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  • OLIVIA WU: Thank you for being here.

  • I have been looking forward to this talk and to meeting

  • Daphne, and having all of you meet her, since I

  • knew she was coming.

  • She's a family physician.

  • She's a writer.

  • And she teaches in the Department of Family Medicine,

  • UC San Francisco.

  • But first and foremost, I think, it's just striking to

  • note that she's a doc.

  • She sits in her office three days a week and sees patients

  • all day long, from birth to age 102, and she

  • takes care of them.

  • And she's the first doc I've taken around Google, and I've

  • taken many doctors around, who said, let me take a picture of

  • the size of your desserts.

  • And let me take the picture of the size of the cheese you're

  • serving, because I want to show my patients how small

  • you're serving them.

  • This is how she cares about her patients

  • and about their health.

  • And she prescribes good eating, among other things.

  • And as she said to me at lunch, if you care about your

  • food, you ultimately have to find out and care about how it

  • is grown and where it comes from.

  • So I'm so excited for her to come and talk to us, to make

  • this connection between our natural world, what's grown,

  • how it's grown, and how that connects with our health.

  • I'm talked to quite often by people who

  • say, there's health.

  • Tell me what I should eat and what's good for me.

  • And then tell me about what's good for the environment.

  • They have nothing to do with each other.

  • And to me, they have everything to

  • do with each other.

  • And I think Daphne's going to talk to us about that, among

  • other things.

  • So she's also a writer.

  • She's a columnist for the "Washington Post," in the

  • Health section.

  • And she's got these two books. "Farmacology" just came out.

  • Very excited to see it and to hear about it.

  • I thought I'd end by reading to you some of the titles of

  • articles that she's written.

  • "Locavorism vs. Salmonella," "Take a hike and call me in

  • the morning," "Prescribing Food," "Farm-Fresh Goat-Milk

  • Lattes."

  • And to me, this is the fascinating thing about her.

  • She is comparing small family farms, which I consider to be

  • in pretty fragile state, to integrative medicine, medicine

  • for the whole person, and drawing lessons from farming

  • when both of them are things that are really kinda edgy.

  • So I can't wait to hear more.

  • Please welcome Daphne for me.

  • [APPLAUSE]

  • DAPHNE MILLER: Thank you so much.

  • It's lovely to be here.

  • I have to tell you guys that you're kind of

  • like my lucky penny.

  • Because five years ago, when "Jungle Effect," my last book,

  • came out, it was at Google that I gave one

  • of the first talks.

  • And that book went on to do quite well.

  • And once again, this is one of the very first talks that I'm

  • giving on "Farmacology," so maybe I need to rub all of you

  • afterwards.

  • So I'm going to tell you a story about soil and your

  • health today.

  • But first, I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I

  • got into all of this in the first place.

  • Maybe one way to illustrate it would be to tell you about a

  • conversation I had with a reporter a couple weeks ago.

  • This was a reporter that was interviewing

  • me about the book.

  • And at the end of the interview, he told me about

  • something that he'd seen down at Stanford at their new

  • technologies, cool new inventions expo.

  • And what it was, was a box.

  • And you could buy a cartridge, just like you can for a

  • printer, and the cartridge contained a plant and soil and

  • a computer chip.

  • And you would put it in the box, and shut the lid, and

  • push the button, and you would get a plant.

  • And the inventors, they're actually on Kickstarter, were

  • saying this is great.

  • Now anybody can be a gardener or a farmer.

  • And the interviewer wanted to know what I

  • thought about this.

  • Well, the geek in me thinks it's pretty darn cool.

  • What is that computer chip doing?

  • And all you have to do is add water.

  • Are you serious?

  • And this plant grows on your counter.

  • And you need light, but you don't

  • even really need sunlight.

  • And I was, like, on my phone trying to find the website and

  • everything

  • But the healer in me had some real hesitations.

  • How do we think that we can reduce something so

  • complicated, something that nature does with so many

  • elements as growing our food, down to a cartridge and push

  • the button, and a computer chip?

  • It's the same hesitancy I have when I think, how can we

  • reduce something so complicated as depression down

  • to one neurotransmitter, or diabetes down to one hormone,

  • or cancer down to one missing piece of DNA, or one excessive

  • piece of DNA.

  • And in fact, it is exactly that concern about the

  • reductionism that sent me out of my medical office to learn

  • from sustainable farmers.

  • Because from my vantage point, I actually saw them as being

  • professionals, who were in charge of healing an entire

  • system, that had thought about all of those pieces, sun,

  • moon, bugs, rain, and brought them all together to make

  • something grow.

  • And that was what I was interested in doing in my

  • medical practice, is that kind of complexity thinking.

  • So that was one of the first things that started me looking

  • outside of the 8 by 10 walls of my medical practice.

  • It was also my interest in food.

  • And as Liv said, you talk about food long enough, you

  • have to start to wonder where it comes from.

  • And you have to start to get beyond those words like,

  • organic or GMO.

  • These are just kind of labels.

  • You just have to understand what's really

  • happening behind all that.

  • But I'd be misrepresenting myself if I told you that I

  • had no background in agriculture.

  • In fact, I was conceived on a farm.

  • That might be too much information.

  • You guys are just getting to know me here.

  • My parents were part of the

  • back-to-the-land kibbutz movement.

  • They moved from a small town outside of Massachusetts to

  • Israel in 1964.

  • And they were living in a little, tiny

  • shack on the kibbutz.

  • I guess when you're living in a single bed, the next thing

  • is you have a kid.

  • I don't know.

  • But my mother found out very quickly that children on a

  • kibbutz are raised just like the chickens.

