Why Healing Our Soil Is the Real Healthcare Revolution

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor Hyman Show.

Allen Williams
The vast majority of farmers today, they themselves have no clue what really good nutrient dense food tastes like.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the HymanHive, for live q and a's, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health.

You can also explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products at doctorhymen.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial.

Allen Williams
We became increasingly reliant on inputs and on products that what I now call band aids on a gushing wound, you know, that's all those products are. The vast majority of our research, the vast majority of the things that we, the practices that we implement in agriculture today and the products that we utilize and apply never address the root cause of the things that are truly impacting us from the diseases to the past, to the lack of fertility, to the soil degradation, to the animal health, they never really address it. So again, it's putting a band aid on the gushing wound, here's what's happened over the last several decades in farming. Farmers have been encouraged and led through federal policy, through crop insurance programs, subsidy, and many even lenders and everybody else to become more and more specialized to the point that today, and Mark, this may be very surprising to a lot of consumers, but today the vast majority of farmers do not eat anything that they produce on their farms. They go to the grocery store just like everybody else.

Now, how sad is that? That we're not as farmers, we don't even know now, obviously I do because we're very different. We're regenerative in what we do and we produce a lot of what we eat today again, like when I was growing up, but the vast majority of farmers today, they themselves have no clue what really good nutrient dense food tastes like. They are also entrapped and ensnared in the same food cycle in this highly processed foods and so on and so forth that every other consumer is ensnared in as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You said that you know, farmers when you grow up are skinny, and now they're

Allen Williams
all overweight. Right, right. Well, they don't do it. Farmers today, of our highly specialized equipment, GIS, you know, GPS guided equipment and so on and so forth. Basically they're like a truck driver, they're very sedentary, so their butts are seated in the seat of a tractor, a combine, a sprayer, whatever the case may be, you know, for long hours every day and they're not even having many of these tractors and combines today not even having to physically steer, they're just listening to podcasts or there you go, or, you know, listening to the radio or whatever.

And so the honest truth is I found that god awful boring, okay. And mind numbing to think that you have to form that way now because in almost all of them have consultants that are provided by major agribusiness, they're called crop consultants, so what we find is farmers today are making fewer and fewer of their own decisions. Those decisions are made for them by their lenders, by their suppliers, by their consultants, and their ability to think and to reason about what they're doing and why, their whole decision making capability has basically been co opted and and their decisions are being made by others. So even though they take all the risks, they own the land or they lease the land that has to own the equipment, they have all of this incredible debt, what's happening is that they still are not the key decision makers on their own farms. They may think they are but in reality they're not.

And so what we're seeing and I wrote an article about this last year relative to the significant amount of depression and suicide in the farming community. Again, what a lot of consumers may not realize is that depression is rampant in the farming community right now because of the significant financial stress and even environmental stress that's on these farmers. The suicide rate is among the highest of any profession in in the world, not just in The US, but in the world. So And it's also it's also from a health point

Dr. Mark Hyman
of view, it's one of the most dangerous professions. Parkinson's rates are extremely high. We know that's very much linked to pesticide and agrochemical use. So there's a lot of health cause that causes from dealing with all those agrochemicals as well for these farmers.

Allen Williams
Oh, you know, the cancer rates have skyrocketed, you know, neurological disorders have skyrocketed. And then of course, all types of inflammatory disease due to obesity and just their diet, their daily diet, you know, because again, they're not eating any better than the average consumer. So the very things that you deal with on a daily basis as a medical doctor with a lot of consumers are the very things that the farmers themselves are dealing with as well. And the most discouraging thing is the lack of hope that we experience and encounter out there among the farming community. And that is why we do what we do because we want to restore that hope and we want to give them an opportunity to not only be much more viable and profitable in their farming operations and be able to remove and separate themselves from all of these dependencies, but we also want to restore their quality of life.

And that's what they're really missing today, Mark, is quality of life sucks for many of these farmers.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, it's it's sort seems like very similar to what I do. You know, I see patients come in, their health is so degraded, just like the soil and the farm is degraded. They're stuck in the, you know, pharmaceutical trap as opposed to the chemical trap and diabetes on piles of medications. And they feel hopeless. And yet within a very short time of people changing their diet, they can unhook from the medical industrial complex, get off the medications, use food as medicine, lose tons of weight and reverse their diabetes and all kinds of chronic illnesses pretty quickly.

And it gives them hope. So I think, you you're offering the same message. Think of what you do is sort of regenerative agriculture and what I do is regenerative medicine. I mean, functional medicine is ecosystem medicine. It's about treating the whole ecosystem and creating health within it as a way of creating a healthy person.

We don't treat the disease, we treat the person's own constitution using natural principles to help restore function. And you do the same exact thing with agroecological systems and restore function as and as a side effect, you don't need the agrochemicals, you don't need the specialized seeds, you don't need the fertilizer, and you have all these beneficial side effects. So the side effects of eating healthy and fixing this diseases are all good ones and the side effects of doing this agriculture are all good ones. Right. You can conserve water, you restore soil carbon, you increase biodiversity, you increase the phytonutrient and density of the plants, the mineral content of the plant.

Mean, it's just all these beneficial ripple effects. And the farmers make more money. They're happier. But it seems to me there's this there's this barrier we have to overcome where people who are farmers don't see the situation that they're in. They they're sort of locked in it and they can't see where the horizon to go.

