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Anxiety is running high right now. We feel helpless, and perhaps even powerless, in the face of this “virus.” Dr. Zach Bush, physician, international educator, and thought leader on the microbiome, suggests two ideas to empower us in our desire to protect our health: 1) there are positive steps we can take to improve our own health and the health of the planet and 2) we should not blame the “virus” for the deterioration of both. Zach explains in detail how toxins in our environment have led us to where we are today: as sick as our surroundings. He suggests that pollutants in the air and on the land are compromising our health and jeopardizing our future. The virus is just an “innocent bystander,” in his estimation, being blamed for a larger problem. His prescription for each of us? Get outside. Reconnect with nature. And with one another.
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Episode Transcript
Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda
The truth is there is a lot of concern because of our worldwide health situation. Cases are rising, and so is our anxiety. Part of that anxiety stems from a general sense of helplessness and powerlessness before the situation. What can we do to be proactive and cultivate health in our bodies and the world? This is episode 248, and our guest is Dr. Zach Bush. Zach is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. He is an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health diseases and food systems.
Zach offers some perspective and ideas for boosting our health. It starts with taking positive, proactive steps rather than simply managing disease or our fear of one. He reviews the role that pollution and environmental toxicity play in viral distribution and mortality. He talks about the importance of giving Mother Nature her lungs back and reminds us of the power of a hug. Finally, Zach suggests that the virus may be an adaptation of the body rather than an attack on it, as it is generally perceived.
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Welcome to the show, Zach.
I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.
I want to hear about your personal experience these past few months.
We have to have a resilient and sustainable future through a food system that’s going to support human health.
It has been quite an interesting chapter for humanity and, at the same time, recognizing the events and the crisis. It has affected so many lives, certainly on the health level but much deeper and far broader sweeping has been the damage done economically to so many families around the world. Millions of jobs were lost. Millions of families push toward the brink of severe financial stressors that existed even before this event.
I have been pushed beyond the brink through this. A lot of tragedies are unfolding in homes around the world regarding the stories of child and sexual abuse. That is unfolding with the increased stress, isolation, and everything else. There is this sense of sadness for the world that has been there and matched. I hope it is surpassed by an extraordinary human moment where we’ve seen such appropriate outreach and expansion of thought and awareness from humanity at large.
Our team, both at my for-profit companies and our nonprofits, are similar to what has been happening at nourishing traditions over the last decades, which is preparing the world for this message. We have to have a resilient and sustainable future through a food system that’s going to support human health but also our planet that needs to be co-created rather than extracted and conquered.
This moment of the pandemic has brought more of that awareness and sense of urgency to every household in the world of, “What are we going to do when supply chains are lost? How are we going to support ourselves at a more fundamental level and reach a level of independence that we have been lacking for decades?”
I have a sense of excitement for myself and humanity at large. This is our moment. This is the moment that the important stuff comes to light. We have an opportunity to engage one another to create real, sweeping, fundamental changes in not just the behavior of our food on the plate but how we start building socio-economic systems that respect Mother Earth and every animal and human on that Earth. How do we bring that sense of deep regard and awareness of the sacred nature of life itself? How do we start behaving that way as a species for the first time? We are at a tipping point of consciousness, connection, and opportunity to engage in places we don’t usually get to go.
You sound so calm and even killed, while in the meantime, the rest of us are going crazy. If we are not anxious, our families are. I was talking with my sister. She was like, “We are going to have a Korean barbecue.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” She’s like, “We are all going to be near each other but at a distance.” I was like, “What is happening?” She’s afraid for her children. She wants to protect her children from any contagion. I see it quite differently. What do you do when people around you are living in fear, Zach?
Education is the best approach for me. Sharing my own experience and my sense of peace about the whole thing helps but you also have to respect people where they are at. Understand that if they are coming out of fear, that’s the journey they are on. Fear plays a potent role in change. It’s rare to see humans change direction without a sense of crisis or fear in the mix. If that’s what it takes for our society to start to wake up and take care of our planet, that’s how you can help somebody who’s in fear of germs move towards more of a proactive stance.
Every viral stress that gets put out by biology is always a signal of adaptation. It’s never an attack. Viruses have never attacked humanity in our history. Viruses that are ever-present. The vast majority of our human DNA is interacting with, if not completely, constituents with viral genetics. More than 50% of the genes that make us human are inserted into our genome by viruses, critical genes like stem cells, and their capacity to be pluripotent to repair any organ in our body. That’s from an RNA retrovirus, similar to HIV, that endowed us with the ability for regeneration.
Helping people realize that we have the wrong story around viruses and germs is a critical piece of the puzzle for me. I have been on a constant education mission daily for months, getting out the message that the virome is always for life, bio-diversification, and adaptation. If we see new viral signals around the Earth, we know that biology is being stressed in a new way and looking for new pathways to regenerate, repair, and adapt. That’s exactly what we see with Coronavirus. It’s adapting to new chemical stressors in the environment and the illness that’s coming down upon us.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the virus directly. The virus is quite benign. The vast majority of people that are exposed are asymptomatic, some 50% or more, and the other 40% have mild symptoms that they are not even aware of as Corona. There’s this 5% to 10% that will get quite sick, and 0.1% will show up and have a life-threatening situation on their hands. It’s in that 0. 1% where we see the reality that there’s not even an infection presenting.
