Why You Should Love Dirt
These days our environments have become very sterile and clean which is nice in some respects, but we need to ask ourselves what effect this has had on health. Certain molecules in dirt—such as fulvic and humic acids found in green clays—have been shown to have beneficial effects for detoxification and binding toxins in our guts. These can help us mitigate the effects of our toxic modern world. But molecules in dirt can have an even more profound effect on our health than just helping us detoxify.
Dr. Zach Bush has found some pretty amazing properties of specific 150-million-year-old molecules in dirt that he found in the geologic fossil record. How he came across these effects and the conclusions he drew is nothing short of amazing. Dr. Bush is a medical doctor and researcher and noticed that damaged cells displayed some interesting behaviors. He saw that damaged cells had lost the ability to communicate with one another and in turn could not recognize that they were surrounded by other cells. This lead to the cell doing things that were in the short term beneficial to the individual cell but quite damaging to the community of cells as a whole.
To try and fix these cells he set out doing lots of different experiments. He eventually exposed them to common fulvic an humic acids and saw some favorable results. He started looking for substances that carried similar molecules to these and eventually found this 150-million-year-old dirt that had the most. When he put these molecules in the presence of damaged cells the cells started to reform communication with one another and do cellular processes more beneficial to the community of cells.
He draws the conclusion that much of what we see on a cellular level when cells are damaged and become isolated is also what we are seeing on a community level in society. When individuals become isolated members of society and lose the human connections that bring us together they can lash out at society, sometimes violently. They can exhibit behaviors similar to the isolated cells in that they can do things that damage the community as a whole. This is a profound metaphor.
Dr. Bush has put this molecule into a supplement called Restore. So far this product has been most beneficial in restoring the connections between cells in the gut lining, connections that are damaged in conditions like leaky gut and inflammatory GI issues. It is one of the main tools we use here at the Balance Wellspace to help patients achieve gut health and detoxify their bodies.
So, our very clean and sterile environments have limited our natural exposure to the dirt that exposes us to various molecules that help our bodies function optimally. Getting out into nature and not being afraid to get a little dirty every now and then can have big impacts on health. In the meantime, products like Restore can also help us achieve better health if we can’t get exposure to nature often enough. It is also an important part of any gut healing protocol.
- Gildea, J. J., Roberts, D. A., & Bush, Z. (2017). Protective Effects of Lignite Extract Supplement on Intestinal Barrier Function in Glyphosate-Mediated Tight Junction Injury. Journal of Clinical Nutrition & Dietetics, 03(01). doi:10.4172/2472-1921.100035
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