Are you aware of the fascinating link between soil health and your gut health? Today on the Land Food Life podcast, join me, Kara Kroger, as we take a deep look at how our agricultural practices are wreaking havoc on our soils and, indirectly, our gut health. However, don't lose heart; this episode isn't all about doom and gloom. Together, we'll explore six transformative principles that can rejuvenate our soil and gut health, enhancing nutrient absorption, and overall well-being.
Have you ever thought about the impact of industrial farming, pharmaceuticals, and unhealthy consumption patterns on your health? As we navigate this episode, we will delve into these concerning topics. I will share insights from my 25-year experience in regenerative agriculture, nutrition, and natural medicine. We'll discuss the power of nutrition in preventing and healing diseases, the negative impact of antibiotics and certain medications on our gut health, and the prevalence of health issues in Western civilizations due to unhealthy practices.
Finally, we'll draw fascinating comparisons between soil and the human gut as parallel digestive systems. We'll delve into the importance of consuming whole foods and understanding the gut-soil connection in maintaining health. To wrap it all up, I'll present six principles for soil and gut health, discussing how to encourage life in our gut, minimize disturbance, and the benefits of integrating livestock. So, are you ready to embark on a holistic journey to healthier living? Tune in to this eye-opening episode of the Land Food Life podcast.
Are you aware of the fascinating link between soil health and your gut health? Today on the Land Food Life podcast, join me, Kara Kroger, as we take a deep look at how our agricultural practices are wreaking havoc on our soils and, indirectly, our gut health. However, don't lose heart; this episode isn't all about doom and gloom. Together, we'll explore six transformative principles that can rejuvenate our soil and gut health, enhancing nutrient absorption, and overall well-being.
Have you ever thought about the impact of industrial farming, pharmaceuticals, and unhealthy consumption patterns on your health? As we navigate this episode, we will delve into these concerning topics. I will share insights from my 25-year experience in regenerative agriculture, nutrition, and natural medicine. We'll discuss the power of nutrition in preventing and healing diseases, the negative impact of antibiotics and certain medications on our gut health, and the prevalence of health issues in Western civilizations due to unhealthy practices.
Finally, we'll draw fascinating comparisons between soil and the human gut as parallel digestive systems. We'll delve into the importance of consuming whole foods and understanding the gut-soil connection in maintaining health. To wrap it all up, I'll present six principles for soil and gut health, discussing how to encourage life in our gut, minimize disturbance, and the benefits of integrating livestock. So, are you ready to embark on a holistic journey to healthier living? Tune in to this eye-opening episode of the Land Food Life podcast.
Welcome to the Land Food Life podcast. I'm your host, kara Kroger. In each episode, I'm dedicated to enlightening you with invaluable insights on how we can heal the land, our ecosystems and improve our overall health and well-being. My goal is to raise your awareness about caring for nature as a whole and the life-giving breathing soil beneath your feet, help you understand the origins and medicinal value of your food and embrace the interconnectedness of everything that surrounds you. With 25 years of combined experience, studying and coaching in regenerative agriculture, natural medicine, nutrition, cooking, mindfulness and cultivating abundance, I am thrilled to share the life-changing tools I've learned. By implementing these practices, you'll experience a regulated nervous system, a nourished body, ready to pursue your dreams with energy and vigor, the ability to collaborate with nature and a renewed sense of hope and purpose. I am so grateful to have you here today. If you like what you hear, please rate, review and help me spread this information to as many people as possible. Let's get started. Welcome, everybody. I am beside myself with excitement to be presenting the very first episode of the Land Food Life podcast. After six months of learning and planning, I am glad to be getting this endeavor off the ground and out into the airwaves. Yay, and I'm very glad you're here, and I really can't wait to learn more about your needs and provide content that's within the scope of this podcast that's going to help raise your quality of life, because that is what this podcast is all about is working together to raise the quality of life for all beings, helping you embody the ecology of human, animal and land health as one. So please don't hesitate to DM me on Instagram at Land Food Life, or you can go on over to the Land Food Life website at LandFoodLifecom and email me, and you can share stories or topics that you think are worth hearing more about. I am very curious to know more about you, so please reach out. I've chosen to make this podcast a combination of styles, and so every two weeks, I'm going to be releasing a combination of solo podcasts where I break down a topic in depth, and also interviews with amazing leaders who are working in the scope of the topics we cover in the Land Food Life podcast. So you can count on me to be releasing a podcast every two weeks in these two different formats, and we'll see how it goes. Maybe y'all will like these solo podcasts more than you like the interview podcast, or maybe you'll enjoy both and ideally we will listen to your needs and your desires and what people are liking the most and will choose to progress based on what y'all are enjoying the most.
Speaker 1:I chose a theme for the first six episodes of the Land Food Life podcast, and that theme is foundations. Some of y'all know that in the past I had a culinary business, when I was a chef and caterer that was called Foundation Culinary. I chose that name because I really do believe that food is the foundation of our health, but there's also a lot of other foundations that we need in our lives to be healthy. We will be focusing on foundational things that you can do to build health and regeneration in yourself and on the land, and that can happen by cultivating soil and gut health, which we're going to talk about today, or by using herbal medicine or counting on your community or using your spirituality for healing. It can also be achieved by actively doing daily detoxification practices to support your longevity and wellness, and also by creating new paradigms around abundance and wealth for both your personal and business success. These topics are a take on the three-legged stool that is often talked about in the agricultural philosophy of holistic management, which I have used extensively as a soil health educator and regenerative ag coach, and the three legs of this stool represent social, environmental and economic health as the foundation of sustainability and regeneration. Which is the seat of the stool and really the truest foundation giving everything on this planet life, is the soil. And not only does that foundation provide the resources for us to form into a body and to breathe and eat and play, but it's also a remarkable tonic to our health by way of the nutrients and the microbes within it that link humans and the soil together in inextricable ways, and mainly that is done by way of the gut and by way of the foods that we eat. You may be wondering can we really improve so many of these digestive issues that everyone is suffering not everybody, but a good majority of people, about 70% of people are suffering with? Can we improve those by changing the way our foods are grown and by changing the foods that we eat? And the reality is that more and more evidence is suggesting so.
