Transcript of Episode 110: How to Fix Leaky Gut
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra, and special guest Dr. Zach Bush.
Meredith:
Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. This is Episode 110. I have Dr. Pompa here and we have a very special guest today; we have Dr. Zach Bush. Before we jump into the conversation I’m going to tell you a little bit more about Dr. Bush. Dr. Zach Bush, MD demonstrates the unifying science behind the devastating changes in the food, farming, and medical industries, and introduces the breakthrough science of bacteria and their communication with the body’s defense systems.
The industrial storm of the last 70 years has left the human gut and immune systems vulnerable to injury. Two synergistic toxins in our food and water systems have exploited this vulnerability, resulting in direct damage to the tight junctions that compose the natural firewalls at the gut-blood and blood-brain barriers. The correlations between diet, gut bacteria, and autism, have been long recognized.
This new science finally delivers the mechanisms behind this relationship. The novel science of bacterial communication is the foundation for a new class of dietary supplements that goes beyond the probiotic/prebiotic and enzymes eras of gut-supplementation. This science offers new avenues for ongoing grassroots changes to big industry to foster a healthy future.
Zach Bush, MD is one of the few triple-board certified physicians in the country with specialties of Internal Medicine, Endocrinology, and Palliative Care. His achievements include award-winning cell biology, clinical care, and medical evaluation. He’s the founder and director of Revolution Health Center in Scottsville, Virginia, and he’s the CEO of Biomic Sciences – the team that has brought forth the novel science and product line of Restore.
We’re so excited – very impressive bio, Dr. Bush, and so excited to have you on the show. Welcome.
Dr. Bush:
Thank you so much for having us. We appreciate all of the wisdom that’s here on the line with us.
Dr. Pompa:
Thank you. Thank you for that, Dr. Bush. We do appreciate you coming on. I have clients from all over the world who are very, very, sick and challenged. Often times, one of them says, hey, check out this product. I found it, I’ve been using it, and it seems to be helping. That’s how I came upon this product so many months ago. I always do, I always listen. I go and I start researching different products. I saw some things that I read right off the bat that caught my eye. One thing that I was very interested in is, of course, we have experimented with every probiotic and every bacteria, and it’s very limiting as how much you can get a gut well with that. Immediately I was thinking this was going to be just another probiotic type of product. I saw that it wasn’t; it was based more on redox molecules which I know a little bit about out, and what it did for the tight junctions which is – this is a big deal today. I always say 95% of Americans have a leaky gut and just don’t know it.
Dr. Bush:
Most of us.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Of course, today I’d love to talk about some of these chemicals that we are being exposed to today like no other time in history that are leading to this massive leaky gut epidemic, but I also want you to tell the story that I got to hear, at one point, from you directly about how this product came to be. Because it came through, oddly enough – correct me if I’m wrong – cancer research, right?
Dr. Bush:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
I mean that’s kind of what – yeah. So tell that story and then we’ll have to [3:44] product.
Dr. Bush:
I always like to start all my talks that I do, especially with physicians and really well-educated people, that all of the events of the last five years are very classic for some of the major paradigm shifts that have happened scientifically over the last couple hundred years. A whole book has been written on this since the 1950s, is Thomas Kuhn – K-u-h-n – if you’ve never read his book called Structure of Scientific Discovery, it’s a fascinating book and it really got played out in this scenario.
Basically, none of us – especially me – are smart enough to conceive conceptionally of a whole new paradigm shift proactively. I was going down very narrow pathways of belief system, narrow pathways of science, very much in my chemotherapy cancer mindset. I was at the University of Virginia from 2002 to 2010, at University of Colorado before that. My research had matured from the endocrine world into the cancer world and I was working on tumors of the endocrine systems. I had stumbled upon a pathway that was using Vitamin A compounds to kill tumors. The way that I was doing that was through apoptosis or program cell suicide. And that’s an area that, actually, is very apropos for an endocrinologist to study because we are fields that studies endocrinology and metabolisms –is the name of our subspecialty.
Metabolism, in a nutshell, is the science of the mitochondria. The mitochondria are what burn energy and produce energy in our bodies and so they really set the metabolic rate. When you look at cancer from an endocrinologist’s standpoint, it’s much different than an oncologist’s standpoint. An oncologist is trained to think kill the cell with a toxin. An endocrinologist is starting to think about it from a metabolic standpoint – stop seeing the cancer cell as something that needs to be killed and start seeing the cell, or the cancer cell, as the weakest cell in the body. That’s a really interesting thing, is cancer cells are the most injured, damaged, and unrepairable cells in the body, and yet we’ve built this massive $3 trillion fear machine around these cells. It’s interesting, of course, and we could have another podcast on the word fear. I mean, that emotion tied with disease is so powerful in changing our perception, as doctors changing our perception as patients, and everything else.
I was definitely locked into that fear pathway thinking, oh my God, I’ve got to kill these cancer cells, turn on the suicide, get them gone. As you start working on metabolism you start to realize, wow, these mitochondria, which are non-human, are taking care of the human cell in which they live. Mitochondria’s, basically, a prokaryotic cell. Prokaryote’s like bacteria mitochondria; these guys are their own little life form. They have their own DNA they replicate separate from. That was my world. Look at mitochondria – and when the mitochondria eat food that you eat, the food that’s on your plate is inaccessible to human cell. They can’t use any of the fuel there, and so the bacteria have to liberate that, and then the liver has to turn it into just two things, fat and sugar.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay.
Dr. Bush:
Fat and sugar are the only things that are going to, ultimately, fuel a cell. Actually, the human cell can’t use either of those. The mitochondria have to then consume the fat and sugar, turn that into electrons, and then take those electrons, pump it to the electron transport chain in the mitochondria, and produce ATP. ATP is ultimately the fuel that runs the human cell.
How many times are you separated from the food on your plate? It’s pretty interesting, and so when somebody’s eating food and not feeling well – my whole world started to change when I started learning nutrition. It was like the kale can’t be feeding the patient, it just can’t; it has to be feeding the bacteria, or feeding the mitochondria that are feeding the human. When you start to see that relationship, that paradigm shift that happened to us in 2012 starts to really be set up.
My cancer research died pretty quickly when the NIH pulled funding at the University of Virginia. This was 2009/2010. We were in the middle of a massive recession, as you recall, everybody was losing their houses, NIH funding was crashing, and so our department went from 75 faculty to 23 faculty in a course of a year or two. We just had this devastating effect on academia. My research funding dried up in the midst of that and so I had to leave the University at that standpoint. At that point I was pretty depressed because I really loved the research. I loved the microscope, I loved teaching, I was a chief resident before I became faculty. I loved teaching. I thought I was going to be isolated out in the community and not be able to really do any of my passions again.