There's a different way. And how do they unhook from that incredible burden of debt and loans and crop insurance and the way their farms are set up and sort of the scale of it is so big. And I would love you to talk about, you know, how you work with these farmers to get them to, one, see the light and to have the confidence to actually start to transition and what you're experiencing out there in the field. Because with your soil health academy and understanding ag, you are actually out there running around the country, meeting with farmers in rural communities, helping them understand that there is a different way. And, you know, you shared with me before that, you know, ten years ago, you couldn't get 10 people in a room, and now your rooms are filled with 60 or 70 farmers looking for a different way.

So how do you how do you get them to cross that barrier? And what does that look like for the average farmer?

Allen Williams
Yeah, so excellent question. And the first thing is always education. You cannot implement and practice what you don't know. So they have to learn. And that's why we created the Soil Health Academy as that vehicle through which they can begin to get that education.

And the academies are designed specifically to be able to help farmers go back to their farm, to their ranch, and implement these practices immediately. So our schools are designed, they're multi day number one because there's a lot of ground that we have to cover. Secondly, they're very hands on. Third, we always host them on a regenerative farm or ranch so that those in attendance get to see these practices actually being implemented and they get to see and experience the result of what happens and obviously be able to interact directly with those regenerative farmers and ranchers so that they can learn from them. So the educational process and that component is critical and so we do a three day school initially for these farmers and ranchers with half the day in the classroom each day, the day out in the field.

I often say that all farmers are inherently from Missouri, the show me state, always want you to show them, right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Allen Williams
And farmers are very visual, very hands on, so that practical component is critical. But when we get them in the field though, we reteach them how to be keen observers. Know, as a medical doctor, you have learned that observation of your patients is one of your key tools, to be able to properly assess and diagnose and treat. We have found the same thing working with the soul and working with repairing ecosystems, that observation is absolutely crucial. So we teach them how to observe and we actually go through observational exercises with them each and every day and you will be amazed at what happens here.

It's almost like the cartoons where you know people have an idea and you see the light bulb above their head in the cartoon, you can almost see that you know, in them you see their eyes light up and get big and and they're like, oh my god, I get it now. I get it now. And and these are people that are that have been out on the land their whole life, Mark. Okay, but yet their eyes are open, their ears are hearing, and their noses are detecting the aromas, it's like for the very first time in their lifetime, these are things they've never observed. But then the second thing that we do, we start it at the school and continue it afterwards is we develop a network, we provide a network of support for these farmers because often what happens, their local communities do not support them because peer pressure in the farming community is far worse than it is in any elementary or junior high school, I promise you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What's that weird stuff that Joe's doing down the road on his farm? That's kind of weird. I would fill his field, it looks terrible, you know, it's kind of a mess.

Allen Williams
Right, so if you're not doing everything like your neighbors, they're gonna let you know it. And they're gonna say, what in the heck do you think you're doing? And even your own family members will do that to you. And then of course, everybody that sells you something is doing that as well, right? They're telling you you're an idiot for making any changes.

And so we have to provide these farmers for them to be successful. They're being bombarded with that all the time. So we have to provide for them a brand new network, a network of support and encouragement and mentorship. And so that's the other thing that we provide through the Soil Health Academy and Understanding Ag. And then the third leg, we call it the three legged stool.

The third leg of what we provide to help them be successful is that ongoing mentorship and consultation. Because as they start down this path, down their journey to regenerative agriculture, they are gonna hit some roadblocks some issues and challenges, just like anything else that you may change in your life. And they're going to need that a little bit of ongoing support, just like you support your patients on an ongoing basis.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So like, you know, former that you met, because we've got 5,000 acres of soybean field, who's tied into Monsanto now bear full on fertilizer, agrochemicals, tillage, big equipment, locked in the bags. He goes home and goes, here's your course. He gets so excited. Look. He's like, I'm gonna do this.

What are the barriers and obstacles? And how does he go from a mono crop or maybe two true crops to a diversified resilient regenerative organic farm?

Allen Williams
Yeah. So excellent question.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Because he might wanna do it. I just imagine there's a lot of barriers that are set up within the system that prevent him from doing that. And I don't support him with financial supports on the back end like crop insurance that make him feel secure to do it. Because as a farmer, you're not making widgets in a factory you can do any day, any night, 20 fourseven. Deal with mother nature and weather and droughts and storms and floods and fires and all kinds of stuff.

So how do they make that transition? Because I think that seems to be the biggest barrier.

Allen Williams
Well, the very first thing that they have to understand and then start implementing are what we call the six principles of soil health. And obviously they get that sort of drilled into their heads during the academy. I'll give those to you and your listeners very, very quickly. The first one is context. You've got to understand the context of your farm that includes goals and objectives, profitability, targets, quality of life, even spiritual aspects, the whole bit.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And location.

Allen Williams
Absolutely. Environmental, everything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you grow to Saskatchewan or Mississippi it's a little different.

Allen Williams
That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So you have to understand your context and believe it or not because of the constraints and the influences that many farmers have, you'll find that they truly do not fully understand their own context and you have to help them with that. The next is we teach them to minimize disturbance. So one of the first things, the very first steps they can take when they go back home is to start significantly reducing the amount of tillage they do, because the vast majority of farmers are still what we would call full till farmers.

