Gut Health Gurus Podcast: Zach Bush MD on Glyphosate, Autism and Chronic Disease Epidemic (2024)

KribenGovender:Hey, you guys. Kriben Govender from the Gut Health Gurus Podcast.I've got a background in food science. My colleague, JamesShadrach, has got a background in psychology. We have got a guestfor you today, Dr. Zach Bush, MD, coming live from the US. Zach,thank you so much for coming on the show.

ZachBush:What a pleasure to be on with you guys. Thank you, everybodylistening, for your time and attention and interest in thissubject. We're really going to be knocking on some of the mostimportant foundations of the human health, human epidemics ofdisease around the world, and really the financial wellness of ournations going forward. So excited to have all you guys present.Thank you for being so kind to have me here as a guest.

KribenGovender:Our pleasure. Zach, what we like to do is, just to set the scenefor the audience, who is Dr. Zach Bush, MD?

ZachBush:You're making it sound very mysterious there. But, yeah, I thinkI'm on a lifelong journey to figure that out as well. I thinkthat's part of why we're here. It's to figure out who we are andwhy we're here and where we're heading.

ZachBush:I am, I think, a reformed or continuously reforming medical doctor.I spent 17 years in the academic experience of becoming a doctorand going through all my postdoctoral training. I became tripleboard-certified first in internal medicine. I went on in internalmedicine in the hospital environment to be chief resident and teachresidents and students and faculty at University of Virginia.

ZachBush:Then went on to a fellowship training in endocrinology andmetabolism, which is the study of hormones and how they regulateeverything from the brain to a neurologic function to organsystems, things like the thyroid, reproduction, different aspects.It was then on faculty in endocrinology at the University ofVirginia.

ZachBush:Decided to leave my research in 2010. My research was inchemotherapy development in cancer and how it related to nutritionultimately, like how does metabolism or the fueling of the machinehave to do with cancer cells. That was my niche was findingchemotherapeutic nutritional agents, vitamin A compounds and thelike, that could disrupt cancer metabolism at the mitochondriallevel.

ZachBush:I left all of that in 2010 to start a nutrition center in apoverty-stricken area of Virginia, a little town of 550 people,serving about 40,000 rural people who really were in a food desert;no grocery stores of any quality, et cetera.

ZachBush:In that journey, I had to continuously be deconstructing myunderstanding of not just being a doctor in human health, butreally deconstructing my understanding of biology itself. What doesit mean to be biologically human? That has a lot to do with thingslike inflammation, immune function, all these general topics. But,interestingly, excited be on your show because you tie in thepsychology so well.

ZachBush:The psychology and mental health turns out to be very tied intonutrition now. We know that have turned over the last decade tothis whole gut-brain axis as a huge new understanding of humanphysiology, and that makes it sound like the human gut is tied tothe human brain. While that is true, and every day more true, thenew science over the last three or four years that's reallypointing to the microbiome, the ecosystem outside of the human isactually regulating the gut which is regulating the brain.

ZachBush:In a very interesting fashion, we can say that the first brain,from my perspective, is now the microbiome. The second brain is thegut and how it deals with the information of the microbiome. Thenthe third brain, the central processing unit, and nothing more thanthat, is the human brain.

ZachBush:We have to stop thinking of this as the cognitive center of humanexperience. Start to understand it's only our relationship tonature itself that would initiate the opportunity for self-identityin a world of consciousness, for the initial thought, for themaintenance of healthy brain function.

ZachBush:90% of the serotonin made in the body is made in the gut lining,the [inaudible 00:04:19] cells. 50% of the dopamine is made in thegut lining and another 40% of the total body is made in thekidneys. So 90% of dopamine, 90% of serotonin. That's a whole newworld for understanding neuropathologies, neuro health, all ofthis.

ZachBush:Who is Zach Bush is starting to become really I am a product of myenvironment, and my environment is certainly my microbiome at theindividual level. I'm starting to understand myself better andbetter in relationship to I'm only as healthy as the ecosystem thatI live within.

ZachBush:If I limit my experience to drywall boxes that we call houses,plastic off-gassing cars, and a carpeted, artificially-infusedoffice space, if that's my environment, I can't actually be ZachBusch. I will be some sort of diminishing version of Zach Bush, butI won't be the full self-identity, self-encapsulated, self-purposed machine that I should be.

ZachBush:That's at the individual level. But what I'm finding in my own lifeis my spiritual wellness and my own psychological conception ofcognition is starting to rise as I get more and more integratedinto the macro community as well. It's only through interactingwith beautiful people like yourselves that I really get to seemyself in its fullest measure.

ZachBush:This is the phenomenon and the beauty of community and my oneexcitement about technology. In general, I think the informationtechnology age has threatened human health on many, many levels.But the one silver lining is connection. The ability for us to sithere and look at each other ... You're at 3:00 a.m. there, so it'skind of you guys to be up in the middle night for me, I'mmid-morning here in Virginia, and yet we're having a real communiontogether through this technological thing.

ZachBush:We can celebrate the opportunity we have to become a globalcommunity outside of the manipulation of the third parties that hashistorically determined who your network is, who is your sphere ofinfluence who can help you move to your next level. That's nowbecome freely accessible to the vast majority of humans. Carry acell phone, you're connected to the world.

ZachBush:I am excited that while we continue to understand the extraordinaryrelationship and opportunity we have in the microbiome, that's ourmicro-ecosystem. Our macro-ecosystem should mirror that inopportunity. That's a long answer that I'm starting to think laysthe foundation for the rest of our conversation.

KribenGovender:Absolutely. Zach, what does it mean to be human?

ZachBush:Wow! Such a cool question. I think this is something that's alwaysbeen batted around by the spiritual world, religion giving us someconstructs over the last 5,000 years, no matter if it's in thepre-Christian world where we have the Roman and Greek mythologiespredated by the Persian mythologies and going back in time. Thespiritual religious realms have been batted around. What is it tobe human? What are gods? What is outside of human consciousness?Where's all this coming from?

ZachBush:That, of course, went into conflict in some ways with thescientific realm as the Persians developed the science. Then thatmatured through the brilliance of the Greek philosophy and startingto really wrap systematic thought processes and philosophicalstructures around the science. We're good 3,000, 4,000 years intocollision of religion and science in regard to this question of wasis it to be human.

