 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. All right, in this episode of Mind Pump, I got the opportunity to interview a very intelligent individual, Dr. Zach Bush. He's a triple board certified physician, which for those of you in medicine, you know just how rare that is. He's an expert on leaky gut and on digestion. We have a great conversation in this episode about some of the things that may be causing issues with your gut and why that's a big deal and what you can do about it. Also, this month we are running a promotion. A promotion, you say? Enroll in any of our bundles, any of our bundles including our super bundle, which is one year of exercise programming. In other words, if you enroll in the bundle, you've got all of 2008 planned out for you. You know what exercise is to do, when to do them. You know the tempo, the reps, you have exercise video demos. I mean it's all set up for you. Different phases, you'll be changing your workouts as you go along. The super bundle, if you enroll in that or any of our other bundles, you will get a free Mind Pump t-shirt. We're gonna be doing this for the entire month of January. People love our shirts for whatever reason. It's a legit shirt. It is. You gotta highlight that for me. It is, and for whatever reason, we do promotions like this, people go crazy. So I can't guarantee we'll be able to do this for the entire month of January because we have kind of a limited supply, but it is a massive promotion. Again, enroll in any of our maps, bundles, and get a free t-shirt. For more information on that, you can go to mindpumpmedia.com and without any further ado, here I am interviewing the very intelligent Dr. Zach Bush. Our audience, quite a few of them came to our show to listen to us about building muscle burning body fat, but we do talk a lot about the wellness aspect of it. And in particular, in the whole muscle building fat burning world, nobody pays attention to that and the products that people are advertised and given and that take for the workouts and stuff are just horrible for health and particular gut health. And like I was saying, I started using Restore because it was recommended to me by Dr. Mercola when we had interviewed him and profound benefits with my own personal gut health. It's pretty amazing, pretty amazing stuff. So before we get into that, like if you wouldn't mind telling our audience a little bit about your background, how you started and what got you to where you're at now. Yeah, that's a very nonlinear pathway as I suppose almost everybody's life is, but I started in medical school just planning to be a family medicine doctor and really know what I was getting into and then discovered research along the way and got really passionate about kind of being a part of developing and discovering stuff we hadn't known yet. And so it kind of became a passion of mine. And so I finished medical school and with some research in the brain and how it responds to our hormones and modulates our mood and leads to mood disorders. And during that time, decided I was gonna probably pursue the hormone medicine which is endocrinology as a long-term specialty. So I came out to the University of Virginia and did a three-year residency in internal medicine which is kind of the foundation of all adult medicine. So you help run everything from the bone marrow transplant in cancer center all the way to the acute cardiac heart stuff to the general medicine wards where you see a lot of pneumonia and infectious disease and complications of diabetes and the like. And so that was kind of the journey overall. And then once I finished my subspecialty in internal medicine, I did a teaching year at the University of Virginia and spent a year teaching medical school students and residents kind of how to go about pursuing that pathway of academic medicine and really pursuit of Western medicine, allopathic, very pharmaceutical-minded setting and then moved on to endocrinology and metabolism for a few years and did research in cancer and tumor genesis and how tumors form and how they kill themselves and developed some chemotherapy from vitamin A compounds that I was working with at the University of Virginia. And during that time, I was starting to realize that nutrition was starting to come out in the literature as perhaps more powerful than a drug would come up within a cancer realm. And so started to really dive into nutrition for the first time in a 17-year career of pursuit of medicine and really was dumbfounded at what I was seeing out of the laboratory microscope as to kind of how things would change if it just changed the nutrient environment around the cells and everything else. So got into nutrition big and left academia in 2010 to start a nutrition center for a reversing product disease and that became Revelation Health Center and that was in Virginia. And spent a couple of years there really intensively teaching and treating patients with intense medical and nutritional regimens for chronic disease and found that it was a pretty remarkable subset of these that no matter how healthy the food we fed them, they were actually getting worse, not better. And we find this a lot in the elite athletes as well as the chronically ill is that, man, here you are eating like top 1% of the world and you've got massive amount of nutrient availability, supplementation coming out the wazoo and there's just so much inflammation and distress and the vast majority of