The 5,700 patients presenting to New York hospitals with what we were calling COVID-19 had no fever. They had no white blood cell elevation or left shift in the white blood cell analysis to suggest that there’s even an infection going on. Instead, they are presenting with hypoxia or loss of oxygen from toxic exposure. I have been working diligently over the last few months to help tease out what is the mechanism of that toxicity. Like its origin in chemical agriculture, we find that the pathway for this virus to carry toxins in the bloodstream is not the virus’ fault.
The virus is binding to air pollution. Air pollution is binding to toxins like cyanide and other things that we produce in our transportation and energy sectors. That’s what induces that hypoxic event. We keep blaming this on some deadly virus when we have to back up and realize the people are dying from toxic exposure to the environment. All of those pieces can be tools to help people move from a state of fear to a proactive realization of, “I don’t need to protect my kids from some dangerous virus. I need to protect my kids from the toxicity of human behavior. I need to move my kids into a clean environment for the next few months while this virus burns itself out,” which it will.
All Coronaviruses disappear after eighteen months or so in human experience. SARS, MERS, and all these big pandemics that have happened are gone in eighteen months because we have developed a balance of homeostasis. The human immune system, as herd immunity, starts to learn the role of this virus in our genomics. We take that information on, and it doesn’t cause any illness after that eighteen-month period. That’s going to happen again.
We’ve never needed a vaccine for these viruses to go away. They go away because our immune system is intelligent. We are in a normal relationship with Mother Nature that we have always been in. We’ve made that a fatal condition in a few people but ultimately, taking the lives of some tens of thousands, probably around the world of patients that would have likely passed away from other forms of pneumonia and viruses but 2020 has been COVID. Every year, there are new strains of respiratory viruses that participate in challenges to the immune system.
Those that have those damaged and vulnerable systems can succumb to illness secondary to the virus but never die from the virus. They always die of secondary complications of bacterial pneumonia and hospital-acquired infections and all of the things that lead to these high mortality rates. We’ve seen that in New York City with 88% mortality for ventilated patients. Those numbers are extreme. That has to be hospital-acquired toxicity, not something that came out of the environment. There’s no environment that’s produced that toxicity outside of a hospital with COVID or any other virus on Earth. We are producing the toxicity that’s leading to this mortality stuff.
If I understand you correctly, what we should do is move our families or get ourselves into a situation where we can be less exposed to toxins. Do you mean into a place where there’s less pollution and maybe non-native electromagnetic frequencies?
That’s exactly the thing that is important. If you are trying to figure out, “How do we socialize safely?” You mentioned a COVID barbecue or something like that. If you are doing that in LA, your risk is that you are in LA air pollution. The virus is an avenue for that air pollution. It can enter your bloodstream and cause an injury. If you want to do social events, make sure it’s at the beach or out in the mountains, somewhere place away from the typical toxicity. We are vulnerable to that toxicity in a new way.
That’s poetic of nature to design, in some ways, a virus that exposes the toxicity that we’ve created on the planet and makes us more vulnerable to our own damage. There are nice checks and balances in reality to that syndrome. The idea of taking a proactive role as a parent or as an individual to say, “I know exactly how I’m going to keep my family happy and healthy. We are going to be outdoors as much as possible in the cleanest environments we can reach. If that means we need to go for a three-hour drive outside of LA or New York to get to that clean air, we are going to do that. We are going to engage Mother Nature in ways that we haven’t had an opportunity to perhaps in years.”
The excitement that I have is people are doing that. We are seeing people hit all of this. We are going to see an exciting period as national parks, city parks, and beaches are opening back up. I hope that everybody takes the opportunity to witness Mother Nature healing from the break that we’ve given her from our onslaught of consumptive and destructive behavior, and then we engage her in a creative process.
Many countries have been in lockdown, isolation, and so forth. We’ve stopped using airplanes and a lot of modes of transportation. Do you think in a way that’s going to facilitate the disappearance of the virus?
The virus will always be around but it doesn’t cause us problems unless we couple it with these toxicities. What we saw in China is clear. As soon as the air pollution drops below 40 parts per billion of this specific air pollution called PM2.5, as soon as it dropped below 40 micrograms per cubic meter, the deaths from this COVID syndrome disappeared completely. If we clean up the atmosphere through decreased poisoning of the atmosphere, we will not have a problem with COVID.
It’s an easy line to follow through this. It’s important for people to realize that the reason why people aren’t getting sick isn’t that they are sequestered. It’s because they stopped poisoning the Earth. We need to take that message forward because people are completely diluted that there’s some advantage to social distancing. The only thing that could’ve possibly come out of social distancing was a slight blunting of the curve.
Fear plays a potent role in change.
