Dr. Zach Bush on Glyphosate, the Microbiome & What Modern Medicine Gets Wrong

0:00We have just recently found out through genetic sequencing that the human colon holds more biodiversity than any other ecosystem on the planet. Wow. Blowing away coral reefs, rainforests, whatever you can think of as diverse ecosystems, the human colon holds more. There's so much more than what we're just seeing through our lens. We now know that the intellect of a human is the result of biodiversity in your gut. What we see is two-year-olds with cancers that we had 20 years ago and 80-year-olds. Our children are aging at an extreme rate because of their disconnect from the biology of our soil system.

0:34Dr. Zach Bush is a triple board certified physician and renowned educator whose work on the microbiome, disease prevention, and regenerative farming is transforming the way we understand health, longevity, and the environment. We use about 4 billion pounds a year of glyphosate globally. 4 billion pounds of a chemical that has been demonstrated and patented as an antibiotic against bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. Can you explain the power of nature that it has on our health in general? When you take away that communication network, you don't need a nuclear event to drive a cancer epidemic. You just need daily life.

1:06In Los Angeles, more than 30 % of meals are eaten alone behind a steering wheel. You cannot be nourished by a meal. No matter how superfooded out your smoothie is, it will not nourish you to health if you're eating that in isolation behind a steering wheel in traffic because you are not knowing nature's connection to your body. How do we shift our mindsets to understanding that this is really where true longevity stands? We've got to break our hearts over the broken promises of the biohacking industry. If you're a biohacker, you are also doomed to failure because we have a 100 % aging process that is in human journey.

1:42Firstly, I want to say thank you to tuning in and listening to the show. It means a huge amount. And connecting with all of you is something that I absolutely love as part of this journey of growing the show. One of my biggest goals of 2025 is doubling the reach of this show. And I can't do that without your support. So I would love to ask you a favor if you can press subscribe or follow on whichever platform you listen to. This helps us reach more people. And for me, elevating women in science is so fundamental and ethical and scientific information. So if you feel the show empowers you and gives you the information that you've been seeking, I would love to ask a favor in return and to hit that subscribe button and help me reach the goal that I've set for the show of 2025.

2:29Thank you. Zach, welcome to Live Well, Be Well. I'm so excited to be here with you in this entire audience. It's a pleasure. I have been so inspired by your work. Like, truly, the fact that you are creating an incredible ecosystem of human health, which is not just concentrated within the mind and the body, but within a whole ecosystem of the planet. And how we're viewing that and how you're really trying to get us to expand our mindsets to connect, that there's so much more than what we're just seeing through our lens and what we're talking about today. I was really trying to figure out where I was going to start this conversation because there are so many, there's so many areas that I could go down.

3:14I'm a nutritionist. I have been very focused on the work in nutritional science and I came to a point about eight years ago where I was banging my head against a wall because I felt that we weren't seeing things clearly and people were leaving my clinic and coming back in three months later. we needed to change so much more than that and now as I'm looking at health expanding more than ever it's going to be an eight trillion dollar industry by 2027 I really think we need to be having like deep conversations around our health so much more than just the longevity conversation that many are having today so I love that you've written a quote that it's not just about living longer but living more fully.

3:58And so I wanted to start off by asking you a question on how do you personally define a life well lived? The first thing that comes to mind on that is Khalil Gibrand. He was one of the greatest philosophical minds of the 20th century, perhaps. And about 100 years ago, he was asked, how should you parent? And he said, it was very easy to parent really well. He said, all you have to do is make sure that every day you try to think more like your child and make absolutely sure you never make them think like you. And I think that's a life well lived, is a life in which you resist the temptation to become an adult in your mind, and you resist the temptation to believe that you're responsible in a cosmos as grand as it is for anything, ultimately.

4:43And no child wakes up with a sense of burden of responsibility when they're in their joy. We train them into that responsibility. We break their relationship to their joy, and we tell them that it is going to be metriced on their ability to fit themselves into a duty, responsibility, performance model of a life lived. And so we push them into the mind. We push them into their emotional bodies, and we ask for a performance. And in that, we take them out of their magic. And so, a life well lived, we will find out again and again, is a life that finds its way back into the heart and the mind of a child.

