Zach Bush argues that a rapid reversal in U.S. cancer death geography (the South becoming the epicenter) between 1996 and 2006 reveals a flaw in conventional cancer models and implicates the microbiome—both gut and soil—in predicting population-level cancer expression. After visiting farms and the Soil Health Academy, he contrasts regenerative soil systems (multi-species cover crops, no-till, intact mycorrhizae) with chemically managed soils, linking loss of microbial/fungal networks to human disease. He critiques functional medicine for becoming reactionary rather than cultivating intrinsic health, warns against "anti-" movements, and advocates for imagining decentralized agricultural, medical, and economic systems (references Farmer's Footprint).
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Between 1996 and 2006.
Chapters
We reversed the cancer map in the United States for the first time where suddenly the south was the epicenter of cancer death where it had never been in the whole history of our nation before that. And we did that in a 10 year period between 1996 and 2006. We reversed the cancer map. And so that was, you know, should have been impossible if our model of cancer was right. We had to update our model of cancer to include the microbiome to find out that it's the microbiome within our gut and soil systems is predicting population expression of cancer. Which is pretty amazing that we can boil it down to that level. But sadly, as we kill bacteria and fungi, the humans will manifest all dise diseases, including that end stage of cancer. And so this pattern was what I was set out to tell. But as soon as we got out on the ground I thought I was going to tell people, oh, everybody just needs to eat organic and we're going to be good to go. And we stopped at our very first farm on our journey and the Soil Health Academy with these brilliant farmers were there showing the impact of poor soil management on farms. And they did these simple soil tests showing the resilience or the kind of architecture within a regenerative soil system that's done through multi species cover crops and no tilling. So you leave the fungi intact to build the mycorrhizae and the they support this biophotonic event and beautiful system. And they show that just sitting in this column of water and it never dissolves. It's just like this ecosystem in and of itself dropping in the clod of dirt. Next to it is a chemical farm nearby that as soon as it enters the water just dissolves. There's no root system, there's no mycorrhizae, there's no mycelium, there's no bacterial network for supporting nutrient biodiversification or whatever it is. And it just dissolves into dust. And in the last one they drop organic soil and it dissolved even faster than the chemical farm had. And that was my aha moment of like, oh no, we set out with the wrong story, we have the wr wrong narrative. I just thought that the spraying was the problem. But it's a collapse of our entire understanding of how soils cycle and our care for that. And in the end it turned out to be very similar to what's happened in western medicine the last couple decades is in kind of recoiling from or in reaction to an increasing pharmaceutical kind of collapse. We birth functional medicine and we kicked the allopathic model off and said, they're just a bunch of pharmaceutical company jerks. Don't believe them. We, we're going to fix you. And they got back on the same stool and said, for your Lyme disease, I'm going to give you this $300 a month instead of their 300amonth. And I'm going to give you all these supplements, I'm going to give you all this stuff and I'm going to make you healthy because I'm going to give you bioidentical hormones instead of the pharmaceutical hormones. Whether those are different or not, lots of debate. But the end point is in kind of becoming reactionary to the current paradigm. We failed to reconsider a completely new paradigm and we became a reaction to the paradigm. And so we really fed more energy into that system, I think. And we can do the same thing with an anti vax movement. When we polarize around a dead paradigm or a dysfunctional paradigm, we do nothing to, to, to move past it. And so functional medicine, I think has accidentally become this reinforcer of the old paradigm of you have a disease and I, you need me to fix it for you. I think the, what we should have done is created a new narrative which was, you have all of the health and resiliency right in you. Let me show you how to get there. Let me show you as a physician, be your guide into your own intrinsic health. And that would have been a really powerful revolution. And we can maybe take that step now. And that's what our clinic is trying to do. We have the intrinsic health series doing that effort to try to say, hey, look, let me just show you into your own capacity for health and healing. But we should have done the same thing in the agricultural setting is instead of saying, oh, you don't want to spray all those chemicals, here's organic inputs instead. We did the functional medicine move. We said, chemicals are bad, but all these other inputs you need, instead of mentioning that you could just plant 32 species of biodiverse cover crops, leave those to their biologic mass, and then lay that biologic mass down either through animal management or through roller crimpers or other technology. And so keep that biomass on top of your soils, protect your soils, add back all that bionutrient mass, create an ecosystem within, above and below the soil for that, and then create this bio. It's basically letting the whole system find its intrinsic health, resilience and regeneration. And so we've slowed down revolution, we've slowed down the emergence of humanity and the planet's potential by creating antis. And so you can't be anti pharmaceutical. You're just part of the old dialogue. You can't be anti vaxx. You're part of an old belief system that the immune system is trying to sterilize the human body from all viruses and bacteria. It doesn't work that way. We know that, but we're having a hard time changing that narrative. And just screaming at the old narrative and saying you're wrong isn't helping us. And so same thing for farming, same thing for health, same thing for economics, same thing for politics. If we keep being anti to the problems that we see, we're not becoming different. And so let's not fall into the anti trap. And so as we started to tell the story, we realized we can't just be anti glyphosate and anti roundup. We need to imagine a new future. And that new future, of course, led us quickly into the realization where we need decentralization. And that I think is the story of everything. We shouldn't have six hospital systems that control 90% of health in the country. We shouldn't have three or four conglomerate insurance companies that control health in this country. We shouldn't have six companies that control 95% of the seed in the United States. We should have a diversified and decentralized system for all of these things. We shouldn't have centralized banking. No, that's a terrible way to do economics globally. We need a decentralized economic system. So all of these systems in the end are showing us what nature does all the time, which is decentralized life. Life happens in a fractal way on planet Earth, down at the soil level, within a single cubic centimeter, you're going to see the entire intelligence of what all of humanity could do. We could learn it from a single cubic centimeter of soil. And so that's, I think what farmer's footprint became was we need a big re envisioning. And what does a whole agricultural slash medical system look like as we decentralize into the template of nature?
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