  • They're basically kept in a separate coop.

  • And she decided she did not want a communal child, so I

  • was not born on the farm.

  • But I have my roots on the farm.

  • But I was on this farm.

  • And that's me that you see in the corner.

  • And this is a picture that was actually sent to me very

  • recently when the farmer's daughter found out that I was

  • writing this book.

  • But this is a piece of land in upstate New York that my

  • parents bought when they moved back to the States.

  • Actually, it was 150 acres.

  • And I think they bought it with their stipend from

  • graduate school at that time.

  • But this was an introduction to agriculture.

  • But I don't know if any of you grew up on a farm or do some

  • farming now.

  • Is there anybody in the room who is connected in

  • any way to the land?

  • OK.

  • Even gardeners, you count.

  • If you have a little box out there, that counts.

  • OK, wonderful, everybody in the room.

  • Well, this kind of farming, I think you see what's happening

  • with the soil here.

  • It's being turned upside down so that all that little

  • architecture of bugs and roots and all these things that

  • nourish plants on the top, are actually being turned deep

  • down into the earth where they can't do very much.

  • But this was kind of what farming had turned to in the

  • late 1960s when I'm standing there in the corner.

  • My next experience with farming actually happened in

  • medical school, where my best friend, it turns out, in

  • medical school, was a goat farmer from Mendocino.

  • And he'd been homeschooled all the way until college.

  • And we would sit in the back of the lecture hall.

  • And the professors would flash these images or slides of

  • diseases up.

  • And he would sit next to me and say, my goats get that.

  • Or, I know exactly how that works.

  • Because I've taken care of it for years on my goats.

  • And it was fascinating to me that he was way more advanced

  • of a healer than I was because of his experience on the farm.

  • And that stuck with me.

  • So then, my next experience with farming--

  • I'm giving you sort of my background in farming-- was as

  • an intern in the Salinas Valley.

  • I went from Harvard Medical School, which was sort of this

  • tertiary care, hyper-reductionist, focused

  • specialty training to a family medicine training in the

  • Salinas Valley.

  • And there I took care of farm workers.

  • And it was the first time in my life that I saw something

  • called organophosphate poisoning, which was a

  • pesticide that's now illegal, but then, in the early 1990s,

  • was still being used all the time in the fields.

  • And I remember one of my first times in the ER, being on

  • call, and this woman coming in, pregnant, her fingers

  • stained black from picking berries, seizing from

  • organophosphate poisoning.

  • And I saw an array of fetal malformations in their busy

  • obstetrics ward that I hadn't seen

  • during my previous training.

  • And so there it was really the dark side of farming that I

  • was exposed to.

  • But my real interest in farming probably happened the

  • same time as all of you, in that I started to become

  • interested in sustainable food, and this fantastic

  • movement of knowing your farmer and going to the

  • farmers' market and hearing about young idealists, people

  • in their 20s and 30s who were giving up their fancy

  • educations and going back to the land and starting to grow

  • vegetables, veritable vegetables.

  • And I heard these stories.

  • And here I was, as a family doctor in medicine, wondering

  • when are people going to be clamoring for their medicine

  • to have a face the way they're clamoring for their food to

  • have a face?

  • And when are we going to get the same idealists who are

  • pouring into health and healing and wanting to be

  • primary care doctors the same way they want to be farmers,

  • underpaid primary care doctors?

  • And I'm still waiting for that movement to happen.

  • But that is one of the reasons I started to look at this

  • paradigm of complexity and sustainable farming.

  • But then, the more I started to learn about farming, the

  • more I realized that farmers and I have the same patients.

  • I started to look at, actually, what they

  • do on a given day.

  • And you have to squint a little bit here, OK?

  • But if you do, it's amazing, the levels of the structures,

  • the way, actually, that they work and that the nutrients

  • are moved from top to bottom.

  • And look at those hairs.

  • Their hair follicles look surprisingly like soil.

  • I mean, there is a pattern here that repeats itself not

  • just between the skin and the soil but between the

  • intestinal lining and the soil and the pulmonary

  • tree and the soil.

  • And then you start to look on the electron microscope level.

  • Can you guess which one of these is the villi in our

  • intestine interacting with microbes and nutrients.

  • And In which one is roots interacting with

  • microbes and nutrients?

  • Can you guess?

  • Don't read the bottom.

  • You cheated already.

  • But hard to tell, right?

  • So the one on your left is the intestine.

  • And these are the intestinal villi.

  • And this is the glycan, the nutrients that are being

  • processed and brought in.

  • And this is the same with the rhizosphere, with the roots

  • from plants.

  • And it works the same.

  • The organic matter comes in.

  • The microbes process it.

  • They put it into these perfect packages, and then it gets

  • absorbed through these finger-like projections,

  • whether it be in your gut or in the soil.

  • And then, I started to learn that the ideal pH of soil and

  • the ideal pH of our bodies are pretty much exactly the same.

  • And the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of soil, and the

  • carbon-to-nitrogen ratio that makes up our

  • being is darn similar.

  • And then, all of a sudden, it dawned on me-- and I feel

  • pretty stupid that it took all these years for it to dawn on

  • me as a physician--

  • but you know all those carbohydrates and fats and

  • proteins that make up our body?

  • Where do they come from?

  • They come from the soil via our food.

  • In fact, it's not too much of a stretch to

  • say that we are soil.

  • And when I started to think about what that meant, all of

  • a sudden, my exploration took on sort of

  • two levels of meaning.

  • There was the model for farming that

  • interested me as a doctor.

  • And then there was the practice, these things that I

  • could actually learn that I call farm-to-body lessons,

  • that I could go out and bring my patients so that they could

  • be healthier.