Speaker 1:Today I'm going to tell you about many of the factors that are causing damage to our soils, mostly by way of our agricultural practices, and then I'm going to tell you about the six principles that can be used to create healthy, functioning, nutrient dense, microbial rich soil that will be able to easily infiltrate rainwater, purify the rainwater that comes in and goes into our ground, and surface water. Soil that stores moisture during periods of drought and flooding. That can create healthy, thriving ecosystems. I'm also going to tell you about the things that we consume some that are within our control and some that are not that can potentially damage the gut and its microbiome. And then I'm going to tell you about the six gut health principles that I designed in correlation with the six soil health principles that reflect the similarities between the soil and the gut as parallel digestive systems. These principles offer six foundational steps that you can follow to create gut health, for better digestion, nutrient absorption and neurotransmitter production, for balanced mental well-being, and also for elimination and to remove waste from the body. All of these things are going to help fuel and optimize all of our life's pursuits, and that is what we are all about here on the Land Food Life Podcast.
Speaker 1:So, whether you are a farmer who feels like you've hacked soil health but you've been completely neglecting your own personal health due to the time-consuming nature of agriculture and you're feeling the consequences of that at this point, or whether you're a consumer who's struggling with IBS, constipation, diarrhea, gas bloating or any of the other digestive issues that we experience regularly and you go to the grocery store and you feel like you don't know what to eat to feel your best or how to choose healthy foods, this podcast is going to be helpful to you. If you've been hearing about all the benefits of gut health but you don't understand quite what that means or how to get there, we are going to go over that today. So, whoever you are, you are going to learn something here that will be helpful for your health and the planet if you can put some of these principles I share into practice. This episode definitely contains a lot of information, but I've done my best to make sure it offers a lot of solutions that will be helpful to you and to make sure that you know how to apply what I'm sharing with you today. I have created a six-page heal the soil, heal the gut guide that lays out a step-by-step approach to putting all this information into practice. So if you'd like to receive that guide, go to LandFoodLifecom and sign up for my email list to get this free resource. It will be very helpful. You can put it on your fridge, you can share it with friends and ultimately learn ways that you can heal the soil and heal the gut. If you are ready to know the steps that you need to do this, I've got you covered, so let's go ahead and dive in.
Speaker 1:So, to begin, I'd like to start with a quote from the author Wendell Berry. He states there should be some profound resemblance between our treatment of our bodies and the treatment of the earth. We need to move our focus away from organs to organisms. So, in other words, mr Berry is talking about the big picture thinking versus small picture thinking, reductionist versus holistic or relational versus transactional. This type of thinking was common among many ancestral and indigenous ways of living, but was smothered out by colonialism and industry. So when we look at the bigger picture and think holistically, which is what I'm going to talk about today, we can make this shift from small picture back to big picture thinking and relating, and it's going to benefit us all. So currently there's a great deal of research that's focused on both the human gut and soil microbiomes, and this is helping us think more about organisms versus organs and opening up so many paths to how we can heal the earth and our bodies by looking at how all of this is interconnected.
Speaker 1:So just to give you a little insight into my background, since this is the first Land Food Life podcast, I want to tell you about how my journey began. So I came into regenerative agriculture after spending a number of years in Mexico, belize, guatemala and the US studying indigenous plant medicine, and then 18 years in the holistic health field as an herbalist, nutritionist and chef, running my own business. And then, upon being exposed to a philosophy of land regeneration called holistic management, while I was living and helping a friend restore her degraded pastures on her cattle ranch in Uvalde, texas, I began to witness the really profound similarities between human health, soil health and the fascinating microbes that move between us and that really inextricably link us to. And what was so cool about this is that this discovery quickly brought me full circle in my work as a nutritionist and an herbalist, because I realized that no human or animal on this planet was going to become healthy if our soils were not healthy. And, believe me, most of our soils are far from healthy, so, unsurprisingly, neither are most of our human gastrointestinal tracks. So I became sincerely inspired to do something about improving the state of our soils and agriculture to produce healthier food and, of course, healthier people. And I went back to school and I got my degree in agriculture at Texas State University and I've been working as a regenerative agriculture and holistic health coach to incorporate all my skills under one holistic umbrella and by focusing on soil health and particularly the health of the human gastrointestinal tract, we can heal humans, animals and the land. So that's what we're going to talk about today, and I'm sure you've all heard the Hippocrates quote let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. And after 25 years working in holistic health, I really cannot state how much I believe in this statement. So I've seen hundreds of people turn their health around by changing the foods that they eat, and nutrition, in my opinion, is undoubtedly the foundation of our health.
