Human and Planet Health Solutions with Rob Herring
Rob Herring offers solutions to the health of the planet and population in this episode. For more info or to watch his films visit: https://www.earthconsciouslife.org/
Rob Herring offers solutions to the health of the planet and population in this episode. For more info or to watch his films visit: https://www.earthconsciouslife.org/
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Hey, everybody. | |
Happy Earth Week. | |
My guest today for a return engagement is Rob Arring. | |
He had one of the most popular podcasts earlier. | |
Rob directed and produced the award-winning film The Need to Grow, which we talked about on the last podcast. | |
That film was narrated by Rosario Dawson. | |
It was seen in 175 countries. | |
He co-founded the platform Earth-conscious life as an environmental filmmaker, citizen journalist and musical activist. | |
Rob writes songs for health and eco-activism. | |
He headlined the Rock for Nature concert in Berlin for 25,000 people. | |
He is a certified holistic health coach and is the co-founder of Integrative Pediatrics and has a big, big interest in one of our central Wheelhouse preoccupations, which is how do you reverse the chronic disease epidemic in our children? | |
And how Rob Hughes, my friend Mark Hyman, says that food is medicine. | |
But the way that we grow that food and the way that we consume that food really helps. | |
And that's one of the central formulations of your philosophy and your approach advocacy. | |
Yes, indeed. | |
Yeah, food is medicine. | |
We know that more and more as our population is eating things that look like food, that resemble what once was food, but unfortunately are not containing all the nutrients and are unfortunately contaminated in ways that they once were not. | |
And so through that is that that's really one of our biggest interactions with nature. | |
We can think of it that way where the actual soil is being turned into something that is consumed by us that turns into our physical bodies. | |
So if we're eating things that were contaminated, we're polluting our own bodies. | |
So this is a big part of my work moving forward is really not just how our connection to earth and minerals through our food, but how really all the elements are medicine. | |
And how air is medicine, how water is medicine, how even something like fire, the way that we interact with light and the way that light works within the body, the way that heat works within the body. | |
These things are all medicine. | |
And so as I've been doing deep dive research on how much of our food system has unfortunately Kind of become destructive, not just to our own physical bodies, but to our ecosystems at large. | |
What I keep coming up against, or what I'm reminded of, are the synergies with The systems within our body and the systems on a larger scale. | |
And that we really are an ecosystem. | |
And so that we and our human health is such a reflection of the ecosystems that we see on a planetary level. | |
And just as we're seeing biodiversity loss on large scales, just as we're seeing pollution on large scales, we're also seeing biodiversity loss within the human body. | |
And we're seeing this even in kids, even in newborns, being born without certain microbes in their gut microbiome that we would expect with a healthy newborn. | |
And we're also seeing these same kids being born contaminated to chemicals even before they exit the womb. | |
And so what are we doing on a planetary level? | |
On an ecosystem level that is unfortunately affecting our human health. | |
And so as I've looked into this deeper, I've been, you know, just returning to these elements. | |
And air is probably the first and foremost, right? | |
We can live so long without food. | |
We can live a certain amount of time without water. | |
Can't really live that long without air. | |
So I don't think we want to dismiss the power of air and clean air. | |
And so much of us are breathing water. | |
In pollutants. | |
And we know that the EPA has estimated that we're spending over 90% of our time indoors. | |
I think for the average person it's well more than that. | |
And how are we interacting with fresh air or not? | |
And what's happening inside the ecosystem of our homes? | |
So we're polluting the indoor air quality with these things like volatile organic compounds, otherwise known as VOCs. | |
What are those coming from? | |
Everything from our carpet to our couches to the way that we cook. | |
And there are simple solutions. | |
Just turning the vent on when we're When we're actually frying something on a pan or reducing the number of candles that we're burning or the amount of incense that we're using. | |
Can we crack a window open? | |
Simple things like that can have profound impact. | |
We know that our mental health, our physical health changes when we go outside. | |
So can we bring a little bit more of the outdoor world Into our indoor space, which is what's so important about things about holiday, quote unquote, like Earth Day or Earth Week or Earth Month is because it reminds us, hopefully, of the connection that we have to nature and the dependence that we have on nature. | |
