This episode was remotely recorded. Dr. Zach Bush is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. He is an internationally recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease and our food production systems. He shares a vision for how humanity can use the challenges we’re facing collectively as an opportunity to transform our relationship with nature and life as we know it on earth. If you’re interested in learning more from Dr Zach, please visit www.zachbushmd.com
How can we support our immune health despite toxicity in our environment, especially in the context of a global pandemic? How are our systems of food production contributing to the destruction of ecosystems worldwide, and giving rise to disease outbreaks like the one we’ve seen with Covid-19?
We had the privilege to "sit down" online with Zach Bush MD, to ask these questions, and get his insights on everything from the top anti-inflammatory foods, to how the air you breathe affects your microbiome.
Zach Bush MD is a renowned, multi-disciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care and internationally recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to human health. www.zachbushmd.com
00:13 Ivy Joeva:
How can we support our immune health despite toxicity in our environment, especially in the context of a global pandemic. How our systems of food production contributing to the destruction of ecosystems worldwide and giving rise to disease outbreaks like the one we've seen with Covid-19 we had the privilege to sit down with Zach Bush MD to ask these questions and get his insights on everything from the top anti-inflammatory foods to how the air you breathe affects your microbiome. Dr Zach is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. He's an internationally recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to health disease and our food production systems. But beyond his medical expertise, he shares with us a vision for how humanity can use the challenges we're facing collectively as an opportunity to transform our relationship with nature and life as we know it on earth. This is an episode you may want to listen to more than once and share with your loved ones. Now my conversation with Dr. Zach Bush.
01:22 Ivy Joeva:
We're in the middle of this global pandemic. And I want to kind of have your perspective on this, cause I know you've said that we can just expect more of this to come and worse. So in your view, what has been contributing to this? What are the causes?
Dr. Zach Bush:
Yeah, so it's definitely been portrayed as a new thing by the media and perhaps to get the clickbait and certainly by the politicians for some reasons, maybe great some momentum behind the public, you know, movement and the economic shifts that have happened. All that remains unclear to me. But the science behind this is not new. This has been happening since the beginning of biology as we understand it. Viruses which are not living organisms, they're not like bacteria and fungi. Viruses are actually just packets of genetic information. And in the case of this one, it's an RNA virus. RNA is a, a template that is derived from DNA. Viruses are unique in that they can insert this RNA into our DNA and then can make a protein out of that. And so the Corona virus that's being recognized with this pandemic right now again, the science is very incomplete to say that we know that there's coronaviruses causing these deaths.
Dr. Zach Bush:
All we can say is that there's a correlation between detecting the strand of RNA in the bloodstream and and the, the consequences that are happening to very few of the people that it's detected in. So the vast majority of people that we detect this RNA in are asymptomatic. And there's a very small segment that will become sick and even a much smaller segment that will become fatally ill. It's certainly leading to the death of, of people around the planet. And on a population of 7 billion, we are very blessed and fortunate that the number has been as low as it has, but that doesn't diminish the human loss that we're seeing from this. My concern is that there, there's a misperception of newness to this, and also there's a misperception that this is the same as other viruses. The clinical manifestation that's happening in the ICU is as much different than other viruses that we see such as influenza.
Dr. Zach Bush:
So this virus is a adaptation of a longstanding Corona strain. Corona viruses have been around for since the study of viruses really started, and it's one of the most common contributors to common cold and things like this. So coronaviruses are common. They happen on a yearly, if not multiple times a year basis to the human population. And so in that way, this is old news. What's new news is that there was a shift in the, in the amount of genetic information that was in that virus that happened perhaps in October, November of this year, past year in China. And the phenomenon of shift rather than drift is something very significant. A shift is where we have a sudden upgrade of, of the RNA information in this virus where it can make new proteins and therefore behave differently clinically. And in this case, there's a new protein in this Corona strain that we've never seen before, which I find fascinating.