In hindsight, we know that didn’t work at all. In fact, the countries that did not do any social distancing, mass, and all of that have had some of the best outcomes. We have seven states within the United States that didn’t do any shut down of retail or stores and everything else. They had the fewest fatalities of any of the states per capita. We did the wrong thing in hindsight. Nobody at the health science or public health level thought that social distancing was going to stop infections.
They wouldn’t have announced early on that they were going to try to reduce the speed of the epidemic so that there wasn’t much overload with the hospital. At no point did any of those officials come out and say, “This is going to decrease your likelihood of ever getting this virus.” That’s scientifically inaccurate. We don’t pass viruses through respiratory droplets often. Most of it’s passed through the airborne virus state, which is not tied up in the liquid of a respiratory droplet.
Respiratory droplets go 3 feet or so. That’s why they say social distancing helps because you can’t pass respiratory droplets, yet that’s not how viruses pass around the world. Viruses have been passing around the world long before human air travel or human existence. Viruses have been trafficking the planet through airborne techniques. That’s what we are seeing with this air pollution phenomenon. That binds to PM2.5 carbon particulate in the atmosphere and gets carried around the entire globe for an even distribution across the land.
You can see this. If you look at the US map, the virus affected all of the counties in the United States over about a four-week period cohesively. There are pockets of increased mortality. The actual number of cases is going to end up being consistent across that space because it doesn’t have to do with respiratory droplet spread. It has to do with the air spread through high atmospheric trafficking. The pollution drops down onto the human plane from the stratosphere in an even distribution across the planet.
To make a little analogy, if this virus is a signal of adaptation, it’s like the red check engine light on our car. When that comes on the dashboard, it’s because, let’s say, my oil needs to be changed. It’s only going to show up when my oil needs to be changed. We may continue to see responses to the virus when our pollution and toxin levels rise.
We will see more fatalities as we continue to poison the Earth for sure. Some of those will be from COVID but we see the same phenomenon every single year from flu. Flu season is not a season of viruses. The virus is around 24/7, all the time without change. It’s not like the viruses are born out suddenly in October and then disappear in June. That isn’t how the science of any of it works, yet we have been led to believe that there’s a flu season where suddenly viruses are attacking us between October and June.
If you look at the air pollution, CO2, methane, and carbon particulate in the atmosphere between October and April, it goes berserk because we’ve lost the greenery in the fall and winter months that pulled that carbon particular back into the soils. We’ve always had this explosion of carbon in the atmosphere, and that carbon in the atmosphere is what we now call flu season. We’ve blamed it on a virus but in fact, we don’t have symptoms of the high prevalence of respiratory issues until the carbon particularly goes up in the air.
We’ve tagged not just COVID but influenza as this annual experience, as if the virus was causing a problem when in fact, the virus is an innocent bystander, if you will, of genetic information. That’s flowing to and fro between bacteria and fungi and human cells all the time. We have this genomic communication network going that we call viruses but they are not living organisms. They don’t attack physiology. They are integrated into our genomic code all the time and should be a benign experience but for the toxins, we tag onto that.
There are nicely published papers showing that the flu virus and COVID virus bind to PM2.5 and carry it into the bloodstream. These viruses are always ever-present. We have the wrong model for our understanding of viruses because we thought they were part of the microbiome. We thought they were bacteria or fungi, some living organisms that could attack us. It’s not at all the case. Viruses are not living organisms. They work closely in coordination with our own genomic transfer data and our own genomic replication.
We produce these viruses, not nature. The human body is what has produced every single Coronavirus that’s affected any other human being. The stress mechanisms that we are putting into the atmosphere through what we call viruses are an indication of the level of stress in human biology. The more stressed our systems are, the more of these genomic variants we are going to make over time and the more viruses we will produce for one another. It’s not nature attacking us. We are producing the genomic information we need for adaptation and change.
You are one of several experts that I’ve interviewed on this subject. You have been singing the same song in a way. I understand this concept, yet I don’t see it on other levels when I watch the regular news. Here is the COVID Task Force from the president. They have a different take on it. Is any of the information or perspective getting to them?
I’ve spoken to members of the task force. There are ways in which we are trying to propagate information. Not just me but many scientists and doctors around the country are standing up to say, “The common dialogue in the media is so erroneous. That’s completely got the wrong, backward old science belief system.” It’s true orthodoxy of science, which should be an oxymoron. You cannot have orthodoxy in science.
Science is an ever-emerging, transforming, and developing body of knowledge. You cannot have orthodoxy, yet we created orthodoxy around germ theory. We applied it improperly to viruses. This belief that viruses can attack us is being rolled out through every media channel on the planet. Viruses are a part of our genomic equation system far beyond human origin. We need to stop damning these things. We need to start understanding why we present with toxicity around viruses, how that relates to the pollution of our soils through our agricultural system, air, and water systems, and how we interact with those.
What I get discouraged by from time to time is thinking we are going to keep up the social distancing, the wearing of masks, and some of these protocols that are uncalled for, unnecessary, and instill fear in people.
