Dr. Zach Bush connects the dots between chemical farming, our chronic disease crisis and our spiritual crisis

Here’s a useful perspective on what we’re all going through or witnessing.

I was planning to just pull a quote, but it’s so good I ended up transcribing most of it… Hang in there until the end. That’s where the hope is.

We’ve literally built an entire economy of not just the United States but the entire western civilization on health care. And that’s been a hidden reality for a long time. But for thousands of years the real control of populations has been around food. And we find ourselves in that same, if not amped up version, now that we have 7 billion souls on the planet. That becomes very, very big business when you start to be able to control food and we see that the ultimate political control is around food chain and whether it delivers health or not.

I’ve recently found myself in a massively reductionist state of my understanding of the world around us… when I’ve spent 20 years of my life studying medicine, which was the opposite… where every year and minute you study in that environment, they try to convince you it’s more complicated, that’s there’s 1000 different diseases, that there’s 10,000 different drugs to treat those diseases… But in reality what started to deconstruct that world was that the cancer I was studying under the microscope when I was devising chemotherapy happened to really be the exact same process as an abscess in the ankle of a diabetic patient. Again, sounds totally disparate, but the end totally reductionist viewpoint is it’s only one thing, which is chronic inflammation.

Inflammation is actually a normal biologic response to an injury.

If we have a chronic inflammatory epidemic in the world - which is actually a better definition than lots of diseases - then we must be overwhelming the immune systems of all of the public for some reason at the same time.

Some time between 1982 and 2000 we did something to the environment to totally decimate the protection system of our immune systems…in the late 1990’s/early 2000s…we were seeing diseases in what seemed like completely different organ systems in the population go epidemic simultaneously.

Examples of this was certainly autism that you mentioned earlier. We had 1 in 5,000 children with autism in 1975, today… the most recent data, 1 in 36 children with an autism spectrum disorder. And the big argument for a long time was, well maybe we’re just diagnosing and recognizing autism better, which is kind of laughable if you’ve ever sat with an autistic child - here’s a 5yo who can’t speak, can’t make eye contact, hits his head against a wall for hours a day to try to console his terror. We didn’t miss that in 1975… But then to further emphasize that the fastest acceleration in that growth pattern of this epidemic has happened between 2012 and today when we’re seeing a doubling every 2 -3 years. And that autism rate at the current rate will see 1 in 3 children with autism in 2035.

And then in 1996 we saw this sudden rise in the Alzheimer’s dementia in women. Interestingly, the Alzheimer’s rates has not changed in males since that time. But at the same time in 1996, we see this uptick and consistent linear growth parallel to that Alzheimer’s tracking women with Parkinsons in males. And so we have species specific, gender-specific, organ-specific diseases in the brain, and peripheral cancers, all of which took off at the same time in the mid-1990s. Autoimmune disease - unbelievable epidemic - starting up in the late 1990s. And so this was the cracks that were starting to form in my world view, that maybe there weren’t 1000 different diseases because they all started going epidemic at once, which really begs the question, Is there a root cause of the root cause of all disease?

In the same way that we’ve misunderstood the gut and what gut health means, we’ve misunderstood soil.. and in the early 1900s, really late 1880s, we started to change the way we farmed… we started to disrespect the importance of crop rotation and soil rest, cover cropping… this led to a massive death of the topsoil, which led to the dustbowl which ran through the 1920s and 30s… During the dust bowl we actually for the first time started to outsource our food production…

… then WWII hit and we did something interesting… we had this huge petroleum industry which was revved up… because we had all tanks, jeeps, mechanized warfare for the first time in human history on this scale…

So we had this huge petroleum industry that suddenly grinds to a halt because we have this glut of petroleum, and we suddenly realize we can extract nitrogen phosphorus out of that oil and we started making chemical based fertilizers for the first time. So they found a new marketplace for this oil. And it was a great message to the farmers, who were still suffering with bad dirt… “you don’t need to go back to thousands of years of traditional farming, just spray this chemical”…

And so the farmers started using it and it became kind of a revolution for them. And it was actually called the Green Revolution of the 1960s. So the Green Revolution was actually use of nitrogen phosphorus potassium or NPK fertilizers. And NPK fertilizer did turn plants green, because nitrogen and phosphorus do that, but what was lacking for the first time in human history was the nutrients and the medicine that should always have been in that food.

And so the plants became weak, just like a human being who lacks nutrients. Their immune system goes down. And when a plant’s immune system goes down it becomes prone to viruses, pests, and it can’t excrete stuff from the root system that would keep weeds at bay. And so now the plants are getting attacked from the outside… And the chemical industry says, “no problem, here’s a new chemical weed killer, here’s a pesticide.”

So the farmers got themselves locked into this codependent relationship with chemical fertilizers, then chemical drugs for the plants, to then keep them alive despite a failing biology underneath the surface….

