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Why We're Facing a Health & Extinction Crisis—Dr. Zach Bush Unpacks the Truth · hol+ with Dr. Taz MD | The Future of Medicine is Holistic

• Why We're Facing a Health & Extinction Crisis—Dr. Zach Bush Unpacks the Truth === Zach Bush MD: We've contributed to a 10,000 fold increase in the rate of extinction on the planet over the last 50 years. Wow. And so that 10,000 x on extinction events of species is what we need to escape. Because right now we're online to go extinct over this next a hundred years or so at our current biologic collapse rate. Zach Bush MD: And so we're all addicted to our work or to substances or for this, we're missing the bigger point. We only have one human problem. It's Nature Deficit disorder. Mm. And that Nature Deficit Disorder has led to this decline in metabolic function because we kept separating ourselves with our technologies from nature itself. Zach Bush MD: We need to get away from this external pursuit of health, and we need to become internal generators. Dr. Taz: Unfortunately, we have walk to journey that has. Made us sick, made our planet sick as well. But I think if we can all come together and turn it around, then we can have a different outcome. For sure. Zach Bush MD: You have to be in community to really fundamentally heal. Dr. Taz: Wow. Zach Bush MD: And it's so powerful when we empower each other, not as doctors and nurses, but as a small community. What if we could heal each other by being witness to one another? Dr. Taz: Mm. My next guest is guaranteed to blow your mind. Get ready to rethink everything. How we think about health and wellness and life in our planet, how it's all connected, and so much more. Dr. Taz: Please welcome Zach Bush, Dr. Bush, to the show. He's a. Specialist in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. But he is better known and internationally recognized as an educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease, and food systems. He founded Ciera Group and the nonprofit farmers footprint to develop root cause solutions for human and ecological health. Dr. Taz: His passion for education reaches across many disciplines, including topics such as the role of soil and water ecosystems in human genomics, immunity, and gut and brain health. His education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming and pharmacy, and his ongoing continued efforts are providing a path for consumers, farmers, and mega industries to work together for a healthy future for the people and our planet. Dr. Taz: Please join me in welcoming Dr. Zach Bush to the show. I am beyond. Thrilled to have you on the show. I have. Admired your work for years, and I think you are such an instrumental voice in where we need to head in terms of health and planetary health and how to bring those two ideas together. So welcome. Dr. Taz: Thank you so much. Can't wait to have you here. So there's so many things I wanna talk to you about, but before we jump in, maybe just for somebody brand new into our space mm-hmm. Of holistic health and planetary health, maybe just give us a little. Blip of how you went from MD physician just like me into this space. Dr. Taz: What was the spark? What happened? Mm-hmm. And then we'll jump in from there. Zach Bush MD: Beautiful. There may have been a seed planted before it all happened, but the seed was, uh, working with a group of international midwives, birthing babies in the Philippines when I was very young and I was heading into engineering school and then took a year off and, and headed, uh, to the Philippines and had this experience there for six months. Zach Bush MD: And that once you've seen what you see, you can't unsee it kind of moment. And so suddenly I was like, engineering looked. Like something that was gonna be boring compared to what I had just witnessed. And so, um, that, that phenomenon of birth is such a, an unspoken miracle and something that's overlooked, I think, in our society radically these days. Zach Bush MD: And the opportunity to kind of play in that space of the generational life, the witnessing of life coming into the world, uh, was something I just couldn't escape. And so it took me from thinking I didn't like school and mm-hmm. Wasn't a good student to something where I was like ready to apply myself in any way I think. Zach Bush MD: And, uh, so I went from kind of an average student to trying to get through pre-med and all of that. And, uh, eventually in a medical school. A slippery slope there into thinking, you know, I want, I, since I was mostly a blue collar kid growing up, building houses, cars, things like that, I thought I would be a surgeon 'cause I was decent working with my hands and tools. Zach Bush MD: Yeah, absolutely. And that seemed obviously, and then somehow, so when some unknown reason, surgery was just profoundly boring for me. I found that myself, just a lot of standing around waiting for something. Yep. Me too. Waiting for something to happen. And so instead I ended up in the completely opposite direction, was really more of the intellectual. Zach Bush MD: The pursuit of understanding of human systems. So I was in internal medicine initially for three years doing hospital based medicine in the ICUs and then realized I was kind of chasing the wind in the ICU setting. Even though we had, you know, what seemed like the power of God to restart hearts and, you know, pull people back from the brink of death and all this stuff that's in the adrenaline moment seems powerful. Zach Bush MD: Yeah. You find out that you're kind of just doing like end stage symptom management of a disease that started 25 years ago and you can't really change the disease now 'cause it's too far down the road. So that after a few years I realized I need to, I need to get further up that river and see if I can have an effect on my patients. Zach Bush MD: It's maybe more meaningful than, you know, kinda the revolving door of ICU care until they die. And, uh, in that journey found endocrinology and metabolism and endocrinology is the study, of course, of the hormones and the way in which they coordinate the body. And most endocrinologists go down that side of the field. Zach Bush MD: But the second half of the specialty is really overlooked, I think, which is metabolism, which is a study of mitochondria. And that became my fascination. And so I developed a bunch of biomedical research in mitochondrial dynamics in cancer cells, and through that I had the opportunity to develop a new chemotherapy, um, in vitamin A compounds that interact with the mitochondria. Zach Bush MD: And I. Not knowing it then, but that was my slippery slope into the world of the microbiome, which was really coming of age. This was 2005 to 2010 timeframe. Mm-hmm. And so genomics was starting to really change our understanding of what it meant to be human at the time. And it was changing our understanding of disease in general. Zach Bush MD: Uh, up until that time, and unfortunately still the dogma in the industry is that a carcinogen is something that breaks DNA strands like radiation. Uh, what was coming. And through genetics though at the time was the sudden realization that actually you can predict which cancer somebody's gonna get by a change in the microbiome of their gut. Zach Bush MD: And that just didn't fit anybody's model of what cancer actually. But we're still not really Dr. Taz: talking about that, honestly. I mean, think you're, that's poorly taught. You were ahead of your time back then, but you're still ahead of your time, even 10, 15 years later I would say. So it, you know, that idea And I, it's so funny too, because I almost thought I was gonna be an ICU doctor. Dr. Taz: I loved that. You know, the procedure, the adrenaline part of it, but it gets old and you realize you're only having so much of an impact on, on your patients, you know, and then endocrinology and metabolism is fascinating as well because you are interconnecting, you are thinking about the body as a whole, not thinking about it in one isolated sphere, but how, okay, so I want, 'cause not everybody watching or listening may understand the mitochondria. Dr. Taz: Mm-hmm. Talk about the mitochondria. It's the powerhouse of the cell. It's providing energy. You're finding the connection between the mitochondria and the soil, not the soil microbiome, but our, our microbiome, our soil. Yeah. Our, so, so can you wind that together for us? Zach Bush MD: Yeah. Uh, I, I think again, unfortunately it hasn't changed the education system, but we're taught that the mitochondria or the powerhouse, the human cell, which makes it sound like a part of the human cell or something human right. Zach Bush MD: When in fact it's non-human and it's one of the highest technologies that the earth has produced is the mitochondria. Uh, maybe for a second I need battle cup, actually, and just define life. 'cause then mitochondria make a lot more sense, right? Because everyone's like, wait, what do you mean I've got non-human stuff in me? Zach Bush MD: What's happening here? So, yeah, exactly. So you're full of aliens. Yeah. Um, which is actually very much the truth. So. Life is, in its simplest definition as far as I've come to distill it now, is life is a concentration of light energy. Yes. And it takes an enormous amount of light per cubic centimeter to generate enough energy to coordinate the materialization of a particle out of vacuum space. Zach Bush MD: And so Einstein showed us that light can either be a particle or a wave, and it can be at, at the same time, uh, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to anybody's brain. But what he's saying basically is energy in the form of light, which is, is the energetics of the universe. That electromagnetic field that we could call light is, uh, in this constant vibrational frequency expression of itself all over the universe. Zach Bush MD: And if it's witnessed, if there's something that is still enough to witness the photon of energy, then it will become a particle. And so this is called the observer effect in, in physics, but everything is in wave until it is seen, and then suddenly it can become particle. Mm-hmm. And, uh, to become particle, you know, when light becomes particle, you're ob you're basically demanding an enormous amount of energetic exchange or, or trans formation. Zach Bush MD: And for that, to get something as complicated as a bacteria, you need an enormous amount of sunlight concentrated before you get there. So physics, the brightest thing it does is a sun or a star, uh, biology. The single, single cell bacteria or fungi has to concentrate a thousand times, brighter, that sunlight before you can have enough energy to manifest a single cell. Zach Bush MD: And so that gives you a sense of just how extraordinary it is that a cell exists. It takes a lot of technology in nature to create that much light energy in a cubic centimeter. And the way in which that was done, and you know, as life emerged is, is through fermentation. So bacteria and fungi, you've maybe made yogurt before, maybe you've made sauerkraut. Zach Bush MD: Yep. That's a process of using the microbes in the air to start generating energy to the fermentation of the carbohydrates, for example, in a piece of cabbage to become sauerkraut. So the fermentation is this process of liberating energy from other cellular, uh, forms of, of life. And before you can get cellular life, you have to have some molecular energy. Zach Bush MD: And the way in which molecular energy happens on, on this planet at least, is through carbon. And so, CO2 in the atmosphere is, is the energy potential of the, of the planet. And so all this demonization of CO2 right now is a big problem for our scientific understanding of the world. But nonetheless, CO2, we all need to come to terms with the fact that this is actually the bloodstream of life. Zach Bush MD: And if you don't have CO2 in the atmosphere, you, you don't have life. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more potential for life the planet has. Our atmosphere has very little CO2 in it. 0.04% of the atmosphere is actually CO2. Most of it's nitrogen, oxygen, a few other gases. And so CO2 is this sliver of the pie of the breathe there of this planet, but it's enough to help store sunlight. Zach Bush MD: And so the way that's done is through the green, green things behind us. A a green leaf, uh, produces chlorophyll, and that chlorophyll takes CO2 and stores a photon of sunlight between the two carbons. And so two CO2 molecules start to chain together to store sunlight and, uh, glucose or carbohydrate or a fatty acid are long chains of CO2 built in these long carbon strings that we would call sugar or fat. Dr. Taz: You're taking me back to med school. Biochemistry class. Right? Exactly, exactly. And sadly, I'm remembering all these formulas. I'm like, oh my gosh, this was the pain assistance. But yes, and sadly that's, I'm completely following, but having a little bit of trauma as you speak too, sadly. That's Zach Bush MD: why what happens is as doctors, we forget that. Zach Bush MD: Yeah. And so you ask a typical doctor, you know, what is life? And, you know, vague answers, right? Because we forget that first few days of, of training and then it's dwarfed by, you know, eight years of, you know, pharmaceutical training after that. But that's, the actual biology is not understood well, and therefore doctors behaved the way they do. Zach Bush MD: Um, therefore, I behaved the way I did as I thought I needed to poison the cells to get them healthy and such an insane metrics of chemotherapy, for example. So. Um, there, there's this slippery slope that happens if you forget this. So as a society, as a human species, we need to remember that light is the code of life and the biology of the planet. Zach Bush MD: Namely, the green things on the earth are what store that sunlight in a way in which can be liberated by the mitochondria. And so the human cell has no way to take that carbohydrate or fat and turn it into energy. The human cell lacks that ability, 'cause this human cell can't do fermentation. The bacteria and fungi do that. Zach Bush MD: Hmm. But a multicellular organism has let go of its ability to do fermentation, and it is now relying on the microbes to do that. And so the, the gut of an earthworm, a wolf or a human is the soil systems that start that process of metabolizing potential energy. And then they, they process all of the nutrients that would be in your food into. Zach Bush MD: The glucose fatty acids and other compounds that will become the, the carbon delivery to the mitochondria. So the bacteria live inside your gut. And actually now we know there's microbes that live in every single organ system in your prostate and your breast and your brain, you have microbiome throughout your whole body. Zach Bush MD: So you're an organic garden of microbes that are producing energy or potential energy for you, and then that gets put into the bloodstream eventually getting inside of a human cell where the mitochondria live. Mitochondria are tiny little bacteria that live inside of human cells. And that's again, what wasn't taught to us well in medical school. Zach Bush MD: No. I always Dr. Taz: thought of it as a organ. Organ. Like an engine organ. An organ. Like an organelle organ. Exactly. That was the word that was used. Yeah. Zach Bush MD: So this is a little organelle that lives inside of you. And maybe they taught us that. Because we're too narcissistic as a species to believe that we rely on anybody else, but there actually is no human mechanism of creating energy for human life. Zach Bush MD: It's entirely done by these microbes. And so the, a tiny little bacteria called an archaea absorbed a methane producing bacteria around 3 billion years ago if the fossil record is correct. So around 3 billion years ago, you have this massive innovation in biology moving from the ability for fermentation to produce that breakdown of carbon, to release the sunlight into mitochondria. Zach Bush MD: And so this new innovation of the bacterium that we would call mitochondria allowed for respiratory, uh, digestion or breakdown of that carbon chain, which was 10 times more efficient than fermentation. So there was an explosion of light energy per cubic centimeter, and that suddenly enabled multi-cellular life to occur. Zach Bush MD: It takes, you know, a thousand times more energy than sunlight per cube ator to produce single cell. But if you start to think about a human body that's got dozens of organ systems with roughly 70 trillion human cells that are interacting with 14 quadrillion mitochondria and 1.5 quadrillion bacteria of 40,000 different species, the system is so freaking complex. Zach Bush MD: That is, it dwarfs the complexity of what we would think of like a city center. Mm-hmm. And yet you've seen it yourself. If you go out to the country, somebody can have a solar panel and their little house and all is well, you go into the city now, you need nuclear power plants and everything else because you are requiring so much energy because there's so much community. Zach Bush MD: So the more complex the interactions, the more energy you need to maintain that, that system. So the multicellular life of a human requires a lot. So the mitochondria are how we become human ultimately. And this is where we, you know, went sorely wrong in our, in our addiction to chemical, you know, management of our systems. Zach Bush MD: Because almost every chemical we use, whether it be in the pharmaceutical industry, at the bedside as a doctor or in the farm fields of producing our food, we've become reliant on these small molecule chemicals that function as antibiotics. And so the antibiotics that came out of the 1940s with penicillin. Zach Bush MD: Quickly grew into not just lots of pet antibiotics for humans, but by the 1950s antibiotics for our soils and crops. And so we started using herbicides and pesticides, uh, widespread throughout the globe really by the 1960s. And this was called the Green Revolution, right? Because we found that if we dump chemicals into soil like you, a nitrogen and nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium fertilizers that are drawn out of fossil oil, we were suddenly seeing fields just grow things like never seen before. Zach Bush MD: So we thought, well, this is a good thing. This is amazing, a good thing we're gonna feed everybody, right? What we didn't realize was that when you reduce soil down to basically, uh, an, an engine for nitrogen and phosphorus, you start to chew through the carbon reservoir. And so we started destroying the carbon reservoir of our soils in the 1960s. Zach Bush MD: And in that we sterilized the whole planet. And so 97% of the world's farmable soils are now depleted or severely depleted of carbon metabolism. Mm-hmm. And so this whole process of storing light energy is being undermined. And so now every plant in the world is deficient in energy compared to where we were in the 1960s. Zach Bush MD: And so for this, we're seeing human disease emerge because there's a lack of energy to maintain these complex systems of life. Dr. Taz: So lots of questions. So first of all, when someone talks about a carbon footprint, right, we're trying to reduce our carbon footprint, we're trying to be sustainable, we're trying to be all these things, but then you're saying carbon dioxide is sort of the essential life force or life energy. Dr. Taz: How do you reconcile those two ideas? Zach Bush MD: Uh, well, you actually have to throw out the first idea completely. There. There is no negativity to having a carbon footprint. What is negative is if in creating that carbon footprint, you destroy biodiversity. And so if as an oil company you're destroying ecosystems to go dig your oil out of the ground, then you're a problem. Zach Bush MD: But if you are, you know, taking a look at step back and start to measure biodiversity as a metric for your life and human impact on it, you get a much more accurate vision of where we need to go as industries when you just demonize a single molecule like carbon, CO2, in the atmosphere. Now you let everybody else cheat or be hidden behind this one demon of CO2. Zach Bush MD: And so CO2, you know, is easy to then blame on the oil companies and in global politics. We politicized climate change in the 1990s and two thousands. How Gore's famous film. Yes. You know, inconvenient Truth demonized Carbon, I believe for a political reason, not so much for a scientific rationale. Um, even then we understood that CO2 is actually a tiny contributor to, you know, the extinction processes that we see going on. Zach Bush MD: But it was a very convenient reductionist measurement of a political outcome basically. And what you see is most of the wealth in the world under our current energy systems is held in non-Western countries. Mm-hmm. And so most of the oil in the world is in North Africa. The Middle Eastern peninsula of the UAE and Saudi Arabia and the like, uh, all of the nations there within that peninsula. Zach Bush MD: And then, uh, into Siberia, north China, uh, north India, Siberia, north China. That's one third of the planet's surface. That's all under desert right now. And it's those desert countries that have these huge oil reserves under the ground. Because that's actually a carbon cycle. Deserts go into grasslands every 20,000 years. Zach Bush MD: And then the grasslands, um, go into to Savannah. Savannah into Forest, forest back into desert. And when it desert flies, that silica has so much, um, basically energy force. 