Dr. Zach Bush on “Gut Health and the Microbiome”
Zach Bush, M.D., discussed “Gut Health and the Microbiome” in a video interview with Neurohacker collective.
From the interview:
I’ve come to realize that there’s really no room in academia for us to call anything [00:27:00] a bad bacteria anymore or a bad fungi or a bad parasite. The reality is if a parasite shows up, Lyme disease being an example of this bacterial agent that can set up this parasitic relationship to blood cells and things like that. That spirochete in the bloodstream looks like the problem, but in fact, I believe that that spirochete is probably there as a last ditch effort to create some sort of normal metabolism in the soil of your body [00:27:30] because this is exactly what we see in organic gardening and everything else. If you go out into Virginia and you go take a rototiller and just clear a bunch of land, chop down the trees, rototill the soil, the first things that are going to pop up when you’ve just denuded that soil of its life is weeds.
Same thing in the human system. If we go and build a hospital and we try to sterilize the entire hospital, we wipe out the whole ecosystem with alcohols, ultraviolet light, radiation, we do everything known to [00:28:00] man to kill bacteria, well, then we’re going to just select for the most ridiculous weeds that are able to survive in any ludicrous situation. It’s not the weed being a bad guy there. The weed is actually trying to return life to the soil. You see this in the garden. If you let the weeds take over, they don’t dominate for very long. The weeds will take over the soil and then pretty soon you’ve got tulip poplar tree sprouts popping up. Then a couple weeks or months after that, you’ve got evergreen sprouts. Then if you let it go for two years, [00:28:30] the weeds are having to die back out and make room for the big ecosystem that’s taking back over.
That’s exactly what we’ve done with the antibiotic era. In the 1940s, we created penicillin. What is penicillin? It’s a secretion from bread mold. Here’s a mold or a fungi that’s making an antibacterial. Well, why would mold check the growth or push back bacteria? Because it’s trying to be in a cooperative relationship with the bacteria. Guess what the bacteria make? They make antifungals. [00:29:00] They make anti-yeasts. They make antivirals. They make anti-parasites. When we fix the terrain, we see all of these conditions dissolving very quickly not because the terrain is curing anything. It’s just the natural progression of the weeds get to back off when they’ve done their duty to bring nitrogen in and bring all the resources that were missing when you had denuded it. We started with penicillin. Then, of course, every decade since then we’ve had logarithmic increase in the number of antibiotics [00:29:30] on the market and the different techniques we use to kill bacteria.
We’re about five, six decades into this journey of killing bacteria in force through the medical environment. We plateaued as doctors back in the 1990s. We haven’t really increased the number of prescriptions in the United States since the mid-’90s. We prescribe an amazing 7.7 million pounds of antibiotics a year. That’s a pretty gross number. It equates to 833 prescriptions [00:30:00] per 1000 persons, 833 prescriptions per every 1000 persons in the US is how much antibiotic we prescribe. It’s literally impossible to distribute more antibiotic prescriptions than we do in the US. We saturated that market.
Now contrast to the antibiotics that we’re using in our food chain and it starts to pale in comparison. As of 2014, we were using somewhere around 30 million pounds, so a good four times more antibiotic in our [00:30:30] chickens, pigs, and cows and their raising right before we slaughter them. Of course, their feces is contaminated with, their urine’s contaminated with antibiotic, and their meat itself is impregnated with antibiotic. We have four times as much antibiotic going into the food chain as we do into the humans from their doctors.
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