Your Microbiome and Health | Zach Bush

all right everyone welcome back to the primal blueprint podcast i am so excited to have zach bush md on the show today he is a physician specializing in internal medicine endocrinology and hospice care he is also an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health and disease and food systems so we're really going to get into that today welcome to the show zach oh so glad to be on with you thanks for having me and you and the audience blessed to be in fellowship you have uh i mean every single one of my colleagues and podcasting colleagues and friends in this paleo primal ancestral world is such a huge fan of yours i've been hearing about you for some people like you have to interview and i'm like who's this guy and watching some interviews with you and really resonating with a lot of what you've said and there's so much out there um i kind of want to jump into your specialties right away um let's let's talk about inflammation which is such a root cause and while inflammation is a natural process it's gotten out of hand and let's just start there before we edge into talking about the microbiome tell us for the people that might not understand this concept can you give us a rundown on it yeah inflammation should actually be broken down into two categories unfortunately medicine has kind of clumped them into the same word of inflammation but acute inflammation and chronic inflammation i think should really have their own lexicon within them because acute inflammation is much better described as adaptation and so we basically have an adaptation system and we have a chronic inflammation which is a dysregulated you know already a pathologic breakdown process going on so you have adaptation and you have you know consumption and destruction kind of pathways and in the adaptation phase you're getting stronger not weaker with every stimulus you get and so it's a very important realization that the human body and biology as a whole whether we're looking at mammals all the way down to a single cell organism biology is built around this adaptive capacity that we call acute inflammation but again i think the word inflammation has a lot of negative connotation to it which doesn't play out in the acute inflammation phase what you're doing is you're mobilizing resources you're mobilizing uh you know regenerative capacity within the body to make yourself stronger not weaker so what do you mean by acute give us a scenario of what an acute category would be real life yeah uh something on the forefront of everybody's mind right now is something like a respiratory virus and so if you get influenza or if you got a coronavirus what's going to happen is in in the your symptoms are going to come on at about the peak of of your viral load and so you're producing virus through your own rna mechanisms and it turns out this is a highly regulated process your body has decided to make the proteins from this virus and they're new proteins for your body they're up regulating a whole cascade of issues and events within the body this is an acute inflammatory or adaptive event that's now happening in your body as it gets updated with this new input and so as you're starting to to build this you know viral load what you're doing is you're you're increasing in your protein synthesis in a massive way and so you're making new proteins your body's never made before and you're making them in billions of copies which is you know a way to quickly change metabolic rate and all of this now when i say adaptive you know being more important than acute inflammation is important because while you may feel achy and you know febrile malaise and brain fog in those couple days as you're recovering from flu that's not actually the virus at all doing that what's happened is the virus peaked started a stimulus towards that to adaptation and then resolved and so by the time you're 24 48 hours into symptoms your your virus is already gone you you've already suppressed the production of that protein family and so at no point is the virus now really responsible for anybody's death nobody's died from flu nobody's ever died from covet people die from complications when they're their acute adaptive capacity fails to meet the opportunity and they they now accumulate inflammation and they cannot that they can't resolve and so that only happens if your reservoirs for acute adaptation are are low and so in a healthy individual you have these huge pools of antioxidants and detox pathways stem cell activation is very easy and so you can clear massive amounts of of cells that need to be turned over and so adaptation is very important for longevity if we don't stress the system then it just it kind of goes into this kind of atrophy state that you see if you put somebody in a hospital in or in a nursing home for three weeks they lose all their muscle mass their they don't get sun they don't get movement they don't get fresh air and their whole biology is collapses they go into multi-organ failure within a month and so and that would be and just want to jump in there on that with the importance of weight-bearing activity for the purposes of organ reserve like marxism always talks about in terms of right because then you're in the hospital and if you haven't challenged those lungs and they've taken a vacation they're going to take a freaking vacation on you when you need them to write expel at that time and so like you said no one dies of you know no one dies of a broken hip right they die of disturbance yeah and in both cases whether it be the hip or you know influenza you're usually dying of downstream pneumonia and and so pneumonia sets in typically because you have an abnormal microbiome we'll get into that you know later but the point being is that when when you're in an acute phase of opportunity to get stronger not weaker all you have thousands and thousands of different cellular pathways that are being induced to uh create newness in the cell and create youth literally and so when you are in recovery from the flu or coving you know remember 50 of people who are exposed to that virus never have any symptoms that they identify another you know 40 of the remainder have mild symptoms and then you have a few that are really sick and stay home for a week or two or three and they kind of have ups and downs of fevers and this kind of inflammatory pathway and those are the people of course that had a limited reserve of adaptation capacity so low glutathione production within their bodies and the like and so with that that acute adaptive phase you're doing all kinds of beneficial things and so it's really important to remember fever is one of the biggest gifts that can happen to a human being and here we always suppress it with tylenol and we rush in like oh you don't want a fever like if you're you know you know no that's not at all the biology when when a cell hits 105 degrees it it dies like is if it doesn't have enough adaptive capacity and so what we do to improve the efficacy of chemo around the world it's done in the us we don't do this and i'm i still don't know all the market forces that have kept this from being normal but hyper hypothermia really potentiates the the capacity of chemotherapy to work really well so you heat the body with heating blankets and hot water and all of this and you heat the body to 103 104 degrees and then give the chemo you get a completely different result you're putting a thermal stress that's going to potentiate this in a damaged cell population like cancer cancer is a very weak vulnerable damage system and so when you stress it with heat it's there so now you think about what's going to happen if you know we're constantly trying to keep our kids from having a fever the first sign we're giving them anti-inflammatories prednisone and you know everything else as soon as they get covered