I started this little clinic down in Scottsville, a town of 550 people, out in rural Virginia. They are in a food desert down there. There’s not a significant grocery store in the entire county so they eat from cheap gas stations and the like. I moved down there to try to teach people how to eat and reverse their diabetes and other things. In that midst, I was two years into teaching people how to eat nutrition. We were starting to see clear evidence that healthy food was not translating to health in the patient. It wasn’t working. No matter how much I juiced them, no matter how much kale I gave them, the cancers weren’t going away, the diabetes wasn’t going away, they were stuck. Sixty percent seemed to bounce back and do pretty good but there was a stuck population. Even ones that bounded back never bounced back all the way, they just got better but not well.
I had people plateaued and I had people that just weren’t responding. That started just asking a lot of root cause questions. What’s the root cause of disease? This had actually come to me at the University of Virginia when I was studying cancer under the microscope and treating diabetes in the clinic. When I was actually cleaning out the ankle – a big ulcer in the ankle of a diabetic patient in clinic – and I had just, minutes before, been in my lab looking at cancer cells in the microscope and it suddenly dawned that those dead and dying cells in this guy’s ankle were the same as my cancer cells that were on the verge of dying all the time. That was the moment where everything started to click for me. It was like wait a second, there’s not cancer and diabetes. There’s only one thing; it’s, ultimately, just a failure of the cells to repair. That is caused by inflammation.
Inflammation started to be seen by my brain was like, oh, one thing not 35,000 diseases with 100,000 different treatments – one disease with one potential treatment. That shift is big. I think you’ve been through that. I think every practitioner out there, that’s now practicing more integrative type of practice has come to some version of that conclusion of, okay, it’s simpler than we were taught. We don’t need all the pharmacy, we don’t need all this. We’ve got to keep it simple.
We started asking root cause questions then – what’s the root cause of inflammation? When you start asking what the root cause of inflammation is – if inflammation is the root cause of all disease and you look across that population that we have, autism has gone from 1 in a 1,000 to 1 in 40 over the last 50 years, major depression – 1 in 100 to 1 in 2. Massive, massive, [11:34] changes in these chronic diseases. If inflammation is the root of all those diseases, and they’re all increasing at the same time, it starts to say there’s something that happened in our environment that changed.
Because I was feeding kale I just thought maybe the kale has changed. I was reading research from the 60s and 70s that really set us in motion. Nutritionists say that plant-based diets heal just about anything. They had amazing science but we weren’t seeing that replicated and so was there something wrong with the kale? We started going down that avenue. We started pulling articles on nutrient content food – you only need to pull three articles to see the devastation. The lycopene that we had in tomatoes in 1950 were completely different than what we have on the shelf today. The food that is on the shelf looks pretty, but its nutrient content is completely devoid. Do we blame the tomato plant for that? No. We blame the soil. That’s how we finally got a Western medicine doctor from a pharmaceutical approach to chemo to start thinking that, wait, something’s in the soil, and something in the soil could, potentially, help.
With that shift, I was talking about soil and my collogue in clinic, who’s not a scientist by training in the academia, but is a self-trained scientist through working in integrative health clinics for almost 40 years. He’s a genius – he pulls this 90-page white paper on soil science and brings it into my clinic. I start flipping through this thing, really quickly because I’m in a busy clinic and behind, and I flip a page and sitting in the middle of that page is a carbon molecule that has these binding sites on the end of it that look for all the world the chemotherapy that I’d been managing. That stopped me in my tracks. My first split second was like somebody spilled chemotherapy in the soil. My second thought was, wait a second; I already proved that Vitamin A from a carrot can kill cancer. What if the carrot didn’t make it? What if the carrot got it from the soil? That was such an easy closing of the loop. It took us only a couple more weeks of research to find out that that molecule that was sitting in soil was made by a bacteria.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Of course.
Dr. Bush:
That was a massive breakthrough for my brain. The mitochondria, I had mentioned to you, are making these little metabolites – I don’t think I told you but they make redox molecules, that you had mentioned, in the process of making that ATP. Ubiquinone and all these enzymes in the electron transport chain, every time they move the electron past to get it to the ATP production, they make a redox molecule.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Bush:
These are small oxygen/hydrogen binding relationship molecules. They can only bind once. They’re kind of like a bumble bee, they can bind once and then they’re done; they can sting once. What was sitting in the soil was a carbon-backbone molecule with 17 different potential binding sites around it. With the understanding of [14:40] structure, you can see, oh, my gosh – if you bind oxygen/hydrogen over here, the molecule isn’t done. It’s got lots more activity. The content of a stable, renewable, redox molecule has never been introduced to the literature. This is the breakthrough that we had in 2012 is oh, my gosh, there’s such a thing as a stable redox molecule and it’s made by the bacteria.
Let me close the loop for you now. Mitochondria and their redox molecules are the communication network of cell repair inside the cell. I had studied that and thousands and thousands of labs around the world have studied those redox molecules into oblivion. It’s clear that at least 50% of the aging process is a loss of redox molecules.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Bush:
With that knowledge that they are the communication network of youth and healing, and a loss of them causes a lack of cell repair in aging, you’re 90% of the way there. Now think about the body, of what we know from the last 10 years, that bacteria are important. Now I just told you that we’ve just found a molecule in soil that is made by bacteria that has redox potential. Let’s think about where mitochondria exist for a second. Mitochondria only are inside of eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms. The human, the animal, and the worm – all those have mitochondria, and that’s how they do cell communication.
We have 30,000 or 100,000 species of bacteria that don’t have mitochondria in them. They’re prokaryotes. How in the world would they do cell communication without a mitochondria? They can’t, and so they have to make their own redox system. That was our breakthrough – it’s oh, my gosh, the bacteria are making their own system, they can communicate. That answered many, many, questions very quickly as to why UCLA and UCSD were publishing those papers at the time. This was 2008 to 2012. They put out a bunch of papers that said if you have these bacteria in your gut, you get breast cancer. If you have these bacteria, you get colon cancer. If you’re missing these bacteria, you have major depression.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Bush:
It’s like drawing this link between disease and the ecosystem of the gut but nobody can figure out how they were connected.
Dr. Pompa:
One of the problems right there is that when we – when I read that research, when we started reading that research some years ago, we started saying, okay, let’s put these bacteria there. It didn’t work. We give people probiotic’s – oh, yeah, little bit better; this is a little bit better. But we’re not solving these big problems like we thought when we first started discovering the relationship between bacteria and certain conditions. Go from there.
Dr. Bush:
The probiotics were such an important step forward for our field. I would include myself as one of the dark-age doctors here. Probiotic industry and people starting to say that bacteria were important – we’re talking about the 1950s with the Rodale Institute and the birth of organic gardening in the 50s, 60s, 70s. People were talking about soil and the importance of soil management and bacteria. Look how long it took before we started to address that, as practitioners.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Bush:
The 1980s started to have a few probiotics. By the 1990s they were becoming a bit of a fad. By 2000 you were, finally, considered behind times if you weren’t using probiotics. Let’s think about the probiotic for a second, though. The human gut, ideally, somewhere around 20,000 to 30,000 species, none of us have that right now. We have devastated our ecosystem through antibiotics in our food chain, antibiotics in our doctor’s offices, etcetera. Herbicides, pesticides – all killing the bacteria.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Dr. Bush:
We’ve had a loss. By an NIH study that started in 2010, we’ve been mapping the gnome of the human gut. It took 44 patients enrolled in that study before they hit 10,000 bacterial species. That gives you an idea of just how deplete we are. We are walking around with a very narrow biome. Then finally we say okay, bacteria are not just the enemy. Bacteria may be healthy for us, and so let’s do probiotics.