  • And "Farmacology" is sort of the

  • culmination of all of that.

  • It's a whole series of lessons from everything from a

  • laying-egg farm and what it can teach us about different

  • kinds of stress, to a cow-calf farm and what it can teach us

  • about super immunity or how to build our resistance, to an

  • aromatic herb farm that teaches us, actually, how

  • plants have special messages for our

  • metabolism in our body.

  • But I'm going to tell you one story today.

  • And as I said at the beginning, it is the story

  • about soil and us.

  • And it starts, actually, with this farmer here, Erick

  • Haakenson, and his wife Wendy.

  • Erick was actually not married to Wendy when he bought his 12

  • acres of land in the Snoqualmie Valley in

  • Washington State.

  • He bought it in the late 1980s after having a varied career.

  • Unlike a lot of farmers, he wasn't born into farming.

  • He actually had gone to Yale Divinity School for a while.

  • And then he became a salmon fisherman up in Alaska.

  • But then, in the late 1980s, he wanted to fulfill a

  • lifelong dream, and he bought 12 acres in the Snoqualmie.

  • And his goal, as he explained to me, was that he wanted to

  • grow vegetables that had nutritional punch.

  • But as he started to farm the land and plant his crops and

  • see what he was getting, he realized that, in fact, his

  • soil was depleted.

  • It was tired.

  • It had no more nutrients in it.

  • And now, from what you've just learned, when your soil is

  • depleted, that means that your vegetables are not going to

  • have nutritional punch.

  • And so he was a smart man, a learned man.

  • So he went to the agronomy books.

  • He went to the agricultural science textbooks.

  • And he started to learn about how to replenish his soil.

  • And he learned about what is called testing and replacing,

  • where basically you go around your property, and you take

  • samples in each one of the fields that you're planning to

  • grow your vegetables in.

  • And then you take these samples, and much like a test

  • tube, like you would with your blood when you go to the lab,

  • and you send it off to a central lab, that's an

  • agronomy lab.

  • And they send you back something that looks very much

  • like this, very much like the reports that I get in my

  • office for my patients.

  • You get one for each area that you've sampled.

  • And it tells you if you have too much of a mineral or too

  • little of a mineral.

  • It also tells you how much to replace it.

  • And so Erick took all of this information, being the dutiful

  • farmer, and he started to follow directions.

  • So I'm going to actually take a second and just read you a

  • tiny excerpt from the book about this.

  • And it's Erick talking to me.

  • "'I spent days following up on those computer readouts.

  • I used my John Deere cone spreader and ended up putting

  • thousands of pounds of minerals all on my 12 acres.'

  • He was not exaggerating.

  • I estimated, from the reports, that in the years Erick used

  • the Agricultural Testing Services, he'd spread more

  • than 50 tons of imported minerals over his land.

  • 'But somehow, it didn't feel right.

  • There were lots of minerals that I wasn't sure

  • where they were from.

  • They were probably taken from developing countries where

  • their soil needed these minerals more than we do.

  • And I was also wondering, if these are all so good for my

  • plants, why does the manufacturer recommended that

  • I wear a mask while I'm spreading them?'

  • Plus, despite all his efforts, Erick was not seeing the

  • miraculous improvements that he'd hoped for.

  • He said, 'I couldn't help thinking, yeah, I'm putting

  • these minerals on the soil, but are they really

  • getting to the plant?

  • And if I happen to put down a little too much of one thing,

  • what did it do to all the other nutrients?

  • I'd heard stories about how adding too much of one can

  • lock up other elements.

  • This could create soil conditions that were even

  • worse than when I started.'"

  • So I'm sitting there, at Erick's dining room table, and

  • he's telling me this story.

  • And as he's talking, all of a sudden, I flash onto a patient

  • that I had seen in my office a week before coming to his farm

  • to do this internship.

  • And her name was Allie.

  • I kind of changed her name for the book.

  • It wasn't really Allie, but we'll call her Allie.

  • And she was pretty typical for my practice.

  • She was a woman in her 30s, who, the best word I can find

  • to describe her, was depleted, just like Erick's soil.

  • And she had had some intense things happen in her life.

  • Her business had gone awry.

  • Her father had gotten very sick.

  • She had been doing a lot of traveling for her work.

  • And she started to get very fatigued.

  • And she was going around and seeing various physicians and

  • also seeing other healers.

  • And each time she would go and see someone,

  • what would they do?

  • They would test her.

  • And then, they would get the readouts, and they would

  • replace her.

  • And she was starting to be this pharmacopoeia of

  • prescription medicines and also supplements.

  • Meantime, her digestion was going to pot.

  • She was just feeling terrible.

  • There was, like, this limited diet that she could eat.

  • She'd get those bag things of spinach and steam them,

  • because she knew she needed some kind of

  • vegetable in her diet.

  • And then she would survive on energy bars.

  • They were the only other thing that would make her feel good.

  • And so she came to me, as sort of this last-ditch resort, in

  • desperation, and wanted to find out what I

  • recommended for her.

  • So this is a description of my first visit with Allie.

  • "If Allie were sitting at the table listening to Erick, I'm

  • certain that she would nod her head in agreement.

  • To her first appointment in my office, she brought in not

  • only her thick file of test results but also two shopping

  • bags filled with prescription pills and over-the-counter

  • supplements.

  • One by one, she unpacked them onto my desk and a neighboring

  • bookshelf until my little exam room looked more like a

  • vitamin shop than a doctor's office.

  • The pharmaceuticals I could recognize right away, a

  • proton-pump inhibitor for her stomach, an antispasmodic for

  • her lower abdominal cramps, an antidepressant for her mood,

  • an antihistamine for her allergies.