ZachBush:My [inaudible 00:08:04] about being alive right this moment and inthe part of my career that I'm in right now is I feel like, for thefirst time in 180,000 years of human existence, we're knocking onthis moment now where religion and spiritual belief systems arecross-secting scientific evidence. We're starting at what is thefabric of being human? But it has a lot of structures that haven'tbeen preached to or understood in the spiritual realm.

ZachBush:What is it to be human, you are ultimately made of the same fabricthat the stars are made of, that the planet itself is made of,bizarrely, even the vacuum space out there between the planets.You're made of the same fabric, and that fabric is a combination ofatoms and their system. An atom is the building block for whatwould be an element in the periodic chart. The periodic chartbecomes the building blocks for a molecule. A molecule becomes abuilding block for a cell. A cell becomes the building block for ahuman organ. Human organs become the building blocks for a whole 70trillion-celled organism that we would call human.

ZachBush:But one thing that we have to hold on to, because right now if yougo into a doctor, they're going to do maybe a CT scan or an MRI andtake pictures of all your organs, and they're going to convince youthat you're an organ system creature and you're built up of twokidneys and a liver and a brain and the neurologic system and twolungs and heart. It's a rudimentary belief system about who you areand what you are physically.

ZachBush:What's been lacking in modern medicine, which is anything butmodern when you start to consider the physics of the situation, themodern medicine continues to look at the solid part of you. Theproblem with that is that only 0.001% of you is actually solid.99.999% of you is actually vacuumed space.

ZachBush:That is truth based on the structure again of the atom. The atomsthat make up the entire universe are inherently a tiny, tiny bitsolid. There's a tiny little solid core made up of protons andneutrons, which, bizarrely, actually have the same structure. Aproton has the same structure as the black hole that's in thecenter of our galaxy. It's a double tetrahedron.

ZachBush:Bizarrely, that double tetrahedron is the three-dimensional Star ofDavid or the star on the Muslim flag or it is the two dimension ...If you project the three-dimensional structure, which is called a64 double tetrahedron, down into a two-dimensional structure, it'sactually the flower of life.

ZachBush:That two-dimensional design of the flower of life, if you haven'tseen this thing, just Google flower of life and you'll see amillion different depictions of this, and you'll find out that thatdepiction was actually etched with some sort of laser technology.We don't know what it was, but predating the Egyptians, whoeverbuilt the pyramids 10,000 years ago, etched this flower of lifeinto the structures, into the blocks of many other pyramids.

ZachBush:All the way back 10,000 years, somehow they knew that this was thesecret to life itself. This was the structure that was the fabricof everything. To find out now in just the last few years that thatflower of life, when popped into a three-dimensional structure, isa 64 double tetrahedron, which was the structure of our proton,which is the structure of a black hole, you start to realize whatis it to be human? To be human is simply to be yet another face,another pixel version of the expression of the universe itself.

KribenGovender:Wow!

ZachBush:That sounds very heady and very grandiose on some level, and yet wehave some very interesting concrete proof that this actually playsout at the macro level of being human and being in the humanexperience. These experiments were done on college campuses.

ZachBush:Before I tell you what the study was, I need to explain to you thata black hole, whether out in a galaxy or representing the structureof a single proton in one of your atoms, is a structure called adouble torus in regard to its motion. It's a gravitational fieldthat pulls everything inside of it. People are familiar with theblack hole concept, right? It's such a powerful gravitationalforce. It even pulls light into it.

ZachBush:Well, part of that thing that's getting sucked in at the protonlevel is actually the electron itself. We think that the electronis being sucked right inside the proton into the black hole andthen spitting back out, and it's cycling in and out of there in anextraordinarily fast millionths of a second speed of rate.

ZachBush:The black holes out in the universe also are taking in and spittingout electrical data. Stephen Hawking, the famous astrophysicistswho passed away recently, Stephen Hawking became famous fordiscovering these particles that are coming out of this informationstream, out of black holes in the universe, and so they got namedHawking particles. He held that that was this random informationflowing out of black holes.

ZachBush:It turns out that many other physicists, and including himself inthe end, would agree that there seemed to be structure to thatinformation, meaning that there's some sort of data or knowledgethat's flowing in and out of black holes. He and other physicistshave proved that all the black holes are connected throughwormholes or some other phenomenon in the astrophysics quantumworld, such that any black hole putting in and out informationwould have the same information exchanged across all the blackholes in the whole galaxy, and then in the whole universe[inaudible 00:13:59].

ZachBush:As such, every single proton within every single atom within everysingle molecule within every self, we have complete singularity ofaccess to information as well. How did they even start to look atthis as a possibility of really being the fabric of reality we livein, because this sounds super weird?

ZachBush:What they do is they take two groups of students and they put themon opposite sides of the campus. They gave both groups a verycomplicated crossword puzzle. They asked the first group to startand they time the length at which they could finish this crosswordpuzzle. No communication, physically or otherwise, to the othergroup. The other group had to sit and wait for this team tofinish.

ZachBush:They finish at 48 minutes. As soon as they finish, they wait Ithink it was five minutes or 10 minutes. They waited some number ofminutes. Then they start the second group to solve the samecrossword puzzle. They've done this many times now across differentenvironments and always the second group finishes a few minutesfaster than the first group.

KribenGovender:Wow!

ZachBush:Meaning that there's an exchange of knowledge, there's an exchangeof information through the experience of the first group travelingthrough vacuum space in connection to all of those black holeswithin each of those individuals.

ZachBush:That's a test environment on a university campus, but as anentrepreneur who has started a bunch of companies now, I get tobump into a bunch of entrepreneurs and thought leaders around theworld now, and I see this happening actually on the macro, macrolevel, which is once an idea comes up through an inventor, as a newrevelation happens, within a few months, I find out that somebodyelse over there on the other side of the world had the same thoughtwithin the same few-week period, and over there there was somebodyelse that almost had the same thought over there.

ZachBush:Knowledge is literally percolating up to the fabric of humanity,which is very hopeful to me, because if we look around, we have acomplete desire in regard to our species in that everytechnological leap forward we have made has accelerated ourconsumptive behavior. We consume resources faster and faster andfaster as a species and we're literally gobbling up the world'sresources in regard to food, mineral resources, oil and gas, airitself, fresh water, you name it. We're using up the preciousresources on earth and don't have a way to recycle that energy. Ifwe don't change and if we don't break out of the behaviors andtechnologies that we currently depend on, then we're going to beextinct within roughly the next 60 to 70 years.

