Panel: Ask the Experts – How Regenerative Organic Agriculture Can Improve Human Health

with that said i would like to read a short statement that represents our position rodale institute's position on these matters one that we believe represents the collective spirit of the regenerative movement and so here goes true regenerative agriculture is about healing the land communities and the human spirit this was true when robert rodale began using the term regenerative in the late 1970s and it remains true today this is to say that as long as we have injustice in this land we have work to do and long as long as people suffer from oppression we have work to do and as long as human rights are not upheld we have work to do to truly commit to regeneration we must fight injustice wherever we see it whether it's in ourselves in those around us and in the systems that perpetuate it stewarding the land and everyone on it is an active practice and so we look forward to a healthier and more just world one grounded in healing compassion and responsibility so that brings us to today's discussion which is about healing back in november of 2018 a group of leaders from the medical community soil scientists and farmers convened in a rented conference room from a regional hospital here in pennsylvania to begin a conversation that would lead to the reimagination of our agriculture and health care systems these leading minds began sharing their collective wisdom and best practice that would chart the course for the white paper that we we recently debuted and we will discuss today our founder j.i rodale said that healthy soil equals healthy food equals healthy people all the way back in 1942 and you know as i've reflected on these words countless times over the last couple of years i really have begun to see two profound truths that have emerged for me the first truth is that our farmers are on the front lines of human health they are the first line of offense in ensuring our public health and ultimately that our job as farmers is it's not to produce food our job as farmers is to produce healthy people the second truth that's emerged for me is that if we're ever going to reverse the course of chronic disease that that is exploding exponentially right now our doctors and medical communities need to look to our soils and agricultural practices for solutions our health care system is broken with levels of disease rising each and every day and at the same time our industrial food system is using more harmful pesticides than ever before quality of life is decreasing along with the nutrient density of our food and we need to act now to fix the health of people on the planet and we believe that regenerative health is that solution we're here to talk more about our white paper about what our white paper has on earth and the concrete steps that we can take as a society to reverse the course that we're on today we gather to unveil a new solution to fix our broken systems and to ignite a new conversation between doctors and farmers one that we invite each and every one of you to join to lay out a new path for all of us to walk together doctors and farmers we need to all be at the same table working hand in hand as partners so now for the why why did we write this paper and why now this paper is the first of its kind that brings together scientists farmers and medical doctors for a holistic analysis of our food and health care systems with research spanning the globe and contributions from numerous health care and ag professionals the power of the plate examines the intertwined nature of food farming nutrition and health care in a way that's never been done before this paper contains for each and every one of us it contains solutions for each and every one of us if all of us come together collectively to take action we can ignite a new future in human and planetary health and now for some logistics um first of all i want to encourage each one of you that's listening today to download the full paper and the fact sheet if you haven't already done so and you can do that at rodale institute.org under resources you can find the paper there second there will be a q a today uh at the end of our towards the end of our webinar and i encourage everyone to to begin submitting questions through the q a function within the zoom platform and finally um this webinar is being recorded and it will be posted on rodale's website and you will also receive a link to the recording by email at the conclusion uh likely tomorrow and now very quickly i'd like to just introduce our panelists our esteemed panelists i'm going to go ahead and read everyone's bio and then we'll get into it starting with the esteemed dr scott stoll who is my dear friend and the co-founder and chairman of the board of the plantrician project dr stoll is also the co-founder of the international plant-based nutrition healthcare conference the international journal of disease reversal and prevention and the regenerative health institute he serves on the whole foods market scientific and medical advisory board he appeared in doctor in documentaries such as game changers my favorite and on many other national tv shows dr stowell is also a published author of numerous works including your next bite a live and many scientific articles next is dr megan greger who is the co-founder and chief medical officer of the kelln foundation a 501c3 nonprofit that encourages family and community physical and emotional wellness after earning her md from the university of pennsylvania dr grega spent time as medical officer for the u.s navy as a staff family physician at hunterdon medical center and director of women's health services at lafayette college she's currently managing director of latris la trazant retreat and wellness center adjunct faculty at st luke's university health network and faculty advisor for the lewis cats school of medicine at temple university next is dr ron weiss he is a physician and a farmer he is co-founder or he is founder of ethos health a farm-based healthcare system at the center of this system is ethos farm a 280 year old working regenerative farm in long valley new jersey that grows produce to be used as part of an evidence-based diet of whole food plant-based foods to reverse and prevent chronic disease dr weiss is a diplomat of the both the american board of internal medicine and american board of lifestyle medicine he is also assistant professor of clinical medicine at rutgers new jersey medical school and next is dr zach bush a physician specializing in internal medicine endocrinology and hospice palliative care he is an internationally recognized educator thought leader mastering consciousness on the microbiome as it relates to health disease and food systems dr bush founded seraphic group and the non-profit farmers footprint which i highly encourage everyone to check out to develop root cause solutions for human and ecological health his education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming and pharmacy and his ongoing efforts are providing a path for consumers farmers and mega industries to work together for a healthier future for all and finally certainly not least dr andrew smith who is chief operating officer and chief scientist at the rodale institute my colleague drew is responsible for administering facili facilitating and implementing the research activities at rodale as well as leading and expanding the research team's impact on a global stage drew earned a bachelor of science in agronomy at cornell and a master of science in entomology at the university of maryland after two years in the peace corps assisting a cooperative of small-scale vegetable farmers in guatemala and 10 years farming organically on his own in pennsylvania drew attended drexel university in philadelphia where he earned his phd in environmental science with a concentration in molecular and population ecology drew formerly held the position of research director for rodale institute's vegetable systems trial and so with that said are we ready to go panelists great uh let's get started so my very first question um the power of the plate provides nine recommendations for improving human health and um excuse me bear with me my first question is uh for dr smith the collapse of soil health and i'm wondering if you drew could share a little bit about the urgency you know what's happened to the soil how did we get here and it's my understanding that there is some um very there's a high level of urgency around soil health can you speak to that yeah thanks jeff and thanks for uh the panelists because like you said we're really trying to connect soil health to human health because we think it's critical but most of us at rodale are soil scientists and agronomists and we study the soil but we know that 95 of the food we eat has its origins in the soil but the majority of soil around the world is degraded some of it so severely degraded that it's unproductive and when i use the term unproductive i mean that it doesn't have the capacity to produce food or provide ecosystem services in any way what's made it worse is that we've generally adopted a chemically intensive form of agriculture over the last 100 years or so and these practices further degrade our soil they cause environmental impacts that cause toxins in the environment and actually are create greater risk of food insecurity because they create dead zones in in in waterway waterways furthering further limiting or risky in food supply but if you consider that from 1960 in about 1960 we applied about 200 million pounds of pesticides in the united states today we apply over a billion pounds of pesticides in the united states and over 5 over 5 billion pounds globally these are persistent chemicals that don't degrade in one year in the environment so we're compounding chemicals on top of chemicals in order to you know meet our food demands of a growing population um and it further degrades our soils and puts us further at risk and most of what our tracking of soil health we like to use the term health because we know there's billions of organisms as a matter of fact about over 90 percent of all genetic diversity