5:27I love that. You said one of my favorite words, which is joy. My other one is play, which I think we've lost a lot of adults. You started off as a conventional doctor, I want to say, one that did a very inspiring work, but then you made a huge shift. Can you tell me about that shift, that moment, when you started changing the landscape of how you saw health and medicine? The seed for that shift was planted actually before I became a medical doctor, so I was actually going to engineering and was excited about that. I was a blue-collar kid, grew up in Colorado, and was building cars at a young age.

6:02Loved pounding on metal and welding and restoring classic cars. I was a blue-collar kid. And the coolest thing I could think of, because my dad was pretty insistent that I should think of something other than being a mechanic, and so engineering seemed like an obvious extension of that. So I thought about robotics. It seems like maybe that would be cool because it was a word that I'd heard of, but I didn't know what to include. So I was going that direction and then had my heart broken, which is such a wonderful thing. So I finally got my first girlfriend when I was 18 or something. I was terrified of girls for the previous 18 years and 52 years old.

6:36I'm not sure I'm any less terrified of women today. But there's an incredible moment that comes with that first heartbreak. And only as dramatic as an 18-year-old can be. I knew I just needed to take a year off of college to deal with my heartbreak. And in that moment, my aunt called me from the Philippines and said, what you up to? And I said, I just decided to take a year off like four hours ago. And she's like, oh, what are you going to do? I said, oh, I'm interested in travel and came up with something. She said, well, you should come to the Philippines and birth babies. And I was like, holy smokes.

7:05That's, oh, okay. Like that was about all the thought that went into that. So I worked in a tire shop busting tires for six months to make enough money to get a plane ticket over to the Philippines and stayed there for six months birthing babies. And I was immediately hooked. I couldn't unsee what I'd seen. I was watching women born and lived in abject poverty, bringing forth babies that were five pounds at the most, you know, tiny, tiny little babies that were perfectly formed. I couldn't feel, it was just too ridiculous. How is this woman with absolutely no support, with abject poverty in a tin shack with sewage running outside the front door.

7:50How are these babies being born so perfectly? What the heck is going on in these women? And then I would eventually find my way into the medical field through all those subspecialties, and I would be trained out of the thing I witnessed, which was the miracle. And I came to believe that these were basically life was a series of traumas, and everything was a pathology and everything had a drug to treat the pathology. And it was my job to be the technician at the pharmaceutical table to figure out what chemical I was supposed to put in every one of those bodies to help it through its disease journey to death.

8:27If they had disease that got worse or they died, I was a failure as a doctor. So as you can tell, given that we have a very high percentage of death as humans, you're kind of doomed to fail as a doctor if the metrics were handed. We have to embrace the fact that we are born. It is such a freaking miracle. And so the turn of events that happened as my heart got shattered from my profession, those seeds that had been planted with those babies in the Philippines was the reseeding of my joy. Because when I fell out of academia after 17 years in that space, I found myself in farm fields of Virginia with a rural clinic that was serving fifth-generation poverty and food deserts that were, you know, people not even equipped with grocery stores.

9:15Everybody's eating out of gas stations, which is the case for much of America now. We have food deserts that cover the vast majority of our country. And so I started there, and I watched people birthing. And this time, instead of babies, they were rebirthing their own bodies. And And that became really the regendering of my hope of like, my gosh, with almost no resources, a woman can bring forth a perfect baby in the squatting villages of the Philippines. And a fifth generation poverty family in rural Virginia can rebirth itself by growing a garden in the backyard, starting to regain health sovereignty, which gives them a sense of dignity.

9:58and in one moment of dignity they can lose judgment on their journey and they develop that moment of play and that moment of joy that you so love and they get healthy really quick and the definition of health has to be held loosely because many of them would die from collective trauma to them but they died in joy with a sense of freedom a sense of sovereignty that they had most of their life and so they died well and so live well we're going to have to lose our fear and death, and when we start dying well, we will live much different lives. So much to be said on what you've just explained to us.

