The Food Solution : Eating for Today to Save Tomorrow

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Glossary
Introduction
1. Why I Can’t Close My Eyes and Live Happily Ever After
2. My Journey back to Dirt
3. The Soil-ution
4. Pesticides and Herbicides
5. The Gut and the Microbiome
6. Nutrient Deficiencies – How Well Can You Function?
7. Mental Health and Food
8. What Is Organic or Regenerative Farming Anyway?
9. Making the Right Food Choices
10. Looking at Food in My Pantry
11. The Masculine and the Feminine
12. I Have a Dream
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Additional Resources
About Difference Press
Other Books by Difference Press
Thank You

Citation preview

THE FOOD SOLUTION EATING FOR TODAY TO SAVE TOMORROW

DR. GUNDULA RHOADES

Difference Press Washington, DC, USA Copyright © 2021 Gundula Rhoades All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews. Published 2021 DISCLAIMER No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, or transmitted by email without permission in writing from the author. Neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretations of the subject matter herein. Any perceived slight of any individual or organization is purely unintentional. Brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTENTS

Glossary Introduction 1. Why I Can’t Close My Eyes and Live Happily Ever After 2. My Journey back to Dirt 3. The Soil-ution 4. Pesticides and Herbicides 5. The Gut and the Microbiome 6. Nutrient Deficiencies – How Well Can You Function? 7. Mental Health and Food 8. What Is Organic or Regenerative Farming Anyway? 9. Making the Right Food Choices 10. Looking at Food in My Pantry 11. The Masculine and the Feminine 12. I Have a Dream Epilogue Acknowledgments About the Author Additional Resources About Difference Press Other Books by Difference Press Thank You

For my parents, Gisela and Werner Fremerey, who loved me every minute of my life and enabled me to stand up for what I believe in

‘Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last river poisoned, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.’ — PROPHECY OF THE CREE INDIANS

GLOSSARY

A few definitions of the terms and phrases I will be using throughout the book: ‘Normal food’ means food that is produced in modern agriculture, mostly – if not always – with pesticides and artificial fertilisers. ‘Conventional farms’ are, on average, chemical using farms, producing ‘normal food’ – as above. ‘Organic food’ means ‘natural’ food that is produced without chemicals – this used to be the old ’normal,’ but nowadays is the exception and as such I will talk about it as ‘organic.’ ‘Organic farms’ are, on average, ‘certified organic’ and do not use chemicals.

INTRODUCTION

Our aim should be to leave the planet a better place than it was before. For our children. But are we? Let me be short and precise. My aim of writing this book is to convince you to save your own health and the planet with me. How? By making one choice: to eat organic food. With this book, I want to explain why this is important, what you will get out of it for your own body and mind, and why and how the planet will benefit. This is huge, necessary, and relatively easy. I also want you to realize that through eating ‘normal’ food nowadays, even if it is not processed, you will most likely get sick, it will render you, most likely, infertile, and will, most likely, eventually kill you. Even if you eat a lot of vegetables and fruit, and even if you are a vegetarian or vegan, it is nearly inevitable that you will get sick sooner or later – and most people sadly have no idea how bad ‘normal’ food is nowadays and what it does to them. Most health practitioners do not know how food is grown and what it truly means that ‘our food is losing its nutritional value.’ What I have discovered is, that this is the one main and most important reason for our declining health and health of the planet: How food is grown. This is central to ever being healthy again. This is why your diets don’t work. Every diet, be it paleo, keto, vegan or vegetarian, pescatarian, etc., only touches the surface. Of course, the other major problem that Earth faces on top of irresponsible leaders and coronavirus is the destruction of the natural

environment. If we believe the leading scientists (which I do), then we have only about ten years to sort out our mess. When I listen to the warnings of the scientific community, David Attenborough being one of them, then we must start changing now. The polar caps are melting, the climate is changing fast, the gulf stream – which kept climate stable – has changed already and with it, the large ocean currents, sea levels are rising, natural events like flooding, drought, and fire are getting more extreme, fast. The talk is about food scarcity, civil wars, displacement of millions of people, famines, and extinction of species in an ever-warming world. The more I find out about it, the scarier it gets. And sadder – as I am a veterinarian, I am saddened by billions of animals dying in fires or floods. Both happened in the last two years here in Australia. Big floods up north, ultimately caused by climate change, killed one million cattle. The following year, three billion animals died in the unprecedented fires. Being a mother, I fear for the world my children and grandchildren will live in. And it is all human made, of that I am sure.

During the drought, when it was dry and dead outside, when koalas were brought to my clinic in kidney failure because there was not a drop of water in the landscape, and when we would not even see the sky for the smoke for weeks on end, I often would wake up and be horrified at what we people have done. Have we really destroyed the planet so much that this is happening? After 120 million years of living in this district, we are now facing the extinction of the koala and the platypus. I am sure, we people have created this, and it is five past midnight to change.

But if we can agree that we need to live sustainably to have a healthy planet, and that none of us wants to have a life of sickness and misery, we are one step ahead. Most of us of course are concerned about pollution, dying ecosystems, global warming, the disappearance of the bees, species extinction, fires, droughts, and floods. But most of us are overwhelmed and we don’t know what to do. On a personal level, most of us have at least one of these niggling diseases like bloating, wind, feeling tired, having asthma or joint pain, if not worse. Chronic diseases – like cancer including leukaemia, autism, Alzheimer’s, irritable bowel syndrome, endometriosis, infertility, and so forth – are rising at an alarming level that leaves me dumbfounded. Most of us are overwhelmed about that too and confused about which diet to follow. Do you feel like I did? I got completely stressed, pessimistic, frightened, sad, and frustrated when I looked at the devastation on every level around me. So many people around me are sick. I lived through the most severe drought ever and witnessed how it destroyed my farm, my community, the landscape, the trees, kangaroos, koalas, and birds. I was in the middle of the bushfires that killed between one and three billion animals. I observe the effects of a changing climate in Europe also, as my parents still live there. Combine that with the daily news of, in my eyes, irresponsible world leaders like Trump or Putin and frustration (and panic) can settle in. I had times when I turned off all news, stopped reading newspapers, and resigned from a couple of board positions because I couldn’t handle the emotional toll it took on me. It seemed too big for me to do anything about it and it simply frightened the hell out of me. The feeling of being powerless against big business and against the destruction all around us, the population explosion, the dying of the Reef, and the melting of the icecaps was terrible. I hid at home and retreated into private life and private life only. I think so many of us do that. We do care, deeply so, but then it becomes so unsurmountable that we ‘play dead,’ like a beetle on its back when it is about to get eaten and goes into fear-paralysis. But here is the hope: In my district, after the long and awful drought and the terrifying bushfires in 2019 and 2020, it started raining again and the world around me came back to life. I also read stories of how the ocean

recovered around a little island nation when they put a fishing ban on, I witnessed the return of the koalas and the frogs here in my district, and how the farms recovered at such an amazing speed it left me happy and breathless. One year later, the farm dams are full, the cattle fat, birds again abundant, and more trees than not have survived the drought. During Covid, we all witnessed how the air quality improved, how people near the Himalayas could see the mountain peaks for the first time in their lives, and how the dolphins returned to the canals in Venice. That all gives me hope. And every day, I witness people and animals regaining health. Because this is what happens with your body if you stop insulting it with bad, empty, poisonous food. Nature and your body will heal, of that I am sure. This is what my book is about: it is not too late to turn things around. Nature is amazingly abundant, as is your health. Both, nature and our bodies, have about 3.8 billion years of life to prove that they are fantastically resilient and can recover at a high speed. When I look at a paddock that now has grass hip-high on it while last year it was barren, when I witness animals returning from seemingly nowhere to inhabit my farm again, and when I witness animals healing from the most amazing injuries, then you can understand that it is not the alternative if our planet lives or dies, but rather if we want to be part of it. Nature doesn’t need us. We need nature. As soon as we, humans, will ‘take the foot off the pedal,’ nature will recover. Take the foot off the pedal destroying your own health with ‘white bread and fast food,’ and your health can be abundant again also. I am witness to this every day. So, here is the solution: If food is grown again on organic or regenerative farms, climate, ecosystems, rivers, and oceans will be saved. If food is grown again on organic or regenerative farms, and you eat that food, your body will be saved. After this statement ,you might as well stop reading this book, believe me – make one change in your life (switch from ‘normal food’ to organic food) and most will be well. Your choice of what you consume will be the cornerstone of healing your body and the nature around you. However, this book is an explanation of why this statement is powerful

and true. Truth is, hardly anyone I talk to has any idea, how food is grown. A lot of people are concerned about eating meat, yet the truth is that any food that is grown in modern farming systems is highly deficient in nutrients and grown with so many poisons that your health and that of the planet is in extreme danger. It is one easy change for you, but for the planet and your health, it’s massive. It just takes us all individually to take responsibility rather than abdicate it and let big businesses or governments call the shots. It is up to you what you buy. I am showing you that you, as a consumer (or if you are a farmer, as a farmer), can take your responsibility seriously and truly do something. Just by the choice of food you buy. You can help save the planet. You can be healthy again.

WHY I CAN’T CLOSE MY EYES AND LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER

A

shleigh is one of my clients. I am a practicing veterinarian and own my own veterinary hospital in a smallish country town in rural Australia. It is a farming community and I am the local vet, treating cattle, horses, dogs, cats, sheep, and goats. I also own a farm nearby on which we used to grow beef cattle. Ashleigh came to my clinic with her dog, Peanut, to seek advice about her dog’s health. Peanut was only eighteen months old. The family had moved to a farm 1 year ago and the crop-dusters (aeroplanes spraying farm chemicals) were frequently flying over their house. Sadly, after some diagnostic workups I diagnosed Peanut with acute leukaemia. All her lymph glands were swollen and painful and she declined rapidly. We had to euthanize Peanut within one week. Ashleigh’s husband Craig and their two children were there when we had to let Peanut go. The whole family was crying and heartbroken. This is far too common in my daily work. Over and over, Ashleigh asked the question why a dog that is so young would get a disease so severe that euthanasia is the only option. As I always do, I started a conversation about why we suffer from many diseases especially cancer nowadays and I ended up becoming Ashleigh’s permanent consultant about her own health and that of her family. Ashleigh is a young woman in her mid-thirties. She has two children, seven and fourteen years old, a husband and a few dogs. She told me what a typical day would look like. She gets up in the morning after the alarm was put on snooze about five times because she has difficulty finding the energy to get out of bed. She has a shower and is annoyed about her flabby tummy and tries to avoid looking into the mirror

too closely. She is so frustrated, because she has tried numerous different diets, but none of them work. She has tried eating less, moving more, avoiding carbohydrates, eating more vegetables, and being vegetarian – but nothing seems to work and she is about twenty-five kg overweight. Her blood sugar was found to be on the rise recently. After her shower, she would be waking her children up to get them ready for school. They are hard to get out of bed, too. The young boy, Tom, is autistic which she finds very challenging. It needs all her patience and love to deal with him as he is, but often she feels herself getting stressed and anxious. Her fourteen-year-old daughter Lucy suffers from panic attacks and depression. She is under psychological care and is on medication. She makes breakfast – cereals and milk. It’s easy and in her busy life, convenience is key! The dogs get fed with biscuits out of a bag – again, convenience is all. The dogs don’t mind; they love it and it says on the packet that it contains all nutrients. She grabs Tom’s asthma puffer, makes sure that Lucy has had her medication, and with a big sigh, sends them to grab the school bus. After the children go off to school, she gets dressed, puts some make-up on, and leaves for work. She had to take a couple of hours off today as she is booked in to have a mammogram and a scan today. The fear of having breast cancer sits deep in her tummy. ‘Is this the life I dreamt of?’ she asks herself often. As if it wasn’t bad enough that Craig had a cholesterol and a prostate cancer scare the other day. Aren’t we too young, she kept thinking, to get cancer? But then, Peanut did…? After a busy day at work, she rushes to the supermarket to buy food to fill up the fridge. The kids can eat! It’s expensive and the mortgage consumes so much of their income. It is not easy. She grabs some biscuits, a couple of loaves of bread, some more breakfast cereals and milk, fruit, and vegetables with some yummy looking strawberries and blueberries in the hope her children will eat these healthy items. They certainly don’t eat enough vegetables and fruit, she thinks. With good intentions to make them eat better, she buys another bunch of broccoli and carrots also. Tonight, as she feels overwhelmed and exhausted, it will just have to be pizza. She grabs a couple of cartons from the freezer and exhales with relief,

as dinner is taken care of. The scan showed some weird tissue in her breast and she is freaking out. It annoys her that most food items are wrapped in plastic, but it is too hard to change for her in her busy life. It is a fleeting thought, as she just watched half a documentary on the mounting challenge of rubbish in the oceans but then had to turn it off – it made her too sad. She is aware of the problem but … someone for sure will sort this out one day? Her tummy was bloated again today and it was embarrassing to pass so much wind. This seems to be happening too often nowadays. On the way home, she quickly drops into the nursing home which luckily is not far away and visits her mother. She is only 75 years old but suffers from dementia. Alzheimer’s, the doctors say. Ashleigh thinks that there is nearly no point in visiting her because her mum doesn’t seem to recognize her anymore anyway. But her sense of duty doesn’t let her cut corners and she spends ten minutes with her and helps her with her dinner. Ashleigh thinks of her dog, Peanut, that I have just put to sleep. Peanut was so good for the children. Tom, her son, loved Peanut and, being autistic, he has trouble showing his emotions. Peanut though could make him love and they would cuddle up on the floor, on top of each other. Lucy, her daughter, also had a special relationship with Peanut. The dog seemed to sense when an anxiety attack was near and would not leave Lucy’s side. And then Peanut became sick and had to be put to sleep. Sadly, this is not the case, and neither is Ashleigh an exception. I talk to 20 or 30 clients per day about their pets, and in most if not all conversations I lead (animals are a good conversation starter), I hear the same stories over and over again. When I talked to Ashleigh and she told me what an average day was like for her, I suggested that I might be able to help her. For the first time in her life, Ashleigh heard someone say that there might be a reason for some of her problems which can be fixed, some other problems can at least be helped. She had tried all sorts of things with the local doctor. She got pills for indigestion and antidepressant medication to keep her going. But nothing helped, and it felt wrong to pop tablets all the time. Craig was given ‘statins’ to lower his cholesterol and since then, their sex life has deteriorated. He just doesn’t seem interested any more. Fair enough, she thinks, I am so tired at night anyway…. Ashleigh’s story sounds extreme at first, but sadly this is a story that I

hear in various forms multiple times a day. Does this story somewhat sound familiar to you? When I am reading this passage again, I can’t help but accuse myself of exaggerating. But her story is typical. But her story seems typical, in that there are so many health problems, physical and mental, that make life hard and seem to take all the joy. Ashleigh was brave – and probably desperate enough – to follow my invitation to talk food and health. She turned her life around. She prioritised. She chose to change. She shifted her mindset – and her body healed itself. She did it. After a year of following my advice, I saw her with a new puppy in my clinic recently and she just seemed to glow. It was a pleasure to see that she had lost a lot weight and her whole complexion has changed. She says her children still have problems but only a fraction of what it was used to be. She has energy, her skin was glowing, and she had lost at least 20 kg. She looked fabulous. She told me that she stopped all medication and feels better than she ever has. All her bizarre symptoms – of weariness, joint pain, brain fog, feeling bloated, and lacking in energy – have changed. I am so happy for her. She thanked me and acknowledged that my knowledge helped her whole family to turn their life around. Sadly, most people I meet are neither open nor willing to make that shift and to help themselves. I have now watched generations of clients come to my clinic with their pets or livestock, getting sicker and sicker every year. Stories like that happen in my life all the time. I find when people are open to learn and listen, I can help change their lives – and with that, help the planet also. If this story resembles somewhat your life, this book is for you. It will give you an explanation about why your body and your mind don’t seem to be functioning on a high and vibrant level. I remember Ashleigh’s face just looking at me a year ago with the expression on it of: ‘Vibrant? Body on a high level? You must be joking. I am glad when I can get through a day without collapsing!’ This is sadly the reality for most of us. Days are a struggle. These insidious health problems that Ashleigh faced – like bloating, being overweight, brain fog, lack of energy, children with mental issues, cancer, and Alzheimer’s – are so common nowadays that this seems to be the ‘new normal.’ It crept up on us, slowly, over the last twenty or thirty years or so, and very few people noticed.

If we older people remember when we were at school: Was there a child with asthma? Were there autistic children everywhere? Did our grandmothers end up in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s at an early age? No! It was just not a part of our lives. And do you also remember, if you are a bit older, that you would drive around at night in your car and the bugs would smash on your windscreen and you would have to frequently stop to clean it so that you could see? Do you remember that? Where are the insects? I remember also listening to the first stories of David Attenborough and another nature cinematographer, Prof. Grzimek, when I was a child in the 70s and 80s. I was glued to the screen watching their stories about the untouched wilderness areas of the world. Somehow the world seemed still mysterious and healthy then, even after two world wars. Bad news on TV would be about some political drama or one or the other country starting wars and conflict. That was bad enough. But nowadays, the news is different. They are about a pandemic threatening us all, about plastic in the ocean that is everywhere killing turtles and dolphins, the Great Barrier Reef dying and bleaching, climate change melting huge icebergs, polar bears drowning and starving. We hear about islands in the Pacific going under, about droughts and fires killing a few billion animals in Australia, temperatures rising, and – if you are a little bit better informed – about the changing of the Gulf Stream which will change our world forever. We hear about that when the bees are gone, our food supply is endangered. And on the very periphery, we see pictures of people in lab coats genetically engineering new varieties of corn or wheat. Somehow it doesn’t feel right any more. It feels off, scary, a world of technology that moves faster and faster if we want to or not. And sometimes we wonder: What is this life about? Where have the butterflies gone? We sometimes watch a movie in which the world still seems romantic and ‘normal.’ I get this feeling of ‘homesickness,’ of a desire for a world in which young children are running around in a field of flowers making daisy chains and coming home to a home-baked apple cake with cream from the cow, dirty from playing in the mud and the hay. A dream about nature being healthy around me, in which the platypus and koala have space to live, where the dolphins jump, and the turtles shimmer in the water. I dream of my children and their friends being positive about the life that they

can lead in the future without fearing the existential threat of climate change, species extinction, and pollution. I dream of a world in which people are thriving and healthy, and nature abundant and unpolluted. A romantic illusion. For sure. I dream of a world in which the sun will get up in the morning, summer, winter, autumn, and spring will be in their ‘normal’ order, and health is the norm. Am I a romantic dreamer, a conservative idealist? Maybe, because a life of health and beautiful nature that nourishes us seem a lifetime away and the ‘train has gone.’ You may wonder: What does Ashleigh’s health have to do with climate change anyway? You might find that you have one or more of Ashleigh’s problems also, even if you just suffer from gluten intolerance. And you might think occasionally about the planet and its demise but that is certainly out of your reach to do anything about. It is in the ‘too-hard-basket’ and you feel disempowered and helpless to change anything about it. What on Earth could you do…? It feels as if it is too late. But is it…? What if I tell you that it is neither too late nor are you powerless?

HEALTH IN CRISIS The statistics that we are living longer than ever are not true. Some think that our children will be the first generation that will die before their parents! Through antibiotics and vaccinations, we cured and prevented a lot of acute and deadly diseases, that is true, but chronic diseases are rising to an alarming level. Let me give you some statistics (United States of America): Autism 1:36 (previously 1 in 5,000) ADHD 1:8 (70 percent medicated) Asthma 1:10 Allergies 1:4 Diabetes 1:4 Obesity 1:3 Major Depression 1:2 Cancer 1:2 Death from heart attack: 40 percent of all men that die (Germany) Anxiety (unknown, but everyone I talk to has got it…) Chronic childhood disease in the US 46 percent Another study about chronic disease in children stated that 95 percent of children have ‘leaky gut.’ I will explain later, what this is. New numbers of the incidence of autism in 2018 is 1 in 35 children in Australia. Many children are obese (1 in 5, in some countries 1 in 3), compared to 1 in 100 in 1960. Neurocognitive disorders in children are rising exponentially. I don’t doubt this. Talking to any teacher confirms that there is something drastically wrong. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘In 2016, the five leading types of cancer to cause death in younger Australians were brain cancer, cancer of lymphoid, haematopoietic and related tissues (which includes leukaemia), colorectal cancer, breast cancer, and skin cancer.’ I am a veterinarian, not a doctor, but I see the health disasters every day

in my clinic. People bring their dogs with similar diseases that they have: gastrointestinal, cancer, allergies, bad teeth and so forth. Dogs and cats are a little healthier than their owners, as they do not have such a large lifespan and mental disorders are not as pronounced. But the owners tell me their stories when in my consult room, and the stories come fast and hard. Several times a day, I will come out of my consult room and walk to the back of the clinic where my other vets and nurses are, and sadly will say: ‘Another family with an autistic child.’ Or: ‘Another client that is in her early forties with cancer.’ Or: ‘Yet another client with a brain tumor undergoing chemotherapy.’ I would estimate that at least every second client has a story of their horrific disease. The diseases that seem to be present, are all very similar: cancer in various forms. Elderly parents with Alzheimer’s, dementia or Parkinson’s disease. Children with behavior disorders of the likes of autism (scary how many there are!!!), anxiety, self-harming, depression, ADHD, or Asperger’s. Young women seem to suffer from endometriosis and polycystic ovaries. Many women suffer from breast cancer. Men tell me about their prostate problems, which they nearly all seem to have. Many clients literally pull up their shirt (…I know, it can be a bit confronting but shows how desperate people are) and show me the scars from their latest abdominal surgery (‘I lost half my liver.’). Allergies, food intolerances like lactose or gluten, seem to be the fate of nearly every client. Asthma is widespread in children and in dogs. Clients bring their dog in wearing a turban as they are undergoing chemotherapy. Others are simply overweight and cannot manage to lose any weight. One of my nurses (16 years old) is so tired and lacking in energy, that she spends all weekend in bed just recovering from the exhaustion of school and a small job. She reports that all her friends are the same. Another nurse of mine (20 years old) reports that she has endometriosis and was put on the pill to ‘regulate her hormones.’ In a conversation, she reveals that all her female friends suffer from it. Most clients reveal that they suffer from depression. And most tell me that they are gluten intolerant, have irritable bowel problems, hormonal imbalances, or at least asthma. It is my impression that nearly everyone suffers from some disease or

other. There is hardly anyone who seems energetic and healthy, with good complexion and no body or mind problems. The statistics, as above, agree. I personally have eaten organic, wholesome, and unprocessed food for the last 35 years and my children have been brought up with wholesome, organic food. We are all healthy. None of us has either an allergy including asthma, weight problems, gluten intolerance, hormone problems, or anything else. I am 55 years old and full of energy and health. I feel like being ‘the proof in the pudding.’ Eating a varied, wholesome, unprocessed, and organic diet for the last 35 years has worked for me. Why are my family and me so healthy, but society around us is not? When I look in shopping trollies or see people lining up to get ‘food’ from McDonald’s or KFC, I see connections, which I am keen to share with you. Even without statistics, I think we can appreciate that we have a huge problem!

MY JOURNEY BACK TO DIRT

I

grew up in a very industrial part of the world, the Ruhr Valley in Germany. It’s a conglomeration of towns without much green in between. Coal mining, the steel industry, and chemical industries ruled. Soccer, pigeon races, dirty skies, working-class pride, Krupp and Thyssen, and towns bombed out during the Second World War, were my daily reality. That’s my home, and while I honour it, I craved for a life on the land. I also loved science and from an early age, I started learning about biology, chemistry, and physics. Combined with my love for animals and nature, I decided that becoming a veterinarian would be just perfect for me. Luckily, I was good at school and managed to get into university. I studied veterinary medicine at the old vet school in Hanover. Life was wonderful, interesting, and fun. One day though, a bombshell hit me and burst my little bubble. My mother rang: ‘Darling, I have breast cancer, I will be operated on tomorrow.’ I was devastated. She was only forty-six at the time. In hindsight, it was at this moment – when I realized my mother’s life was threatened – that my journey began. My mother started looking for answers – why was this happening to her? She wanted to find out more and inspired me to do the same. I don’t think I would have studied and learned and thought so much about nutrition and food if it wasn’t for her questioning what we were eating. My quest took me from my industrial town to rural Australia through a good old love story. I had worked for a few years in Devon, in the UK, as a veterinarian when I met a man that introduced himself simply and honestly with ‘I grow cattle.’ His body was strong, and he was fun. I fell in love and moved to a cattle station in rural Australia.

We lived on a farm called ‘Gowrie,’ with my father-in-law Gordon, who was a wonderful cattleman, Gordon’s mum who everyone called Granny, and a few more extended family members. Gordon was a great teacher. He loved his cattle. Angus was his breed of choice. These are black cattle that originated in Scotland, and they are of moderate height, tough and sound. Gordon was one of the first few farmers that adopted this breed. Coming from a city in Europe, I had to learn a lot about farming and about the Australian Bush. Gordon was a great and willing teacher. This strong and kind cattleman and I would ride across the property talking about farming. He had a very open mind and always asked for my opinion. But I asked him more. He taught me about what a good bull should look like: ‘Gundi, he has to be straight in the back. Make sure that his tailbone doesn’t go up, that’s wrong. And look at the muzzle. The mouth should be wide and square so that he can eat a lot. And the chest has to be so deep that you can put a 44-gallon drum in it!’

He explained to me the different grasses and how cows ‘park’ their calves between the tall grass while they go off to graze and come back later. He showed me how to pull calves when they get stuck during birth. I learned pregnancy testing so that I am fast and accurate at it now. I got good at mustering cattle on motorbikes and at judging calves if they were good enough to stay uncastrated to being a breeding bull one day. I will never forget the smell of burnt hair when branding calves and the bellowing when they got castrated. It was a tough life but a good life. This is where I learned how ‘normal’ nature worked, how it is connected,

and how I am connected with it, too. I started to look at land in a different manner: I was simply only the caretaker. It was like learning another language: the language of nature, trust, reading the landscape, and of different seasons. I had found my family, my farm, my man, and my home. I had found something raw and beautiful. I remember singing along in my car to music, heart filled with happiness. It fits me like a glove, this life. Community, children, cattle, family. Life is good! It couldn’t get any better! But then disaster struck. Gordon was diagnosed with cancer. He died of bowel cancer a few months later. The first of many that I would say goodbye to. He was only sixty-two years old. He had used a lot of sprays on the property. At that stage, I knew nothing of what was truly happening in and on agricultural land. I guess for most of you, my readers, that is reality, too. His mother, incidentally, lived to 103 years of age and died of old age. How many people do we still know that die of old age rather than cancer? After Gordon died, my husband and I took over the running of the farm, and after our divorce, I ran the property by myself. I do not pretend that I did a good job, because by that time I had three children and an ever-growing veterinary clinic to look after also. However, as I have always loved nature and had learned a lot about healthy and whole foods through my mother’s cancer journey, I decided to convert the farm to ‘organic.’ I had grown up in a big city, studied in a big city, consumed in a big city, and my few years in rural England got me closer to ‘the land’ but I still had no idea how food was grown and produced. I guess that is most of us: We buy food in supermarkets, or on the market if we are lucky; we might know that processed food is not good for us. I had no idea about agriculture (although through my degree and being connected to animals I knew more than most) and how food is grown nowadays – who would know? Farms are a long way away from most of us. We might drive through a pretty landscape with yellow canola growing on it or see some green waves of grain and think how pretty it is! That is probably the extent of our knowledge of farming. I found amazing people in my district who taught me about the soil, about natural cycles, microbes, fungi, and different ways of looking at the country. Gabe Brown’s book From Dirt to Soil taught me biological farming methods. Joel Salatin’s book Polyface planted a dream in my head about farms that are

local and grow more than one thing (he grows chickens, eggs, sheep, vegetables, and rabbits). Peter Andrews’ book Back from the Brink taught me about water and weeds in landscapes. Alex Podolinski’s book about Biodynamics got me thinking about root formation and soil biology as well as energy. More recently, Charles Massey’s The Call of the Reed Warbler taught me about farming and organic farming in particular. I went to field days and learned and learned. A man called Allan Savoury had discovered a method to heal land with cattle, called ‘Holistic Management’ and ‘Rotational Grazing.’ I got involved in his work, too. There truly are too many great people and teachers, books, and courses to mention. Let me just say that I dove deep into this subject and was lucky to learn from the best, especially at numerous and enjoyable dinner parties. At the same time, I worked as a veterinarian. I castrated colts, learned how to inseminate mares, and to take semen from stallions; I vaccinated, spayed, and castrated, I pregnancy tested thousands and thousands of cattle. I performed caesareans in the middle of the night and repaired dogs that were ripped apart by pigs. I plated broken legs and in between, took children to day-care and school, soccer and ballet, piano and guitar. Ten years passed – ten years of learning and growing my business. In all this time, I have never lost my passion for health and farming. When I started learning about the soil, I slowly started to connect the dots. A podcast called ‘The Good Doctors’ here in Australia was one of the first time that I heard doctors speak about the connection of minerals, vitamins, and soil. It opened my eyes to holistic health that cannot be achieved without minerals and vitamins. And then, one day I listened to a podcast from Dr Zach Bush whom I mentioned earlier. Oh, my goodness! There they were, the elusive connections between health, food, and agriculture that I had struggled to understand. From this moment on, I viewed health and disease differently. It had never occurred to me before, that the diseases that I deal with either as a veterinarian or as a fellow human are not ‘normal.’ I had never thought about the impact of farming on food and health. I had noticed that at least every second family had a health disaster in their immediate family. The diseases that people told me about in conversations during my veterinary consultations were always very similar – varying forms of cancer, mental health problems especially in their sons and daughters, including depression, suicide, and anxiety,

dementia, asthma, allergies, infertility, hormone imbalances, diabetes, or obesity. And animals, like ‘Peanut,’ suffered from the same diseases, such as allergies and cancer! But I had never connected the way we farm with diseases. All of a sudden, after listening to podcasts like ‘The Good Doctors’ and then to Dr Zach Bush, I started to see an underlying reason of disease that I had never even heard or known about: Chemical farming with destruction of soils is a major cause of the disastrous decline in our health. I, probably like you, had never even thought about the way food was grown. I was aware of food additives and that they were not good for you, of colours and preservatives – but I had no idea how, in detail, crops like wheat or soy were grown. It turns out, that herein lies probably the central main reason for the decline of our health and hardly anyone knows this. I had no idea of how important healthy and living soil is, nor how utterly toxic chemicals in farming are. I started reading and researching farming chemicals (pesticides and fertilisers) and the soil and began to realise that without healthy soil, and with toxic substances poured onto our land, health of people and animals alike will not ever be achievable. I remember talking to my client ‘Jackie’ when I went to castrate a little colt for her. It was in the middle of the drought, and instead of lying the colt down on a grassy patch, we had to 'drop him’ in the dust – there wasn’t a blade of grass anywhere, just dust and dirt. The wind made it worse, blowing dust onto my sterile kit and threatening the wounds. I hoped he would be OK! Jackie is a tough young woman, salt of the earth. Born and bred on the land, she is a horse rider and farmer. While we were castrating the colt, her child was screaming in the background. He was three years old at the time. This little boy ran around by himself, screaming, not in pain or despair, just seemingly senseless. Jackie started telling me that she was quite desperate and didn’t know what to do with him. She said she’d ask him to do something, but he wouldn’t listen. She said she could smack him or plead with him, but he was oblivious and unresponsive. Poor Jackie. I remember when she was pregnant and how happy and proud she was to have a baby. Now she was tearing her hair out because she couldn’t emotionally reach him. Her son might have ADHD or could be on the autism spectrum, I suspect. I looked at the bare and barren field next to the yards. The whole valley

was brown and dusty. It was spring, and the summer crops and grass should be nurturing the newborn calves and foals. Instead, there was a hot wind, it was 29 degrees Celsius hot, and everything was dry as dust. It felt apocalyptic. The paddock next to us had been ploughed and was ready to be sown. I asked Jackie whether her husband and father-in-law used glyphosate, which is known under the familiar banner of ‘Roundup.’ The answer was yes. Of course, everyone uses it. Jackie’s house is about 30 meters away from the field. The wind was blowing in the direction of the house and the chemicals used on the field would blow directly into her kitchen. I thought of recent studies that I had learned about that have been conducted to look at foetal brain development with exposure to herbicides and pesticides. It was discovered that those chemicals ‘stop neuronal and hormonal development of the foetus.’ A recent study found that glyphosate exposed nerve cells had ‘shorter and unbranched axons and less complex dendritic arbours.’ The nerves simply are not growing anymore! I wondered how much there was a connection between exactly these chemicals surrounding Jackie and the behavioural abnormalities in her child. Jackie also reported that she has had two miscarriages while living in this farmhouse and that her father-in-law has been diagnosed with leukaemia. He has since died. During my research I had learned that agricultural chemicals can cause autism, Asperger’s, leukaemia, infertility, and hormone problems amongst a lot of other things. It seemed as if Jackie, living not even 30 meters away from a paddock that was worked with ‘normal’ chemical agriculture, has to endure all of the consequences that chemical farming is causing. Is this, yet again, an individual and isolated story of ‘bad luck,’ or is this a common picture of an inevitable consequence of humans destroying our basis of life – healthy soil and ecosystems. As you can guess, I strongly believe that the second possibility is true: Modern farming is destroying the soil and with it our food – resulting in an unprecedented wave of mental and physical decline. Another story paints a good picture of this, too: My client Tom lost a mare to colic – he had fed it cattle pellets which contain antibiotics fatal to horses, which is a problem in itself that we will talk about in the chapter about cattle. While talking about the feedlot industry and industrial farming, I

mentioned that people can decrease their chance of getting leukaemia by 80 percent if they opt to eat organic, according to Carl Leifert who teaches at Southern Cross University in, Lismore, Australia. Tom confessed: ‘My little son was sick; he was three years old. That’s what they told me was wrong with him. He was diagnosed with leukaemia.’ This, sadly, is a story I hear all too often. My friend’s son died at the age of three from a brain tumour. The parents were working on a farm in rural Australia at the time. The local riding school teacher has a three-year-old girl that was recently diagnosed with leukaemia also. Numerous local farmers suffer from leukaemia also. Like most people, Tom's family’s diet was not organic, and they used chemicals on their farm. This was the first time that he started thinking about the connection of food, agriculture, and his son’s diagnosis of blood cancer. Nobody had mentioned chemicals as a possible reason for his son’s disease. Doctors do not seem to know the reason why children develop cancer and therefore did not mention this when they talked to Tom and his wife. Like all of us, he assumed that it would not be him or this family that will get sick. ‘…Not my problem.…’ Until it suddenly is.… Stories like this follow me everywhere. These were just a few examples of my daily encounters with clients’ and friends’ stories of disease and suffering.

I started to look at health and disease from a different angle. What if health was intrinsic, as Dr Bush says, and what does that even mean? If it means, that being healthy is our ‘default’ state and if being vibrant and healthy is what we are, what then has actually happened to make our hospitals full of people and children with chronic diseases?

How did this happen, that so many of our children have a chronic disease? Zach Bush says 46 percent of our children suffer from a chronic disease! That is terrible! What if disease mostly happens when we disturb the balance of nature and our own ‘intrinsic’ and ‘innate’ health? I have always known that it is not me, as a veterinarian, healing the animal. I facilitate and help, but the healing of the skin or the bone must be done by the animal. In the following years, I studied the soil and modern farming. What I found is important. It took me thirty-six years of study, work, and learning, but now I know that I have something so important to share and I want you to know this, too.

Through living here in a farming community, I was privileged enough to learn how modern agriculture works and I started looking closer at food and how we grow it. It seemed that my farm growing cattle was fine – we didn't spray any poisons nor did we fertilize any longer with synthetic fertilizers. But most cropping farms around me did. Something dawned on me when I was driving around the district, seeing either green and lush paddocks with grazing cattle or sheep, or looking at crop-growing land that was often brown-grey, empty, and with spray-rigs driving over them. Is that how grains and vegetables are grown?

Looking at the shelves at the produce stores which sell products for farmers, I would notice that there were an awful lot of large containers with ‘POISON’ written on them standing around. Shelves from the floor to the ceiling, five meters high. Is that how farming is done? I thought of my employees' husbands and other family members being employed spraying chemicals onto paddocks or spraying fertilizers. Some suffered from depression and some got leukaemia, some died. What was going on? I was trained as a ‘scientist’ at my veterinary university in Hanover in Germany. But I had no clue about the connections of everything ... yet. I learned about biochemistry and physics, physiology and animal nutrition. About cattle and their rumen, about diseases, viruses, bacteria, kidneys, livers, lung diseases, about pharmaceuticals and drugs and potions. I learned surgery and medicine — but I did not connect the dots.

As veterinarians, we followed the guidelines and the paradigms that are generally accepted at any moment in time, and I was very good at living within this system. I didn’t question it. Why would I? The experts know! I was happy to prescribe bags of dog and cat food, blindly believing what the drug companies told me. I didn’t question, for example, why a ‘hyper-meateater’ like a cat would get a carbohydrate-related disease like diabetes. I wouldn’t question why there were myriads of allergic dogs coming through my door. I didn’t question why dogs got cancer at an ever-increasing rate. I was very good at prescribing conventional medicines and when a new drug

against allergies came on the market, I would try that too. But I was never taught how the food for our pets is grown, processed, and treated nor what the ingredients were. I certainly wasn’t aware of how food for humans is grown and what farmers or processors do with it before we eat it. I didn’t know about transfats, preservatives, E-numbers, colours, artificial sweeteners – all part of processed foods. Of course, every piece of the puzzle is readily available to be found on the internet. If you would bother looking, you would find how wheat for example is grown and what a pesticide called 2,4-D does to you, the environment, or your unborn child. But who would even know about 2,4-D, one of the most widely used chemicals on the planet used in food production in the first place? I surely didn’t before I became more than just a little bit interested! And who would then connect this with animal or human health and disease patterns? Farmers might know about 2,4-D or glyphosate, the most used chemical on our planet – but they don’t know about what it does to a body’s biology. A doctor knows about disease but not much about farming and nothing about farm chemicals in most instances. Doctors treat mainly disease, but do not study intrinsic health or preventative health. I recently had a conversation with the boss of the merchandise section of the local farm store. ‘Merchandise’ in a produce store are fertilisers and chemicals, as well as stock feed, vaccinations, and wormers. In our conversation, he admitted that ‘these chemicals are no good,’ yet did not know what they are, nor the impact they have on the land or our bodies. He is retired now, which enables him to be more upfront than he was able to be whilst employed selling those drums labelled ‘poison’ for producing food or fibre (cotton). He admitted not knowing much about their impact on health nor on the biology of the land. “Everyone is doing it, though, and not many farmers know how to do it differently. They all have the bank manager on their back, making change hard….’ Most doctors don’t know, many farmers don’t know. What is going on? While my knowledge and research into all of this is not rocket science and not exclusively mine, I know that my knowledge of these different aspects and my open-mindedness and curiosity feels rare. Talking to a friend of mine who is a naturopath, I confirmed my suspicion that even alternative health practitioners do not know how the deterioration of soil or the many

farm chemicals influence our health. They simply did not get taught – and neither did doctors or farm merchandise sellers.