So we really want to filter our air. | |
If you don't have an air filter, if you can get one, it's a really good idea. | |
I'm not the first person to say this, but if you don't use a filter, you become the filter. | |
Unfortunately, in just the past couple of weeks, we've seen studies coming out showing microplastics showing up in deep lung tissue. | |
In 2018, we already discovered that microplastics were appearing in human excrement. | |
We've now found them in blood and we found them in our lungs. | |
So what's happening to our human body is once again a reflection of the same types of pollution that are happening on a larger scale. | |
So how do we increase our exposure to outdoor air? | |
You know, there's this word called biophilia, which is a little bit of an interest to reconnect to nature. | |
And some people are a little bit more biophilic than others. | |
The outdoors people, the adventurers, the hikers. | |
But there's something really important to why those people are happy and smiling when they're out there on the trail. | |
And so they're being introduced not just to clean air, but they're also getting exposed to sunlight. | |
And so when we're looking at the fire element, the main thing that's fire that's representing our life is our exposure to sunlight. | |
So many of us are light deficient. | |
We're actually working on a film right now called Pharmacy of Light. | |
It should be out in a few months. | |
That's pharmacy with an F, by the way. | |
It looks at the biophotonic potential of light within our bodies. | |
So we are being exposed to artificial light, just like we're exposed to Artificial stale air and we're deficient in natural light. | |
So many of us think of sunlight as just vitamin D, but it's so much more that's happening there at a hormonal level and genetic level if we can expose our bodies in a healthy way to sunlight. | |
And so we have to look at the way the humans evolved if we want to return to health. | |
And when we use these phrases like natural, you know, do I want something to be more natural? | |
Well, really what that means is how did human beings evolve? | |
So we didn't evolve indoors. | |
We didn't evolve re-breathing the same air, breathing in contaminants from these industrial pollutants. | |
We didn't evolve only getting 10 minutes of sunlight on our skin throughout the day. | |
So if we can expose our bodies to red light spectrum, particularly at sunrise and sunset, we're actually having profound healing impacts. | |
And not just on a physical level, but our mood, our hormones, our sleep. | |
Many things are triggered when we expose ourselves to sunlight. | |
And many of us know this anecdotally. | |
When we spend more time outside in the sunlight, we start to feel better. | |
So how do we get children, especially, to build these types of habits? | |
And we're going up against some information about the dangers of things like sunlight. | |
And of course you don't want to burn. | |
But we know that most of the things that we're using to, quote unquote, protect ourselves from sunlight are just more chemicals, are just more pollutants that are in most of these sunscreens. | |
So as I'm going through each of these elements, of course, we look at our water. | |
We know that water, it's estimated to be the largest cause of death on the planet, larger than war and violence combined because of unclean water. | |
So many of us are blessed to have access to clean water, some of us not so much, but even what is Known as quote-unquote clean that comes out of our faucets, as you know very well, much of this is contaminated with other things, whether it's chlorine, whether it's fluoride, again, chemicals that really the human body didn't evolve to be consuming at this level. | |
So how do we filter our water? | |
And we need to be doing this. | |
If you have access to spring water and can filter that and, you know, at your own risk, This is some of the most healing water on the planet. | |
So I'm always looking at how do we really return things to the way that humans evolved? | |
Because so much of the debate of human health right now is, well, it couldn't have been this. | |
It couldn't have been caused by this. | |
It couldn't have been caused by that because it's hard to find smoking guns to one particular variable. | |
And these are some of the limitations of science, which is that sometimes you can't isolate one thing. | |
But we know that there are very clear trends of ways in which humans have been disconnected from nature and ways in which that we've been polluted and contaminated with new things. | |
And so if we can reduce some of those newer things, it's not that we want to, you know, avoid all of modern life and go live in a cabin for the rest of time and never go back to society. | |
But how do we get in balance and actually rebuild our connection? | |