is in the soil um and it's because it's a living or soil is a living organism um so certainly the use of those chemicals in the environment as well as the degradation of soil not only puts you know us our health at risk um but puts food security at risk as well so we need to adopt regenerative organic practices in oil in order to reverse soil degradation we need to do that on a worldwide scale thank you drew thank you so much for that response that's certainly a great representation of the collapse of soil health and agriculture i'd like to turn my next question to dr dr stoll um dr stohl i'm curious in from your vantage point what's happening in healthcare today that is leading us down the wrong path in other words where are we failing as a system and ultimately what are the root causes of our human health epidemics that we're seeing rise exponentially thank you jeff and just like two to three minutes we'll summarize that question because it's really a big one but it's very important and what's very interesting is as drew was talking about the collapse of soil health and agriculture we see in parallel the development of a healthcare system that has made some of the same mistakes that agriculture has made you know through the idea of reductionism and compartmentalization where we reduce things down to little parts and we manipulate the small parts and we compartmentalize things into boxes in healthcare we've done the same thing in agriculture in healthcare you know according to cdc between 75 and 80 percent of the cost of health care today is related to lifestyle diseases that's you know essentially how we move what we eat our stress levels our sleep the very you know essence of life and the primary lifestyle factor that's related to this this burgeoning cost of health care today is what's on our plate and and you know it's interesting in medical education today only 29 of the medical schools meet the 25 hours of recommended nutrition training by the national academy of sciences so the vast majority of medical training today is devoid of nutrition training and even that 25 hours as many of us you know dr bush and dr weiss and dr greg and myself can attest to that 25 hours is not nutrition toward disease prevention and even suspension or reversal you know most of that is just basic nutritional education it's icu uh nutrition so it's it's not even getting to the essence of true nutrition for the prevention and reversal of disease so we have a education system that's not addressing the most important aspect of our health care system today and we have a health care education track that's really focused on pharma pharmacologic solutions for disease which are really just managing the symptoms of disease we've become very adept at developing pharmacologic intervention for high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes where we have reduced it down to the smallest receptor and developed drugs to manipulate those receptors to try to get better numbers but we've never stopped to ask ourselves where are these diseases coming from and why do we have epidemics of type 2 diabetes and heart disease today why do we have epidemics of autoimmune disease and by simply stopping and hitting the pause button and asking those really important questions you know where these things come from and if we follow that line of questioning all the way back to where our food grows i think we can begin to develop true holistic solutions that will not only solve the health care problem but begin also solving the solute the problems that we see in agriculture so develop a comprehensive holistic solution for the future beautiful yeah well said thank you so much for that articulate and thoughtful response i'd like to turn to zach dr bush your life took an unconventional path away from what i would uh would i would discern to be the hallowed marbled halls of academia you know working at the highest levels in cancer research and chemotherapy in virginia to working with farmers and rural communities and so big question for you is why you know what did you observe through your work with these rural populations in virginia related to soil degradation and how did soil degradation ultimately influence the health outcomes of your patients thank you uh yeah it really parallels the the two worlds that you just described there drew and scott so effectively there in that i was starting to realize in my chemotherapy research that was actually utilizing vitamin a compounds to kill cancer that there was nutrients within our food that could really bolster human health and could change the course of cancer and so that was my my introduction into the nutrition world because certainly as described my my education hadn't gotten me there and it actually was four years of working with vitamin a compounds in the laboratory before i realized that they could be found in carrots you know it's like that backwards with my understanding of of the world and uh in that journey came to the realization that you know it was actually one of my patients that was really forcing some very difficult questions on me about why i was demanding her to take this chemotherapy and it was in a clinical trial and you know i was you know trying to present the fear of death and all you know all the usual you know paradigm of of what how we're trained to convince people to do something beyond their will perhaps and in that very difficult conversation i started to just you know take a step back finally from you know 17 years of this academic you know mindset and realize that there had never been a case of cancer in human history caused by a lack of chemotherapy and that was a very big paradigm shift as simple and silly as that sounds i totally unstructured my whole foundation because i had believed that we were going to find a pharmaceutical solution for everything and nobody had mentioned that there was was no pharmaceutical underpinning to the re to the occurrence of disease and and so that simple thing took me down the path to realizing i was going to need to change directions and tried to start a nutrition center for reversing chronic disease at the university of virginia and ran into all kinds of barriers and ironically our biggest barrier to success was actually the nutritionists and dietitians in the hospital system because they couldn't you know couldn't adopt a plant-based nutrition you know profile that had been proven for 40 years to be the most effective approach to chronic disease management and so i left the university and went to rural virginia a town of 550 people with the purpose of really believing that if i could find a way of communicating nutrition uh to a populace that was you know devoid of of nutrition sources this was a food desert that most people ate out at gas stations hard to find an actual grocery store 40 miles away and so i figured if we'd figure it out there it would be something that could apply not just to the united states but to the world as we see this chronic disease epidemic spread far beyond our boundaries and as we export you know the american food systems out into the world if the disease follows so i was really hopeful that we could find uh solutions there and i think you know subconsciously the other place that reason i went there is because i i didn't know anything about nutrition and it was the only place that i felt at all confident that i could teach something uh was in a food desert because honestly i just didn't have the first clue of nutrition and after two years of doing that um we started to realize the food wasn't working the the food that had been proven for 40 years to reverse chronic disease kale brussels sprouts incredible cruciferous vegetables all their alkaloids and medicines within it wasn't working for my patients and and after coming to terms with the fact that my patients were actually being compliant which was a two-year journey into just trusting and believing my patients you know ironically we are trained as physicians not to believe our patients and once there came to terms the fact that the food wasn't working anymore and that took me into the soil and in the soil research we discovered that not only was the soil and the plant life devoid of so many of the the alkaloid medicines that had long been there they are now carrying contaminants and and potent chemicals of destruction within the matrix of those vegetables and fruits that had so long been looked to as our medicine so that was a long tangled journey towards where i am today well we're so glad that your life took the path that it did and that you're here with us today sharing this conversation because your work is critically important to our future dr weiss i'd like to turn my attention to you um you opened a medical clinic on a farm not your typical journey in in the in the in the medical field but what you know why did these two spheres seem like a natural collaboration for you you know why why is food ultimately grown in regenerative organic soil the best medicine and would you be willing to briefly describe some of the health transformations that you've seen as your patients have transitioned to a diet grown in regenerative soil sure be my pleasure so i guess i often end up telling this story from the point of a crisis that i had a professional crisis philosophical crisis by the time i reached my early 40s i no longer like the way i was practicing medicine uh you know i'm an internist by training and um i had a a sort of a wide-ranging primary care practice it did everything from urgent care to primary care to workers injuries open seven days a week and but what it did most of all was take care of chronically sick people because that's what primary care doctors end up doing in our health care system as dr stowell alluded to 86 of the time and i became so fed up um because i began to realize that we actually did not have a health care system we had a medical care system and that's where that 86 percent of the three point four trillion dollars goes to not to making people healthy but it goes to sustaining them in chronic states of disease they're never healthy and as i as the years passed then i began to realize that