'cause the sun hitting silica is like basically what you would think of as a superconductor. And so it turns that old soil into oil very quickly. Zach Bush MD: And so we build these deep oil. So that's why they have all that oil, oil reserves through the cycle of the desert, back into grasslands, back into desert again. And so when you then look at geopolitics that are driven largely by energy systems and the dominant energy on the planet is oil, the western countries were. Zach Bush MD: It was an aous thing to demonize oil. Mm. Because it disenfranchised fascinating economically, the oil producing countries of the world. And so it was the west way of penalizing the wealth of these regions, I think, and trying to level the playing field in a field where you're simply disadvantaged because your resources under your earth don't produce as much oil as somebody else's. Zach Bush MD: And so I think that's subconsciously, or probably very consciously part of the agenda that was behind politicizing this. And when you step back and really look at the extinction event that we're in right now, you realize it's not oil and oil. You know, companies that are killing the earth. It's chemical agriculture companies coming outta the US and Germany that are killing the planet. Dr. Taz: Oh, wow. And Zach Bush MD: so we have hidden Western technology behind this carbon story while we poison the earth with our chemical industries and our small molecule chemicals. Nobody's penalizing anybody for that. Nobody's getting, you know, their wrist slapped or getting penalized or, or having biodiversity, you know, offset requirements for a company that's spraying antibiotics at 4 billion pounds a year into our soil system. Dr. Taz: So, is climate change real? Like, how would you define climate change? Yeah. I mean, because that's a political issue right now as well, or has been. Yeah, sure. Zach Bush MD: Climate is definitely changing. There's no question. There's lots of variables to that climate change, including human, human damage. And so if you take a look at global warming as a concept, which is what Al Gore kind of Dr. Taz: right, focused on, Zach Bush MD: they, they called it global warming at the time, and then they had to rename it climate change because actually a lot of areas of the world are not warming and they're doing weird things. Zach Bush MD: And the temperature di differentials across the planet are doing really bizarre dynamic things that are pointing to something other than just CO2 in the atmosphere. Um, which we probably don't have time to get into entirely, but it has to do with actual geothermal dynamics of the earth itself. So the earth, well, lemme just give a short answer. Zach Bush MD: The baby version Earth is Earth is going through a major metaphor, morph ssis right now. Regardless of human existence, let alone behavior, and those changes are, have to do electromagnetic field of the earth itself. So when I was born, the North Pole magnetically favored North America. And so, uh, above Canada there was this foci of, of magnetic field that we called the North Pole. Zach Bush MD: And you would pick up a compass and it would put you there. And it was roughly to the North Pole, but it was actually northern Canada. That North Pole has moved dramatically over the last 30 years. And so now it's over in Siberia. So it's across the North Pole and it's over there. And so you think, you pick up a compass and you're like, oh, certainly it's showing you the North Pole. Zach Bush MD: Well, it's never showed you a North Pole. No. Okay. Um, it's never showing you the, you know, that tip of the, the axis of the Earth's spin, the magnet of the Earth keeps moving. And every couple hundred thousand years, it goes through a complete reversal where the South Pole becomes the North Pole. North Pole becomes the South Pole. Zach Bush MD: The speed of change of that pole right now has got a lot of people concerned that we're about to go through a reversal. If that happens, then we can't even imagine the changes in dynamics on the earth, which has happened many times. So the earth will be fine, but it's going to change coastlines in ways we can't even imagine if that were to happen. Zach Bush MD: Yeah. Right now we don't know if it will go through complete reversal. And it's certainly possible 'cause I think the last one was a couple hundred thousand years ago, so it seems on track to, but we're certainly seeing the movement of the magnetic field of the earth and that during a movement of the North Pole magnetically you get these extremely chaotic patterns where there's no longer just the, the, the, the well ordered double Taurus of the planetary geology. Zach Bush MD: You now get this weird, super chaotic pattern that I think matches what we call climate change very well. Mm-hmm. Where some places are flooding that have never flooded, right? Some places are drought, some places are hot, some places are cold. We're getting freezing in Atlanta, right? At times we've never seen it freeze before. Zach Bush MD: Snow. Dr. Taz: Snow in Atlanta. So Zach Bush MD: the strange weather patterns match that rather than just like some linear growth of heat. Dr. Taz: Okay? Zach Bush MD: And so when we really sit back and ask ourselves, is our learned experience global warming due to CO2 in the atmosphere? The answer is no, it's not. It's not matching that pattern at all. Zach Bush MD: So CO2 in the atmosphere is dwarfed by other problems in the atmosphere that are produced by our chemical industry, such as methane and things like that. And, and that's largely coming from natural gas, not that. So the whole effort to get off of fossil fuels and yeah, and oil and go over to natural gas sounded like it was gonna be our new green energy. Zach Bush MD: But the amount of methane that is being produced through our natural gas industry that's leaking into our atmosphere is actually far worse than any carbon offset we would've gotten from, you know, the advantage of oil, Dr. Taz: oh my goodness, over oil. This is all so politicized. It's to like, really, it's all politicized. Dr. Taz: All right, so we've got this question mark around climate change. We have, Zach Bush MD: well, let, let me emphasize before people walk away thinking we don't have a problem, climate change is happening. It's got a lot of factors. I. Uh, deeper than that, I think we can start to say that the problem that humans are creating is a decline in metabolism of the planet, and therefore human biology and all other biology of the planet. Zach Bush MD: So we've accelerated through our behavior, we've contributed to a 10,000 fold increase in the rate of extinction on the planet over the last 50 years. Wow. And so that 10,000 x on extinction events of species is what we need to escape, because right now we're, we're online to go extinct over this next a hundred years or so at our current biologic collapse rate. Zach Bush MD: And so we've got a very short amount of time to re-understand this issue of the planet. And we need to stop thinking about the problem as a chemistry problem, which is what Yeah, the whole, right. Yeah. Dr. Taz: CO2 Zach Bush MD: story is arguing. We have a chemistry problem, we have a biology problem, and that's much more. Zach Bush MD: Integrated of a solution set that we need to go after rather than just demonizing one molecule. We need to come to terms with the fact that it's death of complex ecosystems through chemical agriculture as a primary driver. That's really fundamentally at the foundation of why climate crisis is happening, why extinction crisis is upon us. Zach Bush MD: And so we need to develop a much more holistic understanding of the nine partitions that drive extinction. And of those nine, we've passed six of the nine to guarantee that there is, we are in the midst of a massive extinction event that is not reversible. So now we have this short amount of time to rethink our relationship to the Earth and earth's relationship to human in time, to see nature recover this, which she can. Zach Bush MD: She's very fast. Which was my next question. Dr. Taz: Are we gonna be able to recover if we're a hundred years? Out. Like, are we gonna be able to recover? Zach Bush MD: Nobody knows is the interesting thing. You know, we're, we're, a lot of people think we're past the 50 50 threshold, so 50% likelihood of us getting through this. I personally think that it's a hundred percent likely that we get through, but it's gonna be achieved in ways we can't even probably imagine. Zach Bush MD: And it's the children on the earth right now that already know what that future looks like. Mm. And so we need to very quickly let go of our politic, politicalization of these issues. And we need to start to empower our children to dream our future. Um, Khalil is your brand. A hundred years ago, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century said, was asked, how should we parent? Zach Bush MD: And he said, we need to make sure that we never make our children think like us, and we should strive every day to think more like our children. And so we need to empower our children saying, you, you came in right now, and if you did, if you're a soul that showed up right now, you, you must be part of the movement. Zach Bush MD: A movement, a transformation, a reimagining of a future that we can't see yet. And so let's start empowering the dreaming of children. Let's start empowering our own dreaming as children. I can find the child in me still, and when I do dream like a child, I can shake off the limitations of, well, that's impossible. Zach Bush MD: Well, that's never been done. Yeah, those, you know, you're, you're, it's a pipe dream. And I can start to dream bigger and I can start to feel, realize I, if I can feel the future in my body, then it's already here. Dr. Taz: I love this and I, I wanna wind it back to health. Like if we put our finger at 1940. What happened to human health from 1940? Dr. Taz: Fast forwarding to today, can we mirror, like what we've seen in the healthcare landscape and the healthcare space with what we're seeing, kind of with the planetary, you know, frequencies and rhythms and stuff like that. Are you seeing those two things kind of go hand in hand? Zach Bush MD: Yeah. So the, the crisis of today started in the late 18 hundreds probably, and what happened, that's when really the industrial revolution really got its right, you