which is part of the paradigm if you say in what's working for covid it's antibiotics and prednisone that's ludicrous all that's happening is they're suppressing the adaptive capacity of those bodies and those that are are short on reserve may benefit in the short run but you've now suppressed the entire population's ability to do that adaptive you know uh shift so anyway that's a bit of a side but the the reality is we need to start to see these adaptive acute inflammatory short-term events as therapeutic not as illness and what about what about the chronic because that's that that's a different ballgame right that's people not having a virus hit them they're just walking around every day i mean i had systemic inflammation and i can say that it sucked yeah yeah it does suck and what's happening there is night and day compared to the adaptive phase so acute inflammation a great example of acute inflammation is is running down a set of stairs and so when you go running a set of stairs you'll create millions of micro fractures within your bone and immediately you recruit osteoclasts to tear up those those micro fractures and they recruit an osteoblast to lay down no bone and your bone marrow density is literally stronger for having had all those micro fractures that's why when you put somebody in a sedentary state their bone marrow disappears is because they're not doing this this turnover of cellular life and so the the picture that emerges whether it's you know never let anybody get a fever or never let anybody run downstairs is that a static body is always a decaying body it's a body in atrophy biology has to be turning over biology needs the challenge needs the stressor to adapt to something stronger to to achieve a biologic newness to it right because these organs like i mentioned earlier they are not if they're not challenged right if they're not challenged in some way they're not stepping up to their full potential and that's again like you said you're just sitting there and you're wasting away and making putting yourself in a situation for an acute situation to not work out well that's right and and one of the you know effects of that is not only you muscle wasting when you're sitting around you're also not encouraging the body to make that reservoir of coping mechanisms and so you know as uh as fuel starts getting stored as fat for example and and you're just doing fat storage and you're not stressing the muscle system enough to encourage you know trafficking of resources into lean muscle mass maintenance or lean muscle production one of the downstream consequences of that is you no longer encouraging the body to make nitric oxide which is one of its critical anti-inflammatory and communication networks redox molecule that reverses cardiovascular disease reverses aging does all kinds of amazing things but you don't release it if you're not moving so nitric oxide and subsequently glutathione and these critical reservoirs of antioxidants simply just start to diminish because they there's not not a not a call to action for their services and so without that call to action you're getting this this chronic uh leak if you will of the reservoir and so the reservoir becomes depleted um and and you're not you've now kind of for forgotten the cellular memory if you will and so now when you have an acute stressor all of the enzymes that would go on to produce nitric oxide store nitric oxide in the epithelium produce glutathione from the liver vascular tree gut lining all those enzyme pathways are asleep and it takes time now you've actually got to go make those enzymes and now you need to call into action something to go make the proteins that'll make glutathione but if you've been sitting around in a house that has you know mold in it and not a normal microbiome and you can get mold toxin that then you know triggers this hypermethylation across glutathione synthase as a the promoter region of that gene and you can't even make glutathione synthase that would go on to make gluten and glutathione so what we find is we are always the reflection of our macro environment and and so as our macro environments become more and more isolated away from nature and we spend more and more time indoors we spend more and more time in in a small subset of what should be a rich ecosystem of microbiome we become very uh locked down and i find it interesting that in our lab for the last seven years we've been showing that if you take vast amounts of information or communication network from the microbiome protein synthesis happens at speeds we've never seen before and you start making tons of cool proteins detox proteins like dpp4 enzymes you start up regulating the production of tight junctions to make sure your boundaries of your gut bastard tree blood brain barrier kidney tubules all are getting stronger through this communication the microbiome and so once you start to realize the human cells rely on a wireless network that are not made by the human cells but are made by ecology itself and the biodiversity within it you start to realize how is it that we age so fast when we step out of nature when we put kindergarteners in old schools that are full of mold and give them no pe because that's too expensive and you know start to eliminate all the the movement outside and you lock them down in a room they literally will lock down their genome through hypermethylation of their adaptive capacity for acute inflammatory response so now when they get challenged they tip right into a chronic inflammatory state so now they have food sensitivities environmental sensitivities mold sensitivities uh gluten gluten sensitivity peanut allergies you know celiac disease with with direct autoimmune with the uh the gluten substrates you know it goes on down the list but your the mechanism is so poetic in some ways like very elegant whatever you do at the macro level is going to happen the micro level and so now you look at a pandemic and we lock down our global population we're screwed our immunity as a as a population globally just diminished radically and of course it's the high net worth people that aren't really stressed about paying the bills well they're like okay a little forced vacation i'm going to spend more time with family and i'm going to go outside and it's of course our low socioeconomic people in all these neighborhoods that are just lost their jobs are so stressed out they're drive to a park they can't take a train to a park to go get out there those places are kind of locking down it's hard to get out yeah and studies are showing that you know those populations are seeing a 16 pound weight gain as a population just since the beginning of covid and so they're gaining weight they're locked down they're they're in this metabolic atrophy state they're losing lean muscle their mood disorders are on this catastrophic rise right now major depression anxiety disorders child abuse is raised at a faster rate than we've seen in decades spousal abuse has increased you know uh consensual sex and partnerships has gone down like everything's going the wrong direction under this this stressor and i feel like we're just now showing the severity of the pendulum swing of isolate people as a population away from community away from each other and things are going to get worse before they get better and so we we're really demonstrating in a powerful way through this whole terror of what's in nature and some virus out there that's going to attack us we're seeing the very worst of what we do as a human species when we isolate let's get into this microbiome our gut so many things are related from here they stem from there they cause problems you have a gut issue can spiral off and do a million things it can affect our brain um for those that are i mean most of the audience is pretty new not new to this conversation but give us a give us a rundown