KribenGovender:Wow!

ZachBush:That's a daunting and sad scenario. How do we know that? It'sbecause of the current rate of extinction that we have on theplanet. We're losing one species to extinction every 20 minutes.Even in this short podcast, we're going to lose two species thatmay have been even unnamed and undiscovered will disappear from theplanet. Over the last 50 years, we've lost 40% of the biodiversityon the planet. We're nearly halfway done with the completeextinction of biology on the planet at the macro level. In[inaudible 00:17:10] years, we expect to collapse completely to thepoint where human existence becomes unviable on this planet.

ZachBush:It's not too much of a coincidence, I believe, that thebillionaires around us who built this consumptive environment, theAmazons, the Facebooks, and all the advertisers out there that havebuilt our consumer behavior and capitalized that, they are workingon space travel. They're trying to figure out their exit strategyoff a planet that is literally collapsing. They are trying to buildtheir own lifeboats to jump off the Titanic because the Titanicalready hit the iceberg.

ZachBush:Everybody who can see at this macro level because of their, levelof influence or whatever it is, can see that everything is notviable. There's not a single sustainable company on the planetright now. With this understanding, they start looking forlifeboats off the planet.

KribenGovender:Wow!

ZachBush:That's another long conversation to a short question of what doesit mean to be human? To be human right now is a very, very bigopportunity and a very, very big purpose. You showed up here rightnow. If you're on earth at the moment, you chose to show up. When Isay you chose, I believe your soul jumped on into your body andanimated you for a purpose at this tipping point of humanhistory.

ZachBush:We've been here by the fossil record for 180,000 years and we got60 years left, and you showed up right now, which means you showedup at the moment that you would have the potential to either beaware and awake and conscious to learn as much as you can and wecan from the decline and ultimate disappearance of our species, sothat perhaps in the universe we raise consciousness through thisawful experience of extinction so that perhaps somewhere out there,life is being created on another planet or otherwise and with theknowledge and experience we have.

ZachBush:Either you're here to be conscious and awake to add to theexperience of all of the mistakes we've had or you're here with meand everybody else to transform, to transcend, to riseconsciousness to the point where we actually can reinvent ourrelationship to nature, so that we become a synergist, regenerativespecies rather than a consumptive species. We do have theopportunity to do that together, and I believe it's through theconnection like we have here tonight. With the opportunity forhuman connection unperturbed by advertisers and all the otherthird-party manipulators, we can solve every problem on the planetby looking straight to nature for the templates of how lifehappens.

KribenGovender:That's giving me goosebumps, Dr. Zach. I'm mind-blown. Thank you somuch for sharing that wonderful monologue. It was amazing. Now Ijust wanted to go to sideways a little bit on why are we gettingsicker?

ZachBush:Yes. This is the perfect next step in some ways because now we'vepainted the goal: we need to transform. To understand how we'regoing to get there, we need to understand where we are right at themoment. Over the last 30 years, we've seen the most rapid collapsenever imagined. Never imagined.

ZachBush:I mean I've talked to a lot of the health experts that built theAmerican healthcare system as it stands today back in the 1970s,and they predicted a lot of things in 1976 about the year 2000.They predicted oil and gas changes. They actually predicted theInternet and, in some ways, they predicted a lot of thetechnologies that would come along, and they prepared for that intheir modeling of how human health in a healthcare system might besupported.

ZachBush:What they failed to imagine was the possibility that our totalchronic disease burden in this country of the United States wouldmove from 4% to 46% of our children with a chronic disease. 4% ofthe entire population in the late '60s had a chronic disease. Now46% of just our children have a chronic disease.

ZachBush:There was nobody who could have imagined that level of collapse andthere's nobody who prepared for the possibility of that financiallyor otherwise for our country to prepare us for that. We are now infree fall around the effort to support this.

ZachBush:Our entire military budget in the United States is at $680 billiona year roughly. An insane amount of money to spend on defense andtrying to kill other people and all kinds of stupid stuff, but itpales in comparison as a number to the $3 trillion a year thatwe're spending five times more on trying to manage chronic disease,because remember we don't spend much money at all on prevention orhealth itself. We're spending all of that on disease management. $3trillion, if you add it all up, we're upwards of $4 trillionbetween defense and human disease.

ZachBush:We're looking at an enormous portion of our gross domestic productgoing to non-productive aspects of human support. You create jobs,but you don't create productivity through a disease. That realitythat we're in right now is being depicted because of this rise ofchronic disease.

ZachBush:When did that start? It really took off in the 1990s. In 1992, westarted to get a few echoes of it in the US. But it wasn't until'96, '98 where we see this extremely rapid rise in neurologicdegenerative conditions. In our children, it was attention deficitand autism disorders. In our adults, in the males, it wasParkinson's. In the females, it was Alzheimer's, dementia. All ofthose conditions, children, women and men in the geriatric phaseall started taking off with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's in the late'90s.

ZachBush:By the late 2000s, 2008, 2010, we had reached catastrophic levelsof autism, for example. We had moved from one in 5,000 childrenwith autism to one in 88 children with autism by 2012. In the nextthree years, between 2012 and 2015, we would again be one in 46 orone in 48 kids. Then one year later, our current numbers that justcame out is one in 36 kids with autism. Just one year later.

ZachBush:We're on track right now in the United States to have one in threechildren on the autism spectrum by 2035. Just 16 years out. Thenext 16 years is going to determine if we can turn the boat aroundin this country. If we fail to change the fabric of human health inthis country over those 16 years and we continue on our currenttrajectory, the US will no longer be a global power. It isliterally impossible for us to keep up with expenses because theproductivity is going to be dropping so fast.

ZachBush:If one in three children in a single generation have an autisticcondition that's limiting their ability to engage on a productivephysical level, then it's going to take two of that generation totake care of that one, just in their health care, just in themaintenance of that, their support and everything else. A wholegeneration is going to be spending all their money on one diseaseprocess, ignore that 80% of the adult population will have cancerby that time, not to mention all the mental health disorders,autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, you name allthe rest of it. Now you start to see that there will not be aproductive society by the mid-2030s in this country.

