Dr Zach Bush and Cyndi O’Meara Interview
I’ve been following Dr. Zach Bush MD for 3 years now and finally this year I had a chance to hear him speak live in Melbourne, then have a day at Joost Bakker’s incredible home and productive garden along with Zach and his wife, Sue Bradley (TNA graduate), Marie (once Dirt Girl), Charlie Arnott (my new farmer crush) Mary McCarthy (TNA graduate) and Rachel Ward (yes the actress married to Bryan Brown). Zach is truly gifted in how he translates a difficult topic to something manageable for everyone to understand. This interview is no different. We talk about the immune system, viruses, microbiome and hope. He really believes the mess we see ourselves in goes back to the food we consume and the environmental chemicals that are wreaking havoc on our soil, animals, planet and us. We are all powerful, we have the ability to change the course of what is happening by growing our own food, finding a local farmer, considering the chemicals we use and the life we choose to live and share with family, friends and community.
Listen in and be calmed by the hope he gives us into the future.
Cyndi
If you’re interested in learning more from Dr Zach, please visit www.zachbushmd.com
Transcript of Interview
Cyndi O’Meara 0:04
Welcome Zach It’s so good to have you talk to our nutrition students and whoever else will be listening to this, I’d like to start where I first heard about you. So I was listening to Rich Roll a couple years ago, and I think I listened to that two and a bit hour interview, many times and I knew to stop at 40 minutes, because that’s when you really got into glyphosate Roundup. And even though I was on that bandwagon and had been on it, I don’t know, you clarified everything for me. So, let’s let’s first talk about the current thing that’s happening at the moment which is COVID-19, and has glyphosate, do you think, got anything to do with it.
Zach Bush 0:49
Fantastic. So, this history of roundup is interesting in that it was a big change in philosophy, if you will, around how we were going to deal with weeds and threats to a monoculture system of corn, soybean, cotton, sugar beets, sugarcane these modern crops that had been, you know, really started getting a foothold in the late 1800s, the mentality of how to kill things up until that point was to poison them with something that was directly toxic and roundup became, you know, famous very quickly for being the new safe chemical because it didn’t intend to directly kill a weed instead it disrupted the, the mechanism by which metal microbes bacteria, fungi in the light in the soil and plants, create amino acids and by blocking this amino acid pathway, it led to the death of a weed very quickly, or any plant that it was sprayed with. And so it was this indirect pathway so it was less of the kind of nuclear bomb event of Atrazine or a nicotinamide or, you know, one of these age old chemicals that had been in agriculture for, you know, at least since the end of World War Two. And it’s interesting to know with Imagine a world war two there that most of these technologies and chemical agriculture came out of warfare and so nowhere more obvious than that is glyphosate which is the active ingredient in Roundup, which is an organophosphate as a, as a category and organophosphates were famous before 1974 with the the patenting of roundup and glyphosate with Agent Orange compound so Agent Orange was sprayed by the US government, you know, in many parts of the world but through our military, it was heavily sprayed obviously in Cambodia and, and North Vietnam during the Vietnam conflict over a 20 year period. And we completely turned that South Asian landscape into something that looks like the surface of the moon and if you, you can probably find it on Google even but if you google ho chi minh trail, you know 1973 at the end of that conflict. It looks like just this gray dusty moonscape there’s nothing green left and you you know imagine just the horrific blocks of life at the plant level at the level of, you know, the geckos and the monkeys and the butterflies and you know the the MAS that inhabited the dense rain forests that we just slaughtered in the name of being able to see our enemy more clearly. So that’s kind of the mentality of these chemical companies is, you know, definitely bigger is better definitely more killing is better. And when they switch their mindset from, you know, killing the jungles of Vietnam over to what if we could turn this organophosphate category into a weed killer for the consumer and for farmers and so that was the shift in 1974 they patented in 1976 it gets approval to go broad into Canada and EU. And so that’s 1976 and in 1976, the same year that we started spraying this stuff all over the place. We see the first jump of the viral genome into humans from at that point swine. And so that happened in Fort Dix in the US. And so at Fort Dix we see the first, you know epicenter of the first pandemic virus that had leapt from a different species into us and so before that we had bad flu seasons you know the worst one and most famous one was 1918 with the Spanish flu, but that was, that was an HN virus so the viruses in humans are H1N1. Any others H1 all the way up to H5 and up to N6 you know so there’s been different versions of the H N human virus since, you know, we started being able to track these things, but then suddenly in 1976 with this weird pressure of this anti microbial life compound we see the leap into Spanish with our I’m sorry swine flu for the first time. So swine flu 1976 and then since then we’ve had over 12,000 outbreaks around the world since 1976, 12,000 outbreaks of novel viruses leaping species. And so we created this out of an anti microbial pressure. And when I say anti microbial, glyphosate is working as an antibiotic. It’s been patented as the back end anti fungal anti parasitic parasitic so it kills life within the soil. And what we now know about the world of bacteria and viruses is they’re always in balance with one another so the bacteria check the, the replication and clarification of viruses viruses check the overgrowth of bacteria. Bacteria check the growth of fungi, fungi check the growth of bacteria. So there’s this beautiful checks and balances in that massive ecosystem of the microbiome. And here we go spraying this chemical that disrupts that that system of communication that system of organization about microbiome microbiome and the immediate responses is genetic stress signal that comes out as this virus, and we see shift. So now we’ve had 12,000 of these, you know epidemic or at least localized outbreaks of bad, you know, species jumping viruses and you’ve seen a lot of them you saw SARS, MERS and now COVID, all three of those are Corona viruses, and they seem to come from different species but the bats play a significant role in some of the genetics that we’re currently seeing, but avian flu happens very frequently out of Asia now and so we see avian flu cycle through, we see new versions of of human flu coming out of Asia, every year and so the influenza vaccine that we’re always clamoring around for has never blocked the number of infections of influenza. It can modify in some of the studies maybe the amount of the length of time that you’re sick but it doesn’t actually block the influenza and one of the reasons is because the virus is changing constantly it’s got, they always have new genetic information. Modifications within that gene genetic information, and they have new protein envelopes, so you can’t really block the ability of these things to get into the human body and of course the human body is what replicates the this genetic code that we call viruses, so the viruses are dead species they are dead entities they’re not like bacteria that can make energy and digest food and repair themselves and procreate. That’s a life form. Viruses are not life forms, they can’t replicate. They can’t produce their own energy. They’re just little floating protein sacks that have a little bit of genetic information in them. And so these little benign things are floating all over the place. And when I say benign I mean not because they must be because they are so numerous that they outstripped, all other life, you know, forms on earth in their sheer dominance of the ecosystem. In ocean water there’s 10 to the 15 viruses per liter. So you grab a liter bottle fill that up you you’re holding 10 to the 15 viruses of one with 15 zeros after it, in the air above it, you have another 10 to the 15 per liter so in soil you have 10 to the 15 in a single gram of soil. If you add this up planet wide we have 10 to the 31 viruses in the soil we have 10 to the 31 in the air and we have 10 to the 31 in our water system. And so soil, water and air you’re up in levels that are hundreds of millions if not billions of times more viruses than our stars in the entire universe. And so we really don’t have, you know, systems to help us think as big as the viral kingdom is. And so, for this reason we shouldn’t be surprised when the viruses have to make these adaptive signals change from moment to moment because we’re putting the stress on the system.