on what the microbiome is and and the and that center our gut our gut the center of which kind of dictates everything yeah so there's two massive paradigm shifts happening in our understanding of gut health over the last decade and the first of these is to find out something extremely radical which is that human health is no longer you know focused on or founded upon the human cell this is just as you know radical as the 1600s when galileo with his telescope discovers that earth is not at the center of the universe and it was so disconcerting to scientists it was disruptive to religions it was you know you just couldn't find a more catastrophic statement as earth is not at the center of the universe in fact we're circling a small sun that's circling in a giant galaxy that's you know out in the middle of space with a billion other galaxies like that just didn't make any sense to anybody and in the same way we see you know this the the misinformation that's being put out there around covid is exemplary of how slow it is for science to come to terms with new information of this paradigm shifting capacity to find out that human cells are not responsible for human are not even capable of human health but instead they are fully reliant upon microbiome ecosystems that are communicating across redox singling is such a big shift it's it literally changes our whole cancer management we're spending you know 37.7 trillion dollars a year in the wrong paradigm now because we're all we're doing is giving drugs to support human cellular pathways statin drugs disrupt the fire the the hmg coas enzyme pathway in the liver which is entirely human enzyme pathway for making anti-inflammatories blood pressure medicines disrupt human receptors that would then go and regulate our blood pressure we already know you can look at you know any thousands of journals that the microbiome in the gut is predicting whether you have hypertension or diabetes or hyperlipidemia or obesity it's the microbiome that is predicting that the pathology that develops in the human cell is a symptom not at all a root cause scenario for pathogenesis the human cells are dysfunctioning due to a lack of communication due to a lack of nurturing support from the microbiome so that's you know paradigm shift number one microbiome not the human cells at the center focal point of human health number two radical shift is the understanding that the microbiome is not relegated to our colon you know all these years we said oh well the gut is you know has all the bacteria and there's good bacteria and there's bad bacteria we have this war-like mindset not just of the microbiome apologize for the dogs behind me the microbiome but also this warlike mentality or belief system that in fact the immune system's responsibility is to keep the body sterile so now we've moved to the realization that oh my gosh every single organ system the liver the kidneys the eyeballs the the brain itself has an organic garden of micronutrients and micro that are being produced by the microbiome locally and so we now know that a healthy human body has healthy microorganisms bacteria protozoa fungi yeast living in the brain living in the gut you know living in the in the organ systems throughout the body that is a radical shift in our understanding of immunity because we've thought that sterilization was the key to human health since the late 1800s so for 150 years we've been saying we got to sterilize the environment we got to wash our hands we got to do this and that because and the immune system for god's sakes got to fight off every virus every bacteria everything else and now we find out that there's actually 10 to the 15 viruses in my bloodstream today 10 to the 15. that's the 100 hundreds of billions of viruses in my bloodstream today so that i can communicate genetically which is exactly what the virum is is just a genetic communication network i have to be communicating cell to cell throughout my whole organ system and i need to communicate outside of myself as to what genetic information and decisions i'm making on a daily basis and so i'm exuding virus i'm exuding exosomes i'm exuding all this genomic information all the time to coordinate you know behavior and so not only is there bacteria in every single organ of my body in a healthy state there's viruses throughout the whole system and so these are radical shifts there's no such thing as good bacteria and bad bacteria turns out every bacterium has a role within the species or within the ecosystem each species having its niche this is going to take us decades unfortunately to adapt our science to and we may go extinct in our continued misinformation here and confusion and inability to make this transformation and the reason why i fear our extinction is watching our behavior in regards to something like this pandemic here we are creating viruses out of biologic stress that we're creating out of an extinction level stressor on the planet through our extractive destructive pathway and as soon as a virus emerges to help update again it's all about adaptation the viruses are there for genomic adaptation to informers out to inform us it's a it's literally a software update and so you have to have that software update else you don't know how to adapt to a new stressful environment what is that new stressful environment well if you look at hubei province it's the highest stress level of antimicrobials and air pollution in the world it's the highest level antimicrobials because it's the highest spraying of roundup anywhere in the world or glyphosate containing herbicides and it's the highest pork and poultry industry in the world uh with antibiotic demand and so we're pouring it into our food system for global distribution of poultry pork and grains corn etc and all this gmo crop and hubei province is the epicenter of that and so we're putting extinction level stress losing a species every 20 minutes around the world now and hubei being a massive epicenter of that as soon as the virum goes out into the world for adaptation it's supposed to disperse through the air very very smoothly in a radical way over an eight-week period uh we'll have our first distribution across the northern hemisphere and then over a four-month six-month period we'll cover the whole earth in a new viral update and the pattern in which it travels is very predictable because of air currents and everything else and so we're supposed to put these viruses through the whole ecosystem through aerosols viruses have been distributing throughout the planet in this fashion for billions of years they weren't waiting for airplane travel to spread viruses so when you see a cdc map of this person flew here and therefore it spread through north america that is complete scientific bs now we know that viruses spread without human behavior if a airplane had anything to do with it it maybe it bounced things forward six to eight days wait six to eight days and that virus is already present in north america for the air traffic across from hubei into the u.s and northern hemisphere northern half of the us in that initial phase when it comes back through the southern half the u.s and the and the kind of more temperate uh or more tropical climates about three months later as it comes back in a reverse loop and so this cycle is very predictable has been there forever what happens to create illness rather than just an adaptive update is air pollution and so air pollution carries something called pm 2.5 which is tiny carbon particulate that happens to bind viruses abnormally and it creates clumping of viruses and so instead of your lung getting an update with a few thousand uh viruses which your body has no problem adapting to it can take that genomic information will decide whether it will translate it or not you may make some viruses internally but everybody who's ever heard about