Probiotics, you flip it around and look at how many strains are on there, you have 3 species or 7species, or at best, maybe 24, or 25 species. There’re a couple products that have come on the market in just the last two years that tout 100 species and things like that. If you go to that seven species, most typical probiotic, and then read the list, those bacteria are not prevalent colonizers of the human intestine. Those bacteria were actually extracted from cow intestines, and grown there in large batches, and then put in to long-term cultures. From that we extract all these massive quantities of bacteria that become our probiotics. Our probiotic industry is now $3 billion a year, just the probiotics. That’s a lot of bacteria that are being sold, and those are not – a single one of them – being pulled from the human gut. They’re all being pulled from cow gut. Those cow bacteria do not know how to colonize our gut; much, much different environment from a pH standpoint from the digestive enzymes that are present in the human gut, totally different than a cow. We’re using the wrong species of bacteria. The interesting thing is, as far out as that sounds, they can actually help a really screwed up gut for a little bit. I think a lot of patients have said, oh yeah, I went on probiotics and I felt a bit better.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Dr. Bush:
How is that possible? It’s possible if their gut is so narrow after being wiped out by viral infections, antibiotics, and rest, if they have the wrong weeds that have now cropped up – and everybody in your network, I’m sure, is aware of the weeds. It’s Klebsiella, pseudomonas, E.coli, candida — all of these guys are the ones that cropped up and wiped out gut. Once those weeds start growing and they become your dominant ecosystem a probiotic, even if it’s from the bacteria of a cow, is actually helping to, somewhat, balance that system so you can feel a little bit a better.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Dr. Bush:
At no point are you going to reach a point where you’re like hey, optimal health – three species of cow bacteria. Nope. Not going to happen.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s not going to happen.
Dr. Bush:
When you start to think about what we’ve now done is people have become convinced they should chronically be on probiotics. What happens if you take 35 billion, or 50 billion copies of the same bacteria every day? Oh, my gosh, you’re creating a monoculture in your intestines. All of us need to stop using probiotics chronically. We have a $30 billion industry with zero science behind it; nothing was really ever showing that probiotics do this, or really help that. There’re a couple thousand studies that have been done with marginal results in some areas. Nobody knows why the results are happening or how they’re any [21:56].
I think that it’s time for us to start saying okay, if you’re going to use a probiotic, at most maybe two weeks. When do you use it? Maybe after an infection, maybe after an antibiotics exposure, maybe after a Lyme exposure, maybe after chemotherapy; these are sensible times to say okay, I bet the system’s screwed up, let’s just throw something new into the ballpark and see if it helps. I’ve told you in 2012 we found a communication network between the bacteria, and so this is the new paradigm. What happens if we stop trying to over-engineer which bacteria are and just give back the cell signal that the gut is supposed to have? We had a communication issue just a few minutes ago putting the podcast together. I couldn’t hear you, you could hear me, then I was calling you and we had this network of IT confusion.
Dr. Pompa:
What do you mean [22:48].
Dr. Bush:
That was happening to the gut – that’s the human gut right now is some bacteria can hear, others are like, what? It’s total disconnect. You put the communication network back in and then immediately knows what the other one needs. Now I can hear you, you can hear me, and we can have a conversation. That is exactly the same scenario for the bacteria. We put that communication network in and the bacteria can, in an instant, say whoa – way too much candida in the system. Start producing antifungal. The bacteria actually make antifungal with the oxygen molecules and everything else, to start knocking back the candida and the yeast; and so you got that to knock out.
Another example is, after the antibiotic exposure there’re little pockets in the intestine that are protected from that. I really believe that the appendix is probably the most important piece of the colon. We’ve [23:44] the appendix out of humans for decades saying that it was a useless remnant from when we used to be bunny rabbits, who have these big appendices. We have been convinced it was a useless remnant of evolution that we have an appendix. That little finger-like projection from the colon is actually a little island of unique bacterial species. When you have a big gastroenteritis, or something tearing through the colon to screw up the environment, the appendix is this protected little haven to keep the ecosystem there. When you put the communication network with the first few sips of this liquid communication circuit breaker network of the redox molecules, the circuit board goes in – whether it’s from the appendix, or maybe pockets behind the tonsils, or wherever it is, these little niches of bacteria say, oh, we’re the ones needed. They can jump in there, proliferate, and within days you have a gut that’s doing something different.
Dr. Pompa:
The product is Redox Restore which has these redox molecules in it. Meredith, you might want to grab a bottle of it. Now let’s talk a little bit about – Dr. Bush, what you just discussed, you found in soils. I think you found it seven layers deep in legate soil. These bacteria that produce these redox molecules cohabitate in that deep layer and those redox molecules are in that product that she just held up. I’d have to say, we’ve had some very, very, amazing results with the product. We’ve had some unique results with the product, to the point of – and I’ll let Meredith explain her results – but when I had many people take it, even just a tablespoon, they got headaches, GI distress, some bloating, perhaps. I immediately said great, the product works!
Dr. Bush:
Yes. Exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
That was it for me. Of course, when I got it, Zach, I started chugging high amounts of it to see would do. I got headaches so I had to cutback. From that standpoint before I ever gave it to a patient I had my own little experiment, and that was interesting. I had one of my children who got some symptoms after taking it. Now Meredith, on the other hand, got no symptoms at all. She didn’t notice anything, perhaps. Right, Meredith? Speak for yourself.
Meredith:
Yeah. It was bizarre. A slight amount of bloating, but I’ve gone through two bottles – the large bottles – maybe in a few weeks, like three or four weeks, and I was chugging a really high dose. I was wanting to get a result and I wasn’t really getting a reaction. I was curious what you had to say about that, too, because you were just speaking about the appendix. I did have mine removed when I was 12 and I have had different gut challenges since then in my life. This product didn’t seem to provoke much of a result for me.
Dr. Pompa:
You have one end then you have the other end. Explain both ends, Doc, and then we’ll talk a little bit more about the product.
Dr. Bush:
Actually, you both got a result; you just were expecting to get the same result.
Dr. Pompa:
Uh-huh.
Dr. Bush:
The reason is – and there’s absolutely no offense in any of these comments – but the reason has to do with age a little bit. The aging process – with each decade that passes in our life we lose mitochondria. As the aging process, when the loss of mitochondria, one of the important things that’s happening is you’re losing electrical charge that’s made by that mitochondria metabolism across the cell membrane. The higher the electrical charge inside the cell, the more water will be pulled inside the cell. The more water inside the cell the more nutrients. At a youthful state we’re very well hydrated inside the cells. As we age, we get increasingly dehydrated. The more toxic the food environment has gotten and everything else, it’s accelerated the death rate of the mitochondria, and it’s accelerated the rate we get dehydrated – the age at which we start getting dehydrated.