  • But a good proportion of the bottles in Allie's pharmacy

  • were labeled with vague names, like Vital Force or Woman's

  • Thrive, rather than a specific nutrient.

  • And when I read the fine print, I saw that some

  • nutrients reappeared on a multitude of bottles.

  • For example, I found five supplements that contained

  • zinc and four others that listed Vitamin A or its

  • metabolite retinoic acid.

  • Looking at this impressive array, it was not too much of

  • a stretch to think of Allie as locked up.

  • Indeed, any drug or supplement can have unintended effects in

  • humans, like soil can become deficient in one nutrient as a

  • result of having too much of another.

  • For instance, excess calcium can create zinc and iron

  • deficiencies in humans.

  • Interestingly enough, Erick told me that excess phosphate

  • in the soil can create the same deficiencies in plants.

  • I wondered how many adverse interactions might be taking

  • place in Allie's fragile system because of all the

  • drugs and supplements she was taking."

  • So back to Erick.

  • I asked him, so what did you do to make this beautiful land

  • that I've been farming for the past couple days, as I was

  • sitting at the table.

  • And he told me the story about how he actually ended up

  • rejuvenating his land.

  • He went back to the books.

  • But this time, he didn't go to your standard agronomy books.

  • He went to books by the grandmothers and grandfathers

  • of organic agriculture, people whose names you might

  • recognize, like Rudolf Steiner, and FH King, and Lady

  • Balfour, and Sir Albert Howard.

  • These are people who wrote about organic farming very

  • early on and influenced people like the

  • modern day Michael Pollan.

  • These are the original organic agricultural philosophers.

  • And how did they get their opinions?

  • They got them from watching traditional farmers farm on

  • the land, farmers who had been farming a piece of land and

  • received it from their parents and their great-grandparents

  • and their great-great-grandparents and

  • planned to hand it down to their children, and their

  • grandchildren, and their great-great-grandchildren.

  • And so they had found a system of preserving the soil and

  • preserving fertility on the land.

  • And it didn't matter if they were in China, like FH King

  • wrote about China, or if they were in Germany and Bavaria,

  • like Rudolf Steiner, who wrote about Germany and Bavaria, or

  • India, like Sir Albert Howard.

  • What they were all doing was pretty much the same.

  • They were farming in the image of nature.

  • They were farming the way that nature farms.

  • How does nature farm?

  • Nature farms with animals, not just with plants.

  • Animals are there to replenish the soil.

  • Think of a natural setting like a forest.

  • How does it happen?

  • The animals are part of that ecosystem.

  • Nature always keeps ground cover.

  • Have you ever been to a place in nature, in the wild, where

  • you just see bare soil?

  • There's always something that's protecting it and

  • preserving the moisture.

  • Nature doesn't till the way you saw in that first picture,

  • where you take that delicate top layer and

  • stick it down lower.

  • It can't do anything to nourish the plants.

  • Nature doesn't use chemical additives.

  • Nature conserves water.

  • Nature uses seeds that were grown in that place, because

  • they're intended to be there, not seeds that are actually

  • refined for a distant land or that have another gene

  • introduced in them, as we're seeing now.

  • So Erick became very influenced by these writings.

  • And he, too, started to farm.

  • And his method is called biodynamic farming.

  • But it really is this full cycle of farming in

  • the image of nature.

  • And what he did, by doing this, is he started to nourish

  • all of those microbes and all of those worms and all of

  • those voles, the little rodents that live under the

  • soil which are there to process that organic matter.

  • And in turn, these billions of unpaid workers began to

  • nourish his plants.

  • And he started to grow the most amazing grass, because he

  • would rotate the animals through.

  • I mean, what better fertilizer than a cow, right?

  • They deposit it.

  • And then they plow it in with their hooves.

  • And then they move on.

  • And they'll also disturb the top layer just enough that you

  • start to get a little system going on there.

  • So does that grass look pretty good to you guys?

  • I mean, I know you're not necessarily experts, but

  • wouldn't you say that's pretty good looking grass?

  • Yeah, good grass.

  • And then he started to grow amazing vegetables.

  • And he's just this very, very popular farmer up in the

  • Snoqualmie.

  • But the true test is that about 8 to 10 years into

  • having given up that test and replace and changing his soil,

  • he went back, and he did those soil samples.

  • And he sent them back into the lab.

  • And the results came back that everything was perfect.

  • And he hadn't bought an outside

  • additive in almost a decade.

  • So his new system was really working.

  • So I'm sitting there, as a doctor at the dining room

  • table, after having done a hard day's labor in his field,

  • and I'm thinking, how does this apply

  • to Allie, my patient?

  • Here she is in San Francisco suffering, eating her energy

  • bars and her wilted spinach from Costco and, you know,

  • eating her bags of medicines every day.

  • Can I make the leap?

  • Can we start to say that when Allie enters an eco-cycle that

  • she, too, can get healthier just like his vegetables and

  • just like the cows and just like the worms and just like

  • Erick and Wendy reported for themselves

  • and their farm interns?

  • What would happen to Allie?

  • So I'm a woman of science.

  • So I started to go to the

  • literature to see what happens.

  • I mean, we have all of this data now, telling us that if

  • it is a biodynamically rich soil, if there's a lot of

  • worms and a lot of microbes that are just teeming in that

  • soil, and there's a lot of actual DNA in the soil, that

  • you grow a more nutrient-rich and more varied crop.

  • Can you guys tell which is the biodynamically rich soil here

  • just from looking at this slide?

  • What's your guess?

  • The one on the left, yeah.

  • And you're not a farmer, right?