And another cool thing that I've been learning about is the way in which nature and time in nature really shows benefit to our whole physical body in as little as a few hours. | |
There's a concept from Japan called Shinrin-yoku, otherwise known as forest bathing. | |
And there are studies that show that in just a few hours in the forest, What's happening is that the body's natural killer cells, a key immune system cell in our blood, goes up by as much as 50% just from a few hours. | |
It actually stays higher. | |
So this is a key part of the immune system that can fight cancers, that can fight infectious disease. | |
And so this time in nature is not just, you feel better, it's just some woo-woo idea. | |
We know that on very measurable metrics, blood pressure goes down, anxiety goes down, the healing power of our immune system goes up, our mental health changes, our mood changes. | |
And so even things as simple Plants in hospital rooms. | |
At first was written off as, okay, that can't be that big of a deal. | |
But there are studies that show that plants in a hospital room during recovery increases healing. | |
So what's happening there? | |
Our bodies are really starving to be back in nature. | |
Wildly, even so much as a picture of nature compared to a photo of something else or a painting of something else. | |
We see shorter hospital stay and less reliance on pain medication, less anxiety. | |
So our bodies are really deprived. | |
And the way that I've been looking at as we're seeing all these mental health issues is that our brain evolved in a way to actually tell ourselves when things aren't right. | |
And sometimes when we feel bad, we think that's a problem. | |
Can we flip that script? | |
I mean, obviously we don't want people to feel bad, but when you start to feel a bit sluggish, when your energy is low, When you're depressed, instead of looking for more ways to focus on problems and be even more depressed, what if we ask ourselves, hey, this is feedback. | |
This is like the engine coming on, the little light coming on that says service engine soon in our car. | |
It's giving us a bit of feedback. | |
So actually, when we're feeling bad, what can we ask ourselves? | |
Well, what can I do to feel better? | |
Something isn't working. | |
We have to change something. | |
And what many people have found is that by just getting outdoors more, you know, getting into national parks, getting into any green space, bringing green space into the home, little things as much as looking out to a view of the trees for just a couple minutes, we can see that there's mental health change. | |
So I love exercising outdoor, you know, even if you aren't a runner or a hiker or a biker, just something like a walk. | |
You know, these simple things have profound impact. | |
So I'm always returning to air, water, earth, and fire. | |
And how do I get them back into my life as much as nature optimized them over thousands and thousands of years for us to feel good? | |
I'm more and more aware of the metaphors and the connection between individual human health and the kind of macro environmental health. | |
And, you know, what we want to do in both situations is to is to fortify the immune system, fortify resiliency of the ecosystem, resiliency of the individual organism, rather than use a war metaphor and say we got to eliminate this particular agricultural. rather than use a war metaphor and say we got | |
Past are and we're going to do a chemical warfare against them or we got to eliminate this particular virus with chemical and technological warfare, but instead build, bolster the human immune system, bolster the ecosystem so that they can absorb the kind of bolster the ecosystem so that they can absorb the kind of punishment that humanity is now giving | |
One of the sort of interesting experiences I had at Riverkeeper Was in ways of figuring out ways to measure the impacts of pollution on a river, on a creek, on a feeder stream. | |
We have in upstate New York and in Hudson Valley, literally thousands and thousands of small creeks, many of them. | |
Headwaters, not only at the Hudson River, but of the reservoirs that feed the drinking waters of life for 10.5 million people in New York City, this incredible reservoir system. | |
It's really three systems, the Croton system, the Delaware system, and the Catskill system. | |
And we'd see somebody build a golf course on one of those creeks. | |
And you couldn't really, we knew they were using pesticides, but usually the pesticides were running off in slugs during rainstorms when there was nobody, there was rarely anybody out there to measure, you know, what was happening in the creek at that time. | |
We ran into a group called Stroud Water Research Center in Pennsylvania. | |
And what they do is they put leaf packs and they weight them down with rocks, these little packs of leaves and cheesecloth. | |
They put them for two weeks into that creek and then they take them out and they basically shake all the little bugs out of them. | |
