The Medical Debate That Changed Everything: Germ Theory vs Terrain Theory

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:32Darin Olien:By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad. You don't think of these small little things, but they add up a lot over time, and we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean. Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different? Plus, maybe that exposure to that plastic, getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea.

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2:53Darin Olien:I'm stoked you're here. You're going to be in for a doozy today. We are diving into a very big topic, so bear with me. Hook in and hold on. Pause it. Keep listening to it. Like and subscribe. Whatever you want. This is fascinating. This has been something. I've talked about this a long time ago, 15 or so years ago, when a good research buddy of mine brought to my attention germ theory versus terrain theory, why your body is the medicine and maybe your body does not ever make a mistake. And the reason I say that is there's ample evidence to show scientifically that we may have got this wrong. The science of terrain, how your internal environment determines your susceptibility to illness and why the mainstream idea of medicine has largely ignored this framework, especially since the Flexner report that was put out in 1910.

3:51Darin Olien:We're going to get into all of this stuff. So what if everything you were taught about getting sick was only half of the story? What if the germ, the virus, the bacteria wasn't really the primary enemy, but your body's response to the environment you helped to contribute to it? So what do I mean? I know this sounds like I'm about to go off the edge or off the rails, right? But I'm not. Believe me. I'm going to walk you through the science, the real science, published research, the kind that has been quietly sitting in peer-reviewed journals for a very long time. So we're going to squeeze into that a little bit and resurface some of that stuff because here's what I have come to understand getting to sit with a lot of incredible researchers, scientists, naturopaths, homeopathy experts, you name it.

4:53Darin Olien:I've gotten to sit with a lot of people. I've studied health, studied biology, had my undergrad in physiology, nutrition, kinesiology, all of that stuff. So I have a bit of an understanding and especially over dedicating my life to this stuff. This thing reads very true to me. Our internal biological environment is almost everything, that terrain. And what we have the power to build, protect, and optimize is literally in every choice we make, sitting with us every day. Today, we're diving into one of the most suppressed debates in the history of medicine, germ theory versus terrain theory. We're going to explore this science, this history, this research, and most importantly, what you can actually do about it.

5:45Darin Olien:Now, the thing is you can follow along as much as you want, but as I conclude what's going on, there's no downside. There's no downside of my conclusions at the end of this podcast. It's only up. So to understand where we're at, we have to go way back in the 1800s, two brilliant scientists, two very different worldviews, and a battle that shaped the entire trajectory of our modern medicine world. Louis Pasteur, the father of supporting the germ theory. Louis Pasteur was a champion of this germ theory, the idea that specific microorganisms invade the body from outside and cause specific diseases.

6:35Darin Olien:Pasteur's work was literally on pasteurization, vaccines, microbiological infections, and was genuinely groundbreaking. So I'm not going to take that away from him for sure. He proved that microbes cause fermentation, they contaminate, and they breed disease. That is true. He was right, but partially. Now germ theory gave us some things too. It gave us antibiotics. It allowed for us to sterilize things and surgeries and whatnot. And it also created the vaccine technology. These are massive achievements, obviously. They've saved a lot of lives. But this is a big but. Germ theory also led to reductionism, reducing things down so you cannot see the full picture, i.e.

7:29Darin Olien:treat that inflammation, treat that bug. but don't look at the entirety of the body in this case. So it became pathogenic-centric view of health. It became the dominant lens. Find the bug, kill the bug, done, that's it. That's what we need to do. Now, come into it, Antoine Beauchamp, a French microbiologist and scientist. He was seeing, literally in his research, the terrain, the environment. So it was at the same time that Bishemp and Pasteur were working. And Tom Bishemp was developing this completely different model. Bishemp proposed that diseases arise not primarily from external germs, but from imbalances in the body's internal environment.

8:23Darin Olien:That's the terrain. So when that's imbalanced, then it has some interesting effect. Bashemp observed, literally observed, the microorganisms in the body that could change their form and function based on the environment they were in. A concept he called pleomorphism. When the terrain is healthy, microbes coexist harmlessly. They're in balance. They're kept in check. When the terrain becomes compromised through poor nutrition, outside toxins getting in, certainly stress, disruptions in certain levels of pH throughout different parts of organs or tissue, and also fundamentally depleted in minerals, these same microorganisms, these same microbes can transform into pathogenic agents.