KribenGovender:Wow!

ZachBush:What's our opportunity? Let's say, worst-case scenario, the USbecomes the poster child on what not to do. You guys in Australiahave an opportunity to very, very rapidly learn from what we'vedone and do it differently. We better quickly figure out how didthe US manage to create chronic disease epidemics across the brain,across the immune system, across the liver, across the kidneys? Howdid all of the diseases take off at the same time in themid-1990s?

ZachBush:That, of course, comes down to the smoking gun that my group in mylab had been working on for the last six years, which is ... It's2019 now, for the last seven years. For the last seven [inaudible00:25:30] been working on this molecule glyphosate. Glyphosate isthe active ingredient in the weed-killer Roundup that's usedworldwide on the genetically modified crops, so GMO corn andsoybean grown in Australia, alfalfa, canola. All of these crops arenow GMO. They've been genetically modified to be able to be sprayeddirectly with this chemical glyphosate.

ZachBush:Glyphosate started its spraying on crops in 1992 in the US with theapplication on wheat. Within a couple of years of that, we had anepidemic of wheat allergies called celiac disease andgluten-sensitivity. We invented gluten-sensitivity out of theapplication of glyphosate or Roundup to this gluten-containingwheat.

ZachBush:We now spray many of our staple crops, the legumes, the lentils,the beans. So many other things are being sprayed now just like thewheat, not to kill weeds but to actually dry the crop quicker. Weuse them as a desiccant. That desiccating process means that we'respraying the crop hours or days before harvest, which means thatthe individual is going to get very high residues of thosechemicals.

ZachBush:Those aren't genetically modified compounds. In fact, they'retrying to kill the plant faster and dry it out. Those aren'tGMO'ed. They're simply heirloom grain or a hybridized grain that'sbeing sprayed directly or, in case of the legumes, the same thing.Then there's the genetically modified compounds, the corn, soybean,and everything else that's being sprayed directly with theherbicides.

ZachBush:What's happened is water-soluble toxic called glyphosate at suchhigh volumes around the planet, currently 5.5 billion pounds a yearbeing sprayed, all of that being sprayed onto the soils of theplanet. Water-soluble means that it doesn't stay on the surface ofanything. It immediately gets intercalated or brought into thefruit or the vegetable in all its water content. Your typical fruitor vegetable is 60% to 70% water, just like the human body. It thengoes into the water system, gets pulled into the river [inaudible00:27:30] the oceans.

ZachBush:In the United States, we have the Mississippi River. It runs fromnorth to south. The last 90 miles of the Mississippi River arebetween Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana. That is now calledcancer alley. It has the highest rates of cancer in the entiredeveloped world in the last 90 miles of the Mississippi River.

ZachBush:Why is that? I believe it's because 85% to 90% of all theglyphosate sprayed in our rich farmlands is ending up in one watersystem concentrating throughout the whole system of the Mississippiinto that last 90 miles, and it's killing life starting at themicrobial level.

ZachBush:Glyphosate, as it turns out, has not been patented as aweed-killer. It's been actually patented as an antimicrobial,antibiotic, antifungal, you name it. As that compound hits themicrobiome of the soil or the water or the air, we could losemicrobiome. As you lose microbiome, you lose the ability to growlarger things, plants, animals, humans, et cetera.

ZachBush:With a water-soluble molecule on this planet, it turns out itdoesn't stay put in the river or the ocean that it's pouring into.It goes into the air itself. Through evaporation, we end up with75% of the air around the Mississippi also contaminated withRoundup. We're breathing this compound. It turns out that that endsup in a cloud and now we have 75% of our rainfall contaminated withRoundup.

ZachBush:You're starting to get the picture that we're living it, we'rebreathing it, we're drinking it, we're eating it. One molecule allover the planet. We can follow the chronic diseases around theworld in their progression with their adoption of glyphosate andRoundup and GMO cropping and the death of their soils.

ZachBush:For you guys in Australia, you were about 15 years behind us. Wereally took off in the US really aggressively with the spraying ofthis in early 1992, but it's really '96 that everything reallylaunched.

ZachBush:Glyphosate as a compound came off patent in 2007 for taking overthe vast majority of the production of generic glyphosate anddumping that into the global marketplace. Unfortunately, it had anextremely adverse effect on Australia because you guys had a freetrade agreement with China that continues today, which means youwere pennies on the dollar of glyphosate, which could be sprayedaround your lands all over the place.

ZachBush:It wasn't just your farmers. Your homeowners are spraying it intheir yards. Your municipal systems, if you're anything like[inaudible 00:29:59] along our roadways, along our utility lines,we're using it as a broad-spectrum killer of weeds all over theplace, schoolyards. You go on down the list.

ZachBush:What do we see happening on the public health level, in the UnitedStates we have one in 10 children now with asthma, which we cantrack directly back to a small intestine injury from Roundup as itdoes its damage along the gut lining. If we look at in comparison,you guys had a very low level of childhood asthma right up until2008, 2009, and then started rising.

ZachBush:You guys are actually seeing a faster rise in your children thaneven in the United States, and you're now one in four children withasthma. You guys are having a chronic disease epidemic that's goingto be even probably out of proportion to the US if things don'tchange. Over the next 20 years, it's not going to be asthma that'sgoing to cripple your economy. It's actually going to be the cancerand the degenerative neurologic conditions in your adult populationthat are going to cripple your economy.

ZachBush:You guys have a national healthcare system which is going to bepaying every dollar of expense to manage this chronic diseaseepidemic as it takes off. If I were within your government or anadvisor to your government, I would simply take all of our publichealth data and its trajectories, match you guys up there, and say,"Okay. Now we can predict what's going to happen five years out, 10years out, and 20 years out if we don't change things inAustralia."

ZachBush:One of the very fortunate things that you guys have, I think, isthere is an intrepidness about the Australian people that is inconflict right now with the extreme bureaucratic tendencies of thegovernment. The Australian government is even more bureaucraticthan the US government in regard to things like drug oversights anda lot of health oversight and regulations around doctors andmedical care and all of that. You guys are bumping into an intenseregulatory, bureaucratic environment.

ZachBush:What I'd do is I'd work with Australian farmers and everythingelse. I'm just more and more convinced that you guys have, at thepeople level, an extreme tenacity and extreme tendency to have arevolutionary mindset. I think that that could really changetechnology fast in the farming industry quickly.