viromics and and how the infections quote unquote occur is you need millions and millions of copies typically in the millions or billions of copies of the virus to hit hit the human system and overload its normal capabilities well if you have pm 2.5 in high concentrations it's going to cause abnormal clumping instead of breathing in one virus in a small space you could have thousands of viruses that are clumped onto these pm 2.5 and so you get an abnormal overwhelm of a single cell that's suddenly getting hit with a bunch of this and so this is how we create the appearance of pandemics and blame viruses when in fact it's through this environmental ecosystem level stress that we put on through antimicrobials and then create an abnormal delivery system through air pollution to create own overwhelming capacities that we do see death related to the presence of a virus again the virus is out of the bloodstream by the time any of those people die it's not from the acute adaptive requests of the virus it's from downstream complications of not having a biological reserve to respond to acute uh adaptation well let's let's let's get into that biological reserve because everyone listening to this and watching this is uh by the way this is a video episode for people that are watching we've moved over to do that so some of these are coming up um how do we get to that point everyone's looking to improve their immunity and you know and have this this whole system of their microbiome working efficiently to the best of our you know with longevity and anti-aging now um i'll say something you know i was why i do a ton of hiking in california and it's pretty dusty so sometimes by the time we're done there's dust all over me and you know and i've breathed in all this stuff and i know you you would say go girl yeah um and i was walking with a primal friend and we were talking about that he's like you know this is really good for us what we're doing right now and then i heard you talk about like hey anywhere where there's ferns go sit there and read a book tell us why we need to get into dirt and get into nature with you know you know piggybacking on this discussion of getting ourselves exposed to things that are going to inform our microbiome in a healthy positive way awesome yeah this kind of comes down to a similar topic you know to where we were getting with this old mentality of like the immune system needs to sterilize the environment and bacteria only is supposed to stay in the gut through that belief system where we develop this kind of warfare mentality where there must be good bacteria trying to fight the bad bacteria and we have this like war-like thought process or belief system about the microbiome itself only to find out of course like you go to a jungle or you go to you know a coral reef nobody's fighting anybody there's a natural relationship between species yes some species are eating some species yes there's a hierarchy of food chains yes there's all this stuff happening on but never to one another's extinction there's always this balance there's this beautiful orchestration going on that biology has figured out over billions of years and each species seems to have this integrity and respect for the other species in that even those that they would hunt they understand that it's a sacred event and you can see the interaction of animals when they hunt one another is radically different than the annihilation approach that we use as humans you know no animal separates itself from the killing and so i'm intrigued that you know you never see a shark outsourcing the killing of of the seal like it has to go and chew the head off the seal and so it's it's a visceral connected thing humans lost our spirituality around the consumption of protein when we outsource this thing and we distance by proxy is what you're saying instead of hunting our own food right that's right and so when we outsource the the the kind of consumption of nature that we never get to spiritually interact with it we actually lose so much i think spiritually energetically but from a microbiome standpoint what happens when we study the gut for example or the microbiome of the skin and all of the organ systems of the hatsu tribe which are you know out in in west africa you get this incredible you know microbiome that it represents species you've never seen on an american or or somebody from western nation uh one of the predominant species in the gut of the hatza tribe can only be found in nature on the hide of zebras it turns out that the hodgson tribe will hike for many days uh the men will go out and they'll they'll find a a herd of zebra and they'll shoot from great distance with their bows and they'll take down a couple zebra they'll quarter the zebra and they'll carry these zebra quartered on their shoulders for two days on the way back to the tribe by the time they're back there the zebra hide has informed their entire microbiome and as soon as the tribe sees them coming all of the kids come and just jump all over the the dads are back and the men are back and they're hugging each other and they're all crawling over each other and there's all this skin touch they're wearing almost no clothing whatsoever and so pretty soon by the time that zebras even arrive the whole tribe is covered in zebra microflora isn't it probably appropriate to think that now that gut of those individuals that are informed by the very microbiome of the animal they're about to consume is going to deal much differently with that protein than if they had never seen a zebra before and somebody came with a plastic wrap styrofoam based thing with a pat of pink meat in it and said here's zebra but but is it like i i understand the philosophical theory behind that but like is there any signs to say that it's better that i have this relationship and that my if i have the microbiome on me from the zebra that somehow i'm gonna uh you know the facilitation of that that protein in my body is going to be better it's so exciting it's a great question it seems like a intriguing beauty to it or poetic but then uh what happened with the hatsu tribe is a group of missionaries came through and delivered boxes and boxes of antibiotics and said if you ever get sick you should take these antibiotics and the researchers that were on staff had been mandated by the harvard irb that they could never intervene on any any decisions the tribe was making they couldn't give any input they couldn't tell them to do things or not to do things and so they immediately called their their research you know coordinators and said look we feel an ethical need to remove these antibiotics from the tribe and came down that they weren't allowed to do anything tribe didn't have a word for antibiotic the tribe had no word for sick and so instead of waiting to get sick to take the antibiotics they sat around that night and ate the entire box is all the boxes of ciprofloxacin all these horrible antibiotics and the the the few researchers that were on the ground that night were literally weeping they just felt like this is the end of the the gut flora of mankind because they demonstrated by this time years into the study that the the odds of tribe had 10x the microbiome flora than a western consumer and so they felt like this was the last semblance of what the the full potential american gut or human gut would look like and they would now suddenly you know adapt to this american gut dumbed down 10 version they kept doing their study every morning going out collecting stool samples from the tribe sending them back to the states and a month later they get they get the data in the day after the next day after every day for the rest of that month after one of the most massive antibiotic exposures that any human could possibly get there was zero change in the microbiome there was no collapse of the microecosystem in their