know, foothold with trains. Zach Bush MD: And so when trains really became a normal mode of transportation, it shrank the world. Technology started to really accelerate around the globe at that point. And. During that process by the 1940s, you know, the Great War had really accelerated a lot of technologies on the planet. And so the, the World War II and the innovations there and World War I just before it, we had seen the innovation. Zach Bush MD: We'd gone from horse and buggy to jet aircraft in 50 years. Like what? Crazy the heck. Yeah. Like that's, yeah. It's an insane amount of innovation that happened during that time. Which begs the question of like, how does human ingenuity happen? Like how, how is that even possible? We've been near 300,000 years and then we go from a horse to. Zach Bush MD: You know, jet aircraft. Mm-hmm. Like what? What happened? And so we need to, maybe you touch on that as some future conversation, but the fact is that did happen. There was something that touched human ingenuity at that point, or the human imagination or human information that allows to suddenly, you know, pop our head above some previous normal and become something radically different in that journey. Zach Bush MD: Right. In the 1940s, we were at an incredible balance point of deciding our future as a species. There was groups of scientists that were discovering how nature was working within biologic systems to cure cancer and all kinds of things through natural phenomenon. There Dr. Taz: were Zach Bush MD: absolutely, Royal Rife was a phenomenon, you know, in and of one man's name. Zach Bush MD: But he really was representative of an entire scientific, you know, group that even was present by the late 18 hundreds. So as the industrial revolution emerged, um. Dr. Koch was, I think one of the, the powerhouses, uh, KOCH, uh, Koch was arguing with Pasteur in the late 18 hundreds, uh, over the issue of, of microbes mm-hmm. Zach Bush MD: And the concept of infection in germs. And so, uh, Louise Pasteur was arguing that humans are embattled against nature and nature's trying to attack us. And if nature, if a bacteria gets inside of us, then we get sick and we die. And, and so the immune system must be a, a battlefield for sterilizing the human body. Zach Bush MD: And Koch was an brilliant scientist and observer, and he was just like, that's not fitting my experience. He's like, I'm studying indigenous people and cultures that have no, you know, industrial water or clean things. Right? And, and they're living better and healthier than we are in these cities. By the late 1800 cities were toxic. Zach Bush MD: Yeah. And, and the life expectancy had gone way down because of the phenomenon of, of these, you know, kind of nascent urban spaces where suddenly everybody's crammed together. Disease was through the roof, the water systems didn't work, and so the people were drinking their own feces basically. And so there's so much tuberculosis and cons called consumption at the time, and lots of these kind of infectious cholera and all this. Zach Bush MD: And so we had created a disaster biologically by pushing people into these nature deficit spaces. And then we started to innovate to try to bandaid that, right? With technologies like, you know, by the 1940s penicillin. And so here we were creating an unhealthy ecosystem for humans live in, and then we were creating band-aids and saying, well, the Band-Aid's gonna fix it, Dr. Taz: right? Zach Bush MD: Without ever addressing the fact that no, it's the, it's actually the environment that I was creating. The sickness life expectancy was like 48 years old in the, in the US in, in end of the 20th or 19th century, end of the 18 hundreds. And so by the 1950s, sixties, we suddenly had this life expectancy of 70 years, and we're like, oh my gosh, these technologies are gonna fix everything. Zach Bush MD: But really what had happened is we had started to, you know, demand changes be made in child labor. And a lot of the death that was keeping our average age of 48 wasn't, 'cause people weren't living long, it was 'cause children were dying at such high volumes. Mm-hmm. And that was largely 'cause of our toxic city center. Zach Bush MD: So as we cleaned up municipal water, uh, when we went ahead and, and started putting chlorine in, in swimming pools, we eliminated polio overnight because the kids were all getting polio in the summertime and swimming holes in post World War II era. We didn't have a polio epidemic until we did urban dwellings and, you know, urban centers in that post-World era. Zach Bush MD: Then we created an epidemic and then we said that we fixed it by the polio vaccine, but really what we did is we went and cleaned up the water system so the kids stopped getting polio in the, in the water holes in the summertime. Um, but anyway, we have a lot of this like subterfuge of like environmental things happen and then we get disease and then we change environmental things and then people get healthy. Zach Bush MD: And instead of recognizing that in environmental effect. We instead are looking for, well, what did we do to the human? What did we do right? What did we do that caused any of that? And, and, and so we have this long problem of seeing human disease as a human problem instead of an expression of the relationship of that organism back to its ecosystem. Zach Bush MD: And that's where we're now at with genetics is realizing, oh my God. To be human is to be the most complex ecosystem on the planet. Our species actually holds more microbial diversity than any other species on the planet. Therefore, we produce more energy per cubic centimeter. Therefore we produce more intelligence. Zach Bush MD: 'cause we have more data inputs into our brain than any other species on the planet. And so the data inputs that are necessary for intelligence to occur, actually occur in the gut lining. So when we talk about the microbiome, this isn't just like soil to feed you. This is the soil that's making you think your ideas are literally coming as an amalgamation or a co-creation from the diversity within you. Zach Bush MD: And as you decrease the diversity inside of an intelligence, their creative juices go down. Dr. Taz: Hmm, interesting. A single Zach Bush MD: course of antibiotics for a human will take you into a 70% increase in major depression. Two courses of antibiotics in 12 months. 44% increase in major depression. Wow. We don't talk about this at all. Zach Bush MD: We don't talk about. And so your neurologic intelligence, behavior adaptation capacity for creative thought relies on the ecosystem within you. And as we start to imbue our entire food system by the 1970s with these chemicals that are potent antibiotics, we started to undermine soil health globally, which undermined plant health globally, and then the plants were carrying the residues of the antibiotics. Zach Bush MD: We would eat those and our mitochondria started disappearing by the 1980s. Dr. Taz: So did we get dumber? Zach Bush MD: Yeah, Dr. Taz: we did for sure. From the 1970s on, Zach Bush MD: from the 18 hundreds on, from the 18 hundreds on. A good way to do this, I think you can probably find it still on if you Google this, but if you look up eighth grade education or eighth grade final exam, 1880, there's no college kid coming outta college today that could pass that test. Zach Bush MD: Really, the complexity of the philosophy, language skills, mathematics skills that were an eighth grade education in the 1880s does not. Is not taught in our schools anymore. We're, Dr. Taz: we're thinking we're so ahead and savvy and all these other things. So going back to health for just a second, I, I wanna see if I have this right. Dr. Taz: Sounds like we've gone from an environment of infection and disease to then one of a metabolic crisis, which is all the cardiac stuff, weight gain, obesity. Mm-hmm. All of that stuff. Now I feel like we're transitioning to one of mental health and cognitive, yeah. Decline. Would you tie that entire spectrum? Dr. Taz: Yeah. Infection, inflammation, cardiometabolic, weight. Now to this Cogni global co cognitive decline, right? In our children we're seeing sensory processing disorder, A-D-D-A-D-H-D, autism, and you know, the population in between. We have anxiety and depression, we have dementia of all kinds. We have, you know, we have a problem cognitively that people are struggling to find solutions to, we blame technology, we blame family units. Dr. Taz: We blame so many different things. Is it really just all back to the microbiome? Zach Bush MD: It's one graph. I can show you the entire last 50 years of human disease in a single graph. So if we have a, a vertical axis on the graph of metabolism, which means light energy per cubic centimeter produced by mitochondria, right? Zach Bush MD: And then along the lower one, we have years from 1976 to 2025 here. During that, what is that? You got 50 year process there. Mm-hmm. In those 50 years. Uh, we started in 1976 with widespread use of glyphosate in the form of Roundup, and we were using Roundup in our farms and within a couple years in our backyards and in our driveways as a weed killer. Zach Bush MD: And so the famous Roundup molecule that you now find in any hardware store in the world, uh, you'll go and, and probably every garage in the world. Yep. Dr. Taz: Yep. Zach Bush MD: Uh, has got a bottle of Roundup. And that Roundup has an active ingredient called glyphosate. So glyphosate starts entering our water system and our food system in the 1970s by 1981, the first tip down, the first symptom of a declining metabolism globally as obesity. Zach Bush MD: Hmm. Obesity is a phenomenon where you have the same number of calories, but you can no longer burn the calories 'cause there's fewer mitochondria per cubic centimeter To turn that back into light energy. And so with that inability to convert to light energy, this, the human cell is like, oh, there's too much fuel sitting here. Zach Bush MD: We're gonna have to send that back to the liver. And so instead of burning it in the cells, the cells are sending the energy back to the liver, unable to use it 'cause the mitochondria, the vital bottleneck of energy production or conversion from CO2 or uh, or from long chain carbon back into CO2. And so obesity happens as we start to store fat in the liver. Zach Bush MD: The very first biologic consequence in the endocrine world is an increase in insulin resistance. Yep. Which is a decrease of function of insulin to move those carbohydrates into the cell. So now you gotta double hit. Not only do you not have enough mitochondria to get the glucose into light, you don't have enough insulin function