10:35Maybe some listeners' minds needing to take a moment to nourish what you've just said on the profound impact of how we're looking at our symptoms rather than our root causes. The question that came to my mind, which is seeing as a doctor you're treating people who are sick, they're coming to you and they're ill. what are the bodily signs showing when the body is ready to heal the body is always ready to heal in fact the body is always healing the body is healing the moment that it's conceived and so the amount of friction in the universe towards life is infinite there's constant tearing at the cellular at the molecular at the atomic level of life there is friction and so without a constant healing machine, you would have never made it to cell number five, let alone 70 trillion cells that have teamed together to rebirth themselves constantly.

11:33Your entire gut lining, billions of cells, dies and is rebirthed every three days for your entire life. You are a healing machine at a rate that you cannot conceive of. To accumulate disease, you have to create a rate of injury that supersedes that constant rate of healing that you're walking around with. to do that you have to keep repeating the same story and that story is largely you don't deserve to be here you don't deserve nature you don't deserve to be nourished and so you deserve need to serve at your own exhaustion you need to put everything else before yourself you've got to you know perform here before you deserve a paycheck you got to do this before you deserve to be loved, whatever it is.

12:20So this journey is just so simple in the end of, wow, we've got such an opportunity right now to let go of the performance of being human and become much more childlike in our receipt of the nature that is inherently driving this miraculous machine that allowed you to self-organize in your mother's womb from the likes of one cell into 70 trillion cells that actually can't even thrive for a single moment if they weren't already in concert with 14 quadrillion bacteria that live inside of your cells that we call mitochondria. And so this question, I think, you know, probably four hours ago, started around the question of, like, what is this journey going to look like as we start to understand health in the context of our ecosystem?

13:05You mentioned the microbiome. Health is ultimately a concentration of light energy in a body that allows for enough energy for communication to be uninterrupted. A cell with unfettered access to information can never disease. If you are connected to a natural ecosystem of biodiversity, you are literally bulletproof because the humans aren't in the system. We left. Human intervention has the opposite result of a keystone species. Keystone species is measured by its impact on an ecosystem. If you put beavers back into the rivers of the southwest in the United States, our deserts go back green again.

13:44Within a couple of springs, those beavers are recovering the microbiome of the soil. They're recovering macro and microflora and fauna. You put bison back into the plains of Texas, same result within two springs. You put wolves back in Yellowstone. Not only does the microbiome recover, the rivers start flowing again. What wolves have to do with rivers, nobody ever guessed. But the fact is a keystone species, an elephant in the bush of Africa, white lions in Timbavati, South Africa. Every time one of these keystone species has been rewilded, it increases the biodiversity within it. Humans, for the last few thousand years, have been doing the opposite.

14:27Every single place we have set foot, we create monoculture. We decrease the connectivity between species by driving out the biodiversity in creating monoculture in the name of health or food systems or whatever it is. And so we have had antibiotic effects on this earth. Biosis is a cool word. You just look up the word biosis and just like maybe put that front and center of your life, you know, mantra of what does it mean to live well. Biosis means in reference to the interconnected relationships that allow life to occur. so biotic or biosis means the interconnected relationships that allow life to occur antibiotic was a pretty good name for what we would create in the 1940s it wasn't the first antibiotic we created but penicillin would become the blockbuster we had created a really effective antibiotic that had been used in undermining human health for a long time and that's alcohol And so from alcohol to penicillin, we had made a paradigm leap forward.

15:341940s, we get penicillin. By the 1960s and 70s, we find chemicals related to those antibiotics that can kill weeds. And so we started using megatons of antibiotics in our soil systems by the 1970s and 80s. Today, if you just pick one of our many, many herbicides, there's dozens of herbicides on the market that work very effectively at killing things in soil systems, but the granddaddy of them all is glyphosate. It's the single molecule and active ingredient in Roundup, which you've probably got in your garage if you have one. It's probably in your grandmother's shed. This product has made it into every single household worldwide, really, and it's been used in every farm field, essentially, globally for generations now.

16:19Currently, we use about four billion pounds a year of glyphosate globally. Four billion pounds of a chemical that has been demonstrated and patented as an antibiotic against bacteria, fungi, protozoa, every single type of organism that grows in soil has been shown to die under the pressure of this chemical. When you pour four billion pounds of a potent antibiotic into the soils of the earth, the metabolic life force decreases. And our laboratory, as mentioned, had showed that that microbiome produces the communication network that allows cells to thrive even in nuclear events. When you take away that communication network, you don't need a nuclear event to drive a cancer epidemic.