and i understood that food was causing their diabetes right food was causing their obesity food was causing their arteries to clog up and food was the basis for all of this where was that food coming from it was coming from our industrialized food system and at that point i decided to end my practice because i just did not see a way forward i sold it off i took the money i sold off the rest of my assets and i bought this broken down old farm now this farm wasn't any farm i spent about five years trying to find this farm this farm is one of the most historic farms in america and it tells the story of agriculture in america from colonial from the from colonial days and by the time i got here sure enough like our current story it had been enveloped and sucked into the industrialized food system its 342 acres were used to grow gmo monsanto feed corn and soy to feed kafos to create some of the poisons that were you know sickening my patients so i came here with the idea to stop that and to align myself align my practice of medicine and to align the production of food as living medicines in in a unified concept to change the health of human beings and of the environment here in the valley and so that's my story of the farm as far as you ask you know uh why is food grown in organic soils the best well just to take them off real quickly of course food grown in regenerative soils has access to living creatures in the soil that that helped to deliver all the raw materials that plants need to create those amazing molecules that enhance flavor aromas and textures so they're delicious to eat and they're they're so attractive to look at and so beautiful the smell uh and of course these same molecules deliver us health because the same molecules that make them so pleasant to eat are also the molecules that build human health and of course regenerative produce also has on it a completely different microbial world than does conventional produce and that world gets on us and in us and helps there are probiotics that come from the soil to help regenerate power um so and the last part was just quickly um by eating plants like this and dedicating the diet to a diet of whole plants we routinely reverse multiple sclerosis here on the farm reverse osteoarthritis pain even when someone is on the schedule for a knee replacement already they can cancel the operation we reverse asthma in people who've been on lifelong inhalers they no longer have to take them we reverse diabetes it's gone and of course obesity and coronary artery disease and all those chronic diseases we talked about yeah amazing one last question for you dr weiss is it true that you actually give vegetables to patients right there on the farm as a prescription uh we do we have the the doctor's farm market of course and people are always welcome to driving off the road and come to the farm market and we have little signs next to each uh a tray of vegetables and boxes to exactly how they help and how they were grown and our patients come there and of course you know quite tight that's so inspiring wow thank you so much for the work the beautiful work you're doing in this world um dr grega you know i think i'm most excited to ask you the question that i'm about to ask because i believe it's most relevant to where we are today uh in our world and uh the question is you know really what was the genesis or the motivating vision for you to create uh the food as medicine opportunities for the urban populations here in pennsylvania that you've created and moreover why is this critically important now um to the health of individuals and our health care system and how do we solve for inequality and inequity in our food system thank you jeff that's an excellent question and for me as a primary care doc a family doc and a lifestyle medicine doc i feel very passionately that there is no lack of information or evidence regarding the benefits of healthy lifestyle choices especially in regards to eating a predominantly whole food plant-based diet but unfortunately there is a huge deficit in implementation and especially on a population level of the types of food and physical activity choices that will lead to the increased longevity and vitality for our patients so as physicians we can talk about encouraging patients to eat healthier food and that's a really good thing for us as docs to do but if we can't help them access it and most importantly if we can't help them enjoy it then we are not going to be that effective at changing this course of this chronic disease epidemic that we find ourselves in so we decided at helen foundation that utilizing strategies like the garden as a classroom program that we run with local elementary schools where kids actually are engaged in growing and especially tasting their own real food that they that they grow and supporting community garden opportunities and also definitely providing some longitudinal plant-based cooking classes out in the communities that can bring together children families neighbors in a place where they can experience how delicious this healthy food can be and then also addressing the food access issues that's just as important so using strategies like the real food mobile market or the lehigh valley horror store initiative which brings in healthy fresh nutrient-dense produce into these areas that have decreased access to the grocery store is really important because this helps remove some of the obstacles that so many of our urban neighbors are confronting when they are trying to shift to a healthier diet and as a healthcare provider but also just as a citizen of this country it is appalling to me that access to healthy food depends on your zip code and that should not be the way our system is and so you talked a little bit about justice and social justice food justice with all the things that are happening in our communities with the covet epidemic and with the the you know anger with some of the situations that are happening nationally food should be a basic right and for us it should definitely be the healthy food that promotes longevity and vitality so then also we also have to think about how critically important it is to engage the doctors of the future and dr soul talks a little bit about this too that our residents and our medical students need to have opportunities to come out into these community-based behavior change activities so they can learn like how do you learn these tools to promote healthy lifestyle change in our patients it's not something that we usually learn in medical school or in residency we learn how to write the prescription but we don't learn how to teach people to enjoy you know an amazing whole food plant-based meal so you did ask a little bit i think at one point about what would be a case study like what can we give as an example of all this so one of my favorite stories about the impact of food as medicine out into the community involves a gentleman who was part of the saint luke's diabetes support group and he received a weekly fruit and vegetable prescription voucher so that he could come to eat real food mobile market every week this guy came almost every week he would choose his favorite fruits and vegetables he would ask questions of the staff and get new recipes to take home with him and he actually started becoming like a community champion he was bringing his friends and neighbors to the mobile market he was hanging around and talking to new customers and you know telling them what was going on and what sort of food he liked to make from the produce that was available so this actually became for him not only just a medically focused activity it became social it became like he had ownership of this and it was like he had an accomplishment of all of these things that he was that kind of kept him coming back and so within about a couple of months of increasing his fruit vegetable intake and decreasing his processed foods he actually came off all his diabetes medication and this was several years ago which is just amazing um because he still comes to the mobile market almost every week this is years later and talks to the customers while he's buying his produce and tells them about his success and so that is just like he's like paying it forward in such an amazing way this is the sort of thing that we can see this is why i went into medicine i didn't find it in the places like dr bush and dr soul and dr weiss have talked about i have found it out in the community and that's why these interventions are so important amazing that's so inspiring thank you so much for the beautiful beautiful work you're doing out there in the world and just an honor to have you connected to this larger mission drew i'd like to come back to you you know um we we often hear uh the argument the question really not an argument but can regenerative organic agriculture be scaled can it actually feed the world you know can we actually take these kind of agricultural practices described in this paper and um replicate them in enough so that we can actually feed the world through this way of farming how would you respond to that question oh thanks jeff yeah that's a major question we try to address at the rodeo institute and we certainly recognize that there's been good research studies that have looked at conventional or standard farming practices that are mostly chemically intensive practices and compared them to an organic or low input systems and have shown that there's higher yields in the conventional or standard practice but there's other research studies out there especially in developing countries where access to these chemicals are limited which show that organic production can actually sometimes in some cases double yield and production um but you know the number of studies that everybody looked at that is is limited um and a lot of them are really focused on you know a lot of times they use corn or cereals high calorie cereals as the test crop especially those that are you know nitrogen consumptive which is one of the reasons why um there's a limitation in regenerative organic agriculture but i say that as a segway because what we found is there is hyper focus on yield production