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 their food and we find ourselves in that same you know 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 the food chain and whether it delivers health or not i've basically found myself in a massively reductionist state of my understanding of the world around us when i had really spent you know 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 there's a thousand different diseases that there's ten thousand different drugs to treat those diseases then but in reality what started to deconstruct that world was the realization that the cancer i was studying under the microscope when i was devising chemotherapy happened to be really the exact same process as an ulcer in the ankle of a diabetic patient again sound 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 in the world which is a better definition than lots of diseases then we must be overwhelming the immune system of all of the public for some reason at the same time sometime between 1982 and 2000 we had a did something to the environment to totally decimate the protection system of our immune immune systems and the big tip off to me in this process you know here i am in the labs developing chemotherapy and is so buried down the rabbit hole of the pharmaceutical model but there was a big tip-off starting to happen in the late 1990s and early 2000s that 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 one in five thousand children with autism in 1975. today we have just three weeks ago released the most recent data one 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 five-year-old who can't speak can't make eye contact hits his head on the wall for a few hours a day to try to console his terror we didn't miss that in 1975 you know this is not a diagnostic dilemma but then to further emphasize that the fastest acceleration in that growth pattern of this epidemic has happened between 2012 and today where we're seeing a doubling time every two to three years in that autism rate at the current rate we'll see one in three children with autism in 2035. and then in 1996 we saw this sudden rise in 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 1996 we see this uptick and consistent linear growth parallel to that alzheimer's tracking women with parkinson's and males and so we have you know 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 in the late 1990s and so this was like the cracks that were starting to form in my world view that maybe there weren't a thousand different diseases because they all started going epidemic at once which really begged the question is there a root cause of the 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 misunderstood soil for the longest time and in the 1900s early 1900s really the late 1880s we started to change the way we farmed um simple things happened like we went to steel grinding for wheat instead of stone grinding it which meant we could get more of the fiber out which means we created a higher gluten and a higher refined carbohydrate load in our flowers and in our wheat system and everything else so that's one example of a shift but the main thing that happened is we started to disrespect the importance of crop rotation and soil rest cover cropping etc this led to a massive death of the topsoil which led to the dust bowl that ran through the 1920s and 30s and it's fascinating that here we are only 80 years out from this event where our ancestors you know two generations three generations were literally starving to death we had soup lines that went for days you know across the entire midwest and houses were literally being buried in dust of dead soil that had died during the dust bowl we actually for the first time started outsource our food production because these people lost their local gardens and farms so we started to rely on importing food for the first time and we started let's outsource that concept then world war ii hit and we did something interesting which is we had this huge petroleum industry that was revved up bigger than it had ever been in the history because we had all tanks jeeps mechanized warfare for the first time in human history on this scale we had planes for the first time i mean this was like full out totally different thing that had ever happened in history and it was a world war much different than world war one in its scope and so we see this huge petroleum industry that suddenly grinds to a halt because the war is over so we have this glut of petroleum and we suddenly realized we can extract nitrogen phosphorus and potassium out of that coal 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 in the midwest is like you don't need to do crop rotation you don't need to compost you don't need to go back to thousands of years of farming tradition just spray this chemical on there yeah forget about whatever you might have learned during the dust bowl yeah that was that was 40 years ago that's right ancient times we're modern now yeah and so these farmers started using it and it became a revolution for them and it was actually called the green revolution of the 1960s and so the green revolution was actually use of nitrogen phosphorus potassium or npk fertilizers and the mpk fertilizer did turn plants green because nitrogen and phosphorus do that but what was lacking in those plants 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 becomes prone to viruses pests and it can't excrete the stuff from the root system that would keep weeds at bay and so now the plants are getting you know attacked from the outside if you will and the chemical pharma chemical industry says no problem here's a new chemical weed killer here's a pesticide and so the farmers got themselves locked into this co-dependent relationship with chemical fertilizers then chemical drugs for the plants to keep them alive despite a failing biology underneath the surface there right akin to taking a drug to deal with the symptoms of some ailments that you have that creates a whole battery of side effects that then require you to take another drug to deal with those it's just a an environmental version of that it's exactly the same thing in fact the drugs have been the same in a lot of ways the main drug is antibiotics western medicine really got its first foothold with penicillin our first antibiotic and that happened to be in the 1940s with world war ii 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 pesticides are largely uh antibiotic rather than you know what you would think of maybe a weed killer or something and the most famous