That’s why it’s being done. Dr. Fauci and all these people at the NIH keep telling us the masks don’t work, yet somebody is mandating through the government agencies that people wear masks in all public places. If they don’t work, then why are we being mandated? The answer is clear. They want us to stay in a state of fear. When they roll out a multibillion-dollar vaccine, some other therapeutic intervention, or some new spray that they can put into the atmosphere to kill viruses or whatever story they come up with, it’s to drive and exploit our fear of massive multibillion-dollar situations that are unnecessary and attacking nature.
It never works. We are amping up the game. We are elevating this attack, and nowhere is that truer than this story of masks and social distancing. It’s trying to create an environment or creating an environment where we start to fear one another and see each other as part of the problem. We are paranoid about the health of those around us. That is going to be a schism in human behavior and social structure if we allow it to persist.
What steps do you think we can take to not allow it to persist?
It comes down to self-education, self-awareness, and intuition. Everybody, if you will sit, meditate, and be in silence for a day around the health of yourself and your family, and think about where does that come from? Has health for your family ever come from a pharmaceutical bottle or a vial of a vaccine? Is that where health comes from? No. That’s disease management at that point. Where does health come from? Health comes from within. At our clinic, for example, we started the intrinsic health series a number of years ago, and it’s gotten successful over the last few months.
As people have gotten isolated, we launched a biology-based camp and community connect where we do small group coaching on intrinsic health. What are the elements of biology that produce a healthy human cell and subsequently a healthy human organism? The answers are quite clear. It comes down to fundamental changes in our relationship with our food, water, air, and movement. Health is going to come out of that space that’s within you rather than from some supplement box or drug company. That’s not where health has ever come from.
Biology builds health. Biology has this intrinsic capacity for repair, regeneration, and resilience. What’s challenging the human species is not some lack of health capacity at the biological level. It’s the result of our disconnect from biology itself. We have decided to fight nature in every single avenue. We fight against bacteria with all of our antimicrobials and all of our alcohol sanitizer, which drives me crazy. Stop trying to wipe nature off of you. Nature is there to nursemaid every human cell into its full potential.
You can’t have a neurologic activity without the bacteria and fungi being engaged. The bacteria and fungi produce, in concert with your endocrine system, 90% of the serotonin and 50% of the dopamine that will fuel your brain. You have to have the microbiome present to have consciousness, mood stability, and that intelligent integration of sensory processing. All are coming from the microbiome itself.
Stop trying to kill her. She will nurse you back into health. Mother Nature is intrinsic in her capacity for healing, and it loves a co-creative, biologically diverse environment to do that within. That’s how she works. We need to overcome fear with a sense of community. That sense of community needs to happen at the microbiome level. It needs to come up, bubbling up to our sense of connection to our food system.
The virome is always for life. It’s always for bio diversification. It’s always for adaptation.
If you don’t know a farmer, get to know a farmer. If you haven’t been to a farmer’s market, get to a farmer’s market. If you haven’t planted a plant in your window, on your deck, or in your backyard, then plant a plant. I don’t care if it’s wildflowers or something you can eat. You need to get back engaged with the growing process. Mother Nature has asked us to be co-creative with her. Growing things is an incredibly profound experience.
It can change you spiritually and raise your consciousness through the act of putting a seed in the ground, watching it sprout and mature into a fruiting plant, watching a child or a loved one consume that tomato, eggplant or cucumber, knowing that Mother Earth invited you into that process to provide that for the people you love. That’s the journey of intrinsic health. It’s written into our genomic code. It’s written into the viruses themselves on how to be in a community, be resilient, and be adaptive. If we keep trying to sterilize ourselves away from that, we will die.
What you are saying reminds me of the quote Dr. Price said, “Life in all its fullness is Mother Nature obeyed.”
I received that in our nonprofit Farmer’s Footprint. It has been such a journey of education for me being on these farms and listening to farmers talk all the time. They say over and over again, “When you try to fight Mother Nature, she always wins.” That’s an awesome line. I hear it reflected there in Weston’s words. This is our source of life. Life cannot be fought against. It isn’t in opposition to anything. It is its own energy source. If you put yourself in opposition to it, you are going to face dysfunction and, ultimately, disease and death. We have a lot to realign with but it’s so fast to welcome us in.
Our breakthrough in the lab back in 2013 was the discovery of a communication network in soil that is made by bacteria and fungi. We now recognize that as being produced in a healthy human gut as well. We pull those carbon molecules that function as a wireless network out of fossil soils. We had a super diverse microbiome 60 million years ago that was wiped out by the last massive extinction event. We are repeating that extinction event that we saw with the dinosaurs through the death of the topsoil.
This time, we are the death of the topsoil through our agricultural, energy companies, technologies, and pollution. The dinosaur time was an asteroid that hit and killed the topsoil of the Earth. It’s profound that in that soil, predating those extinction events, we find communication at work made by a multitude. You are talking about millions of versions of bacteria and fungi. Each species, each variant makes its element of carbon molecule metabolite, which functions as another key or wireless communication network within the system.