Cyndi O’Meara 8:53
Yeah. So what’s the purpose of a virus, why is it even been so many places, why is it in our body, you know, what is the actual purpose of a virus.
Zach Bush 9:05
Viruses are critical to life. So, one of the most important mechanisms for staying alive is adaptation. You have to adapt minute to minute, different, you know, insults from the outside world, you need a minute to minute know how to repair a different way, the toxins, you’re gonna see from bacteria tomorrow or from the chemical industry, tomorrow is gonna be different than it is today and so to stay alive It’s a constant state of adaptation, the viruses are the mechanism by which biology communicates and so we have to have a way to send signal of genetic activity and genetic stress and the viruses are a big piece of this. The viruses are big strands of RNA or DNA that can code for multiple proteins, including their own envelope. And so this strand of RNA might come into my body, insert into my genome and then make DNA and RNA subsequently, depending on what type of virus it is, that RNA DNA relationships are very large strands of genetic information. More recently, We’ve come to realize that the human genome is very very little human. Most of it is non human ie it doesn’t actually code for human gene, most of it seems to be this, this tiny little information that we now call micro RNA, that are tiny versions of a virus. These are tiny little strands of genetic information in the form of RNA that’s too small to make a protein. And so we just thought it was junk we literally called it junk DNA, and we just thought that all these little particles of nucleotides floating around that had been liberated from the junk DNA were useless. But in the last five years this whole science of micro RNA has come to it’s, you know, kind of birthplace and it’ll probably be decades before we really tease out the full scale of it because we’re gonna need quantum computers to be able to calculate, just the sheer volume of these things and how complicated their system is, but in our early phases of this, we know that micro RNA are being exuded from our cells constantly in these little pockets these little envelopes of lipid and protein that that can carry that RNA information to another body. And so, fascinatingly we’re exuding this genetic information from our body all the time, and importantly we’re absorbing all this genetic information in the environment. And so with every breath of air we take in viruses which are large RNA and DNA, and we take in millions of tiny little fragments of RNA, that then actually go to inform the big genes on how to behave. And so the 20,000 human genes can make 280,000 proteins. Those 20,000 genes have to be told what to do, because they have so many options every gene can make over 200 different proteins to know how it’s supposed to behave, to know which protein is needed it listens to the genomic information on the cloud or micro RNA around it. And then the human bloodstream right now we’re coming to terms with the fact that already some 35 or 40% of the micro RNA in there is not even from the human genome DNA it’s actually from bacteria, fungi, viruses and the like. and so we have micro RNA that’s streaming from our bloodstream right now that’s informing my 20,000 human genes on what body to build today. And so, why do we need viruses, it’s kind of like asking why do we need a breath of air tomorrow. Without viruses without the, the sheer amount of genomic information there we lose touch with what’s happening in our environment and we don’t know how to adapt. And so when we see a new virus springing up and it jumps from bats into humans, we can be sure that the bats figured out a new genetic link to adaptability, and they’ve exuded that into their environment to say, hey, our ecosystem is collapsing. We have found an adaptation, here’s a stress signal or adaptation signal, and it’s now out in the environment and, and now a human cell picks that up because it has a need for it. When we look through the history of biology, the viruses have allowed human biology to happen. And one of the most you know best examples of this is actually stem cells. The, the strip of genetic information that allows us to, to make a stem cell pluripotent, which means that a stem cell can become a kidney tissue or it can become a bone tissue or liver, that capacity for plasticity of that stem cell to go into any type of cell that’s needed is caused by a single strand of RNA that’s been inserted into the human genome and probably primate, genome, you know, it’s estimated I think around 200 million years before humans showed up which is more than two hundred thousand years ago so we’re very new on the scene but around 200 200 million years ago we see this, this new RNA strand inserted into multicellular organisms that allows stem cells to occur. And so now you look at how a human biology has to happen. We have so few genes only 20,000 genes that’s, that’s, you know, two thirds of what a flea has, a flea has 30,000 genes. And so we have almost no genetic template on what to build and so we’re relying on this pluripotent adaptive environment that was made by the viruses in the first place. And so the virus are giving the power of adaptability to biology on Earth, whether you’re an earthworm a dog or a human you rely on the viruses for constant update constant rebooting of your genome constant view adaptive capacity.