04:37 Dr. Zach Bush:
And so we have yet to identify what that is. Is it a enzyme? Is it something that would help detox our bodies? Is that something that would protect us from cancer? Is it something that makes us prone to disease in the future? We literally have no idea. But the way in which biology swaps, the genetic information via the virus envelopes is always an adaptive process. And so as we stress the environment, viruses become very active in swapping genetic information in response to that stress. And so very predictably, as you look at the big stress was on the planet that we've forced on the microbiome. These packets of genetic information response to those injuries have, have factored very well or correlated very well with these large ecological injuries that we cause to the farming and agricultural industries worldwide. We've seen an isolation of rainforests, a nice 7% of the grasslands, like we have devastated the biodiversity planet in the name of agriculture to feed 7 billion people.
Dr. Zach Bush:
Of course, very, very little of that agricultural land actually goes to feed humans in the United States. You know, Kansas is our most agricultural state. 90% of its acreage is under farmland. And yet they have to import 90% of their food. What are they importing? They're importing the food that they eat. They're exporting the non food that they're growing. So what they're, they're growing is actually corn and soybean and the light that go into ethanol, go into processed foods, go into the apparel industry as polyesters and plastics and such. And so we are growing commodities, but we're not growing food. And so that's, that's important because we keep saying, well, we have to destroy that ecosystem plan to feed 7 billion people. And that's not at all the case feeding the people. It's mostly happening by peasant farmers growing real food. 70% of the world is fed by a peasant farmer. Today only 30% of the world is actually fed out of some sort of large Western agricultural system.
06:36 Ivy Joeva:
And then those peasant farmers are going hungry too. Right? Cause they're selling their crops to us.
Dr. Zach Bush:
Yeah. So those peasant farmers are losing industry because they're actually being trained into chemical agriculture and chemical agriculture is now annihilating their soils, increasing their cost of necessary inputs. And so when you start spraying herbicides and pesticides, sounds like an easy management decision because you no longer have weeds, you no longer have insects eating your plants. But within three, five, seven years, your crop, you know, is diminishing its yields. And so you have to start putting in intensive inputs. And so within a few years of, of the export of our agricultural practices of herbicides and pesticides, these peasant farmers are find themselves bankrupt because they can't afford to buy from the chemical companies, the expensive seeds and the expensive herbicides and pesticides now and, and nutrient inputs that that soil is now needing now that it's dead. And so we are definitely, you know, straining the food system through chemical farming largely because we're not growing food and we're doing a practice that demands more and more expensive practices every year.
07:42 Ivy Joeva:
Understood. So you're saying that this chemical agriculture and the resulting environmental degradation is actually a contributor to what we're seeing with the current pandemic?
Dr. Zach Bush:
Yeah. So when you add an a, this is seen at a hospital level and it's seen on the planetary level. So when we add antibiotics into a hospital environment, what results is drug resistant bacteria? And so hospitals now are rampant with with bacteria that we call nosocomial infections or hospital acquired infections because these bacteria have been bred in an environment of a severe antimicrobial stress and they, there's very few species will develop the capacity to survive in that toxic environment. And so they become prone to overgrowing or causing infection when you, when you expose a vulnerable human microbiome to it. In the same way, if you start putting pressure antimicrobial E on large swaths of the planet through the main herbicide we use as is Roundup, the active ingredient is glyphosate, which has been patented as an antibiotic and a parasite antifungal. This thing kills everything in the soil.
Dr. Zach Bush:
And so when you start with that antimicrobial pressure, you're again going to cause these in the, in the, yeah, attributes or survival mechanisms of the bacteria and they're going to then secrete information at the genetic level and into the organisms that are eating that food. And so the poultry and the swine that then will lead to avian flu. If they're under that same stress and they're eating antibiotic laced food that's already stressed signaling out of it with genetic material, that animal and now becomes stress. It becomes divergent or lacking diversity and its microbiome. It's now inducing a stress message, all of which can be exuded as genetic information. And so I am really, you know, pretty passionate about trying to change the dialogue around the viral kingdom into it's a genetic download or in this case upload into what's happening in the environment. If the environment is stress, we're going to start producing these at a higher level.