When you put this bacterial communication network back into play in human systems, you see human cells even in Petri dishes start to repair themselves and regenerate, which has never been seen before. It’s humbling to find out that even at the cellular level, we only regenerate when we are plugged into Mother Nature’s microbiome. I would love to see a future where we do not have a pharmaceutical industry and a supplement industry.
We have a Mother Nature that has been fully engaged. We’ve grown in an ecosystem that hasn’t existed on the planet since 60 million years back. That’s the potential that we have. That’s the journey that’s laid out before us. If we could revolutionize the way that biology happens on the planet when we align ourselves correctly, it’s in our combat mentality that we’ve created our own demise.
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Coming up, Zach talks about the biological effects of isolation. The power of a simple hug and how to plug back into Mother Nature to keep healthy.
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When you are envisioning that future where we are healthy and reconnected with Mother Nature, I picture us reconnected with each other as well. You’ve talked before about the importance of a hug. Can you speak to that a little bit?
It’s an interesting experience. Everything we’ve talked about so far, from the pollution to the Coronavirus to a bacterial communication network and microbiome, that’s all in the biology field. Biology is the visible portion of life but it’s not the fabric of life. The fabric of life is atoms and the atomic structure. Atoms are extremely minuscule, little energetic events that are happening all the time. They organize themselves into different structures that we call the periodic chart.
These periodic elements are arrangements of protons and electrons. In that, they function as little gravity centers that create density through the organization of space. The atomic structure of humans is the same as that of the rock, as the table in front of you and your computer in front of you. These are all reorganizations of atomic energy. At the atomic energy level, we are also invited to interact and be in a co-creative process.
A hug is an extraordinary avenue into an energetic atomic experience. Every split of a millionth of a second, you are exchanging electrons with your environment. When you go to give a hug, you are swapping electrons. You are exchanging data of your experience of your day. The love you may feel for that individual, the tiredness that might be in your bones from your incredible output or your stress fatigue from financial stress and child stress, and everything else going on in your life.
You are exchanging that data when you get or give a hug. It’s a powerful way to update one another’s software with the information that we’ve received. That hug is your optimal update procedure during the day. If you are going to reboot your computer and update the software, make sure you get in a hug or seven of them in a day to improve your function. This has an immediate effect on our immune system. This fragility of human immunity and mortality from otherwise benign signals like viruses are happening because we don’t have enough resilience.
The lack of resilience is from a lack of communication. You need that hug. Studies show that if you get more than 7 hugs a day, you have 30% less likelihood of ever having flu. There’s this beautiful interaction between the human immune system, the microbiome, and the energetics of hugs that start to create this matrix of communication. In the hug, you are communicating at the electron level. The exchange of genetic information in that hug also happens where you can swap the microbiome on the skin.
You can swap it in your breath, and that’s extremely important. The more robust you get in the exchange of information at the microbial level, the stronger your immune system function is and the clearer the immune system understands how to operate within the matrix of millions of foreign species that are interacting with your body all the time appropriately. That balance is achieved through biodiversity, not through isolation. A hug is a critical tool for healing, communication, and updating our own consciousness and exchange of respect for one another.
Even if we don’t know or understand all the physiology that you described, we know that it feels good. There’s something powerful that happens when we connect with each other. I’m thinking of a person who lives all by herself. She feels like she’s dying emotionally because, maybe physically, she’s not getting that information exchanged. She’s not getting all of those electronic interactions that she needs.
That’s happening all over the world and tragically in ICUs. This is the biggest humanitarian crisis I have ever seen in healthcare. I have never seen a situation where patients are dying alone in ICU. That has never happened in my experience. In our lifetimes, we have never seen this level of fear induced over something that’s harmless. Most people will see it. It’s a virus that is out there, harmless to 50% to the point they don’t even have symptoms. Another 40% will have mild to moderate symptoms, so 90% are completely benign. It’s only dangerous to 0.1% of the population, yet we are treating this thing as some horrible variation of Ebola or something.
We’re going to engage mother nature in ways that we haven’t had an opportunity to perhaps in years.
We’ve adopted that belief because of the misled medical treatments that are increasing mortality in our hospitals. New York hospitals are the worst place in the world to have COVID because there’s an 88% mortality rate. Nowhere else in the world have we seen that level of mortality. It’s because we are using the most extreme measures for isolation that has ever been witnessed. The more isolated a system gets, the more dysfunction it’s going to have. What that woman is experiencing is a version of that.
If we look at physics, it’s coded right in the matrix of the Scientific Laws. The second law of thermodynamics, which is one of the most tried and true truths that we have in scientific experimentation, is a profoundly simple statement. The second law of thermodynamics said, “Any system put in isolation will increase its entropy.” Entropy is a physics term for chaos. “Any system put in isolation will increase its chaos.” That is a phenomenally fascinating and bizarre truth that nobody has figured out why.
If you take an atom, a molecule, and a human cell and put it in isolation, it increases its chaos level. In fact, cancer is a cell left in isolation. You can’t get cancer until that cell is completely isolated from all of its neighbors. It goes into a proliferative state, thinking it’s the last living life form to carry on its genomic code. A cancer cell is a desperately lonely cell trying to do damage control and replicate itself before it dies. That’s true on the deepest level.