Cyndi O’Meara 14:47
It’s interesting that you know one of the things that I remember learning, when I did the anatomy and physiology was the innate and the adaptive immune system. And now we realize that the immune system is more than that it’s the, is it the Byron’s, they call it the collection of viruses. It’s the microbiome the bacteria and things like that. When, when we start to see what we’re seeing right now with COVID-19, and we’re being told to self isolate and we’re told to stay 1.5 metres away and stay in, in, you know, and we’re not allowed to hug and we’re not allowed to do things like that. We’re actually stopping that I can hear from you that genetic message that we need to have in order to adapt to our environment, am I right in saying that is that how I’ve heard you.
Zach Bush 15:40
Yeah. In fact, you know there’s an interesting paper that came out a couple years ago looking at MERS SARS and other Corona viruses that cause the common cold. Coronavirus causes cold all the time like we’ve all been exposed to Corona viruses. This coronavirus has a new protein which I find fascinating that there’s a new protein that we don’t know what it does and now it’s coursing through the bloodstream of humans all over the planet and it’s an adaptation so I, you know, it could give us some new superpower that we desperately need to be resilient in a toxic planet that we created. And so we definitely are when we go in with a broad vaccine that has no hope of actually you know blocking infection, but instead disrupt the relationship between bacteria, fungi and viruses. There’s a good paper that showed that people who got influenza vaccinated had an increased risk of getting coronavirus. And so, it’s this exactly as you say there when you disrupt the, the normal relationship between a human genome, and this new virus, and you add some sort of antibody between those two experiences and you create an inflammatory event that’s not necessarily a good thing. You don’t necessarily want to disrupt this well developed, you know, billion year old 2 billion year old technique of genetic exchange that’s been happening since long before we were here. Genetic exchange is necessary. So why do people get sick if this is good for us and why are people dying if this is good for us. So people get sick, not from the virus itself, there’s absolutely no inflammatory reaction from a new strand of RNA going in and we make new proteins, we make billions of proteins every second, out of every cell of the body. This is not a dangerous or inflammatory or sickening process, what creates the experience of sickness is ultimately the immune system’s response to the cells that are making these new proteins because the immune system needs time to adapt as well to new proteins. When the immune system sees a new protein that it’s never seen before it assumes that the body is under attack. And so it goes into an attack mode. Well it turns out that a few of those cells are going to find it and find the ability to survive out, you know that initial immune system attack, and you’re going to be able to make that viral protein without the immune system being reactive. And so hepatitis C is a good example of this Hep C is a chronic virus in our system or epstein barr virus which causes mononucleosis or an herpes virus that causes, you know, the HSV one like oral herpes, or the related varicella herpes zoster virus, all of these are chronic viruses that live in our system all the time, and our cells are making these proteins and are in a symbiotic kind of balanced state, and when we get stressed, then these things will start to replicate faster. It’s a very interesting thought that is it possible that the herpes virus got inserted into our genome, so that a human would have a better sense of their physiologic stress state, because without the herpes virus you don’t actually know how stressed your body is, but as soon as you have that, that eruption or your skin you’re like, Oh my gosh, I know I haven’t been sleeping well I haven’t been hydrated, eating way too much sugar. I need to get my health back on track well by getting your health back on track you may have just prevented cancer. And so, you know, these early signals of the virus, expressing itself is the very first signs of your biology is imbalanced. And so when you get shingles that’s your warning of like you’re at risk for prostate cancer right now you got shingles so your immune system just got stimulated which is going to make your whole immune system more reactive and you could clear cancer cells because you’re reacting to the shingles. And so this is the system we failed to think about is, these viruses have been around since the beginning of time. They predate humans by millions if not billions of years. And so why do we keep thinking they’re against us, they have got to be for us or else we never would have showed up because they outnumber us by gazillions, and so they have to be part of our genetic evolution, they have to be part of our genetic adaptation, and we need to start looking at them as our friends, not our foes.
Cyndi O’Meara 19:48
I like that, I love the way you think. I want to go to the HIV virus.
So it’s, I have, I have Haemophilia in my family so I have six Uncles that had Haemophilia in the 80s, and of course every single one of them got HIV per se. Two wives and one of my cousins and they all passed away, as a result of it. And I’m looking at, I remember as a 20 year old, my Uncles wouldn’t touch their children. They were scared because they were told that it was contagious. I have one uncle who survived this whole thing. And he was on Oprah. He was on many, he went around America, telling people. It is not what you think it is. You cannot catch it from me, you know, it can’t be done that way, like they called it a sexual transmission. So I watched this in a very quiet secret way in my family, and I’m now watching the same thing unfolding. But on a universal level. So, can you catch this virus, or is it a weakened like it’s almost like I’m asking a rhetorical question because we know that the people that are getting sick from this virus and dying from this virus have comorbidities. Whereas, people like myself or my kids or you Zach, or people who really look after themselves have no comorbidities are breezing through this. So what about those three that died in Italy that said they had no co-morbidities. What do you reckon if you looked into their history there would be something, what, what do you think about those very few that they’re saying, oh they died of COVID. But they have no comorbidities well then yeah it’s a 0.001% of people that have got it, what’s your take on that?