that manifests in the gut and in the neurologic system. And so it can be everything from kind of irritable bowel syndrome, lots of gassiness, it can be chronic kidney stress. A lot of bodybuilders I've worked with over time have got chronic kidney issues going on and the like. So that kind of kept pushing me down the avenue of well what is the secret then if it's not nutrition, if it's not loading the body with nutrients, what's the magical or what's defining health? And that avenue took us down this extraordinary story away from human health and right into the bacteria and the fungi. It turns out that bacteria and fungi seem to be regulating far more than the actual human system does to regulate our genomics, what genes turn on, which proteins we build in our body, which what kind of health we are able to manifest. And so that journey took us into the last seven years of my life. So we'll get into that further with some bacterial journey if you want. Yeah, so let's take a step back for a second. So you had people who would come to you who were sick, whether it be what chronic disease like diabetes, for example, and you would change their diets completely. And what you're saying is there was a large subset that just wouldn't improve at all. Yeah, there was a subset that would immediately improve and get better and would be a celebration. There was then a contingent, maybe third, that would start to get a little bit better, but then plateau and never reach any sort of real health goal. And then there was a third that seemed to actually be getting worse symptomatically rather than better. And that was the challenge that really drove me to ask the questions that led us down our pathway to the bacteria, this category of people that were really being compliant. And you see, there's a lot of doctors where we tell our patients to do something. They go home and do it and they come back and they say it didn't work. And so our immediate assumption is they didn't do what we asked them to do. And so we blame them. We act like they're somehow not doing enough. They're not working hard enough to get this thing to work or whatever it is. So anyway, I started to trust my patients and come to realize, you know what? They're doing exactly what I'm asking them to and they're getting worse. So what can that be? And at this point, you started identifying that it had to do with the bacteria that was in their gut or that makes up their microbiome? Well, at this point, we started asking questions about maybe there's a problem with the food. Maybe there's something wrong in the plants. Is there something about kale that we're growing today that's causing people to bloat and have all these inflammatory reactions to one of the powerful superfoods on the planet? And I was doing a lot of kale juicing and all this stuff. And seeing patients' inflammation markers go up, not down. And that really led us down the question of, well, what's in the plants? Which of course led us to the next question, well, what's in the soil? And it was during that journey in the soil science that I discovered a molecule for myself. It's certainly an old molecule. It's been seen many times in human history, but it's kind of a young coal. It's basically fossil soil that's been in the ground for about 50 million years. And it's largely composed of these carbon snowflake-like molecules, each one a little bit different than the next. And just by coincidence, that family of molecules looked a heck of a lot like the chemotherapy I'd been working with. And so it was an aha moment that, wow, we've been looking to medicine, or rather looking to our plants for medicine for thousands of years. What if we start looking to the soil? And so what we found was that it was the bacteria in the fungi in the soil that was making this extraordinary family of molecules. And that started to help close the loop on how come the entire population has gotten so flip and sick. I mean, it's just, you can't find a kid now that doesn't have a diagnosis. 46% of our children under the age of 12 have a chronic disease. And so it's just such a sick population. All of us have some sort of thing, whether it's migraines and chronic kidney issues, hypertension, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, poor sleep quality, anxiety, major depression. These things have just become so prevalent in the society. And when you start to look at this secret of the bacteria, you start to realize, wow, we've really done the damage by losing the bacterial biome. And we've done that largely through antibiotic use, our food crops. The main antibiotic on the planet is this thing called glyphosate. Oh, roundup. It's kind of a roundup. Oh yeah, right. And a lot of, I was just about to ask you that because I know how prevalent the use of glyphosates are in worldwide crops, but especially here in the US and it is true that glyphosates, and correct me if I'm wrong, that glyphosates don't necessarily interact with human cells. I mean, you consume and it comes right out. But the pathway by which glyphosates work, I believe it's called the shikamadi, if I'm not mistaken, pathway, that's present in bacteria as well, that particular pathway. So we're damaging. Okay, so by spraying these all over the soil, we're damaging the bacteria that you're saying is so important in the formation of things that are important for the health of our plants and then ourselves. Is that play one of the biggest roles? Yeah, so