9:21Darin Olien:Bishemp also described these tiny living particles he called microzymes, now echoed in modern discoveries about the microbiome, the exosomes and cellular communication molecules. So Bishemp was a badass, without a doubt. And there was a famous deathbed admission that happened. Here's where it gets extraordinary. On his deathbed, supposedly, Louis Pasteur famously reported and said, and I'm paraphrasing, Bernard, and I'll tell you who Bernard was, Bernard was right. The microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything. He was referring to Claude Bernard, another contemporary who argued that the body's internal environment, what Bernard called the milieu in Tarou.

10:13Darin Olien:Now, this was the primary determinant of health, he said. This concept became the foundation of modern physiology. So, the man who gave us germ theory may have ultimately conceded to the terrain theory argument. Yet, medicine moved forward with this germ theory, largely ignored the terrain, you can see it in our modern world, for reasons that were as much economic as they were scientific. So the economic hands started getting all over the germ theory. And you probably are guessing why. Because they have a cure for that. Now, I want to talk about something that came about around 1910. Abraham Flexner was hired by the Carnegie Foundation to evaluate the medical schools across North America.

11:07Darin Olien:Sounds like a good idea, right? His report led to the closure of more than half of all of the medical schools in the United States, particularly, now listen up, those teaching neuropathy, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and what we kind of call integrative medicine. They were virtually completely wiped out. The Flexner Report standardized medical education around the pharmaceutical interventions and the germ theory model of disease. It was backed financially by John D. Rockefeller, who had significant financial interests in the petrochemical-based pharmaceutical industry, which is thriving to this day.

11:50Darin Olien:Now, I want to be careful here. The Flexner Report did eliminate some genuinely dangerous quack medicine. We know. Look around. People are trying to sell you everything, telling you you're broken. So the nutrition industry also, you can see it to this day. They're trying to tell you you're broken, so you need this and that. Some supplements, which the ones I support, are backed in science, and they're foundational and that kind of thing. But there's a lot of people out there. So there was some good in the Flexner Report. It got rid of, created a standardization. But the standardization was based potentially on a partial truth.

12:30Darin Olien:an entire tradition of terrain-based, nutritional, holistic medicine was essentially erased from all of the medicine model. So the result, the medical system almost entirely focused on pathogenic and pharmaceutical interventions and almost entirely blind to the terrain theory. So, hey, to this day as we, we don't learn nutrition in medical schools. look around. Every medical doctor has virtually zero nutritional background. The medical doctors that you see giving nutritional data and working integratively have had to learn on their own, essentially, to bring back what we do to our bodies has a terrain effect in our internal environments.

13:19Darin Olien:They also didn't learn how to optimize cellular voltage. There is a frequency to health. They didn't understand how to optimize the mitochondrial function, the microbiome health, or even the foundational understanding of mineral balance. They learned how to name diseases, prescribe drugs, and this is certainly not a conspiracy. You know this. It's just a system built on a partial truth. So here comes E. Richard Brown's book, Rockefeller Medicine, in 1979. Documents showed how industrial capitalism shaped the American medical education and how more recently scholars, including Paul Starr, the social transformation of the American medicine, traced how economic interest drove the medicine towards the pharmaceutical first model.

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15:56Darin Olien:That's M-A-N-N-A vitality.com. Use the code DAREN20 and you get 20 % off your order. This isn't about health. It's about living in harmony with your greatest and highest potential. Now, the science of terrain. Let's dig in a little bit. Let's get into the actual biology, because the science of terrain is not fringe. It's fascinating, and I think you will understand and get and resonate that it is a common sense kind of model. It's just scattered across many disciplines, and they rarely talk to each other. That's the problem. People get in silos all over the place. But this does show up, terrain does show up in immunology, mitochondrial biology, nutritional biochemistry, the microbiome, of course, and even bioelectricity.

16:47Darin Olien:Now, a little bit on bioelectricity and cellular voltage. Every cell in your body operates at a specific electrical voltage. This is true. What researchers call the transmembrane potential, healthy cells. Healthy cells maintaining voltage approximately of negative 70 millivolts to 90 millivolts. Cancer cells have been consistently measured as well as voltages of very low, negative 15 to negative 20 millivolts over and over again. Again, this is not metaphysical. This is basic cellular biology. Nobel Prize-winning researcher Otto Warburg in the 1930s established that cancer cells function in low-voltage, low-oxygen environments.

17:39Warburg found that cancer thrives in an environment, the terrain, where cell respiration is impaired. And then you have many, a lot of research around this, but one amazing guy that I had on my podcast years ago, Dr.

