You have to eliminate that loss of self identity at the cellular level that you induced through your own self abuse. So there's something that you're doing in an underlying autoimmune disease that's undermining your biology in regards to your own self and voice thinking, kind of that inner voice that's destroying you. And the thyroid being the class classic one there, the autoimmune disease of thyroid. One in four children, one in four women, or I think it's one in five, actually one in five girls in the United States with thyroid antibodies by the time she's age 12, was a study that was done almost 20 years ago now. And so with that, many women with an antibody to their thyroid gland, which sits in what's called the fifth chakra, the communication network of the body, you know, what the self think is, which is my voice is not valuable. I'm going to suppress my voice. And I've learned to be rewarded in society by keeping myself silent. And so I'm going to suppress that voice. You cannot heal your thyroid with that syndrome. I don't care what you take. You have to begin at the cellular level to start to support that environment. But until you've cleared the emotional belief that your voice is not important, that thyroid disease is going to stay there. So really getting to the root cause, the root cause at the emotional level, and then ultimately finding that self forgiveness and moving towards a psychoenergetic or psychoenergetic emotional relationship to wholeness. You had to be whole to be able to knit yourself together as an identity. And the moment you die, you're going to find out you're whole. There's no way you became unhole between the time that you knit yourself together in your mother's womb and the moment that you die. Those are the bookends of reality. Everything else in between is the surreal experience of believing that you're not connected to everything and not whole. That's what you're trained between ages 3 and 5. And that's what we call the terrible twos, basically. Right. And so the child who's screaming on the floor kicking at three years old is dealing with the cognitive dissonance of parents and society telling them that they're not enough.

Absolutely, yeah. Whole me right. Connection. In closing, I think that this is a great question, Stacy. We're talking about solitude, as we've mentioned today. And now shipping off our elders and the wisdom that I find myself Craving through conversations like this, but also through the parents, grandparents that I don't have, and beyond. So talk to us about the wisdom that we need to hold on to. Right. You've worked with so many people at the end of their life and the wisdom that they carry, how can we connect to this?

The wisdom is largely around listening. What I watch so many times in hospice. So my last specialty was hospice. I was admitting 80 patients a week to die. Did that for four years. So when you've seen thousands and thousands of patients go through this process, you would think, I think, at the logical level, like, okay, if I was told that I have three weeks to live, I would run around, tell all the people I love how much I love them. I want to spend every waking minute with the people that I love, and I would definitely want to watch my favorite movie, and I want to have my favorite meal every day. And I never saw that happen. Oddly, I watched people spend more and more time in silence and listening as soon as they got diagnosed. And that's where the forgiveness happened, and that's where the spontaneous remissions happened. But it's also where the peaceful letting go of the body happened, where you suddenly slow down and instead of going to check on whatever your to do list was, you actually watch the steam rising off your tea for an hour. And I would watch somebody who was about to die spend a whole lifetime of silence. They spend more time witnessing the beauty around them and feeling it inside their body in those three weeks than they had in the previous 80 years. It's a warning to us that we're missing the secret of life by racing around, by rushing around, by missing the beauty of reality. The people that I've seen live very long and happy lives have an overwhelming curiosity for the beauty around them. And they are constantly looking for that next experience of witnessing beauty. And they stay very youthful until the end. And I was blessed with two. My great grandmother and her daughter. My grandmother were two women that just showed me that in space, they knew how to be alone in nature, they knew how to be alone at the dinner table. They were both my great grandmother's signal for the last single. For the last 52 years of her life, or something like that. Her husband died of a heart attack when he was quite young, and she never remarried. And she was the happiest, most joyful person I ever knew. Incredibly socially active, but only because she knew how to be in peace for living in her own house for 50 years, wake up on her own, walk out into her own Garden. Cut the flowers, make a little bouquet, make the same cup of tea and appreciate that every day. And so you will live long and healthy when you slow down and witness the beauty.

Stunning. Tell us something that you're excited about for the future.