Speaker 1:However, as time moves forward, it has become harder and harder for us to gain the nutrients from the foods that we're eating, because the practices that we're using in this modern world are degrading the integrity of the soil, our food and, unfortunately, our guts. This is because our food is often depleted due to a lack of healthy soil, or many of the foods that we eat are ultra processed or refined, which we're going to talk about a little bit more as we move forward. And, additionally, we're getting to the place where we cannot properly digest the nutrients in our food because our GI tracts are degraded from the onslaught of chemicals that are in our foods and the pharmaceuticals that we take, and they're breaking down the microbiomes in our soils and also in our human and gastrointestinal tract. And we've made the diseased state our true state and we've given up our power of autonomy and agency to the allopathic doctrine of medicine. And allopathic medicine or Western medicine, of course, has been very helpful to us in many ways, but in my opinion it's not the end, all be all, because it fails to teach its patients the power of nutrition to prevent and heal disease. So I'm curious how many of you guys have actually had a meaningful conversation about nutrition with your doctor and walked away with the insight that you need to heal yourself with food? It's pretty rare that that occurs, and probably not that many of you have had an experience like that. So instead of focusing on the root cause of a problem, we have just made pharmaceutical use the norm and ultimately we are going in and treating symptoms rather than the actual root of a problem, and we're mainly doing this with pharmaceutical drugs. Every year in the US, more than four billion prescriptions are dispensed, and this number keeps going up. And it's estimated that 66% of the US population takes one or more prescription drugs, and, additionally, research suggests that the United States consumes the most prescription drugs out of anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1:So, over the years, my deep training and experience has shown me that popular medical and agricultural practices of the last century that we've been practicing have incredibly oversimplified and severely distorted the complex biological processes of life, and we see the negative effects of this on our land, food systems and our health. And this is caused by the excessive use of industrial farming practices like tillage and chemical inputs and treating symptoms instead of the cause of disease in humans and in animals, the irresponsible use of unsustainable consumer goods and non-renewable resources, and also the loss of biodiversity, which is being caused mostly by agriculture and urbanization. So, that said, if you're like me, you might be wondering how to minimize the impact of all of this on your health and your children and the land on which you live and the community in which you are a part of. I'm here to tell you. The good news is is there are things we can do to improve these dilemmas, and I'm on a mission to help do this in the world, both on an individual level, with people and their health, and on the larger level, by helping people with their agriculture operations and helping them to become more regenerative and profitable. And really, the way that this begins is to start learning to think holistically, and what that means is that we begin to learn how to acknowledge that there is no singular effect, that everything we do has a positive or negative consequence, and rarely is anything truly neutral. So when we learn to think holistically and regeneratively and react accordingly, we can do a lot of amazing things like improve agricultural productivity and profitability while still minimizing ecological disturbance, and we can also help stabilize our food systems to create food security and justice for everybody. We can boost nutrient density and health in humans and animals and elevate quality of life and longevity for all beings and, most importantly, create a more hospitable planet for the future generations that I know many of us have a lot of concern about what their quality of life is going to look like. So before we move on to what we can do to regenerate our ecosystem health and our human health, particularly the GI tract of humans and animals. We really need to understand how our soils and our gastrointestinal tracts got so degraded. We're going to dive a little deeper into some of the things I've already brought up.
Speaker 1:So, from an agricultural perspective, there's really two main influences that are degrading our soils in a major way. First, it's the loss of organic matter. And what is organic matter? Well, basically it's all the dead stuff in the soil, from plants to insects and animals that are decaying and cycling minerals back into the soil. Another name for organic matter is humus, and the word human comes from the Latin word humus. What that means is earth or ground, and I love this quote by a Franciscan priest and author, richard Rohr. He says being human means acknowledging that we're made from the earth and will return to the earth. We are earth that has come to consciousness, and then we return to earth where we started, in the heart of God. I just think that's really beautiful.
Speaker 1:But ultimately, organic matter is a source of food for all the soil fauna and it contributes to soil biodiversity by acting like a reservoir of nutrients. Things like nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus and sulfur are all in that organic matter, so it's really the main contributor to soil fertility, and when we lose organic matter in the soil, which happens through tillage, we are losing a lot of fertility. And so what happens is when we till the soil, it mixes oxygen into the soil and it raises the temperature of the soil, which contributes to an increased rate of organic matter decay and then it burns out in the soil. It kind of gets used up. So this relentless tilling and disturbance that we've been doing in agriculture from farm vehicles and chemicals has allowed wind and water to whisk away this really priceless resource of organic matter that usually sits in the top couple of feet of the soil, and so what we're seeing is in the bread belt of America. We have a major crisis unfolding, and when we look at the topsoil of Iowa, we can see that there's been a decrease from around 14 to 18 inches at the start of the 20th century to now, there being only six to eight inches by the end of the century. And since farmers begin tilling the land in the Midwest 160 years ago, we've lost 57.6 billion metric tons of topsoil. Let's just think about that for a minute. What that is equivocal to is 570,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, so that's a lot of soil, and a lot of that is just going into our rivers or it's blowing all around the world. And so soil organic matter is about 60% carbon, and, on a global scale, soil contains around twice the amount of carbon held in the atmosphere and three times the amount found in all of the biomass or vegetation that's sitting on top of this planet. So when soil organic matter decays, it's releasing this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and, on the other hand, when it's formed, co2 is removed from the atmosphere. So our focus really needs to be on increasing carbon storage in the soil, not releasing it into the atmosphere through tillage and other practices that are causing the erosion of organic matter.
Speaker 1:And then the second factor in agriculture contributing to the assaults on our soils is the use of herbicides and fertilizers, and the main one that we use is called glyphosate, and glyphosate is also known as Roundup. And even though this is classified as an herbicide, it is in reality a really potent antibiotic in the soil and in the human gut. And since 1974, in the US over 3.5 billion pounds of glyphosate active ingredient has been applied, and that basically turns out to be about 19% of the estimated global use of glyphosate, which is a total of 19 billion pounds. So globally glyphosate use has risen almost 15-fold since so-called Roundup Ready, genetically engineered glyphosate-tolerant crops were introduced in 1996 by Monsanto. So what we're realizing through various studies is that glyphosate leaches into the soil, and in a study on glyphosate leaching and movement conducted in a field site in Denmark, glyphosate, despite its high binding tendency on soil, was found to transport deep into the soil and leach out with drainage water. There are several water monitoring reports, aside from this one, that provide information on the occurrence of glyphosate in groundwater, and we have seen glyphosate being detected in 36% of a total of 154 water samples collected from Midwestern United States, where glyphosate is really used extensively on corn production.