PLANET IN CRISIS The individual disasters of declining health are one aspect of modern times. The other huge problem of modern life, of course, is climate change and the destruction of rivers, reefs, forests, and habitat. I think most of us are terrified when we listen to David Attenborough and other scientists warning us about the collapse of our planet. During my journey, I had to face the most severe drought in history and lived through the horrifying fires in my district and all over Australia. It was apocalyptic and terrifying. I started to learn about climate change and became a ‘Climate Reality’ leader. This is a worldwide organisation founded and funded by Al Gore, working hard to fight climate change. I started teaching about climate change in schools. Surprisingly, I discovered just how much food production, again, has to answer for: It turns out that agriculture is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases! It is not just the fossil fuel industry, our cars, and factories that contribute massively to the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Agricultural emissions are responsible for about 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions – and agriculture is very guilty of poisoning whole landscapes and rivers with their chemicals. It sadly is not as easy as to say that cattle are to blame and we must all become vegetarians. On the contrary, I found that how we are growing crops like wheat, sorghum, sunflowers, sweetcorn, canola, cotton, chickpeas, Lucerne, oats, and soy in modern farming are at least equal, if not larger, culprits! And I found that natural farming with animals or crops can save us all. What a discovery! And the solution is so simple! Coming back to you, my dear reader, you might wonder now what this has to do with you, as you may not be a farmer. And here it is: As we all eat and as all farming is used to grow food and fibre for us all, how the food (and fibre) we consume was grown has the ultimate power to destroy or heal the Earth. My in-depth knowledge about biochemistry, chemistry, internal medicine, dermatology, gastroenterology, orthopaedics, reproduction, oncology, animal husbandry, cattle, sheep, horses, dogs, and cats on one hand and farming, soil, climate change, and ecosystems on the other hand has

developed over decades and the benefit for you, my readers, is that I connected the dots for you. The way we grow food is killing both us and the planet. Modern agriculture has destroyed the soil with the use of chemicals that were mostly developed as war gases in the First and Second World War. By destroying the soil, we have destroyed the building blocks of life. Therefore, your food is severely lacking in nutrients on one hand, and full of insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides, on the other. Then add the food industry’s E-numbers, preservatives, food colourings, flavouring, trans fats, MSG, artificial sweeteners, its sugar-laden nature, fluoride water, and many other ways the food industry is raping our nutrients and adding chemicals, and you have your answer and your reason for disaster and disease. The very powerful food industry adds tons of chemicals to our food daily. I call this ‘a double whammy.’ Lack of nutrients combined with an overload of pesticides equals disease. We have ‘overfed and undernourished and poisoned people.’ Simple. Modern agriculture is also poisoning the insects which sustain the food chain, the rivers and oceans creating more disasters, and so forth. I can’t overstate and repeat myself often enough to give you hope that our body’s natural state of being should be health. Nature’s default is health. We wouldn’t be the most successful species on the planet and wouldn’t have survived for so long if we were sickly and vulnerable. Cancer would have wiped us out long ago. As Zach Bush also says: ‘… health is profoundly simple. Our bodies are engineered to be healing machines. Regardless of how desperate current public health remains, there is hope for each of us, our nation, and the planet at large: The way ahead is intrinsic health.’ I couldn’t agree more. Fifty percent of the landmass is used for agriculture and agriculture grows food for all of us. So how we grow food is of utmost importance. In short, modern, chemical, industrial agriculture is a huge part, if not the biggest part, in killing your health and the planet and is the reason why we are so sick and the planet is, too. Change agriculture to ‘biological,’ organic, or regenerative farming – whatever you want to call it – and both the planet and you will heal.

THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU I can hear you saying right about now, ‘But I am not a farmer. I can’t help. This book is not for me.’ I thought a lot about who I am writing this book for. Who is my ideal reader, who do I want to inspire and who do I want to give hope to? I thought about this long and hard, knowing that the wider my audience, the more diluted my message might get. The fact is, though, that this book is relevant for everyone who is eating, for every human that wants to either stay healthy or regain health. One group of people that I want to reach in particular though, are young women like my daughter. My daughter is in her early twenties. Chances are that in the next ten years, she will become a mother and make me a grandmother. According to my research, which I’ve already briefly touched upon in the opening chapters, there will be a one-in-three chance of her giving birth to an autistic child. She will have a one-in-two chance of having cancer and her child, my grandchild, will have a high chance of having leukaemia. My daughter will have a one-in-four chance of being infertile, probably with endometriosis or polycystic ovaries. Her partner will have a one-in-three chance of being infertile. These are the statistics! They get confirmed every day when I talk to young women, like Macey, one of my nurses. She is twenty years old and has had hormone problems of various degrees and forms for years. She has never ‘been right’ and all doctors suggest is to put her on the pill. On asking her what her friends are like ‘in that department’ she says, ‘We are all the same.’ I certainly have witnessed two of my nurses try hard to get pregnant with all the above mentioned ‘diseases.’ I was part of their tears and their journey through infertility treatment. Another friend told me today of her daughter Elise, who is in her early 30s. The poor young woman is quite overweight and struggles with multiple health problems, including recently breaking her spine which was poorly calcified. Elise, also a client of mine, was diagnosed with endometriosis and polycystic ovaries early in life. She underwent fertility treatment which made

her overweight and depressed. She had one child, but further attempts were fruitless. Her husband is working in a produce store and is exposed to farm chemicals. He is infertile also, as is his brother who has worked in the same store from the age of fifteen. Elise eventually had to have a hysterectomy, which then left her with emotional scars and a very messed up hormone life. The fracturing of her spine is the last clinical evidence of a body that is out of balance. I always say, that when disease starts and interference with hormones begins, the spiral of misery is endless. Elise truly is like so many young women. What a hell to go through! I feel so sorry for these young women and again, it poses the question: Why? My friend, Elise’s mum, and me both stated that when we were young, we knew no one that had either polycystic ovaries or endometriosis, while nowadays it seems to be the norm when I believe the young women around me. I am a mother and an employer of young women. I can say with authority that I have enough knowledge to warn these young people to do something about it now, before disaster strikes. My book wants to reach every human who has something wrong with their health – mental or physical. I have witnessed an enormous change in health and wellbeing (and body shape) when some simple principles are followed. Add to that, that I will show you that by changing your habits you are truly part of the solution of saving the world (I am not exaggerating), rather than being part of the problem and you will feel full of purpose, energy, and joy – hopefully. Last but not least, this book is also for everyone that feels devastated about the mounting environmental disasters. There are so many young people worried about climate change, and rightly so. We all hate seeing wildlife die of plastic pollution or from bushfires. Pictures of drowning polar bears cut straight into our hearts. We read on Facebook daily that the bees are in danger of being extinct. Last year, when the Amazon was burning, we felt powerless and angry. We might follow “The Extinction Rebellion” and hope that they have impact – but we would not be brave enough to join them. We follow the news with a heavy heart and no clue of what we could personally do. The best we can come up with is to use public transport instead of a car or maybe change our superfund. That’s it.

What happens also when we get overwhelmed with bad news, is that we shut down – as I have personally experienced. Compassion fatigue is a word for it, as is post-traumatic stress disorder. We do understand that climate change and the collapsing of reefs, rivers, and oceans is an existential threat, but because we feel it is out of our reach, we shut down. Have you ever seen a beetle or a mouse ‘play dead?’ We humans do it, too. When a threat or a danger gets too big, we freeze, as if paralysed. Our nervous system goes into a ‘parasympathetic overdrive,’ into ‘freeze’ motion. We give up, put it into the ‘too hard basket,’ and withdraw into our private lives of friends, family, and TV. We hope that governments and ‘the clever people out there’ will sort it. We either fear that it is too late and we will all go down anyway, or we give up and do nothing. The ‘powers-to-be’ are overwhelming. Who can take on Google, the Australian Government, Trump, or the European Union to change the legislation about fossil fuels or renewable energies or plastics? I felt that I have no chance and by the time that people and governments do something, it will be too late. I turned off the news, stopped listening to the radio, stopped reading the newspapers, and went off Facebook. I got so sad and angry that I, temporarily, gave up. But there is something all of us can do. My book is a book of hope, the result of my undivided und restored trust in nature’s ability to heal – and my trust in human goodness and intelligence. With my heart and my knowledge, I am convinced that we can turn our health and the health of Earth around. If we turn agriculture around, we will save the planet and ourselves. We can turn the collapse of health around, as well as the collapse of ecosystems and climate change. We can build our immune systems again to fight weird viruses like Covid. Diane Longboat, a Canadian Native Indian, said something recently. “Are we, humans, worth saving? Wouldn’t the planet be better off without us? The planet will recover when we are all gone. Nature is extremely resilient, it will not even take that long. But I asked myself the question: Will the planet be lonely without us?” What a profound question. “Will the planet be lonely without people?” It is rather a philosophical question, isn’t it? Are we, humans, with all our faults, worth saving? We, who destroy creatures, kill each other, murder, rape, fight wars, kill rainforests, pollute the planet, and are so full of greed –

are we even worth being on this beautiful planet Earth? I do think so. Humans are the only creatures with kindness and care, love and compassion. For every bad trait, we have lots of good ones. We have created music and art. We look after animals (as I can see daily, being a vet) and save the underdog. We can choose which world we want to live in and what sort of humankind we want to be. We can – we could – be good for the planet. We can heal. It is truly not even that hard. Change what food you buy to organic. The magnitude of the impact of this one choice will surprise you. But it needs a lot of us. My hope with this book is that I convince you to care enough about your own health, your children’s future, or nature to change what food you buy. It’s a smallish thing to do to save the world I think, and once you understand the depths of the consequences of it, I am sure you will help me – rather help all of us. It all starts with the earth beneath our feet.

THE SOIL-UTION

W

hen the topic of food and soil is brought up, a passage from a Sanskrit Text from around 1,500 B.C. is often quoted for its succinct and powerful verbiage: ‘Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it, and it will grow our food, our fuel, and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it, and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.’ Food is grown in soil and through the soil. If the soil is fertile and rich, your food will be nutritious and rich. If soils are rich, they grow nutrient-rich food for you. If you eat nutrient-rich food, your body can be healthy. Because that is its nature. Your ancestors prove that you come from a long line of healthy individuals. Rich food is what your body needs to be ‘naturally,’ or intrinsically, healthy. If soils are dead, your food is dead, your health is dead. Simple. True. Proven by three billion years of evolution. Soils should also be the planet’s number one carbon storage. Nowadays, most of the soils are dead, and I will explain to you why (and why it is important for you and your family) – and why the carbon is in the atmosphere and not in the soil.. If we put it back into the soil – and I will tell you how and what your role as a non-farmer can be – climate change can be reversed. These are big statements, I know. But they are true. Healthy soils mean hope for all. It’s possible, its scalable, it’s true. You can be part of the solution. I call it ‘the soilution.’ So what has happened? What has gone wrong? And why is soil important for your health? What does it even mean to have ‘fertile soil?’ What happens

down there and why should it bother you? As I’ve already brushed upon in the opening chapters, the simple answer is: Modern agriculture uses substances that are essentially poisons which kill the life in the soil. If your food is grown in dead soils, your food will be ‘dead’ too, and you will simply not get the nutrients you need. This in turn will make you deficient and sickness in many different forms will follow.

WHAT IS SOIL? Soil is the medium in which plants grow. Soil covers most of the landmass of the Earth. ‘Living’ and good soil is the key to healthy plants, healthy people, and animals. If we lose the soil’s fertility and life, we lose our resilience and our health. Without healthy soils, we will never be healthy, no matter how many vitamin tablets we swallow. Soil is normally a complex structure of dead particles like sand, loam, clay, or basalt. In it are minerals like selenium, magnesium, zinc, sulphur, iron, boron, manganese, calcium, phosphorus, chromium, iodine, copper, cobalt, sodium, molybdenum, or potassium. These are the so-called ‘dead’ components. I will show you later with stories form my clinical practice what happens when even one of them is missing. The live components of soil are bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa, earthworms, and other critters that dig and live in the ground. Roots should grow throughout the soil and give it structure, loosen the soil, let oxygen come in, and create channels for water infiltration. Roots feed the bacteria and other soil life with sugars. The soil provides structure. The minerals in it will provide nutrients for plants. The soil’s microorganisms are as important to the soil as the microbiome is important in your gut. For the past hundred years, modern medicine and agriculture have ignored or simply misunderstood these vital systems. We disinfected and sterilized our environment including the soil. We live our lives petrified of germs. We heat-treated, we added preservatives, we chlorinated, and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned…. On soil tests, we would have burnt the soil into its components to analyse it. How much magnesium is in a gram of soil, how much sulphur, etc. No one even looked at the living microbiome of soil! We only looked at the structure and the minerals. It is such a good example of ‘We don’t know what we don’t know.’ We just didn’t know! Our bodies, it turns out, can’t cope without their microbiomes. The microbiome affects everything in our body from the immune system to making your body’s antidepressants. Even our moods and temperament are

dependent on it. The list of what they do is endless. More on that later. And the life in the soil is no different. To understand the complexity of healthy soils, research all over the world is (finally!) beginning to start. The microbes in the soil have very important functions. There are about 80,000 different bacteria and other soil organisms in the soil, most of them still unknown! They digest dead plant material or dung and break it down into new humus. Humus is the chocolate-coloured, crumbly substance that makes soils fertile and moist. Its water holding capacity is huge – it works like a sponge. The microbes are essential for mineral-availability to the plant, for ‘manufacturing’ or synthesizing vitamins, alkaloids, and amino acids, for helping the plants to grow roots, for communication between plants and trees, and for simply being carbon-absorbing biomass to the planet. I will explain this in more detail later. This is pretty much the explanation and the essence of what this book is about. In each gram of soil are 30 billion bacteria! However, for most conventionally treated soil it’s safer to say, “There should be 30 billion bacteria…” because most of them got sadly killed by chemicals. In the times before chemical agriculture, the soil under your feet would have been heaving with life. Earthworms eat the dead plants, munch them up, and ‘poop’ them out as worm-casts. The gut of the worm is a ‘microbe-breeding-wonderland.’ The worm eats the compost and its bacteria help to digest it; and the worm cast – the worm-poop – is full of bacteria that then goes into the soil. Every gardener amongst you will know the magic of worm casts. It makes stuff grow! The worm castings are then feeding the bacteria in the soil and the plants. The sugars that are produced by the plants through photosynthesis ooze out of the tips of the roots and in turn feed the bacteria and fungi. A perfect system of give and take. Bacteria in the soil will make minerals in the soil soluble, so that the plant can take them in. If the bacteria are dead, the minerals present in the soil are ‘locked up’ – they are bound to the soil and plants don’t have access to them. This will make the plant, which is your food or the food for your food (the cow), deficient in minerals. I will show you in one of the next chapters what mineral deficiencies in your body look like. They can send you crazy, literally.

Mineral-deficient plants are also weaker and more susceptible to diseases, requiring more fertiliser and more insecticides (the bee- and butterfly-killing varieties). Last but not least, bacteria and other microbes synthesize the key components of health. Bacteria in the soil, and only bacteria in the soil, synthesize many nutrients that are essential for our health. They produce amino acids (including the ‘essential ‘amino acids like tryptophan), alkaloids, vitamins including all the B-vitamins, polyphenols, lectins, proteins, fulvic acid, and many more that might not even be discovered yet. These nutrients make plants healthy and strong and are the substances that make ‘our food into our medicine.’ When I discovered that only bacteria make many of these essential, meaning ‘absolutely-necessary-for-life’ substances, I was very surprised.

WHAT ARE WE MISSING IF THE SOIL IS DEAD? Most, if not all, modern farming uses multiple applications of chemicals every season to grow crops. Some fields are sprayed up to thirty times in one growing season with different herbicides to kill weeds, fungicides to kill fungi, insecticides to kill insects, and are treated with fertilisers containing nitrogen or phosphate. All these artificial substances kill life: They kill insects, the soil bacteria, the soil fungi, and protozoa. They leave a dead and hard dirt that can only grow anything when it gets artificially pumped up with yet more fertilisers and chemicals. Humus, the life giving substance that heaves with life, is destroyed. Bacteria building up essential nutrients for us are killed. The heart of our food chain is broken – with dire consequences for us all. I found in my research that more nutrients than I thought were only produced by the microbiome of the soil. Only the bacteria in the soil produce tryptophan for example, only they produce alkaloids and polyphenols. I am not a soil scientist and my research is by no means exhaustive. I have only scratched the surface. But when I did go down some rabbit holes, I was so surprised! I found for example that the B-vitamins to a large degree are synthesized by the soil bacteria. So what happens if they are gone? I discovered that fulvic acid is produced only in humus – and fulvic acid works as a ‘transporttruck’ that takes nutrients into our cells, and without it, vitamins and minerals cannot be transported into our cells – so what happens when the soil is dead and our nutrients are either not produced or minerals are not made ‘available’ by the microbiome to be taken into the plant and therefore are missing in our food? The killing of our soils through modern agriculture, creating nutrient deficient food and overloading us and the ecosystems with poison is, in my eyes, the main reason of our declining health, increase in chronic disease of all sorts, and in particular autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, allergies, asthma, mental health disease, hormone problems, endometriosis, infertility, obesity, auto-immune diseases, and so forth. The toxic substances that are killing soils worldwide daily, making money for a few and powerful companies, in my opinion, are the most life-

destroying things humanity has ever come up with, destroying the heart of the food chain and the heart of our ecosystems alike. And not many people talk about this or know about this. The whole medical system treats the symptoms and has no idea that at the heart of so many diseases is the destruction of the living soil and the overloading of our bodies with poisons that are used to produce food! Food that we are eating all-day-every-day, from when we are in the womb, to being babies, teenagers, adults, or pregnant mothers. Why does this not create a public outcry? Why aren’t the medical schools and the health authorities and governments looking at this and noticing that this is destroying the health and sanity of our nation? Why aren’t the agricultural universities screaming for a change because modern chemicals on our land are killing the soil that nourishes us all? The more I look, the more ‘rabbit holes’ I go into, the more I find that soil is the absolute essence, the ‘key-stone’ of life. All life. Like someone wise said 1500 BC: Kill the soil and you kill life and humanity. What surprises me is that hardly anyone knows about this. Why, I ask myself? Of course, we all know the answer: greed and ignorance. In whose interest would this be to bother looking? The fertiliser and chemical companies are the biggest in the world. They, like Bayer, Monsanto, Incitec, Syngenta, Dow and many others alike, are so powerful that no one has a chance to protest against them. A few years ago, I read the book “The World According to Monsanto,’ which in clear language described what happens to scientists that work for these companies and who want to ‘blow the whistle.’ These scientists are ruined and silenced. Research that could tell how dangerous substances are is covered up or not conducted in the first place. The truth is coming out, slowly but surely. Yet, it is so hard to prove that something causes diseases, like cancer for example. It takes a lot of money and time to even start looking for these connections. More and more lawsuits are opening – but how long will it take for a lawyer to prove that for example ‘Chlorpyrifos,’ a widely used chemical in agriculture, causes nerve damage in the unborn child? How hard is it to prove for example, that Syngenta’s product “Gramoxon,’ which contains the extremely toxic ingredient “Paraquat,” causes Parkinson’s disease? A new lawsuit, against a company called “Syngenta” who makes this toxin, has just been filed. It will take years and years and a lot of money to prove these connections.

We don’t have time to wait. How many more children have to be born with autism or getting sick with leukaemia at the age of three before we change? It makes me so angry. When you know what I know, you will refuse, like me, to eat anything that is produced with poisons that is killing me, my kids, and the ecosystems. How, truly, dare these companies put their products out there and tell every farmer, ‘It’s okay, truly, you need this stuff…!’ I am not an angry ‘lunatic.’ My rage is born from an understanding of nature and health, and to see the illogical, unhealthy, counterproductive, and incredible harm-causing way we produce food makes no sense once you ‘get it.’ To see my friends, clients, and their children suffer, needlessly, is what is driving me to write this book. I am not a writer and there are a lot of statements in this book that have not been proven by ‘double-blind-peerreviewed-studies.’ I feel very vulnerable, as if I am ‘putting my neck out to be chopped off easily’ by different statistics and by large and powerful companies. It will be decades, if ever, before research proves what I am talking about. As I said: Who would pay for it? Yet every day, I talk to my young nurses that are all just about to have children, and knowing that modern food will give them a one in forty, or soon a one in three, chance of giving birth to an autistic child, encourages me again to write and to talk. How could I not? I read enough, to know that I am probably right with my claim that modern agriculture is killing us all. It is my responsibility to tell my nurses, my daughter, my sons, their friends, and my clients that I am hugely concerned about their quality of life. Once you have an autistic child, life will be tough. I don’t say that there aren’t parts of living with autistic children that aren’t wonderful and enriching – but I do know how hard it is to be a parent, and for that matter, how hard it is to be a single mother. To add a child with a brain disorder that is caused by agricultural poisons in our food would have made my life very, very difficult. It is avoidable – that is what my book is trying to tell you. Make the switch, eat organic, support the organic industry, be part of the solution, simply don’t wait for a scientist that was bought by Monsanto to tell you that ‘It is okay to eat food grown with Roundup….’ Do not trust big business. They do not have your wellbeing at heart, but their pocket. Get healthy through eating food grown on healthy, unpoisoned soils.

Switch to organic, grow your own. I don’t want you to live a miserable life!! Now, let me explain this in more detail so that you can see that my rage is born in science and understanding of bodies, nature, and health.

NUTRIENTS PRODUCED IN SOIL Amino acids, for example, are the building blocks of proteins, and proteins are meat, egg white, hormones, cell membranes, brain tissue, skin, your eyes, haemoglobin in your red blood cells carrying oxygen, blood vessel walls, gut lining, and so forth. There are twenty-one amino acids. These are like blocks of Lego. In ever different combinations, they make these proteins like blocks of Lego make a toy. Proteins are amino acids lined up in strings and then folded and crumbled three-dimensionally. It is pretty complicated!! Like letters in a word forming sentences. Eight of the twenty-one amino acids are ‘essential,’ meaning our body can’t produce them. And some of them are only produced by soil bacteria! We are dependent on taking these in with our food. These are valine, leucine, isoleucine, phenylalanine, tryptophan, methionine, threonine, and lysine. They are all building blocks of proteins like hormones and neurotransmitters like serotonin, melatonin, vitamin B3, muscle tissue, and so forth. Dr Zach Bush says that when the bacteria in the soil – or in your gut for that matter – are killed by pesticides, such as glyphosate or artificial fertilizers, they cannot produce these amino acids anymore. ‘When these amino acids building blocks are missing, it is comparable to “taking the vowels out of our language.’ ‘ _t w__ld s__nd l_k_ th_t,’ he finishes. Can you understand the vowel-depleted language? To give you a very good example of what happens when building blocks of hormones in your body are missing, let’s have a look at one. Let’s explore serotonin. Serotonin is our body’s own antidepressant and its main building block is tryptophan. Tryptophan is only made by the bacteria in the soil. If the bacteria are dead (through being killed by chemicals that every farmer uses), they will not produce tryptophan. Tryptophan, when eaten, is transformed in your gut by bacteria (lactobacillus) into serotonin. Could there be a possibility that our world-wide flood of depression and mental illness has a connection to the fact that most soils nowadays are ‘dead?’ Thanks to modern farming, the bacteria that would have produced the amino acids that are the building blocks of hormones like serotonin were killed by fertilizer and agrochemicals.

If tryptophan, the amino acid needed to be transformed into serotonin, is not produced anymore because the bacteria that make it are dead, it will no longer be available in our diet. Consequently, if our bodies are starved of serotonin – an antidepressant, i.e., the ‘happy hormone’ – we will face more and more depression. I ask myself the question: Am I depressed because my life is difficult or am I depressed because I just don’t get enough tryptophan to make serotonin? Can you see this connection? To make it even more interesting, the next fact is that to make tryptophan into serotonin, bacteria called lactobacillus is needed in our gut – no gut bacteria, no serotonin, followed by depression. Can you see how soil is intertwined with everything you think and do? As Dr Bush says, language without vowels doesn't make sense, and the non-availability of the building blocks to build proteins will create damaged hormones and other proteins. The human body is amazing at repairing itself but without the ‘vowels,’ it will break down at some point. I am amazed that people are still functioning somewhat…. Another benefit of bacteria in healthy soils is it helps plants make ‘alkaloids.’ Let us have a look what they are and what they do. Alkaloids are different chemicals that are produced by the microbes in soil and have lots of different functions. Alkaloids in plants function as follows in your body. For example: Quinine is antiparasitic. Ephedrine works against asthma. Homoharringtonine protects against cancer. Vincamine is vasodilatory (lowers blood pressure by dilating blood vessels). Quinidine is antiarrhythmic (steadies the heart). Morphine is an analgesic/ painkiller. Piperine lowers blood sugar (antihyperglycemic activity). There are many more, many of which might have not been discovered yet.

These alkaloids are normally found in vegetables and help our bodies to stay healthy. Alkaloids are ‘nature’s own medicine.’ They have obviously worked well for us, because we are still here after millions of years. In chemical farming systems though, these alkaloids are missing in our food because the microbes that initially synthesize them are dead. Imagine the reversal of the list above. A person fed non-organically grown food will eventually not be able to fight parasites, asthma, blood pressure related problems, cancer – and modern medicine’s answer to that is a pill! Why take a pill when we could have gotten everything we needed from decent food? I say: ‘Let food be your medicine.’ And to follow Zach Bush: ‘Now I’m not saying that medicine is bad and that food will solve every health issue you ever have but everyone knows how important diet is to health. It’s like riding a bike. You start with the training wheels and work from there. The same can be said for our health. Start with the basics. And the most basic part of health is food. So, before you start looking around for something to help fix an issue, ask yourself if the basics are right? Is the food you’re eating healthy? If it’s grown in dead soil, the answer isn’t one you’ll probably like.’

SOIL AS A CARBON SPONGE TO REVIVE SOILS AND REVERSE CLIMATE CHANGE As well as being the heart of the food chain, a living soil is the biggest carbon storage on the planet. Soil can hold more carbon dioxide than the air and plants combined. Climate change is to a large degree caused by too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This comes, of course, to a large degree from the burning of fossil fuels – but the most overlooked fact is that it also comes from farming country. Every paddock that is sprayed for growing crops or vegetables or ploughed, emits a massive amount of carbon – because the soil life is killed by chemicals or the exposed soil is ‘cooked’ by sun-heat. Reverse this, and climate change can be reversed. Let us have a look at how this works.

THE CARBON CYCLE As climate change is heavily debated and is changing our world dramatically, I think it is empowering (and interesting) to understand climate change and CO2 a little bit better. It will also clarify my postulate why carbon in the soil is linked to biology and essential for people’s health and global health. Two principles I want you to get out of reading this book: 1. One is that for you to be healthy, your food must come from healthy and unpoisoned soils which are high in carbons – which mainly are in organic farms. 2. The other is that through growing food in healthy soil, we have the potential to draw down so much carbon that climate change can be reversed and the planet can heal its ecosystems. Every single person that changes their food from conventional to wholesome organic or regenerative becomes the epicenter of saving the planet . The Carbon cycle is an essential component to healthy soil and healthy food. So how does it work? The Circle of Life Most of us have come across the word photosynthesis and will remember that it’s the process of plants turning sunlight and oxygen into sugar. This is a process that happens in chlorophyll, which is ‘the green stuff’ in leaves. This is CO2, the ‘culprit’ of climate change and the building block of all life on earth. It has one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. The plant’s chlorophyll will take six of these and, with the help of some sunlight, it will turn them into one sugar molecule, known as glucose. The chlorophyll in the leaf absorbs CO2 – one carbon atom and two

oxygens – and connects them into a ring of five carbons with the sixth C sticking out. This is glucose, commonly called ‘sugar.’ After the process is finished, the leftover oxygen atoms are released back into the air as O2 – oxygen. Without green plants, there wouldn’t be any oxygen which we need to breathe every second of our days. This is a sugar molecule. The chlorophyll has absorbed six CO2 and has breathed out three O2s. Each blue ball mimics a carbon atom. The sugar molecule is the building block of all plants, like trees, grass, vegetables, fruit, shrubs, and flowers. The more ‘green’ is growing, the more oxygen and less carbon dioxide is in the air! Two things happen through the process of photosynthesis: The plant ‘builds itself,’ using the sugar molecules to grow. The placement of the sixth carbon atom in the sugar molecules, either up or down, will determine if the result is ‘starch’ or ‘cellulose.’ You might not think that it’s important, but this little difference is the difference between being digestible to humans or not. Starch, like a potato, is easily digestible. Cellulose, on the other hand, is indigestible fiber. The only life forms that can digest, and ‘cut up’ the cellulose into its carbon rings (sugar) again, are bacteria! Humans can’t digest grass. Cows directly even can’t digest grass. But the bacteria in the rumen of the cow can! More will be discussed about the magic of ruminants in Chapter 14 but for now, let’s focus on the carbon cycle. Every plant on earth is mainly made from carbon taken out of the air by photosynthesis. The other elements for plant growth are oxygen, hydrogen from water, nitrogen from the air and the soil, sulphur from the soils, and many different minerals. The plants also send sugar down the stem into the roots and these ooze sugar into the soil. This in turn feeds the soil life, like bacteria and worms, protozoa, and fungi. All those sugar molecules that contain carbon are sent straight into the ground.

Plants and soil are the two things on our earth that adore and love carbon dioxide. The soil is the single largest space where carbon-dioxide can go and where it does good. (It goes into the water of the oceans, too, but there it creates havoc, like pH changes and bleaching of corals). Because of photosynthesis, the more stuff we grow, the more CO2, the greenhouse gas responsible for Global Warming, is ‘drawn down’ into the plant or into the soil. And this is the magic of biology! All living things are made from carbon: Fats are long carbon chains. Proteins are crumbled up, three-dimensional carbon chains. Carbohydrates are carbon-rings forming chains. It’s all carbon…. We eat carbohydrates, fats, or proteins and burn them in our cells to CO2, water, and energy. We eliminate CO2 out of our body with every breath we breathe out. This is how the human body gets energy to live, to run, to breathe, and to keep warm. We also transform the carbon-rings or chains that we are eating into our own body. For example, you eat a steak, and you build up your own muscle tissue from that. Equally, when wood is burned, the carbon rings and chains are oxidized to CO2 again. This happens on a large scale in bushfires and on a small scale in your fireplace at home. The recent ‘unprecedented and apocalyptic’ bushfires in Australia have contributed vastly to another episode of global warming – as well as killing over one billion animals. The ‘metabolized’ or ‘burnt’ food that we breathe out is ready to be taken up by the plants to be used in photosynthesis to start the ‘carbon cycle’ all over. The log of wood that you burned in your fireplace to CO2 is again available for plants to photosynthesize. This is ‘The Carbon Cycle.’ It has kept the Earth in some form of balance for millions of years. In the last 150 years, we have dug out long buried ‘carbon dioxide chains’ in the form of coal and gas and have released them into the atmosphere,

adding to the net-amount of CO2. We are burning 150 million tons of fossil fuels per day. That is an awful lot of carbon dioxide released in a very short time! To reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, we must grow grass, bushes, trees, flowers – it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s green and grows. We ‘simply’ must ‘draw it down’ again. Our planet’s atmosphere is at risk. Some people fantasize about research plans and programs that investigate living conditions on the moon or on Mars. How can humans neglect their own once-perfect planet and instead spend billions of research dollars on missions for survival options elsewhere? Let’s fix the planet we’ve got, instead of trying to find a new one. So, you might wonder, how does carbon-dioxide induce climate change? Sadly, a few large companies (oil and gas companies) had a very effective campaign to convince people that climate change is either not real or that it is real and is caused by sun spots or normal climate variations. If we believe that – great! We can carry on as normal. ‘Don’t worry, the destruction of the planet has nothing to do with us, humans, because our track record is that we are really kind to the planet and its flora and fauna, aren’t we?’ The debate has sadly been politicized, it even centered around sexism as it was feminized also. This, as mentioned, was orchestrated by the companies that would have lost financially. It is of no surprise that the Australian Mineral Council has offices right in Parliament House. This is the seat of the Australian Government, which is internationally accused of doing too little to stop climate change and is actively supporting the fossil fuel industry. Let us have a look again at a bit of science, as this is a super important topic whose consequences we all have to face and are facing already, with extreme climate events like fires, hot temperatures, floods, cyclones, and droughts becoming more severe. This will only get worse.

CLIMATE CHANGE You might wonder why a chapter about climate change is in a book about food? And you might also wonder why I want you to understand the basics of climate change (and I apologies if you do already). The big point I want to make, and why I have climate change and farming in this book, is this: If we buy food that is grown on healthy soil that is alive, and organic or regenerative farmers become the norm rather than the exception, and if the 50 percent of all landmass which is used for food production changes from being a carbon emitter to being a carbon absorbing sponge, we would: be all very much healthier of course, and we would be able to absorb so much carbon that climate change will be able to be reversed. Such is the magnitude of the carbon absorbing potential of soil. So, what is climate change? This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive dissertation about climate change. It is a simplified explanation of what greenhouse gases are, where they come from, and mostly, what and where the solution is. As you guess: in the soil. And here is why. Our atmosphere has thickened through the addition of massive amounts of CO2 that was released from the massive burning of fossil fuels in the last 150 years. While water vapour, nitrous oxide and methane also play a role, CO2 is the largest component causing the heating of our planet.

THE ATMOSPHERE What is the Atmosphere? The atmosphere is like a blanket of gases that surround Earth. It: contains the air we breathe. creates pressure on Earth that allows water to become liquid. protects life from harmful radiation from the Sun. helps keep the planet's warmth by preventing the heat created by the Sun from escaping back into space as infrared radiation. is a major element of the water cycle containing clouds and vapour. keeps the climate on Earth perfect for life, just between roughly -40 C and +40 C. The atmosphere is the layer of gases, commonly known as air, and retained near our planet by Earth’s gravity. It is made up of a mixture of gases, mostly nitrogen (78 percent), oxygen (21 percent), argon (1 percent) and carbon dioxide (0.04 percent). It reaches over 500 km above the surface of the planet. There is no exact boundary between the atmosphere and outer space. The atmosphere just gets thinner until it ‘blends’ into outer space. The planet Mercury is an example of ‘life’ without an atmosphere. To demonstrate the importance of the atmosphere, let us have a look at the planet Mercury. Compared to Earth, Mercury is half the distance away from the Sun and therefore it should be much hotter. But this is not quite the case. Mercury’s temperature alternates between – 173 C at night, and +425 C during the day. If you imagine that the absolute zero is -273C, -173 C is very cold. And if you imagine that the autoclave in my clinic sterilizes medical instruments at 121 C, and that you bake a roast at 200 C, Mercury’s temperature of +425 C is very hot. Do you wonder why that is?

The answer is: Mercury has no atmosphere. Therefore, there is no air and no atmospheric gases to keep heat in or out. It is entirely ‘a victim’ to the Sun’s rays without any protection. This is Venus, the evening star. Venus is called our twin planet. She is as far away from the sun as us, twice as far as Mercury. Her size is similar to Earth. Venus’s temperature day and night is +462 oC. Why is that? Why is Venus hotter than Mercury, at least part of its day, although further away? The reason is that Venus has a very thick atmosphere of 96 percent CO2! This traps the heat and infrared radiation cannot escape. CO2 is like a blanket keeping the heat in. And this is exactly what we are creating now on Earth. It is not so much the distance from the Sun that alters our temperature, but the density of our atmosphere. I think that by looking at Mercury and Venus, it becomes so clear how important CO2 in the atmosphere is to keep Earth in the small temperature range that is perfect for sustaining life. Narrow Temperature Range on Earth Let’s think: The absolute zero temperature is -273.15 o C. The temperature in the convective zone of the Sun is two million Celsius! At the surface of the Sun, the temperature gets up to two to ten million Celcius! Luckily, it is 149.5 million km away. However, with temperature ranges in that order, how lucky are we, how perfect is our position in space! How extraordinarily lucky is it, to have temperatures between -40 C and +42C to make our planet habitable? 82 degrees only – that is the narrow range where life is possible! If you want to narrow it down even more, life is really comfortable between five and twenty-five C. Plants will not grow much in soil that is colder than five C and life gets ‘cooked’ when heat is larger than 42 degrees as an absolute maximum. This is only a twenty to thirty C variation at the very most. Between the absolute zero of -273 C and the 4000 C to ten million C on the sun, a variation of twenty degrees Celsius is minute.

If we get an increase of one or two degrees Celsius only, which does not seem that much, it means earth is 5-10 percent warmer. What happens to life above 42C? Life is good and comfortable, when it is between about 5 C and 25 C. Of course, we can put the heater on when it is cold, and we can go swimming or put the fan on when it is hot, but compared to Mercury and Venus, the temperature range for human and animal comfort is extremely narrow. When the temperature in a body goes over 42 C, fatal biological consequences occur. 42 C is a well-known temperature for any doctor, mother, or father. It is the maximum temperature that a human or animal can tolerate. It is the maximum temperature at which life is possible. We call a body temperature above 37.5 C fever. To demonstrate what happens with temperatures above 42 C, I would like to use the example of eggs: If you look at a raw egg, the proteins in the egg are liquid and functioning in their biological way to create new life. If proteins are heated beyond 42C, they start to 'crumble,’ or in other words, they ‘denature.’ They get ‘cooked’, in plain English. As we all know, these boiled eggs would never get back to their liquid and functional stage ever. This is a good demonstration of what happens to proteins when they get heated above fever temperature. To demonstrate this clearly, I will give the example of my dog Primrose. Last summer, I was inadvertently nearly responsible for her death. I accidentally had locked her in my car. I was looking for her everywhere but couldn’t find her. The outside temperature on that day was 42 oC and the temperature inside the car at 2:00 p.m. must have been nearly 70 oC. By the time I found her, she was in a coma and her body temperature, when measured, was 43 oC, one degree Celsius only above the maximum fever temperature. She was panting and barely alive. I felt terrible! Luckily, my clinic is right beside my house and I rushed her to the airconditioned hospital. We used every available treatment, including cold enemas, cold IV fluids, oxygen, an induced coma, antiepileptic drugs, plasma infusions, blood transfusions, drugs to correct mineral imbalances, etc. She survived and is still my pet today, but during the following days she

passed massive amounts of bloody diarrhea and her muscle enzymes measured 300 times normal. We managed to save her life, but only just. This example shows what happens when the body temperature is not 39 oC, which is normal for a dog, but only four C higher!! Four degrees Celsius is not much and yet, the consequences are disastrous. Death follows, as biological functions of the body cannot take place any more. It makes you wonder, when the days in Australia get to 45 C, how any life will be possible….