Zach Bush 21:40
Yeh, so there’s no way that they don’t have comorbid conditions because we all do, you know, 100% of us have biologic stressors happening in our body all the time that aren’t we’re not aware of biological biologic stress is part of being alive. And so there was something in those three but not just those three every single person that has died as complications of being exposed to this virus have not died of the infection they’re dying of downstream consequences of collapse of the way in which blood cells work, hypoxemia or loss of exchange of oxygen so they’re starving of oxygen. And they, they die from that downstream effect the virus doesn’t cause that directly and so there has to be a perfect storm of other events in the bloodstream going on to create these big physiologic, you know blocks that happen, that would disrupt the very most important thing that biology has spent the very longest time adapting to is how do you deliver oxygen safely to cells cause oxygen is actually pretty toxic. And so how do you get the right amount of oxygen into a cell, how do you get enough so that it can produce fuel for itself, but not too much that it causes inflammation. So it’s one of the most adaptive, you know, and most complicatedly regulated and carefully monitored situations and so when you see that function break down, you know there have to be hundreds of different perfect pieces in place, it has to be a perfect storm for the physiology to shut down at a level of hypoxemia. The reason that’s happening is, I believe, you know, there’s a there’s a condition called history us does is, I’m sorry. Is dosis, hypoxemia, and it’s from an exposure to a toxin that suddenly disrupts this and cyanide is the perfect example of this cyanide is a toxin that suddenly disrupts the ability of cells to release oxygen. And so we can treat cyanide toxicity very, very easily actually in the end with with putting in these sodium nitrate compounds that change the shape of the hemoglobin molecule. But that’s not being done for COVID because they keep thinking that it’s an infection that’s killing these people when in fact the infection has been shown to be benign like you know 50 80% of people that are getting exposed to COVID and have it in their bloodstream don’t have any symptoms or have very mild symptoms at best. And so it’s not the virus that’s causing it’s the downstream effects of how that body is responding to that, and likely what else is being activated around that. And, you know, if we go back to your HIV example this is perfect example, HIV is actually likely been around for a very long time cause it’s in a lot of people, an extraordinary study was done recently that got absolutely no press because it would freak people out. If you think that HIV is the infection that causes AIDS, but they showed that in, they screened 8200 people for all of the genetic sequences of viruses in their bloodstream and they found a shocking amount of HIV in there. It was like six times as much HIV as there was hepatitis C. And there was six times as much HIV as there was influenza in the bloodstream of this population. And this was from multiple people in Asia, US, Europe, importantly, it didn’t have any African representation where we think 97% of HIV is in Africa. And so didn’t even look at the most infected. And yet, if you extrapolate this data, we would have 450 million people on the planet right now with HIV in their bloodstream, that’s, you know, many right now, if you go to the the International AIDS committees and everything else they think there’s 35 million people with AIDS, so they could be off by more than 10 times, you know what their current estimates are by this study that showed such a high amount of HIV in the bloodstream. But, interestingly, the ones that were, you know, and this this group had been, by the way, pre-screened for no history of infectious disease. And so by our usual techniques for screening for Hep C and HIV they didn’t test positive that this was actually looking at the genetics instead of looking at the reaction of their immune system. So, it’s an interesting new idea of like, oh my gosh there’s viruses in all of our genome and most of us don’t even react an antibody to it. And so what we again see with HIV is when did it show up. 1978 1976 somewhere in there because we see we know there’s kind of this five year lag period between the beginning of the infectious process and the full blown aids, kind of experience a lot of people think that might be longer than more like five to 10 years, and some people never will get that. And so there was, you know, somewhere around 1976 the shift, well we mentioned 1976 earlier. And now that was the year that glyphosate started getting sprayed everywhere. And we also mentioned earlier that that was the first year that we saw a virus jump species 1976. And so now we have a new virus that we think is new. You know, and again, my, it’s 50/50, in my mindset that it’s probably been around a long time but we created some sort of shift in the genomics of that, that HIV molecule that allowed it to mature and we already know there’s multiple types of HIV right there, HIV 1 and 2 famously, but then there’s subsets within those genomics. So we did something in 1976 to trigger off, you know, all of this and if you look at hepatitis C, it took off in the 1970s. And so there was a little bit of acceleration in the 1960s but it was kind of like a small linear thing then suddenly in the middle of 1976, Hep C does that right when HIV takes off right when we suddenly release swine flu for the first time then avian flu. And then we get 12,000, you know, epidemics of new viral outbreaks over the next 40 years. Something catastrophic happened in the mid 70s to the genomics, of the microbiome to create these new viral things. So what is aids and what is HIV. A few of your uncle’s passed away with the complications from AIDS is my guess. And so, AIDS was a syndrome not an infection, AIDS is described as an immunodeficiency event where the person is usually dying a very bizarre pneumonia of very strange bacteria that usually don’t manifest in humans. And so you see this imbalance between bacteria and human host as this, this virus takes an effect. Very few people with HIV will actually develop aids and AIDS you remember didn’t get discovered until we started to recognize kaposi sarcoma, a weird skin tumor in gay men in the US. And of course later they came up with the story that it didn’t come out of the US that came out of Africa and all this stuff and we have this huge map and who knows what’s right and what’s wrong but what we do