Dr. Zach Bush:
If that's true, then we should be able to correlate very closely the 1976 debut of Roundup into the global farming it and these pandemics, and that's exactly what we see. The first wine flew that jumped between pigs and humans was 1976 and then within three years of that we had flu strains jumping from birds down to humans for the first time. So as we stress these organisms, they started sending out signals not within their own species, but cross species, sending out genetic information that we call viruses. And that was, you know, starting to influence the biology of humans. So if it's just, you know, benign genetic information or something like that, why does it hurt people? Well, it's not necessarily benign. It's new genetic information that can either change the behavior of the immune system, whether it upgrades it or downregulates it. And one thing that we can see these viruses do that can be very healthy for humans is induce fever and a big systemic inflammatory response.
Dr. Zach Bush:
And what we know about viruses is the virus itself isn't what's causing all the symptoms of flu. What causes the symptoms of flu or in this case, Corona is your immune system's response to that input. What we know about cancer is that hyperthermia, then the raising of the body temperature is very effective at killing cancer cells, precancer cells, etc. And so it could be that the, this is an adaptive mechanism by nature to say when surrounded by toxins that are carcinogenic and a drop in that the microbiome protection against cancer, these genes are sent out with new proteins that can either detox us or maybe it's just an effort to increase the, the immune system response to all of the organisms on the planet in this pro cancerous environment. And so I really know that the microbiome has never against humanity. It's never at war with us.
Dr. Zach Bush:
We have this massively mistaken paradigm right now that you see tearing across the whole world that we are in conflict with the virus. We are in conflict with the microbiome and we need to mount war on this. And you see the word war mentioned all the time in the news today. You know, we're at war with this front of thing. We're at war. And I just watched another little segment from a doctor on the front line saying, you know, I, this is literally like being in the trenches of warfare. Like we're so exhausted, we're so tired. So we've got this mentality like this thing is attacking us and we have to attack back with bigger antibiotics. We need to attack back with vaccines. We needed to attack back with all this sterilization of the environment and hand sanitizer and all of this. Obviously that stuff is not at the root cause of why this viruses happening.
Dr. Zach Bush:
The root cause of why this virus is happening is because we continue to stress and higher and higher degrees. The ecosystems of the center of China. I a year ago demonstrated at the sun Valley wellness fester that pictures of China's glyphosate spray map and dead soil systems and said, if we're going to see another pandemic out of China, and when we see it, it'll come out of this space. And it's who? Bei province, right? Dead center of the heaviest frame in the whole country of where we have the highest levels of toxicity, not just a Roundup and, and the other toxins that are from the agricultural system, but heavy metals, manufacturing, toxins, all kinds of crap. So coming out of the very most toxic, most damaged ecosystem. China, we should expect these phenomenon to happen and the world can say, Oh bad on China for being so toxic.
Dr. Zach Bush:
We made them toxic, we exported our toxins to them, we told them to farm this way. We told them they could produce more. Then we export it all of our most toxic manufacturing practices to China cause we could do it cheaper, you know. And, and then we, then we made them buy all of our plastic from us cause we weren't able to manage all the plastic waste. And so we've been shipping that to China. So we have been using China as a dumping ground and that is not some problem of the Chinese government. The Chinese government has been trying to improve the economic wellness of 1.3 billion people and therefore they've made some tough economic decisions. But in January of 2018 they said, no more plastic. We are not taking world's plastic anymore. We need to clean up China. Since then, they've made massive improvements in the air quality in Beijing.