What’s happened here is you guys both have the exact same biologic result. You had massive transformation with even your first couple of uses of the product. The difference had to do with the hydration state when you started. If you get a headache into that first week, or you start to get some bloating where the bowel wall is starting to change its hydration status you can be convinced that you were dehydrated inside the cell. Before you started the product you were dehydrated. Part of that was because of a loss of mitochondria, but a bigger part of it has to do with something called tight junctions. That was already mentioned.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Bush:
The tight junctions are vulnerable because of a loss of bacteria. We now know that. We didn’t know that until we started our science. Nobody has yet known that. Our publications are all in peer-review process. We’re almost a year into it now. We’ve got about eight journal articles that will be out in the next year to really help delineate all this science for everybody better.
What we now know is this communication network of the bacteria is actually the frontline of defense for the tight junction, which is the firewall between you and the outside world. When that firewall goes down, you start leaking water out of your body into the colon. The colon is supposed to absorb all of the water from your food into your body, but when you have a leaky colon you actually get a little bit of water tracking back in to the colon. That leads to even more dehydration in your patient, or in yourself.
That chronic dehydration state can be fixed in an instant when you put it back in the liquid circuit board of the redox molecules. We show that change happening within three to five minutes. There’s a time-lapsed video on our website that shows the destruction and protection of tight junctions, and that’s a powerful one. In 16 minutes, you’re already changing tight junction integrity with the product. That continues to improve. You get stronger, and stronger, and stronger tight junctions for six days straight on small bowel membranes and colon membranes.
Both of you experienced immediate improvement in your tight junction system, which meant you could absorb water and nutrients faster. Now, hearing both of your stories, I can say, Meredith, you were more hydrated inside the cell than Dr. Pompa was. That doesn’t mean he was super dehydrated. He just, like every good physician, doesn’t obey the packaging and just says, “I’m going to do more than they recommend.” He went after it.
Dr. Pompa:
I did.
Dr. Bush:
He started taking really high doses. He slammed shut all the tight junctions, not just in the bowel wall, but remember, every single membrane in the body is tight junction-dependent. Every single blood vessel, every single blood/brain barrier, every kidney tubule, your hepatocytes, all tied together by tight junctions. The whole body in Americans right now is leaky.
That’s best exemplified in an autistic child. A leaky gut on the front end, and then once the front end is leaking, you’re getting all the toxins, all the weird stuff in the food chain coming in. Now that the toxins are there, you can’t get them out because the kidneys are leaky. They can’t mount the electrical charge across the kidney tubules and get the toxins excreted, everything else. The body literally becomes a dry sponge for toxin, and now, it’s a disaster. That’s when we start to see these really rapid aging effects.
We have children right now at the University of Virginia who are under the age of five with sarcomas. These are cancers that never should have been seen in kids.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow.
Dr. Bush:
They are literally being born old. Our population is being born at a biologic age of 60 or something. They’re getting Type 2 diabetes before they’re 10.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Bush:
They’re being born old because they don’t have a membrane. They don’t have bacteria, and their mitochondria are toxic from moment one. We inherit all of our mitochondria from mom. There are no mitochondria in the sperm, and so the only mitochondria we inherit is from the egg. That ova gives us the mitochondria, only three species of mitochondria. The egg then goes on to pass that on.
The child should then inherit the other source of redox molecules, their bacterial biome, from mom, again. Dad becomes almost useless in the world of communication. Actually, that should have been obvious, I guess, for a lot of reasons, maybe. The communication is always from the maternal.
Dr. Pompa:
Yes.
Dr. Bush:
What an interesting thing to think about society-wise. How much should we respect our mothers? What are they passing on? Yes, some chromosomes and all of that, but it’s not the DNA that’s making that kid healthy. It’s their communication network that’s all from mom. The healthier she is before she conceives that baby, the more mitochondria she’ll have in her eggs. She can pass that many mitochondria on. Mitochondria can reproduce. If she stays healthy or gets healthier during pregnancy, the baby will be born with more mitochondria.
When the baby is born, it’s going to inherit mom’s bacteria from where? From the birth canal, from the vaginal canal. Devastating to think, now, that almost 47% of births in America are by C-section.
Dr. Pompa:
Yep.
Meredith:
Yeah.
Dr. Bush:
In C-section, you don’t go through a vaginal canal. You have a sterile birth out of an incision. Now, you get placed on the table next to mom, and whose bacteria did you just inherit? The hospital’s. Oh, my gosh! Probably not the bacteria you wanted to inherit. What a disaster to imagine that 47% of our babies are now being born with a narrow, narrow spectrum of bacteria that can grow in the toxic environment of a hospital. It’s devastating.
This is the scenario where you start to think our children are being born and dehydrated, and they can’t mount this. When we start our autistic kids on Restore, ultra-sensitive. We’re talking three drops of that liquid under the tongue once a day, and they go into a healing crisis.
Meredith:
Wow!
Dr. Bush:
Why is that? Mostly because of water.
Dr. Pompa:
I’ve watched it. Listen, I’ve watched it with many kids already, and of course, adults, as well, who are only able to take drops at first, and then people that can take more, like Meredith. Very unique.
Dr. Bush:
All that’s going to ultimately probably come back mostly to that hydration state. If you start taking the product and you’re getting headaches for that first week, most people just push through. They’re like, “Well, I can manage a little, minor headache.” It’s just like a tension headache. What’s actually happening is probably twofold. One of them, your brain’s swelling. Your brain’s getting hydrated. The volume of your brain, I really believe, is increasing rapidly.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow.
Dr. Bush:
The speed at which the brain shrinks is really dramatic. If you put somebody on steroids, which screws up all kinds of tight junction stuff and – really messed up. If you put somebody on prednisone, like a kid with asthma – these were actually studies that were done in the 1980s when we first got CAT scans. Fourteen days of a Medrol Dosepak that we give for asthma exacerbation – you do a CT scan before and after, 10% loss of volume of the child’s brain. Whoa! Holy crap! That brain is losing neuroconnections, but it’s also getting dehydrated, and so the brain is shrinking.
In those first weeks on this product, brain’s actually going to rehydrate, and the volume will increase probably only by 1% or 2%, but that’s a stretch on the membranes and everything else. That may be a source of some people’s headaches. Headaches are very multi-factorial, and maybe changes of osmolality across a blood vessel – many, many, many different things. I really think that that rehydration of the brain is a fascinating thing to realize. All the tissues of your body are becoming better hydrated when you start the product, and that can lead to challenges as a physician to kind of help your patient through it. The more you educate on the front end of the patient, the better.