during the green revolution over the last 70 years has resulted in a decline in the nutritional concentration of many nutrients in our food and so there's been almost no studies or very few studies that have sought to understand not you know something other than yield but the nutritional quality the nutritional concentrations let's say on a per hectare per acre so our focus really ought to shift from uh production of calories to production of of nutrients which is something that we're we're certainly working on um and then if i were to look at our that are an example of the rhodiola institute institute farming systems trial this is a 40-year side-by-side comparison of organic and conventional grain farming systems and it highlights the need to study these over a long period of time because a two or three year study which is typical for most graduate students um is really not enough time to bear out the differences what we found is that once the soil is restored to health which in our case took about four to eight years coming from um a degraded soil that we've used started in 1981 there is no statistical difference in yields between the conventional and the regenerative organic systems the the one of the biggest reasons for this is because every year that there is a drought or a lane low rainfall situation the organic system significantly outperform the conventional systems and the biggest reason for that is because we restored the soil and put more carbon back into the soil and we put more life back into the soil increasing the soil structure and that has the result of holding or retaining more water in the soil the improved soil structure allows more water to infiltrate into the soil during rainfall instead of being run off and when when there's runoff that's results in erosion and a lot of those chemicals end up into our waterways and that's really the the one of the biggest reasons um and it's really important because we've no we're noticing climate uncertainty right now which can create food uncertainty as well during these climate changes but our regenerative organic systems are more resilient to not just lack of rainfall the last few years we've had heavy rainfall and some of our conventional systems had nearly some of our wheat has had you know almost no yield because of the ponding because the water couldn't infiltrate into the soil because of the compaction um and when we look at at yields like i said we have we see we didn't start looking at wheat in our systems until about 2004 but sin in that time there's been no statistical difference in yield or production in wheat between any of our any of our systems so it's really just in my mind it's a fallacy that adopting you know global adoption of regenerative organic practices will result in you know human suffering because we can't produce enough food is is really just not true yeah in many ways i think we need to turn the question around to begin to ask can conventional farming systems feed the world i feel like in light of where we are today as as a species that's really the question that is coming to the fore so thank you drew um zach i'd like to i'd like to turn to you and um if we can change our agricultural practices in the united states towards these regenerative systems how might the repair of these broken food systems safeguard us from the susceptibility to pandemics like covet 19 and the disruption that this pandemic is having on our global supply chains as well as our immune system resiliency in a nutshell it's centralization versus decentralization of a food system and so with the description you know there about the yield production being equivalent between the two uh that is true except that when we go to commodities cropping gmo crops over you know tens of thousands of acres in a state we lose the production of actual food and so we're not actually producing uh food in the vast majority of farmland in the united states we're producing chemicals really and so we we pump those into processed food chemical industries we make high fructose corn syrup we make uh ethanol for gasoline we make uh petroleum-like products uh you know oils that will go ahead and go into the apparel industry for clothing production for example into and so if we look at the most agriculturally dense you know state that we have as kansas uh it turns out that 90 of the land of kansas is under agricultural use and yet kansas has to import 90 of its food and one in four children in kansas is going hungry for a lack of uh you know caloric access due to poverty and and food deserts and so it's clear that we have completely failed not just to feed the world but we've we're failing to feed ourselves with our chemical food industry it's not a chemical food industry it's a chemical crop industry and a chemical commodities industry and so that reality needs to to really strike home against this you know long you know utilized and and i think abusive message that the world is starving and therefore we need chemicals it just doesn't compute on the scientific level that somehow the more chemicals we spray and the more health is going to be worldwide or the more people will be fed it's just it's not in the same way that more chemotherapy is never going to fix our cancer epidemic you can't pour more chemicals into the situation to fix something that is inherently due to a lack of connection to nature and so that's our truth in the united states but it was actually a huge relief when we started filming our documentary series we were on a farm in the middle of ohio and this we were sitting in a a living room of this farmer's home and listening to his stories of his cows and his deep relationship with these cows since he transitioned to a holistic management style he actually wakes up every morning with his wife and they give reiki energy and healing to their cows which i think is really fascinating but they they've developed this relationship and he said to me you know what's beautiful is how much productivity we get out of such a small piece of land now uh and we are starting to try to mimic the 70 percent of the world that is growing that are the seven so the farmers that are feeding 70 percent of the world who are present farmers and that was a striking uh message that 70 of the world was being fed by a peasant farmer on less than two acres of land and so i i'm very excited that when we start to talk about regenerative agriculture it can scale up and down across all spectrums and the vitality and productivity of the planet can reveal something that we we completely missed in our monoculture belief system and that is one of abundance the monoculture system is ultimately built on a a belief of scarcity nature has never done scarcity nature does abundance and biodiversity and healing all of the time and you know this planet's been through five massive extinctions in the past and and we are now the cataclysmic sixth extinction event on the planet and in that uh every time we've seen a great extinction mother earth responds with even more life and more adversity on the back end of that experience and so i find a deep lesson in that in that mother earth doesn't know scarcity she only knows the opportunity for more the more diversity the more abundance the more of everything and if we were to adopt such a such a viewpoint when it comes to human health we would stop believing in pandemics it's there there is no belief system of a virus that can attack humanity viruses are too small of a piece of genetic information to actually attack a human being in in all of its complexity we we need to start to see that it's a story of terrain and one of uh belief of scarcity and and a reality of abundance and when we align with abundance we're gonna see a much different world unfold beautiful thank you so much thank you for that um dr weiss just building on that you know what promises let's talk about solutions what promises do these farming practices these regenerative farming practices have for the future of health care specifically health care great question um so um i think there are a number of things to consider when answering that uh the first thing is that uh as um zach alluded to before you know as the years go on and we continue to compound environmental damage and pollution and the infiltration of our world with these billions of pounds of chemicals there will be a tab to pay at the end of this uh these these actions and that those actions are contamination of our world and contamination of our own human bodies with these pesticides and and as as rachel carson called them biocides they are life killers they kill us they kill insects they kill fungi they kill birds they kill eagles when i was little growing up when i was five years old you know the federal government realized that our national symbol was on the verge of extinction from ddt which rachel carson called out this led to the formation of the environmental protection agency we have forgotten about her we need to remind ourselves about her again and pretty much outlaw the use of these biocides when it comes to growing food they are endocrine disruptors they they disrupt the way we make insulin process insulin every single hormone that is in our body there are carcinogens they can cause you know developmental disorders neurological disorders and so on and so forth so i see a regenerative system which is ridding our planet of all these biocides an enormous boon to decontaminating our bodies in the world what else okay so if we were to adopt a regenerative system how else could that help well of course as um drew was talking about we and as as as the previous white paper from roedale has demonstrated regenerative farming and and methods have an enormous capacity to store carbon in the soil and by doing that if it was adopted as a worldwide practice we could potentially reverse climate change and of course all the attached health benefits that go along with that like living right because we stopped we would have just stopped destroying our mothership the last thing i'm reminded of you know in my my daily life half of it is split between the farm and half of it is split between seeing uh thousands