And in a healthy creek, you'll see hundreds and hundreds of different species of microbes and small animals and aquatic organisms and, you know, mayflies, caddisflies, salmonflies and larvae and all of these different animals that you'll see intermingling with each other in these incredible teaming communities. | |
And then below the golf course, you'll see the same biomass in terms of poundage. | |
In other words, it's creating the same weight of biomass, but it will be all one species to affect worms, which is a very high-tolerance pollution species, but everything else will be dead. | |
And it became the way that we measured ecosystem health. | |
We could go to the headwater. | |
We could see what was supposed to be in that stream. | |
sources and see how the stream of the barren, diminished, impoverished ecological communities. | |
Well, the same thing, of course, is happening to the human gut biome. | |
And we now know that the gut biome is the largest human organ. | |
It's bigger than your skin and weighs more than your brain or your heart or your liver or your kidneys or your pancreas. | |
And it dictates a lot of immune response in human beings, those little microbes that Evolved coterminants with humanity. | |
They've been our friends. | |
Digesting our foods for us. | |
Protecting us from dangerous organisms. | |
From poisons. | |
From toxins in the environment. | |
This is the most interesting thing. | |
Dictating our moods. | |
Protecting us from depression. | |
From despair. | |
It's really incredible the things that these are... | |
We are... | |
We're not just one organism. | |
We are a walking around community. | |
We're an ecology of all these different organisms upon which we're completely dependent for our survival, for our health, for our happiness. | |
Right? | |
Day-to-day functioning. | |
Nobody's known this before. | |
And what we're finding is a lot of these chemicals, the neonicotinoid pesticides, the glyphosate, the chemicals that we inject on a day-to-day basis that are in our food, our air, etc., they are killing chemicals. | |
Large swaths of that species diversity. | |
And when that happens, human moods deteriorate. | |
We become depressed. | |
We become less healthy, less able to fend off foreign invaders, less able to protect. | |
Protect ourselves against coronavirus. | |
And a lot of, you know, we're finding, for example, you know, ulcers. | |
People thought they'd come from worrying when I was a kid. | |
We now know that it's because your microbiome is out of whack. | |
And there's organisms that in your stomach have been allowed to flourish. | |
The organisms that we're supposed to keep down, those populations are gone. | |
And there's so much science now on this, and it's really fascinating, but really important for people to understand that your health is not going to come in a syringe. | |
It's not going to come even from going to your doctor. | |
It's going to come from taking care of yourself, and particularly your microbiome. | |
Yeah, we've been working on a project about the connection of what's known as the gut-brain axis. | |
And our mental health, like you said, is one of the most responsive when we start to rebuild the gut microbiome. | |
And, of course, many people are now becoming more aware that things like our feel-good hormones, like dopamine and serotonin, the majority of them, are produced in the gut. | |
Some people call it the second brain. | |
We, only in the last few decades, were able to have the genetic technology to be able to identify the differences of what's happening there. | |
It seems almost every week there's new discoveries happening right now when it comes to the microbiome. | |
So it's becoming a bit more trendy or a buzzword to talk about the microbiome and gut health, but for good reason. | |
And so this idea of whether or not you're taking probiotics through a supplement or actually getting them from food, which was the way that we would have. | |
Of course, humans didn't evolve with supplements. | |
They were getting exposed to these microbes through their time in nature. | |
And there's a really interesting thing that happens when we have our hands in something like soil. | |
And there's one bacterium that they've identified called Mycobacterium vacae, or vacae, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, is a particular microbe found in soils that we now know is critical to our serotonin production. | |
And so it may be that our hands are in the soil, and we're breathing a little bit of this in when we're out there working in the dirt. | |
Maybe it gets under our fingernails, or some of it is on the carrot when it comes out of the ground. | |
Maybe walking around barefoot. | |
Barefoot. | |
We have great science now on this technology known as grounding that, of course, a lot of people thought was a woo-woo hippie idea of hugging a tree When in reality, we are connecting on an electrical level to the Earth's electrical field. | |
And this has benefits to our blood cells. | |
In as little as 45 minutes, we can actually, I've seen this in person, where we tested blood, looked at it under a microscope. | |
We grounded the same patients who were experiencing some sort of pain. | |