ZachBush:We're trying to step this up. Every dollar that we make out of mybiotech company that's made by Restore, which is the [inaudible00:32:28] from soil that we might talk about, every dollar there,we're flowing back into other companies, including we've started anon-profit now called Planet Earth Home, and Planet Earth Home isreally working to show farmers that they really are the foundationfor the future of our species.

ZachBush:If they change behavior and they start working synergistically tocreate a regenerative farm and soil management system, they can bethe ones to revolutionize American or Australian health rather thanthe doctors who are always going to be just throwing Band-Aids onthe problem. That's our excitement is, yeah, we have a lot ofscience that has flowed out of understanding human health out ofour Restore products, but now we can reapply that science to thefarming industry to educate those farmers why they may need to makethis very rapid transition to regenerative agriculture.

KribenGovender:[inaudible 00:33:17] pause for a minute just to dig in a little bitdeeper. If there's any Australian farmers listening to thispodcast, what are some of the practices they could be adopting toaddress this problem that we're facing in the world?

ZachBush:In a nutshell, I mean there's a very long answer that I'll try toavoid for that, just because I don't want to take up the next threehours for that response. I've got links at the end to our nonprofitwhere they can get more information. But the short answer iscarbon. Farmers are trained to augment their soils and plant growthwith nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium.

ZachBush:NPK fertilizers really started in the 1960s, coming out of the warenvironment. Post-World War II, there was a glut of oil. They werelooking for other ways in which to use the oil and petroleumindustry, and so they redirected from fuel to oil-based orpetroleum-based fertilizers for soils, rich in nitrogen,phosphorus, and potassium.

ZachBush:They're so effective at creating a green plant that this movementof NPK fertilizers became known as the Green Revolution. We werestill coming out of the Dust Bowl where we had killed all of ourtopsoil in the US, and so we were having huge loss of topsoilacross the whole country from the 1930s onward. By the 1950s, wewere starting to reverse that by getting a lot more plants growingbecause of NPK fertilizers.

ZachBush:The thing that we didn't understand then, and to this day farmersare not taught, is that if you pour nitrogen into soil without anadequate offset of carbon, you actually speed the depletion ofcarbon molecules out of the soil. With the [inaudible 00:34:59],you actually lose the fabric of the integrity of the plant. Youlose its immune system, you lose the integrity of its root system.You get a very vulnerable plant, which means it's maybe prone topests. Both weeds and bugs are likely to start to attack thatcrop.

ZachBush:Over and over again, we see that invasive weed species and all ofthis are coming in in an effort to increase carbon content in thesoil, and yet the farmer's been trained to either kill that weed orstop it before it can get there by overtilling their ground, and inso doing, they're blocking the ability of Mother Nature to get thecarbon to offset all of this nitrogen that they're pouring into thesoil, and by so doing, they're literally killing their soil.

ZachBush:In a nutshell, you need to stop spraying nitrogen. You need tostart to rely on your weeds and your intelligent ecosystems tostart bringing an equal balance of nitrogen and phosphorus andcarbon back in. You need to stop tilling the ground. Tilling killsthe microbiome and, importantly, the mycorrhizae and the mycologyof the soil, which, of course, blocks the ability of the soil tobring carbon out of the air.

ZachBush:Both by eliminating the weeds and killing the ability to reabsorbcarbon through the mycelial bed, we eliminate the recyclingcapacity of the planet and we start to lose topsoil very quickly.As a farmer, you need to stop tilling. Instead of tilling the soilto get rid of weeds, you're going to start rolling.

ZachBush:There's a very simple implement. It's called a crimper roller. Verycheap compared to a combine or a disker. The small ones are about$4,000 to $6,000, used. The larger ones, especially brand new, canbe up to a couple hundred thousand dollars. But per size of theequipment for the scale of your land, you're looking at very muchless than you would for an equivalent disker or tilling equipment.Cheaper to implement and much more safe for the mycology. Youactually preserve the soil architecture with a roller crimper.Instead of trying to disk the soil or till it all up to kill theweeds, you simply roll the weeds.

ZachBush:This creates an armor on top of the soil so that when it rains, youdon't wash your topsoil off, and it creates all that carbon contenton top of the soil that will be reintegrated into the matrix, sothat your soil can handle the nitrogen that will come from thosebeneficial weeds and the rest.

ZachBush:There are such a thing as beneficial weeds. I would say everysingle weed on your property is there on purpose. It's trying toserve some part of nature to help recover your farmland.

ZachBush:Let the weeds be there. If you let them do their whole cycle, rollthem and crimp them at the end of their life cycle, you'll find outthe very next year you have fewer weeds and they're differentcharacter of weeds. They're now doing their purpose in theirrestorative capacity, and you roll those the next year.

ZachBush:If you do this repetitively, you're going to start growing seedsthat are going to come up out of the seed bank that's already inyour fossilized aspects of your soil. 200, 300, 400-year old seedsare going to start to grow again, which means you're going torecover prairie land that is completely devoid of anything we wouldthink of as an invasive weed. It's actually bringing extremely richtopsoil-building capacity back to your farm.

ZachBush:You're going to start rotating, of course, your pack animals.Whether you're using cattle or sheep ... In Western Australia,obviously most of it is sheep, but you'll use the sheep or thehoofed animal as your processing plant that moves from paddock topaddock around your land, and it will start with regenerating theseed bank and working with this.

ZachBush:We usually will use a combination of allow the weeds and put in acover crop. We want about 16 species minimum as your cover crop.You don't want to do a monoculture with your cover crop. Seed 16 to30 species of good, diverse cover crop and let the weeds grow upwithin that as needed. Then roll and crimp that. You can have aseed drill running right behind.

ZachBush:If you push your roller crimper on your tractor, you can pull yourseed drill on the back and, with one pass, you'll wipe out seedsand you'll get your crop in the ground. It'll come up within 14days, and you've got yourself a one-pass system. You've savedyourself fuel, you haven't disrupted the soil, and you've sprayedzero chemicals.

ZachBush:This is the process that we're teaching now is a regenerativeagriculture process based around rapid transition of livestock, ifyou're utilizing livestock in your environment. If there is nolivestock, then its roller crimping. If you have good livestockmanagement, you don't even need a roller crimper. The animals willdo it for you. Livestock, roller crimpers, multi-species covercrops, and then seed drills behind that. That's your [inaudible00:39:38].