to get the glucose to the mitochondria. Zach Bush MD: So the mitochondria now starving. And the human is overwhelmed with sugar and, and calories because they can't get it to the mitochondria. So by the late 18, uh, 1980s, we've got a diabetes epidemic coming on. Dr. Taz: Mm mm-hmm. Zach Bush MD: As the light energy declines in human biology, the first system to really start to dysfunction is the most energetically demanding, which is the immune system. Zach Bush MD: The immune system in any organism is always the most demanding, energetically, because, like I mentioned earlier about cities, the more organisms you have in close relationship, the more energy you demand to maintain healthy relationships. And so you need stoplights and you need the things, and like there's so much right. Zach Bush MD: Communication, intercommunication necessary. The immune system is not a battleground. The immune system is an arbitrary of, of complex relationships between tens of thousands of species. So as the immune system starts to lose its metabolic energy, you start to misbehave and you start to become reactive. Zach Bush MD: When you don't have enough energy for maintaining healthy relationship, you get inflammatory. Mm. This happens in human relationship, politics, everything. Crossing less energy, more inflammatory, your rhetoric gets more inflammatory. You have short fuse, you get angry easy. All your coping mechanisms are shutting down. Zach Bush MD: So that's what's happening in an immune system as the energy. So by the early 1990s, allergies started hitting you. Mm-hmm. So suddenly the immune system is reacting stuff that's never reacted to before. Gluten sensitivity really came online in 1992. And so in 1991, we started using Roundup to dry crops, not just weed killer. Zach Bush MD: We started spraying wheat directly in 1991. By 1993, we have widespread global Wow. Gluten sensitivity. Yeah. Which is actually glyphosate poisoning. Dr. Taz: Mm. Zach Bush MD: Because suddenly we were spraying the wheat days before harvest with a chemical that would be at very high, you know, logarithms, higher residues than if you had just sprayed the weeds near the crop. Zach Bush MD: Right. And so now we have direct crop treatment by the early 1990s with, with Roundup like compounds. And so with that advent, we started to see huge deep injuries in the, uh, immune system, which would, by the mid 1990s rear its head as autoimmune disease. Right now, you're not reacting to the weed outside your body, you're reacting to your own body. Zach Bush MD: By 2001 in four girls in the United States has auto antibodies to her own thyroid gland. Yep. And so we are, you know, systematically destroying our own organ system by 2000 with our own immune system due to the confusion of this lack of coherent communication. In the meantime, the second most, uh, neurologically, or the second most energetically intense system behind the immune system is the neurology. Zach Bush MD: And so here's the rearing of, uh, right in the late 1990s, uh, autism goes through the roof. Mm-hmm. Alzheimer's in women Parkinson's and men, uh, attention deficit disorder, mood disorders, uh, major depression, anxiety disorders at rates never seen before, as the neurologic toxicity continue to climb by the early two thousands. Zach Bush MD: And we see the emergence of chronic pain syndromes, chronic fatigue syndromes, and the rest. And so this is a continued decrement in the amount of energy available per cubic centimeter for a human to do its work. And it's very predictable. We should have seen this coming a long time ago. By 2006, we've got 95% of corn globally being grown as genetically modified roundup ready crop. Zach Bush MD: And so now we're in the billions of pounds per year being used globally. And at that point we see such a decrement in, in mitochondrial function that we start to see the cancer epidemic rear its head. And so we see leukemia's, lymphomas, liver cancer, bladder cancer, thyroid cancer, uh, breast cancer, prostate cancer, all going through the roof in the two thousands. Dr. Taz: It's all connected. Zach Bush MD: It's all the same equation. And so as, as we see the cancer thing come and go by 2010, we have such high residues now that the mitochondria inside the egg of a woman can no longer achieve conception. The mitochondria inside the sperm of the male can no longer have enough energy to swim upstream to find the egg. Zach Bush MD: And so we have a massive explosion of infertility by 2010 globally, which Dr. Taz: we're seeing actively day and day. It's day. It's getting worse by the day. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Zach Bush MD: By the late two thousands, I was an endocrinologist at the time working in fertility clinics. We were suddenly seeing this explosion of infertility and we and IVF became a suddenly standard of care. Zach Bush MD: Yeah. And so by 2010, 2012 standard of care in the United States. Every year since then, we've seen this declining success of IVF. And so now women are going for four or five in vitro fertilization mm-hmm. Attempts before they can get pregnant. And so the reason is, is because even if you've now taken in a test tube and made those sperm and egg find each other, you're still can't solve for the problem of conception. Zach Bush MD: Conception of a human is the most beautiful, brightest thing that happens in the universe, and I can't overemphasize the, the magnitude of the scientific reality. I, so far I've been describing to you the decline of mitochondrial function or metabolism in humans. Right. And that's based on each human cell having about 200 mitochondria in it. Zach Bush MD: Think back to your biology textbooks. How many mitochondria did they tell us was in a cell? Two, usually. Right. There's like two little mitochondria floating in there. They, and they could do a cross section of one of 'em, so you could see it was a double wall of bacteria. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. There's 200 mitochondria inside of every human cell, unless it's a neuron. Zach Bush MD: Then there's 2000 mitochondria in the head of every neuron. And so it takes so much energy for a cell to do its work, and it's crammed full of these bacteria that are reproducing independent of the human cell. And so the bacteria in a thriving organic system of a human body, you've got 200 mitochondria per human cell, 2000 and a neuron, and then the egg comes along, right? Zach Bush MD: And the egg of a woman has half a million mitochondria in it. Dr. Taz: Wow. Zach Bush MD: The egg of a woman you wear a powerful, has half a million generators of sunlight, and at the moment of conception, they discharge light. So this is called the zinc flash and it blinds the microscope, but you can find it on Google. Google this zinc flash conception, and you'll watch a video of this lightning bolt that comes outta the egg at the moment of conception. Zach Bush MD: I. It's that lightning bolt that I believe entangles a soul to a cell. Mm-hmm. And you have to have this huge light event to get the physics to bind an identity to the cell. And this is something that modern science ignores completely, right? Is that each body has its own identity, which is very annoying 'cause the biology is the same, right? Zach Bush MD: My DNA is the same as your DNA. How the hell do I know at every single cell level that I am different than you? And if I put any of my cells inside your body, you'll kill it immediately. 'cause you see it as foreign. What's creating the identity of the freaking cell is this deep secret. And I believe it's not in the biology, it's in the physics. Zach Bush MD: At the moment of conception, this massive discharge of light allows a soul to entangle. And so when we start to see these deep, deep disorders of fertility, which are now driving us to a point of extinction, uh, and not just the United States, you know, I've been in Saudi a lot recently, and Saudi Arabia is now publishing its own data, 68% in fertility rates. Dr. Taz: Wow. And so 68%, Zach Bush MD: 68%. Ugh. And so we are reaching this threshold of inability to produce babies globally. China to Saudi, to us, US is population. Um, so if you below a birth rate of 2.1, then you're destined to disappear as a population. Hmm. United States is a 1.6 right now, and every 10th of a point you, you're taking off decades of survival, uh, for the species. Zach Bush MD: And so at 1.6, the US population has gone in a hundred years, you know, so we've got this very rapid declamation in human reproductive 'cause the light energy per cubic centimeter and the egg of a woman is starting to be challenged by the amount of chemical that egg is exposed to in a daily basis. And meanwhile, nobody's talking about it and everybody's complaining about 0.04% of our atmosphere being CO2. Zach Bush MD: This is the problem with politicizing science as we will spend half a century going down the wrong avenue for solutions that are irrelevant to the biologic outcome of humans or the planet while we go extinct. Dr. Taz: So we have this massive global infertility crisis. Is that the bottom? Mm-hmm. Of this decline that we're talking about with human health. Zach Bush MD: Unfortunately it's not. And we've seen, you know, a phenomenon that we could not have imagined but was actually prophesied by a lot of indigenous cultures over time, was that we would actually see the dissolution of gender. And that's the next metabolic step, really below infertility. And so was Dr. Taz: predicted. Zach Bush MD: Yes, very much so. And so there's an understanding that the massing and feminine would lose its polarity and therefore we would start a new human species at that point, you know? And so we would rebirth out of the dissolution of this polarity by finding our way to this crisis point. And so we have found our way to that crisis point. Zach Bush MD: And so by 2010, uh, the fetus, uh, and you know, even adults at the time, but then playing out in the fetus in ways we haven't even seen fully come to fruition yet. Uh, the process of moving from neutral, which is where every fetus begins, right to a masculine or feminine expression of male female, uh, requires enormous amount of energy. Zach Bush MD: 'cause you're taking an organism that's at this nice neutral, every cell's the same, everything's predictable to suddenly trying to depo, to polarize it one direction or another into a mask and our feminine expression. And if there's not enough energy per cell at that time, you can see this failure to completely gender. Zach Bush MD: And that plays out in the nuclei of the brain more than anyone else because there's so much energy required at the