In other words, they're going out there and they're doing multiple rounds of plowing, you know, moldboard plowing, they may do chisel plowing, know, disking, those types of things. So they're steadily churning up the soil and creating a lot of bare soil, releasing a lot of carbon. So the second step beyond understanding context is to transition them from full tillage to no till. And that's actually a relatively easy transition and most farmers can make that transition even within their first year on the vast majority of their land. So we teach them how to switch from full till to no till that minimizes disturbance in the soil, and that's absolutely critical.

The third thing is we teach them to keep that soil covered or armored. So again, the majority of farmers only have plants growing in their soil and covering that soil on average, believe it or not, of only about 120 to 100 forty days a year. And the rest of the year that soil is bare and that's creating enormous problems that we can talk about here in just a moment, but we teach them to keep the soil covered. So you're keeping it covered when you have your cash crop in the ground, but after the cash crop, you've got to follow that with diverse cover crop. And that cover crop then grows and keeps the soil armored and covered.

So, and that's easy enough to accomplish as well. So we can help them in their very first year identify their context, minimize soil disturbance, and then plant cover crops to keep the soil covered or armored. And that allows us to keep living roots, which is the fourth principle, living roots in the ground year round. So that allows us to accomplish that. Now what that does is that starts them down the path of reducing their reliance on synthetic fertilizers and on all of the chemicals, the fungicides, the insecticides, the herbicides, so forth, because the living roots are the thing that stimulates and feeds the microbes in the soil and then allows those microbes, it fuels those microbes to be able to recharge the nutrient cycle, that mineral cycle in the soil so that we can then start gradually reducing these required inputs.

The fifth principle is diversity. And so we teach them to increase the diversity of their cash crop rotations and to also have highly diverse cover crop mixes that they're planting in between their cash crops. Diversity of plant species is critical. The work of Doctor. Fred Provenza.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, it was on my podcast. Yeah.

Allen Williams
Yeah, yeah, Fred's wonderful, isn't he? And his book nourishment is just fantastic. So I'd recommend that for all you readers as well as another book to read. But Fred's work has highlighted the critical importance of diversity in producing this broad array of phytochemicals, phytonutrients that vital to soil health, plant health, ecosystem health, animal health, and of course, ultimately our health. And then the final principle, the sixth principle is integrate livestock.

So we teach these farmers, you know, the vast majority of row crop farmers today no longer have livestock. And for some of them it can have been decades since they've had livestock. So we teach them to reintegrate livestock into that system to more quickly recharge and re fertilize that system in a natural manner. And when you combine all six of those, Mark, together, that's the magic. You combine all six of them together and now they're making very rapid progress.

So we start them, all these six principles, going down those steps. We encourage them to do their own own farm research and we help them with setting that up and doing that it can be very very simple, but and I'll give you one quick example, can give you many more, but one very quick example of how rapid this can be and how impactful it can be is a farmer by the name of Adam Grady located in Eastern North Carolina, the Coastal Plains in North Carolina. They're Adam's tenth generation, their farm has been in their family since the 1780s. In 2017, that was their first year of regenerative agriculture. And they dove in with all six of these principles.

In 2018, Hurricane Florence hit them and they ended up with nine feet of water, floodwaters covering their farm. In just two years of regenerative agriculture, the resiliency, biological resiliency created in just two years is what saved Adam and his family's farm. All of their neighbors farms were just completely destroyed. All the crops, all the pastures, everything turned completely brown from the floodwaters. Adams green back up immediately, he was even able to get back in his fields two years after the floodwaters receded and plant diverse cover crops.

He was the only farmer in his region that was able to graze his livestock actively through the winter. Everybody else was feeding hay and feed supplements and everything else because they had nothing to graze. And so but also in 2018 in spite of the flood, okay, in spite of Hurricane Florence, they still saved on a 1,200 acre farm $200,000 in input cost in just their second year, okay. At the end of his third year, at the end of twenty nineteen, right after Thanksgiving and I still distinctly remember this, Adam called me up all excited. He said, Alan, I just came back from a bike.

I want to share something with you. I said, what is that Adam? And he said, I just paid off all my loans at the bank And I just bought another farm paying all cash. Wow, bought another farm paying all cash. Exactly.

So he and so let me tell you what's happened.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Farmers are afraid of the economic stress of transitioning because that'll cost them more, they'll lose money, there's a risk to it. But you're saying that the risk is just more theoretical. It's not actually true that if farmers follow these principles and are insidious about it, they can actually quickly turn a profit even in the first year.

Allen Williams
That is exactly right. This does not, this is not a prescriptive or formulaic system that causes you to have to experience losses in the first first one, two and three years, you still have all the tools available, you just learn to use them much more judiciously and what this system does is it's adaptive rather than being formulaic, prescriptive or like a recipe, it's adaptive. So you're constantly flexing and changing according to conditions. Just like with Adam, so he transitioned from all genetically modified crops to now he's planting all conventional seeds, so no more GM seed. He completely cut out all seed treatments so no more neonicotinoid treatment on any of the

Dr. Mark Hyman
Those are pesticides.