I do want to really hit one thing on that, on these symptoms that can happen in the first week because I hear almost on a daily basis, “Oh, I must be having a Herx Reaction.” Not just me, but some of the leading scientists in the field right now of autism and other things are starting to really doubt the concept of a Herx Reaction, which is kind of the concept that you do something good for the body, like vitamin C, or probiotic, or whatever, or a cleanse, and the person gets worse. We say, “Well, you must be having a die-off happen.” I’m not convinced we have any data at all to say that we have die-off ever really happen that causes a problem.
The death of cells through apoptosis is a totally silent event. It doesn’t require the immune system. It doesn’t cause inflammation. If you have a die-off of a lot of biome in the gut, it should have a very minor effect on the human health. Not convinced those actually happen. I think that usually what’s happening is an oxidative event, where the immune system shifts, and the immune system dumps oxygen. That makes the person feel worse because they don’t have an antioxidant reservoir that’s big enough to respond yet.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Bush:
As the oxidant continues, their antioxidants increase, they start making more glutathione, and they start to really come out of the woodwork. That’s why patients, I think, can get worse before better. With Restore, they can’t even do that. Restore is such a cool thing. Forget about Restore. Bacteria are such a cool thing.
They have put this communication network into play that has an intelligence across the cell system that is so beyond anything we’ve really imagined before. The communication is so thorough that each cell can actually figure out if it’s a cancer cell or not a cancer cell. This is the very first compound we’ve ever seen where, by PCR, which is polymerase chain reaction – it’s one of the really super-sensitive assays we use to watch in real time what’s happening in cell signaling.
With our first RT-PCR studies that we did, we were looking at the rates of reactive oxygen coming out of the mitochondria, these oxidative bursts that can turn on cell suicide. This is how I did my chemotherapy stuff, try to get the mitochondria to shoot out this oxidative burst, and then the mitochondria actually perforate and start leaking stuff into the cell. The human cell then turns into what looks like bubble tea. Apoptosis over about a 72-hour period, the cell kind of turns into little bubble stuff and starts to disappear. It doesn’t require an immune system. It’s totally an internal process of cell selection saying, “This is a cancer cell. It needs to die.”
When you put Restore onto breast cancer cells, or colon cancer cells, or prostate, or bladder – we’ve done all of these – within five minutes, you see reactive oxygen species shooting out from the mitochondria, really fast increase in ROS. That’s something I could do with vitamin A. I could do it with chemo, different chemo things. That’s easy.
What the miracle was that none of us had ever seen is we had next to the breast cancer cells control healthy cells, renal tubule [00:39:42] humans. The exact opposite thing happened in those mitochondria. The ROS went down. We’ve never seen one compound do the opposite thing in cell populations based on whether it’s cancer cell or a healthy cell.
That shift is very cool for your body because when you start drinking that communication network, every cell in the body is going to say, “Oh, my gosh! I didn’t even realize I needed to repair,” or “I’m totally fine. I don’t need any repair,” or “Oh, my gosh! I’m a cancer cell.” Totally different things are going to happen in those three cell populations. Really fascinating how intelligent the system becomes when the communication network goes back up.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s remarkable. Meredith, ultimately, your cells, no matter what, are communicating better, obviously. Everything’s communicating better. Talk a little bit about the product. I said it was from these lignites, the bacteria in that lignite, I should say, that produced the molecules. One of the misconceptions about the product, that there is bacteria in it. I would say it’s a sterile product.
Dr. Bush:
It’s sterile.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right? It’s sterile.
Dr. Bush:
It is.
Dr. Pompa:
There are no bacteria; however, there is what the bacteria produces. Meredith, hold the product up one more time just so people can look at that. There you go.
Meredith:
Yeah. Interesting list of ingredients, too. As you said, no probiotics, but it just seems like a lot of different minerals here. There’s purified water, chloride, sodium, lithium, calcium, phosphorous, sulfur, bromide, potassium, iron, antimony, zinc, copper, gold, magnesium, alanine, glycine, histidine, isoleucine, methionine, threonine, valine – a lot of minerals. Can you talk about –
Dr. Pompa:
I’m glad you actually read that, Meredith, because I’ve had – some of my clients, they get the product, and they go, “Oh, Doctor, I’m already taking minerals, so do I need this?”
Dr. Bush:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
“I’m already taking minerals, so do I need this?” What do you say about that?
Dr. Bush:
It turns out that by FDA labeling standards, all labels are misleading, and they’re interesting to read. The only thing that I can put in the top box of the label is actually the active ingredient. You just read what says, “Ingredients,” but you go above that, the only thing I can put in the actual thing that says, “Active ingredients” is lignite extracts. Now, I’ve put lots of words in there because lignite extract is the most useless term I could possibly put there, but that’s the only one that the FDA could figure out what it was.
When you actually describe – if I put the actual molecular description of the family on there, they think I’m a pharmaceutical company or something. That sounds way too medical. It’s biologic if you want to call it – anyway, we had to come up with this very lame term of lignite extracts. All that means is we’re pulling the communication network, we’re pulling the carbon molecules, these carbon redox molecules, out of soil. Lignite is just a layer of soil that’s now a fossil.
The reason we went after that has to do with the soil that we have on the planet right now. We needed an ecosystem that was huge if we were going to get enough words. Something I hadn’t mentioned is that each species of bacteria makes their own 10 or 15 different version of those carbon redox molecules. If you have 30,000 species, you now have millions of words at your disposal. If you only have seven species, you only have a very short vocabulary. We needed to find an ecosystem that was huge.
Right now, we’re lucky to find a topsoil layer in the United States or elsewhere in the world that’s deeper than maybe 12 inches. We have this topsoil, and that topsoil is really where life happens. Bacteria are there; the fungi are there; mycelium, all of this brilliant communication network that makes nutrients available and brings them to the plant root and everything else. We needed some good soil.
If you start really reading soil science, it’s dismal. We don’t have healthy soil on the planet right now. We are dumping 300 million pounds of glyphosate alone – that’s the active ingredient in Roundup – into our soil in the United States every year. Three hundred million pounds, that’s a pound for every man, woman, and child every year. That’s twice as much as it was just six years ago.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Bush:
Worldwide, 1 ½ billion pounds of Roundup being dumped into the soil.
Dr. Pompa:
Unbelievable.
Dr. Bush:
It’s unbelievable.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, on a past show, we interviewed Stephanie Seneff, a senior scientist at MIT.
Dr. Bush:
I know her well.
Dr. Pompa:
We had a long discussion. I don’t recall what episode that was, Meredith, but we had a long discussion about the prevalence of – as glyphosate went up since the late 1970s, all diseases have skyrocketed. Her big thing was it’s creating openings in the tight junctions. It’s opening up tight junctions. It’s causing holes in the gut, disrupting bacteria that we need for this brain to work. We had a long discussion about that.
Dr. Bush:
It’s exactly right. We’ll come back to that story of the effect on the tight junctions because it’s a critical piece of the story there. To finish out your question on where we got this – we need the healthy soil. The only place that we could go was back in time. If we could go before 1950, that would be great. That was before we really started using a lot of these petroleum chemicals and everything else on our soils. There’s no way to get 1950s soil now. You got to go much deeper in, and so we started just basically going down through the layers.