HOW DO GREENHOUSE GASES WORK? Greenhouse gases are gases that have the effect of trapping heat in the atmosphere. They do not let heat in the form of infrared radiation escape through the atmosphere any more. There are four main gases that act as greenhouse gases. These gases act in the same manner as a glass roof in a greenhouse. They let sunlight in, but do not let the heat out. However, on a planetary scale, it turns out to be a disaster because it pushes the average temperature on Earth up. The average temperature is now about 1.5 C higher than the average temperature before. These are the main greenhouse gases: 1. 2. 3. 4.

CO2 Nitrous oxide Methane Water vapour

The distribution of greenhouse gases: The biggest culprit is CO2. CO2 Carbon dioxide is the main active ingredient of global warming, but not the only one and not the strongest. CO2 is a massive problem though. CO2 has been relatively stable in our atmosphere, enabling life on Earth to establish itself in its current form. The carbon cycle was in balance of photosynthesis and growth of flora on one side, and decay and use of this biomass by animals on the other. For the past few million years, plants, bacteria, and animals like dinosaurs built up their biomass, and during a long time, over 60 to 600 Million years, these dead biological structures were compressed and made into a way of storing carbon underground. Through a long process of decay and compression these ‘dead biological structures’ became coal, gas, and oil.

These ‘fossil fuels’ are essentially long carbon chains that originated as sugars, cellulose, proteins, or fats that had grown and lived on earth a long time ago. The coal, oil, and gas that was formed is so compressed, that it became massively energy-rich. Imagine a tank full of fuel. It will get a big car that weighs two tons from Sydney to Brisbane. That’s how energy-rich fossil fuels are. In the last hundred years, since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have started mining these substances and burning them. We are burning 150 million tons of these ‘fossil fuels’ per day. ‘Burning’ is a reaction with oxygen, and the long chains of carbons are turned into CO2 again. It is the opposite of photosynthesis. CO2 is nowadays released faster into the atmosphere than any time in the last 66 million years. CO2 in the atmosphere works like a greenhouse. It is as if we put a glass ceiling around Earth. The ‘glass ceiling’ of CO2 in the atmosphere got thicker. This is called ‘The Greenhouse Effect’. The energy trapped by man-made global warming pollution is now the equivalent to exploding 500,000 Hiroshima bombs per day, 365 days per year. Unimaginable, isn’t it. Here are a few graphic pictures. They show that the radiation of the sun is coming from space onto Earth. They heat the air and the surfaces of Earth. The heat is bounced back as ‘infrared radiation.’ A perfect amount of heat would normally be trapped, and a perfect amount of heat would be let out of the atmosphere to disappear back into space. In the past: thin layer of CO2; nowadays: thicker layer of CO2. A simple experiment, that you could do at home, is to take a glass bowl, put a thermometer in it and see how much the temperature will rise in the glass bowl when the bowl is closed. The thermometer on the inside of the glass bowl will show the temperature increase compared to the temperature measured on the outside. This shows how important the atmosphere is and how the perfect balance of heat coming in and going out enables life on Earth. Nitrous Oxide

Hardly anyone has ever mentioned nitrous oxide and its implications for global warming. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, and it also depletes the ozone layer. Since it also has a shorter lifespan (114 years), reducing it could have a faster and very significant impact on global warming. About 80 percent of it comes as a direct consequence of fertilizer usage on food producing land! Nitrogen fertiliser is not allowed in organic systems! This is where you and I and our food choices can make a big impact yet again! Only half of the nitrogen in the fertilizer gets used by the plant; the rest gets washed away in groundwater as cancerogenic nitrates, or it gets offgassed as nitrous oxide. It rises to the atmosphere and, like CO2, keeps the infrared heat in. If we consider that nearly 100 percent of all American and Australian crops are fertilized with nitrogen fertilizer, we can assume that this problem is contributing to global warming in a big way. 70 million hectares in Australia are fertilized with artificial nitrogen fertilizers. This means that 70 million hectares are releasing massive amounts of nitrous oxide. In addition to adding to the ‘greenhouse gases,’ nitrogen fertilizers are very energy hungry to produce, and once applied, they kill the soil bacteria and fungi with the discussed consequences for our health! Another source of NO2 is the ‘bottom of the manure pile’ when animals are housed or kept in intensive meat production systems like intensive piggeries or feedlots. The manure, if spread out on grasslands on natural farms, would not be a problem; indeed, it would act as a fertilizer. However, in these intensive and cruel meat factories, manure is collected in deep pits. On the bottom of those, oxygen (air) can’t get access, and the manure starts to convert into nitrous oxide. It is the fact that it is piled up or collected in deep pits that creates the problem of emissions, not the manure or the animal per se. Feedlots are culprits here. In organic farming systems, neither intensive pig stalls, nor cattle feedlots, nor nitrogen fertilisers are allowed. This is one of several reasons why

organic farming is not just better for your health, but for planetary sustainability also. Methane Methane (CH4) is another form of carbon that acts as a greenhouse gas. It is 34 times as strong in causing a ‘blanket-effect’ than CO2. Most of its sources are from underground storage, especially where the permafrost melted, fracking, and from the release of gas in ruminants. While cattle do emit methane and one might jump to the conclusion of calling them a big culprit, I would argue that cattle can in fact be either: working as a facilitator to carbon sequestration in soil, or as a carbon emitter in certain agricultural systems like feedlots. ‘It’s not the cow, it’s the how.’ More on that later. Fossil fuel burning and agriculture release of greenhouse gases from destroyed soils are the main culprits of warming our atmosphere. The consequences of global warming are increasingly visible: melting of the ice caps, rising water levels, increase in ocean pH and temperature with the biological disasters like coral bleaching that follow, the destruction of the gulf stream, floods, droughts, and fires. Summary The thickened CO2 mantle of the Earth is warming our planet up. There is a maximum of temperature that living organisms can take (42C). The CO2 that fossil fuel burning released has to find its way back into the soil. Modern farming releases CO2; organic farming puts CO2 back into the soil. Let us help more organic farmers to work their magic by buying their food.

In 2019 and early 2020, dust storms became more severe and frequent. Topsoil was blown away. The Arctic was melting, the Amazon burning, and Brazil’s president Bolsonaro was denying help to stop the fires. The state of the Great Barrier Reef was declared ‘very poor.’ We are not treating our planet wisely and kindly. In my own life, ‘Gowrie,’ my farm, was reduced to dust in the drought. The once-thriving property with beautiful creeks and trees, birds, livestock, and wildlife like eagles and herons looked brown, dusty, and dead. The trees in my garden, which used to be a lush oasis even on the hottest summer days, had died. Farmers in the district were saying that they have never experienced a drought like this before. It was the most severe drought in our recorded history. Koalas were brought to the clinic frequently. Koalas get their moisture from gum leaves but the trees are so dehydrated that koalas had to climb down the trees and look for water. Quite a few that were brought in to me had bite wounds on them, but most were very dehydrated and had gone into kidney failure. When we offered them water, they drank, sometimes for more than an hour. One koala was holding my friend’s hand for a whole hour as if to plead with her not to leave him. Some other koalas were standing in the middle of the streets holding their arms out as if to say, ‘Please rescue me.’ The scenes were heartbreaking and made even worse when the fires all through Australia burnt all along the East Coast and killed one billion animals or more. Like you, I often feel powerless. The problems seem too big and complex for an individual to make a difference. You might know the feeling of having spent an hour on social media to end up depressed, sad, and frustrated for the rest of the day. Mother Earth has sent us a wake-up call after wake-up-call. It’s time to start listening. Healthy, living soil is the key to it all. Soil should be and was alive until modern agriculture started pouring chemicals onto it. It was a several-meterdeep living organism of worms, arthropods, spiders, fungi, amoebae, bacteria, and viruses, held together by minerals and nourished by plants growing in and on it, supplying the underground miracle with sugar and energy. The soil contained more carbon than air and plants combined. Such is the potential, that the minimal increase of organic matter by just 1 percent in an

area the size of America can absorb enough carbon dioxide to reverse greenhouse gas-induced climate change. According to Whendee Silver, senior author of a meta-analysis on climate change and agricultural practices, ‘well-managed agricultural practices such as planting cover crops, optimizing grazing, or sowing legumes in rangelands, if instituted globally, could capture enough carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil to make a significant contribution to international global warming targets.’ But to do that, the soil must not be destroyed by chemicals – which is what happens nowadays through modern farming. Silver continues: ‘Regenerative farming practices minimise or eliminate the need for fertilisers and pesticides, reducing costs, and improving the health of the soil by allowing below-ground life to flourish. They help store water in the soil, drought-proofing farms, and can cool the local area via transpiration.’ (Transpiration is the way plants take in and give off moisture). As she explains, ‘Anytime you increase the organic content of soils, you are generally increasing the fertility, water-holding capacity, and sustainability, decreasing erosion, and improving general resilience to climate change.’ Soil is the biggest carbon sink on the planet. It is, in fact, the only large enough carbon sink on the planet to make a difference. Healthy soil can contain more carbon than air and plants combined. The picture of this man with the four-meter long roots stemming from grasslands is a great reminder of what goes on underground. As roots, plants, and soil microbes are all carbon structures, you can start to appreciate how much space there is underground to store carbon. In one acre of soil is as much biomass as the equivalent of two elephants! In addition to that, every time the plants photosynthesize – which happens every time the sun is shining – simple sugars, known as glucose, are pumped into the ground. Remember, to make the sugar, plants draw carbon dioxide out of the air. Each single sugar molecule is made of six carbon dioxide molecules. Plants are therefore actively drawing carbon dioxide into the soil. Carbon dioxide, obviously, is the greenhouse gas causing global warming. These glucose molecules are food for the microbes and fungi and they are also the building blocks for the growth of the plant itself. And thus, carbon is drawn down and stored – global warming antidote number one! This makes Scott Morrison’s suggestion (Prime Minister of Australia) of pumping carbon into man-made tunnels underground seem very hard work and inefficient, but

I guess every little bit helps. Micro-organisms in the ground are permanently growing and multiplying themselves. Once they are happy and fed with basic nutrients, they will multiply exponentially. Some bacteria multiply every twenty minutes. It takes only six hours to make 264,000 bacteria from just one single starting organism. This is the unstoppable power of nature when it’s happy. Pure abundance. Awesome. This is what we were seeing when Covid-19 lockdowns were enforced – nature’s amazing power of recovery at work. As every bacterium is also a carbon structure that originated from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, you can imagine how big the potential is to pump carbon into the soil by natural principles of ‘simply growing stuff’ in healthy soils. Essentially, any life form is a carbon chain. Life, in carbon terms, is: ‘linear chains of fats,’ ‘crumbled up three dimensional chains of proteins,’ and ‘linear chains of sugar rings.’ Everything alive is carbon. If we accept the fact that global warming is caused (amongst a few other things) by too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is of utmost importance to get this molecule reduced in the atmosphere again. It can either go into plants and soil, or into the oceans. The oceans have absorbed an enormous amount of carbon dioxide in the last hundred years – but they don’t like it! Our oceans are becoming very acidic because they absorbed a huge amount of CO2 and that has a huge impact on corals, the Reef, life, and ecology in the oceans. Oceans hate carbon! Carbon dioxide absorbed into soil, on the other hand, increases the soil’s fertility. Soil loves carbon! Mother Earth loves taking our (organic) garbage – like spoilt food, excrements, and carbon dioxide – and transforming it into fertile soil and new life. The black humus that is produced in healthy soil systems can hold tons of water, make landscapes drought-proof, and make soil fertile. Win-win!

AGRICULTURE AS THE CULPRIT AND THE SAVIOUR For whatever it’s worth, I believe that my father-in-law, when he discovered superphosphate, a fertilizer, did not know that ‘super’ would kill most life in the soil. He, like so many others, distributed this fertilizer over the whole property, thinking that he was doing the right thing and helping his country. Gordon loved his farm and his cattle, like most farmers do. So did my friend Mike McCosker. When his farm stopped producing because the soils were tired and dead, and he himself got very sick, he knew he had to make a change. He started to learn about biological farming. The trouble with nitrogen fertilizer, superphosphate, and most pesticides is that they kill or at least heavily distort microbes in and on the soil. Glyphosate, known as Roundup, is the most used chemical on Earth, and it kills microbes and fungi and protozoa. 2.4-D, known as agent orange, second most used chemical on the planet and another herbicide, kills microbes. DDT kills microbes. Another agrichemical, ‘Paraquat,’ not allowed in many countries but used a lot in Australia, kills all. Methyl bromide fumigated into the ground to grow strawberries, for example, kills microbes. Insecticides do not only kill insects declared as pests, but beneficial insects including bees and butterflies too. There are hundreds of pesticides and herbicides that I don’t even know, eradicating soil life all over the world. Some are more harmful than others, but they are severely detrimental to the biology in the soil, above the soil, and to you. When soil life gets killed, its humus declines, and therefore its waterholding capacity. It becomes hard and dry. Nutrients are not produced and not made available. The carbon storage declines from formerly 8 or even 15 percent to below 1 percent – as happened on most of farming land. Of course, insecticides used in agriculture to kill ‘pests’ don’t only kill pests. They also kill beneficial insects, like predators, that would keep the pest insects down and of course, they kill our pollinating bees. It is estimated that 80 percent of Europe’s insects have perished in the last few years. As insects are food for birds, bird numbers have heavily declined too, made even worse by the fact that some of these chemicals soften eggshells also. What a

disaster. Do you remember driving your cars at night, having to stop to clean the windscreen for the dead insects on it? I never have to clean my windscreens from dead bugs now. I assume that by killing off bugs we have, yet again, destroyed some fundamental food chains of nature, just to make life simple for producing commodities. Conventional, industrial, ‘normal’ agriculture kills soils by application of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Modern fertilisers and modern pesticides, that are used on every inch of farming country that is not organic or used for grazing, kill soil life. If you are eating ‘normal’ food, you must be aware that you are part of this and take responsibility. In organic or regenerative agriculture, in which none of these ‘soil-killers’ are allowed, the soils are brought back to life. They are literally resuscitated. Agriculture, through its various forms, generates 48 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Whilst there are many ways that agriculture contributes, from farm machinery to production of fertilisers (which is very energy hungry), badly treated soils massively emit carbon and nitrous oxide, both greenhouse gases, instead of absorbing them. Around the world, around one billion acres have been lost to land degradation due to modern agriculture and are emitting rather than absorbing carbon dioxide, and inevitably, contributing to climate change. Seventy-five percent of the world’s landmass is used for food production. In Australia, 51 percent of land is used for agriculture. That is a lot of land that we can breathe life back into and convert into a carbon sponge! Drawdown project researchers estimate that almost half of that area could be converted to regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture will be explained later in this book, but at its core lies the regeneration of exploited soils and landscapes to fertile and functioning soils and ecosystems again. So, this means that changing agriculture has a huge impact on the whole planet – and you can be part of this. The Earth and the farmers need your help. Simply through you buying the ‘right sort of food.’ To me, making soils fertile again through organic, regenerative, or biological agriculture is the first-aid medication we need. It is nearly a panacea for the disease pandemic, climate change, and ecosystem

destruction. Unless my dream comes true and all of us start eating and supporting organic agriculture though, the planet will change beyond recognition. Famines, droughts, wars for food and resources, with two billion refugees at least are predicted and no one will be spared. In rural New South Wales, we were already in the midst of it. At the end of 2019, we had hot winds, dust storms, dying cattle, and fires that were blazing through the whole East Coast and South Australia. The Earth and humanity need all of us. Eat for good. Eat to save the planet. And thrive. One bite at a time.

SUMMARY The living organisms in soil create an abundance of multitudes of beneficial nutrients for us. Food grown in organic soils is full of nutrients for you because the soils are alive. Without living soils, it gets harder and harder to grow crops and the nutrient density goes down dramatically, harming our health. Soil can absorb so much carbon that climate change can be reversed. What this means for you Food grown in conventional agriculture is nutritionally poor. Conventional agriculture is very detrimental to soil. Soil is the magic ingredient to provide nutritious food for your healthy body. Healthy soil = healthy food = healthy body. Dead soil = disease. Soil is the solution to climate change. Soil is the root of your health. Action Steps Become aware that all food you buy that is not organic is grown with chemicals. Become aware that all food that you buy that is not organic is very deficient in nutrients although it looks ‘normal.’ Become aware that eating ‘chemically grown food’ occasionally wouldn’t harm you too much, but if this is all you ever eat, it will harm you sooner or later. Fertilise your garden with living compost. Don’t fertilise your garden with ‘feed and weed,’ Roundup or 2,4D (look on the label).

Buy organic food or grow your own. Avoid conventionally grown canola, soy, chickpea, rice, and wheat products, and if you do, buy organic. Buy grass-fed meat only – avoid grain-fed meat.

PESTICIDES AND HERBICIDES

P

esticides are chemicals that are used for all food production nowadays unless organic, biodynamic, or homegrown. Pesticides are the main reason for poisoned rivers, massive fish death, the dying of the Great Barrier Reef, extinction of insects especially the bees, for the decline of bird numbers, poisoned and dead soil, and massive dehydration of landscapes, creating more and more deserts. They are even the main reason for the rain to stop in vast portions of country. Pesticides (and the resulting nutrient deficiencies) are undoubtedly also the main reason why certain diseases are flooding humanity. After extensive research and listening to literally hundreds of stories of clients and friends, combined with my 36-year-long knowledge of medicine, sickness, and working as a veterinarian nearly every single day of my adult life, I concluded that most diseases are linked to pesticides used in agriculture and food storage and preparation, and through the deficiencies in vital nutrients that are a result of those farming methods. The way we farm is the reason why we become ’sick and crazy.’ Eating ‘normal’ fruit and vegetables, meat, or baked goods (while still better than eating processed foods), will still leave you sick. It is like feeding your body small amounts of poisons every day and denying it nutrients that keep you well. I compare it to sitting on a ‘time-bomb’ that will explode sooner or later in one disease or other. Take your pick:

Fatigue Depression Infertility Hypothyroidism Obesity Cancer Alzheimer’s Parkinson’s Diabetes Multiple Sclerosis Immune problems Autism Asperger’s Endometriosis And so forth. One or more of them will happen to you and your family. My research tells me that your body is not given a choice. Its most fundamental needs are undermined and insulted daily with every meal, if eating conventionally grown food. I could study pesticides more and more for the rest of my life, looking into individual actions of farming chemicals. There are hundreds on the market…. But what I found is enough for me to strongly distrust all of them. My choice is to avoid them all by eating an organic and home-grown diet where I know that they are not laden with chemicals. It was a freezing August night. My client, Mike, brought his two-year-old kelpie Minty in. Kelpies are Australian sheep working dogs. They are extremely smart, very fast, great learners, and just the best dogs ever! Mike was very worried about his dog. She was fine yesterday, but today she could hardly stand up. He wondered if it could be a snake bite. We see a lot of them in summer, but not on cold winter days like that one. I ran some blood tests and discovered that she was in acute and severe kidney failure. The machine could not read her levels anymore; they were off the scale. I treated her as I would treat any dog with kidney failure. Intravenous fluids as the main stem therapy followed with some other supportive treatments. The next morning, she looked like a blown-up water-balloon. I had never seen anything like it. Not a drop of urine had been produced. The kidneys

were so damaged that they did not filter the water out at all and her whole body was like a water-logged sponge. I have, to this day, never seen anything like this. In ‘normal kidney failure,’ the kidneys can’t hold the water back and the patients urinate a lot, rather than not at all. All the fluids, about three litres, that I had given the dog overnight into its veins, had stayed in her bloodstream, giving her the appearance of being pumped full of water. Sadly, Minty was put to sleep. I questioned Mike about what had happened the day before. He reported that his other dog, only six months old, had died overnight also. He is a farm worker and had the dogs with him when he sprayed a paddock. Both dogs ran over the freshly sprayed field, and within twenty-four hours they were both dead. The paddocks had been sprayed with a pesticide that helps us produce food, that all of us eat. If it kills dogs, does it kill birds? Snakes? Frogs? Bees? Insects? Butterflies? Children? What does it do to the farm workers and people that spray this stuff? What does it do to the people that live next door when the spray drifts? My client Mary also had a rude awakening that highlights the danger of farm chemicals. She and her family had purchased a new farm. One morning, she went to explore the shed on her new property. I own a shed like this: There are numerous containers of agricultural chemicals with the labels faded beyond recognition, leaving their contents a complete mystery. I have been on my farm for twenty years and these containers are still standing there. What do you do with that stuff? Chuck it onto the local rubbish tip? You can give the containers to the council after they have been ‘triple rinsed…’ but what to do with the unknown chemicals inside? Luckily, I’ve never opened one to have a ‘sniff.’ That is exactly what Mary did. She described how she opened a container and a couple of drops sprayed accidentally on her face. She collapsed immediately, right there in the shed. Her husband found her about an hour later and took her to the hospital. She was flown to John Hunter hospital in Newcastle here in Australia and spent two weeks on life support. She had gone into multi-organ failure and is very lucky to be alive today. In the container was a chemical to grow food. It was a chemical called

“Paraquat.” “It can’t be that bad, Gundi…,” people would say to me. Sadly, it’s worse. Imagine the landscape between Mackay in Northern Queensland through St George, Moree, Gunnedah, Narrabri, Dubbo, down to Melbourne and across to Adelaide and beyond. It’s 3000 km long and 500 km or so wide and about five times the size of Germany, three times the size of France. One point five million square kilometres of soil (150 million hectares) that gets ploughed and treated with artificial fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides, sometimes ten times per growing season or more. If you have ever driven there, it is amazing. You drive for hours and hours through agricultural land. Not grasslands for cattle, no. Soy, canola, wheat and cotton, chickpeas, sorghum, and corn – those are the usual crops out there. None of them are organic. Fertilizers, herbicides or insecticides are often applied with aeroplanes. Aeroplanes that spray the poisons through the air to let them fall onto the ground. I read in the Moree newspaper: ‘The very nature of successful agriculture involves many moving parts from finance to engineering and agronomy.’ No word about the soil, nature, ecosystems, or nutrient value. It is about ‘astute business managers,’ ‘using resources efficiently,’ ‘automated tractors,’ ‘genesplicing technology in cotton,’ which is ‘helping to grow cleaner, and greener, crop production.’ As a side note, after the genetically modified ‘Roundup-ready’ varieties of wheat and soy and corn were put out, the application of Roundup increased fifteen times. There is nothing clean and green about that type of agriculture. There are hundreds of chemicals that are put onto our soils every year to grow food. Hardly any food that you eat daily is grown without them. Only self-grown or organic food is not covered or filled with them. And GM food poses enormous risks for the environment and your body. My friend Mark visited the Mexican-American border in his function as a supporter against homelessness. He had a firsthand look at how the farm workers are loaded up into buses very early in the morning and driven to American farms. They have no protection and must work in the fields with all the sprays that are used to produce foods. Mark described the tumours that were on the bodies of these poor people, which had developed through exposure to chemicals every day. In his words, the farmers were covered in knot-like tumours on their hands, arms, and feet.

It was very sad. Mexico and America are far away from Australia but the issues these countries face are mirrored in our own agriculture. My friend Pauline went to the Lockyer Valley recently, the food-bowl of Brisbane, where a lot of vegetables are grown. She grew up there and was exposed to the chemicals every day. Crop duster planes would fly over her parents’ house frequently. She recalls that her father always became exceptionally angry when chemicals had been sprayed. It affected his mood every time. She said when she returned to ‘The Valley,’ she could smell the chemicals. Apparently, five people there die every week from cancer. While this is hearsay, I don’t doubt it. Pauline said, as soon as she stepped out of the house in the morning, she could smell it again. Many people report that they smell the chemicals wafting through the air. My hairdresser told me about the arguments with her neighbour, who sprays his crops next door at least every week. She can smell it and it makes her feel sick. A client reports that when her neighbour sprays his cotton, that the morning after it is eerily quiet from the lack of birds and insects on her farm. I drove past a farmer spraying his field recently and could smell it, too. Most people I talk to have, of course, no idea how food is grown nowadays. I had no idea. When we drive through the countryside and see paddocks full of oats, sunflowers, corn, or wheat most of us are delighted at the abundance and fertile appearance of these fields. Canola crops look so beautiful and yellow, and a nice green paddock of winter oats in dark green colour looks so healthy. Who would know that it is not? Who knows that the blueberries in the supermarket are drenched in poisons? Or that broccoli is saturated with insecticides? Or that the chickpeas for the hummus you’re eating were sprayed twenty-one times in one season? Of course, our farmers do not go out to deliberately to cause disease and disaster. They get advice from their agronomists, who in turn learned chemical agriculture at university. Everyone is just trying to do the right thing and survive. But ignorance and lack of education is creating a worldwide disaster for health and ecosystems. In the chapter about soil, I explained what pesticides and fertilizers are doing to soil and how this affects the food grown in it and our planet. In this chapter, I would like to give you an overview of these poisons that are added

to the food we eat or its production. I would like to mention that this is chapter is only scratching the surface of what is going on. I will only discuss the most common chemicals used, but there are hundreds. I merely want you to have an idea of how nasty these chemicals are. Despite that, they are used in the production of and on every normal food you buy, unless it is labelled organic. Every single food. Maybe there are some farmers that don’t, and if you can find them, support them.

WHAT ARE PESTICIDES? Herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides fall under the umbrella term ‘pesticides’ and are used to kill weeds, fungi, and insects that are considered harmful to crops. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, this also includes killing all the good bugs like bees. Some pesticides are used before sowing to spray out the weeds. As Australia is always dry, it enables the farmer to just spray, rather than plough, to conserve water in the soil. It sounds like a great idea. Insecticides are sprayed against the different pests as needed. Often more than one insecticide is sprayed, and more than once. You can check out a website called ‘What Is on My food’ (https://whatsonmyfood.org) and punch in any fruit or vegetable you are eating, and you will get a whole list of ten, twenty, sometimes fifty chemicals used on a product. Cherries show up as having forty-two pesticides, carrots twenty-six, broccoli thirty-three, and lettuce fifty-two. Wow. Yuk. How scary is that? Seeds are often pre-treated with chemicals to keep pests like weevils out, or sprayed with antifungal substances to keep moulds away. My friend’s son used to work with seeds to be sown. He was infertile at the age of twenty, as was his brother who worked for the same produce store. Coincidence? After harvesting, the crops are treated again with chemicals. I remember my friend getting very sick after spraying his fodder-wheat with some poison and inhaling a bit: He was in bed for a whole week. As I am writing this, all of NSW is experiencing a mouse plague. Grains, stored in silos and sheds, is heavily treated with phosphate-containing baits to kill the mice – understandably, of course! There are mice everywhere to such an extent I have never experienced. I wouldn’t know what else to do against the mice either, may I add, so I understand – but it is yet another poison used to produce or store our food. Herbicides are ‘weed killers.’ This is a misnomer, as they do not just kill weeds. Most of them kill every plant, bacterium, and fungus they touch, even in minute amounts. They are sprayed onto paddocks before sowing to ‘clean’ the paddocks. Examples are ‘Gramoxon,’ 2,4-D, Roundup or ‘Enlist Duo,’ to name a few. There are several dozen on the market. Syngenta, which is the

company that makes the highly toxic chemical ‘Gramoxon’ which contains a substance called ‘Paraquat,’ has a very informative little video that you can find on the internet that shows the farmers how to dress themselves in PPE gear and how to pour the chemical into containers so that you don’t kill yourself, yes, literally don’t kill yourself, in the process. One drop of this on your skin will make you extremely sick and a few drops will kill you. I am not kidding and not exaggerating. (https://syngenta.com.au/gramoxone360) Unbelievable, that we grow food with this and eat the stuff! The company, Syngenta, who is producing this chemical, is now involved in a lawsuit against them, as it is meant to cause Parkinson’s disease. Fungicides are chemicals to kill fungi and yeasts. They are poisons that are often sprayed multiple times per growing season to combat fungus attack on crops. Insecticides are chemicals that are killing insects. They do not discriminate between ‘good bugs’ and ‘bad bugs.’ They kill beneficial and important bees and butterflies as much as so called ‘pests’ that are harming the crops. Their use has enormous ramifications for the environment. Every day I investigate, I am finding yet another poison that is used to grow food. Here are some examples of what some chemicals used in large quantities on our farms are and what they do. 2,4-D 2,4-D is in more than 1,500 agricultural preparations and as such one of the most used chemicals in the world. It is a herbicide (killing mainly broadleaf weeds) by causing uncontrolled growth in them. It mimics a plant growth hormone called ‘Auxin.’ It makes the plant grow so fast, that it runs out of energy and dies fast. ‘Uncontrolled growth’ reminds me of cancer. Do I choose to trust this company, that it only causes this in plants and not in my body? 2.4-D was developed by the United States and Great Britain in WW2 as a herbicide for warfare. 2,4-D was used in combination with another chemical and is known as ‘Agent Orange.’ It was used as a spray to defoliate vegetation in Vietnam between 1961 and 1971.More than three million hectares were defoliated with this substance by the U.S. military.

I still remember pictures from my childhood of rain forests in Vietnam that got stripped of all their foliage. I also remember television programs about the long-term effects of these poisons on the Vietnamese population. It showed people with cancer, children on crutches because they have severe birth defects, or children being born blind. It was and is terrible. Apparently, four million Vietnamese were exposed to the exfoliant and three million developed illnesses. It caused waves of deaths and birth defects including cleft palate, mental disabilities, hernias, extra fingers and toes, neural tube defects showing up as spina bifida – a condition where the organs are on the outside of the body, because the abdominal wall did not close itself during foetal development. A lot of other genetic diseases, as well as leukaemia, soft tissue sarcomas, Non-Hodgkin's-lymphoma, and many more showed themselves in either U.S. military personnel or in the Vietnamese population. Agent Orange is linked to prostate cancer, throat cancer, bladder cancer, as well as to Parkinson’s disease. Men who work with 2,4-D are at risk for abnormally shaped sperm and thus fertility problems. The International Agency for Research on Cancer said 2,4-D is a possible carcinogen. And so forth. You get the idea. It doesn’t sound good. And yet, it is used for food production all the time. 2,4-D drifts up to 50 kilometres! It is detected in groundwater. In 2012, it was found in more than 90 percent of samples taken from agricultural catchments bordering the Great Barrier Reef. It is used extensively in Australia wherever non-organic food is grown. It is in ‘Feed and Weed’ which you use in your backyard. Chlorpyrifos Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate. This is a group of components that paralyse parts of the nervous system and hence are used as insecticides. The word insecticide means that it kills insects. It is accumulated in the nervous tissue of people. According to the World Health Organization, chlorpyrifos is considered ‘moderately hazardous to humans’ based on its acute toxicity. ‘Exposure surpassing recommended levels has been linked to neurological effects,

persistent developmental disorders, and autoimmune disorders. Exposure during pregnancy may harm the mental development of children, and most home uses of chlorpyrifos were banned in the U.S. in 2001.’ (Wikipedia) Multiple petitions to ban this chemical in agriculture also were denied. The last attempt was in 2018 but immediately denied by Donald Trump’s administration lawyers. Dr Karr, an American paediatrician, says: ‘Chlorpyrifos is supposed to cause developmental issues in children. The EPA however is not banning it despite evidence that when the vulnerable, developing brain is exposed to chemicals like chlorpyrifos, studies have documented issues with learning and cognition, inattention, or behavioural issues and even behaviour similar to what is seen with children on the autism spectrum.’ Karr and environmental advocates like the Environmental Working Group say buying organic produce can reduce exposure to pesticides. Chlorpyrifos is used on a wide variety of crops including apples, oranges, strawberries, corn, wheat, citrus, and more. Over half of all apples and broccoli in the U.S. are sprayed with chlorpyrifos. Hawaii, by the way, has just stopped the use of chlorpyrifos near schools (100 meters) and called it a ‘highly toxic neurotoxin that causes significant damage to brain development in children.’ And we breathe this in and we eat it every day. Chloropicrin In strawberry production, ‘the soil has to be sterilised and fumigated before strawberries are planted,’ because they can only grow on completely sterile soil nowadays. Methyl bromide was used for this purpose but was then banned because it destroyed the ozone layer. With a few years’ lag and quite a few farmers not complying, it seems as if it is phased out now. But, it was replaced with some substance called “chloropicrin.” It is highly toxic, yet strawberries are commercially grown with it. Farmers have to do courses to learn how to handle this very toxic substance so as to not make themselves very sick. Glyphosate

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in a chemical called ‘Roundup,’ produced by Monsanto, now owned by the large pharmaceutical company ‘Bayer.’ It is the most harmful substance for our Earth, and Dr Steven Grundy, an American doctor and surgeon, calls it ‘the antibiotic against the Earth.’ For years, farmers and consumers were told that it doesn’t harm, because it stops a biochemical pathway called “Shikimate pathway’ that we humans don’t have, so therefore it is fine for us. What a silly and un-intelligent assumption. As the widest used agricultural chemical, it made the company billions of dollars though so of course they would call it ‘harmless.’ Let me assure you, its mode of action and what it does is probably the number one reason for worldwide declining health, waves of Alzheimer’s, cancers including leukaemia, autism, mental health decline in all forms, allergies, autoimmune diseases, hormone problems, and so forth. In my opinion, ‘Roundup’ is a crime against humanity and the planet. ‘Roundup,’ the commercial name for a chemical called glyphosate, is the single largest amount of chemical that is used on earth. It is so widely used that one can literally say that every inch of soil that is used in ‘normal, modern agriculture’ is sprayed with it often more than once a year. Glyphosate is in 95 percent of people’s tissues, in over 90 percent of rivers, the ocean, even in the rain. It is in breast milk and in baby food and was found in umbilical cords. There was a lot of data about ‘Roundup’ and its danger – but a lot of this research apparently was suppressed in 1979 already (read The World according to Monsanto). What does it actually do? Glyphosate stops a pathway called ‘Shikimate-pathway,’ which mammals don’t have (hence the declaration it is ‘harmless’ for us). This pathway is in plants, algae, bacteria (including your microbiome bacteria) and fungi – and it (the Shikimate pathway) makes amino-acids. I explain in other parts of the book why this is so utterly harmful to nature and us. Glyphosate also ‘chelates’ cations (positive charged particles) in the soil or in your body. These then get ‘locked up’ in the ground and cannot be absorbed any longer by plants or your bloodstream. It makes minerals ‘stuck in the ground.’ As Roundup is used on nearly every inch of food-producing country, one can say that all food is grown with it and therefore lacking in nutrients (unless your food is organic). Amino acids are not produced any

more, alkaloids are not produced, minerals are locked-up in the soil, tightly held by glyphosate, and the bacteria that would have made these minerals soluble are killed by this chemical too. Before I started my research for this book, I knew that glyphosate was meant to be bad – but now that I have examined and researched more, I am getting more and more convinced that it is one of the main reasons for our man-made disaster. Glyphosate is used as a weed killer (herbicide). It is sprayed before seeds are planted and during growth to kill weeds. And often it is used to dry out the crop evenly for harvest. Crops are literally ‘sprayed dead’ before harvesting. This means that Roundup is on it and in it – and the food we eat is full of it. Glyphosate is water soluble. That means it is everywhere. It is found in rivers, rain, lakes, groundwater, and of course in our bodies. It is in all the wheat and flour you buy, in every bread, cake, biscuit, in everything that is made with corn or soy. Being water soluble, it goes into your cells and mitochondria, as well as into your brain. Mitochondria are your energy producing cells and are actually made from non-human, ancient, bacterial DNA. Mitochondrial disease is heavily involved in cancer formation. Can you start to see these connections everywhere, too? Every food grown in the U.S. – including dog and cat food from very reputable companies – is nearly 100 percent genetically modified and contains “Roundup.” As we covered in Chapter 3, the soil should have abundant life of bacteria, archaea, protozoa, fungi, and algae in it. Glyphosate kills all of these and makes dead soil. It is classed as an antibiotic. Of course, glyphosate also kills bacteria in the gut. Once taken in with food, it will kill your gut microbiome just as much as it kills bacteria outside your body. It is meant to alter the gut microbiome and encourages bad bacteria like clostridial diseases. I see dogs that suffer from diarrhea caused by clostridium perfringens all the time. And if you are unlucky to have an overgrowth of clostridium difficile, a faecal transplant might be the only solution to cure your diarrhea and save your life. A new research from China found that Glyphosate-induced inflammation in the small intestine ‘flattened the villi of the mucosa, altered gut microbial flora, and caused “ion imbalance.” Some pathogenic (disease causing) bacteria were encouraged and beneficial bacteria died.’ [Quang, College of