Allen Williams
Exactly, and you know, just so your listeners know, there's enough, according to the work of Doctor. Jonathan Lundgren, there's enough neonic on a single kernel of corn to kill 100,000 honeybees.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Allen Williams
Yeah, it's amazing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Not like corn, a cob, but just a single kernel.

Allen Williams
A single kernel, a single seed of corn that you would plant. Enough neonic to kill a 100,000 honeybees. So Adam's been able to totally do away with seed treatment, so that's no longer an issue. He has been able to reduce his fertilizer use by 75% in just three years. He's reduced his fertilizer requirements by 75% and continuing to reduce that.

He has done away with all fungicides, so no more fungicide treatments, no more insecticide treatments. So all of that has gone by the wayside. And so everything has improved and we've done a lot of tours and he's even hosted two soil health academies. And the benefits are just incredibly experiential. When you go there, can see smell, hear, taste the differences that you're experiencing on this farm.

Dr. Daphne Miller
The story of how our internal microbiome, all these billions of bacteria and fungi and nematodes, how they are linked to soil is still trying to be understood and told. The science is in its infancy. And we know of course that our microbiome is a unique microbiome. Each one of us has a unique microbiome.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like a fingerprint.

Dr. Daphne Miller
It's a fingerprint. It's not the same microbiome as soil, but we know that there is a lot of crosstalk. We evolved as these single cell creatures out of soil.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And we all grew up in the dirt, right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Hunting and gathering.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Over millennia, what's happened is that different microbes have found their distinct niches, but that they in fact do communicate. And this research is slowly, slowly coming out. And food is probably one of the really important shuttles that goes back and forth in terms of informing the two microbiomes and influencing them in different ways. But it's not to say that our microbiome is the same as soil microbiome.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But there's crosstalk which is

Dr. Daphne Miller
the concept of meta There absolutely genetic crosstalk and that is one of you know there is some interesting studies, coming out. And in fact, fermented foods, which probably are the most important intermediary because in fact what these foods are fermented with is soil bacteria that's on the food and then different forms of usually fungi and yeast that ferment

Dr. Mark Hyman
the food. So like controlled food rotting.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Controlled food rotting.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Otherwise, was sauerkraut.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Right. And researches showing that it doesn't change our microbiome, but it can temporarily affect it. It's like tourists

Dr. Mark Hyman
going through economy. They improve the economy.

Dr. Daphne Miller
But they improve the situation. And Justin Sonenburg's lab at Stanford is, I think, about to publish a paper. I know that they're in the final parts of the study looking at fermented food and its health of patients with different kinds of bowel symptoms. And I think it's actually IBS that they're looking at. And what they're finding is that it probably more effective than all the packaged probiotics that people are trying to sell.

And it makes sense because these foods actually, you know, they co evolved with us unlike things that are invented in a lab.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And what's interesting you point out is that kids who grew up on farms or ranches don't get the same problems with allergies and asthma. Their immune system is developed in different ways that there's less problems with these kids' health and they don't have ADD because they're out in nature all the time. Right?

Dr. Daphne Miller
So, yeah, there's you know, people are referring to it as the farm effect. But there's a big multinational collaborative called the Gabriela Collaborative that was started, by researchers in Europe. But there's actually research happening in The U. S. Now between the Amish and the Hutterite, two different farming communities.

And what they're trying to understand is why it is that children who are raised on sustainable farms have much lower rates of asthma and allergy as compared to children who are more conventional farming systems where they're using more chemicals and so on and children who are raised in urban areas. And the thought is once again, that it is this microbiome. And one could argue that the soil is probably the mother microbiome that's inoculating these sustainable farms, but they're finding that even the animals on these farms are probably influencing kids and dust in the hay and potentially even, you know, things that we typically think of as allergens in the city. But for some reason on these kids, they

Dr. Mark Hyman
are are protective. Grow hay don't get hay fever.

Dr. Daphne Miller
There you go.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, is something that's been noticed all globally that, you know, in developing countries, they're they don't have as much asthma or allergies or autoimmune disease. All these inflammatory diseases that are rampant in The United States really don't exist there or in in at least in the same amounts. And and and the hypothesis is that we're just too clean. Right? The hygiene hypothesis.

Dr. Daphne Miller
It's actually a little bit more complicated punch line

Dr. Mark Hyman
than that. Good.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Okay. And it really has to do more with diversity. So we we're plenty exposed to bacteria and bathed in bacteria and fungi and so on when you were to sample this room or urban environments in general. But what's happened, it's the same thing. Remember I talked about from the macro to the micro.

We're losing diversity on the planet of our animals and our plants. We are also losing diversity of our microscopic creatures of our fungi bacteria and our nematodes and so on. That's happening in lockstep with the macro loss of diversity.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And just to stop because it's an important point to emphasize, it's happening in the soil, but it's also happening in human microbiomes. Absolutely. And the diversity of our gut bacteria is dramatically different than it was a 100 or a thousand years ago.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Yeah. Mean it's happening on plant microbiomes, it's happening everywhere. And it's all from the same cause which is overexposure to bactericides and antibiotics and basically us growing very few types of crops so that we're just getting too much homogeneity in terms of our plant kingdom and pollution Antibiotics. On wild areas and all of these things. Yes, all the chemicals, the antibiotics, the pesticides, herbicides, and so on.