  • You could just tell.

  • If you just even looked, not at the greenery, but at the

  • soil itself, what do you see that's different?

  • How would you describe the two soils?

  • AUDIENCE: Happy.

  • DAPHNE MILLER: Happy.

  • AUDIENCE: Moist.

  • DAPHNE MILLER: Moist.

  • AUDIENCE: Rich.

  • DAPHNE MILLER: Rich.

  • Yeah, there's something about it that feels pliable, like

  • that it can give, like it can allow earth to come through.

  • You're not going to believe this.

  • But as a doctor, when I look at my patients, I apply a lot

  • of these same values.

  • This is what you learn.

  • Is that recognized?

  • Healthy, sick?

  • And this was fascinating for me to see that I had this

  • language, actually, in common with farmers, our ability to

  • sort of evaluate things.

  • But we have a lot of data now showing us that microbes in

  • the soil, in this rich soil, have everything to do with the

  • value of the nutrients that come out of it.

  • And I don't know if you guys are familiar with the study

  • that came out of Stanford about nine months ago, saying

  • that organic is no better than conventional.

  • It's because they were asking the wrong question.

  • If they'd been asking about the soil--

  • because there's many organic soils that look like that.

  • In fact, that's an organic soil--

  • if they were asking, does microbial-rich soil and well

  • cared for eco-soil like Erick's produce happier

  • vegetables, their study would have had a

  • totally different result.

  • Isn't it amazing in science, if you ask the wrong question,

  • you really go down the rabbit hole.

  • So we have lots of information about this.

  • This is not disputed at this point.

  • And we have lots of information that nutrient-rich

  • foods makes for healthy people.

  • We have that information, too.

  • But we haven't completed the arc from soil to our bodies.

  • How do we relate to soil?

  • What happens if I put Allie in that eco-cycle?

  • What happens if I put you in that eco-cycle to your health?

  • And these are the kinds of cross-disciplinary,

  • big-picture questions that we need to start asking and not

  • get caught in our click-and-grow bubble, you

  • know, of putting the plant in the box or the

  • human on the drug.

  • So I called lots of scientists.

  • I asked them this question, what happens to us when we get

  • connected to healthy soil?

  • Can we actually turn our health around?

  • And most of them, there was silence at

  • the end of the phone.

  • I talked to people in health.

  • I talked to people in agronomy.

  • But one day I called Justin Sonnenburg.

  • And he's a microbiologist at Stanford.

  • Do you recognize his slide there on his desktop?

  • You saw that earlier, right?

  • That's the one I showed you of the human gut.

  • What Justin and his wife Erica do-- they're a

  • team in their lab--

  • and they study the microbiome, which is that massive colony

  • of bacteria that lives in our intestine.

  • Two pounds of us is bacteria that we don't own in terms of

  • it not being part of our DNA but that we're discovering

  • more and more has everything to do with our health.

  • It has to do with our propensity for allergies.

  • It has to do with our level of immunity.

  • It has to do with our metabolism.

  • It might even have to do with whether we are heavy or thin.

  • These are all things that are related to the microbiome.

  • And if you're interested in reading more, "Mother Jones"

  • has a fantastic article that just came out, I think, last

  • week but specifically on it.

  • It's one of the best pieces I've seen.

  • But there's more and more coming out about how much

  • these little bugs in our gut sort of rule our health.

  • And what we're discovering is that a certain percentage of

  • these we inherit the same way we inherit property or our

  • grandmother's candlesticks.

  • They come to us within our family lineage.

  • But there's another percentage of them that we get from our

  • environment and we get from a variety of places, including

  • the places where our food is grown, the soil and water.

  • Water is the oceans or where our food is grown, as well.

  • Sometimes we don't think of that as the water equivalent

  • of soil, but it is.

  • And so Justin said, we're just starting to discover how the

  • microbes, those microbes that Erick is growing in his soil,

  • interact with our microbiome and what effect that's having

  • on our health, and that that might explain at least a good

  • part of what happens to someone like Allie in terms of

  • her health when she enters the farm cycle.

  • But I'm just going to share with you some of the research

  • that's coming out on this.

  • And this is new stuff, guys.

  • I've gone from ancient farmers to sort of cutting edge

  • microbiology here.

  • But what we're starting to discover--

  • and this is a study that just came out a couple months ago--

  • is that when your food is grown in soil that's been

  • mistreated, that's been dosed with antibiotics and

  • pesticides and fertilizers, the bacteria that's encouraged

  • to grow in that soil, first of all, it becomes very

  • monotonous.

  • You don't get the huge variety that you got in that slide

  • that you appreciated.

  • You tend to get fewer types of bacteria.

  • And they develop antibiotic resistance.

  • And then what happens is they hitchhike on your food into

  • your gut, and they give information--

  • sometimes it's just a segment of DNA--

  • to your microbiome.

  • And they actually can convert good guys.

  • They can convert the nice candlesticks that you got from

  • your grandmother into antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

  • And so we're starting to discover that, you know, we've

  • known that when you dose animals with antibiotics that

  • that affects your own resistance to antibiotics.

  • We're starting to discover that soil is a whole other

  • piece of this.

  • And we just don't even know what other kind of negative

  • information can come in from having your food grown in

  • negative soil.

  • They're just starting to code these strands and figure out

  • what this little invisible exchange is that's happening.

  • So now I've told you the bad news.

  • But the good news--

  • and this is a piece that Justin wrote.

  • It's about research that researchers in France did--

  • but we're discovering that good information gets

  • transferred, as well.

  • So this is about a study that was done where researchers

  • went and looked at a bacteria that lives on

  • seaweed in the ocean.