And in fact the drugs have been the same in a lot of ways. The main drug is antibiotics. Western medicine really got its foothold with penicillin - our first antibiotic. And that happened to be in the 1940s with WWII. And so we developed in the same decade, the antibiotics that would kill the bacteria in our body with the antibiotics that would kill the soil. And I say antibiotic because these chemicals that we were using as pesticide are largely antibiotic rather than what you would think of maybe a weed killer…

And the most famous of these of course has become RoundUp - the single most successful chemical warfare that’s ever been sold on the planet. We currently sell and use 4 1/2 billion pounds of glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in the chemical, to treat the soils of the earth… That chemical has never been patented as a weed killer. It’s only been patented as an antibiotic. And then it was re-patented as an anti-parasite…

The mechanism of glyphosate is to go in an block enzymes in soil bacteria, fungi and plants. And that enzyme pathway is called the shikimate pathway. It’s important because it makes a number of the important amino acids. Our bodies are composed of over 200,000 proteins. But we only have 20,000 genes. We have this pathetically dumb genome in the sense that a flea has 30,000 genes - so you’re 2/3 as complicated as a flea at the gene level… The reality is we’re very simple at the genetic level and yet we make over 200,000 proteins from a bunch of amino acids. There are 26 amino acids that will build those 200,000 protiens. Those 26 amino acids are just like the 26 letters of the English alphabet in the sense that the vast majority of those are useful, but not critical. But the vowels, these 8 vowels… if you substract one of those vowels, you can affect hundreds of thousands of words.

The vowels in the amino acid category here are the essential amino acids, which if you start to tweak any of those 9, you’re going to start to lose tens of thousands of protein structures in their functionality and their unique form. And so those essential amino acids, not only are they important like the vowels, they also can’t be made in the human body. So those 9 have to come from your food chain somewhere. And it turns out that they’re only made in the bacteria and the fungi in the plants. You don’t have a shikimate pathway in your human cells.

And so these essential amino acids are blocked through the Shikimate pathway by Roundup.

So imagine treating a food chain with a chemical that blocks the ability of these plants to make the building blocks for a healthy human body… a dog, a cat… any complex multicellular biology is going to depend on these essential amino acids and we literally, in the last 15 years, subtracted out the ability to build the body…

So the current statistics is that less than 0.1% of the Roundup used on the planet actually hits a weed. The other 99.99% gets into the soil and the water system… so we are now seeing the runoff from these farms and in the water table itself… it’s going into the air that you breathe and then into the clouds and it rains down on us.

Recent studies in the air and rainfall in the southern United States is showing 75% of the rain, 75% of the air contaminated with Roundup. So before you even take a bite of food, you’re being hit with an antibiotic when you breathe… when you experience rainfall. And so you may be growing organic crops, but they’re getting rained on.

So we have now locked this water soluble toxin into our environment.

Fortunately…there are bacteria and fungi that can eventually digest the glyphosate. The downside is we need to stop spraying it so they can return. We’re decimating those very bacteria and fungi by the presence of Roundup to the point where they’re not digesting it. Current estimates is, if we stop spraying Roundup tomorrow, it would take about 50 years before our ecosystem saw a drop in the level of Roundup below our toxic levels.

If the conspiracy theorist was right, we’d see 1 in 2 people with cancer, we’d see 1 in 30 people with autism, we’d see Parkinson’s going crazy… They’re literally repeating back, if it was toxic we would see literally what we’re seeing…The reality is that the public health statistics have gotten so grim that nobody can say this is a conspiracy theory anymore…

The smoking gun is what we’ve been missing. That’s what we found in 2012. So in 2012 we found it backwards… in 2012 the evidence was getting so overwhelming that we were onto something in the nutrition world… At the time I was still thinking cancer, cancer therapy because my background was in chemotherapy development. So when I found these molecules in the soil that looked similar to the chemotherapy I’d been making, a lot of bells started ringing like what is that, where’d it come from? How is there medicine in the dirt?… and within a few weeks of the discovery of those molecules we found out that bacteria and fungi were making these specific shapes of these carbon molecules.

And that really closed the loop for me because there were these papers that were coming out in the mid-2000s in the cancer world that were starting to say the bacteria in your gut were predicting which cancers you would get. If you were missing these bacteria you’d get prostate cancer. If you had these bacteria you would get breast cancer… Now you fast forward 8 or 10 years and now there’s 10’s of thousands of articles that are showing that genomically the bacterial genome is way more important in determining cancer than the human genome…

So in 2012, when we discovered these chemicals that look a little like chemotherapy that are made by bacteria and fungi in the soil, it suddenly closed the loop of “oh my gosh, what if the bacteria in the gut is doing the same thing? What if the bacteria and the fungi are actually our best source of medicine?”..

It was my chief science officer Dr. John Gildea… he was the first to realize we had put our finger on the glyphosate toxicity issue, which is that this communication network from the bacteria and fungi was actually supporting the protein structure in our gut lining. It turns out that the gut is held together as these trillions of cells that make up that cellophane layer by tight junctions.

These are velco-like proteins that hold one microscopic cell to the next to create this coherent carpet. And he had recognized before this in a number of other labs that… glyphosate seemed to increase the permeability of this membrane. And nobody was really sure why yet. But we suddenly realized that, if this bacterial communication network was in there, we couldn’t injure the membrane. It became bulletproof to the glyphosate injury. And so… we really started to study glyphosate in its relationship to the human cells. Because, like you said, Monsanto has been swearing up and down that there’s no harm to the human body because the Shikimate pathway only exists in bacteria and fungi.

