Zach Bush Md : On how soil health has impacted our public health (part 1)
Zach Bush MD (@zachbushmd) is a renowned, multi-disciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care, and an internationally recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to human health.
This conversation was recorded prior to the coronavirus pandemic, but there are many crucial parallels that we need to draw between ecological health and human health, which makes this episode really pertinent and deeply profound especially at this time!
In this part one of our two-part conversation, Dr. Bush sheds light on how the use of agrochemicals took over and became the norm in the field of agriculture; the ties between how we treat our soils and the consequential health impacts we then experience; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Dr. Bush and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Mission to Earth by NYADO
“Instead of channeling our energy into anger, start to realize we can simply create a different industry. We can create a completely different consumer environment, and we can create a completely different production system.”
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This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological balance, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any podcast app to stay informed and updated on our latest episodes.
On how the microbiome relates to planetary and human health:
"We dove into the crossroads between soil health, plant health, food systems, and human health as it cross-sections at the microbiome.
That was the journey into seeing the world and coming to a nexus of understanding that the ecological collapse we see around us with global warming, the destruction of topsoils and agricultural lands, and the increase in everything from wildfires to extreme weather patterns, is all tied back to microbiome damage on the large scale of soil ecology, which correlates, in time and in severity, very closely with the human health and chronic disease epidemics that we had seen starting in the 1990s and then accelerating over the last two decades."
On how the use of Roundup is connected to chronic disease:
"The following are the mechanisms by which we've developed this chronic disease epidemic through the widespread exposure to the chemical, Roundup:
Number one is the antimicrobial effect.
Number two is the mineral chelation—we no longer have the mineral micronutrient availability to plants and therefore, to humans or animals.
Then, third, that protein dysfunction due to a lack of essential amino acids as the shikimate pathway is blocked by Roundup.
Finally, there is this direct toxicity to protein adhesion which creates a leak across the whole system."
On recognizing the opportunity to change our food industry:
"There's a risk of slipping into hopelessness and anger towards just general human greed, but there's also an opportunity here where we, instead of channeling our energy into that anger, start to realize we can simply create a different industry.
We can create a completely different consumer environment. We can create a completely different production system that now gets away from those chemical dependencies and creates a much higher value product out of the farm, that consumers are going to want to pay for."