Animal Science and Technology, Nanjing Agricultural University, 2100 95 China] Glyphosate destroys ‘tight junctions’ between cells creating ‘leaky gut.’ Leaky gut plays a large part in gluten intolerance and hyper-inflammation of the body. I will explain more about this in the next chapter. A hyper-inflamed state of the body develops. Inflammation shows itself as arthritis, autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, ‘gluten intolerance,’ or as depression. The inflammation cascade lowers your dopamine and serotonin. Recent studies in Nantes, France, proved that glyphosate causes aggressive breast cancer after just three weeks of glyphosate exposure and in 2017 scientists found that it is associated with ‘Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’ We just buried a thirty-four-year-old mother here in Inverell who died from breast cancer, leaving a husband and two young children. They had an agricultural spraying business, spraying fields with glyphosate. Two years later, at the time of writing this, the husband, father of the two children, was diagnosed with cancer also. This is tragic and far too common. In Australia, here in the Hunter Valley, recent studies showed the risk of having a baby with autism was massively increased when the pregnant mothers were near farms where chemicals were sprayed. Glyphosate is a ‘mineral chelator.’ As explained previously, it binds positive ions, like zinc, magnesium, iron, sodium, or potassium. Therefore, these minerals are then ‘caught in the ground’ and cannot be taken up by the plant to grow into nourishing food for you. Glyphosate chelating (so capturing and not releasing) manganese, seems to be hugely implicated in causing autism in the developing foetus. Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Seneff did a lot of research about glyphosate. It is worth looking at. An article in a magazine called Surgical Neurology International looks at this closely. [ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] They state that manganese is an often overlooked but important nutrient that, in small amounts, is essential for multiple functions in the body. ‘Roundup-Ready’ feed, from genetically modified crops, has been shown to be severely depleted. Ninety-five percent of crops of canola, corn, cotton, cottonseed oil, soy, wheat, alfalfa, papaya, sugar, or potatoes is nowadays genetically modified to be ‘Roundup-Ready,’ meaning it has a gene spliced in that allows this crop to be sprayed with any amount of ‘Roundup’ (glyphosate) and not die. This increased the use of Roundup by 17 times. Seneff and Samsel found, that a lot of diseases nowadays can be explained

through the non-availability of manganese alone. They linked autism, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, depression, anxiety, and other neurological diseases to this. Sperm motility is dependent on manganese, lactobacillus in the gut needs manganese protection, and so forth. Again, in my opinion, we do not know enough at all about the intricacies of the body and nature to fiddle with it to such a large extend. Another study of Michael Antonio found that a minute amount of Roundup in your food can induce fatty liver in one of four people. Maybe that explains why in my clinical practice, I find that in at least half of all dogs of all ages, liver enzymes are elevated – without anyone being able to give me an explanation for this. Dog food contains about 60 percent grains, corn or soy, all grown on paddocks that have been treated with ‘Roundup’ and being genetically modified. I rang one of the leading dog and cat food manufacturers and asked them this question: “Do you know that all the wheat and corn is genetically modified Roundup-Ready and contains Roundup?” The answer was: “Yes, we do, but it is okay. It is proven to be safe.” As you can imagine, I doubt that. This company is from the US and is the world’s leading, apparently best dog food, with tons of research behind it. I chose, in my clinic, to not sell any of those foods that I deem grown with those substances. Professor Seralini and colleagues examined this in France and found that the rats that ate GM Roundup-ready corn developed large tumours and kidney and liver failure. Monsanto claimed that he was wrong as he did his research on ‘the wrong type of rat’ and questioned his statistics. However, it is hard to find a product that meets my very simple ‘health’ criteria of simply being without poisons. Non-Hodgins lymphoma is another probable consequence of Roundup [Sennef and Samsel], and in the U.S., a lawsuit recently granted a large amount of money to a man suing Bayer and accusing them for having, knowingly, caused him to have leukaemia (Non-Hodgins Lymphoma). As described with ‘Peanut,’ I see leukaemia, or lymphoma, here often. In children, dogs, and in farmers. Dr Zach Bush describes, the hospitals are full of children with leukaemia, and he described the hospital in Houston, Texas, as a whole city of sick children, running around as if at school – yet all connected to chemotherapy drips and without hair. This is so very sad; it breaks my heart. I read many articles that discuss the importance or non-importance of

this. Again, I ask myself, do I trust research done by the companies that sell this chemical? It is the most widely used substance on the planet and the earnings from it are astronomical. For me, there is enough evidence out there of its harm and I avoid being the guinea pig – simply by avoiding to eat it. Scientific evidence is rapidly growing that indicates glyphosate in the ‘Roundup’ formulation leads to many serious health problems. Giving that this toxic chemical can cause diseases from cancer to dementia to autism, isn’t it time for more to be done to eliminate the use of glyphosate in agriculture? Where are the alternatives? Why hasn’t the EPA re-classified it as a human carcinogen? Roundup will be used in nearly every ‘normal ‘food item you are eating, but especially in corn, soy, canola, wheat, sorghum, or sunflowers. For more information, please study the back of this book. I have graphs and websites you can use to find out more. It is frightening to see the correlation between glyphosate use and the dramatic and fast increase in many diseases since 1991, when this chemical started to cover the world. In the back of the book are some sobering statistics and graphs. Please take the time to have a look. This is not an exhaustive dissertation about ‘Roundup;’ there will be so much more found in the near future, and there is so much I don’t know about. But, what I do know and shared with you, is enough for me to avoid letting it into my body – or that of my children. Enlist Duo ‘Enlist Duo’ is now widely used also. This is a combination of glyphosate (Roundup) and 2,4-D. A company called Dow AgroSciences, part of ‘Dow Chemical Company,’ has developed this herbicide. It is used to spray onto crops that have been genetically modified to be resistant to those two poisons. GM crops is a health hazard but now that these crops are resistant to the chemical, a farmer can spray this product over the whole crop, with a boom spray or a ‘crop-duster-aeroplane’ without killing the crop he or she is trying to grow. This has resulted to a 17-fold increase in the use of 2,4-D and glyphosate in the last ten years. More of these chemicals are on your food now than they have ever been. I, for my part, do not ever want to eat genetically modified food nor

poisoned food. One should be aware, that if you eat soy, corn, wheat, sunflower seeds, canola oil, potatoes, pineapples, zucchini, and so forth, you are eating genetically modified food sprayed heavily with very toxic chemicals. Even if I repeat myself, please remember: If you chose to eat organic food, you can be assured that you will not eat GM plants. There are too many more poisons to mention. The farm stores are full of them and websites like www.bayercropscience.com.au are for everyone to see and explore. Most chemicals listed, when one explores the SDS datasheet, are known as either being carcinogens, toxic for aquatic life, harmful to the unborn foetus, reducing and altering sperm, etc.

SUMMARY Every non-organic food is grown with multiple applications of chemicals. These chemicals kill soil life. Dead soil produces food low in nutrients. These chemicals are harmful to your body. Many diseases like cancer and autism are linked to these pesticides. Action steps Buy and eat only organic or home-grown food. Don’t feed your dog or cat commercial food. Especially avoid grains, soy, canola, corn.

WHY DON’T FARMERS KNOW? Every single food item that you buy in the supermarket that is not organic will have chemicals on it or in it. Most chemicals are not tested properly for their safety and even if they are, they were not tested in combination and not tested for a prolonged period. They were not tested on the unborn foetus because that would be unethical. I stumbled across the first ever study that examined a common chemical’s influence on the foetal brain cells recently. The chemical already had billions of tons applied to food-producing land all over the world. The results were alarming. I feel guilty and disloyal for saying all of these things. I am a farmer myself. I have farmers as friends and clients. I live in the same community with them. And I know how tough they are doing it. I don’t want to alienate farmers. I respect and admire them. They are hard workers and good people, the salt of the earth. I truly think though they are not aware of the consequences of the chemicals they use. Nor do they know the consequence that these chemicals are having on their own health or their families’, or the microbiology in the soil. As much as there is no one paying for research, there is no interest in making farmers aware of the consequences of their way of farming. A lot of farmers that I know have changed their ways only when they found that their soils were dead and they couldn’t grow anything without more and more fertilisers and ‘inputs.’ Some farmers woke up when their own body started to give up. My friend Mike McCosker, now a leading voice in the regenerative agriculture space, and his wife, my friend Helen, are a good example of that. Mike got so sick from farming with chemicals that he had no choice: Change or die. He went on his own journey of discovery and changed his ways, now fighting for sustainable or rather ‘regenerative agriculture’ in Australia, the Pacific Islands, and China. Agriculture colleges and universities do not teach ‘organic,’ regenerative, or sustainable farming. They teach chemical farming only. Modern-day farmers have forgotten how their ancestors farmed. Natural cycles are forgotten.

There is only one university in Australia that teaches biological farming methods. Lorraine Gordon and her team at Southern Cross University have just created a Regenerative Agriculture course – the first one of its kind. I ask: Who would benefit from a study saying that organic food is more nutritious? When you think about it, who would benefit? Well, people like you and me of course. But we don’t have money. The government would benefit tremendously if they would have the intention to consider what I am talking about. The health bill for the government is huge! Twenty-four point four percent of all taxes was spent on healthcare [Australian Government statistics 2017/2018 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare]. It is extremely expensive to treat sick people. There is the cost of medical care of course, but there is also the cost of supporting these sick people financially when they can’t work anymore and they are not paying taxes like when they were healthy and running a thriving business. The government would benefit, so would everyone. But the farmers that grow organic food are usually on small farms and do not have any financial power. They have passion, but not power. They are small, they are local, they are wonderful. But they are not the ‘influencers.’ I think I could spend a lifetime looking at agricultural poisons and never understand how many and how much of it is used. The point here is: Unless you buy organic food, you don’t know what your fruit or vegetables or your vegan burger, another money-making fad (fake meat), is treated with. I would like to follow common sense, that growing food with poison is illogical. How is there even an argument over whether food grown with poison is good for you? It’s poison! It was designed to kill things! Please refer in the back of the book to some graphs that show the correlation between the increasing use of glyphosate and the increasing rise of diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, etc. They speak for themselves. In the next chapter, let's have a look at what it looks like for us humans, if the soils are dead and the food grown on such soils is missing nutrients. With disinfecting and sterilising everything around us, we have destroyed many of the bacteria in our own bodies – bacteria we need to be healthy. Let’s take a look at what’s happening on the inside.

THE GUT AND THE MICROBIOME

W

e have entered the century of ‘the microbiome.’ We are starting to realise that we are not these clean, sterilised, and disinfected beings we thought we were. Only recently have we discovered just how influential our gut microbiome is. Only in the last couple of decades have we realised how important the soil microbiome is. It turns out, the world is covered with millions of different bacteria, fungi, yeasts, archaea, protozoa, and viruses. Now that we have started looking, we are discovering just how many other lifeforms are living in and on us. In fact, we have more cells from other lifeforms in our bodies than our own. Just as the rapid and world-wide transmission of Covid-19 has shown us: We are so much more connected through biology than we ever expected. What we did in the last century was the opposite of what nature had always done. We disinfected our surroundings, chlorinated our water, sterilised our food, smothered it with preservatives, gamma-radiated, fumigated, poisoned, and pasteurised it. We prescribed billions of antibiotic tablets and our children hardly ever play in plain, old dirt anymore. We have sterilised our soils with chemicals and sprayed our food with disinfectants. With those practices, the bacteria in our gut, as much as the bacteria in the soil, have been killed or at least altered beyond recognition. Only in the last decade have we started to look at our gut microbiome – or at the micro-life in the soil. The gut microbiome is the internal mirror of the soil and its microbes. Before 2011, not many doctors or scientists had looked at the importance of it. How could we have missed, what seems to be one of the most important and fundamental parts of our physical and emotional wellbeing? We are only

now, in 2019, starting to understand, just how important our microbiome is. I learned at vet school that the gut has digestive functions, but we didn’t learn how important the microbiome is. We did, however, learn about the importance of microbiome in ruminants, which are cattle, sheep, goats, etc. These animals rely on the bacteria in their large first stomach, called the rumen, to digest their food. Ruminants have the whole rumen full of microorganisms and without them, the cow will die. But in humans and in non-ruminant animals, we did not understand the importance of it at all. The first book that informed me about the microbiome was the book Gut by Julia Enders, a German medical student. I only read this book about six years ago. Modern medicine can perform amazing things: work with the most sophisticated technology like MRIs and ultrasound; transplant organs; visualise the body with CT scans and the like, and yet we’d completely missed the importance of the gut. Now we know that we need the gut and its bacteria for many reasons. Julia Enders reported in her book about courageous mice and scared mice, and how switching the microbiome changed their characters. The scared mice became courageous and the courageous mice became scared. Amazing, isn’t it? The first ever institute of its kind is Melbourne-based ‘Food and Mood Institute’ at Deakin University. It is only a few years old at most. One of Deakin’s esteemed staff members Professor Felice Jacka, wrote a book called Brain Changer. In it, Jacka explains how little research has been done on the relation between ‘food and mood.’ She finds a huge correlation between food and depression and other mental health problems – but she doesn’t even mention organic food – yet. This reflects how little the medical profession and the farmers are in discussion or contact. Even in the current curriculum for naturopaths here in Australia, the way we farm and its implications, as stated in this book, are not mentioned. So many scientists now talk about the microbiome and how to heal it and how important it is. Yet I hardly hear anyone talk about the connection between our toxic farming methods and health or the microbiome! Glyphosate is an antibiotic, 2,4-D is a poison, superphosphate and NPK, a common fertilizers, kill bacteria, disinfectants and preservatives in and on food kill bacteria, antibiotics that doctors prescribe per se kill bacteria. The biggest of all culprits – growing food with poisons – is hardly ever

mentioned. I listen to a lot of podcasts about healthy diets, discussion about plant based or keto or high fat – yet, no one mentions the elephant in the room: nutrient-poor food grown on hardly alive soils covered inside and outside with Roundup and other chemicals. In my opinion, this is the most important reason why our health is getting worse and worse. But nobody talks about it. The chemical industry charged ahead in the last 50 to 100 years or so and concerned people like me are only just catching up.

THE MICROBIOME The gut microbiome is at home mainly in the large intestine. The microbiome consists of bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Most of them are not even known. It is estimated that we have more than 100 trillion microbes in our gut! About 4 percent of our body weight is bacteria! 90 percent of all our cells in your body are non-human! And 99 percent of all the genetic material in our body is non-human! Bacteria are not only in the gut of course, but in our mouths, on our skin, or on the surface of our eyes. And wherever they are, they protect us. For example, scientists have found that the lack of a certain bacteria in breasts predisposes women to breast cancer. We have all recently learned the words ‘microbiome’ and probiotics, which are bacteria we can take in with foods – or supplements. We have learned what ‘pre-biotics’ are: food for those bacteria like grated carrot or any other fibres. And recently I learned the word ‘post-biotics,’ which someone called ‘bacteria poop,’ which are substances like volatile fatty acids or hormones produced by the gut microbiome. Do you get an idea, like I do, that these little critters are so important? And can you imagine what happens when you kill them with your ‘daily bread’ that contains ‘Roundup’ or your broccoli with disinfectants on it? Though dating back only as recently as 2014, research has found that our microbiome: Protects us from ‘bad’ bacteria or viruses. Has immune function: 80 percent of the immune system sits in the gut wall and the microbiome nourishes the gut cells. Produces essential vitamins like vitamin B3, B12, and K. Produces neurotransmitters: 80 or even 90 percent of our serotonin, which is our own antidepressant and mood enhancer, is produced in the gut by the bacteria – and remember, it needs tryptophane for that! Regulates and promotes new blood vessel formation and healing in the gut. Produces SCFA (short chain fatty acids) from undigested fibre. These are important and seem to be much reduced in IBS (irritable

bowel syndrome) and UC (ulcerative colitis). These short chained fatty acids provide energy, heal the gut wall, and give you energy, as well as being anti-inflammatory. SCFA, produced by the bacteria in the gut, help to make the mucosal barrier, which protects the gut from ulcers or cancer. Is heavily involved in the ‘gut-brain-axis.’ (means it influences your moods, thinking and personality). Creates IPA, which protects the brain from plaque formation which causes Alzheimer’s (beta-Amyloid fibril formation). Produces cancer-protecting antioxidants. Prevents DNA damage. Gives babies ‘lesser negative emotionality and less fear reactivity.’ Gives character traits. Prevents autism. Prevents Parkinson’s disease. Prevents auto-immune disease. Prevents ‘leaky gut.’ Prevents allergies. Helps fight infections and creates disease resistance. Absorbs nutrients. As you can tell from the long, yet probably incomplete, list above, to stay healthy, our microbiome is essential. Our gut should be populated with bacteria very early in life. We should get inoculated by our mothers and by our environment, and the healthier and ‘more alive’ they both are, the stronger and more diverse your microbiome will become. Since humans have started to live ‘cleaner’ lives, we have destroyed large parts of our microbiome, naively not realising how important this is for us. Roundup (glyphosate), 2,4-D, chloropicrin, organophosphates, chlorinated water, antibiotics, antifungals, preservatives, and so forth, all kill microbes. Outside or inside our body. Roundup kills bacteria, fungi, and protozoa in the soil but also kills your microbiome when you eat food that is contaminated with it. Roundup is on and in every conventionally grown crop. It is water-soluble, so it is even present in rainwater. Every preservative you eat kills your microbes.

Every antibiotic or antifungal tablet you take kills your microbes. Chlorinated and fluoride-containing water kills your microbes. How many bacteria will you have left in your gut? Can you start to see the connections between health and your microbiome? Or, rather, the connection between your illness and your ‘sick’ microbiome? There are numerous examples of people who have healed themselves from various diseases – from depression to thyroid problems and food intolerances – by healing their intestinal microbiome: Shelley, a client, healed her microbes and all her health issues went. She changed from being on more than ten tablets a day and feeling miserable to thriving and being, well, happy. One of my veterinarians had multiple food intolerances, from lactose intolerance to gluten sensitivity. She healed her microbiome and can literally eat anything now. John, a friend, that suffered severely from psoriasis has healed his gut and the psoriasis is gone. Christie became schizophrenic at the age of fifteen and has been in and out of mental institutions all her adult life. She transplanted her husband's gut microbiome into herself and has not had another schizophrenic episode since. Apparently, she now has some of his character traits though. Michal Moseley reported that of people who received poo-transfers for medical reasons had a success rate of 100 percent and this change could take place within half an hour. He made it clear that it was used for particular medical conditions – but how amazing is that?! Apart from ‘our daily bread’ (containing Roundup and preservatives) and other chemicals killing our microbiome, a lot of children nowadays do not even get inoculated in the beginning. Imagine 2000 years ago, a nanosecond in history, a baby would have been born by a mother that has never had contact with antibiotics and has the microbiome, vaginal flora and mRNA of hundreds of generations before her, in her and on her. The baby is born through the vagina, and the mother’s vaginal bacteria, fungi, yeasts, and viruses would have smothered the baby from head to toe. It swallowed some of it, too. This was the start of inoculating the new baby with ‘good bugs.’ Midwives would swipe the mother’s vaginal excretions into the baby’s mouth. The baby’s environment was not sterile. It was put on its mother’s skin, it drank breast milk that had microbes in it, it got bacteria from the

blankets and the clothes that it was covered with. It might have been wrapped in animal skins. It was surrounded by flowers, grasses, trees, sheep, cows, dogs, cats, birds, natural streams and rivers, healthy air, parasites and worms and insects, and everything else. And, of course: normal, natural soil that was alive. The baby would have been handed around by the village or clan, and lots of different people would have touched and kissed it. It would have slept in the fresh air; it was exposed to sunlight and wind. It crawled in soil and would have stuffed grass, flowers, soil, and even poo from the animals in its mouth. And all of this was inoculating the gut. Antibiotics were not invented, nor was there chlorinated water. None of the ten million chemicals, invented recently and used in our modern lives daily, were around. Preservatives were not invented. Fridges did not exist. Food was made to last over winter by fermentation. Sauerkraut, sourdough, fermented vegetables, and salted meats were all heaving with good and necessary microorganisms. Some societies, for example the Nordic people, even buried fish in the ground to let it rot, before they ate it. Can you imagine how strong and healthy their immune systems were? Babies were exposed to all these natural challenges and their bursa and their thymus imprinted, day in and day out, antibodies against dust and soil and worms and trees and grass and fleas and pollen and viruses. While the child was young, the body was ‘printing’ antibodies and, most importantly, it learned what is ‘normal’ and what ‘isn’t normal.’ If exposed early in life, ‘normal’ is everything in your own body and everything that is floating around in your environment. The body learns how to answer appropriately to these challenges. The word ‘appropriately’ is very important, because, nowadays, we see a lot of diseases that have immunemediated causes. Autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis, allergies, asthma, arthritis, and depression are all ‘inappropriate’ answers of a bored, misguided, and sick immune system. Inflammation is meant to be an immune response to a stimulus like an infection, a trauma, or an injury. So why would an immune system suddenly ‘over-attack’ for example dust or strawberries, peanuts or milk? We were – and still are meant to be – part of nature. All the substances that our bodies were exposed to were natural. Every food was natural. And the liver and the intestines knew the things that would enter our bodies and find ways to digest, use, and eliminate them.

Compare this ‘stone-age child’ now with a child in our modern world. I think you will start to see connections. The mother of any baby will probably have had antibiotics not just once but several times in her life. Her microbiome therefore is disturbed. Forever. She might have had anti-yeast vaginal preparations against thrush. She will have drunk chlorinated water, have eaten preservative-laden food and have eaten products made from flour that was grown with glyphosate and other herbicides. The vegetables and fruit she would have eaten would have been covered in many pesticides. Her drinking water contains glyphosate, chlorine, fluoride, and even arsenic. The baby might arrive in this world via a caesarean and not get the vaginal flora from the mother. In some highly developed countries, the rate of caesareans is as high as 50 percent. What this means for the babies, is that they do not pass through the birth canal and do not get inoculated with their mother’s vaginal, rectal, or perineal flora. The baby will then be bathed in chemical bath-gels and wrapped into near-sterile blankets. I read today that a well-known and commonly used baby bath has ten carcinogenic substances in it. The nappies are bleached and chlorinated. The house or apartment that the baby will live in is super clean and the floors will likely be cleaned with commercial, disinfectants – like floor cleaners. The toys, the soothers, the bottle’ and the artificial teats that babies chew on are often plastic. If the baby is lucky, it gets natural silicone. The mother’s breast milk has not got the right bacteria in it anymore, because the mum probably had antibiotics killing those bacteria off and altering the normal flora. The child is hardly ever outside in the sun and hardly ever on soil. Most children never play in dirt anymore. They never have the chance to put soil in their mouth or to contract some microbes from animal faeces or animal skin. The fear of germs is so big and the chemical-producing industry is of course very good in scaring us all into believing that ‘we just have to clean and scrub and disinfect’ to be a good mother. We are all too clean. I recently read an article, where the gut microbiome of ‘normal’ American children was compared to the microbiome of Amish children. The Amish people, a religious community, live in very natural surroundings and

communities. Foremost, they grow their own food, have no cars, and live a very ‘old-fashioned’ lifestyle. They also live with their livestock and animals. Their children’s gut was found to be extremely healthy and their immune system was wonderful, compared to the average American child. They don’t seem to have autism or ADHD either. Nature had it all worked out – we just have to get out of the way. The pictures of children receiving chemotherapy, losing their hair, barely surviving, or dying are becoming a sight that is too common. The rise in leukaemia in children is scary. An English paediatrician and oncologist, Mel Greaves, PhD, FMedSci, FRS, director at the Centre for Evolution and Cancer in London, found the rise in the numbers of children with leukaemia unusual too, and she started to investigate this phenomenon. What she found was exactly what I had talked about: Our environment is too clean and children are not exposed to enough normal flora and fauna anymore. The immune system does not learn how to ‘respond appropriately’ anymore. The immune system ‘is a bit bored,’ looking for something to fight against, but hasn’t learned how to level out its response. When the children are seven or eight years old, and if they get exposed to any infection, the immune system completely overreacts. White blood cells shoot sky-high, which is exactly the medical picture of leukaemia! Leukaemia is the most common childhood cancer and primarily in industrialized societies. I found her research very interesting and logical. A lack of exposure will not be the only reason for leukaemia to develop, but, in my eyes, it is all connected to our modern system of cleanliness on one hand and toxic food production on the other. We ‘disinfect’ the soil with herbicides and pesticides, we kill the microbes in it and grow food on dead dirt. We gamma-radiate food to sterilize it while in storage. We spray grains with fungicides and insecticides, vegetables and fruit with poisons to make them last longer, we fumigate grains and potatoes, we add preservatives and antibiotics, we grow meat in feedlots with antibiotics, we pasteurise milk, and swallow chlorinated water and antibiotics. Are you surprised we are sick? One interesting anecdote about animals (I am a veterinarian after all): Koalas have their very specific gut microbiome to help them digest only very specific gum leaves that they and their mothers have grown up with. It is therefore not possible to transplant a Koala from one area to another where

the gum trees are different. They can’t digest the different leaves. Kangaroos seem to be the same. They are so dependent on their microbiome that if we treat them with antibiotics, or stress kills their microbiome, the roos will die. The links between stress, microbiota, and health are undeniable. Let us look at some specific diseases and conditions.

AUTISM When you look at a map on a website ‘The World in Numbers,’ you will discover that Australia and America are the two countries with the highest numbers of autism, amongst other things. Europe is low in numbers. America and Australia are the two countries with the most intensive monoculture food production. When I grew up in Germany in the seventies and eighties, autism was hardly known. I only learned about it when I was at university. In 1988, around that time when I was studying in Hanover, Germany, the movie ‘Rain Man’ with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise came out. Again, people were fascinated by Raymond’s abnormality. That is such a good reminder, of just how rare this phenomenon was. Statistically, it is believed there were one in 5,000 children with autism. Nowadays, this has risen to one in forty-eight in America. I do not know the statistics here in my town, but it seems that every second family that I talk to, has a child with autism. One child in year five in a large town near the coast here in Australia reported that there is one class in his year full of children that are violent, and another class with autistic children. That is not normal. Autism is linked to altered gut flora and first trials are on their way. All this research is only in its infancy and I doubt that it is as easy as adding Lactobacillus reuteri to a child’s diet. Of course, this research is great, but we must look at this phenomenon of autism and all the other mental disorders holistically. We can’t use ten million different chemicals without having proven their safety, grow food on dead and depleted soils, grow GM crops, spray pesticides, alter food beyond recognition – and then think that adding one bacterium can solve it. The altered absorption of manganese I mentioned before. As manganese is chelated, and so bound in the soil and is not absorbed into the plant and with that into our food, the lack of manganese (Mn) seems to be of utmost significance in causing autism and many other diseases. The rise in the use of glyphosate mimics the rise of autism directly. First studies have shown links.

‘One in three children in the U.S. is predicted to suffer from autism by 2030.’ [Z. Bush] Can you imagine a society where one in three people has autism?

THE GUT AND ALZHEIMER’S ‘Every older woman will soon suffer from Alzheimer’s.’ — DR Z. BUSH

When I heard this, I had my doubts if this statement is true. Could that be true? That would be terrifying. I think of my mum, who has eaten organic, whole food since she had her cancer scare 35 years ago. Her mind, and that of my father, is as sharp as ever. She told me recently that she can recite 170 poems! She is 81 years old. I started to ask the question ‘Why?’ Why do so many people get Alzheimer’s? One of my students, Ping Kwang, was in my clinic as part of his clinical training to be a veterinarian. He is from Hong Kong and was a neuroscientist, researching Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease at the highest level. He reported that scientists know which proteins are deposited where and that they cause these debilitating diseases. Zach Bush says it this way: ‘Women will forget their connections to their families and men will lose the ability to do things.’ This reflects that Alzheimer’s sits in the limbic system, the brain part of connection, love, learning, and pleasure, and Parkinson’s in the lower brain stem that gives coordination of movement. I asked Ping if any of his scientists have ever thought about the soil, tryptophan, amino acid production, or chemical agriculture. The answer was a clear ‘No.’ So I started to draw my own connections. I found that tryptophan makes IPA, the substance that protects the brain from Alzheimer’s-causing beta-amyloid plaques. I went down some rabbit holes trying to find out where tryptophan is produced – and, as you already know, I found that it is only produced by bacteria in the soil. I also discovered that tryptophan needs gut bacteria to be transformed into several substances, amongst which is IPA…. Could I be onto something? To me, it shows yet again, that nature had it all worked out and that I, for one, will again follow her, rather than believing in a chemical company telling me, ‘That it is OK to pour poisons on land,’ or that we ‘have no choice

than doing it because we have to feed the masses….” Just as a quick rehash: If you get enough tryptophan in your diet, and if you have special gut bacteria that survived antibiotics, bacteria-killing preservatives, chlorinated water, and if your gut bacteria are surviving because you feed them enough healthy fibre, and if you do not eat anything with bacteria-killing glyphosate or 2,4-D in it – if these parameters are OK, your bacteria will make a substance called IPA which gets absorbed, travels to the brain, and helps protect you from Alzheimer’s diseases. That is a lot of ‘ifs.’ How is your chance??

THE GUT AND DEPRESSION The gut bacteria produce serotonin and dopamine, the body’s antidepressants (again from tryptophan). The microbiome makes at least 80 percent of your antidepressants! Think for a second, before you go onto antidepressants: How healthy is your gut? Do you feed it well? How many antibacterial agents including Roundup do you eat every day?

THE GUT-BRAIN AXIS The microbiome talks directly to our central nervous system via the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the nerve that is responsible for all your autonomous functions like heart rate, digestion, breathing, and so forth. It originates in the limbic system, which is the part of the brain that creates your emotions, is the centre of pleasure, motivation, learning, memory, and sex. The limbic system is made up of different parts – for example, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and quite a few more. Here is where the hormones of the body are regulated from. Hormones that are directly or indirectly associated are growth hormones, thyroid hormones, female hormones like oestrogen and progesterone, the male hormone testosterone, the stress hormone cortisol, the feel-good and ‘cuddle’ hormone oxytocin, and some others. The autonomous nervous system starts from there, regulating all the automatic functions of our body like heart rate and body temperature, digestion, and rest, and so forth. The hippocampus is involved in spatial memory and in formation of new nerve cells. Spatial memory means remembering what, when, and where. The amygdala remembers your emotions connected to events and lets you focus and concentrate on things. In short: The limbic system is what makes us human. It colours your world, it makes you thrive, be interested and open, have pleasure and memories. The limbic system only works through feelings and language is not included there. And the vagus nerve goes straight into it, coming from the gut. The saying “I have a gut-feeling” turns out to be true! In fact, I always thought that the vagus nerve’s main function is to take orders to the organs – until I found out that it is the other way around. Eighty percent of the vagus nerve goes up – from the gut and organs to the brain. For every one nerve fibre going from brain to gut, there are eight nerve fibres going from the gut to the brain. So how important is the gut????

THE GUT AND ALLERGIES I will talk more about this in the chapters about glyphosate and about gluten, so I will only give a short summary of the connection here. Most foods you eat have glyphosate in them. Within fifteen minutes, it can destroy the ‘tight junctions,’ which are connections between the cells that are lining the small intestine. Big gaps between the cells appear, and much larger and less digested food particles can enter the body bypassing the gut cells. These ‘foreign’ substances can make our immune system go ‘crazy.’ This hyper-inflamed state is exaggerated by the lack of gut microbiome (glyphosate kills the bacteria) not producing anti-inflammatory SCFA…. A hyper-immune state means inflammation anywhere in the body: joints like shoulder or knees, dermatitis, hay fever, asthma, fibromyalgia, etc. How many dogs or people suffer from arthritis or from allergies?! Leaky gut is of course not the only reason, but it is an important one. This inflammation also decreases serotonin in the brain. Depression follows. If you buy organic food, you will have food from healthy soils, grown without poisons, with a bit of living soil still sticking to your carrot to inoculate your gut. The soil will be alive and actively absorbing carbon, the insects can buzz around, the water cycle is functioning. You nourish yourself and you protect your unborn baby. Your gut will be healthy. Your feedback to your limbic system will be healthy. Your mood will be good, your fertility hormones are pumping. You are open to learn because your vagus nerve will be positively stroking your learning centre. It nearly sounds too good to be true.

SUMMARY Your gut microbiome might be very unhealthy. Your children’s gut microbiome might have never developed in the first place. Modern food kills your microbiome. Microbiome is vital for life. Your vague symptoms of any disease might be linked to your gut bacteria. Action steps Eat or drink fermented foods like sourdough, sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha. Buy organic food to avoid chemicals. Eat gut-bacteria feeding fibre. Drink filtered water. Add good and diverse probiotics for a short while to your meals. If you dare, follow my advice and ‘eat dirt.’

NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES – HOW WELL CAN YOU FUNCTION?

H

ealth, diet, and food shouldn't be rocket science. Through the millennia, each of our ancestors made it to being fertile adults to have children. Therefore, relax, your body has always known what

to do. When you think about it: Your own ancestors on both sides of your family actually go back to the first life on Earth. Your ancestors go back to England or Spain, wherever your family came from, but beyond that, your lineage goes back to where homo sapiens originated: to Africa. And then way back past our common ancestor, the primates, way down the evolutionary tree to the first amoeba that ever lived when life began which was about three billion years ago! Every single ancestor of yours must have lived and reproduced for you to be finally born. Let me repeat this: for three billion years! Anyone that was too sick to reproduce simply didn’t and is not one of your healthy ancestors! In my opinion, this shows just how strong and healthy life is. Your body should be the pinnacle of this. Yet, we are less resilient, fatter, more unfit, and sicker than ever before. How can it be that after three billion years, suddenly, our young women suffer from endometriosis or polycystic ovaries and one in three young men is infertile? One in four women nowadays is infertile also and the IVF clinics are getting busier and busier. If you think about it: This must be a new problem – because infertility cannot be inheritable because you wouldn’t be here. Does that make sense? If your mother or great grandmother would have suffered from endometriosis, you simply would not be here to read this. Just the fact that you are reading this, means that all of our ancestors were healthy

– at least to ‘mating age.’ Our bodies are these utterly complex structures that work with an astonishing accuracy. No one could create a flea or fly in a laboratory, let alone a human. When you think about the amazing ‘machine’ or work of art that our bodies are – however you want to look at us, you should be awestruck. From the DNA containing information, to our organs, shape, faces, brains, and nerve structures, to our ability to see, hear, think and act, feel, and make decisions … everything about our bodies is awe-inspiringly complex and well designed. I have dozens of books about every aspect of the human and animal body, trying to describe how it all fits together and works, and then more books trying to describe what to do when things go wrong. I studied it for thirty-six years and I have not got to the bottom of it. And I never will, I am sure. The way our bodies regulate ourselves is absolutely nothing short of miraculous – temperature, blood-pressure, heart rate, digestion, hearing, and seeing, and so forth. All this we take for granted. Over the millions of years of evolution, our metabolism and our food developed and evolved together as one. There was no big division between us and the surrounding flora and fauna. Plants and animals grew all around us; we would eat them, and they would eat us. Our excrements or the food scraps, decaying animals, and plants would go back to nature. Nothing was wasted and everything was a flow of nutrients through one life form to another. The substances that came into our bodies through eating, drinking, or breathing were all natural. Carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals, or vitamins entered our bodies in the form of meat, eggs, vegetables, grains, or fruit. Everything was produced in nature and was ‘natural’ in the utter sense of the word. The soils were undisturbed and fertile in most parts of the world where humans lived. Nutrient cycles worked. The soils were alive and nourished us. Only in the last hundred years or so – which really is a blip in history – has man started to destroy nature and its intricate wisdom. We started to create myriads of artificial chemical substances and poisons (ten million I recently read), and we don’t just build or clean our houses with it or wash our hair in it – we spray poisons onto our fields, crop, and our foods … and then eat them!

Surely this can’t be good. As Jane Goodall, the scientist that lived with the chimpanzees, says: ‘Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads: “How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?”’ To reiterate because this is so important to understand: Modern farming practices kill the soils so that the living organisms that produced nutrients for us and made them available are missing. With this, the heart of our food chain is broken. The chemicals we use to grow and process food enter our bodies with every meal. Our declining health therefore is, in my opinion, due to this dual insult: nutrients that are missing in our food on one hand, and poisonous substances that swamp our land and our bodies on the other hand.

NUTRIENT DEFICIENCIES IN DETAIL One could compare the functioning of our bodies to the running of a car. A car, like any machine, can only truly run smoothly if all parts of it are in their right place, none is missing, and all the nuts and bolts are tight. If one part is missing, for example one tyre or the steering wheel, the car will not drive, and you will probably crash. You need the right fuel to go into its tank – the fuel that it was meant to have, the fuel that it was built for: diesel, leaded petrol, or gas. Our bodies are like an engine. But they are about a trillion times more attuned and complicated. And they need every nutrient and building block to function properly. If one of the building blocks is missing, the whole engine collapses. Imagine just one bolt or nut giving way, for example from the piston of the engine – the whole car will not work. When one small chain in a necklace is broken, it comes undone. Nature works in this manner. Everything is linked and dependent on each other. In our bodies or in the larger ecosystems. The science that we practiced in the last 400 years or so took everything apart. We studied and learned a lot, but in a very reductionist way. Science simply hasn’t had the time and wisdom to put all this knowledge back together. We have a very simplistic way of looking at nature, at cause and effect. If we get a fever, we give anti-inflammatories. If a pest takes over a corn field, we poison the pest. If we get cancer, we kill the cells with chemo. We are constantly treating the symptoms instead of looking at the underlying reason and the wholeness of it all. We need all twenty-one amino acids, all five major minerals, all trace elements, all thirteen vitamins and countless enzymes and phytonutrients – that we might not even have discovered yet – for our bodies to thrive. My question is: How healthy are we? What does this mean that so many of us get diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or cancer? Could it be that we are missing something? You know now that our soils are dead and the food produced is lacking in nutrients and is grown using poisons. The chances of us being deficient in one or more nutrients is very high. In my view, the consequences of bad nutrition are still underestimated.

Theoretically, we know we should eat healthy, but the true consequences of deficiency have not been connected to the low-quality food we eat. We think that high blood pressure is age-related, that Alzheimer’s, autism, and cancer are bad luck. We conclude that anxiety is connected to a stressful life and anorexia is linked to ridiculous beauty standards. Brain-fog is normal and depression is a sign of the times. Of course, many other factors play a part in someone being healthy, vibrant, and happy or depressed, sick, and sad, but I would argue that these issues are heightened or caused when you have bad food. Apart from needing the vitamins, minerals, and enzymes in the first place, they must be in the right form to be absorbed, in the right amounts and in the right relation to each other. For example, too much vitamin C can block copper, and too much manganese can worsen iron absorption. Too much phosphorus influences the calcium levels which in turn gets regulated by vitamin D and K2. It is very complicated, and whenever scientists try to figure out how much of one nutrient or the other we need and in which form, chelated or not chelated, etc., it gets more and more tricky the closer you look at it. It seems like a Rubik’s cube to work out – as soon as you get one side sorted, you mess up the other one! And get this: Ninety-five percent of all vitamin supplements on the market are synthetic. This is a huge problem. Dr Edward Group writes: ‘Many synthetic vitamins lack the transporters and co-factors associated with natural occurring vitamins because they have been “isolated.”’ These can’t be used or recognized by the body in the same way as the natural version. Synthetic vitamins are also devoid of necessary trace minerals. To put it bluntly: You might be doing more harm than good if you’re taking synthetic supplements.’ Despite studying the body for thirty years, I do not think I could work out the perfect measure of every vitamin and mineral. There is also a lot of concern and doubt anyway, if vitamins produced in factories can replace the real ones. To demonstrate the intricacy of getting the balance right, I always like to tell this story: Denise bred free range pigs – in fact, she lived for her pigs. I always grin when I remember that her husband fainted when they tried castrating the piglets by themselves. One day they called me out to have a look at the pigs.