You’re going to hit lignite at totally different depths depending on where you are in the United States and elsewhere. In the desert is always the best place to go because the desert is the least likely of contamination of soil from the air. We went to the southwest United States. The lignite is actually very shallow in the desert because there’s a lot less sedimentation being dumped on top of layers in a dry climate than if you’re in a Virginia climate like I am here. In Virginia, we have lots of leaves and all kinds of compost happening just through natural processes. Out in the desert, very little layering happening.
Lignite from 50 million years ago, pretty shallow, and that’s where we’ve got this. This layer of soil is 50 million years old. If you know about sedimentation systems of rock, you know that it compresses. The soil compresses over 50 million years into a rock. That mineral rock-like layer is eight feet thick.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow.
Dr. Bush:
Imagine how deep the topsoil was that compressed over 50 million years to eight feet thick.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow!
Dr. Bush:
If we had eight feet of topsoil on the earth right now, we would have some of the best places in the world to grow food. There is one farm that I know of that has eight feet thick of topsoil. It’s actually up in Wisconsin. I don’t know if – many of you probably use Standard Process products. Standard Process is one of the few supplement makers that grows all of their own ingredients. They’ve been working on their organic soil for decades, and they actually have reached depths of almost eight feet thick now with their topsoil.
Now, picture 100 feet or 200 feet of topsoil. What did the ecosystem look like 50 million years ago in that soil to produce that? Interesting, in that layer of 50 million-year-old topsoil, you have all of the communication network preserved. That would not have happened if mitochondria were making those redox molecules. Mitochondria redox molecules are so reactive. Oxidants are reductants, and they bond, and they’re gone.
When I was looking at that carbon backbone on these molecules, it was clear that these things could subsist. We started extracting through very old processes just – mineral extraction has been done from old soils for mineral supplements for a long time. The thing is we needed certain pHs and everything else to extract it, so we had to use a pretty unique system, but the concept is the same, where you’re putting high-pressure water or fluid through fossil soil or rock, and you’re getting out substrate. That’s how we just begin with our raw material. Then we bring it to Virginia, and we make every single bottle in my laboratories here.
The interesting thing is the raw material, once it’s out of the soil, you got all that communication network sitting there from 50 million years ago, is completely useless. It doesn’t do a damn thing on the tight junctions. It doesn’t do a thing to a cancer cell. It’s totally inert. At that point, it’s a mineral supplement. It has all the minerals that you would see on the back of the label there. Those minerals are actually part of the issue. What you just read to us, Meredith, is basically the make-up of the skin of a sweet potato, okay? All those minerals and amino acids you just read, that’s a sweet potato, kind of, sitting there.
The process that happens when you take active, healthy soil that’s making the sweet potato skin, and then you let it sit for 50 million years is the ratios of those minerals and amino acids change. With that change, you start to change oxygen/hydrogen binding sites on all of the material in the soil, and you lose the active redox potential that’s in that communication network. It wasn’t too startling that, oh, okay, now we have a mineral supplement, but it’s got no communication effect.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Bush:
[00:49:34] to do that. I knew how to get that turned on because of my work in the mitochondria, and the cancer world, and everything else as far as from a conceptual standpoint. It was actually a colleague out in New Mexico who had a tiny, little supplement production process going on out there – we talked to him, and he said, “Oh, I can get that immediately.” I was like, “Really? Intriguing.” All he had to do was add a number of other mineral substrates back in to get the ratios right. Once those minerals go back to the living soil ratios, suddenly, the redox system turns back on.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow.
Dr. Bush:
It’s wild. Basically, what we’re doing is we’re talking soil minerals and amino acids in different ratios and adding them to our 50 million-year-old soil, and suddenly, life begins. This process is – it has to be pretty highly pH-controlled, and osmolar-controlled, and lots of different things to keep the oxygen/hydrogen binding result. Once it goes active, the things are stable. This was really exciting for us again. To have a stable redox molecule in a bottle is very challenging. There’s only one other supplement that’s done that, and it’s the mitochondrial redox, and that’s ASEA.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Hey, listen, we’ve seen miracles happen with that product, as well.
Dr. Bush:
Miracles, as well, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. It’s a product that I doubted, and it’s a product that, you know, started using. It’s been a Godsend for so many. We also have Merediths. They take it and go, “Oh, I don’t notice much.” However, we know that it’s offering redox, so we know that it – athletes take it. We know it raises their VO2 max. Matter of fact, that was one of my questions. How does this differ from that? My docs use this product now and ASEA, but how do they differ? I don’t want to throw you off your course. Finish your point, and then you can answer that later.
Dr. Bush:
I think my point’s done. I forgot it. I’m good. I think that that’s exactly the next step. We can compare the two products. Oh, this is kind of where we were going anyway. ASEA, I use all the time in clinic, as well. The unique thing about ASEA is when you give back the communication network of the mitochondria, they proliferate.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Bush:
It’s the same thing that happens when you give the carbon redox system to the gut. Your bacteria proliferate. If they know that they are depleted, they simply go into a replication process. Very easy once that goes in. Gary Samuelson’s the guy who stabilized ASEA.
Dr. Pompa:
Gary’s a friend of ours. He lives close here in Utah. I love that man. I love his brain, but I love him as a person.
Dr. Bush:
I am probably the luckiest scientist on earth because I got to know Gary Samuelson through my work with ASEA and working on some of their educational material. I got to know him – we started lecturing on the same stage in different doctor environments and stuff like that. Then there came a time last year where ASEA was really changing as a company and was starting to lose some of its coherence at the top. Gary Samuelson was really kind of getting pushed out. It was an opportunity for me to hire him. Gary Samuelson now works on a massive project with me, which we’re super, super excited about. It’s not a supplement. It’s actually a IT platform for global communication between scientists.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. [00:53:06]
Dr. Bush:
We are so excited about this.
Dr. Pompa:
When Gary was doing that, he was telling me about it. I was like, “Gary, that’s fantastic.” You tell Gary I said, “Hello.”
Dr. Bush:
I will. I will. We get to work all the time together, and it’s a blast. Gary is far more brilliant than I am down there in the oxygen/hydrogen world. The fact that he got oxygen redox molecules from mitochondria stable in a bottle – that’s why the company originally went out of business. In 2007, the company, MDI, that actually created the technology behind ASEA and had it liquid in a bottle, they couldn’t get it stable. It would turn back into salt water.
Dr. Pompa:
Exactly.
Dr. Bush:
They went out of business after almost $15 million of research and went out of business in 2007. Verdis Norton, on the board, wanted to buy it, and so he talked to Jim Pack. They bought all of the science. They bought all the 26 patents and went to Gary Samuelson. Literally, Gary Samuelson had all that material delivered to his basement. He went through all of those pallets of science. After a year and a half, he got that stuff stable. Miracles, he pulled off.