We saw the clumpiness, the sludginess of the red blood cells, the way that they clump together. | |
This, of course, is not an optimal blood flow. | |
We want oxygen to be moving throughout the body, nutrients to be carried throughout the body through our red blood cells really flowing. | |
And a lot of us have stagnant blood. | |
And once we ground, we can actually see a transformation. | |
It's not that it's going to heal everything overnight, but these are very real changes that happen when we ground. | |
There's a great film, I believe it's called The Earthing, that focuses on some of the science behind that. | |
But we know that there's reduced pain, reduced stress, our heart rate variability changes, our immune system We see change in a city. | |
So things like urban agriculture and our access to food are not just about the high freshness, the higher antioxidant content, the high nutrients of the food, but if you can spend time in a community garden, if you can spend time in your own garden, or just stepping into an urban garden or a park, we can really measure the changes that happen in our stress level. | |
And so many of us, of course, are overstressed. | |
And so if we can connect to the soil on a physical level, then there's also this fascinating concept of what are called phytoncides, which are effectively the essential oils that come off of plants. | |
So we've all heard this saying of, you know, stop and smell the roses. | |
But in reality, that time that we might take is not just about the pause or a Zen moment or reflecting on the beauty. | |
Which also has benefits, but literally breathing in these compounds called phytoncides that come off trees and they come off of plants, they have antimicrobial properties, they have antifungal properties, antiviral properties. | |
And they can also enhance your immune system. | |
So this disconnection from soil, from plants, is something that has become ingrained, unfortunately, into our modern culture to the point where most kids don't know where food comes from. | |
Most kids have never planted a seed and watched it grow. | |
But there's something that can happen for a kid if you can give them that opportunity. | |
They're gonna take a lot more ownership over their own connection to that food. | |
They're gonna be more likely to eat healthy food More likely to try, you know, new vegetables that at first they thought were icky or whatever. | |
But even on the adult level, I've seen this happen. | |
We often talk about, you know, for kids, we want to teach them this, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen adults that we've taken out onto a farm or an urban farm for the first time that either they've ever been in their life or maybe in decades. | |
And once they just spend a little bit of time planting, hands in the soil, or tasting fresh food or watching that process, you know, some people, it changes their whole perspective on the food system. | |
And so these experiences of being in nature, I think, are so critical. | |
And we have to protect these ecosystems as much as possible. | |
So we can look at the soil on the planet as our gut microbiome. | |
But of course, many of us think of But we can't dismiss the ocean, which it's estimated over 50% of our oxygen that we breathe comes from these things like marine phytoplankton. | |
So the ocean in and of itself is breathing. | |
And at the same time, I think it's 80% of wastewater is just dumped right into public water without being treated. | |
There are some estimates that up to 40% of lakes, at least in the United States, are too toxic to fish out of. | |
So as we pollute more and more of our ecosystems, it's no wonder that we're seeing skyrocketing chronic disease, because we're actually causing disease on the ecological level at the same time. | |
So if you like being alive, you know, you care about ecology, you care about ecosystems. | |
I think we want to see ourselves in nature because it is Mother Earth. | |
It is what gives us life. | |
The more that we dismiss it or take it for granted, we're pushing ourselves further and further Towards chaos on a human health level, on an environmental level, but nature is resilient. | |
As I just talked about the resiliency, what's amazing about natural systems is that they always build contingency plans. | |
Nature never focuses on one solution. | |
That's a human concept because it always has backups. | |
And you can look at the mycelium or the fungal networks and the way that they work. | |
You can look at the coronavirus. | |
I mean, as soon as we hit it with a vaccine, it just developed variants. | |
That's Plan B and Plan C and Plan Delta and, you know, Epsilon and Omicron and everything else. | |
It has unlimited additional options. | |
Let me ask you one thing quickly because I know that, you know, you're tight on time too. | |
Do any of the supplements work in the microbiome supplements and what do you recommend? | |
I know you're not a doctor or a professional nutritionist, but what do you hear? | |