gut there was they were a hundred percent resilient the conclusions of that portion of the study were that these hunters are in such continuous communication relationship to the greater ecosystem that the gut represents just a tiny little facet and so you can wipe out the gut flora but within minutes it's repopulating because they're breathing outside they never went inside a building they're breathing outside they're touching the same soil they're touching each other's skin they're all up in each other's thing reinforcing each other's microbiome minute to minute in contrast in america a nice study you know to exemplify the opposite was done a couple of them in cell in september of 2018 so if you look up journal cell september 2018 probiotics you're going to see the opposite effect two weeks of antibiotics content within those consumers eighty percent destruction of the microbiome and so uh with that eighty percent loss of the microbiome they were randomized to three groups one group took their own feces encapsulated as a fecal transplant oral to their back to their own bacterial biome that was collected before antibiotic exposure not surprisingly they recovered within 20 days and so very fast repopulation of that ecosystem by repopulating themselves with their own uh gut flora well well now it sounds like it sounds like you were you're kind of bagging a little bit on probiotics are they useful in any scenario to you because uh frankly i've known several people where it's been helpful to do a course of them in certain environments and i also would like to piggyback off of what you said before and i think this is what you mean like for example candida might be present and that's okay everyone's getting along if it gets out of control right because those are the scenarios where things have to be brought back into balance if someone's like overrun with it um so i think that's the kind of point you're making there that yes we we can't eliminate all candida or something like that it there's got to be some in there but it's just a matter of how severe and then i guess answer the second one or both and touch on what i'm kind of looking for if that makes sense yeah so the second arm one was fecal transplant recovery in 20 days the second arm of the study was probiotics and they used the three species probiotic one of the most common probiotics on the market and with that probiotic they saw in the first 24 hours the same recovery effort that the the fecal transplant was viewing so there was this initial surge in microbiome recovery but with continued use of the probiotics the bacteria dive right back down to the same level of suppression that the antibiotic of two weeks had caused so you're saying temporary or a skosh or something might be helpful but a long-term regular use isn't it wasn't doing anything because it turns out there was a third arm that was placebo and then the placebo arm they were taking off at the same rate as the fecal transplant and the probiotics all three recovering at the same rate and then suddenly the probiotics suppressed the fecal transplant recovered at 20 days the placebo a sugar pill recovered complete microbiome diversity at 30 days and at six months they still had not recovered in the probiotic phase and so probiotics were suppressing the microbiomes capacity for a balanced microbiome ecosystem and that makes sense if you take billions of copies just plain devil's advocate plain devil's habit on that study so that's one study one people one situation is that in your opinion always the case are probiotics something you would say don't ever bother with those people yes i would now say that right up until that study i would have said that oh maybe right after antibiotics it makes sense or if you have inflammatory bowel disease i used to use this this exact probiotic was in the study i used to prescribe to all my inflammatory bowel patients and so uh you know i thought okay these make sense and there were some small studies that had suggested maybe some benefit but if you go back and then read those studies they were worse than placebo and so placebo has a 30 success rate and you know most the drugs that we're prescribing across anything now whether we're talking cardiovascular disease or s the the absolute risk reductions are in the single digits and so you're looking at a five percent benefit or ten percent benefit whereas placebo is consistent you know consistently a thirty percent benefit we don't do placebo controlled trials in something like a probiotic this was the very first one that we had seen a probe a placebo arm in a probiotic study and so you know it's very you know unfortunately we haven't done a a placebo-controlled trial in chemotherapy since the 1960s we'd put them head-to-head all the time we'll say well this chemo versus this chemo and and typically we're in a 10 to 15 improvement of outcomes to get fda approval in a chemotherapy whereas a placebo is considered is typically in the 25 to 30 range of benefit and so we consistently are coming in way below placebo whether we're talking probiotics or chemotherapy because we're not dealing with nature's complexities so why would you go sit under the the ferns and breathe it's because we see that in a placebo group they're able to recover full diversity if they go back to their lifestyle you mean go back to nature like that tribe so we all need to get so you would say let's say someone in the states had uh finished a course or they have antibiotics and instead of the old paradigm of hey take some probiotics to replenish and balance and blah blah what would you say get out into nature throw some dirt in your mouth i mean other than dietary management because we know what those answers are going to be but aside from the right paradigm of mouth to anus and making sure we're getting all of the right regenerative agricultural foods etc what else could that person do after they've been through a long haul with antibiotics yeah the nutrition is real and so the nutrition is your fastest way to nature and so if you go outside and pull a potato out of the ground the amount of microbiome you get just in an air burst as you're pulling a root vegetable out of the ground is massive you're getting spores of thousands of different there are there's five million species of fungi in soil systems five million species okay you can't wrap your head around this as a human consumer you know we're lucky when we study uh sport counts and like air ducts in schools and hospitals and stuff like that we'll typically see three dominant species not five million and so this is why indoors is so dangerous to our health is because we're getting this tiny tiny little subset so why do people in the united us have such a hard time recovering from antibiotics when somebody doesn't even have damage of antibiotics in in west africa it's because we have created these extremely narrow ecosystems in which we reinforce our bodies with almost no diversity whatsoever and so not only are we taking probiotics we're living in a probiotic environment of just a few dominant species and therefore we have this weakened immune system and we we lack the balance it's interesting when you said you know well isn't candida bad if there's too much no candida is not actually the problem and i would the exact same phenomena happens on a farm most of the farms in the midwest now are drowning under roundup resistant weeds they've sprayed so much roundup that the weeds have genetically modified themselves so that they can maintain and now they have these vicious weeds that are actually disrupting they can't even run their their tilling equipment or their uh their harvesters through these weeds because they've got trunks on them and so they'll destroy their equipment and so these plates are getting overrun with weeds and so they come in with more weed sprayers and kill more weeds or