But that is probably more the reason why we're seeing asthma and allergy than just cleanliness per se. It's loss of diversity. And that's a really important concept for people to have because the way you protect diversity and maintain that health resource is different than just getting dirty. It's really about thinking like an ecologist or a conservationist and trying to think how do I preserve natural niches? How do I preserve them on farms?

How do I preserve them in urban areas? How do we build cities that actually have places for butterflies and different kinds of insects to flourish and different kinds of plants and different kinds of animals and so on. So it's a bit more of a complicated concept and the danger of us just talking about hygiene.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. No I think you're right. Think that's a very important point. It is the complexity and you you bring that home also to medicine. Right?

You're not just a farmer or gardener you're a doctor and you treat patients and the insights that you've had about disease are are quite unusual for a physician, is that you've moved from the reductionist view of disease to a more deeper understanding that disease is really complex, that there's a complexity of biology, that we we are a complex adaptive dynamic system that's constantly changing and that things like redundancy and diversity are important for our own health. And it's not something we learn about. How do you how do you kind of hold that in medicine? What do you do with that information?

Dr. Daphne Miller
Absolutely. I mean, I I wish that everybody who decided to become a doctor or a nurse or a nurse practitioner or just, you know, any kind of healer in healthcare spent two years working with ecologists or farmers or someone who works with natural systems.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Because by the way we are one.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Yeah, we are one and being able actually see it, sort of display itself, because it's actually hard to understand our natural system. A lot of it's tucked inside of us and quite invisible. And we have to take other people's words for it. But when you're in nature and understanding how complex those systems are and the trophic levels and unintended consequences and how everything interacts, it gives you an enormous amount of humility and respect, for these, you know, these structures and makes you realize that, you know, the the true meaning of first do no harm. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So the, you know, the biology we have is really complex like you said. And I learned a fact recently that kinda blew my mind, which is, you know, we all learn biochemistry and all the pathways. Well, we think we learned all the pathways, but we didn't. There's 37,000,000,000 chemical reactions in the body every second. That's 37 with 21 zeros.

It's hard

Dr. Daphne Miller
to I'll have to take your word for that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Don't know if It's hard to fathom and the complexity of that and everything cross talking to everything else. We're an ecosystem. So in a sense doctors need to be ecologists is what you're saying.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Mhmm. Right? Absolutely. And so when we do these soil labs for health practitioners, that's exactly what we do. And they start the lab in a soil pit on a farm in the Central Valley in California, which is, by the way, an ecology or an ecological niche where a lot of our food comes from.

And it's a very challenging place. It gets seven inches of rain a year and has that amazing topsoil which is what generates our food is incredibly thin. And we dig these soil pits so they can see the soil layers and get in there and start to experience like this is what's pumping out nutrition not only for The United States but for the world. I mean grow so much of the almonds and other stuff that gets exported to other places. That's the true nourishment, not just the corn and the soy.

California is really where our nutrient dense food is going. And for them to, start to understand that this is something that we have to absolutely protect and that we need to get involved in working with farmers to make sure that we can increase this lifeblood for our country. Because right now we're under producing the amount of for even with the current population we have in The US, we are not producing enough fruits and vegetables.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I I don't I don't know if if this is right, but I heard or read once that if everybody in America ate the five to nine recommended servings of fruits and vegetables a day, that we'd only have enough for two percent of the population.

Dr. Daphne Miller
It might not be that low, but we're we're probably in terms of just what we're producing in The US, it's we're we are falling short by about two thirds just for like the Harvard recommended. Yeah. Five to seven a day. And even with imports we're still falling way short. So we are not nutrient secure as a nation.

Producing tons of sugar in the form of corn and soy and so on, way more than we need.

Allen Williams
So it's

Dr. Daphne Miller
not enough of a lot of the macro micronutrients.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And by the way, the soil that you talk about is the source of the nutrients in our food. So even if you're eating the best organic food, growing the best organic soil, the nutrient levels in our soil have declined 90% in the last hundred years.

Ian Somerhalder
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And organic is better, and they're more nutrient dense. But even still, we're not

Dr. Daphne Miller
I don't know if I agree with that. That that what what where did you get that, Dana?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'll send I'll send you the references.

Dr. Daphne Miller
You might, be, referring to a piece that was actually done right here in Austin at University of Texas. And his name is, Ronald Davis, I think. But if you read that study, he does not say that it's because of the soil. It's because we've changed our varietals of fruits and vegetables so dramatically. We are now choosing seeds basically for their ability to produce a lot to be able to travel long distance and to not go bad on the shelves.

So the kinds that the varieties of carrot that we're growing are different than they were in the thirties and forties. But I have not seen a lot of evidence that our soil in The US has been depleted enough to change the nutrient content of our food. Would I'll share with you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'll share

Dr. Daphne Miller
with you. I'll share

Dr. Mark Hyman
with you studies because I literally just gave a talk about this.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Yeah. But you might need to go back and look at the actual research because it is it is I I will be amazed if you find us. I I

Dr. Mark Hyman
there were scientific papers. I'm not making enough. I promise.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Yeah. But a lot of people read those studies, and they blame it on the soil. And believe me, I would love

Dr. Mark Hyman
the studies are of the soil.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Uh-huh.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Looking at the soil nutrient content.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Uh-huh. Oh, I see. So not translating it into the nutrient content of the food.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, the food gets its nutrients from the soil,