This woman is now experiencing that in isolation. She is increasing chaos. We’ve seen this as a form of punishment for thousands of years. The most severe punishment we can give is solitary confinement. We are doing it to our elderly, our most vulnerable populations. We are doing it to our children who are now isolated away from their friends at the most important time socially.
For many of these kids that are graduating from high school and college in isolation, we’ve taken out some of their most formative social experiences for some completely theoretical fear at this point of death. No college kids have died from this in any healthy state. You have to be profoundly disadvantaged at the biological level before this has any threat to you under the age of 50.
One of the fears I see among all of my healthy friends is they are afraid that they are going to give it to someone because they consider themselves asymptomatic carriers or they’ve heard that term. Is that a misunderstanding as well?
That’s the fear paradigm right there. Humans are not the mode of transferring viruses in all of history. Humans are late to the show. We have only been here 200,000 years by the fossil record. Planet Earth has been here for four and a half billion years. The first viruses that we can track back through the fossil record are somewhere around three and a half billion years ago. There were three and a half billion years that passed before humans showed up with viruses, creating life and life abundantly all over the world and creating an adaptation, bio-diversification, and all of this.
We are not the primary vector for viruses. That never happened. We support one another through the communication of the virome. We don’t make each other sick. We are passing information along. If that information is then poisoned with a toxin in the air pollution or otherwise, then it could cause some harm but you aren’t the vector. It’s the nature around us.
How should we interact with the elderly and vulnerable? We should take them to a national park and spend the day out in the fresh air with them if at all possible. If not, if you need to visit them in the nursing home or some other environment, make sure it happens outdoors. Your risk of having some abnormally dense amount of viral production affecting your lungs drops to low experience. You want them to have the microbiome and its biodiversity around them.
Whatever virus may or may not be present or around you or your loved ones becomes a tiny part of the puzzle. If you walk into an isolated room, you spend a few hours there, and there’s no fresh air put into that space, a virus can become abnormally consolidated and present some risk, especially if the person is on medications like statin drugs and ACE inhibitors in the light.
Are the cardiovascular patients and all of them vulnerable? Yes, because of their pharmaceutical predisposition and their isolation away from nature. If you are going to go and engage with the elderly, get them outside in a wheelchair and push them out into the yard. Enjoy space and time with them. It takes a considerable amount of time together, meaning hours or days before there’s any real risk.
In South Korea and Italy, there have been many reports that have come out around the world that even healthcare workers that are in and around these patients that are dying from COVID, 12, 14-hour shifts are not getting sick. There wasn’t a single possible acquired case of COVID noted in these hospitals. That’s unusual. Most viruses you will see are hospital-acquired. It suggests that COVID is harder to get in short-term contact with one another than ever before.
People say, “That is because they are taking all of these measures in hospitals.” The measures in the hospitals are making things worse. In cruise ships, we see an extremely low fatality rate because they are on a ship out in the ocean, away from pollution and safe. We see the average age on the cruise ships that came into Oakland, for example. That ship had 3,700 people on it. One-third of the ship was tested to show that at least 10% of the total ship had become infected with COVID, yet only three people ended up dying.
They didn’t end up having any acute illness leading to hospitalization or death until after they had left the ship after fourteen days of quarantine. They had gone through the whole course of COVID, had come out the other side of COVID, and were having some respiratory symptoms when they left the ship. They were then put into Army tents and all of this toxic air of Oakland. They got progressively sicker over the next few days and weeks. Weeks after, they already had COVID and passed through their system. They are dying from respiratory failure, secretary pneumonia, and all that were acquired in-hospital care.
We have to look at what is causing the virus to spread critically. Is it a bad thing? The virus doesn’t seem to be a bad thing. The bad thing is the toxicity on the other side, so that’s pharmaceuticalized patients. There’s a clear drug predisposition here, ACE inhibitors, which are common blood pressure medications, and statin drugs. Both up-regulate the receptor abnormally for the virus. The virus carries in the air pollution content like cyanide. You get a hypoxic injury, not because of the virus but because human biology has been screwed up by the pharmacy.
The virus then carries human toxicity on the back end of it. Suddenly, you have a life-threatening event. The virus is playing a small and benign role in that. It’s doing what it’s supposed to, which is entering through the ACE2 receptor in the lungs. That’s how it’s supposed to do. That’s how we are supposed to get this genomic update, and yet we’ve created an abnormal landing place for those by pharmaceuticalizing the lung. We’ve created a toxic potential for complications in the hospital systems.
Zach, did you see this coming down the pike? I heard somewhere that you predicted the Coronavirus. Is that true?
I didn’t call it Coronavirus because I didn’t care what virus it was going to be. It has been easy to predict because this is how viral adaptation happens. For the last few years, I have been showing slides around the world of the damage done by Roundup in our agricultural system. If you take the Roundup spraying maps in China, you can see that the most dense spraying patterns overlay the location of the highest viral output from biology. Whether it’s new variants of influenza, H1N3, or H3N3, all these different variants of flu that happened are all coming out of the most damaged biologic system on the planet.