  • And this bacteria has a sequence of DNA in it that's

  • really good at digesting seaweed and processing those

  • nutrients and using it.

  • And it's bacteria that's called a

  • Bacteroidetes type bacteria.

  • And so now that we can sequence the entire genome,

  • and we're starting to be able to sequence the entire biome,

  • they went in, and they started to look at where they could

  • find that enzyme that digests the seaweed in terms of all

  • living species.

  • And they found it in the intestines of cultures that

  • eat a lot of seaweed.

  • And so what happened is that that bacteria

  • passed its DNA on.

  • It hitchhiked on the seaweed into the microbiome of these

  • seaweed-eating cultures.

  • And as a result, they have a better ability than non

  • seaweed-eating cultures to digest seaweed

  • and harvest its nutrients.

  • They have these special Bacteroidetes that are sort of

  • like seaweed gluttons, and that give them all these great

  • nutrients from seaweed.

  • But let's say, if your family grew up for centuries in

  • Eastern Europe, you don't have that ability.

  • And as Justin Sonnenburg said, this is just

  • the tip of the iceberg.

  • How much of this information, this pass-the-gene game, is

  • happening between us and our soil at every given meal,

  • we're just starting to discover.

  • I'm not going to load you with a bunch of this new research,

  • but I need to tell you this other study,

  • because I just love it.

  • This is Italian researchers who went to a tiny village in

  • Burkina Faso and, actually--

  • it's kind of a weird study--

  • they took a group of healthy children in the village and

  • collected stool samples from them and studied the bacterial

  • content of their stool.

  • And then they went and compared these stool samples,

  • the bacterial colonies in it, to a sample from kids who were

  • living in downtown Florence.

  • And I don't know if any of you have been to Florence lately,

  • but they have a McDonald's on every corner, just like we do

  • here in the urban US.

  • And those kids, they have the same childhood obesity problem

  • in Italy that we have.

  • So a really different sample of kids.

  • These are kids in Burkina Faso, who, the best way to

  • describe it is that they are eating this full

  • cycle form of farming.

  • They are eating from land and soil that's

  • very much like Erick's.

  • So the result that they saw was that the children in

  • Burkina Faso, the green is that Bacteroidetes.

  • It's that type of bacteria that tends to be very good.

  • There's many different species of them.

  • But they're all, in general, very good at harvesting whole

  • grains and greens and taking those nutrients and passing

  • them on to you, versus firmicutes, which is what you

  • see a preponderance of in Florence.

  • And this looks much more like our intestine, when they

  • sample people here in the West.

  • Firmicutes thrive on a McDonald's meal.

  • They're great at taking saturated fats and lots of

  • sugar and harvesting those nutrients and

  • moving them into you.

  • Those are kind of the Homer Simpson of bacteria.

  • And so, also, from the children from Burkina Faso,

  • they discovered that they had types of bacteria that we

  • don't even have in our Western guts and that look a lot more

  • like bacteria that they found when they took these ancient

  • stool samples from archaeological sites, from

  • people in Mesopotamia, and looked at what their bacteria

  • looked like.

  • They are able to code the DNA in these ancient stools.

  • The name for ancient stools, by the way, is coprolites, in

  • case you're in a trivia game ever, and you need to

  • come up with that.

  • But they looked a lot more like the Burkina Faso kids.

  • So the point here is that part of our microbiome is going

  • extinct as we move away from these traditional soils and

  • these traditional ways of farming and

  • these traditional foods.

  • We're actually losing the bacteria which are our friends

  • and can help us metabolically.

  • And so learning all of this, I really started to wonder, so

  • what would happen if Allie really reconnected with the

  • farm and became a piece of the farm?

  • And I started to talk to her about this idea, based on what

  • I'd learned with Erick.

  • And I kind of came up with this little set of rules for

  • how to reconnect with the farm.

  • I came up with seven ideas here for her.

  • The first one was to eat a little dirt and bugs.

  • And it was obviously from food that's been grown in an

  • authentic and full-farming way.

  • If you eat that food from the farm that I showed you in that

  • slide that's causing antibiotic resistance, the

  • dirt from that farm that's causing antibiotic resistance,

  • that's not going to be recommended.

  • But eat a little dirt and bugs from a farm like Erick's.

  • Who knows what kinds of information is coming along?

  • And someone, at a talk I gave recently, told me that there

  • are some chefs that are starting to serve sprinklings

  • of soil, actually, on the plate.

  • So this is becoming very trendy, I guess.

  • But for those of you who can't stand the idea of that,

  • fermented foods are really a chance to eat soil bugs.

  • Have you ever thought about that?

  • Fermentation is actually just controlled rotting.

  • What it is, is you take the vegetable, and

  • you put it in salt.

  • And whenever you buy real fermented food, it should just

  • be vegetable and salt.

  • There should be nothing else on the ingredients.

  • If you want a couple herbs in there, fine.

  • But if it says vinegar, or preservative, or sugar, just

  • put it back on the shelf, OK.

  • It should be vegetables and salt.

  • And what happens is that the bacteria--

  • the lactobacillus that's sitting on the vegetable, that

  • came from where?

  • The soil--

  • it starts to ferment it.

  • It does its work.

  • And when it ferments, it multiplies.

  • It grows.

  • And so when you eat a little tablespoon of sauerkraut,

  • you're getting billions of bacteria.

  • And they're not just some bacteria that some scientists

  • dreamed up, which is what you get when you take those

  • probiotics, they're ones from the soil that you co-evolved

  • with for millions of years.

  • And so it makes sense.

  • Those are the ones you want to get.

  • Another pointer I gave to her-- we're always telling

  • people, buy food that's locally grown.