neurologic system, 10 times more than a peripheral cell that might be, you know, the cell of a breast or the cell of, you know, a prostate or whatever. Future tissue is gonna be male, female. Zach Bush MD: The, the neurons were requiring enormous amount of energy to, to distribute energy, to grow certain neurons, large, if it's gonna be a male, certain neurons, large, if it's gonna be female. And it's, I think that neural differentiation where we start to see this emergence of gender neutrality. And so this. Zach Bush MD: Situation that we're in where our, we've got two generations of people now that are not, are largely not identifying as either or. We keep thinking that's a social crisis and there's certainly social overlays and social program that can be a way in which to interpret this. But we actually have a biologic problem, not a social problem. Zach Bush MD: And so the biology deteriorated by 2005, 2010, such that it was a high level of the, the fetuses developing weren't able to gender fully. And so then we end up with this kind of neutral state of behavioral traits where the person in the brain is being told this is how a male functions and feels the world. Zach Bush MD: And they're like, well, I look biologically male, but I'm not feeling. Mm-hmm. I'm not neurologically interpreting the world as male. I'm looking at women. Right. And I understand the female there, and I vibrate in that frequency. I must be a female. The reality is a lot of people will do sex changes and everything else, which is, I oversaw a lot of that as, as an endocrinologist. Zach Bush MD: All the, every sex change, you know, in trans community is dependent on the endocrinologist to provide the hormones and do all that stuff to, to make the transition. But what I saw over and over again there, and what we see playing out, I think socially, globally, is you can make the sex change, but it doesn't actually change your neurology. Zach Bush MD: And so, uh, in the end, this is why we, you find that you're still in some sort of neutral state. Yeah, you may have changed your outward appearance, but your biology is, is still in this lovely neutral space in some ways. And so I don't think we need to. Change anything necessary biologically, we need to acknowledge what's happened biologically and then acknowledge that we could move past this by increasing the metabolic potential of each organism on the planet. Zach Bush MD: Again, starting with the plants that we grow, which becomes the food we eat, which becomes the neurons we, we create with. And so this, this meeting at the center point of the mass and feminine is a necessary part of our journey, which I find quite fascinating. If we were going to survive, we were gonna have to end this male dominant, you know, control the nature thing, you know, control one another, own everything because everything's scarcity. Zach Bush MD: We got kicked outta nature. Therefore, we need to control nature. That whole wounded masculine psyche that comes out of every human, male or female, the wounded masculine within us, believes we got kicked outta nature. So we run around with this. Literal abandonment disorder. And we now know biologically and chemically that if you create an abandonment disorder in any organism, a mouse in the cage, or a human, that abandonment sets that organism up for severe addiction. Zach Bush MD: And so humans are addicted to everything right now. Not because we're dumb, but because we have an A abandon us disorder and our abandonment disorder is from nature itself. And so we even created our religious paradigms, you know, the Garden of Eden. Then we got kicked out 'cause we weren't good enough, or we sinned or somehow we weren't gonna fit the Dr. Taz: right, Zach Bush MD: make the, make the mark. Zach Bush MD: So at the moment you get kicked outta nature. Now you're against it. And now you come at it with this, you know, kind of adversarial effect and you're prone to major addiction to something. And so we're all addicted to our work or to substances or whatever it is. And, and for this, we're missing the bigger point of we only have one human problem. Zach Bush MD: It's nature deficit disorder. Mm. And that Nature Deficit Disorder has led to this decline of metabolic function because we kept separating ourselves with our technologies from nature itself and ultimately from the concentration of light energy. So the path forward is exciting. We created the path down and now we know the path out. Dr. Taz: Well, let's talk about the path out because I think for anyone, you know, watching our listening. It's a little heavy. It's a very different way of thinking about health and human disease. It's a very different way of thinking about our existence. I have long thought that the gender issue is biochemical in nature, and that's really where it's beginning. Dr. Taz: How do we, if it's the mitochondria not getting the energy it needs, how do we help our own mitochondria, the mitochondria of the planet? How, what do we do? What are our starting steps? Where do we begin as the individual and then as a family, and then as a community, what, what do we need to do? Zach Bush MD: The solution came to me actually at the same time, the problem surfaced. Zach Bush MD: So I left the university in 2010 and started my own clinic, which led to my own laboratory. And by 2012, we were starting to study soil because we were recognizing the nutrition that we were feeding in our, our nutrition center wasn't working like the data said it should. And so I was basing my clinical practices of plant-based diet, uh, on the data to come out for 30 years from Cornell and Cleveland Clinic and these huge, you know, academic centers that created an incredible amount of data around the use of plant-based diet to reverse diabetes, reverse cardiovascular disease, reverse cancer. Zach Bush MD: And so I was applying all of that science and it just wasn't getting traction in, in a significant portion of my patients as it as it should. So that got me starting to study. Plant nutrient density, which quickly got us into soil sciences. And, uh, there we uncovered a beautiful fact, which is something that I hold as really a tenant of nature now, which is she has never allowed an injury to occur that she didn't already have a solution for. Zach Bush MD: It's impossible because had there not been a solution for adversity, life would've never happened. This is an adverse, friction filled universe. So there's Dr. Taz: hope. Zach Bush MD: And so there's not only hope, there is a 100% reality that nature is going to engineer herself out of this crisis. Now the only question is, do we wanna stay in play as humans? Zach Bush MD: And if so, we just need to quickly align ourselves with her predictable metabolic recovery process. And a metabolic recovery process is achieved by the increasing the number of interconnected relationships in nature. And so we've gotta take ourselves out of these sterile boxes of houses. And we need to get our children out in rivers and lakes that are not chemically poisoned and we need to start building our food system on soils that are regenerative, that are imbued with these relationships across the microbiome from bacteria to fungi and the rest. Zach Bush MD: And so we found that solution, we were able to show by 2013 in my lab, we were able to show that we could completely reverse glyphosate damage at the cellular and metabolic level by reintroducing soil extracts from fossil soils. Dr. Taz: Mm-hmm. Zach Bush MD: And so that would become the, the dietary supplement line called ion or intelligence in nature Love. Zach Bush MD: Yes. And so what we can show is that, uh, a tiny amount of glyphosate so that the residues that would be in this cup of tea that I'm drinking right now, you're somewhere between, we're in Atlanta, so you're probably. Uh, somewhere around 10 to 15 parts per billion, uh, are, is glyphosate in this cup. And so with that, my cellular biology is diminished in its mitochondrial potential, but just half an hour before getting here, as I was leaving the hotel, I sprayed a bunch of ion in my mouth. Zach Bush MD: And the, and that soil extract is accelerating the light energy produced by my mitochondria at such a rate that that little bit of mi glyphosate no longer does any damage. In fact, it actually makes me stronger. Dr. Taz: Hmm. Zach Bush MD: And this is where, you know, you're getting back into a biologic threshold of regeneration when injury actually stimulates repair to a point of strength rather than weakness. Zach Bush MD: And so this is what we should see. This is why you go to the gym. You go to the gym, you destroy millions of muscle cells by stressing it under the weight of something. You go run down those flight of stairs, you cause thousands or if not millions of tiny little fractures in the bone from that weight bearing, pounding exercise. Zach Bush MD: Both the gym and the bones after the run down the stairs, start to regenerate and start to rebuild such that your bone has higher density at the end of the day than before you ran down the stairs. And you have more muscle at the end of the week than you did at the beginning of the week because you stress the cells. Zach Bush MD: So stress when it's used in the threshold of biologic response is always a good thing. So we can get the glyphosate in our environment actually to access exercise for our future biology if we have enough information and enough resources, carbon resources from the soil. And so that's what we're showing with ion is within seconds of that ion touching the cell membrane, the cell immediately remakes the tight junctions that are damaged by glyphosate tight junctions of the Velcro between our cells. Zach Bush MD: When you damage those, you get leaky gut, leaky brain. And so when you put the communication network and resources back to the human cell, it automatically does what it needs to do, which is to recreate healthy boundaries. Healthy boundaries are then followed by increased metabolism at the cellular level. Zach Bush MD: And so within minutes of taking these soil extracts, you see your body's a TP production going through the room, not only back to normal, but actually higher than it was before the injury. And so in a beautiful way, nature has provided not only the solution for the repair, it's. It's giving us an opportunity to move past any biologic potential we've lived before. Zach Bush MD: We will come outta the glyphosate era stronger than we've ever been if we put enough nature back between us and the glyphosate. Dr. Taz: So what can, so I love ion biome and we use it all the time in practice. We use it here in the house's, probably sitting on the table somewhere out there. And we have noticed that in, I mean, you can notice that instant better energy, instant increase in energy. Dr. Taz: But are there other ways to do that as well? Like just from a. You know, individual standpoint. I mean, I know food quality, all these other things make a difference. But like what are, if ion biome or soil extracts are one, what are maybe two other super efficient ways to regenerate energy to improve sort of the a TP, the light energy chi, all these things. Dr. Taz: Yeah, all these different things in ways we have of describing it. Zach Bush MD: So the first step, what we saw, and by 2013 we started getting these products on the market, is that this was gonna have to be a bandaid. 