know is that it wasn’t some sort of fever, illness, it wasn’t some sort of pneumonia, that was the trigger for discovering all of this science, it was a cancer. It was a sarcoma. And so cancer is the end stage of disconnection of human cells. So there was something much deeper than an HIV virus present to cause aids, you have to have such a fundamental disruption in the way that cell cells communicate for HIV to cause anything. So there’s the possibility that HIV is an innocent bystander in some ways, or HIV is the marker of a more systemic collapse of communication between the virome, and the human biology or human biology as a whole, such that cancers start accelerating in the light. How cellular cancer so the amount of Hep C and HIV co infection is very very high. In Brazil, you know, one in four people with Hep C have HIV. And so there’s this very high correlation of these different you know viruses in the environment, and they all came on at the same time. If you now as a reductionist theory, like, I’m always looking for Okay, if that’s true if that’s true, that sounds crazy Zach’s saying that HIV is happening at the same Hep C, nobody’s ever said that, so I’m always eager to like, find the biologic truth behind that and how is that possible. And interestingly, there’s one gene that makes a single protein that’s that’s responsible for basically tangling up or dicing up the genomic information of viruses. It’s a human gene that makes a protein that act as scissors, and it cuts up viral genome as it enters the cell, so that it’s not overwhelmed with new genetic information. Turns out that that protein can be disrupted by roundup glyphosate and, More importantly, there’s bacteria bogs there’s there’s viruses that can infect bacteria that can shut that human gene off. And so something in the 1970s caused a change in that protein, I believe. And so our genome shifted such that it got locked down so we could not make the protein scissors, to cut up viruses and suddenly we’ve seen an explosion of, you know, vulnerability to other species. So is it really that the avian flu was a different genetic than we’ve ever seen. I don’t think so actually. I think it’s unlikely that we were just changing all these other viruses, there’s been 12,000 outbreaks of new viruses. My guess is they’ve been around a long time. We’re new to their vulnerability because we turned off the scissors. And so if you can no longer cut up the genome of these viruses now we have to deal with a lot of new genetic input is that genetic input bad for us. maybe not because most of us are living still. And actually, some of us are living longer than we’ve ever lived and so is it possible that there’s a genetic upgrade going. But if there’s enough chemicals and disruptors in you know plastics and other endocrine disruptors and all these other toxins that we can’t adapt quick enough then we die of, you know, inflammatory processing because we get overwhelmed by the amount of virus we’re making too much virus because we, we can no longer express the scissors that will clip and prune the amount of viral information going into the system. So, when we start to talk about, you know, the immune system, we have to come to terms with the fact that there actually is no organ in the human body called the immune system. We have a liver we’ve got kidneys we got lungs, but we have no immune system. There is no organ there, it’s a diffuse relationship between different types of cells and now we know that the skin, and the gut lining are the largest and different, you know, immune system contributors. Then there’s the T cells, then there’s the, the B cells that make all the antibodies and all of these things actually don’t even exist when we’re first born when we’re first born we’re like these little sponges of everything and we don’t have an immune system and in this kind of mature stance until about six months of age. But what’s been shown in fetal stool is that by seven days of age seven days in the life, the fetus has 10 to the 8 viruses, 10 to the 8 viruses in their stool and just a single gram of stool. And so this kid is literally covered in viruses within seven days, and yet there’s no infection. There’s no fever, there’s no downside for that organism at all. In fact, that’s starting to form the generation of how T cells are going to form and how they’re going to make antibodies to their B cell system, how killer T cells are going to recognize cell versus not cell. So the viruses are helping this child recognize themselves. And so we have to start to realize there is no human immune system. Deeper than that, there is only one immune system called nature. Mother Nature and Planet Earth are actually a piece of a continuous immune system. And we’re destroying it through chemical agriculture and through pharmaceutical medicine.
Cyndi O’Meara 33:45
You know you made me think when my uncle’s were in Iowa, and it was DDT was sprayed from the time they were born right through to 1974, and then you’d said that glyphosate started around 1976 well we know that you know it was patented in the late 60s and then into the 70s. So all of a sudden, you know, things are starting to click in and what I’m seeing that I saw then was there was no thought of their health and their nutrition, it was, they didn’t look at anything like that they gave him straightaway azt, and I feel like the same thing is happening right now is that you know you listen, clean your hands stay 1.5 meters away, nobody is talking about clean up your environment around you get your house clean get your food clean, you know, ask council not to start to spray glyphosate like, it’s like, I’ve been going on this, or I won sustainable businesswoman of the year, on in my region on the Sunshine Coast. And as my speech as my acceptance speech I said I will be helping the council because they were my sponsors. I’ll be helping the council get rid of Roundup. So that was four or five years ago, nobody’s listening Zach it’s like we’re so caught up in the narrative that doesn’t even seem to be real, or true. And when I look at if I go a little bit political I look at Fauci. He was part of the HIV AIDS commission, like he was part of that and now he’s, he’s rolling out this thing. And what I guess I want to ask you right now because I get so frustrated, is what should we be doing as individuals, not as collectives because we can’t change anybody else but ourselves, what can we be doing as individuals and as my students on the nutrition Academy and everybody else that this will go to. What can we be doing as as quiet activists, and as loud activists. What do you think?