we come in as physicians and spray now instead of antibiotics now that person has candida so we spray an antifungal to try to kill the candida or the herbicide to kill the weed and what happens is we further destroy the ecosystem's recovery and we cause greater problems in the next few months as soon as you stop spraying a farm within a single season you can see all the weeds gone all you have to do is you go in and you plant 18 to 32 species cover crop and you'll see all the weeds disappear and no herbicides no spraying the microbiome comes back into balance and the soil systems in the and the flora and the fauna come into balance around that in the exact same way if we see somebody with candida we need to rush to create biodiversity rather than kill the candida the candida is not at all at fault the candidate is in fact i would argue not even overgrown it's grown to exactly the right level to start the recovery of the process because if you wipe out the bacteria with the antibiotic the the fungal community has to start the the fuel production for a new ecosystem to start you can't have any fuel without microbiome so if you just took an antibiotic and wiped out the bacteria you're now left with maybe a few protozoa and the fungal world to start that regenerative generative process of fuel production resource development trafficking of resources to and fro in the gut and into the human body and so the yeast is going to overgrow exactly to the level of damage done and the need to recover it what it's doing is providing a substrate to new bacteria but instead of telling that person with a yeast problem go you know start bathing in in in fresh water systems and and go and make sure you're doing a waterfall plunge every day and on that little short hike to your waterfall make sure you're brushing your arms underneath all of the ferns as you walk through the path to get as much microbiome to repopulate that used to be gone in a couple months and so you know and it's not it's not gone it's just you know it's it's no longer has it's it's damage control mode and it's it's diminished itself back into the population to fulfill its small niche role that needs to be our approach yeah you uh well you mentioned roundup and uh so let's talk about how that stuff and the chemical companies are destroying the land where you live in hawaii particularly kauai and other places so when i went there several years ago i was there for a month and i'm like why are people protesting like i never see protests in hawaii i was like what's happening and then i was led down a dark spiral path into all of the land leaves to monsanto and all these chemical companies i tried to even interview people about this and some are like i can't even talk to you because they're already effing with me and i was like oh my gosh have i just entered a john grisham novel right but what i learned was the west part of kauai where i had been staying and i had no idea and i'm walking by i'm walking by this shiz every day they're just spraying all sorts of junk and they're ruining the land they are literally ruining the land that some people say i'm not sure if this is true that in order to repair that soil that would mean like growing hemp and having it go there for years and my gosh they're just literally the chemical companies are testing out their gmo corn crops in places like hawaii and it's really ruining paradise and i think um i think it's pierce brosnan's wife did a documentary on it i haven't seen it yet and i know there's poisoning paradise it's funny pointy parrot okay poisoning paradise and then there's that other one like aina aina uh the short is a short brief one so it's insane that i go to the do-it-yourself center and there's a wall of roundup like why right okay so whatever but you know what also krispy kremes should also probably be illegal if we're gonna go in that direction but this is something that is really important for people to know not to use it but also how can we avoid it right tell us because this is what through organic farming and and other i mean i'm assuming if you've got a farm and you're spraying roundup for other stuff and you have animals on that farm they're being exposed to it too but just give us a little bit of rundown on glycophage and by the way the company did what it was a huge class action lawsuit right um about this causing cancer correct so give us a rundown on this horrible chemical and um yeah yeah so glyphosate came on the market in 1974 and went into broad spectrum spraying in our farm system in northern united states and canada in 1976 and um it was you know a very potent weed killer it killed anything you sprayed it on it was initially developed before it was patented as a an herbicide it was actually patented as a pipe cleaner for large municipal piping systems because it's a very potent key later and so mineral deposit within sewage lines is very destructive over time to the function of those sewer lines and they clog up they found if they poured higher amounts of roundup or glyphosate into those pipelines it would chelate it would grab all the mineral off the pipes and flush it out of the system worked really well except they couldn't put it on the market because the effluent that would end up in the pond on the on the back side of that pipe would be killed they would destroy the whole ecosystem they'd have invasive molds and all kinds of horrible algaes and all this and and so just didn't work they couldn't put on the market so but they could see that it was killing everything green around the ponds and so that that's when they decided to switch over to an herbicide application and it you know it wasn't a difficult leap because of course it's an organophosphate which is the same category of you know the agent orange that they had been working on in in vietnam war for 20 years they'd been selling you know millions and millions of of tons of asian orange to the us military to dump it into cambodia and nor north vietnam and we literally created moonscapes out there with with asian orange i mean literally looks like the dust of the moon we took some of the most verdant jungles in the world and turned them into moonscapes i don't know what the the karmic weight of killing billions of tree frogs and insects and pollinators and monkeys and but we did that we did that in mass and that never got that was not the story that got told about that conflict that ran from the late 50s to the early 70s but for 25 years we annihilated the jungles there with this chemical of organophosphate asian orange now we're spraying that into our food system starting the 1970s as we lose the the marketplace for the vietnam war the organic phosphates need a new new face a new role and so they get transitioned from uh war into maybe a you know a a commercial pipe cleaner that didn't work so now we can treat weeds and so the 1976 we start treating weeds and we used it to kill off cover crops so if there was a cover crop growing we would spray that and then we would plant our corn soybean or the rest into that that soil a few days later and so that was 1976. in the 1980s glyphosate manufacturer was it was just monsanto at the time and monsanto did some extraordinary cancer studies and published in the late 80s their own cancer data proving this thing caused all kinds of horrible things and but they showed that that was at concentrations that they could never reach as a wheat killer because the weed killer would kill the crops if they reach that kind of level just four years later a farmer in in northern europe finds out that he could spray his wheat with roundup to speed up the harvest of it um because the weather was coming and he knew he was going to lose his entire crop if he didn't get it harvested but you can't harvest the grain unless it's dry it's going to mold so he sprayed the entire crop with roundup killed it in in 