China uses more Roundup than any other country. It also uses more antibiotics in the food production of pork and poultry than any other country. It has the most toxic food production system on the planet because it accepted Western influence through our Western belief system of chemical agriculture and food production. They’ve tried to go at scale with the pork and poultry production through things like the chemical farms, feed lots, and all of this.
They put out this massive biologic stress signal every year throughout the year of the severe biologic damage done from the anti-microbials, antifungals, anti-parasitics, and everything else that are dumping herbicides, pesticides, and the like is all creating this. You show that map, and then you can show a second map of the air pollution that binds viruses and creates abnormal clumping of toxins with viruses. The air pollution map in China happens to be South of Beijing. All the air pollution of Beijing and the surrounding cities push down into Central China.
You get a perfect overlap of the air pollution and the agricultural toxicity right in the Hubei Province or Wuhan, where this Coronavirus was believed to stem from. It didn’t take rocket science or even any intelligence on my part. I just had Google Maps of where is the most toxic place on the planet. I will show you exactly where the highest signal of stress is going to be coming out of biology. That’s going to be in the form of genomic viral things.
It’s going to transport rapidly around the world because it has the highest level of air pollution. There was a clickbait title that got put on. I predicted something. I have been preaching this for many years that we are going to kill ourselves. It had nothing to do with saying I was some conspiracy theory author or anything like that. It’s simple biology. It is a simple mapping of our toxicity. You can see exactly where this stuff stems from.
We’ll see more fatalities as we continue to poison the earth for sure.
It heartened me earlier when you said that you have been able to communicate some of your theories to the powers that be on the COVID Task Force. Imagine this scenario with me, Zach. Let’s say that someone in charge came to you and said, “Whatever you tell us to do, we are going to do it.” What would you tell them to do?
That would be awesome. I’m so excited for that to happen. I’m sure it’s going to happen. Somebody is going to say, “Zach, you should run the world for seven days. What are you going to do?” It would be simple. I would take the mask off of every person around the world, the only people that should even consider a respiratory barrier. I wouldn’t choose a mask in this case. I would use a clear face shield or something like that, so they are not breathing through a mask.
Breathing through mass has severe concerns around what happens to respiratory health when you breathe through a mask but that’s another story. Take the masks off. Get everybody outside. I would start mapping out transportation and energy plans. People with names starting with the letters A through C cannot drive on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays or whatever it is. You start figuring out how we are going to get back to normal behavior socially and economically without driving a return to the toxicity.
First, let’s do short-term fixes by changing our transportation and energy habits. Second, let’s fix the food system. That’s through a regenerative agricultural system that will reabsorb all the carbon contaminants that we are putting back up into the atmosphere every year, poisoning ourselves through what we call flu season. We needed to fix that rapidly. We’ve only got about eight years to fundamentally change our food system before we kill the oceans in an unrecoverable state.
Eight years is a short amount of time to put in radical change. In FarmersFootprint.us, we are about to roll out a much bigger project around water systems as well. Keep in touch with us through there. Figure out how you can get engaged. It can start in your backyard. If you can start increasing the amount of green content carbon in your soil, you are going to help reverse this trend of the disease.
Plant a garden. Get engaged with the garden. If you don’t have room to plant one, volunteer at a CSA or get engaged at a farmer’s market. Figure out how to become part of a new supply system where farmers are rewarded for their efforts and that we do more direct consumer interaction with them instead of them losing 96% of the revenue that goes into the food system. That is never realized by a farmer. We need to correct that. We need to give farmers rewards for the hard diligence of their work. Every morning, from 4:00 AM, until dusk, they are out there working to create a healthy planet and food system to the best of their capacity.
We need to encourage them and revitalize their economic incentives for doing the right thing, which has stopped spraying herbicides and pesticides, stop over disking and plowing the land, and letting the fungal bed come back into its natural work of pulling carbon, sequestering, and cycling that carbon through our food systems. We can reverse the whole process. We need to fix the food system. Transportation and energy are short-term fixes that need to be put in place and held over time. The longer-term solution is to get the Earth to breathe. We need to give her back her lungs.
If Earth can breathe, she can handle all of our carbon. Carbon is not a poison until we kill the lungs. In her emphysema state, CO2 collects in the atmosphere, and suddenly, we can’t breathe. 1 in 8 children has asthma in the United States, Australia, and other industrialized countries. Our children can’t breathe because our planet can’t breathe. It’s going to happen that way because we are a fractal of the nature we live in. If we give her back her lung, she’s going to repair the system and get it all functioning again. We could get rid of flu season as we understand it if we would go to a regenerative agriculture system across the globe.
I have to ask you because we are a group that’s committed to food farming and the healing arts and regenerative ag. I’m curious about your stance on a diet. Some people have told me you are plant-based, and others have asked me, “Please find out from Zach. Is he not for eating sustainably-raised regenerative meat?”