17:56Darin Olien:Jerry Tennant, he wrote a book called Healing is Voltage, demonstrates that chronic disease states correlate consistently with low cellular voltage. And the restoration voltage through nutrition, minerals, sleep, environment factors correlates precisely with increasing voltage numbers. And now let's add into the microbiome, the terrain on its own. We know more and more of the microbiome. One of the greatest scientific revolutions of the past two decades have been for us to understand the human microbiome. and we're learning like crazy. We now know that the human body contains approximately 38 trillion microbial cells.

18:44That's 38 trillion, roughly equal to or slightly exceeding the number of human cells. These microbes are not invaders.

18:54Darin Olien:They're integral, balanced for us, for immune function, neurotransmitter production, vitamin synthesis, and metabolic health. Research published in journals including Cell, Nature, and Science have transformed our understanding of and with the state of our microbiome as the terrain. It determines, in large part, how you respond to pathogens based on your terrain of your microbiome. A landmark 2016 study published in Cell Host and Microbe demonstrated that gut microbiome composition directly influences susceptibility to respiratory viral infections, including influenza. The terrain of the gut shapes the immune response in the lungs.

19:45Again, if we reduce things down and we don't understand the big picture of health, we're losing the capacity of understanding this incredible nature that flows through us. This is interconnected with the terrain that Beshemp was also pointing us towards. A 2021 study in Nature found that individuals with depleted microbiome diversity showed significant impairment of immune response to COVID-19, for example. While those with robust microbiome diversity, and I'll tell you how to get there, showed stronger immune resilience regardless of age. The immune system is the terrain's army. So here's something critical that the germ theory often obscures.

20:34Exposure to pathogens does not automatically mean disease. This is well established in immunology. Studies of household transmission of respiratory viruses consistently showed that roughly 40 to 60 percent of exposed individuals do not even become symptomatic, even with direct exposure. Why? Because their environment, their immune system, their nutritional status, their stress or lower stress, their sleep quality, the overall stress load. This determined the outcome. The pathogen was present. The terrain controlled the result. Also, a 2020 meta-analysis published in Nutrients found that vitamin D deficiency was among the strongest predictors of COVID-19.

21:29severity and the mortality of that expression. Stronger than any core morbidities, vitamin D is not a pharmaceutical drug. It is something essential to our health. It's a terrain factor. When you have vitamin D floating throughout your body, you are infinitely more resilient to disease. Now here comes inflammation. This means, and let me just say, what if the body never makes a mistake? What if it always has an intelligence? So chronic low-grade inflammation, chronic, and it's sitting around for a while, showed that researchers called this inflammaging. That's right, they called it inflammaging, is the single common thread running through nearly every major chronic disease, from cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, and autoimmune conditions.

22:24This inflammation is not caused by a specific germ. It is a terrain state driven largely by diet, gut dysbiosis, toxic burden, oxidative stress, sleep deprivation, chronic psychological stress, and then published research in journals, including The Lancet and JAMA, has consistently identified these terrain factors as primary drivers of modern disease burden. So now come into mitochondria function, the cellular power plant. Your mitochondria are the energy factories of your cells. They produce ATP, the currency of cellular energy, but they also regulate cellular voltage. I had another podcast talking about the cellular voltage, the flow of energy, the power of the ATP beyond just a powerhouse.

23:16They also are behind immune signaling, apoptosis, which is programmed cellular death, which is very necessary for the body to get rid of damaged cells. Research by Dr. Douglas Wallace at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and others have established that the mitochondrial dysfunction underlies a wide spectrum of chronic diseases, and mitochondrial health is profoundly terrain dependent. It is shaped by the nutrient availability of things like CoQ10, magnesium, B vitamins, omega-3s, as well as oxygen, light exposure, movement, and toxic burden. Are you starting to get it? All of these things contribute to your terrain, your body's ability to adapt and not just be hammered by bacteria and germs, but to be able to fight them, keep them at bay.

24:14When your mitochondria is thriving, your terrain is resilient. When they're depleted, your terrain collapses. And then the pathogens gain the upper hand and take over. Okay, so we've established that the terrain is real, it's measurable, it's scientifically supported, and it's been undersold. Now, what do we do with this? Here are the pillars of terrain optimization. This is what you've been waiting for. These are not just supplements that I'm trying to sell or anyone else. These are fundamental biological inputs that you can do every day for your body, for your health, for your health of wealth.

24:53And the research absolutely supports them. Mineralization, the electrical foundation, which is why I love, it's not a plug, but it's why I love monovitality and the amount of minerals, electrolytes that are in there. All electrolytes, minerals are in whole foods, whole plants. Your body runs on these minerals, these magnesiums and potassium, sodium, calcium, zinc, selenium, iodine, trace minerals. These are cofactors for thousands of enzymatic reactions in your body. They maintain also, just like a battery, they maintain cellular voltage. They regulate the nervous system. They build immune proteins in response.