Dr. Daphne Miller
Yeah but there's they're not the same.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Of course.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you

Dr. Daphne Miller
can actually have a big shift in the nutrient contents of the soil and end up with the exact same nutrient density in the food because these plants are actually unbelievably you know microbes in the soil and the plants themselves are really efficient at scavenging nutrients.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But isn't the problem that most of our soil in this country has become more sterile? It's become more like dirt instead of soil or

Dr. Daphne Miller
It's hard to say and we are at a point where we're that certainly might happen in the future and there are parts of the world where massive amounts of soil depletion have gone on. But it probably is incorrect to say that we are at that point in The US. We still are actually We're

Dr. Mark Hyman
working towards it.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Some of the richest soil

Dr. Mark Hyman
in

Dr. Daphne Miller
the world and it's more a matter of starting to use practices now to really protect it. But to say that food is less nutritious because of the soil in The US is not exactly

Dr. Mark Hyman
Alright. Well, we'll dig those studies up and share them and we can continue the conversation. I think that the concept of a doctor being an ecologist is a really kind of new idea. Right? And and I think that that science is sort of catching up with that.

I I recently got a new textbook called Network Medicine about the body as a network, as an ecosystem, and how we need to rethink science and how we research things and the complexity of the human body and these biological networks that are driving health and disease. We don't think like that as doctors. We think, okay. I'm this specialist and I take care of this disease or this siloed problem instead of really understanding how everything connects together. And

Dr. Mark Hyman
that's Right.

Dr. Daphne Miller
Yeah. Sadly, that is true. I'm finding with a lot of the students and young doctors that I work with, though, that there really is a very different way of thinking. And I'm hopeful for the future of medicine, especially if I can get a lot of them into those soil pits.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I think that's right. I I love the idea of, like, having doctors go out and, you know, work on a farm. In fact, I I actually took a course in biological agriculture when I was in college and got to grow food and learn about food and learn about ecosystems and learn about sustainability. And, you know, I was kind of a weirdo, but it was it was a really important part of my education because I began to understand that relationship.

But I I think your your emphasis on the idea that farm is medicine, as well as food is medicine, as well as parks are medicine, is a really important contribution to our conversation because the average person is not thinking about it, the average doctor is not thinking about it. And then when you follow it down the chain, what are the implications of this? How do we change what we're doing so that we actually can get it right on track?

Ian Somerhalder
Basically what we uncover on film is how Monsanto has effectively been secretly microfinancing most of the university agricultural curriculum in this country for forty years. Now we uncover the money pipeline because if you think about it, if Monsanto or anyone wanted to write whatever, a $75,000,000 check to university, whatever, Texas A and M or UT or something, people would know.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Ian Somerhalder
If they wanted to write $10.07 and a half million dollar checks, people would know. Even a $750,000 check, people would take notice. But no one's looking at ten, twenty, thirty, fifty thousand checks.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So they're doing slowly, slowly.

Ian Somerhalder
So you just feed the system, and then you buy the best science money can buy. And then the congressional lawmakers allow it to go through because listen, I mean, I'm not defending their practices, but think about this from a numbers perspective. There's 23, you would know this better than me because you really are the policy guy, there's 23 agrochemical lobbyists per member of Congress.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, that's crazy.

Ian Somerhalder
So think about it. So you're a congressional lawmaker, right? Hey, Mark, listen, man. Let's just go to The Bahamas this weekend. We've got a great house down there, my wife and I.

Your wife's gonna look really great in this mink coat we got from whatever, Sacks or whatever it is. And so from a numbers perspective, that's two people a month that are coming at you for something. Well, even if it only takes up a week or two a month, think about how much noise that is as a No,

Dr. Mark Hyman
no, They really hear from industry. They don't really hear from people like you and and that's why it makes a difference. And when we go in, they go, wow, I didn't really understand this. And I didn't know about this. And the level of awareness and education is very low.

And once they start to hear the stories, like they start to shift.

Ian Somerhalder
Now that's why we have this this change. And it's amazing. Listen, this is all not doom and gloom. This is really powerful stuff.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And it can has and the policy had to happen. And one of the things that you're talking about just to give people context is land grant colleges, which were established by Abraham Lincoln to build, you know, curriculum for building an agricultural nation. And so these land grant colleges are funded in large part by the government, but they're also funded by agrochemical companies who are highly influential in determining what the science they do and what the studies they do are and what the results are. And so what the curriculum is, because then the students of these land grant colleges come out thinking that in the department is is the only way to go. And and, I was talking to Michael Pollan recently about this.

Ian Somerhalder
He's like, come on.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And he was like, when I wrote when I wrote, omnibore's dilemma, I was supposed to give a talk at Caltech and, they canceled my talk because the the one of the ranchers who's in, you know, of of, you know, industrial meat meat farming, meat factory basically funded huge amounts of money to this to Caltech, and he just said he can't come. They Get rid of him. Yeah. That's the kind of stuff that goes on, you know, and this sort

Ian Somerhalder
of Right under our noses. Yeah. But not for much longer. Yeah. Speaker Johnson is a Louisiana boy like I am.

There are a lot of people from a lot of small towns who get this.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the farmers are. I don't know if you know Fred Provenza. Do you know Fred Provenza? He's an amazing guy. He studied behavioral ecology and looked at, you know, animals and plants and soil and humans.