the antibiotic effect, the way it kills bacteria and fungi and plants, and the reason it's such a potent herbicide or weed killer or plant killer, is that it blacks that shikamadi pathway that you mentioned there. And that's an enzyme pathway that makes the proteins that are essential for the human body to function. And some of those are essential amino acids, alanine, tryptophan, phenylalanine, tryptophan, tyrosine. These guys are made by the shikamadi pathway and those are much like the alphabet. We've got 26 letters in the English alphabet that allows us to spell 200,000 words. Same way we've got 26 amino acid building blocks that help us build 200,000 proteins. And the valves, if you will, the most critical eight of those 26 letters are the essential amino acids. Those are ones the human body's not capable of making on its own and those are made to the shikamadi pathway. And so we've now sprayed a chemical at the rate of two billion kilograms or 4.5 billion pounds a year into our soils and it killed the ability of the soil and the plants to make the essential amino acid. So we're missing the valves in our alphabet to build a healthy human body. And so we're literally truncating the ability to put those pieces together to create a fluid alphabet to create a fluid vocabulary of proteins and superstructure of the body. And this is why we've seen such a massive collapse of the human system. But it's also compounded by the fact that while it's diminishing the ability of bacteria to make those essential amino acids, those medicinals of the food, it's also killing the bacteria. So we're losing this massive ecosystem so quickly. Now, I fear that we've probably had math extinction on a lot of species that we'll never know existed and we'll never recover on the planet. So we've been so cavalier with the antibiotic use, not just in our crops with glyphosate, but also in our meat crops. And so you take a look at the cattle industry but the worst is the pork industry and then of course by the granddaddy of mall of the chicken industry. And so the poultry industry, pork and cows, they're using about four times more antibiotic than all the humans combined. And so we're just pumping in enormous amount of antibiotic in those animals in a very short lifespan, one and a half years for a cow or a pig. And for the chicken, you're looking at just six weeks being pounded with all these antibiotics. So just an extraordinary amount of these chemicals and drugs in our environment led to this huge collapse in the ecosystem, which means that our soil and plants no longer have these complex carbon-based snowflakes that we discovered in 2012. And that's starting to look like a big problem. So you got a problem because you can't deliver nutrients to the plants. You got a problem because you're killing the bacteria themselves. Now we have a huge problem because our soils, plants and our intestinal lining itself is not being reinforced by these complex carbon molecules that do cell-cell signaling or cell communication across the human system. Explain that for a second. When you say cell-cell communication and how this impacts the human body in particular of the gut, why is that important that cell-to-cell communication and what happens when we lose that? Is that the cause of some of the inflammation that we're getting in our gut? That's exactly right, yeah. So a couple of things are happening simultaneously. When you lose communication, you lose the ability to repair the cell. And so cellular repair and all of our mechanisms to kill that cell in case it becomes something like a cancer cell or something like that. As we start to lose the cell-cell communication, we lose the consciousness of the single cell and it starts either replicating inappropriately as you'd seen cancer or it just sits stagnant and is not doing it cellular repair. So we get this old pattern of cells that are just not turning over or turning over too slowly or are turning into pre-cancerous cells or cancer cells. So that is largely happening to this breakdown in communication that's happening across the system. One of the important things that communication does at the cellular level is it's turning on your DNA to make proteins. And what we're seeing is a sluggish protein synthesis from the cells, which means that as they're damaged by chemicals like Roundup. And in fact, Monsanto has been saying for a long time that it doesn't directly hurt human cells, but we're actually showing the opposite in our lab. We're showing it to get direct Roundup effect on the human gut and it falls apart very quickly. It's damaging the Velcro between the cells. And so this huge coherent membrane suddenly collapses. And as that collapses, you get overwhelming introduction of material for your gut lining into your immune system, which sits right behind the gut. That's fascinating because we recently had a guest on our show who explained how when you eat something, it's not inside your body until your body basically absorbs it until it gets to the right part. Your gut is permeable and you absorb the right nutrients or whatever, but if that permeability is thrown off, you're basically exposing your body to whatever toxins or chemicals or whatever's in the food. Even things that may not necessarily be bad for you like complex proteins, but they may be getting absorbed at the wrong parts of the body. And so you develop immune reactions and all kinds of crazy things start to happen. And