24 hours and then harvested and it was like this miracle and he saved his whole harvest and for the first time in 1992 monsanto took the opportunity to rebrand themselves as a desiccant or drying agent and that's the moment we started spraying wheat across the northern united states and by 1993 one year later we see this huge debut of celiac disease autoimmune disease to wheat which of course is not a weed problem it's a glyphosate poisoning of of the relationship to the immune system which i can get into in a minute by 1996 not only are we spraying wheat and soybeans and other legumes that needed to be dry before harvest we got the roundup ready corn soybean alfalfa sugar beets you know go on down list now we have over 30 different crops that are genetically modified to hannah and so by you know the 80s we were saying we'll never reach these kinds of concentrations of cancer causing glyphosate by 1992 we were literally spraying it in the wheat but right before sending it to market and then by 1996 we're spraying it on all of our commodity crops which of course is ending up in our water systems and soil systems and we're starting to put massive amounts of this into the mississippi and every other tributary of river system in the united states and we get these cancer epidemics then every one of these rivers and so the cancer epidemics that are hitting in the south never existed before 1996. we it was never the episode on cancer cancer was always northeast northeast has always been our demographic of cancer death northwest was only known for prostate cancer but northeast was always our epicenter now the epicenter is the the last 90 miles of the mississippi river it's called cancer alley it's the highest rates of cancer in the entire developed world so no jumping into the mississippi freaking river is what you're saying too oh it's worse than that in fact in if you go up to the north side of the mississippi tributaries indiana good example of this indiana's rivers now 80 of them are classified as not appropriate for recreational use they're not only not potable you can't drink them you shouldn't touch them because they're so toxic 80 of the rivers of indiana are are not deemed safe for recreational use now and so that's a terrifying statistic it means that we are literally killing the most precious commodity on earth which of course is fresh water yeah and i and i remember i spent i've spent a lot of time in northern wisconsin for for many years as a child and we literally we bathed in the lake but we were also if we were on a canoe trip the water was so pristine you could just take your mesquite cup dip it right at the side of the canoe and drink it and didn't even have to boil it you know what i mean and then boy that took a turn and i i hate to say i remember those days but that's the case um i really gosh i need to have you back on because i need to rack your brain about so much more but in sort of kind of coming to the end of our time here and we have so much more to discuss but i do want to bring up and i'm bringing out right now because i've been doing it every day which is your products because this is ion gut health and then there's also restore you talk about the microbiome being in our nasal cavities let's talk about these two products because when you look it up and it's terra hydride am i going what is it what is that explain us explain to us what this product is yeah so this product came out of my cancer research in some ways and so i had left the university i was no longer doing my chemotherapy development but i was running a nutrition center for reversing chronic disease that i had started in 2010 and in that journey we found that a huge proportion of people were no longer tolerating superfoods and so we were seeing increased inflammation and bloating on things like kale beets sauerkraut stuff that was supposed to be fixing my patients was making them worse and now you see this in droves right now everybody's got histamine sensitivity and lectin sensitivity and gluten sensitivity like people can't even eat the very foods that we know have the highest levels of medicine within them so the kale the brussels sprouts the cruciferous vegetables they ever become toxic to so many people the night shades critical for alkaloids no longer tolerated by a huge swath of the population and so we've gotten to this point where it didn't we're losing our ability to have health our planet is no longer producing the nutrients and our bodies can no longer tolerate the nutrients that we would need to thrive as a species or as a biology on the planet and so that's the reality that we were facing in 2012 and we were studying soil science trying to figure out what what were we missing or what was now in the food that was causing all these problems how was kale making inflammation go up and the answer ended up being roundup glyphosate glyphosate actually opens up the the tight junctions in the gut to create leaky gut leaky brain leaky kidney tubules and you turn into a sponge for toxin can't can't keep it out and you can't clear it and so you're just absorbing toxin all day long so glyphosate is the the gatekeeper damaging the tight junctions the velcro between the cells your leaky sieve on the front end does the same thing in the kidney tubules you can't eject the toxin so that's what we have where we're dealing with but the the terra hydrate molecules that are in the product you just pulled off the shelf there is the family of of redox singling molecules literally the communication network between the microbiome and the human system so it's a trans species communication network of redox am i am i consuming a translator you're you're actually consuming a wireless network and so your cell phone uh has a computer in there that has a receiver and transmitter on it and you can be you know talking to grandma no problem then suddenly you're more than seven miles away from the nearest cell phone tower and the the message drops and you're disconnected that wireless communication network is very unique because a cell phone tower has never initiated a phone call it's never talked to your mother what's talking is you across this wireless communication network and so what we did was find that that we could create this redox signaling from the microbial metabolites to help trans species communication happen so that a single cell was no longer isolated from another cell and when cells have unfettered access to information they're constantly in that adaptive acute inflammatory capacity that we talked about at the beginning you have almost an eternal like unexhaustible capacity for repair if you have enough information and so it's through isolation that we see the meta diseases happen meta disease of the planet right now is isolation if you end isolation if you can get communication network up and running the whole system comes back online and it knows how to heal in order of its priority which is not necessarily your brains bring us closer to this the wireless network it's that's right so if you see candida overwhelming in the body for example it's because the microbes don't know how to recover from this massive injury it got and you're stuck the problem that we have with probiotics is it's only three species or seven species and it's it's too narrow the problem with trying to take a diverse ecosystem like wild ferments and put them into into normal circulation of the human is again we have so much antibiotic in our water systems remember the herbicides are antimicrobials that's how they function and so as soon as you put a round up into the water and air and and rainfall seven five percent rain rain 75 air in the united states is contaminated with roundup when you're breathing it you're drinking it it's raining on you you can't get a foothold and so we're like constantly behind this so we needed a way in which communication