Summary
Our conversation with Dr. Zach Bush was truly one of spiritual significance. We talk about everything — from the ins and outs of the immune system, to the importance of holistic health, embracing nature, to chemical-free farming, and even touching on the meaning of life. Dr. Zach Bush has such a depth of knowledge and experience. Keep reading if you want to open your mind!
Who is Dr. Zach Bush?
Dr. Zach Bush started out working in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care with a focus on the microbiome. After spending years being exposed to death and dying, Zach was ready to look at how he can work to prevent disease rather than do constant “damage control.”
This revelation is what led Zach Bush to create *Seraphic Group and the non-profit Farmer’s Footprint to develop root-cause solutions for human and ecological health. Through this group and other education platforms, Zach works to advocate for a radical departure from chemical farming and big pharmacy and leaning into nature and life as it is naturally.
In this post, we’ll talk about:
- Zach’s journey to natural medicine
- The COVID-19 pandemic in relation to stress + fear
- How we can support our immune system
- Why we need to focus on holistic health
- Being reverent to nature
- Embracing natural beauty
- How we can heal as a society
Dr. Zach’s journey to natural medicine
We started our conversation with Dr. Zach discussing the concept of death and dying. A scary one for many, and a taxing one for those who work in healthcare. Zach explained that many healthcare professionals take on a feeling of guilt and loneliness when working in this industry. He noted that the suicide rate of physicians is twice that of the average population.
He explains that this comes from the deep depression that many healthcare professionals get from being surrounded by death every single day. It is hard to try and convert the profound emotional process that is death and dying into a typical work environment.
Zach took us through his journey to deciding to work in natural medicine. Before this switch, he felt like he was constantly doing “damage control.” This idea of damage control is, what Zach says, the 4 trillion dollars of healthcare coverage every year.
Zach had a problem with this setup. He believed that we should be working to prevent disease and premature death rather than treating it after it already showed up. This was one main reason he switched to focusing on natural medicine.
Zach Bush on the coronavirus
The past two years have been extremely taxing for everyone. Managing job layoffs, family and friends getting sick and dying, and being filled with constant fear were just a few of the struggles that the COVID-19 pandemic brought. We chatted with Dr. Zach Bush on how fear was the main character in this process.
Zach draws parallels between the mental state of our society during the pandemic to the most commonly used definition of an anxiety attack which is: the sense of impending doom.
We know that fear was driving our society during the pandemic. This fear was fueling and consuming our everyday lives. Fear of catching the virus, of dying from it, of killing your grandparents by passing it along, of losing your job, of the pandemic never ending; the list goes on.
When the trillion-dollar global media companies hype up this fear around us, the amount of fear that creates, Zach Bush said, is not even able to be measured by current metrics.
How this impacts our immune system
Many things happen when this fear occurs, but at the individual level, Zach says, we know we induce suppression of the immune system.
“Your immune system is the relationship between you and the world around you.”
The worst part is that, at a time when we need our immune system to be ready, aka a global pandemic, is when we’ve seen it at its worst. We needed to focus on holistic health, especially building up our immune system, rather than fearing what would come next.
Zach says the two most potent things suppressing our immune system is stress and lack of sleep. When we spend all day listening to the news discussing things like death rates, shutdowns, etc. how are we supposed to sleep soundly?
Beyond that, the move to isolation during the pandemic was, in Dr. Zach Bush’s opinion, one of the worst moves we could’ve made.
“Isolation is the death knell to the immune system.”
How we can support our immune system
Instead, he said we should have had massive parties out on beaches and mountaintops and overall embracing nature and each other. Zach says there is one rule we need to follow to support our immune system:
“We need to be together and we need to be out in nature.”
The impact that human touch can have on our immune system is profound. Getting 7 hugs a day can reduce the risk of getting a respiratory virus by 30-40%. We can see how the pandemic behavior of isolation has been the complete opposite of this.
Dr. Zach Bush says that we should be more like dogs. He said:
“We should be exuberant to touch each other, to smell each other, to be up in each other’s microbiome.”