Dr. Zach Bush:
They've done all kinds of wonderful, you know, interventions, realizing it, ah, there are recently, you know, agreement with Tesla. Bringing Tesla in there as a manufacturer is a huge breakthrough, not only for, you know, the clean air efforts there but also just for a trade agreements were trying to start and be able to do trade agreements with companies rather than a very stubborn U S government. And so I'm excited to see, you know, trying to clean itself up. And if it does and if we can help them do it, the faster we help them do it, the fewer of these pandemics can come out of that space. But remember that MERS came out of the middle East. It didn't come out of China. It came out of out of the middle East and the damage done there probably by the oil and gas and chemical industry. So that ecology and so it's not specific to China.
Dr. Zach Bush:
If we were doing better surveillance, we would realize that the Amazon jungle is producing all kinds of weird variants. And it's only by nature of the direction of jet streams and everything else that the U S isn't getting that the jet stream taking the river of water out of out of the Amazon there is not hitting the U S next it's going West as it as it goes there. So so you've got this situation where we're not recognizing pandemics from that space, but certainly Asia is no doubt getting, you know, variations of viruses and other things as as the Amazon goes under stress. So it's happening all over the world is natural biology for genetic mutations and shift and drift to happen in the viral genomics as we stress the environment.
Dr. Zach Bush:
So on a macro level, you're saying this is actually changing the genetics of the animals that we're raising for livestock. And that's how these viruses are then getting passed on to the human population based on our growing practices. When it comes to human suceptibility to Corona virus and other viruses like it, why are some people getting so sick and others not as affected?
So it's an important question, right? Humanity may now be making proteins from our genome going forward that we've never made before, which is so intriguing to me. We might get an upgrade in genetics here.
16:16 Ivy Joeva:
In terms of the antibodies?
Dr. Zach Bush:
No, in terms of the new genetic sequence that's been inserted into our, our genome
Ivy Joeva:
From the virus.
16:24 Dr. Zach Bush:
From the virus. We have too much chronic disease in this country and we are stressing for decades now our hospital systems, and that's not new news. We are a hospital building a nation because we have to go down and check out Texas, Texas children's hospital, which is you know, towers and towers. It's all city built to house our sick and cancer-ridden children. We are building literal cities to house our sick people. This little extra stress on top of it that's happening right now. I'm not trying to say that the, the human loss is little. It's, it's enormous loss. When you love lose a loved one, it's enormously exhausting to work beyond your capacity as a physician or as a nurse or any care provider or a respiratory therapist. Right now in these ICS of course is exhausting because you don't have enough resources, you don't have enough staffing, you don't have enough because the margin that has been squeezed out of the medical system to make more profit has been always pinching down on resources and always trying to maximize profits.
Dr. Zach Bush:
That is a public, you know, company that is running your healthcare system. We run them like public companies. We have to extract as much economy out of those things as possible. And so these public entities, these public businesses that are tasked with making money are always trying to cut. So why does our healthcare system get stressed so easily? Well, we have too much chronic disease. We run them on very narrow margins. We outsourced to the cheapest manufacturer possible all the time. And so yes, of course, trying to make most of our masks cause we want the cheapest possible mass to squeak out another one and a half cents of margin on every master that we buy. And so this is the disease that we have at the economic level, which is margins are shut, shut, shut down. And we're lit - wgse're running on this small margin, which is insane.
Dr. Zach Bush:
When you know that every three or four years there's going to be another pandemic that will stress the hospital system. People that are dying from this virus are not who you would expect if this was like the previous coronaviruses. And that's why the science is really starting to intrigue me around Cronin just cause we know there's now an RNA strand that's coding for a protein that we don't know what it is. We have never seen this protein in human biotic before. So that's intriguing. So we have a new protein and then we have a new clinical syndrome or a new clinical presentation that I also find fascinating, which is these patients are not dying of acute respiratory distress syndrome are ARDS, which is typically what happens with MERS, SARS influenza. When these viruses get bad and induce a pneumonia like reaction or an inflammatory reaction in the lungs, we see whiteout on chest x-ray.