KribenGovender:That's wonderful, Dr. Bush. I think that'll be very insightful forfarmers. What we will do is we'll put some links into the shownotes to direct people to your organizations, where they can findmore information. Really appreciate you sharing that. Now let'stalk about leaky gut. What is leaky gut and how do we fix it?

ZachBush:Very good. I was pointing to the year 1992, with the advent ofglyphosate spraying on wheat, and 1996 on all of our staple crops.How did that correlate with chronic disease? Two forms. Number one,we kill the microbiome. It's an antibiotic. You start to kill themicrobiome. If you lose the microbiome, you become vulnerable atthe gut layer and the immune system that sits right behind that,there are lots of different diseases.

ZachBush:What is the process of that or the mechanism by which thatvulnerability happens is what we uncovered in 2012. In 2012, in mynutrition center, I was seeing people get worse on health food. Icouldn't figure out why kale and Brussels sprouts and all thesesuperfoods were actually making people more inflamed andsicker.

ZachBush:It turns out that they had this thing called leaky gut. With leakygut, you lose the integrity of the gatekeepers or the barriersystem of your immune system to the outside world. Your body ismade up of 70 trillion cells, and many billions of those cells arethe epithelial lining that runs from your nasal sinuses, esophagus,stomach, small intestine, colon, and rectum. That whole gutenvironment covers more than two tennis courts in surface area.Massive, massive exposure to the outside world.

ZachBush:That's your most important ground zero of your exposure, yourself-identity as a human. What does it mean to be human? An intact,intelligent barrier system of the gut. The skin, in comparison, isonly one and a half square meters. One and a half square metersversus two tennis courts, you can see how much more, 85% to 90%more surface area in your gut than your skin.

ZachBush:Who is human is that which is wrapped within this intelligentbarrier system. The billions of cells that make up those two tenniscourts in surface area are called epithelial cells. They're allbonded together by these little proteins that look like Velcro.It's called tight junctions. As the glyphosate hits the gutmembrane, the tight junctions fall apart and dissolves the tightJunction.

ZachBush:It's not the first time in history that humans have been creatingthe opportunity for gut leak. It turns out that the oldest medicineon earth, I would argue, is alcohol. That medicine has obviouslybeen used as a drug, both medically as well as recreationally. Butit turns out alcohol was probably our first leaky gut injury. Wedamage tight junctions with alcohol.

ZachBush:Alcohol and glyphosate and other pharmaceutical compounds likeibuprofen, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, all of theconstipation medicines, they all damage tight junctions to createleaky gut. Once you've damaged all the Velcro, you no longer havean intelligent barrier that keep that stuff out, bring this stuffin, this should come this way. We need water, we need nutrients,but we don't need insoluble fibers. We don't need plastic. We don'tneed all the junk in our food, and so that intelligent barrierstarts to break apart.

ZachBush:There's many herbicides and pesticides out there. For example, thetypical red wine made in the United States has 64 differentchemicals that are pesticides and herbicides. Glyphosate is farfrom our only problem.

ZachBush:Why do I spend so much time saying this is our biggest problem?Because it is the one chemical that has that direct effect ofbreaking apart the front barrier system. Sorry for the vibrationalnoise.

ZachBush:The opportunity there for the glyphosate to open up the tightjunctions in the gut, that is what then is, I would say, thegatekeeper drug, if you will, that then opens up the toxicity ofall the other chemicals that are going to come behind it, becauseyou no longer have an intelligent barrier system. I thinkglyphosate really is public enemy number one here globally becauseof its ability to erode this barrier system, cause the leakygut.

ZachBush:Now that's horrible news. That's bad news chemical right there. Butit's important to point out that, as we were talking earlier aboutconsciousness and psychology, it turns out that the gut barrier isnot the only thing held together with tight junctions. The sameproteins hold together your entire blood vessel tree. All of thecapillaries, the blood vessels are made of endothelial cells heldtogether by the same tight junctions. Your kidney tubules that areresponsible for detoxing your body, held together by the same tightjunctions.

ZachBush:Then, very importantly, your blood-brain barrier. That barrier thatwould protect your central and peripheral nervous system as theholy of holies is also made of the same tight junctions. We havejust now proved this out. We're talking about this for years, butwe've just proved it in our labs by growing blood-brain barrier inconjunction with gut epithelial, that if you injure the gut with aglyphosate injury, you immediately get a loss of the blood-brainbarrier as well. With one fell swoop, you're grading leaky gut,leaky blood vessels, leaky kidneys, and leaky brain.

KribenGovender:Wow!

ZachBush:It's one chemical right now that's eroding not just humanself-identity, but the self- identity of these different organcompartments that are supposed to be carefully regulated. What's inyour bloodstream should not be what's in your brain.

ZachBush:If it does become unregulated, your brain is going to start to havea lot more chronic inflammation, the central nervous system, immunesystem gets easily overwhelmed by a bunch of stuff it should havenever dealt with, and you start to get chronic inflammatory changesin the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system.You develop chronic fatigue, brain fog, poor sleep quality, sexdrive collapses, and endocrine dysregulation, low testosterone, lowestrogen levels, you get premature menopause, you get prematurepubarche or puberty in the children. Instead of going through it at13, these girls are going through puberty at six years old now.

KribenGovender:Wow!

ZachBush:We have this complete breakdown in the endocrine system because theblood-brain barrier has also dissolved. It's a terrifying situationthat we decided to create a food chain around a single chemicalthat would destroy self-identity and organ identity throughout thesystem.

KribenGovender:Wow! It's definitely a huge concern. Let's say, going on toTerrahydrite ... Did I say that correctly?

ZachBush:Uh-huh.

KribenGovender:What is it and how did you discover it? Why is it potentially abenefit?

ZachBush:Perfect. Terrahydrite is a word that we've coined. We've termed in'Terra', meaning earth there in Latin there. You've got earth andan interaction between oxygen and hydrogen. My discovery in 2012 inthe soil science was that we found a bunch of molecules that lookedsimilar to the chemotherapy I used to make.

ZachBush:Since 4,000-year-old Chinese medicine, we've been looking to herbsand plants as our medicinal source. Suddenly, in a single fewminutes in my clinic, when somebody brought in the soil sciencepaper and is flipping through it and found this molecule, the ideathat there could be medicine in soil was a revolution in mymind.