That’s the only thing that can proliferate mitochondria. The aging process is really linked to how many mitochondria you have. In one week on ASEA, you can see as much as a 10% to 30% increase in your total body mitochondrial population. Every year, in a healthy diet, when you’re really working hard, you’ll lose about 1% of your mitochondria per year. You regain 30% of your mitochondrial population in one week, reverse 30 years of aging. That’s a profound supplement, and that’s why it’s miraculous.
I have never noticed a difference taking ASEA. I’ve been on it for four years. I have never noticed an acute change with Restore as far as headaches and everything else. With Restore, you’re getting the same immediate shifts that you get with ASEA. You get this huge proliferation within the first week of your mitochondria. With ASEA, you’re getting a huge proliferation of your bacterial biome with Restore in the first week. I didn’t know that was going to happen.
When I got this thing into a bottle, stable, I went right to cancer because it was my niche. I started doing breast cancer cells, and it was ridiculously – it changed my whole view of mitochondrial world. We were seeing apoptosis happen at about one hundredfold better than I was getting with my chemotherapy, and it was happening in two hours instead of 72 hours. Nobody knew that apoptosis could happen that fast. The bacteria are so damn good at this communication, extracellular communication and getting the mitochondrial shift, that it happens so fast.
I did that. I was already drinking the product. I hadn’t felt anything, and so I was taking way too much of it as it turns out. You only need a teaspoon or so to make a huge difference. I was drinking it by the cup, and I felt great. Everything was going well, and I did start to notice changes that we’ll talk about, maybe, at some point. In the acute phase, noticing nothing, but I knew the science was working better than anything we’d seen.
We did some toxicity trials in renal tubule cells, the gold standard for toxicity, and there was zero toxicity. Water becomes toxic on renal tubule cells at about 20% concentrations. We started at 20%, and there was zero toxicity, which was remarkable, but then the cells actually lived longer. We haven’t extended the life of renal tubule cell cultures since 1967. We increased their lifespan by 15% with our very first safety trial.
We then went to 50% a couple months later. We now are going to 100% concentrations of that stuff, and you can grow the renal tubule cells in the Restore. It’s a beautiful thing. No toxicity of the product. We knew that at that point, so I put it right into my cancer patients. Again, I wasn’t even thinking bacteria at this point. I knew it was a bacterial communication, but I was thinking, “I need to help this person’s cancer.” It was a pancreatic cancer patient, and pancreatic cancer patients have often been so annihilated by chemo and the resulting antibiotics that they have what we call white chalk stools. They literally pass no organic material other than the dead epithelial cells of their gut lining, so their poop looks like pieces of white chalk.
I had a 59-year-old woman with two-year diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. She weighed 59 pounds. She was a walking skeleton. When I first did her abdominal exam, I almost hyperventilated. It was one of the most stunning exams I’ve ever done. You could see her gall bladder on her liver. You could see her entire abdominal anatomy because she had no abdominal fat left. She had burned through her body.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow!
Dr. Bush:
She was a walking skeleton. She was having, for over a year, white chalk stools. She’d had a complete bowel obstruction from her cancer for almost four months by this time that I saw her. She was admitted to my hospice service. I was afraid to give her any hope, so I didn’t tell her anything about what I knew so far. I hadn’t put this in a patient, yet. I had felt fine. I put her on a tablespoon three times a day, and she could take it only very slowly because she couldn’t swallow much because of the bowel obstruction. She was swishing it in her mouth and would slowly swallow it over the course of an hour. She called me four days later and said, “I just had my first massive brown bowel movement in almost two years.”
Meredith:
Wow!
Dr. Bush:
In four days, she repopulated a sterile gut with a sterile supplement. What a cool story! What a cool story. Where did those bacteria come from? They mostly come from her breathing because she wasn’t eating. She wasn’t eating fermented foods. She wasn’t on probiotics. She breathed the bacteria that would repopulate her system.
I really believe that most of the ecosystem that we depend on every day doesn’t come from a capsule of probiotics, doesn’t come from the sauerkraut. It comes from you walking out into your garden, turning over some soil to plant your seeds. All of the airborne bacteria happen; you breathe them in or you reach over and you pet your dog. You run your hand across that back of that dog. Bacteria go airborne. Pet your dogs more. Kiss your cats. Those animals are still walking in their own poop. That’s brilliant.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely!
Dr. Bush:
[00:59:51] their ecosystem.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Listen. I wouldn’t argue it. I couldn’t agree more. You went full circle in our conversation when I said, “Hey, look. We can’t repopulate guts just by taking bacteria in pills.” There’s a time and a place, but it really is about what you’re talking about. You also answered my question of how the Restore product can actually populate gut bacteria. There you have it.
Dr. Bush:
There you have it.
Dr. Pompa:
Redox us offering communication tools, if you will, for our bacteria. It’s for our mitochondria and cell-to-cell communication. That is what’s missing. Once that cell-to-cell communication is there, the armies can do their thing. The cells can start to say, “Hey, we need more of this, more of this,” boom, boom, boom, and the body starts working. That’s called innate intelligence. I’m a firm believer, Dr. Zach. Remove the interference; the body can do the healing. It’s that innate intelligence and that cell-to-cell [01:00:51] that does it.
I’ll tell you one of the things that I’ve seen with my clients that makes me really excited. I interviewed Dr. Seyfried, Thomas Seyfried – I don’t know –
Dr. Bush:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. We put people in these fasts or restricted moments, in and out of ketotic states, in and out of different fasts, so we challenge the cells. Bad cells can’t adapt. You said it best. The weak cells, the cancer cells, they have no ability to adapt like healthy cells, right?
Dr. Bush:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
We challenge them in those restricted states. Then a product like Restore – I actually keep them on the Restore during a fasting state, and a product like ASEA.
Dr. Bush:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
Now we’re offering communication, and we’re challenging the cells. I’m telling you, Doc, it’s been magic, not just with these conditions that we’re talking about today, but multiple types of conditions. We’re seeing that microbiome change. We’re seeing, really, things change faster than ever. Epigenetically, I’ve seen these things turn off and autoimmune, faster than ever.
Dr. Bush:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
The combination of using this product with these restricted states, I can almost come out of my skin. We have a lot of doctors that watch this show. I train a lot of doctors around the country. I’m about ready to do a seminar in Atlanta. We’ve been doing this product with these restricted states and fasting, and I’ll tell you what. The docs that are doing it are telling me they’re seeing the exact same results, and they, too, are coming out of their skin. We have something here, Doc. We could talk for an hour and a half. We might be even approaching that, right, Meredith?
Meredith:
[01:02:37] over and hour and – yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Real quick question: Can you take it – I always tell people to take it away from food, but you can take it with food, too. Anything like that, you want to give them instructions on how to take it, where to start? Fire away on that, and we’ll end on that note.