of these of course has become roundup the most single successful chemical warfare that's ever been sold on the planet we currently sell and use four and a half billion pounds of glyphosate which is the active ingredient in the chemical to treat the soils of the earth four and a half billion pounds of a single chemical annually that chemical was never patented as a weed killer it's only been patented as an antibiotic and then it was repatented as an antiparasite and it wasn't yeah that was the original purpose of it correct well it's the mechanism it's the mechanism they recognized and so the mechanism of glyphosate is to go in and block enzymes in soil bacteria fungi and plants and that enzyme pathway is called the shikimate pathway and and it's important because it makes a number of the essential 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 two-thirds as complicated as a flea at the gene level which i find reassuring if i can't find my keys or i'm having a bad day i'm like okay i'm two-thirds of healthcare as a flea what can what are my real expectations here but 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's 26 amino acids that will build those 200 000 proteins 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 eight vowels in our language if you subtract one of those vowels you can affect hundreds of thousands of words the vowels in the amino acid vocabulary here is are the essential amino acids which if you start to tweak any of those nine you're gonna start to lose tens of thousands of protein structures in in their functionality and in their their unique form and so those essential amino acids not only are they important like the vowels they also can't be made by the human body so those nine have to come from your food chain somewhere and it turns out that they are only made by the bacteria the fungi in the plants you don't have a shikimay pathway in your human cells and so these essential amino acids are blocked through the chickamay pathway by roundup and 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 forget about a human it's a dog a cat any mammal 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 because we changed the the 26 letters and so the current statistics is that less than one tenth of one percent of the roundup used on the planet actually hits a weed the other 99.99 gets into the soil and in the water system and washes off and so we are now seeing the runoff from these farms and in the water table itself so we have fossil aquifers in the united states here that run from canada all right all the way down to historically mexico that has now dried up we've we've turned over a thousand square miles of of uh texas into desert over just the last 20 years from sucking water out of the ground that fossil aquifer is now contaminated with roundup that's filtered down into this ancient freshwater source forest and then in the same moment you've got the mississippi river which collects over 80 percent of all the roundup in the country and then it's evaporating the whole time so it's going into the air that you breathe and then it goes into the clouds and then it rains down on us recent studies in the air and rainfall in the southern united states is showing 75 of the rain 75 air contaminated with roundup so before you even take a bite of food you're being hit with an antibiotic when you breathe you're getting hit with an antibiotic when you when you experience rainfall and so you may be growing organic crops but they're getting rained on and so we have now locked this water soluble toxin into our environment fortunately you know to give you a little bit of breather here from the bad news is that there are bacteria and fungi that can eventually digest the glyphosate the downside is we need to stop spraying it so that 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 then we'd see one in two people with cancer we'd see one in 30 kids with autism we'd see parkinson's going crazy they're literally repeating back if if if it was toxic we would see literally what we're seeing you know and so the reality is the public health statistics have gotten so grim in the last eight years that nobody can call this a conspiracy theory anymore um but it's almost like yeah but that's where's the direct where's the smoking gun the smoking gun is what's been missing that's what we found in 2012. so in 2012 we found it backwards um i don't think anybody's actually smart enough with the human gray matter that we're given to actually create a paradigm shift prospectively right so every great you know mind that we look to and pass galileo or you know ben franklin or anybody we said oh they discovered something or you know edison these just came at moments when the evidence got so overwhelming that it became obvious right and so in the same way in 2012 the evidence was getting so overwhelming that we were onto something in the nutrition world but we at the time i was still thinking cancer cancer therapy because my background was in chemotherapy development and so when i found these molecules in soil that looked similar to the chemotherapy i'd been making a lot of bells started ringing of like what is that where'd it come from how is there medicine in the dirt like where is that coming from and within a few weeks of that 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 had been some papers coming out in the mid-2000s in the cancer world that were starting to say that the bacteria in your gut were predicting which cancers you would get if you were missing these bacteria you would get prostate cancer if you had these bacteria you would get breast cancer that was so radically bizarre and out there for our current model even to this day as to how cancer worked but now you fast forward eight ten years and now there's tens of thousands of articles that are showing that genomically the bacterial genome is way more important in determining cancer than the human genome and and so this reality was hitting and 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 our gut is doing the same thing what if the bacteria and the fungi are actually our best source of medicine for everything and so that's the direction we were going but as soon as we put this into petri dishes with cancer cells and beyond we suddenly realized no no there's something way deeper happening with these this information stream coming out of bacteria and fungi and it was my chief science officer dr john gilday he's a phd in genetics and and cell biology and he was the first to realize that we had put our finger on the glyphosate