ZachBush:But most importantly, when we found out that molecule was beingmade by bacteria and fungi, it finally closed the loop on my cancerresearch, and UCSF, UCSD, many universities around the world, thatwe're starting to find out that if you're missing certain bacteria,you get prone to cancer of this type. If you miss these bacteria,you get breast cancer. You lose these bacteria, you get coloncancer. You lose these bacteria, you get prostate cancer.

ZachBush:We knew these correlations, but we couldn't figure out why or howthe bacteria could possibly be affecting in such a predictablefashion the outcomes of the big human organism. The discovery ofthese molecules suddenly answered that because each species ofbacteria and fungi makes a subset, different subset, of thesecarbon molecules, each one looking different with differentfunction.

ZachBush:We call them carbon snowflakes. Everybody is relatively familiarwith the concept that each snowflake looks different at the crystallevel and everything else, all H2O, but organized in differentthree-dimensional structures, they have different features. Thecarbon snowflakes made by the bacteria and fungi, each speciescontributing to this fluent communication [inaudible 00:48:00], ifyou lose communication here in this aspect of Terrahydrite, then westart to become prone to dysfunction over here.

ZachBush:That's the journey into Terrahydrite. Terrahydrite is a term for alarge family, many millions of different variants of carbonsnowflakes made by bacteria and fungi, and that's the activeingredient that would go on to become our supplement line calledRestore. What you're taking in Restore is literally a supplementthat intends to do nothing to your body. It's the first supplement,I think, that really tries to do nothing.

ZachBush:The reason why it's trying to do nothing is because it's muchdifferent than a vitamin A or alpha-lipoic acid or curcumin or anyof these other compounds that we think of as having medicinalfeatures. All of those go on to bind to some sort of receptor, anda receptor that goes on to change genetic behavior of the thing. Itmight be an anti-inflammatory, it may up-regulate antioxidants, itmay have all kinds of important medicinal features.

ZachBush:Restore is much different. It has no molecule within it that'strying to bind a cell receptor. Instead, it's working with thisoxygen, hydrogen, this hydrite component of the carbon moleculethat's exchanging information over distances. You can think ofRestore as a liquid circuit board, a liquid circuit board thatspreads across the cellular environment to take information fromone cell and passage it to a distant cell.

ZachBush:In this way it functions as the wireless communication network ofthe whole body. When you take Restore, you might experience manydifferent things. If you're super healthy, you may not notice muchbecause you're going to simply start aging a little slower. Whatdoes it feel like to age slower? It feels a lot like you didyesterday, and that's the goal. If you keep feeling like yesterday,you're not going to age.

ZachBush:Sometimes the best way to find out is Terrahydrite working or notis take it for three or six months and then stop it, because you'regoing to suddenly catch up with your aging process and you'rereally like, "Oh, I did feel six months younger in that six months.I just didn't notice it because it felt a lot like yesterday." Itcan be interesting to watch that slowing of the aging process.

ZachBush:That's a heady thing to say, we figured out how to slow aging. Infact, aging is not complicated. Aging is literally 50% of it isdehydration inside the cell, which results from leaky gut, leakyblood vessels, leaky kidneys, and the second 50% of the agingprocess is a loss of this communication across cell structures.

ZachBush:With one compound made by bacteria and fungi, you're fixing theleak, improving hydration, and bringing the communication networkback into play. That's, in a nutshell, what is Terrahydrite andwhat is Restore.

KribenGovender:That's awesome. We're pretty much coming up to time, but we've gota couple of questions from our community. We have a community, aFacebook group of about ... It's approaching 10,000 people now. Ourpost says, "[inaudible 00:50:59] we've got Dr. Bush coming on. Sendme your questions." We'll just rapid-fire these questions.

KribenGovender:There was a question specifically, and I think you might havetackled this during the discussion, but why are we seeing a rise inautoimmune disease? That's the part one to the question. Part twois why is that once you get autoimmune disease, you tend to have[crosstalk 00:51:31]-

ZachBush:[crosstalk 00:51:31].

KribenGovender:... on top of it?

ZachBush:Great question. We talked about leaky gut. 60% to 70% of yourimmune system by volume and 80% of the antibody production that'sdone in your whole body is done in the one or two millimetersbehind the gut membrane. I'd mentioned this as your frontline ofdefense. You have two tennis courts. You start to very get leakygut, your immune system lining behind that is now getting exposedto the whole world.

ZachBush:Autoimmune disease develops when you've overwhelmed the immunesystem and stimulated it with a bunch of foreign material. Forevery single fiber, protein molecule that's foreign to your bodythat flows through that leaky gut, your immune system has to mounta response, and it begins with a T-cell, which is a type of whiteblood cell, responding to that protein or that foreignmaterial.

ZachBush:The T-cell, once activated, recognizing a foreign material, willcall in a B-cell, another type of immune cell. The B-cell becomesthe manufacturing plant for the antibody needed to attack thatforeign material. The B-cells start cranking out throughout thewhole gut lining to attack the outside world that's flowing throughthis unregulated barrier system.

ZachBush:What happens with an autoimmune disease is that sooner or laterit's literally a roulette wheel: you make enough antibodies toenough different protein structure. Sooner or later, one of theproteins in your body is going to be close enough in structure tothat foreign material that the antibodies from your B-cell is goingto cross-react with your own tissue.

ZachBush:In rheumatoid arthritis, you're attacking the supportive jointspace, the surfaces of the joints. In the case of Hashimoto's orthyroid disease, which is the number one most common autoimmunedisease right now in the world, it's the thyroid that cross-reacts.Type I diabetes, it's a specific cell within the pancreas. Adrenalinsufficiency is a specific adrenal cell getting knocked out.Celiac disease, a specific protein within the gut lining. All ofthese proteins start to cross-react with the B-cell manufacturingsystem; you end up with autoimmune disease.

ZachBush:Because the pathophysiology of one autoimmune disease is caused byall this overwhelm and it's a roulette wheel, sooner or lateryou're going to get one, now you're just as likely to get two orthree or four autoimmune diseases over time because, again, thesame pathophysiology is there for the thyroid disease versus type Idiabetes versus all the rest. It's an open gate. The leaky gut isthe beginning of an autoimmune process. Chronic stimulation ofthose B-cells is the conclusion of it.