Zach Bush 35:45
Step one is changing the way that you interact with the consumer environment. And so you have a huge. You are the entire industry, which is exciting. Your choices that you make and then the choices that you inform that your parents, your kids, your loved ones, you know, you are affecting through your own awareness, a myriad of tiny decisions, 1000 times a day. How much plastic is wrapping that cucumber up by the time it gets to your, your shell. How many hundreds or thousands of miles has that cucumber traveled before it ended up on your, your, your grocery store shelf and then in your kitchen. These decisions are fundamental to the problems that we have. We got lazy as consumers, in the late 1940s we were growing 45% of our food in our backyard gardens, with the Victory Garden movement out of World War Two. Today we grow one 10th of 1% of our food. And so we simply stopped growing food. And so through the simple thing of saying I just need to get closer to the soil, you start to become a powerful shifter and you’re doing this already, because if you’re listening this my guess is you’ve been buying organic for years now, and you’re part of this movement that you remember 10 years ago nobody had organic on the shelf of every grocery store. And even today in areas of Australia and the US you still can’t find organic on the shelf, but if you walk into New York City or you walked into San Francisco, you can’t find a shop that doesn’t brag about being non GMO or organic or anti….. did this or that consumers mind has radically changed and been radically misinformed, but to the degree that it’s starting to be conscientious of the need for a decision here. We didn’t think about a cucumber before how it got grown now we’re thinking about it and whether you know the organic certification is good or not good that’s a whole nother ball of wax. rowdy is making the consumer empowered to start to become part of the decision tree again. But the most powerful thing you can do as an individual is grow backyard garden, you will fundamentally change your neighborhoods your culture and everything else and the entire consumer and chemical industries, by taking over just that small part of food sustainability, food sovereignty, food independence and that can start with just a tomato plant on the back porch like I have here we just have a little pond over here and so we got a little Lanai in the backyard, you know, out beyond that, but on our we’ve grown a wine pepper plant we got tomato plants we got some kale, some lettuces in a tiny little space. And so it just takes so little to start to get reengaged, and so get re engaged, and then start to know your farmer. And when you start to reach out to your community and find out who your CSA’s are, where the farmers markets are and get to know the farmers at the farmers market, ask if you can drop by their farm and help out on the weekends so that you can actually see what they’re doing, get a sense of their biodiversity on their group, are they really spraying chemicals are really not spraying chemicals, you know, all of this stuff. So the more engaged you get the more intrigued you’re going to get and the more your kids are going to love vegetables. Whenever I hear that my kid doesn’t love vegetables then I know that person doesn’t have a garden. A kid will always eat vegetables that they grew. A kid will typically not even let that tomato get into the kitchen because they’re going to eat it right off the vine because they love it. And so I think it’s very important for us to realize that the problems that have been created were largely because we outsourced our responsibility and involvement in the food generation, so that’s huge. Then as a group, I couldn’t be more concerned about Dr. Fauci and his conflicts of interest right now around vaccines and he’s telling the Americans that they will never be able to go into public again unless they’ve been vaccinated. That’s the kind of, you know, military state kind of thing that the anti Vax groups have been terrified of and I’ve always been like, Ah, that’s not going to happen like they can’t make that and here it is happening right in front of me I’m like oh my gosh I was wrong. They could come out and say something as ridiculous as this, and then back it up with the military. So I’m very amazed by what’s happening in United States right now I think that the US media and government has co opted, the entire intelligence of the scientific community. Science is being gagged right now not to tell any of the story that you and I just had.
Because it disrupts the common paradigm of you need to vaccine you need to, you know drug, you need this or that. The idea of you just need nature and you need way more nature in your life before HIV goes away and Hep C goes away and all the stuff that is not good news to a $1 trillion agricultural system that relies on chemical inputs and it’s not good for three and a half trillion dollar US agricultural or health system, our, our US health system is seven times larger than our entire defense and military spending. That’s how much money we’re spending on chronic disease. And so when we say that we have a viral pandemic crisis , no we have a chronic disease crisis in this country and in most western countries that are crippling our economies, long before any pandemic happens. We are destroying humanity through chronic disease not through acute infection. Pandemics will be scary when they happen but they are not the thing that’s threatening our extinction, our extinction is going to come through the combination of early childhood chronic disease which is now 52% of children the United States and the collapse of fertility of our species, one in three males in western countries is now infertile by sperm count. And so, we are reaching this tipping point of human biology, for our own existence, our extinction can be mapped 70 years in the future kind of best case scenario right now. And so, in 70 years we go extinct as a species if we keep on the path that we have with disconnect of nature and increased effort to kill nature, and that’s what we’re doing with, with this pandemic right now. The immediate response in Asia was Let’s fly airplanes overhead and spray toxic chemicals into the environment to kill this virus. That’s what caused the virus. Imagine the number of mutations we’re going to create over the next 12 months for the, the effort to spray and kill everything in the environment in Asia over the last couple of weeks so we are just ludicrous in our approaches it’s not science based, it’s fear based and fear is never a rational bed partner.
Cyndi O’Meara 42:02
But fear is what there is, like the amount of fear that is happening in Australia, you know, we’ve got the same thing happening here where they’ve said it could be 18 months you’re gonna have to stay isolated for 18 months until the vaccines here. No, no one is talking like you are no one’s talking like, you know, when you were over here we had you speak, we had Charlie Arnott, Charles Massey you know all of these incredible thinkers. There’s mathematicians, that are saying the numbers are wrong, that you should, it should never have happened this way. Yet I’m not seeing it on mainstream media, I can’t listen to mainstream media at the moment, because the minute I put it on, I hear something and I go – that’s a lie, that is a complete fabrication of what is actually happening out there. But what I am, what I feel really good about is, I believe there’s an awakening. You know you’ve been on this bandwagon for quite a long time. And me too. And I feel like everyone’s waking up, do you get that feeling?
Zach Bush 43:03
Oh so much, I’m so excited about what’s happening honestly because here, you know, so should we be afraid of Dr. Fauci. Yes, he’s a terrifying personality, totally frightening personality, should we be afraid of the WHO. Yes, it is a private organization that that poses as some sort of governmental benign NGO thing, it’s not it’s a private agency, should we be afraid of the CDC yes we should be afraid of the CDC because it’s neglecting all of its data to make you know the pharmaceutical companies look good. And so yes we should be afraid of all those things on some level but we should also laugh because here we are rational intelligent science community rational intelligent physician community rational intelligent consumers, we can look at the data and realize, oh my gosh. They are so wrong, Bill Gates is wrong. Fauci is wrong. The CDC is wrong, NIH is wrong. They have the wrong old premise of a germ theory that was literally stemmed out of the late 1800s and has never been validated since. And so we have this old belief system of its humans against the germ, and it’s ignoring the last hundred years, let alone the last 10 years of intense science that out of every university in the world has shown that human biology is made of viruses human biology is the result of the microbiome, the human immune system is a small niche within a global immune system. That is the right thing. And so the exciting thing to me is when the enemy is that wrong. They’re going to die. They’re gonna collapse so the exciting thing about transformation, there’s a great book written in the 1960s by one of my, my lifelong mentors, I wish I had met him in person But Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called The structure of scientific revolution in the 1960s, and it’s kind of a must read for anybody who’s freaked out about the current situation. Right. Yeah, the structure of scientific revolutions. And, you know, I’m just going to dull it down to the Zach Bush version of this which you’re going to probably read the book and be like, it didn’t even say that in the entire book I kept waiting for that part and it never came so my brain does weird things to data sometimes but the, the take home for me is that when the common paradigm starts to reach its most extreme limits of justification, and it’s now separated itself from, from modern science and knowing it will continue to try to proceed without changing direction until it starts to fall apart, and then it will take more and more irrational steps to try to consolidate the story that it has been telling you for the last hundred years. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing Fauci do, we’re seeing him say things that actually make no sense, nobody should ever shake hands again. That was Dr Fauci a week ago.