Speaker 1:And owing to extensive use, this chemical poses chronic and remote hazards to the ecological environment and human health by way of its ingestion from food and water. And unfortunately, we consume a lot of glyphosate in the grains that we eat, because many grain crops are sprayed with glyphosate right before they are harvested as a desiccant to the plant to make it dry out before it is harvested, and so we consume quite a bit of glyphosate from consuming non-organic grains. Let's move on to the human health perspective and the biggest issues causing GI degradation in human health is the widespread use of antibiotics and other medications and the widespread consumption of a lot of ultra-processed and refined foods that are totally void of nutrients and laden with chemicals, including the glyphosate that I mentioned before and many others that are insecticides and various things like that. So a book that I read this year that has been really impactful is written by Dr William Davis and it's a book called Super Gut, and in that book he really discusses how modern life has caused this massive loss of bacterial species in our guts that have really important functions for human health, and those functions include mental health and well-being, which we've seen a sharp decline in mental health and well-being in many of our friends and family members, especially since COVID. But he likens this loss of microbes to be the equivalent of an inner extinction event that we can reverse through our choices.
Speaker 1:But one of the things that he also says is antibiotics are like a time bomb set off in the GI tract that leaves a path of microbial devastation and it can often take years to rebuild a microbiome, which often never fully recovers after taking antibiotics and many people take a lot of antibiotics, maybe once a year or sometimes even more, and the likelihood of an infant being given antibiotics in their first few days of life is really really high. So in 2016, 260 million antibiotic prescriptions were written, and antibiotics are prescribed to newborns and infants at nearly two times the rates of adults. So I hate to say it, but the microbiomes of our children barely have a chance if their mothers cannot pass on the microbes to their children because they've been prescribed antibiotics and they cannot build one due to the use of multiple antibiotics in a young person's life as well. So this doesn't even factor in that 70% of all antibiotics are prescribed to livestock to accelerate growth, and we consume these antibiotics each time. We consume the meat from these animals, as well as those that end up in our water supply from the manure that is dropped on the ground by the animals in confined animal feeding operations. So ultimately, we have a lot of exposure to antibiotics in our lives, and paying attention to decreasing that can be really, really beneficial to our health.
Speaker 1:So, to keep moving here, I also want to talk a little bit about some other drugs that can break down our intestinal microbiome, and those are going to include stomach acid blocking drugs and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and these nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs can increase clostreoidies difficile, which is a bacteria that causes an infection of the large intestine, and it further degrades our GI tract when we have an overgrowth of that bacteria in it. So, taking that into consideration, reducing the amount of gastric reflux and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen and Tylenol and things of that sort can be very helpful also for keeping the gut microbiome in good health, and I know that these things are very common, so a lot of us don't realize how much just eating healthy can help us not need those types of drugs, and so, while I'm not saying that you have to completely eliminate them, but considering that they are playing a role in gut dysbiosis is important. So, moving on to the second factor that's contributing to the degradation of our GI tracts and other health issues is the heavy and very consistent intake of refined foods that the majority of the population eats in Western civilizations. So, as I mentioned before, many refined foods come from foods that are heavily sprayed with glyphosate and also have many other chemicals added to them as preservatives. But not only are they lacking in nutrients because they are refined, but they also act as an antibiotic in our GI tract, killing off our healthy intestinal microbiome and specifically fostering an environment that encourages the overgrowth of unhealthy bacterial species. Because they're also high in sugars, they will feed dysbiosis in the gut, which is what a lot of the unwanted bacteria that like to overgrow in our gut like to consume. And so, in humans, ingestion of glyphosate from our food and water is lethal to our healthy balflora, and particularly the lactobacillus and bifidobacterium species. And glyphosate does not affect unhealthy species, so in other words, it doesn't select for bacterial species that are harmful in our GI tract, only for the good ones, of course, because that's the way life works, anyway.
Speaker 1:So we've put an excessive amount of energy into studying individual nutrients rather than looking at the synergy of food as a whole, and when we eat refined foods, we're not only consuming entry calories, but we're missing out on many important secondary plant compounds. And secondary plant compounds that are produced by plants in order to protect themselves are like nutritional dark matter of which we have only began to really understand. And currently we only are tracking about 150 nutritional components in our food composition tables, and this represents about 0.5% of the roughly 26,000 chemical compounds documented in our natural foods, and so basically 99% of the biochemicals present in our food are untracked by nutritional databases. So there's a lot more for us to know and learn out there about these plant phytochemicals and what they do in our body, and I'd like to just name a few of these phytonutrients so that you can recognize what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:Glucosinolates are compounds that are found in cruciferous vegetables or the broccoli family of vegetables, and those particular phytonutrients are incredibly helpful at supporting our liver, for detoxification and also for acting as anti-cancer agents in the body. Then you may have heard of lycopene, which comes from tomatoes and grapefruit and watermelon and things of that sort, and lycopene is really helpful as acting as an antioxidant in the body. It's particularly helpful for supporting prostate health. These are the types of chemicals and foods that can be very helpful to us and we just don't know as much about them as we know about some other things. But we're moving forward and learning a lot more about them and that's very exciting. But that's why eating a lot of fruits and vegetables is very helpful, because they're chock full of these phytonutrients which are acting as protective mechanisms in our body, even though we don't quite understand them.