They looked green! They didn’t want to eat and had stunted growth, weighing half of what they should. In fact, they were anorexic. After a thorough investigation we found that they had been fed ten times the amount of copper they needed! Pig farmers mix their food up themselves. Excessive copper in the body blocks zinc, and the symptoms we saw were those of zinc deficiency. They showed stunted growth and had very wrinkled skin which was bizarrely thickened. Anorexia. Lethargy. I will never forget the picture of the green pigs running around looking like crumpled up old men. Cute in a weird way, I’m sad to say. This is a good example of what happens when one mineral gets too high and another one too low. I for one rather rely on the infinite wisdom of nature. I eat eggs, vegetables, meat, or fruit that were grown ‘by nature in a natural way.’ As soon as we think we can grow food in an alternative way – let’s say a hydroponic system, where we offer the plant a chemical cocktail of minerals and water, and grow food without soil – we are bound to get it wrong. We need the whole thing: food grown on whole soils and left whole. I do not rely or trust pharmaceutical or vitamin-producing companies preparing vitamins in a bottle. Here is a list of symptoms that you might be suffering from mineral or vitamin imbalances: Fatigue Depression Infertility Hypothyroidism Diabetes Poor concentration Memory problems Osteoporosis Arthritis Frequent food cravings Impaired growth Coronary disease Multiple Sclerosis

Cancer Immune deficiencies Obesity Remember, minerals should come from the food we eat which in turn is taken from the soil they are grown on. May I also just mention that it is not that the food we eat has no minerals and no vitamins in it any more. If that would be the case, we would have probably stopped farming in this ‘new’ way with chemicals already. Rather, the food we produce has much reduced nutrients in it. Several studies have looked at the nutrient content of vegetables and fruit. The statements vary from ‘Oranges have no vitamin C any more,’ to ‘Vegetables have only got a fiftieth of the vitamins,’ to ‘This carrot only has one two-hundred-fifty-thousandths (1/250,000 th) of the vitamins’ in it. The studies all agree that food is not as rich in goodness as it used to be. When talking to people, we all seem to agree also, that ‘Grandma’s and grandpa’s vegetables from their garden were the best,’ and that ‘Tomatoes don’t taste that good any more.’ Or that we find vegetables colourless. The real difference is invisible, and that, I assume, is why it is so hard to accept, understand, and truly be convinced of what I intellectually know. Fruit and vegetables sort of look the same. They always look fresh, they all look even, they all look clean. Who really believes that the crooked carrot with a bit of dirt on it, or the banana with a bit of brown in its peel, or the uneven sized oranges that are organic, can save your live and be nutritionally far superior? We can’t see the gamma-radiation that sterilized the fruit, we can’t see nor smell the thirtyplus different chemicals on your strawberry, and we simply don’t know that the blueberries were grown with toxic chemicals that give a whole town’s children birth defects and their workers sores on their bodies. You simply can’t see it in the food that is on the shelves. You simply don’t know that you should eat 250,000 (or let it be even only twenty) more carrots to get the nutrients you need nowadays than our bodies required for millennia. The fact is though: This is the state of food at present if you buy ‘normal’ food from the shelf; it was grown with multiple chemical inputs on destroyed soil and the pesticides on it will be high and nutrient levels low. In my opinion, nutrient deficiencies and toxic overload, trickling into your body with every bite you eat, are the main reason for your body’s

decline – and the way we farm is a major contributor to ecosystem destruction and global warming. Let us have a look what happens, when just a few nutrients are missing. Remember: It is not that you have no minerals or vitamins, but that you have ‘too little,’ to varying degrees. So rather than thinking you are lacking a substance completely, and the consequence is very obvious, think: “Am I running at an optimal level of vitamins, minerals, or other nutrients for my body?’ Knowing what I know: None of us are. It is like ‘death by a thousand cuts.’ Deterioration of health (and ecosystems) is a slow decline, it is insidious and nearly invisible, it is complex, interconnected, and very hard to easily see and understand. It is ‘a wicked problem,’ decline of ecosystems and your body’s health is slow, it is often not obvious where your headache, infertility, or cancer comes from, why you feel tired all the time, or you have brain fog. It is not immediately clear why young women at a high percentage suffer from endometriosis nowadays. When I was young, it was unheard of! It truly is like ‘a slow decline,’ a ‘death by a thousand cuts.’ It is slow and insidious, my points are hard to prove, the money to do research isn’t there, and so forth. It took me 36 years of connecting the dots. It took all my medical knowledge, my years at university, my twenty-three years on the farm, my journey converting ‘Gowrie’ to organic, my years of reading about soil and, last-but-not-least, thousands of conversations with my clients and thousands of days as a veterinarian ‘fixing animals,’ to understand what is happening. I read dozens of books and listened to hundreds of podcasts, to arrive here, with this book, in your life. I realize that most people are not as fascinated by a biochemistry book as I am. My staff shake their heads and roll their eyes (lovingly of course) when I start my rants about nutrition or cancer. For some reason, it fascinated me and I bothered to spend time trying to understand and form a picture in my head. I had plenty of times when I considered not writing this book, of giving up, do ‘normal medicine’ like everyone else. Don’t put my neck out and my reputation on the line of challenging big companies and big farming. I am sure I was criticised about being outspoken about climate change. Writing and speaking up for what you believe in doesn’t please everyone. What keeps me going, though, is that I know my research and knowledge

‘has legs.’ Once you know things, you can’t ‘un-know’ them. When I have young women that tell me about their journey of infertility, or when people I know and love get sick with cancer, I simply feel the need to help. I want to shout it out: ‘You don’t have to be sick! Just do this! Just eat organic! Trust your body, it knows what it’s doing, always has, always will,’ even if I will get criticized. Let’s have a look at what some deficiencies look like, and see if you can find yourself in them.

LACK OF MINERALS Calcium Calcium is needed for the functioning of nerves, the heart, the muscles, for strong bones, teeth, for your gut to work, and many other things. Let me show you what happens when Calcium is low with a common story form my vet clinic. “Quick, this dog is dying!” one of my nurses yelled, storming into the clinic carrying a little dog in her arms that was very sick! It was panting and its little legs were paddling. It appeared to be in a coma and was not responding at all. I asked the owner about the history: “She was fine just an hour ago! I just went shopping, and when I came back, I found her like this! She had puppies three weeks ago. Will she die? I love her so much!” I had a suspicion about what the problem could be. Milk fever! It typically happens when the pups are about three weeks old and the mother is producing so much milk for her pups that she is simply running out of calcium! Chilly, that was the dog’s name, had a body temperature of 41 degrees Celsius (instead of 38). We immediately connected her to an ECG and noticed that her heartbeat was very wrong, beating in an irregular fashion at over 200 beats per minute. I drew a blood sample and my in-house biochemistry analyser showed that indeed her calcium was very low. After inserting a catheter, we started to inject calcium. The ECG was monitoring Chilly the entire time. If we give her too much calcium, or if we inject it too fast, we could induce AV-blocks, which means that the heart will start beating too slow and she could die. I took my time and monitored Chilly. I observed her movements, which were getting calmer every time I injected more calcium. The shaking stopped, she stopped whimpering, and the ECG showed that her heart rate was getting slower and more regular until it finally resembled a normal ECG again! After twenty minutes, Chilly was sitting up and licking my face as if to say ‘thank you.’ Her owner was so pleased that we saved her little girl’s life and gave me a big hug.

I love this example, as it shows what happens when just one mineral is missing from the body. Not just in animals, but in people, too, of course. Our bodies are all very similar. Chilly still had all the other minerals and vitamins but this one missing mineral – in this case calcium – would have killed her. The absorption of calcium is dependent on vitamin D3 (which is produced by sunlight on your skin from cholesterol), and vitamin K2 (to put the calcium into body tissues like teeth and bones, or milk for that matter). The level of calcium in your body is dependent on the level of phosphorus, two more hormones (calcitonin and parathormone), and the level of phosphorus is dependent on what you take in with your food. High phosphorus in your diet will deplete you of calcium. Modern food, nearly all of it, is grown with high phosphorus fertilizers (superphosphates and NPK) and grains are stored with phosphates to keep vermin out. It sounds complicated, and it is. So many factors influence our ‘homeostasis,’ this sweet spot in our body when everything is in balance. To show you another example: I see a lot of cats with ‘absorptive lesions’ in their teeth. Cats are nowadays on a 60 percent grain diet, while nature had made them into a ‘hyper-meat-eater’ with only 5 percent carbohydrates in their food. A mouse, a stable diet for a cat in nature, has got about 5 percent of carbohydrates in it, so if we take this as a guideline of a perfect diet of cat, they get 55 percent too much grain. Grain is high in phosphorus, which makes the body excrete it, but this process is tightly linked to removing calcium from bone or teeth. I see a lot of cats with ‘neck lesions’ (holes in the neck of their teeth), and the veterinary fraternity has not got a real answer to why this happens. To my knowledge, we veterinarians have not yet looked at the lifestyle of indoor cats not getting enough sunlight and having a high phosphorus diet as a possible cause of this. Again, humans have interfered too much with nature, and bodies are falling apart in many different ways. The poor cats go through terrible toothache, sometimes for years, and mostly undiagnosed. Summary It is extremely hard to balance minerals in your body. Your body knows how, but be careful with interfering with supplements. Taking one mineral supplement might mess up your body more

than you think. In natural, unpoisoned food from healthy soils and with a varied diet, your body is able to balance itself well in most situations. Action steps Eat organic food. Trust your body to get it right.

MAGNESIUM Magnesium is a mineral that should be absorbed – with the help of microbes – by the plants and then digested by animals or humans. Magnesium is needed for more than 650 enzymes in the body. Enzymes are substances in the body that ‘do stuff.’ If Magnesium is involved in 650 actions in your body, then this means that if you are lacking in magnesium, which most of us do, 650 body functions of yours are not working to their potential! Some major signs of magnesium deficiency are: Tiredness/ fatigue Muscle spasms in skeletal muscle Muscle spasms in the muscles of blood vessels causing high blood pressure and migraines Muscle spasms in the muscles of the uterus causing uterine cramps Nervousness Anxiety Irritability Lack of concentration Headaches Dizziness Heart palpitations Tiredness Low potassium and calcium levels in your blood with the consequences of those Osteoporosis Can you find your own symptoms in this? I can! People should have 300 mg daily, but almost never get more than 200. So where is magnesium? How can you get more and why are most of us deficient, even if not to a clinically dangerous level? Magnesium is the central mineral in the complex structure of chlorophyll,

the plant organelle that is responsible for all photosynthesis on earth. This means it is necessary for all carbon dioxide absorption, glucose, and plant creation. Chlorophyll is the substance that makes plants green. So, essentially, if you eat a green plant, you should get magnesium. Green leafy vegetables should be the source if, and this is a big if, the plant could absorb enough magnesium from the soil through the soil’s microorganism being alive and making magnesium soluble so that the plant can take it in…. Again, everything is depending on the biology to be alive. If most of us only get about two thirds of the magnesium that is needed for the optimum functioning of our bodies, and if magnesium can make you calm, relax muscles in blood vessels: How much of our anxiety, nervousness, and high blood pressure could be caused by this deficiency alone? As an added benefit, when magnesium is in a plant, it is easily absorbable for us, too. If you take it in form of a tablet, most of it will pass through your body unabsorbed. Even through the skin, Magnesium is absorbed better than through the gut (Epsom salt baths). Summary Magnesium is needed for 650 body functions. Magnesium is needed for body and mind. Hardly any of us are getting enough. Its source is mainly leafy green vegetables. Magnesium is best absorbed in its natural form in food. Modern, agriculturally produced vegetables are lacking in it nowadays. Action Steps Eat organic, green leafy vegetables. Have Epsom baths regularly. Foot baths with Epsom Salts are great too.

SELENIUM Selenium is deficient in all Australian soils. My cows on my farm should have had forty-nine units, but they had 0.9. This corresponds to the generally low level of selenium in people, too, especially in Australia. Selenium (similar to vitamin E) is used by the body as an antioxidant. It stops oxidative processes in the body. Most, if not all, diseases are oxidative injuries to tissue. Selenium (and vitamin E for that matter) catch the ‘free radicals’ that occur during this process and make them harmless. There is good vitamin E and selenium in the ‘whole grain,’ especially if these still contain the ‘germ,’ which is nowadays, sadly not the case. More on that in the chapter about wheat. If we either have a high number of free radicals, for example through artificially produced vegetable oils using them up, or a low quantity of ‘antioxidants,’ disease of any sort will eventually follow. A neuroscientist that I discussed this problem with lately explained that Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease are to a large degree caused by oxidative processes. He worked at the highest level of research and confirmed what I had suspected: Scientists know where and what is happening with neuro-degenerative diseases, but they do not know ‘why’ it happens. I asked him if the science community has ever looked at the role that food has in this and if they are aware that most food nowadays is very different from what our bodies were used to ‘in the olden days.’ I also asked him if any of his colleagues were aware that our food is grown with chemicals on literally ‘dead’ soils – his answer was ‘no’ to both questions. What I was talking about was completely new to him. So, what does selenium deficiency look like? This is a good example from my life as a veterinarian: I remember getting called out to a farm where sheep were lying on the ground and arching backwards. A terrible sight! The sheep had so-called white muscle disease in which muscles get destroyed, because selenium was not there to protect them. Selenium is in over eighty enzymes and without it, pretty much nothing works.

For example: Lambs won’t grow. Their wool is broken. Fertility is low. Muscles tremble. Cell membranes are not protected from being attacked through free radicals. Higher rate of cancer Weak calves Premature births Perinatal deaths Mastitis (udder infection) Suboptimal fertility Hypothyroidism, because selenium converts T4 (thyroid hormone) into the more active T3 Cancer Humans have a fertility crisis as we learned, and thyroid disease is common, as is cancer. In my opinion, selenium deficiency will play a big part in the explanation of this. Summary Most soils in Australia are selenium deficient, which means your food will be, too. Vitamin E and selenium do the same thing: they are antioxidants and protect you from any disease. Most if not all diseases are oxidative processes so antioxidants are a big key to health. Cheap oils like canola and sunflower oil will ‘suck up’ your antioxidants. We need more antioxidants nowadays due to high level of aggressive chemicals in our lives. Action steps

Brazil nuts are high in selenium – eat three organic Brazil nuts per day. Eat organic. If eating grains: eat organic grains and whole grains only. Buy yourself a flour mill. Sprout organic wheat.

ZINC Zinc is extremely important in a lot of body functions and is intimately connected to immunity, too. It is used for at least 100 enzymes. It supports normal growth and growth of the foetus, child, and adolescent. Seventy-five percent of all people are deficient. If you remember the ‘green little pigs,’ you will never forget what zinc deficiency looks like! To establish if I am deficient, my naturopath did a test with me: I had to taste a zinc solution and if I couldn’t taste it, it meant that I was lacking zinc. I was lacking it – and I am not the only one. One-third of the world’s population is lacking in zinc, at least. This is made worse because the body does not have a zinc storage system, so it all has to be taken in with food. Foods high in zinc are meat, especially red meat, poultry shellfish, oysters, and to a lesser degree, legumes, whole grains, and nuts. Deficiencies show as: Acne Dry skin Slow wound healing Sores at the sides of your mouth Ulcers in your mouth Disturbed sense of taste or smell Lack of appetite Weight loss Amenorrhoea (not getting your period) Misperceptions (when your perception about things is wrong) Cognitive functions (like learning) are impaired Anxiety Irritability Depression ADHD Lethargy

Nausea Schizophrenia Infertility in men Impotence in males Prostate disease Let it sink in. I’m not saying that other factors don’t play a part in these issues. But food is the fuel to our body. How can we expect our body to be healthy if we keep feeding it the wrong things? Who nowadays does not suffer from anxiety attacks? One in four men are infertile. A vast amount of school children nowadays seems to have a lack of concentration. A lot of young women are anorexic. A huge number of people experience depression and lethargy. The University of California has had successful trials of curing anorexia with zinc supplementation. It is stated that, ‘There is evidence that suggests zinc deficiency may be intimately involved with anorexia in humans; if not as an initiating cause, then as an accelerating or exacerbating factor that may deepen the pathology of anorexia.’ Summary Most people are zinc deficient. Zinc deficiency can affect your body and your mind adversely. Zinc is utterly important for growth and development. Zinc is invaluable for your immune system. Zinc is used for 100 or more enzymes. Action steps Eat organic, grass fed meats. Occasionally eat oysters and other shellfish.

IODINE Most people around the world are deficient (75 percent). Iodine is in the water of the oceans and in the air near the coast. It is in fish, seaweed, and sea salt. Iodine is needed to produce thyroid hormone, which is the ‘speed-giver’ of your whole metabolism. Iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of intellectual disabilities, and lack of it can cause cysts in breasts, and, of course, thyroid dysfunction. Its lack is highly related to learning disabilities. Seventy-five percent of the human population is iodine deficient through a lack of iodine in their diet. Where has it gone? One explanation is that it is one of the minerals that is removed when removing the wheat germ in the processing of flour. But to add to that, there are substances in our food and water that block and compete with iodine. Namely: a) Fluoride added to our drinking water and in toothpaste is competing with iodine. Iodine and fluoride fill ‘the same spot’ in our metabolism but fluoride ‘wins’ over iodine. b) Potassium-iodide was used as a dough conditioner in the bread industry but was recently replaced with ‘bromide,’ another agent that is competing with iodine. Bromide outcompetes iodine, so if you are eating ‘normal’ bread, you will take in bromide. c) Perchlorates are sprayed on plastic food coverings to avoid static electricity. These chlorine compounds again outcompete iodine. Plastics are incriminated in causing oestrogen related cancers also and the competitive nature of chlorates winning against iodine enhances this. One could continue this list of minerals that are needed for our bodies by talking about cobalt (needed for Vitamin B12), manganese (seems to be necessary to prevent autism amongst many other functions), sulphur (for all proteins), iron (for haemoglobin), sodium, etc. But it is not my goal to give you an in-depth analysis, but rather to paint a picture of the magnitude of disease and ill-ness that can occur when natural foods are lacking in goodness.

Summary Iodine is needed for thyroid hormone. Iodine opponents are fluorides in drinking water, perchlorates on plastic, and additives in bread. Action steps Eat more sea salt. Filter your water. Avoid plastics. Avoid normal bread.

MANGANESE Manganese is also not absorbed into our food as it is chelated (caught) by Roundup in the soils and because other chemicals destroy the microbiome of the earth also, as mentioned before. It was recently proven that our serum (blood) manganese is depleted when on a diet of ‘normal’ food. Manganese deficiency seems linked to most of the chronic, modern diseases, and if you would like to know more, please read Sennef and Samsel’s dissertation on this. They link manganese deficiency to oxidative damage of mitochondria (this is implicated in cancer formation), Alzheimer’s, neurological dysfunctions, myositis, gut dysbiosis (the wrong gut bacteria growing), autism, osteoporosis, osteomalacia, anxiety, birth defects, and abnormal sperm. Again, I am amazed by my research stumbling over more and more connections of healthy, wholesome food and health – and the destruction of health when even one small element is missing.

LACK OF VITAMINS Vitamins are biologically necessary structures that are needed in certain quantities. They have different ‘jobs’ in the body. There are thirteen of them, all needed in various amounts. Most of us would know that the lack of vitamin C causes scurvy, a disease that seafarers suffered from when being on sea without fresh vegetables for a long time. You might know that vitamin A from carrots is good for your eyesight. And you might even know that B vitamins are good against a hangover when taken as an effervescent tablet in a glass of water after a big night out. Let us have a snapshot look at how some of these vitamins work and play together. Vitamin D3 and Vitamin K2 I must tell you the story of the ferret called Rufus I had in my clinic as recently as last week. It was a young male ferret, and the owner, a young woman, had hand-reared him from a very early age. The poor little thing was in extreme pain. His action in his hind legs was … weird. He still had feeling in his legs but he could not walk. When touched, he screamed. Poor little ferret! He also had a high fever of 41 C. At first, I could not work it out what was wrong with him. I took an x-ray – couldn’t see much on it. I thought I had got my X-ray settings wrong. After another two attempts of trying to take a good picture of his spine, I realised: It wasn’t my technique, it was actually not possible to take a picture of his spine because his spine was not calcified. I could just make out that his thoracic spine was crooked, the rest of the spine was hardly visible. As you might know, bones show up white on X-rays. The spine of poor “Rufus” was not calcified at all and it was so soft that it was pressing on his nerves. The spine was rather like cartilage than bone, if you can imagine that. It dawned on me what had happened. I asked Cathy, the owner, if the young ferret ever saw sunlight. Cathy suffers from mental health issues and never goes outside. Argh! I got it. Rufus spent all time with her indoors, and while they are good mates and

very close, he never got direct sunlight! Sunlight makes vitamin D on your skin or on animals’ hair, they then lick it and take in the vitamin D. Vitamin D helps absorb calcium from the food in the gut to put it into the blood stream. Rufus was kept in the dark, in a living room in the middle of the house that has no windows, hence was vitamin D deficient and developed the clinical picture called rickets. Even if he had calcium in his diet, the lack of sunlight was responsible for all his bones being uncalcified. I had seen this a few times before, once in a lizard that was kept in a nightclub in a red-light district and never saw the sunlight either and once in a guinea pig that was also being kept inside without direct sunlight. I prescribed a calcium syrup and sunlight! Do you get enough vitamin D? Vitamin D is made from cholesterol on the surface of our skin, but only when we expose the skin to the sun. It helps absorb calcium from food. It takes calcium from the gut and transports it into the bloodstream. It then helps to put the calcium into the bones and teeth to make them strong. If we don’t get enough sunlight, we will not have enough vitamin D and we can’t absorb calcium. In Australia, where we are very conscious about the risk of skin cancer, most people cover themselves up with long-armed shirts and hats all the time. In schools, the slip-slop-slap policy is fiercely implemented. This is an Australian policy that makes sure that every child is covered with long sleeves, a hat and sunscreen when out in the sun to avoid skin cancers. When one ponders how much sunlight we or our children truly get, it doesn’t add up to much. Apart from its role to absorb calcium in the gut, its other job is to keep ‘tight junctions’ intact. These represent the glue between cells. If vitamin D3 is reduced, the cells will get ‘unglued’ and the integrity between them falls apart. Normally, the gut lining cells are glued together and only let very small molecules like chlorine, potassium, or water through these ‘tight junctions.’ The lack of vitamin D caused by the lack of sunlight; gluten and ‘Roundup’ (glyphosate, discussed in a previous chapter), all destroy the ‘tight junctions.’ In the gut, this is called ‘leaky gut.’ Normally, only water and minerals can squeeze through these ‘tight junctions.’ However, when the ‘glue’ is destroyed, the cells move apart and

big holes, or ‘leaks,’ develop. The consequence of this is that larger molecules – let’s say larger chunks of peanuts or strawberries – can bypass the intestine cells and enter the bloodstream. Suddenly, larger than normal ‘bits of food’ are in the bloodstream. The body’s defence mechanism, its immune system, knows that this is not right and starts fighting these ‘unknown and inappropriately large’ molecules. This is what we call inflammation. Inflammation can feel like stiff joints, muscle aches or your body can reply with allergic type immune reactions like asthma, allergies, or even depression. A ‘hyper-inflamed’ state is induced. In your blood vessels, the lack of vitamin D can make them inflamed and leaky, too. If the internal wall of blood vessels is falling apart, the body will try to repair it and put a Band-Aid on it. Heart attacks are a consequence of the internal integrity of the coronary arteries being damaged and repair attempts ‘blocking’ the internal lumen. Without making a huge statement here, I just wonder…. This is another piece of the puzzle, I guess. We humans have always lived outside through history until recently, maybe the last 5,000 years or so, which is a blip in history, and would have spent only minimal time in our caves at night. It makes me wonder…. Another aspect of vitamin D deficiency is that it is nowadays recognised as an ‘anti-cancer’ vitamin. Why is that? Cells that are not tied into their group because their glue has failed and the cells are floating around ‘lonely and isolated’ will think: ‘Oh, I have to grow. I have nothing beside me – I have to fill the gap.’ One could call this the start of a cancer growth. There is much talk nowadays about the link of vitamin D and cancer, as well as depression. The son of a friend of mine was treated by a chiropractor for recurrent back pain at the age of sixteen. The young man also had depression. The chiropractor conducted some blood tests and it was found that the vitamin D level in the body was very low. He was prescribed sunshine and vitamin D supplements and his turnaround was nothing short of miraculous. His mood changed for the better and his mother reported that he was ‘a different kid altogether’ – and his back pain vanished. Reduced vitamin D can make bones so brittle that they break. I diagnosed this frequently in reptiles for example that were kept in the dark, or recently in a guinea pig that was much loved but never saw the sunlight as it was kept in a dark room. The x-rays of bones that are ‘see-through’ are impressive. This condition is called rickets.

Things get interesting if we take into account another vitamin – vitamin K2. Vitamin K1 (for blood clotting) and Vitamin K2 are also derived from cholesterol by the way. Be very wary if someone wants to put you on ‘statins,’ which are cholesterol-lowering drugs! Vitamin K2 is a not-so-much talked about vitamin. When I was at university, it was not even mentioned, so its existence has not been that long discovered. It seems responsible for depositing the calcium (that was absorbed with the help of vitamin D3) from the bloodstream into the right places in the body, for example into bones and teeth. It also prevents calcium from being stored in the ‘wrong’ places like arteries or soft tissues. As such, the risk of hardened and calcified arteries is lowered by at least 50 percent when sufficient vitamin K2 is eaten. It prevents and treats osteoporosis, which so many older women suffer from and then are medicated with breast-cancer inducing oestrogens in the form of HRT (hormone replacement therapy with oestrogens). As vitamin K2 takes calcium out of the blood stream and into tissues, K2 is meant to prevent Alzheimer’s, kidney stones, wrinkles, bone spurs, and cavities. Vitamin K2 was found to reduce spinal fractures by 60 percent, hip fractures by 77 percent, and all non-spinal fractures by 81 percent. It significantly reduced heart attacks by keeping the coronary arteries free of calcium deposits. It is meant to prevent us from heart attacks. It is not clear where vitamin K2 is produced. It might be fermented by our own bacteria in the colon. It seems most likely though that the vitamin K2 comes from fermented foods, like ‘natto’ (fermented soybeans), sauerkraut, or other fermented foods, animal products like liver, egg yolk, butter, milk, and meat to a lesser degree. When trying to find a good source of vitamin K2, one stumbles repeatedly over the fact that the meat or milk had to be grown on pasture (grass), rather than on grains. Is this then significant for our health, that most cattle are ‘finished’ on a grain diet in feedlots? I wonder. Weston A. Price, a dentist who did an enormous work of research into foods of indigenous societies, found the following: ‘It is important to note that commercial butter is not a significantly high source of vitamin K2.’ He analysed over 20,000 samples of butter sent to him from various parts of the world and found that the Vitamin K2 concentration varied 50-fold. Animals grazing on vitamin K-rich cereal grasses – especially wheatgrass and alfalfa in a state of growth – produced fat with the highest amounts of

vitamin K2. The soil in which the pasture was grown also influenced the quality of the butter. It was only the vitamin-rich butter made from cattle eating grass that was grown in three feet or more of healthy topsoil that showed dramatic curing properties when combined with cod liver oil in Dr. Price’s experiments and clinical practice. Therefore, vitamin K2 levels will not be high in butter from grain-fed cows in indoor dairies. Since the overwhelming majority of butter sold in the U.S. comes from such dairies, butter is not a significant source of K2 in the diet nowadays. Cheese, milk, and egg yolks have varying amounts of Vitamin K2 in them, as does beef. Weston Price examined the effect of cattle eating grass on the amount of Vitamin K2 in butter –- I guess the quality of soils and grass influences the amount in milk and egg yolks, too. I wonder how many of us are deficient in this amazing vitamin? If I look at my (very healthy) diet, I cannot find enough sources that would provide it to me, yet it seems very important! A good example is one of my clients in his early forties. When talking about his racehorse's electrolyte balance, he told me that he had a heart attack recently. I was surprised and questioned him why. Apparently, he has calcium plaques in his coronary arteries. I asked him about his diet and lifestyle. It turned out that he might be deficient in Vitamin K2, as he does not eat any red meat nor fermented foods at all and has not done so for the last twenty years. I assume he is very low in vitamin K2. People have cleared their vascular calcium plaques with vitamin K2 because this vitamin helps the calcium that is in the blood vessels to be deposited into teeth and bones. If it is absent, calcium stays in the vasculature and plaques can form. It further came to light that my client has suffered from two broken kneecaps which finished his rugby career. There was no apparent reason at the time for them to fracture. I questioned his vitamin D status, as a common Australian habit is to cover all your skin with clothes to avoid sun cancers. Summary You and your family are probably vitamin D deficient. This will make your bones soft. It might encourage depression.

It will encourage leaky gut and inflammation. It might be responsible for your arteries blocking, causing heart attacks. You need sunlight to produce vitamin D on your skin. Vitamin D is an anti-cancer vitamin. Vitamin K2 puts calcium into bones. Vitamin K2 lowers risks of heart attacks and fractures significantly. Both are made from cholesterol – be wary if ‘statins’ are prescribed to you. Action Steps Eat fermented food. Go into the sun more (10 minutes whole body in summer, half an hour in winter). Eat grass-fed meat. If you can’t go into the sun enough, or you live in the arctic circle or northern Europe: Daily requirement of vitamin D for children: 400 IU/day Daily requirement for adults: 200 IU/day Eat fermented foods and grass-fed milk, butter, and meat. Vitamin B1 or Thiamine Vitamin B1 is one of eight B vitamins. B vitamins make sure that the body’s cells are functioning. They are central in the body’s energy metabolism, make new blood, brain, skin, and brain cells. Vitamin B1 is produced by bacteria in the soil and in the rumen of cattle by the bacteria that live in it. To demonstrate the importance of B1, I would like to tell you yet another one of my stories. We were in a drought and it was winter. The farmers had to supplement their cattle. A very panicky farmer rang and asked me to come out to have a look at his cattle straight away. He said quite a few of his cows were down and

stretching out with their backs ‘arched the wrong way;’ some others seemed ‘crazy.’ When I arrived at the farm, two cows were down with their heads arched backwards and were seizing. Some other cattle ran around with high stepping gaits and were obviously blind, running into things. Another cow was standing in a shed pressing her head into a corner. On asking the farmer what he had been feeding, he said prior to this he had increased the grain portion of the diet. I had a suspicion of PEM or CCN, which is an acute vitamin B1 deficiency that translates as polyencephalomalacia or cerebrocortical-necrosis. I treated the animals as well as I could and told the farmer to call the district veterinarian to perform a post mortem to confirm my suspicion if one of his cattle died. They like to be involved when livestock animals die. We modified the feed and gave vitamin B1 injections. The presenting picture of PEM, or Poliencephalomalacia, also called CCN, cerebro-cortical-necrosis is a result of acute vitamin B1 deficiency. The brain gets problems with its energy supply and the cortex of the brain liquifies. This is obviously deadly and can only be reversed in its early stages. The professional treatment is to give thiamine (B1) injections, but successful treatment will depend how ‘dead’ or necrotic the brain already is. Cattle can normally produce thiamine themselves. The rumen inside the cow on the left side of their body resembles a large tub of food, water, bacteria, and protozoa. The bacteria act as the cow’s food supply (this is their own meat so to speak. The cattle eat the protein of the bacteria that grows in their own rumen) and these bacteria produce vitamins and digest the fibre. Under certain circumstances, bacteria that break down thiamine, take over in the rumen and destroy the B1, causing an acute B1 deficiency. What does this mean to you though? Statistics show: We are all vitamin B1 deficient. Vitamin B1 is produced in the soil by the bacteria – if they are alive – and is then stored in the germinating layer of grains (as in for example wheatgerm) which is missing in our food as will be explained in-depth in the chapter about flour. The WHO (World Health Organisation) claims our daily intake should be 5mg, and on average we take in 0.8 mg. We traditionally should get a lot of vitamin B 1 from the wheatgerm that is part of the grain. But, this wheatgerm is removed and thrown away in the processing of the flour.

The WHO knows this, and has asked every bread manufacturer to add chemically produced thiamine to their baking process. First, the food industry removes the goodness by throwing out the germ of the grain (it will be explained in the next chapter) and then we add a factory-produced artificial substitute. It hardly makes sense. Vitamin B1 helps turn Glucose into energy for the brain. So, one of the first symptoms of B1 deficiency is mental and physical tiredness. Symptoms of Vitamin B1 deficiency are: poor attention span poor concentration poor cognitive function in young adults brain fog slow reaction times numbness in hands brain disease fast heart rate mental confusion peripheral nerve disease So even if we don’t die like the cows on my client's farm, we cannot function properly when we only, on average, get a fraction of what we daily need. I know that I often suffer from brain-fog and poor attention span. Summary You will most likely be deficient in vitamin B1. Your mental brain fog might be due to this alone. Your lethargy might be due to this alone. Vitamin B1 is made by bacteria in fertile soil. If grown on fertile living soils, vitamin B1 is in the germ of whole grains. Normal flour, bread, baked goods, and pasta are made from extracted grains and hence deficient.

Vitamin B1 is a ‘methylator’ and ‘makes your brain tick over.’ Action steps Eat ‘true’ whole grains – I will explain this in the chapter about flour. Sprout wheat (recipe will be in the chapter about flour). Eat organic. Eat organic pork. Eat organic lentils, peas, beans, sunflower seeds. Don’t forget: These must be organic, as it is the bacteria in the soil that produce this vitamin. Grain grown on dead soils will be deficient in B1. It is produced in the soil, taken up by the plant, and then eaten by the animals. So, it, again, needs fertile, living soil, growing, healthy, vitamin-rich plants, eaten by animals that then can be a source for us. Tryptophan Ah, tryptophan! The example of tryptophan, where it comes from, and why it is important, sums up most our current dilemma. One little building block of life, take it away, and life will suck! Tryptophan is one of eight essential amino acids. The term ‘essential’ means that humans and animals cannot produce it and must take it in with food. Tryptophan is one of the less common amino acids, but it’s super important. Tryptophan is a precursor (building substance) for the following compounds: Serotonin, your antidepressant ‘good-mood-hormone’ Melatonin, which is a hormone making you sleep Niacin, also known as Vitamin B3 (can cure schizophrenia) IPA which protects the brain from forming Alzheimer’s causing plaques

So, Tryptophan makes us happy, it helps us sleep, and it helps us not get schizophrenia and it protects us from getting Alzheimer’s. Vitamin B3 (made from Tryptophan) reduces the risk for dementia by more than half and improves memory. Dr Hoffer, a psychiatrist, had a 90 percent cure rate in healing schizophrenia with vitamin B3, vitamin C, folic acid, and essential fats. Ninety percent! Tryptophan is only produced by bacteria in the soil via a pathway that is called Shikimate pathway and needs to then be transformed into the active forms by our microbiome in our gut. One type of bacteria in the gut transforms tryptophan into IPA which is a substance that protects us from beta-amyloid-plaque formation in our brains. These plaques are the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Another bacterium converts tryptophan into 5-HT and then into serotonin – which is our anti-depressant. And yet another bacterium converts tryptophan into vitamin B3 (niacin), which has shown to be able to cure schizophrenia and yet another one makes it into the sleep-inducing melatonin. Wow. How would life look like without tryptophan? Sad, sleepless, suffering from dementia, and possibly from schizophrenia. So, we need both: Tryptophan from the bacteria in the soil and we need our gut microbiome! But remember the story about glyphosate previously? It stops this pathway and kills the microbes in the soil that would produce this antidepressant building block for us. This is how Roundup works. It stops the Shikimate pathway. Roundup is in 95 percent of all food items and kills your gut bacteria, too. Bacteria, algae, fungi, and plants have this pathway, but mammals and animals have not. So, if the soil-organisms are killed, they cannot produce tryptophan and other essential substances incredibly important for our health any more. Of course, our gut microbiome is also suffering from preservative and antimicrobial overuse which kill the bacteria – and the synthesis of serotonin, melatonin, niacin and IPA is hindered. I know this may seem complicated to understand and I feel very nerdy, getting excited about this. However, the easy translation is: Kill the soil and you will get mad, sad,

schizophrenic, and sleepless – at least! These are only a few of the thousands of proteins that need tryptophan. What does this potentially mean for all of us? Look at what is happening already: Many people have Alzheimer’s now, and the trajectory is that every woman will get Alzheimer’s, at an ever-decreasing age, soon. Depression has epic proportions and synthetic antidepressants are prescribed at a massive scale. Insomnia is very prevalent. The lack of tryptophan in our diet alone explains a lot of diseases it seems. Summary Tryptophan is only produced by bacteria in the soil. Tryptophan is essential for the production of vitamin B3, serotonin, melatonin, and IPA. To make those substances, you need healthy and diverse gut bacteria. If you eat conventionally grown and processed food, you will be deficient in tryptophan. It will increase your risk of dementia, schizophrenia, insomnia, and depression. It will increase your risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Action Steps Buy and eat organic food and you’ll be right. Grow your own. Eat meat from animals that were happy grazing in a paddock. Avoid feedlot-meat (grain-fed). Avoid any conventional grown food as it will contain glyphosate which kills your gut bacteria. Pamper and heal your gut microbiome. Avoid preservatives and antibiotics.