He's incredible. He wrote a book called Nourishment, which everybody should get. He's been on the podcast a couple of times. Oh, I got to read this And he, you know, he's talking about how he was going around teaching about this to farmers and then, you know, there used be like one or two people in the room and now it's just filled and people, the farmers and the ranchers are desperate to change because they see the failure and the failure of the system, failure

Ian Somerhalder
of ability

Dr. Mark Hyman
to actually make money, to make a living and they're struggling. And they understand that something's broken and they're looking for a different way.

Ian Somerhalder
By the way, that was another thing. You know it, you do it too. We're formulators, right? So when we were building out the formulas for the absorption company, we started with just four use cases. It was restore, calm, which really chills people out and it just gets you to that place where it quiets the noise, and I needed that too, energy, which I live on, and then sleep.

And the reason we started with those four things was how can we get people to have better days so that they have better weeks, they have better months, and then eventually those months string out into years and then the years string out into a lifetime. And this is something you and I have talked about at great length. Happy, healthy people build happy, healthy societies by making happy, healthy choices. It's unimpeachable information, right? So again, man, it goes back to I'm putting together this amazing program for farmers where I'm gonna start sending these to a lot of these hardworking farmers because you feel the lift and better sleep, especially when you're stressed about crops, finances, all that stuff, you need to get that good sleep.

So I'm doing this program and I'm gonna put some spend behind it where I just get it to farmers, just get it to people who

Dr. Mark Hyman
are

Ian Somerhalder
busting their asses in the field. If you've ever been on a combine or if you've ever been on a harvester at 05:30 in the morning after you couldn't sleep all night and this is now three, four weeks in a row, you start to deplete in a way. Listen, a very dear brother of mine is building a bank and I was really fortunate enough to consult with them, paid, but I got to work with these Nobel laureate behavioral psychologists. I mean, these people, they know a lot about humanity, right? And one of the things we were talking about was there's, and this is a term you know because you're a doctor, eco anxiety.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Eco anxiety.

Ian Somerhalder
It's a real diagnosable term at this point. And there's 27,000,000 young Americans that are basically, think about it. You're young. You're trying to figure out what you're doing with your future. There's famine, wars, droughts.

There's a broken food system, broken water system, broken political systems. Everything's broken. You go into college. You're gonna end up with a $200,000 debt, but you're gonna end up with a $30,000 job. And so they feel this wait, wait, wait, and then they just end up doing this.

And then what do they do? And it's eco anxiety. So the idea is to lift them back out of that where you realize, this is what I always say to people, it's not all doom and gloom because I see the data. I know it's coming down the pipeline. We are actually about to balance our climate.

We're gonna rebuild our food systems. We're gonna rebuild our economy, and we're gonna do it all through food. And that is the most amazing thing. I always hear people joke sort of like coastal elites talk about the flyover states. There are no flyover states.

Dude, those states are the rock stars of the country. It's not just the breadbasket. They're gonna be the greatest biosequesters of carbon dioxide that we have. They're our life's blood. And the people running those farms and those businesses are our brothers and sisters and they're crushing it.

And so what we're gonna do is arm them with all this amazing, not even technology, it's old technology since it's old as dirt.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's a really powerful I'm sure you heard Gabe Pound tell the story but he had because this farmer who's been on the podcast, and he

Ian Somerhalder
He's a

Dr. Mark Hyman
go link to this.

Ian Somerhalder
Of our greatest heroes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Show, but he he's an incredible guy who was a traditional farmer in North Dakota, spraying chemicals, doing all that for years, which is probably why he got ALS to be struck. And

Ian Somerhalder
Well, I can't say a 100%. You know,

Dr. Mark Hyman
he had all these

Dr. Mark Hyman
bad years of drought and hail

Ian Somerhalder
and Five years of hell.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It was just a mess. And then somehow he got Thomas Jefferson's journals

Ian Somerhalder
Yep.

Dr. Mark Hyman
About farming practices and started to incorporate some of these practices that

Ian Somerhalder
Isn't that amazing?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Was like restored his farm and restored the soil. He's such a hero and he's he's really a key part of these films, Akiste the Ground and Common Ground, which everybody really should

Ian Somerhalder
see these They're

Dr. Mark Hyman
really powerful moving films to help you understand what the food system is, why it's broken, why it starts on the farm in the soil. And how, if we change that, we change everything. Right? You're kind of linking altogether, but not only do we restore the soil ecosystems, restore biodiversity, protect our water resources. Not only do we prevent the chemical pesticides that are harming humans, but we also produce food that's more nutritious, that solves a lot of our chronic disease epidemic.

We help the farmers have more economic kind of health and wealth.

Ian Somerhalder
And inclusive with farmers. By the way, we haven't even touched on the fact of the social dynamics and the ethnicity of farming. The amount of young farmers coming into the fold, indigenous, black, brown, purple. It doesn't matter who you are. And one of the more exciting things is too, the indigenous cultures are about to thrive.

A lot of these reservations are gonna become these regenerative giants.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Going back to their indigenous practices.

Ian Somerhalder
Going back to their indigenous practices and allowing them to make a ton of money. Oh man, who was I just talking to? He's amazing, such a powerhouse. But I wanna say in 1930, I'll have to go back. Have such dad brain.