of coveted 19 patients and i've seen um you know the terrible outcome of this and i'm reminded that this epidemic and the ones that are to come which are already presenting themselves to us such as avian flu which are maybe just a mutation or two away from spreading as pandemics across the world that these diseases that will can potentially be um global destroyers emanate from mankind's unnatural relationships with animals the way mankind raises these animals for example in cafos then the way we process them and the way we distribute them so i see a regenerative future where we we're growing up and promoting plant-based diets as solutions uh and preventive measures to these zoonotic diseases amazing thank you so eloquently stated so uh turning to dr stoll you know this is a big question because there's a lot within it and a lot that we've a lot of work we did in this paper to get to the bottom of the answers here but despite a clear link between food and health medical students receive fewer than 25 hours of nutrition education during their medical schooling instead as you alluded to earlier they are focused on pharmaceutical based disease management systems how do you propose that we train tomorrow's doctors in light of the findings within our paper and how do we make farmers a part of the healthcare conversation thank you jeff and i just want to say how much fun this is to be a part of this panel i am learning so much and it's such an honor to be a part of this group of people you all are amazing and it's this is fun for me i'm just enjoying listening so it's really such articulate answers thank you um yes so what's very interesting you know and what's really hopeful is that this next generation of medical school students and residents um they have the vision you know as we have all interacted with medical school students and residents and visit medical schools and spoken and given grand rounds at uh hospitals this next generation that is coming up is they are dialed in they are intuitive and they are already discovering and believing in the power of food and the power of lifestyle to begin transforming um human health and they're also beginning to make the link between the way our food is grown and the types of food that we're eating and the link to human disease and the opportunity to prevent reverse disease so i'm actually very hopeful you know we are in this kind of season of crisis when we need to pivot and do things differently but i believe that the work that we're all doing we're plowing the hard ground we're taking the rocks out of the field because the next generation is going to plant the seeds that bring an amazing harvest and so i think that while we're talking about some of the challenges today that this next generation of medical school student and resident despite the lack of training are gaining knowledge through the internet through youtube through social media that is changing the way that they view their profession and the future and so with that it is very very hopeful but i think the missing link here in healthcare services is linking in farmers and agricultural sciences into the healthcare equation and i always believe and i always advocate that farmers need to be elevated to the level of hero in america they have been often outcasted pushed out forgotten thought of someone that's just out in the dirt growing food that we eat but their job is really critical and the work that they're doing is essential to human health and i believe that we need to find those regenerative farmers and people involved in agriculture and tell their their stories and share with people in the medical community the work that they're doing to regenerate the soil and how the soil is so important in the health of the plants that can lead to a healthier human population so that's part of this webinar and our white paper that we did and the work that we want to continue forward together is helping to create these conversations that have not existed currently where we are bringing together farmers and agricultural scientists and soil scientists to meet with hospital administrators and doctors and researchers to begin having a common conversation and developing solutions that are collaborative in nature yeah that's and i think i would be remiss uh scott not to mention uh rodale institute's partnership with a local regional hospital that i alluded to earlier uh saint luke's here in eastern pennsylvania where four or five years ago we were rodale institute was invited to become partners with st luke's and we now have a 22-acre regenerative farm on that campus with our own employees growing food and all the pa all the food that is grown on that farm ends up on patients plates but not only is that exciting but it gets even better last year st luke's university health and their medical school launched a residency whereby medical students that are training to become doctors can now spend a portion of their hours of education on that farm working in the soil so that's really an amazing case study for what we believe is the future of health care and then moreover rodale institute has the pleasure of hosting many many interns young people from all over the world that come for an entire growing season and learn how to become a farmer they learn farming and what gives me every single day that i show up to my office and i see these young people many of whom are women it just gives me so much hope to know that the next generation of farmers people growing our food are these young energy-filled vital people that are that are looking at regenerative agriculture as a career these are very intelligent well-educated people that are choosing farming as their path for for their careers so that's exciting finally as we close this round of questions i want to turn to dr grega and ask this question that we began to unpack earlier but i want to bring it full circle um you know dr greger in your opinion how do we feed our most vulnerable our under-resourced low-income low-access populations and ultimately what do you see as the barriers to access that we can remove that's a really important question jeff so thank you because at this point we have to think about the type of environment that we have built in these communities and you know this is not a uh a law of nature or some sort of thing that we can't change we have chosen as a society to build communities where the healthy choice is not the easy choice as a matter of fact the healthy choice is almost impossible to find and so you have to really really work at it and it doesn't mean that there aren't people who live in these communities who are growing their own food and cooking phenomenal meals there are people like that but they are more the um the anomaly and i don't know if you've ever read the book nudge by sunstein and failure but it's a great story not about medicine but about why do we as people make the choices that we do and we make choices based on the people around us i mean yes we use our information our education our intuition all sorts of stuff like that but in general we follow along with people that are doing things that are that are our friends or our family kind of like how when your parents said if somebody jumped off a bridge would you follow them too it's that sort of a thing so if you think about your social architecture and what your your environment looks like you walk out of your home or your school and all you see is fast food and convenience food you don't see any of these wonderful fruits and vegetables that dr weiss has on his farm or that rodell has growing out there all you see is kind of junky but very convenient and hyperpalatable food it's pretty likely that you're going to be choosing that type of food that's a very different environment than if when you walk out of your school or your home or your business you see community gardens flourishing and people are are working in those gardens uh your kids come home from school and they're excited to tell you about the tomato plant that they're growing on there on their windowsill there and you see a mobile market of some sort at the local ymca or something that has all this produce that's available right in your neighborhood that's a different social nudge that's giving you a different um sort of push as to what your choice of food is going to be so as far as how do we reimagine this we have to reimagine these communities as places where the default choice is the healthy choice it's not that the default choice is the stuff that makes us sick like what dr white said about you know it's the food that is doing this to our to our bodies to our population if we can create it so that when the kids are going through the the lunch line all of their choices are healthy and then it doesn't matter what they choose because everything is healthy or if you have it so that people who when they get out of work right there they're able to grab some of the healthy produce that they need for dinner that's going to make a huge difference now how do we do that that has to do with i don't say subsidies but the way our world is currently set up the margins on produce so so slim whereas the margins on medications for people is very very large so it's a lot more uh lucrative to be prescribing medications for people and kind of keeping the environment the way it is and they're eating a lot of junky food than it is to try to bring this food as medicine into the communities where they where we serve it but if you look at it from the society standpoint why are we spending 11 billion dollars every year on insulin glarging and we spend nothing on helping people eat lettuce and lentils so let's start thinking about it from a society standpoint we spend a whole lot of money taking care of people keeping them chronically sick but still you know like kind of working along with their medications why don't we shift some of that money to keeping them healthy with food and there's things like medically tailored meals fruit and vegetable prescription programs lots of ways we can do it incentive programs that have shown to work you don't have to just give people free food but you have to make it easy accessible