KribenGovender:That's awesome. That's an amazing explanation to why we're facingthese epidemic of this [inaudible 00:54:13] inflammatory situation.The next question is from what I've read ... In fact, correct me ifI'm wrong ... that you're very much driven by your children and Iguess wanting to have a better future for the children, betterhealth outcomes. How do you manage your household in terms ofeating habits? How do you instill those values in your children sothat they can take that on to life as they turn into adults?

ZachBush:I am very blessed in that way. I feel like my children have almostled the charge on that lifestyle in the home. Back 12 years ago orsomething like that, my family watched Food Incorporated, a greatdocumentary on the animal protein production systems around theworld. My daughter, who's a huge animal lover, as soon as the moviewas over, she was like, "I'm never eating meat again in my life."She, as an eight-year-old kid, immediately could see that this was,a, a humanitarian disaster, ethical disaster and, b, an insanelytoxic thing to expose her body to.

ZachBush:We were already kind of moving towards a vegetarian, plant-baseddiet long before that, but as soon as this movie hit, it was likedone in our family. That was easy. My son became a very avid ... Aplant-based avid kid and has maintained that, in some ways, morevigorously than anybody else in the family.

ZachBush:My son now is 21, my daughter is 18, and they're really in theiryoung adulthood here, living out lifestyles that I think reallyparallel my own ideal and what I'm always preaching to my patients,which is have a low footprint on the planet. The lower you eat onthe food chain, the smaller your footprint. You eat high on thefood chain, big animals and the rest, you're going to consume a lotof fresh water in that meat consumption and you're going to demanda lot of herbicides, pesticides, and crop production to create thatone pound of beef or whatever it is.

ZachBush:One pound of beef, by the way, consumes somewhere between 2,500 and5,000 gallons of fresh water. One pound of beef. If you avoidbuying a pound of beef for your family, you'll save more water forthe planet than stopping your showers for six months.

KribenGovender:Wow!

ZachBush:The amount of water consumption alone in an animal protein-baseddiet is completely unsustainable for the planet. You multiply outthat pound of beef in that 5,000 gallons of fresh water times sevenbillion people, you start to clearly see in a week if everybody waseating a pound of beef, we would have no fresh water left on theplanet. We would suck the fossil aquifers right out of the groundand we'd have an empty resource there. We'd have contaminatedbrackish rivers and lakes with Roundup and everything else sittingin it as our only source of fresh water.

ZachBush:We are currently in the United States pumping 17 trillion gallonsout of our fossil aquifers that have been there for billions ofyears, 1.2 billion or whatever it's been, sucking that fresh waterout of our fossil reservoir tanks. 17 trillion a year just to feedcattle.

KribenGovender:Wow!

ZachBush:It's just a really unsustainable process. Stupid, stupid use ofprecious resources. All of those things have played into aplant-based diet. That doesn't mean you have to be strictly vegan.It doesn't mean you can't have any fish or whatever. It means thatyou need to radically reduce the amount of animal proteins in thediet.

ZachBush:Personally, I think that dairy is a disaster to human health. Wewere never cows. Dairy milk was designed for calves. Remember thatthe calf stops drinking that milk at six months and never drinks itagain in its life. We're the only species that drinks milk beyondinfancy. We're certainly the only species that drinks some otherspecies' milk. We made the mistake of picking that species as ourmilk source as a ruminant, which has a totally different gut than ahuman does. Not only is it not our species, it's not even the rightarchitecture of a gut to put the right milk into.

ZachBush:[inaudible 00:58:29] on dairy. Milk is the number one problem.Cheese is a huge problem. Really highly fermented dairy productsare less of a problem, but not to the point of inflammatorycapacity. Of course, you have the additional problem that mostdairy is highly contaminated herbicides, pesticides, and otherchemicals as well as hormones that those animals are given andeverything else.

ZachBush:[inaudible 00:58:55] the industry is toxic now. Then they have toheat-pasteurize the milk which breaks the structure of the oils,makes it more carcinogenic and all this. In a nutshell, goplant-based, eliminate dairy, go as low as possible on animalproteins in the home, and you'll really move yourself towards anutritional opportunity.

ZachBush:Eat organic as much as possible, not because organic farming issustainable. It's not. We don't organic farm in a regenerativefashion. We need to revolutionize organic farming.

ZachBush:But with every dollar that you spend on organic food, it is yetanother step away from chemical farming. I think we have to votewith our dollars right now and eat as organic as we possibly can,demand change in the industry, which is happening. More and moreorganic farmers every single year, and that's exciting. We need toteach them to go beyond organic and become regenerative, but that'san easier jump than going chemical to organic.

ZachBush:Buy organic, eat organic, and ultimately grow your own food. If yougrow your own [inaudible 00:59:52] really taking control of foodindependence. If you can't grow your own food, then know yourfarmer. Farmers' markets, CSAs, the like are great opportunitiesfor you to really be in touch with the food system in a moreresponsible way.

KribenGovender:Wonderful. We're pretty much coming up to time, but the finalquestion I like to ask my guests is if there's one thing you coulddo to improve your gut health, what would it be, Dr. Zach?

ZachBush:One thing would be grow your own food, I guess. The most powerfulsingle thing you could do would be to be so in touch with yournature that you're little eating from your yard, down to the levelthat you might not even pick the fruits and vegetables. You wouldeat them off the vine just like the rest of the animal kingdomdoes. When you pick a fruit or vegetable, it changes a lot of thestuff in there. You're better off grazing on your own plants as ifyou were an animal still in the kingdom.

ZachBush:That would be the one most powerful thing you can do is get so backin touch with nature that you would be like the deer and the otherlarge mammals out there that graze on the nutrients and the giftsof Mother Earth.

KribenGovender:Right. Dr. Zach Bush, I just want to say thank you. A huge amountof gratitude and respect for what you're doing to enlighten theworld, transform the world, and set up a better future for ourchildren, for our grandchildren. Hopefully we can reverse thetrends that you talked about and really come ahead as a species andnot have to leave the planet. Let's hope for that. Thank you somuch.

ZachBush:Very glad.

KribenGovender:God bless.

ZachBush:Thank you all so much for your wisdom and your efforts.

KribenGovender:Thank you.