toxicity issue is that this communication network from the bacteria and fungi was actually supporting the protein structure in our gut lining and so 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 velcro-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 started to publish 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 we couldn't injure the the membrane we it became bulletproof to the glyphosate injury and so in that journey we start to really study glyphosate in its relationship to the human cells because like you said monsanto has been swearing up and down that there is no harm to the human body because the chickamay 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 right so that's why drugs have side effects is they don't actually go and do exactly what your doctor says it's going to go do it's going to hit a bunch of other receptors and do other things 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 macro membrane in your body the blood vessels that that fuel your entire body with oxygen nutrients are held together with the same tight junctions the blood-brain barrier that perfect protects your peripheral nervous system and your brain same tight junctions the kidney tubules that are held together to detox your body same tight junctions and so what's happened as we introduced a chemical that's directly toxic to this this velcro-like protein is we turn into leaky sieves on the front end gut leak and nasal sinus leak and 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 an immune response from peripheral or get nutrients to some distant space is also leaking and 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 and so if that's true if glyphosate was really damaging that then we should see a massive explosion in neurologic injury to children and adults starting in about 1996 that's exactly when we see this steep increase happening in autism alzheimer's parkinson's neurodegenerative conditions like ms autoimmune diseases and all the rest i mean all of this has sounded like a lot of bad news but identifying a problem is so much of the solution you know and so now that we identify the problem look we've we've put into our food chain a chemical that deletes the ability to build a healthy human body we've put into the food chain a chemical that deletes the medicine out of our food which we didn't have time to talk about but uh that shame chickamay pathway makes the alkaloids which are the medicinal features of our food is deleted by glyphosates we build a diseased body we build a food chain that doesn't have the medicine in it and then we take away the most you know vital thing which is this micro cause a macrocosm phenomena you just talked about so far i've been describing to you that we are losing the identity between the outside world 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 was foreign in the same way at the macro level i believe we're losing our self-identity as human beings as we start to leak and we start to become majorly depressed panic disorder we start to get lost down these rabbit holes of doubt insecurity fear guilt we have spiritual crisis we have a 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 could possibly endure right now it's because we are literally losing self-identity at the cell level because we are eating a chemical that breaks our self-identity at the cell level a sickness happens and it results in an immune reaction in the healing process i think that's what's happening to our society right now we have a sickness and a 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 to 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 a foot 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 i left and so the you know a woman can in an instant suddenly realize as her boundaries go up at the gut and at the blood-brain barrier her macro boundaries of that's not spiritually and psychologically appropriate i am me i am i am important i am loved i don't need that kind of abuse in my life in the same way i'll have somebody walk in and say doc i just quit my job i just started my company that i've been wanting to start for 30 years and wasn't confident enough to start and i just realized i am ready and i just did it and so i have this goosebump experience over and over again despite some of the you know tragedy that's in the talks that i give and the science that i now know and i'm constantly seeing this bubbling up of human hope and human healing and consciousness coming on and i take great hope in that 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 one in three 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 we don't because why 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 is going to be ten years ago it was less than one percent of the food sold in the country and now we're pushing it you know we're up to maybe four or five percent in a lot of communities if we can push that to 16 percent these are numbers that were apparently leaked from monsanto in their marketing analysis if if the american food chain became 16 organic monsanto and chemical farming would lose its financial stability thank you for watching this episode of after school i'm dr zach bush and i'm just honored to be with the community at the fabric of our nature is the message and capacity for regeneration and fascinatingly after the last five extinction events on the planet there has been an explosion of life because in fact the fabric of the genome the fabric of biology as it is made is that of adaptation and diversification after every major extinction event the level of stress within the genome inspires more creativity it is not a demise it is not a victim it sees the opportunity for something more dynamic more adaptive and more resilient and ultimately more intelligent after that last great extinction the world did not suffer back or struggle back to create the dinosaurs instead mother nature envisioned the possibility of birds mammals humans and here we walk the earth today and we have triggered an extinction event through our extraction and our consumption because of our our belief that we are separate from nature that we need to control her that we need to domineer her and that we actually are some sort of manifest destiny towards her consumption changing that mindset and coming into alignment with mother nature will create a future that none of us can imagine we could in fact be a part of that new adaptation of biology on earth for a more intelligent more diverse and more explosively regenerative future i look forward to being there with you you