convenient affordable and it has to taste good and then it'll work out couldn't agree more our uh ceo jeff moyer says all the time at rodale institute that we need to begin to pay the real price for real food we've externalized the price of food we're paying for it in health care not in not on the front end and that would be an investment yeah paying it for the environment in our health care and we need to shift it so that people are incentivized to eat the healthy the healthy food and it's still delicious absolutely yeah cool well we're uh we're at the top of the hour here and i want to go into our final round i'm calling this our lightning round and so i'm going to ask our panelists to keep their answers to one to two minutes so that we can leave time for q and a from our audience around the world the firs the question i want everyone to respond to is what is your vision for a regenerative future and please give us one closing action item that each one of us listening today can implement right away to begin reversing the course that we're on so why don't we go in reverse order here starting with dr stoll all right that sounds great um my my vision for a regenerative uh future is a vision where agriculture and medicine begin working hand-in-hand collaboratively collaboratively in such a way that hospitals are integrated with agricultural systems and food is grown in local regions served in the hospitals as post-operative meals patients discharged with healthy whole plant-based foods that can restore their health and every medical clinic has a garden that provides local access for you know communities at risk that can join with the clinicians and the health care system in growing food and serving food and meeting local needs so it becomes this hyper localized environment of health where there's a collaborative participation between the community the health care system and agriculture and in doing so these local communities develop friendships they develop working relationships and side by side they get healthier together and you know one of the things that i've learned that oftentimes we we do because we can but we need to stop and ask questions and so one of the most important actionable items i believe is we just need to stop and ask questions why are we doing what we're doing what is real food and what can i do today to make a difference and then we just simply make a decision and so uh that would be my actionable item is for people to just take you know 30 minutes in the next week and ask some important questions of yourself and ask some important questions about our culture and our community and then make some simple decisions on actionable items that you can do and i'll leave those for the panelists but you know asking questions would be my actual item excellent thank you so much uh zach i i think a regenerative future is gonna you know begin in the food system but i think it has the opportunity to take us far beyond that into a regenerative socioeconomic and socio-political mindset where we start to realize that a decentralized value system and economy is going to be critical to the elimination of wealth hunger poverty as concepts and we start to just see abundance as the concept is mentioned earlier and so i think that there's an opportunity for consciousness to really emerge from our understanding of how does regenerative agriculture create so much health and and density of nutrition and and regenerative power for bio biologic function and if that's possible to do that in a cucumber then what what we do as a society is we start to recognize that biodiversity in our mindsets and our social political viewpoints and um our very diversity of the biology within our species and the mindsets and consciousness within our species if we can start to embrace that and and take this these regenerative lessons of soil and start to apply them on a a global scale i believe that homo sapiens could actually step into their sapien sapien mindset of wisdom and and start to behave much differently not just to one another but to the world that we live in and realign ourselves with a natural state of of abundance in life and regeneration rather than the chronic state of war and conflict that we have really developed into as a species great how about one action item for us one action item i think you know to begin this process is going to be silence i think we need to to in some ways stop talking so much and so and and stop thinking so much and to make some deep observations out of silence especially taken in nature and so if you get the opportunity today to go outside and alone go and sit under a tree or sit and stare at a flower and start to rethink why you're here and what are you going to align yourself with in that nature and become a regenerative mind and a regenerative belief system before you concern yourself with growing food thank you amazing i know where i'm headed after this call and that's to my garden just a few steps from my door here so thank you for that i couldn't agree more dr weiss how about your vision and one solution yes well uh that's a spooky question because uh we've spent uh here at the farm about the last month or so uh as semi-finalists for the rockefeller foundation 2050 food system vision prize we were semi-finalists and we had to answer this question that was the question that determines the finalists um selection so i'm prepared so in the the vision of the future for the world would revolve around the addressing of six systems that all are interlinked and that's systems including the environment economics diet policy culture and technology so um it's a very complicated thing to all to interlock these systems and to have them moving together in a unified fashion but if i had to just mention examples of of how each of these areas could be worked on to give a regenerative future it would be things like i mentioned before removing chemicals from our environment by working through federal policy for example and strengthening our ep the epa's toxic substances control act it would be reimagining our farming system so it is a it is based on not huge 10 000 acre farms growing gmo soy and corn bean corn and soy but they're small redundant and resilient farms growing um food real food for people and making livings for people and supporting people in in who are economically challenged and and and giving them livable wages um it is about developing technology that would make small um small time farming um uh economically viable by having labor-saving saving devices because you have to we have to all remember that regenerative farmers farmers do not depend upon chemicals to do their work regenerative farmers you know often times are you know doing hand-to-hand combat with hand labor so i'm re-imagining technology so that we can come up with implements like weeding robots that can take out weeds instead of using chemicals or using back breaking weight so those are some of the ideas that are within our vision for the future and the one thing that i would suggest for people to be mindful of is three times a day you have a fork and you pick it up and you eat with it please make sure that plants are on the end of that fork and they don't have a dose of poison served with them they're grown regeneratively they take the beautiful living nature of the soil and bring it into you and restore your health that's my suggestion thank you so much i actually have to take this moment as a result of your your word of advice to all of us to underscore that the name of this paper and the genesis of it it actually came from that exact idea and i believe uh dr stoll was the motivator for the title the power of the plate because every single one of us every panel everyone that's listening today from all over the world we all vote three times a day and there is power in what we decide to put on our plate we can actually change the world by that decision so thank you so much dr gregor what your vision and one solution please thank you wow these are just such uh amazing views to listen to so it's been an honor getting to hear everybody's ideas about this and to have this discussion for me when i look at it i kind of look at a national or society perspective and from that perspective my hope is that we will choose because we can choose to put the resources and the time towards preventing and reversing our ubiquitous chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes by using all of these strategies that some of the other panelists have mentioned but to use our nutrient-dense whole foods use regular activity stress reduction restorative sleep use these type of holistic strategies instead of spending billions and trillions of dollars on the pharmaceuticals and the procedures that we're currently using to treat these diseases we also really need to educate our doctors of the future about the power of the plate and like what you were just talking about how amazing the power is not only our doctors the next generation of kids like when we go out into the elementary schools we talk quite a bit about the power of the plate and the power we haven't used that specific word but we're excited to start teaching the kids here in lehigh valley that idea too but then it's it's you vote with what you eat and so that we can choose as dr weiss said every day to kind of create the world that we want to inhabit and we have to be able to shift our reimbursement strategies so that physicians can sustainably run a practice that focuses on mentoring people and supporting patients through these intensive behavioral change interventions like dr weiss does to be able to actually make change for the person not just with pharmaceuticals and that that we're getting out of this assembly line productivity model that encourages the pills and the procedures but when i look at like what's our action step what can you do today i from my hope is that the majority of us in this community will rediscover the joys of gardening and cooking and when we garden then we garden restoratively regeneratively and that we start to cook again with family and with friends and we find that joy of being together and enjoying this fabulous food