Fulvic Acid One substance that is hardly talked about and I would just like to put your attention to is fulvic acid. It is neither a vitamin nor a mineral, but it seems to be the ‘key to rejuvenation.’ Here is why: Fulvic acid is the most amazing substance. It is a rather small molecule that is produced by the bacteria in the soil – if the soil is alive. Fulvic acid is part of humus – and it cannot be synthesized in a laboratory. Fulvic acid is not a mineral or vitamin, but is a powerful, life-giving substance that is quietly disappearing from our food. There are so many benefits to both plants and animals. It seems to essentially be the ‘transporter’ of vitamins and minerals into the cells of the body. Without fulvic acid, our body’s ability to absorb nutrients is severely diminished. It is also a powerful antioxidant and can remove cellular waste products and toxins. You could compare it to a truck shipping food in and out of your town. It is thought that more than seventy trace elements, electrolytes, polyphenols, flavonoids, and essential amino acids get bound to it to be transported. Wow. It is therefore called ‘the rejuvenator’ and is meant to have a multitude of benefits that are unmatched by any other natural substance. Wow again. The benefits of fulvic acid are: enhances absorption of minerals and vitamins anti-inflammatory effect anti-allergy improves eczema speeds skin healing anti-aging improves gut flora and gut health anti-diarrhoea effect improves energy levels reduces oxidative stress

useful in osteoarthritis patients shows antiviral activity has antifungal activity effective for the management of oral biofilm infections increases fibroblast viability and reduces collagen degradation(anti-aging) improves memory and brain function supports immune system stimulates metabolism, cleanses toxins and heavy metals from the body Ah…. I probably got you confused and overwhelmed by now. But don’t panic. It’s obviously important, but the good news is, that nature had it all sorted for you anyway. I thought about cutting things out, making it easier, leaving some facts, but: I feel even if you don’t truly understand all the nuances and facts – and you are not even meant to – this shows how intricate and clever and connected everything is. And the simple, one action that covers all the previously suggested steps is: Eat normal – meaning organic or unadulterated – food. It is all just food. Nothing special. What are its sources? You get it from food. Only plants that are grown organically in rich, fertile soils that are high in humus will contain fulvic acid. As most of our farming methods are not organic (anymore), this is very hard to find. Summary You can swallow as many vitamin pills as you like – without fulvic acid not much will be transported into your cells. You need to eat food that was grown in humus-rich soil. No conventional soil nowadays is ‘humus-rich.’ Only organic or home-grown food will have this vital ingredient. Fulvic acid transports nutrients into cells.

Action steps Eat food grown on humus rich soils. Eat organic food. Eat dirt.

MENTAL HEALTH AND FOOD

I

recently became acquainted with Peter, a young man in his early twenties. He came to ‘hang out with the girls’ in the clinic and he would do odd jobs for me. We painted the outside of the clinic together so we were working alongside each other; we talked and I learned that he and his girlfriend had split up. He had quite a rough time mentally. For young people living on the land, life can be challenging. The drought, fires, and the economic downtown in the area make it hard to find jobs. However, his main diet was: McDonald’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, sometimes supplemented by Kentucky Fried Chicken. I imagined what it would be like to only nourish your body with deficient and dead food. Nothing fresh, nothing wholesome. Instead, Peter is daily eating chips that are soaked in sugar and made from potatoes that were fabricated in a horrendously toxic fashion, the bun is full of preservatives, white flour, and so forth. Who knows what else McDonald’s is doing to the ‘food’ before they sell it? Peter was constantly tired and suffered from depression. He had tried to take his own life. I mention him here as an example of so many young people I know and hear about. Depression, anxiety, and self-harming seems to be very prevalent in our young adult and teenage generation. Over a few healthy lunches at my house, I explained my view about nutrition to Peter. I said to him: ‘What if your headaches, your constant tiredness, and your depression are connected to the food you are eating?’ There are hundreds of videos and books about how to deal with problems, about positive thinking, spirituality, about trying to change unhealthy patterns

of living and form good habits and ways of evolving. The self-help-book industry is booming, and that is a wonderful thing. My point is that if, for example, you don’t drink water, you will die and you can practice selfdevelopment all day long, but you will still die of dehydration. If you don’t have something to feed on, you will starve. If your lawnmower doesn’t have fuel, it won’t work. If you don’t have a bed, it is hard to sleep. If your brain doesn’t get nutrients, it can’t function. It seems as if society is struggling a lot with ‘happiness’ in our present time. Of course, there are so many different factors that influence your mental wellbeing that it is hard to establish where mental health problems come from. We all have problems and difficult times to face and I guess that is the challenge of life itself. Relationships, money, your family, the weather, the economy, things that happened to you as a child, and so forth of course influence your sanity and mood. I would like to examine though how much food would have to do with your mood swings, unhappiness, or even with more serious mental disorders like schizophrenia, anxiety, or depression. I do not want to discourage anyone from seeking professional advice and help. My intention rather is to show that good nutrition with essential nutrients might be the ‘missing link.’ What if my postulate is right, that food has got a lot to do with mental wellbeing and that without the basic ingredients in the form of nutrients it is very difficult if not impossible for your body and mind to be ‘happy and sane?’ What if I am right that your gut and gut microbiome ‘colours your world either in “happy rainbow colours” or in black?’ A book I recently read, written by Professor Felice Jacka from the ‘Food and Mood Institute’ in Melbourne, had the same idea and she found significant differences in people’s mental health on different foods. A great book. However, what she did not examine was the quality of the food – she didn’t examine the difference between wholesome, organic foods and their ‘watered down’ and even poisoned versions of food grown in conventional agriculture. As I have tried to explain, there is a vast difference in nutrients. There are so many amino acids, vitamins, and minerals missing in conventionally

grown agriculture that it is just not enough nowadays to advise: Eat fruit and meat and vegetables – as these raw ingredients themselves are poisoned and deficient. Dead soil creates dead, nutrient-lacking food. In my opinion, one needs three basic things for good mental health (as well as family and friends of course): Exercise has been shown to work better than antidepressant medication against depression. Sunlight is essential for a happy mindset. For people in the arctic circle, it is hard to stay happy during the dark and long winter months in which sunlight is rare. Nutritious whole food – with the emphasis on both nutritious and whole. As we have learned, only home grown, organic, or biologically farmed food is nutritious. These three are the foundation of good mental health. Psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors are important. They are like brick, mortar, and a good interior designer for creating a nice home. My argument is though that nutrients from natural and wholesome sources are like the foundation of a house and of health – and without a solid foundation, the house will crumble. We are part of a massive learning curve presently happening regarding food and mental health. We have to get back to common sense. My philosophy is that our bodies and our minds have evolved, together and simultaneously with food, for millions of years. Only in the last eight years have we started to seriously look at the gut microbiome for example, which turns out to be more important than nearly anything else in our bodies! What else is there that we don’t know, I wonder? Brain research in the last few years has explored the fascinating subject of how intricately everything is connected: The bacteria in your gut are essential for your immunity. The connection between gut microbiome and your vagus nerve going into the limbic system influences the amygdala, which gives you your emotional state and your learning ability, and influences your hormone response, which in turn influences your emotional and physical responses, etc…. The body is a wonderfully

functioning, amazingly connected miracle – everything is connected, everything makes sense, everything keeps us alive. With my book, I want you to come to one very simple conclusion: Eat organic, eat local, eat a variety of vegetables, fruit, meat, whatever – as long as it is natural and it is whole, organic, unprocessed food. Your body will sort out the rest. Because it always has! Your body hasn’t read the physiology or biochemistry books to know what to do – it does it anyway.

MENTAL HEALTH DECLINE ‘According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly one in three of all adolescents aged thirteen to eighteen will experience an anxiety disorder. These numbers have been rising steadily; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety disorders in children and teens went up 20 percent. ‘These stats combined with the rate of hospital admissions for suicidal teenagers – also doubling over the past decade – leave us with many concerning questions.” [...] ‘13.9 percent of children and young people (aged 4 to 17 years) met the criteria for a diagnosis of a mental disorder in the last 12 months.4” […] ‘One in ten young people aged 12-17 years old will self-harm, one in 13 will seriously consider a suicide attempt, and one in 40 will attempt suicide.’ The statistics about the decline of mental health – especially in children, teenagers, and young adults – is alarming. I see and hear it daily when I talk to my children and their friends or more often from friends and clients when they confide about the worries they have for their own children. One of my clients has a depressed son in his mid-twenties that doesn’t leave the house and a suicidal and depressed, self-harming daughter. Three of my nieces are self-harming, scarring their arms and thighs forever. Another niece is in the hospital with bulimia and anorexia. Young women that I have known since kindergarten are suffering from anxiety attacks. Another young man in my close circle has attempted suicide. Another client told me that their eightyear-old son has tried to commit suicide. Of course, there are multiple reasons for these complex societal problems and it would be naive of me to say that everything has to do with the food we eat. However, when I was starting to ‘join the dots’ and look closer at what nutrient deficiencies and toxic substance can cause, I found enough evidence to support my theory. Just like the dog with calcium-deficiency or the cow with B1 deficiency – what if we don’t have the basic nutrients for our brains to work? What if your world gets coloured ‘in black’ by a lack of nutrients and gut biology on one hand, and toxic substances in food on the other? If even a single nutrient is missing, what would this do to your mental

ability to function? Here are some examples of what happens if you have ‘lack of…’: Vitamin B1 deficiency causes brain necrosis in cattle or people. Calcium deficiency makes you tremble and have fits, speeds and weakens your heartbeat, and causes brain-dysfunction (remember the dog with milk fever previously. Zinc deficiency causes many brain and behaviour disorders. Magnesium: low levels of magnesium in the body can result in numerous symptoms like tremors, poor coordination, muscle spasms, loss of appetite, personality changes, and may include seizures. Low magnesium causes irritability, anxiousness, and nervousness, as well as poor concentration. Vitamin B12 deficiency causes anaemia, tiredness, and lack of function of the nervous system as well as aggression. The lack of gut microbiome causes lack of serotonin and dopamine production, which are our own antidepressants. Tryptophan deficiency causes lack of serotonin, lack of antiAlzheimer’s protection and lack of vitamin B3 which in turn could cure schizophrenia as well as reduced melatonin production which should make you sleep well. Essential amino acids: that are essential building blocks of our hormones and neurotransmitters – if these are not produced anymore, neurotransmitters like serotonin will not be produced anymore. One could compare this to taking the vowels out of our language. Omega 3 fatty acids are necessary for the brain: We eat too little fish and we eat grain-fed meat which is low in omega 3s instead of grass-fed meat that is high in it. The Institute of Psychiatry in London is doing research proving that it has nearly miraculous effects on manic-depression. Lack of iodine causes cretinism and ‘stupidity’ if severe. If not severe but only deficient, it will lower your thyroid hormones which influence your mental attitude, vitality, ability to think, and your metabolism, to name a few. Lack of good fats in general will lower your cholesterol, which is

the building block of many hormones like oestrogen, testosterone, cortisone, aldosterone, progesterone, and so forth. If you are a woman, you will know how your hormones and your cycle influence your mood and the lack of them has tremendous influence on mood and body. A diet high in sugar (for example in breakfast cereals) will push your blood sugar high, causing euphoria and happiness for about half an hour, but shortly after, the body’s counter-regulation causes an under-sugared state in which you feel nervous, aggressive, moody, and anxious. This happens daily to most Australian school children. Sugar uses up your B vitamins. The more sugar you eat, the less B vitamins you have. Vitamin B3 deficiency: Schizophrenia was cured with high amounts of vitamin B3 which is normally in the wheat germ and missing in our diet nowadays. It should be made from tryptophan in the gut if the right gut bacteria are present – which mostly they are not in our present age. Soy suppresses your thyroid, which if it is low, will make you sluggish and sad and it is very high in oestrogen, interfering with your own female hormones. One story I would like to present, as it very much demonstrates the power of vitamins. Linda, one of my close friends, was concerned about her mother in the nursing home. Apparently, her mother has always been a ‘real lady.’ She was never seen without being well dressed and make-up on and her language was impeccable. She would never swear. However, after a couple of months in the nursing home, she started ‘swearing like a trooper.’ She was forgetful and plain ‘cranky.’ Linda was very worried about her. Her mother’s whole nature and demeanor had changed. Linda’s mum then received some vitamin B complex injections from a nurse that has cared for the elderly for a long time and swears by it. Within a couple of days, Linda’s mum’s behaviour was back to being her sweet, wellmannered, and ‘classy’ self. The change seems as defined and whole as giving a dog with milk-fever a calcium injection. It is a good example, demonstrating that deficient food truly makes a difference. I imagine that nursing home food would consist of cheap, processed food out of cans and

premixed gravies, not of highly nutritious, fresh, organic vegetables and meat. The behaviour change, in Linda’s mum and many others I have heard of, is profound. As explained many times before, many of the nutrients in food are missing because either the bacteria in the soil or in your gut that would produce them or make them available are dead, or modern manufacturing processes have destroyed them. As you can see, you need a lot of different minerals, vitamins, fats, and proteins to have a healthy mind. The list above is a small one and not exhaustive, but shows how the lack of one of these nutrients is devastating to the body and the mind. Our food is so utterly deficient in nutrients and so distorted by the way it is manufactured, that it does not surprise me that we have such a high number of people with mental illness. Even if it is just ‘having the blues,’ it is worth examining if you are deficient in minerals or vitamins. Could it be that you are lacking in something? Are you sure you have enough nutrients? Could it be possible that the tendencies of modern school children to be ‘fidgety’ or lack in concentration has something to do with a bad diet? Every mother knows how children react when they have sugar. They will get hyperactive and emotional or teary when under-sugared. Food colours make kids ‘go crazy’ and every parent will vouch for that. Nutritional deficiencies are obvious and have been vastly overlooked. And here are a few examples if you have ‘too much of’… Glyphosate destroys the tight junctions between the gut cells, so that the gut becomes leaky and substances like bacteria, insufficiently digested food, or toxins can enter the bloodstream. This is causing a hyper inflamed state which in effect lowers serotonin levels and causes depression. Glyphosate stops plants from producing alkaloids which have many health functions (see chapter on glyphosate). Glyphosate near your home has been proven to increase the risk of having an autistic or ADHD child. Propionic acid (PPA) as a preservative hinders neuronal development in the foetus and thickens the glia cells. PPA is a

common preservative in food. Trans fats. These are industrially produced fats, that are in most cakes and biscuits that you buy. These trans fats are replacing the ‘normal healthy’ fats in the brain, comparable to taking “bricks out of a wall and replacing it with polystyrene bricks”. Chemicals like Chloropicrin or 2,4-D which are widely used and sprayed on crops like broccoli or strawberries are nerve gases and are on the list of chemical warfare – this will surely do something to your mental health. It is an organophosphate which accumulates in your nerve tissue and causes Parkinson’s and is implicated in Mad Cow disease. ‘Paraquat,’ a very common herbicide in Australia, causes Parkinson’s disease (check out the Syngenta website/’Gramoxon’). GMO: Most wheat and soy and corn crops are GM. Who knows what this will do to you? We know it causes cancer. We know it inflames your gut. An inflamed gut is ‘leaky,’ see above…. Preservatives: Preservatives kill gut bacteria. Gut bacteria in mice have shown that they can make the mice either ‘courageous ‘or ‘scared.’ And that by switching the bacteria and mice around, one can change the mice’s behaviour. Gut bacteria influence obesity, diabetes, mental health, and are meant to heavily influence autism and ADHD. The research has only just started. Chlorinated water, antibiotics, disinfectants, and glyphosate in food all kill gut bacteria which have many different effects on mental health. As mentioned before, gut bacteria produce serotonin from tryptophan which is the body’s antidepressant. Gut bacteria would produce vitamin B3-but they are killed by daily glyphosate on all foods. The benefits of B3 were mentioned above: People were cured of schizophrenia with vitamin B3. Gut and gut bacteria are damaged by commonly used ‘emulsifiers’ in food. 2,4-D, a widely-used herbicide, hinders neuronal development in the foetus. Tins (tinned foods) have ‘hormone disruptors’ on their surface – substances disrupting your endocrine system, meaning your hormones: thyroid, sex hormones, fight and flight hormones, etc.

Hormones influence your physical and mental health tremendously. Meat from stressed animals is meant to transfer mRNA to the consumer, giving them anxiety within fifteen minutes of eating – again, meat from local farms killed preferably on the premises so that the animal does not get scared, would be wonderful – but our systems don’t allow it. Aspartame, a common artificial sweetener: ‘The range of symptoms and ailments attributed to aspartame in a 1994 Department of Health & Human Services Report (twenty-three years ago) include headaches, migraines, memory loss, dizziness, seizures, numbness, rashes, depression, fatigue, irritability, tachycardia, insomnia, vision problems, hearing loss, heart palpitations, breathing difficulties, slurred speech, tinnitus, vertigo, and joint pain. Aspartame is an excitotoxin and excessive exposure to aspartame can cause damage to your brain cells.’ Looks,as if aspartame is also definitely linked to your mental health – wow. Think before you have another Coca Cola Zero! Aspartame is on the market as Nutra-Sweet. Through deficiencies on one hand and toxic substances on the other hand – wherever we look, we seem to find yet another chemical, that is used for commercial reasons, but is not good for our health and our ability to feel and think. Which diet would be best? In my opinion, it doesn’t matter what you eat for your mental or physical health. What matters is that the food you eat is nutritious and whole. In the past, Native American Indians ate differently to native Amazon tribes or Australian Aborigines. The Masai eat different foods to people from India. Eskimos eat fish and meat. Fijians eat seafood and coconuts. Tibetans eat meat, fat, and apricots. It all depends on where people live and what is available during the different seasons. There is a principal though that all these humans had in common: All people ate food that was produced without poisons, in soil that was

alive – because that is the default of soil. Humans did not extract, chemically alter, colour, and emulsify, add preservatives, E-numbers or flavour enhancers that were made in a chemical lab. They did not disinfect, gamma-radiate, and store it after fumigating it with toxic gases, and wrap it in plastics. They did not spray their fields with war-gas-like substances or grow food on hydroponics. They did not grow food which was genetically modified. They did not grow food that was sprayed by people in suits with gas-masks on, because the poisons would harm the person spraying the crop. They simply ate whole foods – with the emphasis on ‘whole’ and ‘food.’ Do you see the craziness of all of this? I would urge everyone, including myself, that if you have any mental health issues, to look at your diet first and improve it if necessary. You might find that your anxiety disappears when you follow the principles of good food, exercise, and re-connecting to nature and being outside to get some sunlight. You might find that your depression lifts, if you get your magnesium and vitamin B1 right, by simply eating wholegrains and organic green vegetables. Or even better, start sprouting some organic wheat. You might find that your happiness level goes up dramatically, when you stop eating junk food and you follow whole-food principles. Your physical health will undoubtedly get better also. I recently had another young vet student and after only one week of eating my homegrown and organic, unadulterated food, she reported to feel so much better! To make you feel even better, by choosing organic vegetables and grassfed meat, you will feel the pleasure of doing something for our Earth. With every organic egg, for example, that you are eating, you know that you will have benefitted mother Earth, rather than raping and pillaging her. You will know that you supported a farming family, whose children don’t have to be exposed to poisons. You will feel the pleasure of doing something for the greater good. We all need purpose in life. Imagine, simply by making the choice to eat organic, you are benefitting so many people and the greater common good. You eat – nature benefits. Having purpose is a big factor in mental well-being, so please enjoy the knowledge that with every bite you eat, you help nature heal. Please don’t get me wrong. We all have challenges in life, and we can

certainly create dramas for ourselves through negative attitudes. We have relationship breakdowns, can be made redundant at work, or have family members get sick or die. We can be bullied at school or fail exams. Life has got a lot of challenges. Life will throw obstacles at you but don’t let poor nutrition be one of them. Seek the help you need for the problems you encounter, whether that be a counselor or doctor, but don’t forget to make sure your foundation is strong. Without good food, without a strong foundation, how can you be expected to grow?

SUMMARY Your depression, anxiety, brain fog, or just nervousness might be exacerbated by the lack of nutrients in your food. Your depression might be caused by chemicals in your food. Your nervous system and brain needs all nutrients to function properly. Your mental state is probably more than you realize influenced by the nutrients or the lack of nutrients that a modern diet provides (or doesn’t provide). Your gut microbiome plays a central role in mental health – not the right bacteria, no mental health. Action steps Changing your diet to organic and whole-food might clear your mind – I know many people that, once they follow my advice, they get off antidepressants. Feed your children well – teenage depression, anxiety, and suicide are at an all-time high. Eat whole foods. Buy and eat (or grow) only organic food. Eat meat that was grown on grass, avoid grain-fed meat and intensively grown chickens and pork. Feed your gut, encourage your microbiome (fermented foods, organic foods, sourdough breads, kombucha, kefir, natto, sauerkraut). Possibly supplement iodine, zinc, magnesium. Fish oil is a good source of EFAs. Exercise. Get sunlight. So, what does ‘organic’ even mean?

WHAT IS ORGANIC OR REGENERATIVE FARMING ANYWAY?

‘ISN’T ORGANIC A SCAM?’

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ne frequently asked question is whether organic is truly organic. A lot of people say that it’s all a ‘hoax,’ ‘it is not different,’ ‘organic farmers are cheats.’ In Australia, we have two main organisations, namely NASAA and BFA (now called ACO: Australian Certified Organic). To convert your farm to organic and get certified, you have to present farm plans, budgets, and have to be audited several times. The organizations will thoroughly investigate your bank accounts. If organic farmers are found to have inputs that are not allowed, they will be banned from selling their products as organic. It is very strict. Every organic farmer that I know is proud of their farm and truly convinced about the reason why they converted to organics. They went through hardship and quite often a temporary financial downturn to change their ways. For my friends in the organic industry, it is a way of life, a way of thinking and of conviction. Often it started with them themselves getting sick, or their children or parents dying. A few years ago, circumstances forced me to stop breeding bulls on my farm. My heart has always been with nature and with eating healthy food, and for years the idea had been in my head to convert ‘Gowrie,’ my property, to organic. Having a beef cattle property rather than a farm where crops are grown made it much easier to convert. I became a member of the Biological Farmers of Australia (BFA), printed their standards and guidelines, and became ‘an organic farm in conversion.’ This process took a few years and I had to have a management plan worked out. I had to set some land aside for trees and native bushland, fence out areas that had been sprayed in the past, or where former generations on Gowrie would have dipped their sheep against mange and flystrike. We were not allowed to use chemicals or artificial fertilisers and our cow herd was not allowed to be fed hormones, growth promotants, or antibiotics to allow them to be fed a high grain ration in their diet. Organic cattle are only allowed to eat organic feed. I managed to acquire coconut meal (Copra) that was certified organic to feed the cattle in winter when grass was sparse

and the cows were lactating and needed more energy in their meals. I could not feed them grain that was grown on large monocultures, grown with Roundup or other chemicals. I was not allowed to worm them unless they were dying of parasites, and then they would have had to be taken out of the organic system and sold as ‘normal’ cattle. Once a year, a controller from the BFA, one of the organic certifying bodies, would come and interview me about my practices. He would also look into my financials. He would look at my account statements and go through my spending, confirming that I didn’t buy herbicides, antibiotics, or growth promotants. He was very thorough. Anyone that runs a business will know that it is not easy to hide an expense of a few thousand dollars from the tax office, the accountant, or the certifying body like the BFA. My steers and heifers, like in all organic systems, were not allowed to enter a feedlot when they reached a certain weight either. Feedlots feed a high amount of grain in the diet and to make the cattle tolerate such a high amount, they must be fed antibiotics in their feed daily. The grain that they get fed must be cheap, so it is of course not organic, but grown in large and toxic monocultures. The animals are stressed and suffer in social groups that are too large for their comfort and often have no shade and shelter. Organic cattle in contrast are not allowed to be in a feedlot, and they are only allowed to be fed small amounts of organic grain or other organic feed if they need more nutrition than the grassland provides. And this grain or whatever else you are allowed to feed must be organic also. On my farm, this was only necessary in winter, which was also the time when my cows would have a calf and need the extra energy. It is of course much easier to grow organic livestock than it is to grow organic vegetables or crops. The standards for organically grown vegetables are the same: No poisons are allowed. The farmer has to grow disease resistant crops, fruit, or vegetables, and for that to happen, he or she has to have fertile, living, and healthy soil. It is of course much ‘easier’ – but also much more expensive – to simply spray paddocks with chemicals and have those poisons do the work for you. Anyone that tries to keep their garden paths free of weeds will know what I am talking about. It is far less effort to spray ‘feed and weed’ or Roundup than pull out weeds with your hands. As explained in previous chapters, these chemicals in non-organic

farming are so harmful that they kill everything they touch! In the soil, they kill the earthworms, fungi, and bacteria. In the ecosystem, they kill pest insects as well as beneficial bees or predators. The run-off of those chemicals flows into the creeks and rivers and kills aquatic life, for example the daphne, a kind of water flea which is the invaluable bottom of the food chain in rivers. The nitrites from surplus artificial fertilisers create algal blooms in rivers and lakes which then consequently die, suck up all oxygen, and create dead rivers or huge ‘dead zones.’ The massive fish death in Australia in 2019 and 2020 can be attributed to that and to water shortage due to agriculture and fracking drawing massive amounts of water out of the landscapes. The huge ‘death-zone’ in the Gulf of Mexico is also a consequence of chemical farming and run-off of lost soil and agricultural ‘poisons.’ The pollinating bees have declined to levels that leaves scientists speechless and they warn about the complete collapse of our whole food system as these pollinating insects are killed. Chemicals cannot distinguish between ‘a good bug’ and a ‘bad bug.’ And, of course, it poisons you when you eat it. Most people that I talk to know that organic food is better for them, or at least they acknowledge that it is probably less poisonous. However, hardly anyone that I have conversations with connects their choice of food with healing the planet. Would you have been aware that you choosing to buy an organic steak rather than a non-organic steak has all these benefits for the environment? The cows and steers live in natural, grassy paddocks. Feedlots are not allowed. Chemical sprays are not used to grow the food for the cattle. The farmer and his or her family are not exposed to toxic chemicals. The soils are alive and actively storing carbon. The soils are heaving with microorganisms that produce the medicinal properties of your food for you, including B vitamins, essential amino acids, fulvic acid and so forth. The rivers running through the organic farm that you support by buying their product do not get harmed by toxic runoff. If I would have had to resort to feeding my cattle grains, the grain would have been grown on organic farms. Large monocultures with all their nasty side-effects of deforestation and chemical sprays applied by large machinery or ‘crop-dusters’ (aeroplanes) are not allowed in organic systems. My grain would have come from a smaller farm that practices good biological management. Because of the rigorous standards of organic certifiers, you can trust it. If

it says ’organic,’ it most likely is. Organic food is, in very simple terms, normal! There is nothing special about it, really. Before industrialized agriculture, all food was organic. Organic is default. Organic is not a new fad or craze for inner-city, latte-drinking hippies or rich people. It is simply normal food. Food that is grown on fertile and healthy soils without artificial fertilisers and poisons. That’s all. And everything else you eat is chemical food. And it is already making you sick. I also always like to remind critics that organics is a bit like the common law. Murder, blackmail, thieving, or rape are not allowed in our society, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. A whole police force and legal frameworks, lawyers, solicitors, and the court system are busy making sure that the law is upheld when people break it. I’d rather ‘take the risk’ of buying organic blueberries that might have been grown by a farmer that is ‘cheating’ than knowing for certain that these blueberries were grown with fifteen or more insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides sprayed on them! The main differences between organic food or conventionally grown food: It is healthy for you! Organic produce does not allow artificial fertilizers or pesticides. Therefore, organic soils are alive. Butterflies, bees, insects, birds, worms, and small mammals can live on organic farms without being poisoned. Soil on organic farms is high in life-giving humus, Humus absorbs and stores carbon. Humus absorbs and stores water making the farm more droughtproof. Humus and green crops help the ‘small water cycle’ which we will talk about later. Organic soils are heaving with life. Organic soils absorb water and store it fast. Organic paddocks are never without groundcover helping animals

and the planet. Organic meat production does not allow cruel feedlots – the animals have a good life. Organic meat animals are not allowed to be removed from their mothers too early. Cattle on organic grasslands or silvopasture (a mix of woodland and grass) live a life that is as natural as possible. The have a bull to ‘make them babies’ rather than being artificially inseminated and they can look after their young until weaning. This is the life I lived with my cattle. Pigs are kept outside so that they can roll in mud and have normal behaviour. Chickens are kept outside on pasture where they can be ‘normal chickens.’ Organic farmers do not spray chemicals that threaten them and their family. Organic bees are not fed antibiotics or sugar. Organic bees are not killed by insecticides. The produce is often sold locally – less food miles. No poisons are sprayed contaminating landscapes, rivers, lakes, and the Reef. Organic food is nutrient dense. Minerals were made soluble by the bacteria and other soil-life, and can therefore be absorbed by the plant to become strong and healthy and disease-resistant. The abundant microbiome of the soil produces the vital nutrients our bodies need. With the help of microbes, a plant can take up as many nutrients as it needs, making the plant more pest resilient. If a product is labelled ‘organic’ in Australia, it will have the certified bud logo of Australian Organics or the square label of NASAA written on it. The USA has its own stamp and so does Europe. Most countries have their own certification label, procedures and guidelines. If it says organic, it is. Trust it.

REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE Some people also criticised that organic farming does not demand to heal the soils, that it only tells you what not to do rather than what to do. This is quite true, although any organic farmer knows that if he or she doesn’t heal the soil first, organic farming will not work. Out of this criticism grew a new and exciting way of farming: Regenerative Agriculture, ‘RegenAg.’ Regenerative farming practices developed from sustainable farming. We realised, though, that land degradation and the degradation of the soil has been so immense, that the status quo should not be ‘sustained.’ The land has to be regenerated. I am proud to say that some of my friends, like Helen and Mike McCosker, who are local farmers, and Lorraine Gordon from Southern Cross University, are working towards this ‘regenerative label.’ The plan for regenerative farming is to take organic standards and improve them further to include farming practices such as rotational grazing, multi-species sowing, and pasture cropping and to improve the health of the soil, rather than keeping it at the poor level it currently is. So, you could call it ‘Organic-plus.’ It takes landscapes, water cycles that rehydrate landscapes, and social factors – like work-place fairness or the rights of indigenous people – into account too. However, ‘the rules’ yet have to be written, and I will be following this with anxious anticipation.

‘BUT I CAN’T AFFORD ORGANIC’ I hear this often. My answer always is: ‘Pay now or pay later.’ Or, ‘You can’t afford not to.’ Take my friend Carolyn, for example. I used to talk to her often about organic food, and she would always reply: ‘Yes, Gundi, that’s okay for you – you are a vet and business owner and can afford it, but I am not that rich. My mortgage, my car, everyday life … it is a constant financial struggle. And no way am I going to give up my pleasures like having a drink with friends or going out for a meal. No way could I do that. It’s all too hard! You have no idea what it’s like to struggle. And you got to die of something. I’d rather die happy. Organic is for rich people and yuppies. That’s not me!’ I would say to her: ‘What’s your life worth living if you are sick? Then you can’t work, then you’ll be miserable or dead! And the small amount of money that you have now will be even less.’ Carolyn’s thoughts and attitude to change speaks for many people. She thought to follow my advice of eating organic would mean too much work, too much money, and a whole lifestyle change. It seemed too hard to manage in her daily bustle. However, her body started to tell her otherwise. She felt that her body was not digesting food anymore. Her body felt bloated, her stomach was uncomfortable and growling. She, my biggest nonbeliever said: ‘It felt as if there was poison in it.’ Carolyn gained weight; had no energy; suffered from depression and brain fog; felt so unwell for someone so fit. She knew it was not just age. “I never used to stop moving. I am a worker. I called myself the “Energizerbunny.” Go, go, go! That was my motto! And now I was a turtle. I was sluggish. I was diagnosed of having a tumour in my head. It seems to be benign, but its growth worries me. Why, I asked myself !?’ She then started to Google her symptoms. ‘I found that I had leaky gut. I found advice to start eating organic and to get rid of processed food and food that had preservatives in it so that my gut microbiome could start repairing itself. Everything I read promised me that my body would fix itself.’ She learned that organics was cheap to buy at the markets and her shopping cost reduced by $40 a week. The produce she bought, she found,

lasted longer than anything she previously had bought in the supermarket. Carolyn now buys most of her food organic, but she still goes out for dinner and indulges with non-organic food to be social and just to enjoy, and she still has her champagne, which she loves, in the evenings. Her body is now healthy and resilient again. This is what I do, too. I buy most of my food organic, but when I go out for dinner, I am just having a good time and eat whatever is offered. My body can handle it. It is like eating ice-cream on Sundays or having wine occasionally: A resilient body can handle the occasional splurge. ‘The biggest difference that I tell everyone now is how healthy I feel from the inside out. And the most surprising thing was, that it only took three weeks to feel a huge difference. And it wasn’t that hard.’ We now sit at my kitchen table and laugh about her initial resistance. Now, she is one of my biggest advocates. My conviction is: The price you pay once you are ill is huge in suffering, loss of income, your job, and possibly your life. The price you pay when you have a child with leukaemia, a brain tumour, or autism is huge. I know this is a bold statement, but all my knowledge that I have accumulated over the last thirty-six years tells me that I am, sadly, right: Modern agriculture creates a wave of nasty and chronic diseases and changing your food to organic, nutrient-dense food can avoid 90 percent of those modern diseases. I am convinced; I don’t have any doubt about it. As Carolyn now says to join in my chorus: ‘Your body will repair itself. You just have to give it a chance and it will. It is magic.’ My word. I say this daily. Whenever I ‘fix’ an animal, I know that, yes, I am helping it by, for example, plating a broken leg or stitching a wound, but the healing is 100 percent done by the body. We just have to get out of the way. This is how nature works. I am trying to eat 100 percent organic, but even for someone like me who has been interested in this for many years, it’s not easy. For a lot of people, organic food is too expensive. I realise that organic food is dear, but whenever I am tempted to cut corners and go for the cheaper option, I only have to think of the many friends, clients, and acquaintances I have that are sick, and I stay with the organic option. And as Carolyn proves, at the end of the day, it can be cheaper, even if the singular item you buy might be more expensive.

It is a question of priority. Most of us do have cars, TVs, computers, internet connection, video games, and a Netflix account. We mostly do have the money for a daily cup of take-away coffee or the money to go to McDonald’s. If one is smart, it is not super expensive to change your staples in your diet to organic. If you switch pasta, rice, potatoes, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and porridge oats to organic, you will not feel the price difference so badly as those items go a long way. And regarding meat: At least if you buy grass-fed meat like lamb or beef, you have avoided the nasty feedlot-system and, as we will see later, cattle or sheep in grasslands can be a very good thing for the environment. (I know this will surprise you a lot but it’s true.) As Carolyn explained, ‘Before I changed my diet, when I ate meat, it would stay in my stomach for days and I could not digest it. Now I don’t have that!’ And, she laughed and added, ‘And I passed a lot of wind, how embarrassing! I had to stay away from people, ha-ha! I’m fine now and safe to be around again!’ Once you know what is added to your food or what is missing, once you know how many chemicals are in those strawberries or on those ‘healthylooking’ blueberries, you will notice that you are more willing to spend your money on ‘good’ food. Healthy food is a necessity to living a good life, to having healthy children and to be able to have a healthy body and mind. Every food grown in conventional farming systems – like grains, soy, corn, cotton, any vegetable, any fruit, and nuts – are grown with ‘poisons.’ Unless it’s labelled organic or grown by you or your grandmother, it’s come into contact with poison. Every. Single. Food. Wheat, corn, soy, canola, and quite a few other crops in addition are genetically modified – which is not allowed in organic systems either. There is mounting evidence that genetically modified food causes cancer – and who knows what else. We are all guinea pigs in this ‘experiment’ nowadays that you don’t even know you're a part of. Scary stuff. In the last 50 or 100 years we have invented and created ten million new chemicals. Chemicals for agriculture and food, for cleaning purposes, or chemical warfare. In fact, a lot of chemicals in agriculture were developed as chemical weapons during the First and Second World War. And some wonder why we are sick.

It is amazing how much rubbish our bodies can cope with. And they do. They put up with it for years and years, until finally, the body starts to rebel. Our bodies are crying for help, ‘Please feed me real food without poison.’ That’s when people get sick. I am the witness of this every single day at work in my clinic.

‘BUT I’M NOT A FARMER, WHAT CAN I DO?’ We are all consumers. And we vote with our dollars at the cash register. If we all buy organic or regenerative food, farmers will be encouraged by big businesses like Coles or Woolworth to grow organic or regenerative food once a demand is there. For a while, organic food might be more expensive, but prices will fall when it becomes the new ‘normal.’ Everything that we deliberately grow on this planet is produced for humans. Everything. Some of it, of course, is grown and produced for animals, but they ultimately serve us, too, to feed us, be our pets, or give us fibre for our clothes. Our pets serve us and so do the chickens that lay eggs for us to eat. The grain that is grown for cattle in feedlots is grown so that we can have a grain-fed steak. When we truly realize this – that everything is produced for us, for you and me – we will understand the power we have. It is your choice and mine what we buy. It is our choice to eat organic or not. And it is our responsibility – for the planet, its creatures and our children. It is our choice to use this throw-away plastic cup or not. It is our choice to drive a car when we could also walk or use a bicycle. When we buy organic food, it results in: More organic or regenerative farmers More healthy soil Increased carbon and bacteria in the soil Increased nutrition in food An immense drawdown of carbon Reversal of climate change Organic farms are usually small and local. Food miles are fewer and you are supporting a small farming family directly. Wouldn’t knowing that also make you feel good in these times where we are all looking for meaning and purpose?! Imagine if every person would eat organic. Think big. Think positive. This makes me excited!