Speaker 1:To wrap up this section of the podcast, it's my opinion that, between the loss of organic matter in the soil, the onslaught of agricultural chemicals in our food, the antibiotics and other medications we're taking and the refined foods that we're eating. We are really being duped right before our very eyes, and the pervasiveness of food allergies and autoimmune disorders and other devastating health elements take hold of each generation in more profound ways than the next. So, even though we are living longer lives, we're not necessarily living more healthful lives in optimal health, and so hopefully, the remainder of this podcast is going to give you some more information on how you can start improving your nutrition through eating whole foods. So now I'd like to delve into the incredibly fascinating similarities between soil and the human gut as parallel digestive systems. The earth, soils and human gastrointestinal tracts are surprisingly similar in that they are both digestive systems and, through advances in microbiology and close examination, we are seeing that the biological and symbiotic processes that are taking place in the human gut during digestion are really equivocal to the digestive processes taking place in the rhizosphere or the area surrounding a plant's root zone, which is effectively a plant's digestive system.
Speaker 1:The soil and its microbial community and, for those of you who may not be familiar, the microbial community consists of bacteria and fungi, and protozoa and arthropods like earthworm and dung beetles and different things like that. So the soil and its microbial community can be seen as anagolous to an external GI tract of a plant, and these organisms exist to hold water in the soil and break down organic matter from dead plants and animal material with potent enzymes into absorbable nutrients, which then are taken up by the plant through the large surface area of the root system and they go into nourish a healthy plant and ultimately, as plants are, photosynthesizing meaning taking CO2 from sunlight and turning it into energy in the plant, which is basically sugars those sugars are then taken down through the plant roots and fed to the microbes in the soil to keep the microbes alive, in exchange for these nutrients that the microbes are mineralizing with their enzymes in order to make them available to the plant. Building on this parallel, the body breaks down the food we eat in a deceptively internal environment. So, even though most of us think as the GI tract as internal, it is in fact a very long digestive passage that runs from our mouth to our anus that is highly exposed to the external environment of our body by way of what we eat and drink and breathe, and so, like the soil, it is also home to trillions and I mean trillions of microbes that are producing mucus and enzymes that are also helping us digest and absorb nutrients through the large surface area of our villi and micro villi, which is basically the tissues that line our GI tract and absorb nutrients. And so through this symbiotic relationship with the microbiome in our gut and the enzymes that they produce to help us absorb our nutrients, we are able to survive.
Speaker 1:I'd like to give just a little bit more perspective here on this. The gut can be likened to a massive bioreactor that's made up of microbes and enzymes that are really hard at work, and if we look at our 10 trillion human cells that we have in our body, they are outnumbered by bacterial cells 10 to 1. So we have 100 trillion microbial cells in our body that are not human, and so if we were to look at the whole body, our human cells making up 10% of our DNA would be represented by our big toe, and then the very rest of the body would all be DNA from microbes. So more than 99% of the DNA we carry in our body is microbial DNA.
Speaker 1:The other really interesting thing here is that there is something called the microbiota gut brain axis and, depending on the literature you read, the gut can be considered as our second brain, also known as the gut brain. So it contains many of the neurons and neural circuitry and neurotransmitters that are all present in the brain, and gut microbes can affect normal brain development and behavioral functions by signaling between the nerve cells that affect motor control and anxiety-like behavior. Half the dopamine production in the body happens in the gut by microbes. Almost all serotonin is produced in the gut and microbes produce chemicals that are going to mimic or block serotonin. So, in other words, the health of the gut is mirrored in our psychological health and vice-versa. So just keep that in mind as we move on as well.
Speaker 1:Even though the digestive processes in the body and in the soil function differently, there is really a fundamental link there, and they're both digestive systems and they're both being run by microbial activity. There's 10 billion viruses in one teaspoon of soil and we don't even know what all they are doing, but we know that they do keep the bacteria in check that is in even higher amounts in the soil. So ultimately, all of these microbes, along with us and the plants, are working synergistically to create health and healthy ecosystem processes on the land as well as optimal health within our bodies, and by using our intuition, we can learn to look at the land and our bodies for clues as to whether we are functioning in harmony or not. I love this quote In a very real sense. The land does not lie. It bears a record of what men write on it, and the body doesn't lie either, and it's constantly telling us a story about what it likes and dislikes.
Speaker 1:All throughout my career, I focused on learning how to observe and how to use my intuition to help me look at my client's internal, external and dispositional traits to help tell the story of their health. And then, eventually, this helped me go on to look at what was happening on the land, both above and below ground, to tell me its story of what was happening. And along with the power of observation, many regenerative farmers and ranchers use something called the six soil health principles to make management decisions on their land, and by following these principles we can improve soil health and perhaps the nutrient density of the foods that we grow. So as I followed these guidelines in my agricultural work, I began to see how they were anagolous to things we can do in our diet to build a healthy GI tract and functioning gut microbiome that can prevent and improve disease. And so I developed six human gut health principles to create awareness of how similar these systems are and give people a place to start to heal the gut and or keep it healthy.
Speaker 1:The first principle is know your context, and context is the circumstances that form the setting for an idea or decision and the terms in which it can be fully understood and assessed. For instance, this would include the characteristics of an ecosystem you're working in. So is that ecosystem dry or wet? In holistic management, we might call it brittle or non brittle. Are you managing cattle, goats or maybe both? You have a multi-species operation. Are you trying to manage in an intensive way or in a minimal management style based on your lifestyle and what you can actually do? Do you have small kids? Do you have grown kids and a lot of time on your hands and you can manage intensively as opposed to maybe not being able to when you have more going on? So are you farming as a hobby or for sustenance, or is it a business in which you want to profit? And all of these things are the contexts that are going to help you make decisions around the other principles. That is looking at context from an agricultural perspective, but let's look at it from a lifestyle and nutrition perspective.