'cause there's not enough of this fossil soil extract to actually let us keep doing what we're doing. Zach Bush MD: To right now, we've killed 97% of the earth's soils through chemical agriculture. If we keep doing that, we will run out of the, the antidote, right? Um, and so we, we need this soil of today to become the soil of yesterday. We need to start generating such potent soils that every bite of food and every drink of water is carrying these molecules in it. Zach Bush MD: Again, these molecules are made by diverse ecosystems. So diverse species, diversity within the bacteria, fungi, protozoan, and the like, are creating these millions and millions of different variants of these little carbon molecules that function as the liquid circuit board for communication. Redox chemistry is this technical name for that, and so that liquid circuit board is being created by diverse ecosystems. Zach Bush MD: And so with, we hope we put our entire supplement line and the entire supplement industry outta business over the next 30 years because the concept of dietary supplementation is ludicrous. Like. Nature's been feeding itself for billions of years on this planet. It wasn't waiting for humans to come along, right, to supplement nutrition. Zach Bush MD: We needed the supplement industry to come along when we completely denuded our food system of nutrients. And so right now, the entire, you know, $500 billion supplement industry is a bandaid on top of a dying food system. So. By 2018, we realized we gotta do something about this. 'cause farm fields all over the place, organic or otherwise weren't performing at the levels that we're gonna recover this metabolic crisis that we just described. Zach Bush MD: So we launched a nonprofit called Project Biome, and the concept of Project Biome is Rewilding Nature Systems to increase the number of communication networks and number of relationships in nature. And then regenerative agriculture as a system for allowing soil systems to return to this level of intelligence and, and opportunity for repair. Zach Bush MD: And then reconnected economies when we start to allow bioregional economies to, to surge again. Bioregional economy is a description of. Your wellness financially should depend on how healthy is your ecosystem. Mm-hmm. Locally. Dr. Taz: Mm-hmm. Zach Bush MD: Therefore, you should be eating from your system locally. You should be actually stimulating industry locally. Zach Bush MD: And we know this, we see signs up at every retail shop, right. Hey, shop local. Local. Dr. Taz: Yep. Zach Bush MD: Don't give it all to the, you know, the five people that own all the stock of Starbucks or whatever it is. Right. You know, so that e local mindset is a symptom of this deep knowingness that if we would return to the village, if we would return to village dynamics of macroeconomics, we would have a very stable economy again. Zach Bush MD: And so we don't necessarily have to go backwards in time. We need to go forwards in time to a new village model where. We understand that human biology in our metabolism is equal to the soil metabolism is equal to water metabolism. And now we need to start benchmarking our local economies against the success of our local environments. Zach Bush MD: And then we can play those off each, each other. You know, one biosphere within the middle of the United States should actually have overlap and interaction with the biosphere economics of those around it. And pretty soon North America, uh, with Mexico, US and Canada's not three countries, but it's 15 biospheres that are communicating economically and energetically to raise the vibration so that children can be a possibility again. Zach Bush MD: Mm-hmm. So that gender can be a possibility again. And so this is where I think I get excited is it's pretty simple. It's, it's rewilding increasing the number of indigenous species in an environment as regenerative agriculture. We stopped chemically destroying the ecosystem, allow complex biodiversity to return and then a reconnected economy that honors that recovery system. Zach Bush MD: And so that we started in 2018 and we realized that it was too complex to like reach each household with that message. Right? So we started farmer's footprint. Okay. And farmer's footprint is our outward effort with Project Biome. 'cause Project Biome is mostly working with governments and industry to like really align those issues. Zach Bush MD: But every household can do farmer's footprint. And so farmer's footprint is this wonderful, uh, Japanese proverb that we pulled this from. But the proverb is, the best fertilizer for a garden is the farmer's footprint. Hmm. And it was the realization that if every household will get their shoes off and start walking in nature again, specifically in their backyards or on their porch or in their community gardens, and start to be directly interacting with soil, their health will immediately recover. Zach Bush MD: And so my clinic just interacting with them, just interacting with nature, not like Dr. Taz: planting things or doing things, that's exactly what you would love to do, is start Zach Bush MD: moving from walking in the garden to planting the garden. And in 1945, we had a very high level of health. We'd gone to an average age expectancy of, you know, 70, 72 or something like that. Zach Bush MD: And so we had this great recovery of life expectancy and everything else by the 1940s and at the end of World War II, 1945. Not just the US, but the UK and all the Allied forces. Those countries were all growing 45% of their food system in their backyards. Mm. We called 'em Victory Gardens. We understood that victory was only gonna occur if we had food sovereignty. Zach Bush MD: This is the United States problem right now as Homeland Security has been boiled down to how big can we build the fences and how high can we make the tariffs, Dr. Taz: right? Zach Bush MD: That's not a healthy system. The healthy system would be where is food sustainability in the United States? And the answer is zero. We have no food sovereignty in this country anymore because we grow an enormous amount of stuff. Zach Bush MD: Corn and soybean everywhere, but that never ends up on a human plate. You can't actually eat GMO corn or soybean. It's too toxic and it's doesn't even taste good. It doesn't produce food. So we have to turn that into chemicals. So we do high fructose corn syrup, we do ethanol for gasoline. We do plastics for our, our clothing industry so that everybody can wear plastic yoga pants. Zach Bush MD: It is just this in generative engine of energy, but it doesn't end up as food. And so for that, the United States is extremely vulnerable and really every, every city system in the world is extremely vulnerable to humanitarian crisis and biologic collapse because our food systems supply chains are now measured in thousands of kilometers. Zach Bush MD: And we're extracting those food systems on slave labor pricing from developing economies. Mm-hmm. So the United States is fed by South America. Uh, Europe is fed by Africa. Middle East is fed by Africa and, and parts of Asia. And so it's slave labor for thousands of years to produce food when food is not seen as the foundation of life. Zach Bush MD: And so we need change, major change in socioeconomic systems that start in your household, so you can immediately become part of the solution by joining this farmer's footprint movement. You go to the farmer's footprint website, farmer footprint, us. Uh, and also in, in Australia, um, uh, we've got a big org there as well. Zach Bush MD: So you plug in and, and we have free content and, and cheap paid content too that will take you through the one-on-one of how you turn your backyard, you know, Kentucky Bluegrass Lawn into a food force to start creating health sovereignty and food sovereignty for your own household at the community level, starting to get engaged in community gardening. Zach Bush MD: Um, I'm on the, on the advisory board for Denver Urban Gardens, which is now really a template for the whole country, and they're now teaching their systems of, of community garden management to 26 other states now. Um, but it's a phenomenal example of how urban settings can start to create food sovereignty within these small pockets. Zach Bush MD: And even a small amount of food grown in your backyard or community garden has a huge ripple effect into your own biologic health and vitality. Dr. Taz: Wow. Hmm. Zach Bush MD: And so this is the grace of nature that it takes such a little bit of her to start to restore your relationship to her. And so. Welcoming back a mint plant onto the countertop in your kitchen or into the window sill. Zach Bush MD: A single mint is hard to kill. Mints like your magic. If you don't think you can grow food, go buy a mint plant and find out that you can keep it alive. If you just. Take a leaf off of that, even better bite the leaf off without picking it. 