What if everyone would buy organic food? The demand would be so big that the few organic farmers would not be able to keep up. More and more farmers would see that this is where the wind is blowing and become organic. Farmers will focus on their soil, making it more productive and healthier. Because of the farms being organic, wildlife and insects can recover. The farmers themselves look back to a time where they had to spray their crops with poisons and how sick they felt and how worried they were for their own children or their farm-workers. Local farmers’ markets would make life enjoyable again. Farmers are getting in contact with their local communities. We meet at the market and we see directly who gets our money. And all the time we buy organic food, our soils draw down more and more carbon from the atmosphere. One bite at a time, every time you feed your body healthy, you are also saving the Earth. Imagine that! One bite at a time, you are saving yourself and the planet. That is the ultimate feel-goodfactor, three times a day! Imagine, by making the choice to eat organic, we are changing the world. I feel for modern farmers…. The problem of modern agriculture is deep and societal change will be very slow, especially because the monetary interest from the chemical companies is huge. Farmers need to learn again how to grow without chemicals and because the knowledge is lost, it seems a huge risk for them. A lot of farmers simply do not dare to change. And I get that! They have debt, kids at school, mouths to feed, farm machinery to buy, cars to run, and insurances to pay. Outgoings and debt on most farms are massive. Change is scary, especially when you don’t know how. And those that might like change can’t afford the loss of income as their farm undergoes the process. We want farmers to give us healthy food but we don’t offer them a solution to do so. Where are the programs to help farmers convert their farms? Conversion takes time. All that time adds up to money being lost. With the numerous droughts hitting Australia, farmers have been playing catch-up for years. There are no spare funds to convert the farms. The truth is, farmers must look at their livelihood as a business first. How is a business meant to thrive when it suffers through droughts, floods, and fires and then is expected to throw money into new land management programs? If the government wants a healthy population, maybe they should start looking at the foundations. Food. And maybe they should start figuring out ways to

encourage farmers to take that step and become organic without the huge risk that everything will fall apart and they’ll be bankrupt. I’ve seen what this drought does. Farmers can’t think of growing or improving their business because they’re just trying to hold onto the little they have. We want them to be better, to grow better food, and help us stop climate change. But it’s easy to ask others to do this while we sit back and wait. Why aren’t we helping them make this change? It benefits us all. I do understand farmers and they need help. Yet we can't afford to wait until governments or big businesses stop growing food with poisons. It will take years to ‘change the system’ and make people understand that the only intelligent thing to do is to grow food naturally again. Apart from a huge knowledge gap, the monetary interests of the agricultural chemical companies and the pharmaceutical companies are too big. They are the biggest and richest companies in the world. It would be very hard to fight chemical companies like Monsanto. We would have no chance to win; they are powerful and rich and have better lawyers than you or I. The pharmaceutical industry will not be stopped, neither will the medical system change their ways quickly. Rather than exhausting ourselves in a ‘fight against,’ we can simply ‘change towards.’ ‘What you resist, persists.’ Change towards – change to something that is vibrant, exciting, makes you feel good, makes you and the planet healthy and creates a beautiful new world – is far more enticing! And we can all do this with the simple switch to what we, as individuals, buy. The more of us who buy organic food, the faster change will happen. So, don’t blame Monsanto, which is the company that produces billions of tons of Roundup and makes genetically modified plants and organisms, just refuse to buy their product. Of course, before you read this book, you didn’t even know you were doing that with every bite you eat! Don’t blame Bayer, a large pharmaceutical company that also just bought Monsanto, just buy organic and avoid them by not getting sick in the first place. Let us start a ‘green revolution’ by refusing to consume things that are bad for us and for Earth. I will discuss later, how to make the right food choices for your health. I will make the connection between your choices and saving the planet more obvious. It all comes down to making a single choice:

to buy organic. Amazing, isn’t it?

SUMMARY You can simply trust the organic labels. Just buy organic – you don’t have to change your whole life. Simply by buying organic or home-grown food, you give your body the freedom to heal itself. There is hope for all your weird symptoms. Trust the NASA or AO labels. The impacts you have when buying organic are far reaching beyond your own heath, from animal welfare to the health of farmers, rivers, and ecosystems. It doesn’t have to be super expensive. You being healthy is priceless. Healthy Action Steps Simply buy as much as you can organic. Your health will probably sort itself out. When buying meat, buy grass-fed beef or lamb.

MAKING THE RIGHT FOOD CHOICES

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eter, my nurse’s brother, had quite a rough time mentally. For young people living on the land life can be challenging. The drought, fires and the economic downtown in the area make it hard to find jobs. Peter would start his day with a coke and a sausage roll. Sometimes he would have a ‘healthy cereal’ out of a box. For morning tea, a chocolate cake and some chips. Lunchtime would be a burger and another soft drink. For dinner, it would depend. Potatoes and meat and some vegetables, which wouldn’t be organic but better than fast food. His is a typical starch- and sugar-laden diet with probably next to zero nutrients. Peter was constantly tired and suffered from depression. He had tried to take his own life. I mention him here as an example of so many young people I know and hear about. Depression, anxiety, and self-harming seems to be very prevalent in our young adult and teenage generation. Over a few healthy lunches at my house, I explained my view about nutrition to Peter. I said to him: ‘What if your headaches, your constant tiredness, and your depression are connected to the food you are eating?’ After we explore the modern diet’s lack of nutrients on one hand and the overload with toxins on the other hand, I would like to explain the importance of food choices also. Not only is the food most of us eat produced in the wrong manner, but our choice of starchy and sugary foods over fats, proteins, and healthy vegetables is a huge contribution to most diseases, including diabetes mellitus type 2, obesity, and heart disease. Food additives and processing of foods in ‘chemical laboratories’ exacerbate the problem. As a general rule, one should eat a variety of whole, organic foods.

As mentioned earlier, traditional diets in different countries varied: The Inuit would eat seal, fat, fish, or elk; the Japanese fish, seaweed, fermented foods and vegetables; African people would eat game, eggs, poultry, and few vegetables. Some would drink blood from their cattle and milk. Europeans in the Mediterranean consumed olive oil, vegetables, fish, and meat, eggs, and poultry. In traditional societies I imagine, it didn't seem to matter so much what one ate: It was, very simply put, whole, unprocessed, unpoisoned, unaltered food. Of course, it was organic because no one yet had the ‘stupid’ idea to grow food with poisons or kill the soil off first…. In cold climates, food would have been made to last by fermenting it, as fridges had not been invented. Traditional societies worked out how to make sauerkraut, pickles, or salted, smoked, or dried meats. We now are finding out how healthy those fermented foods were. In short, you will not go too far wrong if you eat with this ‘triple bottom line:’ 1. Organic 2. Unprocessed 3. Whole Our modern diet is laden with sugars and processed starches, food additives like trans fats, colours, preservatives, hundreds of E-numbers, not to mention the poisons that agricultural producers put onto them. Food is heated, pasteurised, homogenised, gamma-radiated, stored with fungicides and insecticides, processed, extracted, dyed and so forth. I know hardly any family that manages to eat food as it was meant to be. Not one. I try and I am certainly struggling too. Unadulterated food is hard to find and expensive. Let’s have a look at some obviously bad choices and what to avoid: Avoid: sugar white flour

any bread unless truly wholemeal and organic pasta rice (brown rice is better) potatoes jam cakes biscuits breakfast cereals muesli bars teriyaki sauce tomato sauce (40 percent sugar) Sweet soy sauce maple syrup pancakes soft drinks alcohol The amount of sugar in our diet is astronomical nowadays. A powerful sugar industry stops every attempt to counteract this. If you have followed Jamie Oliver's attempts in England and America to reduce sugar in schools, you get an idea how impossible it was and is to change this. We put on fat and the obesity epidemic is due to this (and not fat!). Another, not commonly known, fact though is that it contributes massively to the occurrence of so many heart attacks. When I treat animals in my clinic with highly concentrated sugar solutions, either to treat under-sugared episodes or dogs with severe vomiting and diarrhoea that haven’t eaten for three days, I am always very conscious of not injecting the solution inadvertently into the tissue outside the vein. The consequence is sloughing of the skin a few days later. Sugar solutions are very irritating. People with uncontrolled diabetes, and a longstanding high blood sugar, will have arterial damage in vessels with the consequence for example of non-healing ulcers. Every nurse will know this well, trying to heal these ulcers for weeks on end in old people with diabetes, often on their legs. The arterial walls become very inflamed with high blood sugar. If this happens in a leg and the artery blocks, the foot might die and require amputations. If the artery happens to be somewhere vital, for example

supplying the heart, and the body tries to repair the damage by for example putting cholesterol there to heal, the artery might get blocked and a heart attack follows. Sadly, we then blame cholesterol, but the cholesterol is the ‘band aid’ rather than the cut. Big pharma then tells people to starve their body of cholesterol, which is the building block of most essential hormones. To starve your cholesterol down, or to take statins against it, has officially never saved a life but created a lot of infertile, impotent people with delayed brain function. Sugar also feeds cancer and sugar destroys B vitamins. I’d also like to mention that a lot of sugarcane here in Australia is grown near big rivers and near the ocean and around Tully and Cairns at the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. As most of these farms are not organic, fertilizer and pesticide applications are high. The runoff creates massive dead zones like in the Gulf of Mexico and the killing of the coral and fish in the Reef. I would like to encourage you again to go onto the before-mentioned website of Bayer Crop Science Australia, go into ‘find a crop solution,’ then put in ‘sugar cane’ and see which pesticides are suggested. Click on one of them and then go into the SDS data sheet. You will find in nearly all cases that this substance is ‘highly toxic to aquatic life’ and has ‘extended high toxicity to aquatic life.’ Not only is the sugar like poison for you, but it is also grown with toxic chemicals that kill life in rivers and oceans. Sadly, the Great Barrier Reef is a good example for this. I could cry when I think about it. Most people will recognise that eating organic and low sugar is better for themselves, but most people do not realise how big the impact of your eating organic food is for the environment, from carbon absorption to help climate change to not poisoning rivers and oceans. Even with the risk of repeating myself: If you choose organic, you are not poisoning the environment.

FATS Fats are the body’s energy storing system, we all know that! Too much fat in your body is of course not good for you. Eating fat is not so much of a problem, because you can only eat so much before you will feel sick. Sugar, on the other hand, has no hormone that is produced when you have too much to give you the feeling of ‘being full,’ or satiated. We all know that when you eat a lot of fat, there is a point when you just can’t eat any more. You are full. We all also know, that that feeling does not develop when you are eating white bread and jam or ice-cream. Fats are used for cell membranes and in brain and brain function as well as being fuel and energy. Forty percent of your brain is made from fats. Fats are so important for memory. They are structural components of the brain and cell membranes and give the brain plasticity! Olive oil can repair brains and get across the very choosy ‘blood-brain-barrier.’ Fat is necessary for life. Omega 3 fats regulate inflammation and suppress it. Omega 6 fats encourage inflammation. A balance between the two keeps your body just enough inflamed to fight off invaders and not too inflamed to be ‘allergic’ or in shock, which is a state of inflammation also. Since some studies stated that cholesterol was to blame for heart attacks, the witch hunt against fats began. The study has since been proven wrong, yet most doctors prescribe the cholesterol-lowering statins every day with dramatic negative consequences for the patient. Statins have not ever saved one life, yet they are highly harmful to our bodies. Fats have been misunderstood for quite some time. The cereal and sugar industry made us believe that cholesterol, which is built from fats, is the enemy and we should cut off all animal fat, eat margarine instead of butter, and eat grains instead. Of course, the cereal industry with a successful marketing campaign had everyone fooled for a long time. Cholesterol is made by your own body. Cholesterol is a structural component of cell walls and plays an integral role in membrane fluidity. It is necessary for protein sorting, signalling and communication between cells, and apoptosis, which is normal cell death. It is the building block of a lot of

hormones. They are called steroid hormones. Without cholesterol, you would not be able to form oestrogen, testosterone, aldosterone, calcitriol, cortisone, progesterone, vitamin D, Q10, and the adrenal gland hormones. These are all derived from cholesterol. To starve yourself of it is literally suicide in my opinion. The fact that cholesterol is found on the inside of blood vessels potentially causing heart-attacks through ischemia, is because cholesterol is trying to repair the damage done to the inside of blood vessels through constant irritation. This constant irritation is mainly caused by sugar. Again, the body is wise and has done this game of life for millions of generations. For someone to suddenly declare cholesterol as evil, while encouraging us to eat vast amounts of sugar, is again just a money-making exercise. The statin and the sugar industry, as I said, are making millions. To repeat: Fats provide the building block for cholesterol and fats are the building blocks for all cell membranes (phosphorus-lipid-double-membranes) and absolutely vital for the functioning of your brain!. What are Omega 3s and Omega 6s? Omega 3s are ‘the good fats.’ They are anti-inflammatory. We find them in fish and in grass fed meat. Omega 6s are ‘the bad fats.’ They are pro-inflammatory. They are found in seeds and seed oils. They are particularly high in canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil, and especially sunflower oil. The ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 should be one to one. Therefore, inflammation and anti-inflammation are in balance. The reality nowadays sadly is that Omega 3 to 6 is one to twenty, which is heavily on the inflammation side of the balance sheet. Our fat intake is highly pro-inflammatory. Examples of Inflammation are: Allergies Asthma Joint and muscle pain Depression Anxiety

New research has shown, that again, cattle in feedlots have a lot to answer for. When fed a high grain ration, the following happens: Cattle that are grain fed in feedlots are producing high Omega 6 (Bad). Cattle in grasslands produce the good Omega 3s. (Good) Again, having gone against nature and feeding a grass eater a high grain ratio, it doesn’t just make the cow sick, but the consumer also. I always like to say: ‘It’s not the cow, it’s the how.’ This is a very true slogan now in the Regenerative Agriculture space. It is not that meat is per se good or bad, but rather how the meat – and the fat – was grown is the crucial difference between healthy and sustainable meat and fat and ‘bad’ meat (for the environment, the cattle, or you). About fifty years ago, cattle in feedlots were starting to be fed canola as it is a cheap and highly energy intensive crop because of the high amount of seed oil in it. Cattle in feedlots got cancers everywhere in their bodies as quickly as after 100 days on canola oil. The industry needed another market and produced margarine: a hydrolysed, overheated, rancid, grey sludge that was made palatable and nice to look at by treating it with nickel, bleach, colours, and artificial flavours tastes added after the hydrolysing process. Yum. Say no more. But it’s got the heart foundation stamp on it. Crazy! ‘Saturated Fat May Save Your Life’ by Bruce Fife, N.D. is an in-depth book if you should be interested. Pete Evans, a popular chef and author supporting the ketogenic diet, and the Paleo movement, got it right in my opinion: Natural fats are good and necessary. The whole myth about cholesterol was a money-making exercise of the canola, cereal, soy, and pharmaceutical industry. Please refer to other texts about this; it would blow the size of this book out too much. Brain Fats Are Necessary for Your Brain We need fats to think. Forty percent of your brain is made of fats. Children with enough Omega 3s have the lowest risk of behavioural and learning problems later in life. Fat supplements reduce anxiety and depression. Fat supplements, especially Omega 3s, improve behaviour, dyslexia, ADHD, coordination, reading, and writing. Fats are in every cell membrane.

I will leave it here and refer you to other books about fats. Just remember: Fats are essential, and especially animal fats. Enjoy meat fats, but avoid any seed oil fat at all costs. Do not touch margarine. Can millions of years of evolution be so wrong? I must also mention trans-fats, which will hopefully be declared toxic soon, but are still in most baked goods you can buy in the supermarket. The newly developed trans-fats which help the food industry to get the biscuits just crunchy yet soft enough, also enter the brain and replace the beneficial fats with them. This can be visualised as taking a brick out of a wall and replacing it with polystyrene. I wonder what this does to our mental health? Most commercial baking goods contain trans-fats and again, the food industry is not taking advice to stop adding certain ingredients although an ingredient is harmful. A high starch diet with lots of sugar, with margarines – that were made from highly extracted vegetable oils, and highly processed, and chemically altered – are nowadays preferred to a traditional diet of meat and their containing fats. How bizarre. Big business is producing statins, big business is growing canola oil. Big business nowadays is growing glyphosate-sprayed Roundup-ready canola and … the heart-foundation puts a stamp on it. To me this is ironic and wrong. The truth is slowly coming out, but doctors are gagged to tell the truth. If a doctor here in town would have a patient with ‘high cholesterol,’ they simply can’t say: ‘Don’t worry about it.’ They would have the whole medical profession and pharmaceutical industry, the AMA, and the law disagreeing with them. I, personally, can say it to friends and family: “It’s the sugars that will kill you and cause heart-attacks, not cholesterol. You need cholesterol to live! Forty percent of your brain is fat! And it surely isn’t a trans-fat made in a lab you need.” Even in my position as a veterinarian, I feel like I must be careful. Only as a private person do I feel safe to speak my mind. Why would animal fat or fat in milk or cream, butter or fat on a steak be suddenly dangerous? Cholesterol-lowering drugs and polyunsaturated, manufactured oils, make men impotent and the statistics show higher rates of cancer. We as people have lived and enjoyed fats since the beginning of time. We

would hunt and fight for the fattiest bits. Heart attacks were only 10 percent of what they are now in the beginning and middle of the last century. What a weird coincidence, that a drug that makes millions and millions of dollars and an industry of highly refined fats tell the whole world that processed food and drugs is better than whole foods or a traditional steak. Other Oils In regards to oils, coconut oil is healthy and its production is not laden with problems as far as I know. Olive oil has the right amount of medium chain fatty acids in it and is also considered very good for you. However, it becomes unhealthy when heated to high temperatures as in frying. Animal fats, as they are pretty ‘saturated’ so therefore pretty stable, are good for frying and roasting. Lard or drippings have been used for centuries and are just fine. Duck fat is great and super tasty. Avoid any seed oils: Canola oil Margarine Sunflower oil Cottonseed oil

PROTEINS Proteins are probably the most unadulterated food source. Meat (but it must be grass-fed and free range), can be good for the environment if grown right, and is normally less contaminated with toxins. Proteins are mainly in eggs, meat, fish, and poultry and in some plants, especially in legumes. Proteins are made from building blocks that are called amino acids. Proteins are essential for life. I will leave the vegetarian debate out of here. I am a meat eater, but a very conscious one. I will not eat factory farmed pig or poultry and not eat grain-fed, feedlot-produced beef. I am lucky because I get pork from happy pigs that are produced at a client’s place and his pigs are spoiled. The beef comes from my friend Glenn, an organic farmer that lives nearby and his cattle are happy. Lamb comes from friends and my organic free-range chickens come from an organic producer nearby. My exhusband sometimes shoots a deer and catches fish. My chickens lay eggs. I am lucky though that I do not live in a city. If that is where you are, try to find an organic butcher. Again, the benefits for the animals and the farmer, the soil, and the whole ecosystem, including the atmosphere, are unbelievable. Feedlot-produced meat has multiple problems and I strongly discourage them and think they should be forbidden.

WHEAT AND GRAINS Recently, I had a vet student staying with me. She told me that as a child and teenager, she was dreadful. Moody, snappy, cranky, short-fused. Her mother then put her on a gluten-free diet and her personality completely changed. I was surprised about her having been a difficult teenager, because, now, in her early twenties, she is very calm, chilled, patient, and all-round lovely. She told me that whenever she eats anything with gluten or flour, she gets severe stomach cramps, bloating, and wind. Her story probably sounds familiar to a lot of people. I asked her if she would be brave enough to try my self-milled, truly wholegrain, organic wheat pancake, and she agreed. Miraculously to her (as expected to me), she had no symptoms after eating my pancakes. Why? Let me explain. My journey and knowledge about grains, specifically wheat, started over thirty years ago when my mother got breast cancer. It was a shock, but thankfully, my mother started to do her own research and discovered that there was more to the things we were eating. Margarine was healthy, right? We thought that white bread probably wasn’t as healthy as wholemeal but ‘what the hell, it can’t be that bad.’ Salads consisted of a few green leaves. Potatoes were a staple, but no one told us that they were grown and stored with chemicals. Food is food, I thought. How naïve. Nutrition was seldom talked about. These were the mid-eighties, and no one worried about what they were eating! No one had heard about Roundup before and in fact, Roundup started being used mainly after 1991. No one knew what happened in the paddocks. Farming has always been the same, right? Farmers grow healthy food and they themselves are rosy-cheeked bundles of health. They are the people closest to nature, aren’t they? My mother had the wisdom to look closer, and she found a book by Dr Otto Bruker, a German doctor with his own clinic that treated disease with healthy foods. His work changed my life. Thanks to his book and my mother, I started to

think about food and its connection to health. According to Dr Bruker, whole food is the building block of life. Food is the basic ingredient of health. And health is our default (otherwise mankind wouldn’t be here). It is intrinsic. Dr Bruker’s central message is simple: Eat whole foods. It doesn’t even matter what you eat, if it is whole and unaltered. And as I’ve been saying throughout this book, eat food that isn’t poisoned and is grown on healthy soils. Did you ever wonder why everyone seems to have gluten intolerance nowadays? Gluten intolerance and coeliac disease are real. In my opinion, they are due to these factors: Wheat and other cereal grain varieties that are bred and farmed are higher in gluten and the gluten molecule has been altered. Wheat varieties are often genetically modified. Glyphosate has been introduced since the early 1990s, has severe effects on the gut, and is used in wheat production. Modern farming uses artificial fertilizers and pesticides, killing the soil in which wheat and other cereals are grown in. Flour nowadays consists of only a fraction of the whole-wheat kernel. The beneficial parts of the grain have been removed. This namely is the germ and the germinative layer. What happened to our grains? The first breads were probably produced by grinding grains by hand between some rocks. Recent scholars suggest humans have been baking bread for at least 30,000 years. These were coarse, whole grain bread, and were made fluffier by ‘leavening’ them with yeasts and later sourdough. The grinding process was refined by the Mesopotamians who started using two flat circular stones stacked on top of each other and rotated to grind the grain. Gluten intolerance would have been unheard of. What happened? Where is the difference between the coarse and healthy wholegrain bread and the fluffy stuff that you can now buy in a plastic bag? What is the difference between wholegrain and wholemeal and why does it matter? Gluten intolerance is directly related to what we have done to the grain:

how we grow it and what happens when we process it. The previous chapter explained what happens when we are deficient minerals and vitamins. To a large extent, these deficiencies can be explained by how we process the grain, and how we grow grain in dead soils with the help of chemicals. Here is a quick definition of a few commonly used terms: White flour contains only the gluten and starches from the centre of the kernel. The germinative layers and bran are removed in the milling process. This is what most baked goods are made from. Its nutritious value is like sugar and very low. Wholemeal is only the outer layer (bran) plus the gluten and starch. The germ and the nutritious inner layer are missing. The only advantage to white flour is that it contains some fibre which your gut bacteria need. Most people believe this form is healthier. It is not. It is still deficient in all vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. Wholegrain is all the grain. This is the only form of flour that is healthy and whole, and the obvious difference is that the germ is still contained in it. Under normal circumstances, the grain is a little powerhouse of nutrition. The germ contains vitamin E, vitamin A, vitamin B1, vitamin B2, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, folic acid, riboflavin, niacin (B3); vitamin E, vitamin A, magnesium, zinc, manganese, potassium, iodine, copper, selenium, iron, fats (wheat germ oil), antioxidants, phytochemicals, and many more. These are contained in the germ and the small germinative layer surrounding the grain. Do you recognize some of these from my chapter about nutritional deficiencies? The outer layer of the wheat grain is the indigestible fibre, or bran. This fibre helps the gut movement and feeds the microbiome in our large intestine. The most inner compartment consists of gluten and starch: This is what we know as ‘white flour’ nowadays. It does not contain many minerals nor vitamins. For thousands of years, flour contained most vital nutrients that people needed, and the addition of yeast, sourdough, and water made the minerals

even more absorbable through the inactivation of phytic acid. When industrialised ways of production and distribution became widely spread in the late 1800s, producers wanted to store the grain for longer periods of time. The fat-containing wholegrain flour had the tendency to become rancid after a few months. Hence, millers and industry started to throw the best and healthiest part of the grain away – the germ and the inner layer – and with it, all the goodness mentioned above of vitamins, minerals, good fatty acid,s and other phytonutrients. Only the bran, the starch, and gluten core remain to serve as flour. In the sixties, scientists performed some rather interesting tests on rats and cats. Rats were fed with white flour alone or white flour with bran. The germ containing lipids, minerals, and vitamins were absent. All laboratory animals showed the same symptoms: They lost weight, their growth stopped, and disease, cancer, and death followed suit. They also became aggressive towards each other. If sick animals were given access to the whole grain again, even if ever such little amounts, they recovered. The whole grain is ‘the holy grail.’ It has all the answers magically and perfectly combined. All those vital nutrients are contained in the germ of cereal grains. Please be aware that when you buy ‘normal bread’ in a bakery or in the supermarket it is the extracted ‘starch-and-gluten-only-version’ of the grain. If you buy ‘wholemeal’ and think this is healthier, you’re going to be disappointed. Some bran might have been added, but sadly no more nutrients or vitamins will be there because the germ and germinative layer have been removed. For the past thirty years, I’ve had a small flour mill in my house. Since my mum was diagnosed with cancer and learned about the importance of eating whole foods – and in particular whole grains – I have baked and cooked with organic wheat, spelt, or rye, and always freshly mill it at home on my kitchen bench.

I grind my own organic flour for pancakes, cakes, for waffles, and even for gravies. The taste of wholegrain self-milled flour is a bit nuttier than the white fluff you can buy, but it is richer in taste. It is super easy as the mill is permanently in my kitchen. I pour the wheat (organic of course) into the top funnel, press the button, and flour exits the spout. The immediate use of the flour has another advantage: The vitamins and proteins have not yet been oxidised for a week or for months through the exposure to air. In ‘the olden days’ we would mill the flour and bake it very

soon afterwards. Now it is milled and then bleached and stored for months. To prevent weevils, a lot of the grain gets treated before milling as well. One of my clients has had leukaemia for the last three years, like so many people that live and work in agriculture. He noticed some bugs in his stored grain and fumigated the silo and the toxins that he inhaled were so strong that he got another bout of leukaemia and was acutely

sick for a whole week. Another farmer I talked to advised me that the

chemical to poison weevils must be put onto the back of his truck and one is not allowed to carry it inside the driver’s cubicle, because the fumes that are emitted even when the chemical is in its packaging can be lethal. What to Do Now? Eat the whole grain. Remember, wholemeal is not wholegrain. Get yourself a flour mill (‘Schnitzer’ makes beautiful ones). I have had my mill from ‘Schnitzer’ since I was a student, and for thirty years I have been making my own flour with the same machine!! It might cost you a little upfront but what an investment in your health! I buy a calico bag of whole grain, biodynamic wheat or whatever grain I fancy, and push it through my mill when I am cooking. My son Keanu, who is the ‘man-of-gravy’ (his gravies are the best!) could demonstrate how he chucks a small handful of wheat into the mill, pushes a button, and twenty seconds later, he has his fresh, truly wholegrain, non-oxidised flour to put into the gravy. Regularly, on a Sunday morning, I pour the wheat into the mill, make my flour, and make the healthiest pancakes by adding organic eggs, organic milk, and maybe a bit of honey. Yum! Carbs that are actually good for you! Other whole grains could be chia, linseed in moderation, oats, rye, barley – whatever. The main thing is to eat whole and organically grown grains. Sprouting – So Easy and Good for You! I often sprout wheat. This increases the vitamin content enormously and make this into a powerhouse of health. When I sprout wheat and eat it, I can truly feel the energy it gives me. (Of course, the wheat to sprout must be organic or, better even, biodynamic.) It takes about three days soaked in water for the wheat to sprout. This is its most nourishing state with vitamins multiplied and abundant. You will need three tablespoons of wheat in a shallow dish. Dab them with water until they are drowning in it. Keep overnight. In the morning, quickly rinse off the metabolites that swim on the

surface and make it a bit slimy. This is a good sign that the wheat grain has started to activate. Moisten at night. Repeat.

After two to three days, depending on the time of year and the temperature, a small white germ about two to three millimetres long will form.

Bite into it: It is very sweet and soft! The germ is activated and the amounts of the vitamins B, vitamin E, and vitamin A have multiplied exponentially. The sprouted wheat kernels form the basis for my muesli. Add fruit, yoghurt, nuts, a grated apple, maybe a bit of honey or lemon – yum. Sprouted wheat is a powerhouse of health. A true superfood. The cancer protecting vitamin E has multiplied. The B vitamins can work their magic for your nervous system. One word to sweetening with sugar: Sugar uses up B vitamins and should be used only sparingly. Here is a very easy recipe to make your own sourdough bread: Buy a sourdough starter culture from a health food shop. Pour the starter on some organic rye flour and let it ferment at room temperature for four days until it smells sour. This is now your culture that you can use for years to come. How to make bread: Take the starter culture which is about half a cup full. Pour in about 800 grams of flour. I grind my own wheat in my flour mill and put half wheat and half rye into the mixture. Then I add water until a paste is formed that I can easily stir around. Let this mixture ferment for 12 to 24 hours. Take two tablespoons of the mixture out for your next bread. You can put this in the fridge to wait until you are ready for your next bread. Stir in about half a tablespoon of salt, and two teaspoons of yeast, and pour it in the bread maker. If you don’t have a bread maker, you can stir it again and put it into a form and treat it like a yeast dough: Let it rise for about 1.5 hours and then bake at 180 C. It couldn’t be easier. I don’t even measure the amount of flour or water; I

just make it into a thick slurry; this always creates a beautiful and moist bread. Of course, you can add spices or other ingredients like pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, nuts, chia seeds, or whatever else you fancy. I vary my amounts of rye and wheat also. Rye creates a very dark bread and wheat a lighter shade of brown. It is so yummy! In hindsight, my mum says it was a blessing that she had her cancer scare and started learning about the benefits of whole foods just in time. My parents are now eighty and eighty-one years old and are still active. They even go ballroom dancing! I was lucky to have changed my diet to an organic and whole food diet thirty years ago. My family and I are healthy and have hardly had any trips to the doctors. Apart from the normal colds and coughs, we have no other ‘modern’ diseases. I feel blessed that I learned about food a long time ago.

SUMMARY Whole meal is hardly better than white flour. Wholemeal is not whole grain Flour has lost its vital and healthy ingredients. Flour and grains nowadays are grown on dead and poisoned soils and are therefore nutrient deficient. To regain full health, even a small number of whole grains containing the germinal layer and the germ can be eaten. Every conventional flour-derived product is deficient (bread, biscuits, pasta, cakes, pancakes, self-baked cakes). ‘Normal’ flour is deficient and full of poisons (when grown and when stored). Gluten intolerance is a product of extracted flour and Roundup. Stop eating all of those ‘carbs.’ Action Steps Stop eating anything with conventional flour. Stop buying commercial biscuits (yes, even Tim Tam). Buy yourself a flour mill. At least buy organic wholemeal flour, but be aware that even this is lacking in nutrients because the germ was thrown away. Start your own sourdough culture. Have fun with it. The wholesome goodness of bread could be one of the pillars of health – not just physical, but also mental health.

10

LOOKING AT FOOD IN MY PANTRY

I

always find it satisfying to convert my knowledge about theory into daily practice. To make this easy for you, let us have a look at my pantry. What do I eat? What will you not find in my household? Has it worked for me? I told you a lot about what the different poisons in chemical agriculture can do to you, and what deficiencies can do to you. So, let’s get very practical. What you will not find in my pantry: Anything nonorganic or not home grown. Anything in cans: The inside covering of the cans have ‘hormone disruptors’ on it. Anything commercially baked, because it will contain trans-fats, high amount of sugar and white, bleached, extracted, probably genetically modified wheat. Pasta: Non-organic Pasta heat is high in gluten – this and the Roundup cause disease. Ice-creams: very high in all sorts of chemicals. Breads, buns, hot-crossed buns, cakes, birthday cakes: These products will have high amounts of gluten, chemicals, genetically modified grains, additives like preservatives and sugars. Soft drinks: Soft drinks are high in sugars – if they are low in calories, they will probably have artificial sweeteners in them

which are highly toxic excitotoxins. They are highly addictive. Lollies: Most lollies are high in sugars and colours. A website called ‘PAN,’ short for Pesticide Action Network, is a good and quick app that can show you what is in and on your food. It is a North American website and you can find it under: http://www.whatsonmyfood.org/ action.jsp You can download it onto your phone and you can take this with you when you go shopping. This website shows: Strawberries – Grown on completely chemically sterilised soils. Over 30 pesticides used. Apples – 47 Pesticide Residues Found by the USDA Pesticide Data Program 1,2,3 Broccoli – 33 Pesticide Residues Found by the USDA Pesticide Data Program 1,2,3 Lettuce – 52 Pesticide Residues Found by the USDA Pesticide Data Program 1,2,3 Milk – Four Pesticide Residues Found by the USDA Pesticide Data Program 1,2,3. Only Four. These are not nice, but hey, only Four!! You can check out most fruit and vegetables for residues and implications. It is frightening. If you study the PAN website closer, you will be made aware of what effects the chemicals can have. Some are classed as being cancerogenic, some as harming the unborn child, some as being severely toxic to aquatic life. Most additives are all of the above. It is a very sobering read, when you realise that your food is not just covered in one chemical but often in ten, twenty or even more. Please consider, that the stated toxic side effects of those poisons have mostly not even been studied in combination. This means that if chemical A causes a disease, and B causes another one, the combination of the two could have yet another effect. And the cumulative consequence of eating chemicals three

times a day or more for 30, 40, or 70 years has not been studied either. On the APVMA (Australian Pharmaceutical and Veterinary Medicine Authority) website, one can find most substances and how their safety was tested. You will read that, for example, substance A has been tested on one rat for one day and one application and no side effect has been found, therefore it is safe for agriculture and human consumption. I encourage you to have a look, the lack of testing will surprise you. Therefore, the easy way out, in fact the only way to avoid these chemicals, is to eat organic. What do I have in my pantry and fridge? All items stated here are organic – as much as I can find. If an organic option is not available, I will not ‘starve to death’ but eat the ‘normal’ version if I truly want the item. Knowing what I know now, though, it makes me nowadays slightly uncomfortable. However, you can only do what you can do, and I guess if I eat 80 to 90 percent organic, my body – or the bodies of my children – might handle the rest. May I also just say that I am a very busy businesswoman, veterinarian, and mother and am not a great cook. For me, in my time-poor existence, I don’t spend hours on fancy meals. It is all pretty basic – but that doesn’t matter, as all ingredients are pure and healthy. Even ‘meat and three veg’ is okay; there is nothing wrong with it. My pantry My oils: Olive oil, cold pressed Coconut oil Butter Lard Cream Baked goods: None Grains and flours:

Whole wheat to mill into flour Whole oats to roll in my oat roller Quinoa Chia Whole rye for bread Nuts: Almonds Pecan Macadamia Cashews Brazil Dried fruit: Sultanas Apricots Apple Rice and Pasta: Wholemeal pasta Brown rice Vegetables and fruit: Whatever’s seasonal Meat/ Fish/ Chicken: Grass-fed and organic Fish only a little as the oceans are overfished and I’d rather leave the fish there Free range

Local Coffee and tea: Any, but all organic Milk/dairy: Full fat, unhomogenised Not pasteurised if available (this refers to raw milk which by law is not allowed to be sold commercially) Full fat cheeses – often I can’t find organic cheeses and use ‘normal’ cheese Organic yoghurt – or at least live yoghurt Organic feta Eggs: Organic or from my own chickens Sugar and sweeteners: Organic brown sugar Organic raw sugar Honey (organic and/ or local) Organic maple syrup for pancakes Wine and beer: Organic beer Organic wine Organic cider With these ingredients, one can vary meals, cook, bake, and indulge and you can be happy with the knowledge that you are eating wholesome,

nutritious, and un-poisoned food that is not genetically modified. It is relatively simple, once you are set up.

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT WHY NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW Most of us have a romanticised view of how food is grown. Nowadays, this couldn’t be further from the truth. So why don’t many people know what I am talking about? This is one problem: The universities teach the young farmers chemical agriculture without looking at the human and environmental health problems this causes. Students at agricultural universities are taught chemical agriculture, involving artificial fertilisers and chemical inputs. Soil science is still in its infancy, like the knowledge about the gut microbiome is also. Only in the last ten years or so have people started looking at the biology, the bacteria, fungi, protozoa, etc. in the soil. Universities are simply not teaching it yet, as the databases and ‘double-blind studies’ will take a long time to develop. It is one thing if I, a veterinarian, say: ‘Hey, this all seems to fit together, look at this anecdotal evidence, I think I have a point...,’ but another, if a scientific organisation like a university, that will be scrutinised by an international community of scientists, wants to teach the same. I have no doubt that my connections are ‘right,’ that I have a point in advising to eat natural food rather than chemically grown and processed food. But I do not have any double-blind, peer-reviewed studies that I could put into an international scientific magazine. Nor do I want to, by the way. It takes years and years of research, money, and time. I’d rather trust that nature had it right. Another reason why it is not well known, is that who would bother looking? When you do look on the website of, for example, Australian Bayer Crop Science, you will see a website with beautiful pictures of lush countryside. Chemicals have powerful names and are advertised with the qualities that are practical to a farmer, e.g., ‘high flowablility,’ ‘mixes easily,’ ‘high strike rate even if plants are becoming resistant to other herbicides,’ ‘fast strike down effect….’ The toxic nature of the chemicals is on a different level on the site, readily visible for anyone that bothers looking. But who does? Not many people. We are all too busy, we do not think that we would understand, and, anyway, we are not the expert and have no idea. I understand that completely. Before I started researching and questioning

this, I had no idea either. At least, in my case, I have a scientific background and can understand the topic. However, the average person can’t. If you are a teacher or an accountant, a shopkeeper or bartender … how would you ever even think of questioning where your food comes from and how it is grown? Sadly, this impacts all of us at the most basic level of health, fertility, and wellbeing, and as shown now multiple times, it affects the health of our planet tremendously. But hardly anyone feels qualified to comment. Farmers get taught at universities. As the saying goes: ‘Follow the money.’ Big agrichemical companies can sponsor people and universities, where research is conducted. Small, alternative, individual, organic or regenerative farms do not have money or influence. Regenerative agriculture is a grassroots movement, not a government-supported enterprise. Farmers do not understand because nobody taught them. They are caught in a vicious cycle: They must produce a crop to pay for the high cost of these ‘inputs’ and the infrastructure. I understand that completely. In a wet summer like 2020/ 2021, insects, mice, and fungi threaten your thousands of dollars of commodity that are in your field. It is a big ask to a farmer to forfeit that income. I do so understand! The knowledge of soil (as the knowledge about the gut microbiome) has only just started. Everyone was very ignorant and thought that a few minerals would make soil fertile, which is so far from the truth. But we have only just started to question and research. And where would research money come from? For these fundamental questions, money is very sparse, if not completely unavailable. As my student Ping said: The professor must get funding from the government. He has a lot of competition from his peers, and if he does not get governmental approval within three years, he will be sacked. This alters the choice of his research subject already, to make it relevant for a government agenda rather than the ‘common good.’ However, the consequences of industrialised farming are horrendous for your health and for the environment. We simply cannot continue. If Dr Zach Bush and his research team are right, then a society, where every third child is autistic and every old woman suffering from Alzheimer’s, is simply not sustainable. It will cause societal breakdown and will be, even just from an economical viewpoint, a disaster of the biggest magnitude. Agrichemical businesses are very powerful and sell a lot of product, so the pressure on farmers is high and alternative growing methods that use less fertilisers and no chemicals are not supported.