Speaker 1:A food dome is defined as a person's individual nutritional chemical barcode and can help define the context of your personal nutrition. So what foods are available locally? What are your cultural preferences? Do you have an illness for which you have a special diet? This is all going to determine what your food dome is. So food domes are complex because they're influenced by our food supply and our personal choices, geography, the cultures in which we're growing up and also our socioeconomic status. So when you take into consideration the social, environmental and economic context of any given situation, whether it's human nutrition planning or land management planning for an agricultural operation, context is principle number one, because all of the other principles are going to be influenced by understanding these factors. So know your context, first and foremost.
Speaker 1:The second principle is armor, the soil and the gut. We protect the soil by keeping it covered with plants or mulch, and this is going to protect it from erosion from wind and water. The power of a raindrop hitting bare soil is really, really intense, and so it can very easily erode that soil and move those soil particles with it as the water runs off and takes that topsoil into our rivers and streams and eventually into our ocean, carrying whatever chemicals that soil has in it, which is causing algae blooms in the ocean and killing off the life in the areas where rivers come into the Gulf of Mexico and other places as well. So, additionally, I've talked to farmers who are in the Panhandle of Texas, where there can be quite significant dust storms. We all seen the pictures from the dust bowl and in reality that is not a thing of the past. That still occurs. And I know one farmer there in the Panhandle who practices no-till farming and so ultimately he's keeping his soil covered with cover crops when he's not growing a cash crop, and when a windstorm will come, his air on his farm is completely clean and clear, but you drive off of his farm and you literally can't see your hand in front of your face, and so it's pretty remarkable what an impact covering the soil with plants or mulch can have on preventing erosion, thank you.
Speaker 1:So the other thing is plant leaves on top of the soil create a surface area which absorbs energy from sunlight and atmospheric nitrogen and other micronutrient minerals that are coming onto that plant, and so basically, it's taking in nutrition by the surface area of the leaves of the plant and then transferring that into the roots of the plant as sugars that are then feeding the microbes. Additionally, these leaves host a microbiome that exists on the surface area of a plant that protects the plant and helps fight off pressure from pests and insects and things like that. And then when we consume those foods, we are also consuming some of those microbes that exist on the plant or vegetable that we consume, which builds the microbiome in our gut as well. And, like I mentioned earlier, the plants are also producing phytonutrients that are protecting the plant from being killed off, but those are also benefiting some of the soil microbes as well by way of protecting the ground and keeping those soil microbes alive and keeping the temperatures of the soil very cool, because microbes really begin to die off once the soil reaches about 110 degrees, and that can happen way quicker than you might expect. So keeping the soil covered protects the temperature of the soil and the microbiome living within it.
Speaker 1:So let's move on to the gut. How do we protect the gut? Well, we do that by creating a strong biological and mucosal lining in our GI tract, likened to the living plants that are living on the surface of the soil. The mucous layer in our guts protect the villi and the microvilli, the cells that line our GI tract, which are made up of epithelial tissues and cells whose job it is to absorb nutrients, and so the mucosal lining acts as a house for our gut microbes to do their job. It's basically a physical barrier to protect our intestinal cells and acts as a medium and a lubricant for the immune system to work in. So some of the things that I mentioned earlier, like taking antibiotics or using gastric reflux medications or non-steroidal anti-inflammatories or eating refined foods those things can actually break down this mucosal lining in the gut, which is protecting our absorptive capabilities. Ultimately, there are lots of foods that we can eat that will increase the mucous lining and make it thicker and protect our gastrointestinal cells and keep absorption happening at optimal levels. So things like okra and aloe and chia seed, nopal, cactus, flax and a lot of other foods that are rich in these polysaccharide mucosal foods that when you eat them you can actually sense that mucous that they create and that is going into the gut and helping to create that mucosal barrier in our gut. But there are other things as well that don't have that mucous type feel to them. So catechins and green tea can basically cross-link the mucous proteins in our gut and that makes the mucous lining thicker and stronger. Clove is another herb. Clove tea can help in that arena as well. And so those are just a few. So we can protect the gut by creating a strong mucous lining and eating healthy foods and trying not to take the drugs and refined foods that can break down that mucous lining and instead protecting them with these foods that I've mentioned.
Speaker 1:Ok, so let's go on to principle number three. Principle number three is increase biodiversity. From a soil health perspective, we want to increase species both above and below ground, and obviously below ground that is going to be the microbiology and that's going to include bacteria and fungi and protozoa and arthropods like earthworms and dung beetles and rolypolis and nematodes and all these other things that are crawling around the ground below our feet doing all kinds of work that we don't even think about and that we really are just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding. But if we have a lot of biodiversity in the microbiome below the ground, we generally tend to have more diversity above ground, with insects and birds and mammals and all these other creatures that are roaming around. So when the soil is healthier, often times there's just a greater amount of biodiversity happening above that soil.