Dude, was up every hour

Dr. Mark Hyman
You got little kids.

Ian Somerhalder
Every hour on the hour last night with my son screaming into the monitor because he's not feeling great. But I think in 1930, there were a million black farmers and now there's 50,000. And now they're coming back and they're bringing this incredible indigenous knowledge that they have into the food system and thriving and growing. And that's what makes America so incredible. When we all come together, I'm not trying to sound like some cliche out of some newspaper clipping, when we all come together and we lift each other up, that's when we win.

And getting farmers off the drip of the agrochemicals, and then the other side of my life is keeping them fueled with things that actually work. Jeez, dude, the future is bright. Get your sunglasses.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're doing this like you're living this. You have a farm. You have animals and Oh, food and tell us about your kind

Ian Somerhalder
of what? My my wife, she's the animal whisperer.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like it's like Green Acres. You went from like Hollywood to the

Ian Somerhalder
Beverly Hillbillies. Yeah. Green Acres. But it's

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's dating me actually. I used to watch that.

Ian Somerhalder
This is why I called my mom on the way here to thank her for that base. And one of the things is too I realized we can't build a great society without unbelievably well rounded children. My experience as a child, I had the big My farming uncle and aunt cousins were very successful, they were the ones that always had all the money. It's also where my love of flying came from because he had beach craft aircraft aircraft that I used to fly in and that's where I my great love of flying.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You died in a Beechcraft and lost.

Ian Somerhalder
I know, I felt so bad. As I was saying before we were rolling, I said that to JJ Abrams and Damon. I was like, Guys, this is embarrassing. I fell 30,000 feet out of an L1011 and survived, and then I fell 30 feet out of a beach craft and died. But those experiences as children, now I'm 46 in a month and change, all of those systems that I was exposed to are now playing out.

Supplements, health and wellness. I have a whiskey company with a lot connection to bourbon in the South and the familial component, but that also spans, that's into my agriculture side. Between my wife and I, she's got jewelry that she created this closed loop, basically completely sustainable model for luxury jewelry, crushed it, launched, did their first deal with Michael Dell and it just crushed Oh yeah, that great. Well, had all this gold because Michael Dell just said, Hey, listen, all of these computers and landfills and my name on it fixed this. So he started using a hot water process to extract all sustainable, but extract all the heavy metals from microprocessors and gold and silver

Dr. Mark Hyman
and stuff.

Ian Somerhalder
And they end up with all this gold. They didn't know what to do with it. So my wife, so Nikki Reed at like 27 years old, 28 years old calls Michael Dell and says, I know what you can do with that gold. You're going to give it to me. You're going to sign a multiyear deal with me.

I'm going to build a sustainable luxury jewelry line out of it, and it's going to sell out in like a week. So they did that. She went to CES, the consumer electronics show in Vegas, representing Dell

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's crazy.

Ian Somerhalder
On a stage, and the whole collection sold out in thirty six hours.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.

Ian Somerhalder
So that's when they knew. So she created that whole system much like we did with building a regenerative whiskey company and now we have Absorb. So we have these two parents that came from the entertainment world, by the way, daughter still doesn't know what we do, Who are now between two parents, yeah right, two parents running, building three companies simultaneously, very successful companies, simultaneously which I'm gonna do 110 flights this year. I am your model, I'm your anti model patient. My system is broken down and to be honest with you, it's not like some shameless plug.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Because you're working too hard?

Ian Somerhalder
But I wouldn't be able to do what I do had I not built this company. If I didn't have the absorption company, I'm not even kidding, there is no possible way you could do what I do and then still get up and maneuver at this level and pace.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You got a farm, you got kids, you've got

Ian Somerhalder
20 Oh man, 26

Dr. Mark Hyman
animals

Ian Somerhalder
or something crazy like And we just released, my wife, we just introduced another horse into the herd yesterday and so worried that they were treating him well throughout the night.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The other horses.

Ian Somerhalder
The other horses, yeah. And they did fortunately, checking on him early this morning. But like our daughter, rather than worrying about eco anxiety or some digital BS, that was her biggest worry last night was, Is our horse gonna be okay? And I'm gonna check on him in the morning before school. You know what I mean?

That

Dr. Mark Hyman
She's connected to these

Dr. Mark Hyman
nature and Connecting to

Ian Somerhalder
incredible

Dr. Mark Hyman
mean, instead of what we need. Our kids are so not connected to nature. This is like nature deficit disorder, ADD.

Ian Somerhalder
Exactly. But that's about to change, Doctor. Mark. What we're doing when we launch Common Ground and we repackaged Kiss the Ground, now Common Ground is going out. This film changes lives.

And with your help and your hard work and ours, we're changing policy. And this is what I said Vegas, not Vegas, sorry, DC, very similar in a way. But that's what I just said in DC, is because anytime you go and you do all the circuit in DC, it's all about policy. It's policy, it's policy, it's policy. Yeah, policy's important, but this isn't just about policy.

This is about good policy, helping good people. And that's where we win. And that's what I said.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's a triple The earth wins, the farmers win, people win, the government wins.

Ian Somerhalder
Everybody wins because when more people make more money, they pay taxes rather than just a few big agrochemical companies that don't pay any taxes most likely. This is how we build our society. This is how we build our communities.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Doctor Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am chief medical officer.

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