Me, I'm really excited about me. I think all the projects that I have going right now, I'm super interested to see who I actually am in human form and I get to see a little bit more of it each year now. And I've been blessed to start these seven day immersive experiences. Just finished one up in Costa Rica this past week. Have another one coming up. It's got some slots in it so if you want to join. But I'll be in Northern United Kingdom at an incredibly magical location up in Yorkshire. It's stunning. Broughton hall is just a storied place and so you're going into a mythical realm to experience yourself. And Seven Days of Self is one of the most exquisitely beautiful things that you'll ever find. And I just got to watch 120 people forever change because they, they discovered how old they are. And there's really no, there's really nothing more incredible as a human being than to be witness to somebody else stepping into their wholeness. And it's, it's a lot like the beauty of watching a 4 year old in wonderment playing by themselves under a tree, so happy and so fulfilled without a want or need in the world because they're so immersed in the smell of the soil that their feet are in or the mud puddle that they've got their, their trucks driving through or whatever it is and they're, they're in that space and that's what I, I got to watch 120 adults become a child again in their wholeness. And I'm, I've, I'm ready to die now. Yeah, I've seen everything like it's, it's enough, you know, once you get to see that, that, you know, you came, what you came to do as a human when you get to witness that. And so I think we could all just wonder at how fast it is to correct the system. Seven days to correct, you know, 50 years of wandering in the desert and seven days of self and suddenly everything makes sense because it all was there all along and it was really awakening up. It was a waking up and a remembering rather than some sort of detox protocol or biohacking trick or whatever it is. It's none of those things. I've never seen one biohacking trick Ever make somebody whole, it does not work. It's always putting somebody outside of themselves. It's always them chasing the next technology. I think that we'll look back in 20 years and find out that one of the second only to western medicine was the biohacking movement in distracting humans from their wellness. And we've got to end it. Think about what would happen if you were a bank and you suddenly had your computer systems hacked and you suddenly lost all of the wealth that had been compiled there for all of the people that you cared for and all the people that were your clients and now wonder at how we think that it's going to feel different to biology when you go and hack her, if you go in there and tear up her volts and take all of the wealth because you feel good for a moment, because you got your little high from your cold plunge or your reflection super breathing or your red light exposure or your quantum light therapy, I mean it's just endless number of things now. You just had a high, you just had a drug experience that took you out of your innate wellness, your rooted wellness that you're speaking to. And so we got to get real. We got to stop believing that these billion dollar industries are actually out for our good. They're actually just out to great wealth environment where everybody's in scarcity and everybody's afraid there's not enough of life. And so somebody comes along and says you can live to 180°80 years if you take their supplement. They haven't breathed in a long time and if they would just slow the freak down and sit with you and look at your eyes for two minutes, you'd both be crying and you'd both live longer for that.

I could not believe that. Rather fewer years being with the people that I love, feeling whole again. My energy is just buzzing. I hope some of you felt that today. I can now see the journey of our story to just bring us to this moment. From acknowledging what's happening in the world to searching for solutions that are outside of ourselves, which ultimately and how it ties into even my journey, it's coming back to self and the radical permission that you have to take to love yourself again and to be with others and letting them see you for who you really are takes a lot of courage. But in those moments, I'm sure what you experienced just recently in Costa Rica, when you get to those moments, nothing else matters. It's like all of these illusions and fear and scarcity that exists around you just shatters, falls to the ground, it goes away. You're so present to the joy of life in this insane, gorgeous vegetable that you get the people that you get to be with and the children that you get to be with. Thank you for today. We're going to link out to everything. Please go to ZachBushMD.com to find you the farmer's footprint. Get your eye on learn more about Zach's incredible programs and online courses. Also, you do a lot. You show up in this world quite a bit for a lot of other people. And I just want to acknowledge that because you inspire a lot of of you. Thank you.

Honor to be part of this community called human.

Can't wait to have you back.

Thank you, Mona.