Well that may be true regarding that enzyme target, but the classic thing with any drug is it always has off-target effects… The side effects of glyphosate that are outside of the shikimate pathway is direct injury to the protein structure that holds your gut lining together.

This would be bad news if that was it. But it turns out that every macromembrane in your body - the blood vessels the fuel your entire body with oxygen and nutrients - are held together with the same tight junctions… The blood-brain-barrier that protects your peripheral nervous system and your brain… the kidney tubules that are held together to detox your body… same tight junctions.

So what’s happened as we’ve introduced a chemical that’s directly toxic to this velcro-like protein is we turn into leaky sieves on the front end - gut leak and nasal sinus leak - so every time we breathe, every time we eat we’re starting to leak and our immune system gets overwhelmed. Then the blood vessels that are supposed to deliver - either and immune response from peripheral OR get nutrients to some distant space - is also leaking, so we’re getting permeability of the blood vessels. Then you get to the blood-brain-barrier. This is supposed to be the holy of holies. A peripheral nerve or the brain is supposed to be protected against everything in your blood because even glucose, which is the main fuel for your brain, should not get into the brain in an unregulated fashion. It will damage the nerves. And so the holy of holies of the central and peripheral nervous system is being destroyed.

So if that’s true, if glyphosate was really damaging that, then we should really see a massive explosion of neurologic injury to children and adults starting in about 1996. That’s exactly when we see this steep increase happening in autism, parkinsons, alzheimers… neurodegenerative conditions like MS, autoimmune diseases and all the rest…

We’ve put into our food chain a chemical that deletes the ability to build a healthy human body… a chemical that deletes the medicine out of our food… that same shikimate pathway creates the alkaloids which are the medicinal feature of our food… is deleted by glyphosate. So we build a diseased body. We build a food chain which doesn’t have the medicine in it. And then we take away the most vital thing, which is this microcosm/macrocosm phenomena… So far I’ve been describing to you that we are losing the identity between the outside and our immune system by the breakdown of these membranes. We get leak that’s literally taking away self identity from the immune system and so we get autoimmune disease where we’re starting to react to our own body as if it were foreign.

In the same way, at the macro level, I think we’re losing we’re losing our self identity as human beings as we start to leak and we start to become majorly depressed, panic disorder. And we start to get lost down these rabbit holes of doubt, insecurity, fear, guilt. We have spiritual crisis. We have relationship crisis that’s on an epidemic level equal to cancer and beyond. The ability to stay in human relationships seems to be the most complicated thing that we can endure right now and it’s because we are literally losing self identity at the cell level. Because we are eating a chemical that breaks our identity at the cell level.

As sickness happens it results in an immune reaction in the healing process. I think that’s what’s happening in our society right now. We have a sickness and disease on the planet of loss of self-identity and human consciousness of our purpose here only to trigger the ultimate healing process, which is to realize that we’re all one. We are all on one mission to find truth in ourselves and through one another. We are calling in community. We are going overcome the isolation of our cell phone era. We’re going to start to touch each other more. We’re going to hug each other more. Because we have to. And that’s a beautiful healing process that I already see afoot in the world around me. And I’m blessed to be able to go and speak all over the world right now and I’m blessed in that journey to see humans changing their macro consciousness as they change their diet, as they change their nutrition, as they get in touch with their food chain, as they put bacterial and fungal communication networks back in their body.

They come back 18 months later to my clinic and they’ll say, Doc, I just left my husband. He’s been abusing me for 35 years and I finally realized I don’t deserve that and so i left. And so a woman can in an instant suddenly realize as her boundaries go up at the gut and at the blood brain barrier, he macro boundaries of “that’s not spiritually and psychologically appropriate… I am me, I am important, I am loved, I don’t need that kind of abuse in my life.

In the same way I’ll have someone come into my office and say, doc, I just quit my job. I just started my company I’ve been wanting to start for 30 years and wasn’t confident enough to start and just realized I am ready and I just did it….

I’m constantly seeing this bubbling up of human hope and human healing and consciousness coming on and I take great hope. I take great excitement that if a few of us can become conscious and aware and awake right now, it has a ripple effect that is so quick. And it has to be quick because one thing we can be certain with no matter what background we come from scientifically or politically, we can agree that any society faced with 1 in 3 children with autism will collapse under a financial blow that is inescapable. And so we’re about 16 years away from a sure complete collapse of our financial status as a country and yet we don’t hear a single politician talking about it… because the politicians are not the solution. You and I are the solution as consumers. And we are doing it already. The organic food movement - nobody predicted how successful it was going to be. Ten years ago it was less than 1% of the food sold in the country … now we’re up to maybe 4-5% in a lot of communities. If we can push that to 16% - these are apparently number that were leaked from Monsanto in their marketing analysis - if the American food chain became 16% organic, Monsanto and chemical farming would lose its financial stability

More thoughts on healing from Zach Bush here.

And then watch this.

So there’s hope.

Start anywhere.

Start a garden. Hug a tree… or a person.