  • Buy food from a farmer that has a face.

  • You guys are busy.

  • You don't know how to do that.

  • Or you get it from your cafeteria here.

  • Let's say you're going to pick out a piece of fruit or a

  • vegetable--

  • the best way is to look at the piece of fruit and vegetable,

  • and smell it.

  • And if you can take a little taste, if it's a grape if it's

  • something like that, take a taste.

  • If it tastes wonderful, and if it smells good, chances are

  • it's been grown in a wonderful way.

  • Because most of our conventionally and mass-grown

  • stuff and stuff that's been grown through bad soil, its

  • seed has been either engineered or hybridized to

  • succeed anywhere and to be transportable and not

  • perishable and all of those things.

  • It's not a seed that has been maximized for taste and for

  • nutrient value.

  • And taste and nutrient value often run together.

  • So I really encourage people to actually get to know their

  • vegetables through their nose and their mouth and not

  • through their eyes.

  • And when you use your eyes, look for imperfection, OK?

  • Usually stuff that's been grown in a local and

  • sustainable way, it's going to be a little lopsided.

  • It's not going to look like some beauty queen that's,

  • like, puffed up and been given lipo and Botox and is

  • completely the same as the next one.

  • And the vegetables and fruits that are a little bug-eaten,

  • that's where most of the nutrients are, because

  • antioxidants are basically like a vegetable's

  • equivalent of a scab.

  • They're the place that it goes, that it actually uses to

  • fight whatever bug or whatever.

  • It's their immune system.

  • So look for the cabbage leaves that are a little moth-eaten.

  • Don't throw those outer ones away.

  • Or if someone else is throwing them away, you go eat them.

  • Choosing food with a story is a little different than

  • choosing local food, because we don't have the luxury

  • around this country of getting stuff fresh and local the way

  • that we can in San Francisco or the Bay Area.

  • But choose food where there's something about the farm on

  • the label in the store that says where it's grown, talks

  • about the farmer.

  • I was speaking with Wendell Berry, who's belongs in that

  • food philosopher category.

  • And he told me one of the ways that he vets his food is he

  • finds out does the farmer live on the farm?

  • So much of our commercial food, the farmer's wearing a

  • suit and working in a city somewhere.

  • And that farm is owned by someone who really isn't even

  • invested in the soil, whose grandfather and

  • great-grandfather wasn't part of it or who doesn't have the

  • plans to keep it wonderful so they can pass it on like an

  • heirloom to their children and grandchildren.

  • But the minute that the farmer becomes invested in the soil

  • and preferably owns that soil, they're going to take care of

  • it like the most precious family heirloom, and they're

  • going to give you, and they're going to give their own

  • family, delicious food.

  • Another important thing, and this is just

  • self-evident, is to cook.

  • Because that's when you start to use these materials.

  • And I know here you have this wonderful food served to you

  • during the day.

  • And I know that your chefs and your food procurers are doing

  • an amazing job here.

  • But when you go home, use the same kind of mindfulness.

  • And another important piece of it is to

  • give back to the soil.

  • I don't know how many of you live in a place where you can

  • do communal composting or you have access to your own

  • compost bins.

  • I mean, even if you live in a high-rise apartment in San

  • Francisco now, you can contribute to the green bins

  • with your food scraps.

  • Saving water, taking a shorter shower is a way to give back

  • to the soil.

  • Because any water you don't use, in the global picture,

  • can be diverted towards agriculture.

  • And connecting with nature, in the book, it's in the sixth

  • chapter of the book, I talk at length about all of these

  • chemical connections that we have with nature and how,

  • actually, there are messages when we work with plants, both

  • olfactory messages and so on, that can make us happy or can

  • change our outlook on things.

  • We are actually having this sort of secret conversation

  • with nature that we don't even realize.

  • So just getting around nature.

  • Farming is great.

  • Gardening can be great.

  • I wrote a chapter that took place in the Bronx in the book

  • with urban farmers.

  • And one of the researchers, who is studying urban farmers,

  • found out that they were healthier and thinner even if

  • they weren't growing vegetables, just because being

  • outside, perhaps connecting with the plants.

  • Who knows what it was?

  • And the most important thing is to treat your body the same

  • way as you would treat your food.

  • So anything you put on your body or put in your house,

  • think of it as something that eventually is going to end up

  • in your soil.

  • Because it will.

  • So when you're buying shampoos, or makeup, or

  • moisturizers, or cleaners for your car, or detergents for

  • your laundry, or your toothpaste, look for all of

  • those bisphenol As, those VOCs.

  • If it's something that you don't want to take immediately

  • and eat yourself, don't put it on your body, don't put it in

  • your house, because it will end up back in your food.

  • Vinegar is a fantastic cleaning resource.

  • I use it as a cleaning fluid for everything in my house.

  • Believe it or not, baking soda is the best shampoo I've ever

  • discovered, cocoa butter for your skin.

  • And these things have everything to do with the farm

  • and have everything to do with your soil.

  • And the other thing that I didn't write up there, and

  • this is really important, is to treat your body the same

  • way as a mindful farmer treats their soil, because sometimes

  • we care more about the soil than we do about ourselves,

  • which is very interesting.

  • So I shared all of this with Allie.

  • And we strategized about how she, in her San Francisco

  • life, could start to do this.

  • And she actually started to get a CSA box.

  • And she started to volunteer in a school garden, and just

  • made more time to be outside, and made more time to cook,

  • and started to have a different idea about how she

  • was choosing her food.

  • And she slowly started to get herself off of those shopping

  • bags full of medicine.

  • The one medicine--

  • because I saw her recently-- she still takes an

  • antidepressant.