this can happen all the way up to the blood brain barrier if I'm not mistaken, is this correct? Yeah, you're spot on there. Yeah, you can imagine the surface area of your gut starts with your nose and sinuses and goes all the way to the rectum there. So you got your esophagus, your stomach, your small intestines, large intestines all the way down to the colon, end of the colon there. And so you've got that huge surface area which measures somewhere around two tennis courts and surface area is this massive membrane. It's made up of over a trillion cells that are all tied together by these tiny little velcros, velcro proteins. And when we're lacking the bacteria, we don't make that velcro protein effectively. And so we're sluggish to respond to this direct injury to the velcro and so that falls apart. And as soon as the gut lining starts to fall apart, like you say, you get a cascading effect across the system where the kidney tube will stop clearing toxin and have a hard time holding on to proteins. You start to have protein leaks. We have a direct entry to that blood-brain barrier. So everything in the bloodstream starts to overwhelm the neurologic system. You can get brain fog, you can get poor sleep quality, poor sex drive, the whole works. And so that's kind of the pattern that we're seeing clinically. Those are the leading causes of complaints in physicians' offices these days. And it looks to be all coming from this one phenomenon of losing our barrier systems, losing these healthy boundaries from the outside world into our immune system, from our bloodstream into our brain, from our blood and the kidney tubules. All these barrier systems are collapsing under the pressure of the roundup. In the recent past, I'd say probably the last maybe 15 years or so, you would hear, quote unquote, wellness experts talk about this and talk about things like leaky gut syndrome. That was a term that was thrown around a while and it was laughed at. And it seems like science is starting to prove some of these things to be true. Now, when you have someone like yourself who you're a triple board certified physician, you have a science background, so you're not just some wellness blogger. And now you're talking about some of the dangers of products like or chemicals like glyphosates. Are you getting pushback? Like are they saying, are you getting letters and stuff to stop talking about this stuff? Because you're not talking about tiny companies. These are massive organizations that control or tied to the entire food supply. Yeah, that was a very powerful group politically for sure. And the answer is we're not getting direct communication from them. I think that there's concern to validate us by addressing us. So right now we're getting the ignores syndrome here, but we're getting the word out broadly now. So I think they're always calculating not just Monsanto, but it's every chemical company in the world now makes glyphosate. And so Monsanto was the company that kind of patented round up and took it for 30 years, but then 2007 it came off patent and now all five of the big chemical companies in the US and actually the vast majority of glyphosate made on the marketplace today is made in China. And so we have chemical companies all over the world that are competing for that industry. I think they feel a little bit untouchable at this point. So I don't think they're terribly concerned about truth. We've actually had a lot of truth about the dangers of round up for many years and it hasn't affected public opinion yet. But I think that my hope is that programs like yours, this is a pretty big game shift for bloggers and podcasters across the world from every different mindset and specialty starting to talk about probably the single biggest chemical problem we have on the planet, that's what's gonna change the system, not one doctor, not one science group, but ultimately the consumer demanding that they find out what the heck's in our food. And we're one of the few developed countries that haven't passed legislation to demand that we start labeling our food. No, I think a lot of, it's clear, it's pretty obvious that we're in the middle of a health epidemic, but I think mistakenly people believe it started with the obesity epidemic, which, you know, right around the 70s, I'd say 60, maybe 70s, 80s, or we started to see that, you know, the obesity epidemic starts to take off. However, farming practices fundamentally changed much way before that. I think probably, when did they start using nitrates in the soils and were we able to kind of strip the soil? Was that 1940s? Yeah, right after World War II, yeah, we started going to the petroleum-based compounds, and so we started using oil and fossil fuels as a source for nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus to get it. And it actually became known as the Green Revolution in the 1950s and 60s, because they found out they're spraying all this nitrogen and phosphorus from oil onto our crops, and everything turned green. We suddenly had like these burdened fields just a decade previous been completely dead. You remember the Dust Bowl stories that came out in 1930s and everything? We had completely killed the top soil in the United States through poor farming practices in the early 1900s, and that led to the Dust Bowl, and then instead of recovering that with good soil practice, we just started spraying these simple resources, the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium on there, and we got green crops, but what we weren't growing is nutrient-dense food. As you can imagine, good soil would have manganese and selenium, and all these millions of trace minerals in there that would be fueling the bacteria and the fungi and the soil that would feed that to the plants, and the plants would then sequester those nutrients and feed them to the bacteria of our gut, and then those bacteria would in turn liberate those nutrients and feed them to our systems so we could build strong bones, strong muscles, strong mind, and that whole system started to collapse as we started to increasingly depend on these chemical farming practices. Obviously what we got out of that was a bunch of weak plants. You don't feed your body well, your immune system goes weak, same thing with that plant, and so we started developing all these diseases for the plant, but the pests would come in, they'd develop viruses, they would develop fungi problems, they'd have all these invasive issues going on, and then of course the weeds would start to move in because these were unhealthy crops. And instead of saying, wow, we should really fundamentally fix this problem, we just turned to the chemical companies again, they said no problem, we'll give you more pesticide chemicals, more herbicide chemicals, and we'll keep things at bay for you. And so we've been in a chemical warfare state, not just with Western medicine against the human body, but in Western agriculture we've been in, for 80 years now fighting the good fight against nature, against the ecosystem. Now, hearing that the soil and the plants are not as nutrient dense, and hearing about how glyphosates reduce the production or prevent the production of key amino acids from either bacteria and the plants themselves, can someone just take nutrient supplements and amino acids and correct that, or is it go much deeper than that? Yeah, it's going quite a bit deeper than that. So certainly getting amino acids into the food chain is a very important piece, and it's a supplementation that can be helpful. But one interesting thing about supplementation is when you start taking single amino acids, you can quickly overwhelm the bacterial system that's supposed to be processing those amino acids. And so I think that it's really tricky to balance an amino acid intake if you have inadequate protein. I'm sorry, inadequate bacteria to handle that protein. And so we see this all the time in the kind of elite athlete and bodybuilder fitness environment where you have huge amounts of irritable bowel syndrome and gas and bloating and chronic loose stools versus constipation and all this stuff going on. And that's largely because we're forcing huge amounts of protein and amino acids into an environment that's inherently devoid of a lot of the bacteria that are necessary to process that intense data or that intense nutrient source. And so I think what we see again and again, when you add back in these carbon molecules made by the bacterium, you get this incredible burst of intelligence back at the gut lining. And so not only is the bacteria starting to proliferate and diversify the carbon molecules that are made by the healthy soils and the healthy gut, they start actually increasing the protein synthesis of those Velcro-like tight junctions that hold the entire gut lining and the blood vessels all together. And so as you increase the density of that Velcro and you get that intelligent membrane back, then suddenly the amino acids can be handled. They can be kept on the correct side of the gut until the bacteria process them, make them bioavailable. They can be trafficked intelligently across that gut membrane and everything else. And so to have a chemical like glyphosate that both wipes out our bacteria and destroys that Velcro, we're just in constant overwhelm all the time. Now you back out of that, you start to give back to all of these carbon molecules, you don't have to supplement with amino acids because your bacteria are now extracting those from all kinds of food sources. And when they can't get it from the food sources, they can make it themselves. And so it's very cool that the bacteria actually have the chikamate pathway. And so they can make the essential amino acids for us even if your food does not. So it's a really beautiful world that we're starting to realize, man, these bacteria and fungi, when they're taking care of us, we're unbeatable. We cannot miss, we cannot be deficient in any nutrient because the bacteria and fungi can produce whatever is needed. And so that's, I think the magic that we experienced for thousands of years was not only was there intelligence and incredible nutrient medicinal quality to our food, there was incredible intelligence and medicinal quality to the bacteria and fungi that were growing within our guts and on our skin. And in every office of the body, we were covered with this biome that was just brilliant. Now we're seeing the opposite where 47% of our children are being born sterile by C-section, they never even see the mom's vaginal canal where they would inherit the bacteria that would help protect them. So they're born sterile, they adopt the hospital's bacteria for instead of mom's for, then they're challenged for their whole life. Immediately they started to colic or poor sleep quality and poor digestive. Then they started getting ear infections. They get hit by antibiotics and get further