19:04 Dr. Zach Bush:
Apparently news coming out of New York right now is that, that's not what this thing looks like. And I, no, I haven't seen this in person. This is another, you know, ICU doctor in New York that put out this video to describe in detail what he's seeing at the ICU bed. He's like, I literally in decades of acute care, never seen anything like this cause it's not ARDS. They are not dying of pneumonia. They're dying of hypoxemia, which is the inability to get oxygen off of hemoglobin. This is manifesting as if the person doesn't have the ability to deliver oxygen. You can get oxygen into their body, which is much different than SARS or ARDS. You can get oxygen in there, but it can't deliver the tissue, so they're going hypoxemic due to an inability to release oxygen from their bloodstream. That's a very interesting phenomenon because we know in our laboratory after years working around Roundup is that that is the injury of Roundup.
Dr. Zach Bush:
Roundup actually induces an hypoxemic injury to all the tissues of the body. There's not a lack of oxygen. The oxygen just can't get into the tissue in the same way. And so in a bizarre way, whatever this virus is, it looks to be in a few patients expounding or causing the very injury that we're doing to the ecosystem to manifest these viruses in the first place. There's some sort of poetic justice that I might be just kind of over reading in that and the science needs to be worked out. But there's something eloquent about that.
20:32 Ivy Joeva:
Well, and I'm also thinking of the poetry of, I mean tragic poetry, but just how we have been destroying and systematically burning the lungs of the planet, the Amazon rain forest. And now we have a virus that's destroying human lung tissue.
Dr. Zach Bush:
I find that again, kind of merciful. I get saying, look, if I can't breathe as mother earth, you're not going to breathe either, but I'm not going to hurt your lung in the same way. And if you do the right thing and plug back into nature, you could heal this very quickly. And so I think she's being very generous with this virus. I think that mother nature is doing something eloquent here. I think mother nature is always acting in our best interests. I don't think we would be here as a species if we weren't intended to be here by nature and by biology on the planet. We are a manifestation of very complex biology. Within the microbiome. We have a very, very simple genome where we only have 20,000 genes. That's a fruit fly has 13,000 genes. You are extremely simple from a genetic standpoint.
Dr. Zach Bush:
When it comes to the number of genes you have the genes then pro program for you to make new proteins. The proteins are interestingly very diverse. You have over 280,000 proteins in your body. A very small number of those may be coming from human genes. We now know that RNA injected into our DNA from viruses. Millions of years ago or thousands of years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago have allowed the adaptation of multicellular organisms in human life to emerge in our genome right now is a retrovirus that codes for the very proteins that allow us to have STEM cells. STEM cells would not work as STEM cells if it wasn't for an RNA virus that upgraded our genome hundreds of millions and years ago. So I find that very, very, very interesting that we are in our adaptive capacity, in our extraordinary capacity for adaptation to our environments. We're the only species that has been able to inhabit every single ecological niche on the planet, which is very unfortunate because what humans do is destroy the ecosystem they live in.
Dr. Zach Bush:
So we've destroyed every single ecosystem on the planet. And so, you know, there's a bizarre negative effect of this, this capacity we have. But on the upside, if we realized that that was due to the intelligence of nature and that we are actually the culmination of an intelligent biologic process on the planet, and we started to act in, in this way, we would see human health recover nearly immediately. We can see it happen in soil with our nonprofits. So all of our money that we make out of our soil base nutritional supplements we put into our nonprofit or other R and D companies to find root cause solutions for the problems. The world right now. And so the, our nonprofit is there to help chemical farmers become regenerative soil managers. And so that shift when they stopped spraying chemicals, we can see 30 years of decimation of soils reverse in a single season.
Dr. Zach Bush:
One, you know, winter without spraying one spring without spraying. And the biodiversity that can happen that very next summer is just work. And so it's so exciting that mother earth is so much more graceful and resiliant than our behavior would inflict upon her. So I think there's a call to action right now for the planet. We just proved beyond a shadow of the doubt that humanity can decrease our negative impact on nature instantaneously. That is the silver lining of this fires. I believe that this virus is giving us the opportunity to find out that mother nature is trying to upgrade us, not only genetically, but she's trying to upgrade us consciously. Our consciousness needs to respond to this event to show us that our economies are dependent on our ecology. And if we can make that leap and we can start realizing that we can't have a stock market.