17:02You just need daily life. And what we see is two-year-olds that are now housed at Texas Children's Hospital in six towers of that skyscraper city that we've built as a children's hospital, two-year-olds with cancers that we hadn't 20 years ago seen in 80-year-olds, osteosarcomas and the like. Osteosarcoma was something that wouldn't happen until you're really at the end of life. You needed a really radical decrease in cell-cell communication at the bone marrow level to get an osteosarcoma. We have two-year-olds with that disease now. What that suggests is that a two-year-old has reached the aging phenomenon on of a loss of communication decades before grandmother got there.

17:49And so our children are aging at an extreme rate because of their disconnect from the biology of our soil systems, from the biology of the soil system within their own body, which we call the gut microflora. So as the soil systems die under our farm fields and within the guts of our children, disease is an inevitable outcome. and we cannot technologically remove ourselves from that disease. We cannot drug ourselves out of this condition. There is only one pathway back into the survival of our species and it is a reconnection with nature at this level of the microbiome of soil and food systems.

18:27There's a lot to unpack there. So me trying to ask a question on our microbiome, which obviously is the operating system that you call it, is so difficult to then ask your question around nature because they're so intertwined. And a lot of people today are searching for one answer, right? They're like, what can I do to optimize my gut microbiome? What can I do to optimize my longevity and my lifespan? What can I do to optimize my endurance? What can I do to reduce my stress? And so we had these very specific silo questions to different parts of the body. Yeah. And that was my journey with my patients is everybody's looking for a solution for their dis-ease.

19:08And we all have great dis-ease in our days and in our lives and in our sleep and our dreams. We are burdened with a lot of disease right now. And nature has a lot of grace towards that. And so nature doesn't expect us to figure it all out. She takes us on a journey back into that health. And so really what it comes down to is we can see the same effect of Chernobyl, perhaps. Nuclear event happens, massive nuclear leak. We have this, you know, contamination of the soil system. A devastating event happens. And so humans stop doing stuff in the space, and nature comes roaring in there and just does so much beauty, and it's now one of the most vibrant ecosystems on the planet.

19:51This is what I saw in my patients over and over again. They needed the nuclear event in their life to stop doing the things that were driving them to their disease. And so over and over again in our clinic, every single day, we heard somebody say, that diagnosis of my cancer a year ago was the most important gift I ever received from God. That was my path back towards self. That was my moment that I stopped doing everything that I had been doing to harm myself. That was the moment that my priorities reversed. We need the nuclear blast in our life to change directions as radically as we need to change directions today.

20:30we mentioned at the beginning of the pre-show questions, the last thing that I will do in this human body is let go of judgment. We have to let go of judgment to make progress towards this healing process within the body. And so we have to realize that whatever stress patterns we have lived out, whatever traumas we have, we're the perfect amount to get us to the breaking point. We have to shatter the human psyche to get to the human heart, and then we have to shatter the human heart with so much desire for love until we get to the quiet space in our core. That's the human journey, and everybody will die in that silent, quiet, still space.

21:13You will be there when you die. You will die alone in the same way that you birthed alone. The moment you came in, you saw strangers around you because they had already cut themselves off from nature. You came in as an expression of an ancient soul connected to the source and abundantly provided for it every fractal of reality, and you stared into the faces of strangers who had cut themselves off from that very nature and then slowly would train you to do the same. you came in very much alone and you will leave alone there's no family member that will go on that journey with you through that eye of the needle to the other side of the veil you will do that alone and it will be beautiful and you will be surrounded by all of the frequencies of love that you can imagine and you will realize that you are completely accepted and you will realize that everything you feared and everything that you felt any guilt and shame over were absolute fabrications of the human mind.

22:19And so there's this invitation to every patient that would walk into my clinic and each one of you is stop looking for the thing outside of you to solve your problem and just go into that silent space inside of you as fast as possible. And I could have been told that a million times, but it wasn't until I hit the wall, shattered, broke, had the nuclear event in my life. And those nuclear events for me were human relationships because I don't really mind. I don't need money to be happy. I don't mind losing money. I don't mind being out of money. That doesn't actually stress me very much. But the end of relationships are brutal on my psyche.