sterilized. And so it's just this chronic long-term battle for most children now to maintain any sort of ecosystem. I can't help but comment that it sounds so overwhelming, like all these things that we are doing to ourselves are hurting us. What are some ways we can protect ourselves? I wanted to talk about these carbon molecules you were bringing up, but before I do, can people protect themselves a little bit by doing things like eating organic, non-processed type foods? Does that make a difference? Does that make enough of a difference to help? It does start moving the needle in the right direction for sure. So organic food is gonna have a lower amount of the chemical residues that round up on it than your conventionally grown crop. However, unfortunately, we've dumped enough roundup into our environment that we've got about 75% of our rainfall, about 75% of the air samples that are taken in areas where there's crops grown contaminated. And so we're literally raining on our crops no matter where we grow them with roundup. And so it's very difficult at this stage within the United States to get away from that chemical residue, that chemical phenomenon. But we're certainly voting with our dollars to lessen the use of roundup. And I'm very hopeful that with enough information, the consumer is gonna radically change the demand, you know, the cessation of that spraying. The good news is Mother Earth looks like it can clean it up. Like the earth, actually the bacteria and fungi are pretty good at decontaminating roundup of who would just stop spraying it. It looks like within 30 to 50 years, we might be able to get their levels back down below where they're doing damage. So they can recover. 30 to 50 years, son of a bitch. We've done a number, haven't we? Yeah, we've left a mark for sure. We've got quite a legacy. So yeah, and I've told people this before too, you know, eating organic doesn't mean you won't have, you know, residues from these chemicals. You'll just have lower amounts. So it's almost impossible to get away from now. You've referenced a couple of times during this episode, you're talking about these carbon molecules that you've identified that are important in cell signaling. Would you mind getting a little deeper into that? Like what are these molecules and what do they do? And why don't we have them or as many of them as we used to? Sure. So you can imagine a compost pile where you throw a orange peel or any kind of carbon material from your garden back into the pile of your compost. And that's broken down very quickly in the soil. I mean, it's in 14 days. If you keep it aerated, everything's gonna return to a soil state. What's happening in that natural compost and it's happening in your garden or same thing happening in your gut. When you eat food, it's all gotta be composted down. You'll notice a healthy gut and whatever's coming out in the toilet never looks like what's on your plate. If it starts to where you have intact food and you're not getting digestion of the food and you're passing food that looks like digested, you know you've got massive depletion of gut material there. So composting is happening all the time in the bacteria and fungi around us. But it turns out that the carbon molecules are pretty specific to each species of bacteria and fungi. And so if you're lacking biodiversity and if your ecosystem has gone from a couple hundred thousand bacteria species down to maybe a couple hundred species, suddenly you're gonna have a whole different system of communication. You're gonna have a whole different system of protection that's really deficient across the board. And I think that's what we're looking at in today's guide. You're looking at a couple hundred species that are now become dominant whether it used to be tens of thousands of species dominant or at least in a balanced state. Now we're seeing this kind of weed-like overgrowth of the intestines. And so this family of carbon molecules is getting narrower and narrower in its vocabulary. And this is leading to a decrease in the cell cell signaling that we had mentioned earlier. And we're getting literally less instructions at the DNA level to build anything because much of that instruction doesn't come from the human cells. The instructions that build our body are actually coming from our environment. And so the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, all of this is coding and determining the behavior of our DNA. And it's increasingly looking like we can't get a clear signal of what to do at the DNA. We're not getting a robust response to any of that environmental stimulus or environmental communication because we're lacking that bacterial ecosystem that would create that wireless network. You can imagine this sort of like your cell phone. Your cell phone has this invisible wireless network that runs out to the nearest cell phone tower and is repeated all the way around the world at the speed of light and this amazing technology. However, if you're more than seven miles from that cell phone tower, suddenly you lose communication. Now, nothing happened to your cell. The cell phone is still completely functional. Nothing broke the computer. It still has the capacity to receive and transmit but it's just locked the wireless communication and it's now useless as a communication device. That's exactly the cell of your body. So the cell of your body has all the machinery to talk across systems, do cell repair, call