Dr. Zach Bush:
If there is no econ, ecological stability on the planet, then we can put our monies into the correct prioritization, into the correct efforts, innovations, technologies that will put us in line with in our consumer product industries and our energy industry and our healthcare industry. All of these need to realign massively to the template the nature is screaming at us to pay attention to and that template begins with biodiversity. If we allow for biodiversity to] happen in the gut, in our soils, on our skin, in our sinuses, in our brain, in every single solid organ system, we now know the microbiome needs to be in each of these faces, in our relationship to other humans, to our pets, to the animals we raise for food to the very crops we grow for food or commodities or whatnot to our sociopolitical situation. Again, if we make it biodiverse, if we create biodiverse mindset and we bring indigenous thought and leadership back into the United nations and we allow the, the indigenous leadership of this planet 400 royal families and nation state leaders that are silenced in, in the, in the national and international media, we need that voice to become very strong because they have many of the answers.
Dr. Zach Bush:
They, they are ready and willing to update their methodologies to fit a modern world, but they have solutions at the political sociopolitical levels that we need to pay attention to. They are very aware of the crises and problems that our current pharmaceutical and agricultural systems are inflicting on these developing countries. We need to listen there and prevent the damage that we've caused in the, in the developed worlds before we go extinct.
26:07 Ivy Joeva:
So what can people do to help support their immune system, whether from this Corona virus or just in general in terms of combating some of our widespread exposure to glyphosate and other toxins in the environment?
Dr. Zach Bush:
It all comes down to, you know, really great lifestyle decisions right now. So your microbiome of your gut, your skin, your sinuses, this whole extension that is your immune system, that microbiome is a reflection or an element. It is the result of the ecology that you touch on a given day, and so the best way for you to strengthen your immune system is to be in as many diverse ecosystems as possible. National parks, national forests, hiking, beaches is done fortunately here in LA now. Anyway, it's happening globally. Our global response to this virus was the opposite of what would have made a resilient population. Putting people in their high rises and putting people in their, in their homes and locking them in there is the opposite of improving immune function. One of my favorite studies that came out a few years ago was looking at one of the how to protect against flu and one of the best predictors of protecting yourself against flu was seven to eight hugs a day.
Dr. Zach Bush:
If you got more than seven or eight hugs a day, you had a 35% reduction in risk of getting the flu. It's very difficult find, you know, food or beverage in the United States, not contaminated. The current single glass of California wine has 64 herbicides and pesticides that are detectable in that glass of wine.
27:41 Ivy Joeva:
What about like an organic wine? Would, would that be the case with them organic foods as well?
Dr. Zach Bush:
Yeah. So far we haven't, so Dry Farm wines is a great distribution company that actually screens every wine they carry for herbicides and pesticides. And to date they haven't found a single vineyard in the United States claiming anything that was actually clean. So the only wines they distribute are from theirs. I think maybe one left in Argentina, but even South America is pretty contaminated. The vast majority of them are coming from small family vineyards in Italy or France and that's kind of the last, you know, semblance of, of clean vines on earth and those are diminishing quickly.
Dr. Zach Bush:
So unfortunately it's a toxic, toxic environment. But our group is working with Carlo Mondavi and Napa. I love what he's doing. He started something called the Monarch project, which is got the goal of cleaning Napa Valley up from what's herbicide and pesticide toxcity over the next 10 years. And he has a beautiful brand called Raen I think his spelling and Raen is a new wine that is on a 75 acre, very small micro vineyard that he's doing there as the test plot of how to clean up the environment there. We have, we have soil treatment products in play in our company in Virginia as well as in the hemp industry where with a lineage town. And so we're helping these growers understand how to radically improve the, the life cycle of their soils to detox everything from Roundup down to the heavy metals and the like.