Speaker 1:We want to work to increase biodiversity by one, maybe practicing no-till farming to keep the microbe community intact below ground. When we till up the land, we often kill off the microbes, and so we can practice no-till or strip-till farming. We can also do crop rotations where, instead of growing a monoculture of cotton year after year after year, maybe a farmer rotates and he'll do corn, cotton, wheat, corn, cotton, wheat, et cetera, et cetera, and that actually allows yields to be better for each of those crops as well. Third, if we are running livestock, we can practice planned grazing so that each pasture has the capacity to rest and recover for a while after the cattle are in that field, or goats or sheep or whatever it is that we're running, and that way the animals don't just go and eat only the specific plant species that they like and eat them till they're gone, decreasing the biodiversity. When you move the livestock around and then you let that pasture rest, it's actually going to allow the plant species to continue to propagate themselves and grow and keep the biodiversity of plants in check, which will then keep the biodiversity of the insects and the birds and everything else in check as well. Overall, we also want to try to eliminate herbicides and pesticides to increase biodiversity, because when we tend to spray these chemicals, we're obviously using them to try to decrease the biodiversity. But in the big picture, we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot because we run into oftentimes greater issues where we use an herbicide and maybe it causes a outbreak of pests to come because we've weakened the plant community and all of a sudden we get a outbreak of pests. So ultimately, the other thing that we can do is create wild spaces on farmland that can act as a habitat and corridors for wildlife and things of that sort, and we can do that just by way of planting those around the field that we're farming in or through it as well.
Speaker 1:So in the human gut, or to improve the human gut, we want to increase the variety of foods that we're consuming, increase the biodiversity of the foods we consume, and we want to improve and increase or bring into balance the species that make up the gut microbiome within us. One of the best ways to do this is to eat a diverse array of foods. So some studies have shown that we should be eating at least 30 different types of foods per week, so many of those should come from fruits and vegetables. Now, I know that oftentimes people get into the habit of just eating the same foods over and over, but when we try to create a diverse array of different types of foods that we're eating, we're going to get a lot of different phytonutrients, a lot of different types of minerals, we're going to have different types of fiber, and ultimately, that's going to provide a nice balance for our nutritional needs.
Speaker 1:When we were hunter-gatherers, we were consuming many different types of foods each day by way of just foraging, and having to consume a number of different leaves and berries and seeds and nuts and things like that. So we were actually eating quite a diversity of foods and changing them as we went through the season. So, ultimately, the other thing that we want to do is try to increase the species in the gut of good bacteria, and so we can do that through eating fermented foods, and we can also do that by eating some wild foods if we have access to them. So fermented foods include things like kombucha, lacto-fermented veggies, kefir waters, yogurts and things of that sort, which you can oftentimes make at home, and I just want to share some information that I read in Dr William Davis's book Super Gut on the loss of L-rutary, which is a bacteria, a lactobacillus bacteria, in the gut, and it is really important in the body for creating oxytocin, and oxytocin is one of the chemicals in our body that creates empathy and connectedness. And one of the things that he says is that we have such low amounts of this bacteria in our GI tract, because it's been killed off, that our oxytocin levels are much lower than they were 50 years ago. And so we're living in a time that's really plagued by disconnection and a lot of people feel depressed and isolated, and we also have record-setting rates of suicide and a lot of skyrocketing divorce rates. And one of the things that he states is could the loss of L-rutary be one of the causes behind these disturbing social trends? And I really do think that we are underestimating the power of microbes. So by increasing the biodiversity and trying to foster the good species in our gut, not only do we have better digestibility, but we can improve maybe some of our mental issues as well.
Speaker 1:Let's go on to the fourth principle. The fourth principle is encouraging life, and in agriculture that would be described as keeping live plant roots in the ground. And the reason why we want to keep live plant roots in the ground as much as possible is that it feeds the soil microbes with those root exudates that I've been talking about. So, through the process of photosynthesis, plants pull the CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbon-rich plant sugars that are then secreted out, the plant roots, which feed microbes in exchange for the nutrients that they're mineralizing by the enzymes that they produce. And when we keep living plant root in the ground throughout the year usually with perennial plant species would be ideal you can increase the chances of keeping the microbes alive. That then can mine nutrients in the soil to make them available for the plant, which then increases the biomass of plant production. Eventually, that plant senesces and dies and drops its leaves down on the ground, which become organic matter and also feed the microbes once again. So we want to keep living plant root in the ground as much as possible.
Speaker 1:Now how do we do that in the gut? Well, basically we feed our gut microbes prebiotic foods. So our microbes need foods that help keep them alive, and if we eat a varied diet, for the most part they're going to be getting those foods, but prebiotics are foods that feed the microbes in the gut and that break down the foods in our gut into absorbable nutrients. Prebiotics are typically non-digestible fiber compounds that are going to pass undigested through the upper part of our gastrointestinal tract and then they're going to stimulate the growth or activity of advantageous bacteria in the colon by acting as substrates for them. And these foods are going to include things like mushrooms and Jerusalem, artichoke and chicory, garlic, leeks, onions, asparagus, fennel, snow peas, cabbage, dandelion greens, ferndock eggplant, jicama, beans and figs and apples and bananas and oats and things of those sorts. So we can eat these foods pretty easily and basically feed the life in our guts and we can live to life by feeding probiotics to our gut microbiome. Also, those foods that I mentioned earlier that are the musilaginous or mucus promoting foods, are also helpful for feeding the gut microbiome, these prebiotic foods as well.
Speaker 1:The fifth soil health principle is to minimize disturbance, and we do this in agriculture or we minimize disturbance of the soil by, like I said before, reducing or eliminating soil tillage, keeping fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides out of the soil and allowing the microbiology to flourish, and this is going to improve the four ecosystem processes, which is the energy cycle, the water cycle, the mineral cycle and the community dynamics, which are basically represented by diversity. So we will minimize disturbance through those processes that keep biological, chemical and physical disturbances from happening. Reducing or eliminating medications is one way that we may be able to reduce disturbance in the human GI tract, but if you are going to come off any medication, you need to discuss that change with your doctor to make sure that it is done in an appropriate manner that keeps you safe and healthy. So, that said, I will go on and discuss a little bit about minimizing disturbance in the human gut. We can stop eating refined foods or reduce and eliminate the amount of refined foods or ultra processed foods that we are eating, which will help decrease disturbance in the gut. As I mentioned earlier, these refined and processed foods help feed the bad bacteria in the gut that we don't want, which can cause gut dysbiosis.