in stem cells, call in the immune system. But if it loses that wireless network, boy, it just sits there stagnant, not sure what's going on. And so it can't update its software just like your cell phone starts to run slower. Errors start to happen and just starts dysfunction across the board. And so that's been the extraordinary journey in a clinic. It's 2012, we started to isolate these carbon molecules out of fossil soils that are 50 million years old. There was an ecosystem on the planet 50 million years ago that's just unrivaled today. And so we've been extracting these huge networks of carbon molecules, these massive wireless network out of these fossil soils and putting this into our patients. And it's literally redefined our understanding of health. It's pretty extraordinary for me as a research scientist to realize, wow, everything I ever studied in the lab, every single cell culture, all my understanding of cancer, all my understanding of cardiovascular disease, all of these things were determined. We created the model for how we thought these things were working in sterile petri dishes. We never took into consideration the incredible bacterial biome and fungi and viruses and their impact on these physiologies of those fundamental human health. So without some of these compounds, and we lose this ability for cells to communicate with each other, we basically lose our ability to heal ourselves. That's correct. That's it. So you're starting to see that we're living on a toxic planet and of course roundup is only one of the many causes you face of the day. So we're sitting on that toxic planet and then losing our entire system of defense, losing our system of repair and response, losing our system of regeneration through stem cell activity. We're just dialing down very quickly. And so you and many of your listeners are experiencing what everybody is, is man, we are spending so much money now doing damage control. We spend so much money on our supplements, on our food, on the water we drink, and we're spending more money on water than we're spending at this point. Really good quality water is more expensive than a bottle of wine. And so it's just extraordinary the cost that's going into fostering and supporting health on this toxic planet. Now, there's a product that you help make that replaces or provides you with some of these molecules that act as the cell towers, if you will. Would you mind getting into that a little bit? I've personally, I have no affiliation with your company. Don't make a dime off of talking about your product. And my listeners know that I've had my own battles with gut health. And more recently, my gut health is better than it's been in a long time. And there's a few things that I've done and one of the things that I've done that I haven't really talked a whole lot about, mainly because I wanted to be sure if this was part of the reason why I've been feeling better and I'm pretty sure it is, was using this product called Restore, which is not a probiotic. It's, what is it exactly? What is in Restore? What is it that I'm taking that's helping me feel so much better? Absolutely, yeah. So Restore is the first dietary supplement to really harness the communication capacity of these carbon molecules that we've been discussing. And so in that, the active ingredient is called pterohydride. And it's this family of complex carbon molecules that have now been put through kind of a catalyst process to get the hydrogen binding right again. So now you have carbon binding oxygen and hydrogen, and it's the release of that hydrogen ion that looks to be the big piece of the puzzle. So as these carbon molecules go into your gut and go across your gut system and your immune system and beyond, they're releasing and absorbing hydrogen at a very fast rate, probably a millionth of a second at which this transition happens. And so this is very much like a digital signal of hydrogen going out into the body that's carried by these huge carbon molecules, each one kind of having its niche within this communication chain. And so what you experienced when you started taking Restore was that within a few hours, you started making more protein along the gut lining. And so we've shown this again and again, small intestine and colon. As soon as Restore hits, you start to see an increased production of the ZO1. It's a protein that is coherent in that tight junction starts being produced very rapidly by the nucleus of all your cells that line your intestine. And so the Velcro just starts increasing very rapidly. Within a few hours, you've got 20, 30, 40% increase in your total body Velcro system going on. Within a few days, six days, it continues to improve and improve. Over that six day period, you now have this very robust system that is now resistant to Roundup. And so we've shown again and again that as you start adding Roundup, you destroy tight junctions. But if you have enough of these carbon molecules around, you actually become quite resistant to that injury. To the point where we've taken it now to 20,000 times the amount that you would typically see in your diet and you continue to do really profound tight junction control. So really a neat story that here is Mother Nature being destroyed as we speak by our chemical industry that's destroying her soils. And yet 50 million years ago, she planted the antidote to our insanity again in her soil. And so it's just a really cool story of grace, I think