Cyndi O’Meara 45:54
I didn’t hear that one
Zach Bush 45:56
All over, we should, nobody should ever shake hands again. And my immediate thought is well thank God I hope that nobody ever shakes that man’s hand again because I want no more business deals for Dr Fauci. And so, you know, I think the reality is, they are reaching this point of collapse. So what the rest of us need to do is do the right thing at home, which is be responsive to consumers connected to nature and work on bio diversification for our children so that they can become a healthy generation. And then we need to work together to clean up our local environments and this is happening so our farmers footprint.us we’re working to launch one in Australia, we’re very excited. And so, farmers footprint has the toolkit. We just, we were on the phone. My wife was just connecting the dots with Joost this week down in Melbourne, to bring non toxic neighborhoods to you guys, which is a program we’ve just launched with Kim Conti who created the program three years ago, and Kim has been very successful she got over 60 counties in the United States that are banning roundup from playgrounds school yards, and other public spaces and so that’s 60 counties that are starting to do the right thing. Because Kim is not trying to tell anybody they’re doing anything wrong. Instead she created a playbook. And the playbook shows which organic compounds replace Roundup, and the other chemicals that are commonly used in these landscapes and so instead of being that that whistleblower, she knew that if she just presented solutions that people would be interested in solutions and so if you go to nontoxicneighborhoods.com, or.org nontoxicneighbourhoods.org that one gives you the playbook. You can also get to it through our farmers footprint page, but we’re very excited about bringing this to Australia because it’s a cool way for communities to say, Alright so we can’t change the game, we can’t change all that today but we can change this. Another program that we have coming is very exciting. We’re working on a putting together a legislative team around a bill that got passed in Pennsylvania, one of our east coast oriented states just a few miles outside of New York City, and Governor there in Pennsylvania recently passed a new farm bill it’s the first State Farm Bill we’ve ever had. We’ve had a federal farm bill that’s been paying farmers to grow chemically chemical agriculture for, For decades, but this is a farm bill that the governor decided he was going to disrupt that he knew that he could raise the tax base for his state if more farmers were in the organic growers category. So he created an incentive program with just 22 million dollars, and incentivized farmers to get the education they needed and get the infrastructure needed to make the transition. Within one year of passing that bill, Pennsylvania became the number two state in the country for growing organic food. And so we’re very excited to now put, you know, California, on, you know, and Governor Newsom there and say hey, you know, Pennsylvania has got you in the crosshairs. They want to be number one. You don’t want that to happen so why don’t you create another Farm Bill. And so we think we can roll up the US with 50 Farm bills that are at state level incentivizing farmers to get out of the Federal farm bill subsidy program and actually grow real food again. We are not growing real food, in the United States and neither is Australia. Kansas is our most agricultural state, 90% of the acreage in Kansas is under agricultural management, Kansas has to import 90% of its food and one in four children in Kansas is going hungry from poverty and lack of food right now. And so we stopped growing food in the 1970s when we started going to these mass systems of mono crops of corn and soybean and sugar and corn and soybean are by and large not going ever to end up on human plate they end up in things like fuel additives clothing industry and apparel plastics, you know all of these co chemical, you know, outputs rather than food itself. And so, we have an opportunity now to really fundamentally change that, at the micro scale, first in your backyard and then, at the state level to overcome these, the Federal farm bill in the US and then once we break the federal farm bill, it frees economies around the world, because right now the whole world has to contend with a US agricultural system that is artificially sustained by our federal subsidies taxpayer monies that allow farmers to sell crops way below their production costs. And so we then affect the whole international scene with this corrupt federal Farm Bill. And so as soon as we decide NAFTA we put hundreds of thousands of farmers in Mexico out of business overnight because they were now contending with a marketplace under clinton that had now taken a subsidized crop and put it into competition with South America and Central America, Mexico, and so we, we, you know, caused a massive rash of suicides in farmers in Mexico, Central America and South America over the next five years they all went out of business. And what replaced them of course is Monsanto and these huge organizations coming in and setting up what problem we can help you have all these chemicals so that one person can manage 15,000 acres, before that time the average farm size was less than two acres. And, interestingly, 70% of our population right now with 7 billion people is being fed by a peasant farmer growing farm, less than two acres, so 70% of the population today is still being fed by that peasant farmer, but their end point is within the next five to 10 years we are seeing the demise of those farmers, right on the horizon if we don’t fundamentally change our economies, and our consumer behavior to support them rather than the big businesses that would like to dominate.
