Dr. Zach Bush on Glyphosate, the Microbiome & What Modern Medicine Gets Wrong
What if the thing that’s been quietly undermining your gut health, immune system, and emotional well-being... wasn’t your genetics or your choices, but the soil under your feet?
I flew to LA to sit down with Dr. Zach Bush — someone I’ve wanted to speak to since the very beginning of Live Well Be Well. A triple board-certified physician, yes — but more than that, one of the most radical and regenerative thinkers in medicine today.
We’ve been taught to think of health as personal: your choices, your genes, your willpower. But what if the real issue is something much bigger — and far more invisible?
This one chemical — glyphosate — is everywhere. It’s on our food, in our soil, and now found in nearly every human tested. Originally introduced as a weedkiller, glyphosate was never supposed to end up in our bodies. Yet it’s now woven into our food system so deeply, it’s reshaping our gut health, immune function, and even our mental wellbeing — without most of us knowing.
In this conversation, Dr. Zach Bush reveals how this single compound may be one of the most widespread disruptors of human biology we’ve ever seen — and how it ties into chronic disease, inflammation, depression, and the erosion of the very thing we depend on most: our microbiome.
Zach shares how the path to true healing doesn’t lie in another protocol — it lies in reconnection: to the soil, to the rhythms of nature, to stillness, and to each other. He explains how the same systems we’ve disrupted — microbial networks, biodiversity, the heartbeat of the Earth itself — hold the answers we need to regenerate, both individually and collectively.
In this episode, we explore:
Why disconnection from nature might be at the root of disease
The collapse of biodiversity in our soil, our food, and our bodies
How grief and heartbreak can be portals to healing
Why compassion — not control — is the missing link in medicine
The difference between nutrition and nourishment
What it really means to live well and die well
And at its core, has modern medicine, in some ways, been failing us?
I’ve spent much of my career grounded in nutritional science, guided by evidence, protocols, and interventions designed to improve outcomes. But over time — through real conversations, through listening to people's stories, and through my own experience — I’ve come to realise that health is not just biological.
It’s emotional. Environmental. Ancestral. Spiritual.
And yet, so much of our current system still treats us as separate parts. It isolates bodies from context, symptoms from root causes, people from nature — and often, from themselves.
This episode invites us to pause that fragmentation. To remember something we’ve lost. And to begin asking better, braver questions.
It’s one of the most expansive and grounding conversations I’ve had on the podcast — one that I’ve continued to reflect on long after the recording ended.
I invite you to listen not just with your mind, but with your full self. What if health isn’t something to strive for — but something we come home to?
Below are powerful insights and personal reflections from the episode. I hope they resonate with you as deeply as they did with me.
🎧 Listen to the episode now
My personal insights and takeaways
1. Disease Is Disconnection
“Cancer is not caused by radiation. It’s caused by disconnection.”
Reflection: We’re taught to see cancer as an external threat — a rogue cell gone bad. But Zach reframes it as something deeper: a loss of connection. In a healthy body, cells are in constant communication. They cooperate, share, adapt. But when that connection breaks — when a cell becomes isolated — it forgets how to belong. That’s when disease begins. It’s not just biology. It’s a mirror. Because so many of us are living disconnected lives — from each other, from nature, from ourselves. If disease is disconnection, then healing starts with reconnection. To soil. To stillness. To the systems that remind us we’re not alone.
2. Healing Isn’t Polite Work
“We have to shatter the human psyche to get to the human heart.”
Reflection: There’s a kind of breaking that’s not the end — it’s the beginning. Sometimes we need to fall apart to remember who we are beneath the stories, the labels, the fear. Zach reminds us that healing doesn’t start with fixing — it starts with feeling. Deeply. Fully. Without running from the mess of it. Sometimes, these moments are our greatest teachers.
3. We Were All Joyful Once
“A child doesn’t wake up feeling responsible. We train them out of joy.”
Reflection: Children wake up curious. Joyful. Present. They don’t ask, “Am I doing enough?” — until we teach them to. Somewhere along the way, we trade wonder for performance. We learn that play is a reward, not a right. That worth must be earned through productivity, perfection, control. But what if the goal of adulthood isn’t to become more responsible — it’s to become more alive? More open. More willing to be playful, wrong, wild, human. Maybe true wisdom isn’t in striving or fixing, but in returning. Returning to the parts of ourselves that never needed permission to feel, to laugh, to be silly, to rest.
4. The Body Hears It All
“Your nervous system responds to how you live, not just what you eat.”
Reflection: You can eat all the right foods and still feel like something’s off. Because health isn’t just about what’s on your plate — it’s about what’s on your mind. Your relationships. Your pace. Your sense of safety in the world. The body listens to all of it.
5. The Return to Joy
“A life well-lived is a life that finds its way back into the heart and the mind of a child.”
Reflection: As adults, we so often equate maturity with control, seriousness, and success. But in doing so, we’ve abandoned joy — the innate, untamed joy we knew as children. It reminds me that health is not a performance. It’s not something we earn through perfection, but something we reclaim through presence. When we let go of the metrics and return to laughter, play and curiosity — that’s where true vitality lives.