instead of relying on the cheap and the convenient but very nutritionally empty convenience foods that currently predominate our neighborhoods so i think it's important for all of us to engage in the shifting of our cultural norms and to help make the healthy choice the easy choice and by voting with what we eat and what we choose to spend our money on thank you there's truly something transformational that happens at a spiritual level when when a person simply engages with the act of growing something i couldn't agree more i've seen it happen time and time again it's it's truly transformational dr smith why don't you bring us home here what is your vision for a regenerative future what's one solution you would offer to us today yeah thanks jeff and i and that ties in a little bit to what dr greger was saying because when i close my eyes and think about the future world i see a i see a more permanent agriculture more perennial systems that are working with nature not against nature i can see ron's soybean field that we walked in the fall that's now planted to native warm season grasses and will ultimately have an orchard that growing as those grasses as an understory to the food-producing orchard um and i see people because we've moved largely away from those type of systems because they're more labor-intensive and now in the united states less than one and a half percent of our population is engaged in agriculture and i didn't mean farmers that's people that are engaged in agriculture those people that are selling fertilizers and other things so it's less than that that are actually people that are actually tilling the land and we've asked doctors and medical professionals to be engaged in our food system but 99 or 98.5 percent of our population are completely divorced from how our food is produced so a lot of like one of our panelists said we need we need to bring community we need to bring people uh back into the fold to make that happen and you know my action item i would say is that we need to provide incentives for farmers we ask farmers to bear a tremendous burden we want them to feed the world we want them to to adopt these practices that are better for the environment but the reality is the majority of farmers around the globe are suffering and that i mean i mean that literally financial stress and emotional depression because of the position they're in so we need to provide some bridge for them to be able to get from where they currently are to being able to practice these uh principles of regenerative organic agriculture you know i want to say that people should buy organic and they should do that because when you do that you're providing an incentive to a former um to make that change but the reality is that there's a three year process for them to get to that point and it's not always easy for to get there so that's one small step that people can do but i think there's more that needs to be done thank you so much thank you so much to all of our panelists i think we have a few minutes here to take some questions from i think we've had over 55 questions come in i'll do my best to uh to summarize and address as many as we can so the first question is a bit of a combination from several listeners such as robin ryan and tabby um they've alluded to the powerful institutions that perpetuate industrial agriculture and pharmaceutical solutions to health including government policy and large corporations the question to our panelists is how do we start to change these policies can we work with the bears of the world or how do we begin to dismantle their power would anyone like to take a shot at that go ahead ron um again this was a this this topic is hot on my frontal lobes because uh this was something we were dealing with in our in our application so i believe that the the best way to deal with this from a from a food production standpoint is to attack from the first line of offense the nutrition guidelines that the usda is responsible for promulgating the nutrition guidelines should be removed from the usda and be placed under the center for disease control as as their responsibility because let's face it we have a very sick country and the usda's main objective and primary goal is in the interest of production for farmers it's not in the interest of human health the centers for disease control is the is the guardian of the nation's health so i think by removing that to more of an evidence-based institution like the center for disease control all of a sudden scientific evidence for uh regenerative plant-based diets would become important and then those guideline lines could trickle down through our system of policy and then make new things happen for example uh we could remove some of these benefit programs like uh some of these entitlement programs like snap the the um the food stamp program wic the pregnant women and child program and the school lunch program we could move them to the department of health and human services they they serve as the most vulnerable members of our society and then department of human health and human services could be guided by the cdc's guidelines for what proper nutrition is to make these members of our society healthy and then lastly i think that if we were to remove the nrcs which is the conservation arm from the usda and place it under the epa the environmental protection agency so that the epa could protect the nation's resources i think all of a sudden we'd be able to undo crop subsidies from our farm bill because they would support for them would fall there is bipartisan support to remove these crop subsidies which then go to create all of this corn and soybean which create these these disease-causing fruits those are some profound answers thank you great go ahead dr gray i absolutely agree with everything that dr white said there's so much that we can do from a policy level that's going to be critical um i also like to look at that question from the standpoint of how do you build the grassroots community movement to force that change to happen so i think of food and health care similarly to the tobacco issue from decades ago it wasn't because the uh the leaders of the country whether the medical leaders ama or the political leaders they weren't really so much the ones that got tobacco to be changed as far as our social norms as far as thinking for kids or in what places you were allowed to smoke that was more of a community grassroots thing of education where it became a different it was no longer socially acceptable for doctors to be walking down the hall of a hospital smoking a cigarette but apparently back in the 1950s it was that came about because of actually believe it or not we used to have cigarettes in the gift shops of the hospitals in our area back in the you know the 50s and 60s so those sorts of things change not because of government regulation per se even though we should definitely pursue that strategy they changed because people decided that was unacceptable and if we get to that same concept with um with the food and with uh the way we treat healthcare for example when we teach the kids about eating real food i've gotten a bunch of emails from parents that are like my kids will not go to fast food now they say that it's poison and it'll make them sick that's not exactly what i told them in the classroom but that's what they took away from the information and i think those sorts of changes over time will be what shifts how we choose our food and what we think about as far as how we structure our health care system i might just mention jeff that you know i don't think we should dismiss or demonize large-scale corporations because we're probably going to need them to get to where we want to be um you know i mean the organic movement people said we're just a bunch of hippies and you know really dismissed and we're still only one percent of the the acreage farmland united states is organic but corporations are taking notice and they can't dismiss the fact that that consumers and farmers want this and so it's sparking innovation that was really dismissed before um and probably ultimately infusing some money into the um into the system that that is needed in order to get us to the next step and probably go from that you know one percent to hopefully two percent 10 50 and then just to build on that point drew because it's so important you know um you're right we don't want to demonize these large organizations ended up you know putting ourselves in an antagonistic opposition against them they respond oftentimes to the the needs of the consumer or the needs of the of the larger group and as dr greg was saying you know a grass grassroots movement where we start voting with our dollars every day based on what we're choosing to eat supporting regenerative agriculture with the new regenerative label that rodale has produced buying foods from local farmers you know voting on a day by day basis with our food will start to push upstream into these organizations and many of them will begin adapting their their policies i know of a number of large food organizations and multinational corporations that are already beginning to pivot the types of foods that they're producing they're beginning to innovate using technology to grow lentils on steep slopes using robotics and so there's there is already this innovative infusion into these large corporations looking to change what they're doing because they also recognize that what we're doing right now is not sustainable thank you so much i'm going to go to the next question i'm going to actually i'll direct it at zac and then please feel free other panelists to to add on uh the question comes as coronavirus has health particularly our immune system's top of mind uh ann from our audience asks how does how does microbiome diversity relate to regenerative organic agriculture and preventing diseases like cova 19 and maria asks how does poisoned soil and water and industrial agriculture relate to pandemics and disease as well right you know we are definitely in a revolution of scientific perspective right now the last 150 years has been dominated by germ theory where we thought that the