Cyndi O’Meara 51:36
Now I think people knowing that they have power as an individual, doing those things, at least gives them hope because I think a lot of people have lost hope that they have no way of changing what’s happening in the world because, you know, we, we, I can’t even get to Scomo, our Prime Minister you know and ask him what the hell is happening. So, you know, I just feel that it would be so nice if things started to shift and if we as individuals can make that shift. That’s what we want to hear.
Zach Bush 52:07
Be the change you want to see in the world I think Gandhi was right and we can definitely do it you know so I’m so excited that the the forces that are arrayed against us are so wrong if they were not so wrong we might have something to fear but they have to collapse in the next 10 years the system is going to collapse the cost of chemical agricultural/chemical healthcare will cripple the US economy and destroy the Empire. And so the US Empire is in collapse, everybody knows it here, the world is trying to distance itself from the US economy in any way it can. I think that the changes recently in the EU are ripple effects of the fragility of the US economy. I think the changes in Canada right now are necessary steps for distancing itself from the US. Mexico is taking very stern steps to distance itself from the US marketplace. And so, you know, we think that we have you know this great nationalistic president who’s trying to protect the US but I’m really excited because I think what he’s actually doing is protecting the rest of the world from us. And so by creating these trade wars and everything else it’s helping China and it’s helping Asia and helping South America distance itself from US economy which is necessary so that we don’t take down the entire global economy. We will definitely hurt the global economy as we continue to collapse, but we don’t need to take it down if we can give the world 10 years to adjust to our almost inevitable collapse at this point. So, no, I’m hoping to meet lots of friendly Australians that really want me to get that Australian citizenship lined up just in case there’s no place for me to be here in the coming years but I love what I felt in Melbourne, I want Australia to know that COVID is a tiny bit of your problem. Your main problem was, was symptomatic with the fires that happened last year and not COVID pandemic. And the fires that happened last year is the real harbinger of the crisis at hand in Australia. If Australia doesn’t immediately embrace a universal adoption of regenerative practices over the next few years, there’s going to be a total collapse of the food system and sustainability there in Australia. When I see the same ripple effects of hope there in Melbourne and outside of Sydney and the Gold Coast is farmers are starting to do the right thing. And you’ve got people like Charles Massey who’s been doing the right thing for decades, and you’ve got, you know, really Joost did a great job speaking in Melbourne recently on the fact that Australia has actually been one of the foremost pioneers in the area of biodynamic farming over the last 50 years. And so there is a there is a ready & able Faculty of farmers and agricultural educators there in Australia, that are more than willing, ready to scale to the full national scale, healthy agricultural system they’re way more better prepared than the US is to make that transition. And so that’s why I’m so excited to get down there and and fuel Charles efforts and, you know, so many of the other groups that are down there, Gold Coast is just ripe for change and, and I think, you know, New South Wales there’s like so many areas that there’s just these pockets of revolutionary hope, I was in Perth a couple years ago Perth is looking like, you know, a perfect template in some ways, because Perth is, is a totally isolated economy, it’s 1200 miles from the nearest city you know and so that that city has to function as a nation so it has a steel industry, has a wool industry has agriculture industry, has tech industry it’s basically a nation and of itself and so Perth could offer Australia the perfect petri dish to say what happens to the Perth economy when we make this regenerative transition here, and you’re going to see the Perth economy, boom, because they’re going to be able to provide regenerative organic food to Asia, which is going to have massive demand over the next few years in South Asia. For those resources and so I think Perth could really become our shining light, you know in this regen thing and of course, you know, coast from from Gold Coast on down is ready to do it on the East Coast there so change is ready to happen, and it’s going to happen whether humanity survives to see that transition through is our choice, and I think we can can radically make those transitions and transformations accelerate by human cooperation and ingenuity, we are just an ingenious creative force when we put our mind to the right problems so thank you for the opportunity to discuss the real problems at hand and the real opportunities that we have in them.
Cyndi O’Meara 56:37
Yeah, exactly. So we had Charles Massey speak at our Nutrition Academy last year. And if our Nutrition Academy goes, you know ahead, the summit at the end of July we still have three and a half months, then they’ll have the chance to see you live and to meet you and I know what you’re like like I met you and your first thing you did was hug me so let’s hope we can still hug.
Zach Bush 57:01
I’m gonna break through all the rules.
Cyndi O’Meara 57:06
But you know, there were four farmers, listening to Charles Massey, and I saw every single one of them cry. And I know quite a few of them have said, we are going to do what it takes to change we’re going to change two things every single day, every single season. So, I like in 10 seasons that’s 20 changes. So I agree with you there, there is hope and there’s more and more people getting on the bandwagon. So I want to thank you Zach, I have a million other things to ask you, but we’re just gonna have to wait for the summit, or we’ll see, we’ll see what happens. But at this point the summit is still going ahead, until you know we know further what’s going to start to happen and whether they’re going to allow conferences, but we’re looking forward to seeing you in Australia in July, if it pans out. If not, we’ll see you later in the year, right.
Zach Bush 57:57
That’s right, we’ll just reschedule
Cyndi O’Meara 57:59
We’ll just reschedule. We figured we’re gonna have you come and everyone’s got, they’re so looking forward to meeting you. So thank you for being like, I guess somebody who is looking at the bright side like seeing what’s happening but also realizing that there is an opportunity here Thank you.
Zach Bush 58:16
Wonderful. It’s so wonderful to be with you. I’m so grateful for your wonderful spirit, your massive smile and the joy you bring to your world in education. Thank you to the whole group of you, all you nutritionists and everybody else listening to this, you guys are the future, you guys are the revolution at foot and so the information we shared today that’s just arrows in your quiver to become part of the change that we desperately need in this world and if you’re not feeling it yet, just know that you, you are literally beginning to envision the future for all those that will wake up so we’re excited for what you are doing for the world.
Cyndi O’Meara 58:49
Thank you Zach.