  • But everything else, she stopped.

  • My guess is that the antidepressant, at this point,

  • it's a pretty low dose.

  • But she holds onto it.

  • And I'm totally fine with that.

  • I'm an integrative doctor, and I like to

  • straddle both worlds.

  • But who knows what piece of all of this worked?

  • Was it the subtle messages from the plants?

  • Was it the microbes?

  • Was it her just getting off all those medicines that were

  • interacting with her microbiome?

  • Who knows?

  • Was it her, just all of a sudden, having a different

  • outlook, a different view?

  • But about six months after she made these changes, just like

  • Erick, we sent lab tests on Allie.

  • And they came back.

  • All of her labs-- all of the subtle deficiencies in iron

  • and Vitamin D and so on, that all of those other

  • practitioners had been replacing--

  • they were normal.

  • And so I called Erick and told him, and he kind of high-fived

  • me over the phone.

  • So we both realized that we'd done pretty much the same

  • intervention.

  • So this picture is just to show you-- this comes from

  • another chapter of the book.

  • It's about raising resilient kids--

  • but this is the kind of connection that other cultures

  • have with their farms and their soil, and this kind of

  • trust that they have, that there's real health there.

  • And I just wanted to show you that.

  • But thank you so much for listening.

  • And please, spread the word about "Farmacology." Go ahead

  • and Facebook me.

  • I just started on Twitter.

  • But I've become a Twitter fanatic.

  • I think it's this great way to learn things.

  • And I share new studies every day.

  • Because I think you can tell, I'm a little bit of a science

  • geek on top of being a holistic healer.

  • And any new research I find, I like to put out via Twitter.

  • So follow me on Twitter.

  • And thank you so much.

  • It was such a pleasure.

  • And I'll take any questions you guys have.

  • [APPLAUSE]

  • FEMALE SPEAKER: If you have a question--

  • AUDIENCE: So there's obviously a richer microbiome in soil

  • than in air, sort of in the rest of the environment where

  • people live.

  • And I know there's some emerging research in that

  • area, too, about what kinds of microbes are in our different

  • environments.

  • And are you familiar with that?

  • How important do you think that is, to our health?

  • DAPHNE MILLER: We don't know.

  • I mean, like I said, the ocean is another enormous source.

  • And soil, obviously, is a very huge source.

  • I think it makes sense that the places where our food is

  • grown is where we're going to get the most beneficial

  • influence from that.

  • But in the chapter on resilience and resistance that

  • I talk about, there's a number of researchers that are

  • studying how farm kids have way less allergy and asthma

  • than children who live in urban areas.

  • And they are discovering that microbes in their

  • unpasteurized milk play a role, that actual microbes

  • that are just in the hay dust play a role.

  • A lot of the yeast that they are discovering, yeast that

  • even we thought were pathogenic or bad for you in

  • these urban environments, might

  • actually be good for you.

  • And they're even discovering that types of bacteria that we

  • equate with poisoning or disease, things like staph and

  • listeria, that in these little doses in farm environments,

  • they're actually protective.

  • So this is just a wide open field.

  • And next week, I'll have something new to tell you,

  • because the literature is just changing very quickly.

  • AUDIENCE: I heard Mary Roach was going to be talking about

  • her latest book.

  • And she was talking about transplants of, like, even

  • fecal matter into patients, that kind of thing.

  • I thought it was pretty interesting.

  • And I'm quite interested in the whole rise and shine kind

  • of cleansing type thing where people are replacing the biome

  • essentially in their bodies.

  • I was wondering you if you had a viewpoint on

  • people doing that?

  • DAPHNE MILLER: Well, when things go bad, then fecal

  • transplants actually can be unbelievably powerful.

  • Unfortunately, the FDA is coming down on it, because

  • it's foreign tissue, and that gets regulated.

  • It used to be sort of this underground thing that

  • gastroenterologists would do in some weird

  • places in the country.

  • But now, as it's getting more popular, I think, pretty soon

  • it's going to be a very regulated thing, like

  • everything.

  • But most of the time, we don't need to go to that extreme.

  • Most of the time we can actually nurture our biome by

  • eating these correct foods.

  • But there are some instances in my practice where I have

  • referred patients for fecal transplant.

  • But those are people who are really, really ill and where

  • all these other things haven't worked.

  • And the next question is, where did they get the healthy

  • feces from?

  • They usually get it from a parent or a family member,

  • someone who shares the candlesticks

  • with them, as well.

  • But it's kind of a last-ditch solution.

  • And another question that I get a lot is, how about those

  • over-the-counter supplements, those probiotics?

  • And even people like Justin Sonnenburg, what they're

  • really doing is trying to mine all this information to come

  • up with the ideal probiotic.

  • Because that's where the biotech is.

  • That's where the money is, right?

  • What I'm talking about, eating vegetables and getting to know

  • the soil, I'm never going to get rich on this.

  • But the problem with probiotics is, because just as

  • I was talking about, a lot of our microbiome is inherited.

  • So yours might look very different than the gentleman

  • in the red shirt behind you and maybe different from

  • someone in the checkered shirt here.

  • And so what is the ideal microbiome?

  • We don't know.

  • Should we be trying to look, once again, like those

  • children in Burkina Faso?

  • Probably.

  • But it's going to be really hard to get back there with

  • our modern-day diets, you know.

  • And it doesn't matter how many probiotics you

  • dump into the system.

  • That's just a living bacteria that needs to be nourished in

  • order for it to continue to grow there.

  • Does that makes sense?

  • Thank you so much.

  • [APPLAUSE]

OLIVIA WU: Thank you for being here.

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