in the way that Mother Nature and this earth is designed for not just our blessings, but also designed for our insanity. It's pretty impressive. Yeah, because I noticed as I was taking it, it took, I really started to see improvements after about 30 to 60 days is when I really started to see improvements in my digestion and then as a result of that, from a performance standpoint, just I felt much better in the gym. I felt stronger. I felt like more energy, of course, because my gut is a lot healthier. So these again, this is basically, when I take this, I'm supplementing with things you're finding in ancient dirt and it's not bacteria, it's not probiotics, it's just helping myself communicate with each other. Are you guys conducting studies on this and what are you seeing in some of these studies? Are there any published that people can look up? Yeah, there's a number of peer review journal articles that have been published around these molecules and they used to restore to manage the roundup injury as well as the gluten injury. And so this whole phenomenon of gluten sensitivity also ties back to roundup. We would not have gluten sensitivity if we had no roundup in the diet. And so both of those have been published. You can find those on our website. Restore the number forlife.com, restoreforlife.com and go to the science page there. You'll see some of those peer review journal articles. We have clinical trials ongoing. Some of the neat things that we've seen was within two weeks of starting the product, the amount of glyphosate that you have in your body that's peeing out is reduced. And so you're getting less and less of that penetration of the chemical in the first place in your system. And so that's an exciting piece we weren't actually expecting. We knew we were combating glyphosate, but we had no idea we were gonna be able to actually reduce the amount of glyphosate that your body's seeing. And so those are some of the cool things, the bacterial communication network of dealing. In addition, we see this huge increase in glutathione. Glutathione is the main antioxidant that your body makes. And that is managing the inflammatory reaction to exercise, for example. So some 85% of the total antioxidant in your body is glutathione. We give the restore product and you'll see some, you know, 800% increase in glutathione being produced by that. We've got membrane cells there in the immune system. So over that first month that you were taking it, you got a huge reservoir built up of the antioxidant reservoir, got a huge reservoir of amino acids and essential nutrients built back up in the body and you really proliferated bacteria. And so it's not unusual over that first month to see a real bulking of your stools where you're suddenly having a couple of bowel movements a day, much higher volume of the stools and soft, well-formed stools that are starting to like coil up in the bottom of the toilet and everything else is the volume associated with it. And that's because the bacteria are just proliferating like crazy. And that's what you wanna see is this huge biome boost. And what you're getting there is something completely different than the probiotics that you mentioned a couple of times. A probiotic is three species or seven species of bacteria that you take every day. And they're in copy at a massive number. So you might be taking 35 billion to 50 billion. There's even a couple on the market now that are bragging one trillion copies of the same bacterial species. Well, imagine now this huge ecosystem is something like the Costa Rican jungle or anything else out there. And you start to go from hundreds of thousand species to a state of probiotic use where you're suddenly taking three species at a trillion copies a day and it's just hammering this ecosystem into monoculture. And it's interesting to note that no clinical trials have ever been done to show any benefit to long-term probiotic use. All the probiotics studies that have ever been done, which are actually quite few and far between, but those few that have been done have only been done for a couple of weeks. And so I really have seen it in my own patients for decades that if you, with chronic use of probiotics, you certainly lose any benefit. But more importantly, you're probably losing bacterial diversity and the intrinsic complexity of the gut. Yeah, it's, I consider probiotics symptom care, but not really treating the root cause of what's going on. I myself use probiotics on and off because again, my gut issues, and I do notice a reduction in symptoms when I take them. But if I stop, everything goes back to where it was before. But anyhow, very, very fascinating conversation. I think our listeners are gonna enjoy a lot of what we talked about. We talked quite a bit about gut health and its importance in pretty much everything, but also in relationship to athletic performance and building muscle and burning body fat and some of the stuff that a lot of our listeners are really interested in. So I appreciate you coming on the show, Dr. Bush. Where can people find you? I appreciate you having us on the website www.restorethenumberforlife.com and you can also find out more about our clinics and such at ZachBushMD.com, Z-A-C-H-B-U-S-H.com, MD.com. Much appreciated, Dr. Bush. All right, thanks for having me on Vesta Health to all the listeners. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. 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