Farms are big in Australia, and chemical farming is very convenient. You do the same thing every year: Spray it out, plant, spray to keep pests away, and spray to kill fungus. You do what is convenient to get your crop to the market. Nutrient density is not asked for. Poison residues are accepted. Again, if you ‘follow the money,’ it leads you to the powerful food industry, which is certainly not the organic industry! Who would truly be interested in finding out, how toxic and nutrient poor food is? The supermarkets? Probably not. The food companies? Probably not. The powerful pharmacological industry? Certainly, not. Independent universities? They should, but as mentioned above, they need to get funding and research dollars, which is decided by governmental organisations, which in turn often are not independent either. Furthermore, most farms are out of reach and sight. If you live on the coast or in Sydney, your likelihood of coming to the wheat belt several hundred kilometres inland is slim. And you would have to go onto a farm and in a farmer’s shed to have a look what is sprayed. Farmers do not, in general, advertise the fact that they have just sprayed 20,000 acres with highly toxic substances that are poisoning the river or extracting water from the MurrayDarling. The change from ‘natural’ agriculture to chemical agriculture was insidious. Farmers, like my father-in-law, got told by industry that putting certain fertilisers on your field will give you increased yields and therefore money. This might have even worked for several years – now, though, increasingly farmers experience that nothing is growing properly anymore – the dead end has been reached. Dead soils only produce when you put a lot of artificial fertilisers on it, which makes growing a crop harder and harder and the farmers get more and more into debt. It is a terrible scenario. I know so many farmers that changed their ways to organic or regenerative methods when they hit this wall. They were pushed into a corner of despair, depression, and debt. The ones that ‘jumped the leap of faith,’ and educated themselves on field days and courses, are discovering magic again. They discover the regeneration of their soils and in fact, their lives. As I did. This is always done from an individual pain point and there are no large organisations supporting these farmers – apart from you, the consumer! Doctors are in a similar quandary. Their research is conducted by ‘big

pharma,’ who in turn has not got ‘health on their agenda.’ They make money by selling drugs to sick people. Think about it: Who would make money from an organic farm which needs no chemicals and no fertilisers, but the little farmer? No one. That is why the only way to change the whole food system is through you. When you and I, the consumers, are demanding healthy food by voting with our dollars, then change in farming will happen. And not the other way around. There are some amazing regenerative farmers out there, but until now, they do not get paid a premium for their product. In fact, there is not even a label that says ‘grown on a regenerative farm.’ The organic label is the only label at present, and whilst it is not perfect, it is the best system there is at this moment in time. Choose with your dollars – it is the only possible way to induce change in the agricultural system. When I go to Byron Bay, a trendy and hip, very alternative holiday destination in Australia, I can feel the vibe of the young people that are into permaculture and organic food. They have set out to make it ‘sexy and fashionable’ – and that makes me very hopeful. If organic food becomes the trendy thing to do, I get hope!

CATTLE CAN SAVE THE PLANET OR IT’S NOT THE COW, IT’S THE HOW As an obvious environmentalist and scientist that is highly concerned about planet and health, you might wonder why I am speaking up for cattle. You might have even suspected that I am a vegetarian or vegan?! I am not, and with conviction. I do understand if people don’t want to eat meat because they feel for the animal being slaughtered and inhumanely kept. I couldn’t agree more. I am vehemently against feedlots, chickens in battery hens, pigs in stalls, fish in cages. Anything to do with industrialised animal husbandry is appalling and must be stopped, in my opinion. I feel, nobody gave us the right to ‘use’ and plunder animals for our own pleasure or money. If we do so, which I can agree with as being part of the big circle of life, we must do it responsibly and with respect. Cattle on my own farm have a great life. They are out in the ‘bush,’ they eat, reproduce, rear their young – for the thirteen or even fifteen years that they are alive. Then they might have what farmers here call ‘one bad moment.’ But they had a good life where they could behave according to their nature. Chickens on organic farms that can walk around, scratch the grass, eat worms, lay eggs, and can behave like chickens do, to eventually have ‘one bad moment’: that to me is acceptable. Free range pigs, like on my friend’s farm, are happy ‘as pigs in mud.’ Without getting into a discussion about vegetarianism and all its different aspects, I would like to acknowledge that I respect everyone’s opinion. I also acknowledge the fact that vegetarians and me have so much in common: We both want to do good and save the planet. I absolutely get that and honour it!! However, there are a few things that just should be put straight. There is a huge misconception that ‘fake meat’ and vegetarianism is better for the environment. It is not. When you compare a green paddock with cows to a field that was ploughed and poisoned, you can see the difference. Growing crops in conventional agriculture is the worst for the environment of all, far worse

than running cattle in a paddock. Everything that I have talked about in this book, the carbon emissions from ploughed fields and from fertilisers, the poisoning of rivers and oceans through pesticides, the killing of the soils, the deforestation to grow more wheat, the genetically modifying of wheat, soy, or chickpeas to be ‘RoundupReady,’ the insecticides on vegetables and fruit trees – that’s where the problem is. The problem lies in conventional agriculture and how it produces food commodities. It’s not the vegetable or the wheat per se, but rather how it is grown. Growing vegetables, fruit, or grains in organic or regenerative farms is okay. Less harm is done here. Organic corn is okay, as is organic soy. But as soon as it is not organic, you know you will have all the poisons thrown at the crop – sometimes up to twenty times a year. Buying a fake burger that is grown with monoculture-poisoned wheat, genetically modified “Roundup and 2,4-D-Ready” soy, extracted starches, and emulsifiers, grown on dead soil … that is not my idea of either healthy or environmentally friendly. It is, in fact, everything I abhor about an unnatural life where big business yet again tries to sell you an artificial product and call it healthy. No!!!!! However, apart from cattle (if they are not in feedlots eating abovementioned soy and wheat) being less harmful than a ploughed field to the environment, I would like to tell you that, in addition, they are the good guys that can save the planet. Let me please say that of course I abhor the killing of the Amazon through greedy developers and cattle ranchers. This is not why I argue. A lot of country has been destroyed through cattle. What I do want to say is, that when done responsibly and right, ruminants can have a massively good influence on environment and soil. We have to produce food somehow for all of us (and our pets), but how we do this, is the key. This truly might surprise you, because whenever we talk in public about climate change, we seem to blame cattle. And now I am telling you the opposite?! The fact is: It is not the cow per se, but it is how the cow is grazed. Cattle grazed in a ‘holistic rotational grazing system’ can sequester carbon at a speed that nothing else can! Although forests are recognized as obvious carbon reserves, the vast grasslands of the planet are far more effective at extracting carbon and

converting it to soil. And this is where cattle can work magic. My farm, if it is not in the drought, is a beautiful ecosystem. Gowrie, as my property is called, has got herons, eagles, lots of kangaroos, ducks, and cormorants. There are fish and frogs in the dams, galahs and cockatoos in the trees, lizards and snakes to keep an eye out for. The cattle live within this environment. The cows have their social order and an ‘auntie’ is always looking after the little calves, while the mothers are foraging. Tractors, ploughs, or other farm machinery that guzzle fossil fuels are not needed. Mustering is done by us on motorbikes, but I always wanted to go back to using horses, like a lot of farmers still do around here. No poisons are sprayed on Gowrie. It is green and clean. Cattle are the main hope that we have to save the planet. Judith Schwartz, an American author, put it simply with the book, Cows Save the Planet. Cattle are not the culprits – they can be the solution. Here is how:

THE MAGIC OF GRASSLANDS Before white settlers arrived, America had about 60 million bison and ten million elk. The bison would start their summer journey in the south of the continent and walk in massive herds towards the north. They would eat the grass on the large prairies and trample the remaining grass with their cloven feet and leave droppings behind, creating amazingly fertile soil. You heard that right: They created the fertile soil. About five months later, the herd of bison would migrate south again and eat the new growth of the grasses, repeating the cycle. This worked for thousands of years and it created very fertile ground with a magnificent water-holding ability which was high in organic matter and humus. The landscapes were vibrant. Grazing management known as ‘rotational grazing’ or ‘cell-grazing’ mimics this cycle and was made popular by Alan Savory in his ‘Holistic Management’ framework. [watch Allan Savory, YouTube: Ted Talk: How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change] The principle is that any grass-eating animal stimulates fresh growth by eating the grasses down to a ‘juvenile level.’ Grass, like any living thing, only has one aim in life: It wants to reproduce. When grass reaches a certain length (depending on the species of grass), it will produce seed heads, then become brown and die because it has done its job! You all know that when lawns haven’t been mown, they grow tall and then turn brown. Their life cycle is over. A mown lawn though stays green and lush. The cattle are like lawn mowers. They eat the seed heads and reduce the height of the grass down to a ‘juvenile’ stage again. I always describe it as the grass saying: ‘Oh, my babies are gone, I have to wake up and produce some more!’ Grass will ‘wake up’ and start photosynthesising and growing again. It will be green and it will draw down CO2 to produce its own biomass. The grass, which is now actively growing again, pushes sugars into the ground, which again feeds the soil microbes These help to solubilise minerals and produce nutrients, which in turn feed the new growth in the

plant. This activity is the sequestration of CO2. The cow pads (bison pads) and the urine are nature’s own fertilizers and with the help of bacteria that live in the cow pad, the droppings are recycled back into the soil. The cloven feet trample the faeces and the leftover grass down, so that it comes in contact with the ground and in contact with the soil microbiome. The soil bacteria and fungi can ‘digest’ or compost the organic material and use it for food. The soil life can eat and multiply and can build up humus. In most ecosystems, cloven footed animals are tremendously important. This process can increase the organic matter in the soil by such a large amount, that it could lower the CO2 amount in the atmosphere as well as reviving dead soils. And it does it fast!!! Alan Savory learned this the hard way. He removed animals from African ecosystems and created deserts – until he learned that ‘trampling animals’ that eat vegetation are the key to constantly renewing the landscape and keeping it fertile and stopping desertification. It is truly incredible and very counterintuitive. But more and more farmers recognise this and Regenerative Farming uses cattle and, to a lesser degree, sheep to improve their land. Rotational grazing practices, where large amount of cattle stay for a short time, like two or three days only, in one paddock, and eat it down to about seven cm height evenly, are the cornerstone of land regeneration. Good grasses are encouraged and the fertility of the soil increases with unbelievable speed. Carbon content rises very fast – truly magical to watch. As the soil can store more carbon than the air and plants combined, there is a tremendous carbon sink waiting to be used and explored by cattle or other ruminants in grasslands. It is estimated that by increasing the organic matter in an area the size of America by as little as 1 percent, we could safely store all the CO2 that all motor vehicles on earth create.

GRASS OR TREES? Are trees or grass better for the environment? Usually, people say trees. I love trees, don’t get me wrong. They are beautiful, essential, shade giving, habitat forming wonders of nature. This argument should never be about trees or grass. It should be trees and grass. There are terms for it now like agroforestry or silvopasture. We simply need both. Variety is the key. Grasslands, however, are the winner in the quantity and speed of carbon sequestration. They're fast growing and therefore, their carbon storing and humus building capacity is second to none. To my knowledge, it is only surpassed by bamboo. Grasslands support a massive amount of wildlife and are, in most cases, not fertilized nor treated with pesticides or herbicides. They are awesome and healthy ecosystems. In addition, no big harvester puffing out fossil fuels is needed. The cattle-created humus is the ‘black crumbly stuff’ of soil. It is a stable, plasma-like complex formed by the microbes in the soil. It is full of carbon in the form of sugar, complex carbohydrates, fat chains, proteins, and living organisms. Humus supports the natural cycle of growing plants. My friend Glenn Morris’ master degree was written about how much the water holding capacity on one hectare of soil can increase, if the increase in organic matter is as little as 1 percent. It is as much as 160,000 litres! This is such a contrast to farmed land, especially monoculture or any cropping country, where water either runs off or takes ages to sink in because the ground is dead and hard! Through overgrazing and ‘set-stocking,’ – where cattle stay in the same paddock most of the time – on the other hand, we have denuded our landscapes with livestock. Charged as guilty. Even here in my district, it is amazing how people still leave their cattle in small mobs in the same paddocks all year. Again, it is not the cow, it’s the how. Forty percent of the world’s landmass is arid or semiarid. Argentina, large parts of North America, Mongolia, China, large parts of Russia, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, large parts of Australia, and Sub-Saharan Africa are all in that category and are waiting to be magically transformed by

‘the magic of ruminants’ into once-again thriving ecosystems. At the moment though, these places are turning into desert fast through overgrazing, chemical farming, and climate change. [here] Soil used to have between 8 and 20 percent of organic matter – industrialized agriculture has dropped this percentage to below 1 percent on a massive and global scale. My farm had only 0.8 percent when I took over its management.... Over-grazing, cropping, large monocultures, and poisons all take their toll on soil and have killed most soil life, denuded landscapes, and allowed topsoil to blow away. Thanks to modern agriculture, the carbon that should be stored in the soil, has been released into the atmosphere, heavily contributing to global warming. Estimates vary, but 20-40 percent of all greenhouse gases are due to agriculture and the way we farm nowadays. While this is a huge problem, it is also the planet’s largest potential for hope. We can easily increase the carbon from 0.8 percent to 5, 6, or 7 percent through holistic grazing management in as short as two to six years. The potential of this is massive! Alan Savory, the founder of “The Savory Institute,’ and advocate for the potential of ruminants in landscapes to stop and reverse desertification, demonstrated this in several different countries. As he says: ‘The vast amount of semi-arid landscapes, which make up about 40 percent of our total landmass, are the largest “empty carbon storage sink” on earth with the potential to draw down carbon back into the landscape while increasing soil fertility and water binding capacity.’ He proved repeatedly, even in the most dehydrated landscapes, that a reversal to lush local ecosystems is possible in a very short time, as short as two to four years. The potential of this is so vast, that it is estimated that climate change can be reversed through holistic grazing management alone. It sounds too good to be true. We need to teach farmers how to rotate their cattle and we must provide farmers with the infrastructure such as fences and water troughs so that they can mimic a migration cycle like the bison in America. In my view, if we grow cattle that are happy and healthy and not stressed during their lifetime, it is okay to include them in the cycle of life.

THE TROUBLE WITH FEEDLOTS However, from an ethical, scientific and ecological point of view, I absolutely abhor feedlots. As mentioned before, about 60 million bison and ten million elk lived in America. They populated the landscape and supported a lot of wildlife. Nowadays, the USA has 50 million cattle. This is very close to even. So, it is not the case that we have too many ruminants in America. In fact, there are less. However, cattle on farms often aren’t managed on a rotational grazing system and end up overgrazing the landscape. The cattle then enter the feedlots. Sometimes, cattle stay for 70 days, sometimes they stay for 365 days, like those in the Wagyu market. During this time, the cattle are locked in small areas, often subject to heat, cold, and wind with no shelter. They are also subject to being in large groups, which stresses them immensely. As a veterinarian, I can also tell you that feedlots have a standing order of antibiotics with their feedlot vet. The cattle mostly arrive stressed at the feedlot. Stress and crowding bring out infectious diseases, of which pneumonia is the number one killer. To treat this, expensive and strong antibiotics are used in large quantities. Amongst other problems, this contributes to the growing concern of multi-resistant germs. Have you heard that it is feared that in as short as five years’ time any routine operation will not be possible anymore, because hospital germs will have become resistant to every antibiotic? I frequently see in my clinic, that nine out of ten antibiotics do not work anymore. This is frightening, and isn’t helped by the overuse of antibiotics in feedlot cattle. Treating sick animals is one reason that feedlots use antibiotics. Please remember, that if these cattle would be allowed to eat grass on a farm in a paddock, they wouldn’t be stressed and they wouldn’t need antibiotics in the first place. The other, more concerning problem is that these cattle are fed such a high ratio of grain that their rumen (their large first stomach) becomes acidic. To counteract this, it is routine that the grain ration is accompanied by

antibiotics that are pre-mixed into the feed and fed to cattle in feedlots daily, increasing the potential for resistance to develop. Cattle are fed antibiotics like virginiamycin, monensin or lasalocid to keep the bacteria in some sort of order and balance. They are fed at ‘sub-therapeutic levels,’ a complete disaster! This will create resistant germs for sure. Monensin and lasalocid are highly toxic for anything but a ruminant. I just saved a horse for a client that ate a few calf pellets. The horse lived, just, but only just, with a lot of expensive treatment. Those two drugs dissolve muscle tissue. The horse that I just treated had a CK level of 100,000 units – it should be about 90. This is the same enzyme we measure when a dog gets bitten by a snake. Snake venom also destroys muscle tissue. These antibiotics dissolve muscle tissue, including the heart muscle. I wonder what it does to humans if it is in the meat? If we consider that cattle are fed grain to make the meat tastier and to fatten cattle fast for a market that chases ‘tender steak,’ the environmental and welfare price of this, in my opinion, is too high. Feedlots need vast amounts of grain. The prairies that used to sustain 60 million bison and elk are now used to grow the grain that is being used to feed the 50 million cattle that are spending weeks and months in American feedlots. The grain, of course, is grown in vast areas of monocultures with degraded soils. If we take the cattle out of the feedlots, let them work their magic and create healthy grass-fed beef, we could heal vast areas of land and sequester huge amounts of CO2 in the revived soils. We, of course, can and should eat less meat. But meat, produced on farms that resemble my own, where the cows or sheep can roam, is as humane, natural, and ecologically sound as food production can be. It seems weird that we dig out 150 million tonnes per day of fossil fuels, drive cars, use electricity, poison our world with plastics and chemicals, poison and kill all soil on which we grow food, are fracking and releasing an incredible amount of methane through that – and then we blame the cattle, who have always been here! And even worse, we think we can create ‘sustainable meat’ in a laboratory in a factory. We are a crazy bunch, we humans.

THE IMPOSSIBLE BURGERS I personally doubt that we can produce artificial meat in a laboratory where we don’t mess nature up yet again. Artificial meat also needs ingredients. These are either sugar, grown in monocultures yet again, or peas, lentils, wheat, or soy – again grown in mostly industrial agricultural systems. Soy, wheat, canola, sugar beet, and corn, common ingredients of vegetarian food, are genetically modified to be ‘Roundup or 2,4-D resistant.’ Having genetically modified crops to be resistant to those herbicides enables farmers to use even more of these chemicals. In the last ten years, the use of the chemicals as a response to the GM crops has gone up ten to fifteen times. It is more important how the food is grown than what is grown. Beef grown in grasslands is beneficial; beef grown in feedlots is not. Wheat or sugar grown on organic farms can be non-harmful and beneficial for the soil, but the same ingredients grown on industrial farms are very detrimental.

WHAT ABOUT METHANE? On the matter of methane, I must add that the net sequestration of carbon through cattle in rotational grazing systems in grasslands is positive, meaning they sequester more carbon than they emit through increasing the organic matter in the soil as shown above. Scientists nevertheless are in the process of investigating a seaweed that can stop methane production in cattle, which would reduce this admittedly harmful emission of ruminants and be one aspect of speeding up the healing of our planet.

THE MAGIC OF THE RUMEN Again, I want you to understand this so that you can make choices of what you eat and what is best for you and best for the planet. As previously described in ‘The Carbon cycle,’ all plants are the result of photosynthesis. Plants build up simple sugars, which is either simple sugar or complex carbohydrates. We can class these as either starches (potatoes, grain, rice, pumpkin) or cellulose. Humans and other non-ruminants can digest starches. You may notice that your blood sugar gets very high very shortly after eating pasta, or potato, or a toast, or sugary jam. Our body can split the starch-chain into simple sugars in five minutes. Easy. That’s why you should cut potatoes and other starches out of your diet if you are a diabetic. Cellulose, however, is what we call fibre and we cannot digest this. It reaches our hind guts undigested and is some nourishment for the bacteria in our colon. The rumen is the first stomach of ruminants. It’s nearly as big as a bath tub. Ruminants are mammals that can acquire nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting it in the rumen before digestion. This mainly happens through microbes. Ruminants include cattle, sheep, goats, giraffe, deer, gazelles, and antelopes. All up, about 200 species. When cattle eat cellulose in the form of grass or hay, the bacteria in the rumen are the tool to split up cellulose. The bacteria split the cellulose into small pieces and produce so-called volatile fatty acids. These are then absorbed into the cow’s bloodstream and are the building blocks for fats and proteins. Therefore, against what we all might think, ruminants have a high fat diet!! The soup of bacteria and protozoa in the rumen subsequently then enters the third and fourth stomach and gets digested as ‘meat.’ The mass of bacteria is the cow’s meat source. Therefore, their diet is a high protein diet! And you thought cattle were vegetarians…!?!? They only pretend to be! That’s why cows are so special: They make sunlight into food. That’s enough about cattle’s physiology. The important thing to remember is that only ruminants are good at digesting cellulose. Humans

cannot live on grass, but cattle can. We of course can and should eat less meat. No doubt.

SUMMARY Cattle can save the planet. It’s not the cow it’s the how. Cattle in grasslands (grass-fed) or organic can be good for the environment (and for you). Cattle in feedlots (grain-fed) are bad for the environment ( and for you). Action Steps Buy grass fed meat. Buy organic meat. Don’t buy grain-fed meat. If vegetarian: Buy organic.

11

THE MASCULINE AND THE FEMININE

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ou might be surprised of the jump from agriculture, food, medicine, and science to a rather spiritual topic. I pondered a lot about feminine and masculine principles lately. This book is very ‘masculine’ – there is a lot of science, knowledge, and there are a lot of facts. It makes sense on a logical level, for sure. But, if I am honest, what makes my heart sing most are the feminine principles of love, abundance, beauty, and the wisdom of Mother Earth. Not that men do not accept and admire these, but as a principle, I would call it ‘feminine.’ There is yin and yang, light and dark; chaos and order are the opposing sides of one coin. In the last 2 or 3,000 years, the masculine principle of dominance and order has prevailed. The earth was dominated, divided up into parcels of land that are ‘owned’ by someone. Women were owned by men, as were children or slaves. Land was ploughed, animals domesticated and put into cages. Rivers were straightened and stopped by dams, nature was dominated and destroyed, poisoned, flattened, and controlled. We as humans crept into nearly every inch of our planet. We kill and use, as if the planet is ours for the taking. We manipulate cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, or horses with hormones for breeding. As a vet, I do this all the time. We genetically alter plants. We measure, count, make money off the land as if it was our right to do so. Is it ours? I truly wonder. I personally do not feel the right to pour poisons on land or to destroy river systems. I truly cannot understand how we as humans can

do this. I love the feminine principle of abundance and fertility. Before we started destroying our natural world, life just lived. Nature is chaotic, abundant, colourful, beautiful, sometimes cruel – and fertile! One seed, so small, can grow a big tree and never wonder if it was possible. A spinach plant can have a few thousand seeds on it, if not a million, and every seed can produce another plant with a million seeds again. That is what I mean by abundance. The fish in seas and rivers were plentiful. Animals were everywhere. Things grew without fertilizer – just with soil, air, sun, and nature. Health was abundant. I become very humbled when I think about how magic life is and how perfectly our bodies work, without ever knowing how they truly do so. You, I, we all are miracles. Life is a miracle. We should honour it and start realizing that it is a perfect system that has worked perfectly well for a long time. Until recently…. In history, we had goddesses of fertility like Aphrodite, Diana, Gaia, Venus, Isis, Shahkti Freyja, Brigid, Onuava, Demeter, Artemis, and many more. We worshipped them because we knew that life’s abundance is a gift. Nowadays, we try to genetically modify plants or animals in laboratories to make them more ‘drought-proof.’ We treat cancer with chemotherapy, we operate and slice, pop pills for anxiety and depression. And lately, we are suffering from a small virus that has stopped the world – did it come from a laboratory? Did it escape? Was it on purpose? However you twist it, we have taken habitat from animals and if this virus is man-made or not – it doesn’t even matter. Humans, us, have done so much research on how to kill each other: nerve gases, nuclear weapons, biological warfare, chemical warfare, radar, fighter jets, rockets, and so forth. Covid is just yet another example of ‘bad’ people (or people powerless within an inhumane system) trying to harm others. It doesn’t seem right to me. It is not right. It is a true consequence of disregarding natural principles. The male spirit dominates, cuts, poisons, and counts the money. Large monocultures without trees, insects, birds, wildlife, and biodiversity create diminished and poisonous food. We are killing life. We are killing our children. Let the female flow again. Embrace diversity and be part of nature. It has

everything to do with love and respect. Trust that nature knows heaps more than we do. If we love our animals, we will not harm them. If we see the beauty in a river, we will not poison it. If we love our children, we do not want to feed them poisoned food. If we love our wife or husband, we want them to be healthy and thriving. If we love the ocean and its creatures, we will protect it. Let nature be part of our lives. You will find that if you reconnect to good food, love, and abundance, beauty, and nature, if you go for a walk and enjoy the sunshine, if you focus on the beauty of a tree or a flower, care for an animal, or simply breathe in fresh air from a forest, that your life will take on magic again. It always works for me. It is time on earth that we decide which kind of world we want to live in. Do you want to live in a world, where we all end up on a cancer ward, have autistic children, forget our past because we get dementia, and are all on antidepressants? A world where we are controlled on every step we take in a more and more industrialised world where only humans have space to live and where animals are extinct, where we don’t even see a butterfly anymore? Perched in apartments in big cities and Facebook knowing every step you take? A life where your food gets delivered by a supermarket and you spend your life on Zoom meetings.... Where oceans are so polluted by plastic and the polar bears are extinct? All due to humans behaving ‘badly.’ Or do you choose to be part of the solution, reconnect to Earth and earth, to be healthy, vibrant, and part of a local community? When do we realise that we live on a finite planet that is actually capable of being ‘heaven on Earth?’ We truly are all one and connected. I hope we will wake up in time and start working together. Everything else is, actually, madness and suicide. It truly is up to us. Let us choose the world we want to live in by making every decision we do count. Choose life. Be the world you want to be living in.

12

I HAVE A DREAM

W

e live on planet Earth, the only home we’ll ever know. Our farmland is void of toxins and poisons. Farmers are caring for the soil in biological ways and grow abundant food. The food we eat is high in nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, and we are eating whole foods that make us and our families have lots of energy. We have healthy bodies and clear minds. The biodiversity on Earth has recovered because we have stopped poisoning the landscapes and there is an abundance of insects, mammals, birds, and reptiles. The oceans are recovering because we stopped using plastics, artificial fertilisers, pesticides, and we stopped overfishing. I see more dolphins and whales again and the shore is teaming with life of birds, shells, molluscs, and sea grass. Nature is resilient and abundant; it has healed faster than we ever imagined. Doctors look after your health rather than your sickness. They treat the problems behind the illness rather than its symptoms. The soils have increased their carbon and the mineral cycles are working again. Humus, which is stored carbon, is increasing and the farmers celebrate that their soil is holding more water again and the need for fertilisers has dropped as the soil is so fertile and alive. The natural local cycles of water are functioning again because the grass and trees are seeding the clouds. The farming families look back in horror when they remember what they had to spray on their fields. Once again, it’s wholesome and healthy to be on the land. The health of the nation, mentally and physically, has recovered. Through

growing local food again and neighbourhood gardens being enjoyed everywhere, we have rediscovered community. Flowers are on the roadside, making our cities look beautiful, and children are playing amongst trees and flowers that grow everywhere. They play hide and seek in urban gardens, surrounded by chickens and puppies. Streets are shady and cool underneath a canopy of trees in which birds love to sing and play. The soil is absorbing so much carbon dioxide that the drawdown is working! It will take some time, but we are on our way. Polar bears have a chance. Our playgrounds have wood, stone, water, and plants, enabling our children to explore nature and to get dirty. They are re-learning ways to grow food, get their hands dirty, and are truly tired at night. The cancer and diabetes numbers are falling. The numbers of autistic children are falling. We are finally working with nature instead of against it. We are reconnecting with the world around us instead of hiding away from it. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and just imagine it. Listen to the birds and hear the rustling of leaves in the wind. Feel the sun on your skin, breathe in the fresh air, and feel a calm happiness rise up through your body like a wave. Life is, has been, and will be good. Humanity has learned how to look after and cherish nature. We have rediscovered the wisdom that lies in every leaf and every tree. We have understood that our bodies have known how to be healthy all along. How else could you be the last living proof of three billion years of uninterrupted lineage of life? Relax. Because that dream could be our reality because choosing real food equals real solutions. Life is divine. Let’s do this. Shoulder to shoulder. Together. Just do it. Please.

EPILOGUE

P

hew. I did it. I wrote a book. I am having a glass of celebratory champagne with my house mate, Ria and my son, Julian. We are cooking organic food, drinking an organic Prosecco, and celebrating happiness. Hope for the future. Change. Good change. When I started writing this book it was September 2019. I just lost the love of my life, the drought was in full swing, and fires started to burn all around Australia. We couldn’t see the sky for smoke for weeks. Birds were falling out of the sky from it being too hot and cattle and koalas were dying all around me. My farm dams were dry, and hot winds were taking the last topsoil away. It was 40 C and it was only spring. Fears of having no water – and fears of fire destroying my farm and home – were daily challenges. My clients were going broke and my clinic, struggling. Shop fronts in town were empty, victims of no money being around. It was apocalyptic. Also, my children were moving out to go and start their lives. After many years of building up a vet clinic with no money to start with, having debt to rescue the farm, after being a single mother of three children, working as a single vet in my clinic, and being on call every day and weekend for ten years, living in a foreign continent away from my roots and family – I was burnt out. I must admit, I cried for the planet, for me, for my kids’ future, for humanity and for a billion or more animals that died in the fire. I was tired of fighting for a planet that humans are destroying – I lost hope. I started writing my book from this spot. Hopelessness, sadness, and despair. And during the twenty months of this, it started raining, nature and my town recovered, my clinic financially turned around , and life has got me

back. I started this book desperately trying to save the planet and its people and animals – and I still do. But a certain calmness has now come over me. I experienced first-hand how nature can recover and that life will continue, in any shape or form. I wanted to write a book about whole foods – and it ended up being about chemical agriculture and the destruction of the basis of life: soil and nature. I discovered so many truths, so many more connections about the wisdom of nature and life. I discovered more and more about the intricate balance of our bodies. I learned so much more than I thought I would, about how deep the destruction is for society, body, health, and mental wellbeing when we go astray from what Mother Earth has developed over millions of years. I developed a newfound trust that nature is getting it right. With or without people. Always. My heart will heal and so will nature. My heart, ecosystems, society, even Covid, will heal when we just listen to her and trust in her wisdom. She has done it for a long time. My journey went from wanting to save the planet, its people and animals, and getting angry about us humans ‘not getting it,’ and despair that it is too late, to acceptance and hope that life will continue. Yet, as Diane Longboat said: ‘The planet would be lonely without us.’ I had to truly think about this: Is the planet better or worse with people? Are we, people, humanity, worth saving? With all the damage we do, wouldn’t the planet be better off without us? We humans are pigs. We rape, pillage, destroy, we are greedy and selfish, we pollute and poison. We destroy nature and we brought thousands or millions of animals to extinction. What’s good about us? Is the planet lonely without us? What a philosophical and even spiritual question. What good do we humans offer? In my opinion, we humans have got so much to offer. We are compassionate; we can love. We help the underdog. We will rescue a koala or a stray kitten. Clients bring injured wildlife into my clinic all the time and we cry for a lost pet. Humans are so able to help each other. We create beauty and art, music, spaces. We have love. We are the only animal that helps other species. There is so much goodness and kindness in us. I truly believe that we have more goodness than badness and that we can do this! I stand for life, love, wisdom of nature and evolution, goodness, music, beauty, and abundance. Let us be good for each other and the planet for a change.

Through feeling abandoned, lonely, and lost, I discovered that there is an abundance of love, health, and fun – life will go on. If we destroy the basis of life, food, and soil, misery and disease will follow. But if we just remember how intrinsically vibrant and healthy life is, we will recover. Nature will heal. We will, too. Take the foot off the pedal and live this gorgeous life. You are meant to. I so hope you will.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to say ‘thank you’ to so many people that accompanied me on my journey. My parents for enabling me to get an education as a veterinarian and for always loving me. My profession in general to teach me a lot- but most importantly that my knowledge is only the tip of the iceberg how bodies and nature work. All the animals that show me every day how magically the body can heal itself and that health, truly, is innate, intrinsic, magic and strong. I want to thank my children for all their love and giving me humility and a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Annika, Keanu and Julian, I love you more than anything. Nic, my dear ex-husband, for bringing me to Australia and giving me the biggest adventure ever. You taught me so much, especially about nature and animals in the Australian Bush. My staff in my clinic – girls, you enabled me to take as much time as I needed to write this book. You also listened patiently to my tirades and monologues about healthy food, agriculture, climate change, my frustration and despair about the environment and pollution. You wait patiently for me to finish a consultation in which I ‘can’t help myself again’ and go on and on to clients about food and health. And, thank you all for believing in me and adopting my advice. I am comforted by the knowledge that you, especially my pregnant staff, are eating organic so that your babies have a much better chance. Ros, Maddie, Min, Lyddy, Sarah, Macey, Silvia, Phebe, James: you rock and it is fun to do amazing medicine with you. Thank you to all my clients that listened to me patiently and changed their ways.

Thank you to my mum, who started my journey and never let go- her passion and intelligence taught me so much; and thanks to my dad who followed her and my advice even without being passionate about it! He trusted! Thank you to friends like Caro Ditchfield, Nick Barton, Glenn Morris, Helen and Mike McCosker, Judy Earl, Janine Kinahan and many more that gave me information and knowledge – I love you all. Special thanks to my friend Adam for helping me come up with the title and title page and never losing faith in me- your support is incredible and to my editor Natasa who kept me on the right track of not waffling too much and staying precise. Thank you to my love for showing me The Feminine. It made me live. Thank you, Australia, for having taken me in and teaching me so much.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gundula Rhoades is a veterinarian, a mother, and an organic farmer. She has been interested in food as medicine for over thirty years. Having “connected the dots” between umpteen modern-day diseases, climate change, and how we grow and process food, she is committed to educating and empowering consumers to take action. Gundi lives in Inverell, Australia.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

BOOKS Animal Husbandry Regained by John Webster Cancer: Cause & Cure by Percy Weston Biodynamic Agriculture by Alex Podolinsky Biochemie by Peter Karlson The Mind-Gut Connection by Emeran Mayer, MD Brain Changer by Professor Felice Jacka Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown Back from the Brink by Peter Andrews Beyond the Brink by Peter Andrews Call of the Reed Warbler by Charles Massy Gut by Julian Enders Deine Nahrung ,Dein Schicksal by Dr Otto Bruker Eine Revolution zur Rettung der Erde by Prof. Dr Teruo Higa For the Love of Soil by Nicole Masters The World According to Monsanto by Marie-Monique Robin You Can Farm by Joel Salatin Polyface Designs by Joel Salatin Optimum Nutrition for the Mind By Patrick Holford Soil not Oil by Vinanda Shiva Kiss the Ground by Josh Tickell and John Mackey Drawdown by Peter Hawken Sunlight and Seaweed by Tim Flannery Cows Save the Planet by Judith Schwartz The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlsen

WEBSITES AND SOURCES Bayer Crop Science, crop.bayer.com.au Glyphosate perturbs the gut microbiota of honey bees, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.pnas.org/ content/115/41/10305Glyphosate perturbs the gut microbiota of honey bees, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. (2018). Retrieved from https:// www.pnas.org/content/115/41/10305 High Levels of Miticides and Agrochemicals in North American Apiaries: Implications for Honey Bee Health, PLOS One. (2010). Retrieved from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10. 1371/journal.pone.0009754 A worldwide survey of neonicotinoids in honey, Science. (2017). Retrieved from https://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/ 6359/109 Lethal and sublethal synergistic effects of a new systemic pesticide, flupyradifurone (Sivanto), on honeybees, Proceedings of the Royal Society. (2019). Retrieved from https:// royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2019.0433 The Effects of Pesticides on Queen Rearing and Virus Titers in Honey Bees (Apis mellifera L.), Insects. (2013). Retrieved from https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4450/4/1/71 Spray Toxicity and Risk Potential of 42 Commonly Used Formulations of Row Crop Pesticides to Adult Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae), Journal of Economic Entomology. (2015). Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/jee/article/108/ 6/2640/2379815 Effects of ‘inactive’ ingredients on bees, Current Opinion in Insect Science. (2015). Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect. com/science/article/pii/S2214574515000851 Cell death localization in situ in laboratory reared honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) larvae treated with pesticides, Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology. (2011). Retrieved from https://www.

sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048357510001884 Exposure of native bees foraging in an agricultural landscape to current-use pesticides, Science of The Total Environment. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S0048969715308937 A Common Pesticide Decreases Foraging Success and Survival in Honey Bees, Science. (2012). Retrieved from https://science. sciencemag.org/content/336/6079/348 Effects of sublethal doses of glyphosate on honeybee navigation, Journal of Experimental Biology. (2015). Retrieved from http:// jeb.biologists.org/content/218/17/2799.short Neonicotinoid exposure disrupts bumblebee nest behavior, social networks, and thermoregulation, Science. (2018). Retrieved from https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/683 Fact Sheet: Bees, Earth Day.org. (2018). Retrieved from https:// www.earthday.org/2018/05/23/fact-sheet-bees/ Save the Bees, Greenpeace. (Undated). Retrieved from tps://www.greenpeace.org/usa/sustainable-agriculture/save-thebees/ from https://academic.oup.com/jee/article/108/6/2640/2379815 Effects of ‘inactive’ ingredients on bees, Current Opinion in Insect Science. (2015). Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect. com/science/article/pii/S2214574515000851 Neonicotinoid exposure disrupts bumblebee nest behavior, social networks, and thermoregulation, Science. (2018). Retrieved from https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/683 Fact Sheet: Bees, Earth Day.org. (2018). Retrieved from https:// www.earthday.org/2018/05/23/fact-sheet-bees/ Save the Bees, Greenpeace. (Undated). Retrieved from https:// www.greenpeace.org/usa/sustainable-agriculture/save-the-bees/

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THANK YOU

Thank you for reading this book. If you want to get in contact with me, please do so. My email address is: [email protected] Dr Gundi Rhoades Gowrie Vet Clinic 131 Yetman Road Inverell, NSW 2360 Australia I’m happy to help.