Dr. Bush:
We’ve got about four pages of use guidelines that are on our website, so for a really thorough review, jump on the website on the Learn tab. Just about on every page, you’ll see a little blue link that says Usage Guidelines, and you’ll pop over to four pages of just really thorough information on this.
In a nutshell, we’ve actually done the science both directions. If you treat the cells before it gets hit with Roundup – we mentioned Roundup and glyphosate. That’s the biggest toxin to tight junctions on the planet. It turns out that tight junctions are not directly damaged from the Roundup. It has to go through zonulin. I’m sure Stephanie talked about that with you guys. The zonulin is produced by the gut membrane in response to the injury from the Roundup.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Bush:
It turns out that when you put Restore in the gut, it upregulates DPP-IV enzymes that chew up zonulin. It becomes a barrier – it becomes an antidote to anything that produces zonulin tight junction damage, which includes ibuprofen, the most common medication used for inflammation. Inflammation is from tight junction injury. Then we give a drug that destroys tight junctions. MiraLAX, the number one use is that is in children with irritable bowel syndrome. MiraLAX destroys tight junctions nearly as bad as glyphosate does – destruction.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow!
Dr. Bush:
Our pharmacy is destroying them. The cool thing is is Restore and the bacteria are amping up the process that breaks down zonulin. Once you put the system on there – and this is in answer to your question of when you take it, before or after the meal. Ideally, you put this thing in before the meal hits because I guarantee you, your food is going to have glyphosate in there. You say, “I eat only organic food.” Last year rainfall study, 65% of the rain falling on the earth has glyphosate.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Dr. Bush:
My gosh! We are all eating it. You’re about to eat; protect the zonulin pathway by putting it in. That’s really the thing is get it in early as you can, and you’ll prevent the damage from happening. We’ve now taken it to 20,000 times the EPA toxic levels of glyphosate, and you continue to protect the tight junction with the Restore. That level of antidote-type function says, “Get it into the gut before the meal if you can.”
We’ve now done the repair study, as well. You can repair your tight junctions after the injury if the communication network goes in there. If you forget to take it before the meal, take it after the meal, and it’s still going to work. It’s just going to take you more energy because now you have repair to do. From an energy standpoint, take it before the meal, or take it with your meal, and then you’re going to prevent the injury from happening. That’s the tight junction story. Take it early.
A teaspoon three times a day is good for 80%. Then there’s a whole variation, like we said, with your super-sensitive patients, three drops a day. I have patients who are one drop every other day. It gets ridiculous how sensitive and sick people are. Start slow if necessary. Where does it tap out? Many of my asthma patients have really done the best at showing me this. Restore doesn’t fix asthma at all. Restore doesn’t fix any disease process. It fixes the tight junctions. Once your barrier systems go up, like you said, your body heals. It just does. My asthma patients have been able to really map the top doses really well. To really get asthma really into remission in a lot of my adult patients, they’ve had to be up around two to three tablespoons three times a day.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Bush:
If they drop below that, they start to get some wheezing back. Two to three tablespoons a day, that’s where I put most of my cancer patients and really sick patients, where they really need a lot of support to the tight junction system, hydration, etcetera. You’re really pushing up the doses there. Anything above two to three tablespoons three times a day, I don’t think has much role. I think at that point, you’re probably just wasting money. Somewhere between one drop a day and three tablespoons is your range, and you’ll sort that out as a clinician pretty quickly in each of your patients. Once your patient’s educated as to what they’re expecting, things will sort themselves out pretty quickly.
Remember, you can put this anywhere, anything that needs communication. If you have a topical thing, eczema, rash, something like that, just put it on there three, four times a day. You could spray it on, or you can wipe it on, whatever you want to do, and it’s amazing what happens. Seasonal allergies, one of the most leading causes of complaint right now in America. That’s tight junctions in your nasal sinuses down. You’re breathing pollen right into your immune system. Spray it up your nose. We actually have a nasal preparation in a very nice, very fine aerosol delivery system that’s coming out next month.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow.
Dr. Bush:
It will be available.
Dr. Pompa:
I have a lot of people breathing it in nebulizers and – yeah.
Dr. Bush:
Yeah. You can put it in a nebulizer.
Dr. Pompa:
Neti pots –
Dr. Bush:
I use it a lot in the neti pots, like you say. The neti pots work well. Just use your usual salt/water combination, and then you just throw in half a teaspoon or a teaspoon of Restore into that. It works great rectally, hemorrhoids, other things there rectally. I’ve got a lot of rectal cancer patients. I’ve got Crohn’s disease, UC. Those patients have so much inflammation down in that perirectal area that it’s just such relief for them to wipe it after a bowel movement onto the [01:08:19]. Use it as a small dose enema, whatever you want to do.
You can use it anywhere you can think of in the body. I’ve used it vaginally for a whole host of different conditions, of vaginal candidiasis and all kinds of things. Wherever you think you might need some help with bacteria bringing in some repair, bring that tool in. Unbelievable on shingles. It wipes out shingles blisters and pain in four hours, not because the Restore’s fixing it, but because the bacteria are killing the virus. Bacteria have antiviral compounds. It just goes on and on. Lots of information on the site.
Dr. Pompa:
We’ve had people use it in their eyes with great results.
Dr. Bush:
Fantastic results. I use an eyecup for that. You can get the eyecups at CVS. They’re like a little plastic dome. Put a little teaspoon in. You flip it up on your eye, and then you just hold it there for three or five minutes and really bathe the eye really thoroughly with it. It’s a game changer. Just a few drops in the eye works. Spray it in the eyes, all of those work, too.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Wow. That’s great information, Zach. We’ve gone overtime, but this was a great subject. What a tool we have. My doctors are grateful and appreciative for the tool, and we’ve enjoyed it. We’ll have to have you at one of our seminars, for sure, to keep educating the doctors. This goes out to thousands and thousands of people, to the public. I know that they got a lot out of it, so thank you.
Dr. Bush:
I could not be more appreciative. There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing that my children’s generation is dying without a solution.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Bush:
When you have a solution, and you – the FDA has got you gagged. It starts to feel hopeless at some point, but the grass roots behind this science has become so fast and furious over the last two years. You guys are exactly the solution. One thing to have a bottle with good stuff in it, but it’s actually communication on the macro level that you guys are doing.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Bush:
I’ve got bacterial communication in a bottle, but if we don’t start communicating as humans, it’s still a lost cause. We’re going to lose two generations of children.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Dr. Bush:
It’s you guys, your doctors, your network. It’s that everyday time that somebody’s taking to listen and talk is going to change the world.
Dr. Pompa:
We appreciate that. That is our goal. That is our mission, and that’s why we do what we do. Thank you, Dr. Bush. Thank you, Meredith. Signing off. We’ll see you next time.
Meredith:
Yep. Thanks so much for watching, everyone. Thank you, Dr. Bush. What a wealth of information. I learned so much, and I’m getting back on it today.
Dr. Bush:
Good for you. All right. Best of health to everybody.
Dr. Pompa:
Thanks.
Meredith:
Take care. Bye.