'cause there's actually more energy in that way that all of plant, all of animal life around the world, grazes on living food. Zach Bush MD: We're the only animal that goes and picks it and lets it die. Mm-hmm. Then we eat it. Um, and so a little bite of mint off that plant daily actually retrains your body to remember what generative food and generative water feels like and tastes like. And so you can start to retrain your brain, retrain your biology into this direct relationship to nature through just a single plant growing. Zach Bush MD: Let that be your inspiration then if you've got a backyard. Tear that thing up next spring, get rid of the grass and start planting a whole food forest in your backyard. Get the kids out there. And any kid that doesn't like a vegetable is simply a kid that's never grown a vegetable. You get the kid planting the seed and suddenly a tomato plant comes out, they're gonna eat the baby tomatoes and they're gonna love them. Zach Bush MD: Yeah. And so the child needs to understand where it's food comes from. Again, most kids don't know where a carrot comes from today, and a lot of kids don't actually know what a carrot pulled outta the ground looks like 'cause they've only seen these little things that look like a baby finger that got melded in the processing as a carrot. Zach Bush MD: So we're so divorced from nature now that our children are suffering to the metabolic crisis that they're in. We got to reconnect and so get engaged locally. Community farmer's markets, I'm really delighted, are starting to crop up in every community globally now. Uh, from Africa to Europe to South Asia, you can find 'em everywhere. Zach Bush MD: And so that, that's gonna be what the future looks like. When our farmers are known, we know their name, we volunteer in their farms on the weekends, so the kids can feel what a big working farm feels like and what soil smells like when compost is getting into it. And that whole technology, that healing itself itself, healing itself, it's where the biologic recovery will begin, is this more interconnected social system of reconnecting nature to humans Dr. Taz: and that will heal the planet. Zach Bush MD: Everything. Dr. Taz: What do you think will happen geopolitically when it comes to health and when it comes to the planet? Zach Bush MD: Yeah. So there's two different futures that are merging. One is a technocratic future where we re rely on computer chips planted in our brains to symptom manage our declining neurology and, you know, artificial joints. Zach Bush MD: And we're infusing everybody with peptides to symptom management. Mm-hmm. Um, peptides will never heal a human being. Peptides will never create health. Uh, probiotic will never create a healthy gut. These are, these are symptom management tools that are making billions of dollars for the pharmaceutical industry. Zach Bush MD: Don't sell yourself short on nature. Nature intended you to produce your own peptides. Mm-hmm. Don't get stem cells from some other quantum being. If it's getting stem cells injected in your body from a fetus, that's not you, that's confusing the hell outta your own biology at that point. 'cause maybe your biology will allow a stem cell to produce a cell, but if it's quantum entangled with a different soul. Zach Bush MD: I stand on the fact that that is confusing to a human body. Yeah. And it's gonna force an inflammatory reaction over time because it's not self. And so we need to get away from this external pursuit of health and we need to become internal generators. And so my eight week program is called The Journey of Intrinsic Health because it's really the, my 30 years boiled down to a nutshell of it can only happen inside of you. Zach Bush MD: You're the only pathway to your own health. Dr. Taz: Wow. There's Zach Bush MD: nobody that can add a single technology that's actually gonna make you biologically more complete. You were so biologically, energetically, metabolically complete at the moment of conception that you became you. That level of intelligence will be thousands of years in the future if we even get scratched. Zach Bush MD: We are so far from our technology mimicking the intelligence of a single human cell, let alone the symphony of 70 trillion cells you can't even carry. There's no technology that's gonna help you. You need to come in line with the original math that designed you, and to do that, you have to integrate back into nature in a deep way. Dr. Taz: Powerful. I don't think we can end this at any better place. I think it's a message of hope. Unfortunately, we have walked a journey that has made us sick, made our planet sick as well. But I think if we can all come together and turn it around, then we can have a different outcome. For sure. It has been an amazing conversation. Dr. Taz: You always blow my mind every time you come on and probably want you back for part three just to dive deeper into some of these ideas. But for anybody watching or listening today, where can they find you? Zach Bush MD: Uh, my main educational website is Zach Bush, md uh, zach bush md.com. You can keep an eye out for my book that's coming out that will encompass a lot of this stuff. Zach Bush MD: So it, it takes iteration and repeating this information in yourself. 'cause it's opposite of almost everything you've heard of the last 40 years. So, so the book is there to really start, give us a, a grounding rod to say, okay, let's begin again. Mm-hmm. On our understanding of science and where it's, that book is called Human and it comes out soon. Zach Bush MD: So, um, you can tie in there and, and start to really think through how you're gonna rebuild your family unit and your community and everything else around this understanding of metabolic force as our future or only our future. Uh, intelligence of nature.com. We'll find you to the soil supplements and, and help bring all those resources. Zach Bush MD: There's a gut supplement, an incredible skin supplement that reverses the, the aging of the skin. Um, both ones functioning as this kind of, uh, nature antidote to the, the current chemistry of our planet. Uh, and then there's a whole line of botanicals that are now available for sleep, for immunity, for, uh, brain focus. Zach Bush MD: And those are nourishing the mitochondrial and metabolic pathways necessary for those different organ systems to return to these high metabolic states. So intelligence of nature.com there. Uh, journey of intrinsic health.com, you can find your way to our coaching program for practitioners. We, we train doctors, nurses into all of the science and. Zach Bush MD: It's far beyond the science is really the lifestyle that allows the support of the science to happen, uh, within a single individual. And so that, that practitioner coaching program is available. It's a four month training program. Uh, we're certified coaching, uh, uh, certified by the, the International Coaching Federation run that. Zach Bush MD: Um, for, uh, consumers, um, out there and families that need help and support. We have the eight week program, which is an immersion in really reintroducing your own biology to yourself. And that's a process of reintroduction of, of core self, that core identity that knit you together in your mother's womb. Zach Bush MD: And then we reintroduce you to food, water, breath, fasting movement, play community through these new lenses of self and helping you tie back into your intrinsic knowingness of where your health path lays. And it's a little different from each person, but it's a beautiful experience. 'cause it's group immersion. Zach Bush MD: So you've got seven other people that are witnessing your healing journey. Mm. And it's only through the witnessing that you actually heal. If you try to go heal by yourself, you actually get sicker over time. Not, not, not less sick. And so you have to be in community to really fundamentally heal. Dr. Taz: Wow. Zach Bush MD: And it's so powerful when we empower each other, not as doctors and nurses, but as a small community. Zach Bush MD: What if we could heal each other by being witness to one another? And we're taking that to the extreme with our immersive experiences. And so you can go again, uh, Zach Bush, md, keep an eye out on my website and social media for the immersive experiences that happen a few times a year around the world. Zach Bush MD: And that is a radical kind of reset of human biology through changing the sacred geometry inside the water crystal of human cells through somatic work that we do for seven days straight together in magnificent parts of nature, to get that nature immersion and re-energizing the original design of human Dr. Taz: fascinating. Dr. Taz: So there's no reason to begin somewhere with all those different options. Mm-hmm. And I wanna thank you again for being here. I ask every guest this question, but I think I already know the answer. You know, the show is really about bringing science and spirit together. And you talk about it, you're so well, and everything you just discussed. Dr. Taz: But when it comes to you, Zach Bush, what makes you whole? Zach Bush MD: I am working on that. This has like, been my biggest challenge. And maybe this is part three for you, or something like that. 'cause it's such a, uh, it's the most intensely beautiful and challenging thing I've ever done. Started about four years ago. I was taking the course of miracles and it blew apart my whole concept of human relationships and one of the human relationship metrics or matrices that I held most sacred, which was that of marriage. Zach Bush MD: Suddenly seen through that lens, I realized we have done something unnatural to human relationships. We've broken the, the fundamental natural law within human dynamics, and for that we see all the stress within human relationships. Mm-hmm. And, uh, never before has it been more high, you know, this extreme level of stress within relationships right now. Zach Bush MD: And I think it's because nature is forcing us to reevaluate not just city systems, we gotta focus back on what does it mean to be me. And so over the last four years, I've been following that course of miracles journey into what they call holy relationship, which is this completion of the mass and feminine within myself. Zach Bush MD: Hmm. And there's no greater challenge that I've ever faced because it triggers everything that you didn't want to face as a human, which is the possibility of loneliness. What if love is scarce? What is, you know, it takes you through all these layers of fears, guilts and shames that you have been programmed with. Zach Bush MD: And this slow detox of all of those matrices has been the most magnificent thing I've ever pursued. The most challenging thing I've ever pursued. Mm-hmm. And it's, it's really is the keystone, or maybe it's the key in the lock for how we're gonna survive as a species is completing ourselves, Dr. Taz: completing yourself. Dr. Taz: You're gonna have to come back and tell us what you learned from that journey next. All right. For everybody watching and listening to this episode of Whole Plus, thank you for being here. I have been so inspired by this. I hope you guys have as well, and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening and watching today's episode of Whole Plus, be sure to share this episode with your friends and family. Dr. Taz: And if you have it already, please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast on YouTube, or click the follow button on Apple, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcast. Don't forget to follow me on all social channels at Dr. Taz md. Until next time, stay healthy and stay whole.