Dr. Zach Bush:
So if you work with the microbes, they'll clean up the environment. And so if we stop killing the microbes with the Roundup, they start to come back and then they, they can quickly get the whole cycle of carbon metabolism as well as detoxification going throughout our soil systems. So how do you stay healthy? You need to be outside, start gardening in the backyard, start breathing real air again. If you don't have a backyard, I don't have a backyard on my little condo. And so I've gotten, got to rely on micro gardening's and my wife and I just put in our little farmer's footprint, our farm farmer's fingerprint, we call it farmer's fingerprint garden. And so we've grown in kale and lettuces and tomatoes and Hawaiian hot peppers on the, on the deck here. And so it takes a very small patch of sun to actually become quite productive and, and just having a little touch to the soil and to the food coming out of that puts you back in touch with that whole microbiome.
Dr. Zach Bush:
You don't need acres of land to become in touch with microbiomes and get your hands in the dirt daily, you know, poke around the tomato plants and check for health as a soil. Make sure it's air ready to get, get that hydration right. And so you're, you should be monitoring looking at that soil, touching that soil, breathing it. You know, I'm a huge fan of just biting mint right off the plant instead of don't pick it, but just bite it straight off the plant. It changes again your microbiome, exposure to it without washing it, without picking it and all that. And so just go straight out to the plant. And so these are ways that you can on your back porch or you know, in a vertical garden on the wall of an apartment, whatever it is, start to get small amount of plant life back into, into your daily routine to start to breathe real biome.
Dr. Zach Bush:
And as soon as this government loosens up, and if this government doesn't loosen up soon, we're going to have to have a revolution. We need to get back outside. And so we got to get out, we got to put push back out into nature as soon as possible because our immune system depends on it. We are going to become sicker, not healthier if we remain secluded. So in whatever mechanism your government is allowing you to get outside right now on the way to the grocery store, make sure you roll down the windows. Enjoy the fresh air drive through neighborhoods that you've never been in. And to get any microbiome drive, drive to the city park, you know, whatever ,windows down, breathe the new air, breathe real air, breathe in that microbiome of the environment. If you take a trip up in your local national forest, things like that that aren't shut down right now and get outside, get into the woods and try to get in touch with nature.
Dr. Zach Bush:
If your beaches are not shut down, then for goodness sakes, get out in the water there and touch nature.
31:45 Ivy Joeva:
Would you recommend anti-inflammatory foods like turmeric and ginger and would, would that be something that could be effective just to support?
Dr. Zach Bush:
Totally. I recommend that like for everybody all the time, any day, every day. And so the things that I recommend for healthy microbiome and immune support for the, from a nutritional standpoint is high fiber. And so as just a one rule, how much fiber are you getting in a day and how much variety your fibers obviously coming from your vegetables and your fruits. And so if you can get to 10 10 species of fruits and vegetables in a week, you're going to start winning the game in regard to fiber diversity and the fiber has the ability to do, to support that bio diversification of the gut.
Dr. Zach Bush:
Huge fan of root vegetables. They need to be grown. Root vegetables are very high in Roundup content if they're grown conventionally. And so you need to go organic on these, but it's going to be things like your beats your turnips or sweet potatoes, your carrots, especially the purple carrots and the white carrots, the radishes, the red, the black, the white daikon radish. These are powerhouses of, of you know, diverse fibers and microbiome micronutrient you know, elemental variety to push microbiome diversification and a healthy immune system response. So eat close to the ground, eat as much variety as possible, at least 10 species of fruits and vegetables a week and see if you're just eating broccoli every day. That doesn't count as a great diet. You need to seriously get, you know, all everything you just mentioned on the roots. And then you go above the ground and you're looking at, you know, all of the different lettuces, you know, kale became a huge fan and I like kale.