to happen without having to rely on bacteria to be there and that's what ion became first in class of as we figured out how to deliver the communication network in an environment where there's too much antibiotic for the bacteria to be present and the result is a recovery of the ecosystem and so that's been what we've been doing for the last eight years in our science lab and beyond is put the community education network there the gut microbiome the skin microbiome and the rest and you we're using the sinus spray which is the fastest way to sense the change in your body a few sprays in each nostril and within 30 seconds 60 seconds you're breathing differently and you stop the post nasal drainage that's been chronic for years in your system because you're breathing not only herbicides pesticides and all of the small particulate of mycoplastics and all that in the junk you're also breathing in pollen that can no longer be kept on the right side of the membrane and it's absorbing into your immune system as soon as you put pterohydride onto the onto the cell system it starts making tight junctions and so the very first studies that we did with this was to demonstrate that you can rebuild the gut lining in a matter of minutes not months when it when you have enough communication network on play and so we found that mother nature in her soil 60 million years ago put a vast amount of information this communication network into her soil systems and that's how we extract it so we extract these small carbon metabolites from fossil soil at 60 million years old which is pertinent because 55 million years ago was our last great extinction by death of the topsoil we lost 87 of life on earth when an asteroid hit and killed the topsoil with a layer of dust that choked out the the topsoil we are now doing the exact same thing we have lost 97 of the soil on earth is now depleted or severely depleted and it's silty which is really dangerous that's why we're having global warming accelerate is because there's silting of the soil it can't breathe when you choke the surface of the planet you start to accumulate carbon in the atmosphere carbon then acidifies the oceans as that's the only dumping ground now for the carbon because the ground can't breathe and now you kill 87 and 97 of life on earth so we're in our sixth grade extinction due to a choking out of the topsoil just like 60 million years ago or 55 million years ago if you go back 60 million years ago you get to tap into a communication network that's never gotten back to that level of biodiversity and intelligence that we we had back then and so when you take ion you're the very first human to be exposed to 60 million year old intelligence we're only been here 200 000 years and so i get goosebumps every time i see somebody reach for one of those bottles for the first time of like you are literally about to have a non-human experience no homo sapien has had the experience you're about to have you're about to tap into a deep deep wisdom of how cells are are able to communicate and when you get that unfettered access we show dpp4 enzymes kick in we show glutathione kick in we show you know all kinds of the the lysine goes through the roof so lysine production is a very specific antiviral that's made by the the microbiome within your gut as soon as you start taking ion lysine goes up carnitine goes up to help protein synthesis and muscle management and all this and so the whole system is making so much protein so fast that it's defying our our previous beliefs about longevity aging the potential for human biology because we never have seen it in nature's full capacity and so i get very excited about this and i know it's it's it's kind of a goosebump moment to find out we don't know what human potential looks like yet yeah we're still just scratching the surface and um i want to just let everyone know it's tasteless um because it's a liquid and the there's no smell or any kind of aftertaste or weirdness with the nose spray so just you know because it's coming in liquid form some people would wonder about that so wonderful there's we just barely scratched the surface and i'd love to have you back on again this year at some point to get in further depth on some of these issues but everyone can go to zac bush and that's z-a-c-h-b-u-s-h dot com right or exactly great thank you so much for your work for creating this product um and is there anything you'd like to leave our audience with as we wrap up here you know i i just would like to recognize that we're here on purpose and a lot of times it can feel like oh my gosh great extinction and i'm freaked out that the soils are dying and we have climate change we have pandemics and there can be this sense of hopelessness and a sense of of just fear can sneak in and i just want to encourage everybody listening that the earth is populated with not 7.8 billion people but 7.8 billion souls and i really believe that we are ancient wise beings that showed up in in a particle moment as humans right now to be part of a tipping point of an experiment of of consciousness and experiment of of integrity love respect and we need to begin that journey into that real purpose of why we're here with the least among us and so we need to lift up the soils of the earth and the microbes around us we need to lift up the children who are being abused today and are not being given the opportunities to become their sole purpose and reach their their sole potential we need to reach out to women who have been suppressed and and poorly educated throughout the world and therefore we have unbalanced socioeconomic dynamics that lead to overpopulation and other things education of women is is a future that has to be embraced as the secret sauce to finding a homeostasis or balance we need to start to embrace the indigenous wisdoms and peoples of the earth that we've annihilated 97 extinction of indigenous peoples over the last couple hundred years alone we need to welcome those people back into leadership positions we need to start welcoming them back into our cpg companies and you know just the vast array of consumer products out there that are so destructive we need to start to inform that industry with indigenous wisdoms of balance and homeostasis and respect for nature and make sure that mother earth herself is lifted up to become the top line not not some bottom line one percent for the planet one percent for the planet is i don't even know how we even managed to think that was a reasonable number uh one percent for the planet movement is 99 to too little every product should have the idea of we need to be sustainable at the in the most you know profound levels we need soil water and air to be at our top top purpose for every company in the world and so this is our potential as humanity is to come together and look for indigenous wisdoms and deep intelligence of nature to define the society that we would want for our grandchildren to to not just miss extinction but to actually reach a new level of thrive and potential as they integrate all areas transportation energy information technologies on the template of mother nature herself and we start to do biomimicry throughout the entire you know vestige of of human ingenuity and we're going to see something really beautiful emerge that is probably the best parting message i've heard from a guest on all these hundreds of episodes thank you so much for coming on our show we'll put everything to connect with you and also your product in the show notes um and i hope to have you back on thank you so much for your work oh such a pleasure to be with you thanks for having me [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Mark's Daily Apple

Views: 100,467

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Id: ru8HoikHR1s

Length: 60min 48sec (3648 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020