22:55So there's something inside of me that has a false belief about the role of human relationships and the necessity for them to never end, for them to be successful, that I had to overcome. And so welcome in the nuclear bombs that will come. Mine happened in relationships, yours might be bankruptcy, whatever it is. Look forward to them in some ways, because otherwise you're going to continue the numbed-out journey that each of us are on until the nuclear blast goes off. And then we have the chance. Then we have the chance for radical transformation. When I'm thinking about everything that you're saying, and I'm thinking about the conversation around self-worth, that's something that I really root a lot of conversations around health on this show.

23:40But something that I've always been so inspired by your work, essentially, is when you speak about the interconnection with nature, which you've just done so beautifully. There was a post on your Instagram that inspired me to write a very long article. And made me realise the connection back to my roots. And it was a post on how nature heals. And there was five slides. You had the power of the birdsong, the power of the water, the blue mind theory. You had the power of sunlight and moon regulation. We're on a full moon right now as we're having this discussion. Healing of grounding, forest bathing, all of these wonderful words.

24:27And I read it and I must have sent that to, I mean, a lot of people, but it inspired me to write a lot of articles after that. I don't want to use the word escapism but there's something about you you've referenced the words letting go you've left referenced the words of judgment there's something about being in nature where all of that's forgotten and I really think about the connection to the microbiome when I'm in nature as well can you explain the power of nature that it has on our health in general and how some of the things that I've just referenced the kind of science behind that and the power because I think sometimes people might think, okay, forest bathing is a bit woo-woo.

25:05A lot of science in this. And whole nations are getting behind that. In Japan, if you have come in with any symptoms of depression, their first prescription is forest bathing. And so whole nations are realizing that this is a very affordable and effective method that far exceeds the benefits of any small molecule chemicals that disrupt your neurology in the name of antidepressant. and so very potent science and very big public health outcomes being measured globally around something as simple as forest bathing and so how does it work why does it work what's going on with that and this comes down to that concentration of light energy produces intelligent life and so the more microbiome that you touch the more ecosystem that becomes intimately involved with your body, the more energy you're going to concentrate per cubic centimeter.

25:57And we have just recently found out through genetic sequencing that the human colon holds more biodiversity than any other ecosystem on the planet. Wow. Blowing away coral reefs, rainforests, whatever you can think of as diverse ecosystems, the human colon holds more. What about the colons of other animals? Way more. And so you look at other mammals and you look at dogs or rooster or whatever you can think of in these systems of, you know, go to the reptiles, go on down the line, they're all diminished in their biodiversity compared to the human colon. And so when we talk about the microbiome, what we're talking about is actually the cellular intelligence of a human system.

26:39And we now know that the intellect of a human, the ability of your neurons to transmit frequencies and neurochemicals that would produce a thought or a creative output is the result of biodiversity in your gut. And so there are billions of nerve endings that poke out through your gut lining to speak and listen directly to the microbiome. And the microbiome is putting data streams into your central processing unit. And so you are the most complex quantum computer that's ever been designed by nature on this planet. And the reason you elicit intelligence is because of the biodiversity of the inputs.

27:23Which brings us to maybe a funny thing that led right before this conversation. You mentioned that your depression coming out of TED because you had listened to what was going to be the future of humanity and the whole thing was about AI. AI is not an intelligent system. AI is a mirror that we can look in to see the results of human thought. But the thing that we should be afraid of AI is not its computational power, not the speed of which it does. It's the lack of biodiverse inputs that should terrify you about AI. Because what you're getting when you type into chat GPT is you are getting a filtered version of reality that is filtered to the language of a colonial empire that has sucked the life out of this planet because it believes it's separate from nature.

28:10It's not the technology that we should be worried about. It's the lack of diverse inputs. I think we will solve this crisis of AI and its existential threat as soon as we give it the information stream of the microbiome. Computers can read that. Computers can get the data from soil metabolomics. Computers can read the data from our genomics in forest floors, in farm fields, and in human guts. We need to give it biodiverse information streams and these computer systems will give us an image that we can't believe the simplicity of. It will make sure that everything that gets outputted in chat GPT is not from human perspective but is from the earth speaking its truth, which is we are all interconnected and there's nothing you can do that doesn't have a consequence in nature, but there's a lot of things you can do that makes those consequences extremely beneficial.