6. Your Body Remembers How to Heal
“You are a healing machine at a rate that you cannot conceive of.”
Reflection: This felt like a quiet truth my body had been waiting to hear. In my work, I often see how quick we are to assume our bodies are failing us — when in reality, they are working overtime to protect and restore us.
Healing isn’t something we command; it’s something we allow. And when we stop seeing ourselves as broken, we create the space for the body’s incredible wisdom to do what it’s always known how to do.
7. Nourishment Begins with Connection
“Nutrition is a reductionist approach. Nourishment is the interconnected relationships you expose yourself to daily.”
I began my career rooted in nutritional science, and while I still believe deeply in the power of food, I’ve come to understand that nourishment is far more than nutrients. It’s about how we eat, who we eat with, and how connected we feel — both to others and to ourselves. A solitary green smoothie can’t touch what a shared, home-cooked meal prepared with care can offer. Nutrition fuels the body. Nourishment restores the spirit.
8. Is Biohacking a Lie?
“To accumulate disease, you have to create a rate of injury that supersedes your constant rate of healing.”
Reflection: This challenges the cultural obsession with optimisation. We're told we must “hack” our way to wellness, but the truth is simpler — and more profound. Our bodies are always healing. Always regenerating. It’s only when we stack self-neglect, disconnection, and depletion on top of that healing process that we fall ill.
9. The Soil Is Sick, and So Are We
“Currently, we use about 4 billion pounds a year of glyphosate globally.”
Reflection: Originally introduced as a weedkiller, it’s now deeply embedded in our food system and detectable in everything from rainwater to breast milk. But the real concern isn’t just exposure — it’s the disruption of the microbial world that underpins human health. Glyphosate is a patented antibiotic. It doesn’t just kill weeds; it destroys bacteria, fungi, and the rich biodiversity of our soil. These same microbes are responsible for producing the metabolites that regulate immune function, repair our gut lining, and even influence neurotransmitters tied to mood and cognition. But this isn’t irreversible. We can begin to heal by rebuilding biodiversity — in our diets, in our environments, and in the soil itself. Regenerative farming, chemical-free food, time in nature, and diverse, whole foods are not just trends. They are the foundation of repair. Because when the soil recovers, so do we.
10. Nature Is Not a Luxury — It’s a Lifeline
“If you are connected to a natural ecosystem of biodiversity, you are literally bulletproof.”
Reflection: It’s easy to dismiss nature as something ‘nice to have’ — a weekend walk, a holiday view. But nature is not optional. It’s not just restorative; it’s foundational.
Our immune systems, our microbiomes, our mental resilience — they are all strengthened by biodiversity. Forests, soil, sunlight, birdsong — these are not indulgences. They are inputs. Every time we reconnect with the natural world, we are remembering how to be human.
11. Grief as the Gateway to Love
“Unconditional love, the true vibration, is birthed through grief.”
Reflection: We often try to bypass grief — rush past it, numb it, fix it. But grief is not the enemy of love — it is the proof of it. It teaches us where we’ve attached meaning, where we’ve truly felt. If we can learn to stay with grief — not as a failure, but as a portal — then we find that what follows is not despair, but depth. A love that is unconditional, unshakable, and far more real than before.
12. Slow Down, or Be Slowed Down
“You are just sick enough right now to slow you down. You will meet yourself again when you are still.”
Reflection: So many of us are moving faster than we can process — burning out before we even realise we’re tired. Often, the body becomes the only messenger we will listen to. But illness, fatigue, even anxiety may not be punishments — they may be invitations. What if we saw these symptoms not as failures, but as wake-up calls to slow down, soften, and return to ourselves? Stillness isn’t passive. It’s where transformation begins.
13. Compassion Over Empathy
“Empathy will destroy a human mind. Compassion will take you where you need to go.”
Reflection: As someone who speaks about compassion often, this moment with Zach shifted something in me. I’d never thought about empathy as something that could hurt. But it can. Empathy absorbs — it pulls us into someone else’s pain until we’re carrying it too. And if you’re a sensitive person, it can be overwhelming, even exhausting. Compassion is different. It doesn’t ask us to match someone’s suffering — it asks us to witness it, gently. To say, “I see you. I honour your pain. And I trust in your ability to move through it.” We need more compassion. For ourselves and for each other.
14. Rewilding Our Way Back to Wholeness
“Everywhere humans have stepped, we have decreased biodiversity. But when we rewild, life returns.”
Reflection: We’ve become disconnected — not just from nature, but from our nature. And in that disconnection, we’ve lost something essential: belonging.
Yet the answer isn’t complicated. It’s in the garden. The forest. The dirt under our nails. The shared meal. The heartfelt conversation. When we rewild — ourselves, our children, our systems — life begins to flow again. And with it, health.
This episode might feel a little different from others on Live Well Be Well — and that’s intentional. Sometimes it’s the ideas that catch us off guard — the ones that stir discomfort, curiosity, or wonder — that leave the deepest mark.
So I invite you to listen with an open mind. Not because you have to agree with everything. But because expanding how we think about healing might just ignite something new — something powerful — within you.
Love,
Sarah-Ann x