Uncovering the Truth: How Misunderstanding Soil, Petroleum-Based Fertilizers, and Mineral Loss Are Ruining Our Health

Zach Bush, MD, Triple Board-Certified Physician

"We have literally built an entire economy, not just in the United States but throughout Western civilization, on healthcare. This has been a hidden reality for a long time. For thousands of years, the real control of populations has been around their food, and we find ourselves in that same, if not an amped-up version now, with 7 billion souls on the planet. It becomes very, very big business when you start to be able to control food, and we see that the ultimate political control is around the food chain and whether it delivers health or not.

I found myself in a massively reductionist state of understanding the world around us after spending 20 years studying medicine. In medicine, they try to convince you it's more complicated every year. There are a thousand different diseases and ten thousand different drugs to treat those diseases. But what started to deconstruct that world for me was the realization that the cancer I was studying under the microscope when I was devising chemotherapy was really the exact same process as an ulcer in the ankle of a diabetic patient. They sound totally disparate, but from a totally reductionist viewpoint, it's only one thing: chronic inflammation.

Inflammation is actually a normal biological response to an injury. If we have a chronic inflammatory epidemic in the world, which is a better definition than lots of diseases, then we must be overwhelming the immune system of the public for some reason at the same time.

Sometime between 1982 and 2000, we did something to the environment to totally decimate the protection system of our immune systems.

The big tip-off for me in this process came when I was developing chemotherapy and was deeply buried in the pharmaceutical model. Starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw diseases in what seemed like completely different organ systems go epidemic simultaneously. Autism is one example. In 1975, we had 1 in 5,000 children with autism. Today, the most recent data, just released three weeks ago, shows 1 in 36 children with an autism spectrum disorder.

For a long time, the big argument was that maybe we were just diagnosing and recognizing autism better, which is laughable if you've ever sat with an autistic child. Here’s a five-year-old who can't speak, can't make eye contact, hits his head on the wall for a few hours a day to console his terror. We didn’t miss that in 1975. This is not a diagnostic dilemma. The fastest acceleration in the growth pattern of this epidemic has happened between 2012 and today, where we’re seeing a doubling time every two to three years in the autism rate. At the current rate, we’ll see 1 in 3 children with autism by 2035.

In 1996, we saw a sudden rise in Alzheimer's dementia in women. Interestingly, Alzheimer's rates have not changed in males since that time. But in 1996, we also saw this uptick and consistent linear growth parallel to Alzheimer's tracking in women with Parkinson’s in males. We have species-specific, gender-specific, organ-specific diseases in the brain and peripheral cancers, all of which took off at the same time in the mid-1990s. Autoimmune diseases saw an unbelievable epidemic starting in the late 1990s. This suggested to me that maybe there weren’t a thousand different diseases because they all started going epidemic at once, begging the question: is there a root cause of all disease?

In the same way we’ve misunderstood the gut and what gut health means, we’ve misunderstood soil for the longest time. In the late 1880s and early 1900s, we started to change the way we farmed. Simple things happened, like switching from stone grinding to steel grinding for wheat, which allowed us to get more of the fiber out. This created higher gluten and refined carbohydrate content in our flour and wheat system. But the main issue was that we started to disrespect the importance of crop rotation and soil rest. This led to a massive death of the topsoil, which culminated in the Dust Bowl of the 1920s and 30s.

Only 80 years out from this event, where our ancestors were literally starving to death, we had soup lines that went for days across the entire Midwest. Houses were buried in dust from dead soil. During the Dust Bowl, we began to outsource our food production because local gardens and farms were lost. World War II then brought a massive boom to the petroleum industry, which led to the creation of chemical-based fertilizers.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s introduced the use of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) fertilizers. These chemicals turned plants green, but for the first time in human history, plants lacked the nutrients and medicine that should have been in our food. The plants became weak, just like humans, who lack nutrients and have compromised immune systems. Weak plants became prone to viruses and pests and couldn’t keep weeds at bay. The chemical industry responded with new chemical weed killers and pesticides, creating a co-dependent relationship with farmers who used these chemical fertilizers.

Western medicine’s first foothold came with penicillin, our first antibiotic, developed during World War II. In the same decade, we developed chemical fertilizers that acted as antibiotics for the soil, killing off essential bacteria and fungi. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is one of the most successful chemical warfare agents sold on the planet. We use four and a half billion pounds of glyphosate annually to treat the soils of the earth. Glyphosate was never patented as a weed killer, only as an antibiotic and anti-parasite.

Glyphosate blocks enzymes in soil bacteria, fungi, and plants. This pathway, called the shikimate pathway, is essential for making certain amino acids. Our bodies, composed of over 200,000 proteins, rely on these amino acids. However, humans only have 20,000 genes, much fewer than a flea’s 30,000 genes. This simplified genome means that the essential amino acids, which we cannot produce and must obtain from our food, are critical. Glyphosate disrupts this, blocking the production of these essential amino acids in plants.

Less than one-tenth of one percent of the glyphosate used hits a weed; the rest contaminates the soil and water system. We now see glyphosate in fossil aquifers and the Mississippi River, which collects over 80% of all the glyphosate in the US. Glyphosate evaporates into the air, contaminating rain. Recent studies show 75% of rain and air samples in the southern US contain glyphosate.

Glyphosate damages the protein structure that holds the gut lining together, leading to increased permeability or "leaky gut." This overwhelms the immune system. This issue extends to blood vessels, the blood-brain barrier, and kidney tubules, causing permeability and leading to conditions like autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and autoimmune diseases.

Identifying the problem is key to finding a solution. We’ve put chemicals into our food chain that hinder the ability to build a healthy human body and delete medicine from our food. We’re also losing our self-identity, leading to major depression, panic disorder, and spiritual and relationship crises. However, humans can change this trajectory by reconnecting with nature, adopting organic farming practices, and reducing our reliance on harmful chemicals.

Fortunately, bacteria and fungi can digest glyphosate if we stop spraying it. This healing process will take time, but the organic food movement’s growth offers hope. By making conscious choices, we can create a healthier, more regenerative future.

Despite the challenges, I see a bubbling up of human hope and healing. As people become more conscious and aware, the ripple effect will be quick and powerful. We must act now to ensure a sustainable future for our children and ourselves.

Thank you for watching this episode of After School. I’m Dr. Zach Bush, and I’m honored to be with a community that understands the fabric of our nature is the message and capacity for regeneration. After past extinction events, life has always rebounded with more diversity and resilience. We can be part of this new adaptation, creating a future that is more intelligent, diverse, and regenerative."