25:39Most people in the modern world are significantly deficient in one major one, that's magnesium. Due to soil depletion, food processing, you know this, and chronic stress, research published in Nutrients in 2018 found that magnesium deficiency impairs more than 300 enzymatic functions and is associated with virtually every inflammatory disease state. Wow, right? Eat a mineral-dense diet, high amounts of leafy greens, sea vegetables, seeds, nuts, mineral-rich water. Consider full-spectrum trace mineral supplements. Get your levels tested so you know where you're at. Now the next one.

26:22Darin Olien:Okay, everybody. Are you ready to upgrade your operating system? I know I am. I'm always game to do that. Not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. That's what we're doing over at Super Life Patreon. This isn't just behind-the-scenes membership. It's a global experiment in conscious living that I am connected to, committed with, in every cell of my body. Each week, you'll get exclusive access to deeper podcast conversations, extended interviews, voice notes from the road of me personally, personal reflections, behind-the-scenes footage, community wellness challenges, and even surprise drop-ins that I no longer do on social media because I don't really dig it anymore.

27:15Darin Olien:We're talking decentralized healing, reclaiming sovereignty, ancient wisdom meets future tech, and a tribe of people with you walking the path. If you love this podcast, the Patreon is where we go deeper, get more real, and reclaim our power together. Join us at patreon.com forward slash Darren Olean. That's Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com forward slash Darren Olin, D-A-R-I-N-O-L-I-E-N. Join the movement, support the mission. Let's rise together. Microbiome. Okay, we can do a lot here. We can support the microbiome, the immune system of our body and so many other functions. Your gut microbiome is the first line of immune defense.

28:07Research from the Human Microbiome Project and the American Gut Project consistently shows that what dietary fiber diversity is the single strongest predictor of microbiome diversity and resilience. So what do you do? Strive to eat more plants. Eat 30 plus different plants every week. Try different ones. Fermented foods. Kemp tree. Sauerkraut. Kefir. Miso. So introduce live beneficial organisms. Increase the diversity. Increase the soluble and insoluble fiber. Increase your plant diversity. Avoid unnecessary antibiotics when you don't need it. They overprescribe that all the time, which can eliminate, devastate your microbiome diversity.

28:54The research here is overwhelming and not ambiguous at all. The other thing you can do is restore your voltage. What can you do? Get some light. Get some photons from the sun. Don't be afraid. Grounding. Sleep. Cellular voltage is restored through some of the most fundamental natural inputs. Sunlight. Grounding to the earth. Deep sleep. Research published in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health found that direct skin contact with the earth, grounding or earthing, rapidly reduces inflammation markers and oxidative stress. Why wouldn't you do that? You can. Easy. The mechanism is electron transfer.

29:34The Earth's surface carries a negative electrical change that donates electrons to the body and neutralizes free radicals. That's right. Morning sunlight exposure, particularly in the first hour after sunrise. Get your ass out. Go for a walk. Run your dogs. Move around. Put your feet on the ground. Boom, boom, boom. You've done so much for your electrical production of your body because it regulates your circadian biology, which is extremely important. It turns on and governs the immune timing, cortisol rhythm, melatonin production. Sleep is when your body rebuilds. During deep sleep, the glymphatic system, that's right, the glymphatic system, the brain's lymphatic network, flushes toxins and metabolic waste.

30:24A single night of poor sleep is measurable. How it impairs the natural killer cells of your body. Protect your sleep as if your life depends on it every day. Find that window where you can always try to go to sleep at the same time and get that seven to nine hours. Detoxification is a thing because every day your body is doing this. It's exposed to thousands now. unfortunately of synthetic compounds in your water, air, food, personal care, household materials, all this stuff, endocrine disruptors, mitochondria toxins, xenoestrogens, all of this stuff. You've heard me talk about this, but there's things you can do because research published in the Environmental Health Perspectives and other peer-reviewed journals documents the pervasive presence of toxins.

31:14All of these things, heavy metals, pesticides, plasticizers in the human tissue are associated with chronic disease states. Support your body's natural detox pathways, saunas, sweating, hydration, clean water, cruciferous vegetables, broccoli sprouts, you name it. Upregulate detox enzymes like NRF2 pathways, periodic fasting, intermittent fasting, activates autophagy, clears the cells. So another pillar, this is a big one as well, stress physiology, the terrain destroyer. Chronic psychological stress is arguably the most underestimated terrain destroyer. It increases cortisol, the primary stress hormone, when chronic elevated suppressed immune function.