microbiome was attacking human biology and the human immune system was this complex organ system of of cells that were attacking the outside world to fend off disease and as we've continued to untangle the the extremely exquisite relationship between the microbiome and human cells and human organ systems we find out that it was a very erroneous path and in fact walked us right into the trap of the antibiotic area the antifungal area the anti-everything era where we were trying to kill life around us thinking that we were somehow separate from it and that is now a very erroneous mindset and we have a lot of science you know over the last 30 years to show that we've uh desperately need to rethink our concept of everything from influenza to hiv to cancer to acne to realize that these are all demonstrations of a shift in terrain and so in the shift of terrain of the microbial system we can create imbalance and that certainly happens in a farm when you you clear cut or wrote a till 10 acres and denuded of all of its biodiversity weeds come up and the weeds are typically a few species that can survive in that damaged thing and the weeds are on purpose to help begin the journey into repopulation and diversification of that land in the same way when we damage ecosystems with monoculture crops and high density chemical spraying for herbicides pesticides as well as direct antibiotic infusion of the food chain of our protein industries with poultry and swine and rest we do massive damage to that whole ecosystem and we encourage the weeds to pop up to begin that journey then we look at the weeds and we damn the weeds and we tell them tell the world that there's this virus and it's it's the virus's fault that humans are dying when in fact the end of this whole thing currently we're realizing that there was no excess of death this year uh the death really was on target with previous years and in fact our respiratory death wasn't even on target for our population growth that uh prediction for respiratory death we we damned a disease process when in fact the the cause of death that keeps rising across the globe is due to our own opposition to that microbial life and so all of these things are intertwined and interrelated and we can predict the next you know pandemic easily by looking at the density of herbicide spraying and the amount of air pollution that will carry those viruses globally and lace those part those viruses with poisons as they traffic into our bodies thank you thank you scott or any anyone else what would you say to our listeners today if how would you what would you prescribe in your practice to to take a proactive step towards safeguarding our immune systems from from getting sick yeah but thank you that's uh it's really important that there's some interesting research i was just visiting with a friend of mine yesterday that was published he published the new england journal of medicine that um that found that you know coronavirus attacks the cells inside of our blood vessels called the endothelial cells so it's really it's attacking our vascular system and one of the exciting things is out of the angiogenesis foundation this was dr william lee who founded the angiogenesis foundation and published that literature they created a list of foods that optimize your endothelial health and those same foods that we'll talk about also optimize your immune system and so it is um it is plants like kale and broccoli and cruciferous vegetables it's berries and greens it's spices like ginger and turmeric it is mushrooms mushrooms are so important for not only our microbiome but also our immune system and our endothelium so oyster mushrooms and shiitake mushrooms you know really boost our immune system getting a good night's sleep is important getting some exercise is really important it optimizes the health of those blood vessels and it optimizes a healthier microbiome and spending time in nature de-stresses us and we know that even when we're gardening we're inhaling the the microorganisms from the set from the soil and we're repopulating our microbiome so it's this beautiful interrelated relationship with the food that we're eating and the way that it's grown and as we're working in the soil to regenerate our our immune system and our health but you know what's really important too is that the way that your food is grown really optimizes your health and so seeking out as often as you can food that's grown in a regenerative organic way really will enhance your health and your body's resistance and resiliency so as much as you can as often as you can grow your own food or buy food from local organic farmers and that will optimize your health beautiful beautiful i'd like to go to one more question i think we have time for one more i think it's an important question in light of the panelists today this one comes from joshua and he's interested in the role of livestock in regenerative organic farming systems many of these medical experts are promoting an organic whole food plant-based diet but we know that livestock can play an important role in soil health and holistic farming how do we balance plant forward diets with the positive with the positives of ending factory farming of animals in favor of pasture-based animal grazing systems maybe drew that question would be most appropriate for you to start and then i'd love to bounce around to the rest of our panelists yeah sure thanks jeff and for that question it's something we often think about um with this discussion because as soil scientists we certainly see the benefit of compost and recycling manures and animals exhibiting their inherent behavior by being out on on grass we actually think that they're these animals are healthier when they're exhibiting their inherent behavior um they we certainly see that they're healthier because their veterinary bills of farmers drop because like the same things that we're talking about when their diet is improved and their environment is improved the animals are healthier and the need for antibiotics and and uh and health care is just almost is gone um and that certainly is regenerative because we because when we consider regenerative we think about animal welfare we think about social fairness for for people as well as the land stewardship um but we also certainly recognize that while animals if if properly managed can improve the health of the soil and can improve the environment the way our current system is structured is really out of balance because most of the animals are in a confined system where they're not exhibiting their inherent nature we produce food ship it to those animals where we produce mounds of manure that becomes environmental contamination overuse antibiotics because the confinement and then we have to clean up that manure and move it somewhere and that's why we um promote integration of animals back on the farm mostly for nutrient cycling you know if you look at where most of the nitrogen ends up it ends up in our water and ends up in our air if we can eliminate the use of solid salt-based fertilizers by integrating animals back onto the land to recycle nutrients we could have a tremendous benefit to the environment and then recognize that the amount of the consumption of meat is also out of whack that it should be in moderation um you know a lot of the healthiest civilizations they ate meat but they awfully ate it ceremonially just a few times a year it wasn't a typical you know daily uh practice that they consumed and i think that we can with that moderation we can have systems that are rebalanced yeah well thank you so much i'm just i'm going to answer the last question here and this comes from travis um and he asks um what can everyone who is listening do today to support regenerative organic agriculture and my answer is one that i've been repeating time and time again especially in light of what we are all facing today and that is simply to get to know a farmer i believe that every single one of us listening today has the responsibility to build a relationship with someone who's growing soil in a way that is stewarding land and and and harmonious with nature that there are these intrepid spirits these farmers in our own communities that often go overlooked and they they rely on us to create markets we should be buying directly from farmers building relationships with them spending our time getting out into the country and stepping foot onto the land where our food is grown step away from a grocery store and onto a farm and so every single one of us can do that and i would encourage you all to join with me so in closing i'd like to again thank our panelists for your incredible input your incredible wisdom your leadership and everything you're doing to advance regenerative organic agriculture for those of us uh that are looking to go deeper i just want to encourage you to use our free social media toolkit found at rodale institute dot org backslash power of the plate and there you will find graphics captions and more resources that you can use easily to share the message of the power of the plate and then most importantly rodel institute is a non-profit we rely on your support to advance our mission and so if you're inspired by what you learned today i encourage you all to visit our website and to consider funding our work and supporting our work because it's with that that we can ultimately heal the world and we encourage you to join us in that uh in closing uh thank you again to diana martin maria pope annie brown lauren dravenstadt and margaret wilson and the entire rodeo institute team for your help in pulling off today's webinar uh an email will be going out tomorrow with the recording if you weren't able to make it today and um yeah let's let's um all begin to put in motion all the great wisdom that we learned today because there truly is power in the plate so with that that brings the conclusion to today's webinar thank you so much to everyone for joining in this conversation and for joining us and healing the world

Channel: Rodale Institute

Views: 14,179

Keywords:

Id: HTNJnRPf9so

Length: 89min 0sec (5340 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020