Dr. Zach Bush:
It's a good one. It got some interesting nutrients. But if something like iron, which is very important at the elemental level for the microbiome, a kind of balance it and it can function as an antimicrobial. The iron load in kale is actually very, very low and then most lettuces is, but in romaine it's phenomenal. So romaine is one of the highest bio availabilities of iron in the entire diet. And so romaine lettuce, you know, the, the, the butter lettuces, the dark red lettuces, and then you can get into things like your kale and precipitous vegetables where your Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, those sorts of things. And so you want to diversify their spread, diversify over the course of the week. I'm a big fan of of kind of the heirloom fruits out there. So things like, you know, mango and things that have not been hybridized.
Dr. Zach Bush:
The classic hybridized crops out there are things like watermelons that are sold at U S grocery stores. If you go abroad and buy watermelon, it's great. It's totally different than any U S watermelon. Totally genetically modified through hybridization in the U S and then apples are another classic version of that. The heirloom apples have very low glycemic index compared to that classic Fuji, you know, Apple in the United States, these big red sweet apples have been bred into low fiber content. As you decrease the fiber content, that glycaemic index goes up and that fructose and the apples suddenly becomes very, very difficult from an endocrine standpoint for your, for your your health. And so eat those heirloom things. Kiwis are a good example of a good one. So Kiwis, mangoes original melons, you know, things like the same what was often called the Santa Claus melanin in the United States.
Dr. Zach Bush:
But honeydew melons would be reasonable cantaloupe, those kinds of fruits out there. So go after variety, go after variety and get outside and grow as much of that as possible over the course of this next spring and summer coming on here, right? I hope that our consciousness is rising in that when the restrictions are lifted, we are going to be all up in each other's stuff and giving each other hugs and kisses and just getting all French on each other because we need to be affectionate. We need to be grabbing each other and saying, I missed you. I love you grabbing each other's and kissing each other on the cheeks. Let's get this re-engagement of humanity to be affectionate, to be loving, to be conscious of our connection, the necessity for our connection to one another, and necessity for our connection to the nature around us, the connection back to a food system that is built within nature, not within chemical industries.
Dr. Zach Bush:
We need, you know, not anymore Franken burgers. We need real food. And that that gets me excited because I think that we could move from this extreme crisis of food system vulnerability that we're currently in to food security over the next five years. As we reorient our priorities from cheap, cheap, cheap is better, to quality is better and home is better and closer to home is better. And so as we start growing our guards again at the end of world war II, we were growing 40% of our food and our backyard victory gardens, we grow less than a 10th of 1% of our food and our backyards now. And so we stopped participating in it. My excitement as everybody's been out of seeds, everybody's out of potting soil right now, like there has been a run on gardening right now and I couldn't be more excited that that was the public's response to that.
Dr. Zach Bush:
That is a rise in consciousness. That didn't happen with SARS, MERS, these other things. I think there a huge silver lining of human behavior through this global event. So if you haven't participated in the, in the gardening revolution in the last couple of weeks, make sure you get out there as soon as things are lifted or get out there today and start the process. Dig a hole, put a plant in it. If it dies next week, no problem. Dig three more holes. Plant three more plants. This is a process you got to learn. You're not going to be good at this overnight. Do not be discouraged by your ineffectiveness the first time out of the box here, start sprouting some seeds in your, in your kitchen right now we've got broccoli seeds and we've got radish seeds going right now and those make incredible micro grains that are so dense and it takes five days and you've got an incredible salad grown on your own countertops so, so please get engaged. It doesn't take a garden plot to start growing your own food and, and start becoming self-sufficient on some level again in regard to your food system.
37:48 Ivy Joeva:
Beautiful. Thank you so much Dr. Zach.
Dr. Zach Bush:
So glad to be with all of you. I'm excited for the future of food.
Ivy Joeva:
Thanks for listening everyone. Visit us online at futurefood.fm. Subscribe on Apple podcasts or listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and put the power to save the planet on your plates and on your playlist. I'm Ivy Joeva. Future of Food is produced by Lee Schneider. Music by epidemic sound. We're part of the FutureX Podcast Network.