I’ve shied away from coming down on any clear identity on that because I don’t think our food should be our identity. It’s important that we understand that we are spiritual beings having human experiences. Too often, our nutrition has been held as almost religious orthodoxy. It creates schisms and delays and disrupts our ability to transform the food industry. Our enemy is the chemical industry. We need a food system that is free of chemicals.
I don’t care if you are paleo, keto or vegan. I would first challenge that and ask you to drop that title and make you remember you are something bigger than your diet. I would ask you, “Are you part of the solution, which is getting chemicals out of our food system and soil systems so that we can heal Mother Earth?” If you are a part of that mission, I don’t care what you eat as long as it’s real food and you are supporting a system that supports a regenerative agricultural system.
I try to help people realize that this name-calling and identity, the pounding of the chest stuff, are so useless and slowing us down. We need a concerted effort to join forces. The vegans should be supporting the paleo and the keto people as long as they are saying, “We are going to eat real food.” I have severe concerns that when people go paleo or keto, they end up spending a lot of their money and time preparing protein shakes or protein isolates from peas. That’s not human nutrition. That’s not anything nature-designed.
Stop doing isolates of anything and start doing whole food eating. If that whole food plant-based system went on to feed a chicken that you are consuming, I’m okay with that as long as that chicken was given its spiritual due. That chicken doesn’t want to be a food source. That chicken wants to be a co-worker with us. A chicken will have joy if it’s given the opportunity to tend to the garden and the Earth with its incredible composting capacity.
A cow can be a blessed gift to the Earth and its regenerative capacity with its bifurcated hooves and everything else that it’s got to work the land. It can be a huge piece of the puzzle. If we are killing that thing at 6 or 8 months of age, in the case of some of these animals, for broiler chickens are killed at six weeks of age, that’s not letting that animal do its purpose. That animal didn’t show up here as an energetic force to be consumed by humans.
It showed up to be a real gift to the planet as well as to humanity. Let those animals do their work before they are killed for human consumption. That would make me feel much better about the situation. We would heal the land faster if we gave those animals their due, which is allowing them to be co-workers of the land. We need to see our animals and livestock as co-workers rather than food.
I’ve heard Jill Sell refer to it as a beautiful choreography. It’s like the dance has gotten messed up between us, the Earth, and each other. There’s a lot of healing work that needs to happen. I appreciate all the advice you’ve given us, Zach. I want to ask you the final question. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?
Get outside. Get into nature and let her show you a path. You are a deeply spiritual force that has shown up. There are seven billion of you that have shown up at the tipping point of human history. We could have as little as 7 or 8 decades left of human life on Earth. We are looking at our own extinction event pending on the horizon, and yet everybody showed up. The seven billion souls that showed up are here to transform the experience of being human. You need to reconnect to humanity, to the animal kingdom for sure but you are not going to start down that pathway with clarity until you get outside.
Take the opportunity to get out of the four walls. Get out of your yard. Get out into Mother Nature at large. Let her show you your purpose that you showed up to do. Be part of the rise of consciousness. Be part of the reconnection to Mother Earth herself. Let’s co-create a future for our children and planet that does not have a foundation of economics driven by chronic disease and economics.
That’s driven by warfare and economics. That’s driven by extractive transportation and energy systems. We need to realize a completely different and aligned mission across all of these different sectors, where Mother Nature is our template and our nourishment as we move into a future that has never been witnessed in human history.
Nature is there literally to nursemaid every human cell into its full potential.
Thank you so much for your time, Zach. I pray we take on that spirit that you’ve recommended. It’s beautiful.
Thanks for your time. I appreciate the audience and all that the Weston A. Price Foundation has done over time to advance the discussion of nature and nurture.
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Our guest was Dr. Zach Bush. Visit his website, ZachBushMD.com, for more information and resources. You can find me at HolisticHilda.com. For a quick review from one of our readers from Apple Podcasts, Wild And Free Always, “Thank you for continuing to provide insightful, thought-provoking, and genuine information and inquiry. Science is never settled. At a time when critical thinking is ever more essential to the future of humanity, thank you for your voice and the voices you bring on to continue the inquiry. Ever grateful for this.”
Wild And Free Always, we are grateful to you for reading and sharing the episodes. Please feel free to write a letter to the editor, which we could insert into a future journal or post a review on Apple Podcasts. We will try to read it here on the show. Thanks again for reading, my friend. Take care of yourself. Hasta pronto.
About Dr. Zach Bush
Zach Bush MD is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. He is an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease, and food systems. Dr Zach founded *Seraphic Group and the nonprofit Farmer’s Footprint to develop root-cause solutions for human and ecological health. His passion for education reaches across many disciplines, including topics such as the role of soil and water ecosystems in human genomics, immunity, and gut/brain health. His education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming and pharmacy, and his ongoing efforts are providing a path for consumers, farmers, and mega-industries to work together for a healthy future for people and planet.
Important Links
- Grass Fed Intestines with Tripe
- Green Pasture’s Fermented Cod Liver Oil
- Farmer’s Footprint
- HolisticHilda.com
This was fantastic!!! Thank you!!!