Speaker 1:And one other thing that I want to talk about is a type of dysbiosis that has become very common and prevalent, called SIBO or CFO. So SIBO stands for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and CFO stands for small intestinal fungal overgrowth. And SIBO can cause fecalization. Fecalization is when fecal microbes that are usually restricted to the colon travel up and begin to appear in the small intestine, conferring the appearance of stool seen normally in the colon up into the ilium of the small intestine. And SIBO causes a long list of health issues and it is often not being addressed by many medical doctors. But some of the symptoms of SIBO are IBS, fibromyalgia, insomnia, restless leg syndrome, skin rashes, eczema, gallstones, food intolerances and allergies, social isolation and feeling of hatred, anxiety and depression, pms and other complications with type two diabetes, obesity, seizure disorders, heart disease and autoimmune disease. And overall this is kind of a silent epidemic that's created by the loss of crucial microbial species that our ancestors had as recently as 50 to 100 years ago and that have been erased by the industrialization of food and medicine. So, combined with the proliferation of bacterial species ordinarily associated with fecal material, it is causing a lot of health problems that are not being associated with the true cause. So Dr William Davis suggests that SIBO is so widespread that the number of people affected exceeds the size of type two diabetes and pre-diabetes epidemics. One in three people have SIBO, according to his research. If you're concerned that you might be suffering from small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or small intestinal fungal overgrowth, then I highly recommend that you seek out a practitioner who has experience in dealing with this disorder. Dr William Davis' book Super Gut is a good place to start educating yourself on this issue. However, I highly advise that you find a medical professional who can help you eradicate it as efficiently and quickly as possible.
Speaker 1:The last principle is to integrate livestock, and while this might make sense on the land, it may sound a little bit funny when we're talking about nutrition, but bear with me and I will explain. First we'll talk about incorporating livestock on the land. To incorporate livestock as a land management tool, this allows for plants to be trampled and grazed, which helps cycle nutrients from the manure, the urine and the plants that they are trampling. So manure excreted by animals is really rich in microbes from the rumen gut and this helps build more organic matter and microbiology in the soil. When that manure is excreted onto the land, organic matter is often taken deeper into the soil horizon by dung, beetles and other microbes. And when we increase organic matter, this increases the ability of the soil to hold water so that it can be used in times of drought, and this also allows for soil to infiltrate more water into the soil when it rains, and so, by way of incorporating livestock, we're also increasing organic matter, and that can be very helpful for regenerating land.
Speaker 1:It's important to remember that grasses evolved with ungulate animals, so there's an important symbiosis that occurs between them, and the saliva of a grazing animal actually contains enzymes that stimulate the plant roots to grow after they are grazed. When grasslands are left ungrazed, oftentimes they will become unproductive, because the material that grows from them in one year will then shade and crowd out the sunlight that is coming down from the sun, prevents the growth from happening in the rest of the plant, and so these plant stands will die out if they are not mowed or shredded or grazed. With grasses evolving with ungulates, they were always supposed to be grazed for short periods of time, followed by a really long rest or recovery period, and when we think about the bison that would come across the United States, they would come across in very large herds, trample, urinate, dung and move on and basically not return to that same piece of land for a very long period of time, oftentimes a year, and it had a lot of time to recover. But all of that trampling and dunging in urination did a lot to aerate and fertilize the land and create some of the richest grasslands that existed on this planet. So that is what can be beneficial about integrating livestock on the land.
Speaker 1:But how do we integrate livestock in the gut? Well, basically, we can integrate livestock in the gut by consuming the fermented foods that have beneficial livestock in them and that can go in and act as a veritable treasure chest to our health, including mental and physical well-being, through nutrient mineralization and ideal gut function. So fermented foods such as the lacto-fermented veggies, kombucha, ginger, bug, kefir, water, yogurt and miso are just a few, and adding these foods to your diet can help introduce the microbial species into the gut that have been reduced by the foods and medications that we've been talking about throughout this podcast. So, ultimately, we want to create a multi-species herd of microbes in our gut that is going to help us digest and absorb our foods and protect us from many other ailments that we struggle with.
Speaker 1:All right, my friends, that was the last of the six soil and gut health principles. I just want to reiterate the six principles before we conclude today's session. So remember they are know your context. Armor the soil in the gut. Minimize disturbance. Encourage beneficial microbial life, encourage biodiversity and integrate livestock, and I really appreciate you guys listening here till the end.
Speaker 1:I know that some of you might be anxious to get some of this put into practice in your life, and I have the six-page guide to help you do that. All you have to do is go to LandFoodLifecom, sign up for my email list and you can download that six-page guide to help you put this into practice. Start healing your gut and start healing the soil. Also, please don't hesitate to reach out via a DM or an email and let me know what you thought. I'd love your feedback and I really appreciate you showing up and taking the time to listen. Well, my friends, there you have it.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the LandFoodLife podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show and gained some true gems of insight that will enhance your quality of life. If you're looking for personalized guidance on holistic health, nutrition or running a regenerative agriculture business, visit LandFoodLifecom to explore my virtual and in-person coaching programs. You can also join my mailing list at LandFoodLifecom to receive exclusive perks and discounts for email subscribers only. I appreciate your valuable time spent here with me and if you're digging this content and you're finding it helpful. Please share it with your friends and others in your network. You can post a screenshot of the podcast thumbnail, tag it on social media and rate the show on your preferred podcast platform. I am very much looking forward to our next chat in two weeks. Same time, same place. Bye for now.