I think there's a lot of things that are irritating our gut that first we need to focus on removing some of the problems. | |
So glyphosate is a big one. | |
That can cause a lot of problems in the gut microbiome. | |
We know that it was actually designed and patented to kill life. | |
And so if we consume a lot of that, which is... | |
I mean, the good news is... | |
That if you start eating organic food... | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
Even some studies show in just a few days the level of these pesticides in the body. | |
Right. | |
That's a beautiful testament to, like you said, the resiliency of nature. | |
Once we kind of stop attacking ourselves, either on an ecological level or a physical level, the body is designed to heal. | |
You try to get rid of the toxics from your diet. | |
Clearly. | |
Of course. | |
So how do we... | |
Should you eat those supplements? | |
Because I do occasionally. | |
It all seems like voodoo to me. | |
All of the vitamins I eat and everything else, I have no idea whether they're actually working, but I keep eating them. | |
So when it comes to probiotic strains, there's so many. | |
And as usual, humans focus on the ones that they think they understand. | |
And so there's only a few strains that we have really great data on the benefits. | |
Personally, I think as we've discussed, it's biodiversity that is really the solution. | |
So I generally, for myself, and yeah, like you said, it's not medical advice, I don't like to focus on one particular probiotic strain or brand, because you can effectively rebuild not only a monoculture, say of one strain, but a limited number of strains that are in that product. | |
Because there's only so many that they're allowed to put into preventing themselves. | |
So I would say if you can switch up. | |
You're supposed to eat sauerkraut and you're supposed to eat, I think, yogurt. | |
Maybe not all kinds of yogurt, but some kinds. | |
Looking at rebuilding that biodiversity, because these are the things that aren't limited by an ingredient list that a human came up with, right? | |
So whether it's kimchi, naturally fermented, even truly fermented pickles, like real pickled vegetables, could be, like you say, certain types of yogurt. | |
And if you can make your own kombucha is a really powerful one. | |
You know, these things sell in the store for $4 a bottle now. | |
You can make it at home for literally pennies. | |
Just by letting your fruit juice go rot, right? | |
Oh, it's that? | |
Just by letting your fruit juice, leaving your fruit juice on the refrigerator for a couple days. | |
Well, yeah, we don't necessarily want to meddle with too much. | |
Now you're advising people to help. | |
Let's strike that one from the record. | |
You obviously want to be careful. | |
It's not just about go outside and eat dirt or just go and expose yourself to anything. | |
But we know that a lot of these foods can be safely consumed. | |
And really, it's like compost for the body, in a sense, where the microbes that are able to break down some of these things in soil and rebuild the health of our soil But once we put those microbes back into our body through things like fermented foods, you know, we're initiating a part of that cycle that is going to help our digestion. | |
So I'm more about the gut soothing foods like aloe or marshmallow root or some of these things that can actually bind to different toxins and bring out some of the junk, but really provide an anti-inflammatory situation for our gut. | |
So things like fasting when done under the right circumstances can just give your body that chance to relax. | |
It's like resting, right? | |
We need to not just be constantly bombarding, especially with a lot of the additives, the seed oils, the fried foods, overconsumption of alcohol, overconsumption of pharmaceuticals. | |
Things that destroy those friendly microbes. | |
Because like you say, they are part of us. | |
We are like walking spaceships of microbes. | |
And we have very clear studies that can show when we rebuild some of those microbial bacteria in our body, depression scores go down. | |
Anxiety goes down. | |
Even physical pain can go down. | |
And we see mood enhanced. | |
We also see cognitive changes and processing speed and creativity and things like that go up. | |
So there's much more than the human brain can even comprehend. | |
So anytime that humans pretend like they're outsmarting nature, I always get a little skeptical. | |
And we need that dose of humility to remember that it's so far beyond what our egoic human brain can pretend like we get it. | |
And it's better just to accept the fact that we evolved in certain ways, try to return as close to that as possible. | |
And generally, our bodies are designed to heal and will want to when put back into those situations. | |
Rob, how can listeners find more about you? | |
My website is called earthconsciouslife.org. | |
And you can check out more of our upcoming films or see our previous film, The Need to Grow. | |
And yeah, you can join our newsletter there. | |
Thank you. | |
And happy Earth Week. |