Creating a better economy
Dr. Zach Bush is incredibly concerned with the fact that most of the food we eat is chemically infected. Zach encourages us to shift to focus on holistic health rather than solely fueling a broken economy around toxic foods. He goes on to talk about how every day we are stimulating the economy by buying these infected foods, household products, etc.
But, the problem is not the consumer’s fault. Instead, our economy needs a morality shift.
Zach said, “What if we created an economy of stimulus where we asked each other every day, ‘what are you most passionate about?’ ‘what projects are getting you excited’ how can I help with that?’”
This sharing of wealth that stems from shared passions and curiosity has the power to change the world.
The important thing is to be vigilant about this change. Zach Bush says,
“If we stay curious about an alternative world than we have today, we can go create that world.”
Embracing nature rather than sterilizing her
Zach, Krista, and Lindsey share the curiosity around why our culture is so focused on being sterile. This concept crosses over many different areas: from sterility with the idea of being ‘pure’ in religion, to sterilizing our homes with toxic chemicals. We are controlling nature and eliminating any variety in life.
Society has the power to shift this narrative by embracing nature and feminine energy.
As a collective, we need to focus on embracing the feminine energy of nature and the human race. If we educate women, Zach notes, the birth rate goes from 7 to 2 almost instantly. So these problems we are having, like an excessive population, can be managed by education and responsible governing.
Zach notes that nature has its own checks and balances system, but we have to stop trying to control nature. He thinks we need to embrace life, embrace nature, and stop trying to live in a superficial world. This will not only positively impact humans’ lives, but the state of mother nature as well.
“When we let life begin to embrace life again, the healing will be so fast and so radical. What took us 50 years to destroy will come back in a decade.”
Embracing nature will feed your immune system and your soul
This is where our conversation gets deep. We’re talking really deep. We asked Dr. Zach Bush what it means to be reverent to nature. His response is something that will stick with us for the rest of our lives.
He said:
“Simply to see that the fabric of it is beautiful. If you can go find the beauty in a leaf, or in a crystal that we pulled out from the bottom of the river, if you can feel the beauty of the water running by your hand in a running stream, if you haven’t felt that recently, go do that please. . . You can feel the energy in that water. Remember that you can feel the energy in nature.”
There are so many ways you can embrace nature every single day. A few ideas could be:
- Take a walk outside with no distractions and observe the nature you see
- Lay in the grass in the morning and embrace the dew on the leaves
- Swim in a body of water; a stream, river, lake, or the ocean
- Watch the clouds pass in the sky
- Grab a blanket and stargaze at night and appreciate the vast sky above us
Zach explains that before you truly love and appreciate nature, you must love and embrace yourself.
Embracing natural beauty
We had a spiritual connection with Dr. Zach Bush on appreciating our own beauty. He reminded us that although society often encourages us to cover up our faces with makeup and view our bodies as a work in progress, we are all made by nature as perfect human beings.
We chatted with Zach about the societal stigma around aging. We constantly fall victim to the capitalistic trap that encourages us to buy skincare products and get plastic surgery that rids our faces of wrinkles.
But Zach made us think about this a little deeper. When we look at our own faces with wrinkles, we feel the need to cover them up or get rid of them entirely. But when did we start to discredit a face of wisdom?
When we look at an elder, wrinkles and all, we only see the beauty and long life filled with growth and memories. We need to channel that love we feel when we look at other people and give it to our own faces in the mirror.
Wrinkles, dark spots, and all “imperfections” that come from aging are only marks of being alive and experiencing the world. Zach reminds us,
“If we are not sensing the world around us we are not alive, and we are certainly missing the beauty.”
Our conversation with Dr. Zach Bush truly felt like a connection with a higher power. We summarized the conversation, but there are so many more gold nuggets of wisdom to hear!
Listen to our full podcast episode with Dr. Zach Bush here. Feel free to share this episode with friends and family to spark a conversation and connect with others.
Want more of Dr. Zach Bush? Here’s where to find him:
- https://zachbushmd.com/
- @zachbushmd on Instagram
- ION* Go to ionbiome.com and use code almost30 at checkout for a free 3oz supply with a 32oz bottle purchase.
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