Newsletter #24: THE #1 thing we can do to improve health
In this newsletter, I am sharing the SINGLE most effective strategy that I believe can solve the pressing human health and environmental issues facing our globe. 👩⚕️🌎️
What is it?? 👇️
It is restoring sustainable agriculture practices that contribute to biodiverse soil and nutrient rich food, and moving away from industrial agriculture that uses toxic synthetic pesticides.
In this newsletter, I will share:
The difference between conventional, organic, and regenerative agriculture, and why it matters.
A smattering of the research showing that pesticides are implicated in nearly every chronic disease and symptom in kids, adults, and the elderly.
The industry forces keeping the science silenced.
12 ways to improve your relationship with soil and promote healthier agriculture.
Neurotoxic chemicals of war are being sprayed on nearly all the food grown in the US. While it’s tasteless and invisible, it is still there. A billion pounds of it in the US alone YEARLY.
You might be tuning out right now and thinking, “This is not exciting.”
And you wouldn’t be alone: I’ve noticed that when I post about the importance of organic and regenerative agriculture, I get the lowest engagement rates of anything I share. 🤦♀️
STICK WITH ME.
This info is too important not to share, and I think the information can change your life and the future of our species. This is not hyperbole; it’s my deepest truth.
In this newsletter, I want to share how your health (and your family’s health) can be transformed by learning about - and reducing - exposure to pesticides. Too many people are sick right now, from kids with autism, ADHD and asthma, to middle aged friends with infertility, gut issues, and anxiety, to older friends with cancer and early dementia. (Sadly, I can name over 10 people I know with cancer right now - this should not be the case!).
And yet, we are turning a blind eye to the dumping of 6 billion pounds of ultra-toxic chemicals on our food each year globally, which is strongly linked to nearly every single chronic disease we face by destroying our mitochondria (see image below!). The history of these chemicals is shocking: a main class of pesticides used in the US - organophosphates - originated as neurotoxic war chemicals in Nazi Germany in World War 2. Read this article for more on the shared history of war chemicals and pesticides. And chemical companies like Dow, Syngenta, and Bayer-Monsanto that make pesticides are waging an all-out campaign to prevent the science of the toxicity of the pesticides to get out, and to influence laws to prevent people from being able to sue for health effects.
This is just a TINY smattering of research papers examining the link between pesticides and various diseases. Bottom line: we don’t want these chemicals in our bodies.
The suffix -cide means “act of killing.” Astonishingly, it is estimated that up to 20% of suicides worldwide are done by intentionally ingesting pesticides. We share an immense amount of biology with the organisms we intend to kill with these insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and more.
What’s more, some of the most commonly used pesticides, like atrazine, promote the conversion of testosterone to estrogen, which can several have negative effects in women (like increased breast cancer risk, infertility), men (depletion of testosterone, infertility), and fetuses (birth defects).
How can we help bring a pesticide-free world to fruition? It starts with each of us prioritizing eating organic food as much as possible and standing firmly against buying or serving food sprayed with pesticides.
I find that even among the most health and environmentally conscious people I know, there's still confusion about why buying organic food matters for humans and the planet. I get it - chemical companies have paid a lot of money to produce ghost written academic papers that create confusion! But it’s time to wake up. Below, let’s start with a breakdown of what conventional, organic, and regenerative really means.
🧠 “Conventional, Organic, Regenerative: What Does It Mean?” An Excerpt from Good Energy
Conventionally Grown Food
Conventional industrial monoculture agriculture fields from above. These always give me dystopian heebie-jeebies. Industrial scale conventional agriculture is a practice of control and domination over nature for short term perceived benefits.
Conventionally grown foods make up 94 percent of food sales in the United States, and the term refers to foods not grown organically. Conventional farming uses one billion pounds of pesticides per year in the United States alone, many of which are known to cause damage to human and microbiome cells and are tied to obesity, cancer, and developmental illnesses, among many others. The United States uses over 800 registered pesticides. The World Health Organization has explicitly stated that glyphosate, the key ingredient in the most widely used pesticide, Roundup, damages our DNA and “probably causes cancer.” Conventional farming utilizes monocropping, the process of planting the same single crop repeatedly in one place, which strips the soil of key nutrients. Monocropping generally doesn’t use cover crops, which are traditionally planted to protect the soil between plantings and replenish the soil with nutrients. Without cover crops, the soil overheats and loses water, becoming lifeless dirt instead of thriving living soil.
Additionally, we’ve replaced the natural replenishment of soil through cover crops and natural fertilizers, like manure and compost, with fossil-fuel-derived synthetic fertilizers. Huge amounts of natural gas and coal are used to directly make synthetic fertilizer. Research shows that long-term monocropping leads to “soil sickness” and a reduction in diverse bacteria. Conventional farming also utilizes mechanized tilling, an aggressive turning and agitating of the soil that kills the fragile ecosystem of microorganisms that allow our food to be as nutrient-rich and resilient as possible. Conventional soil is depleted of microbial life, leading to topsoil depletion, water runoff, and toxic chemicals in the water and environment that are creating environmental catastrophes, like a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi drains.
Conventionally raised animals are subjected to confinement and pesticide-covered grain diets in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) that increase omega‑6 fat content in their bodies. In the absence of diverse natural diets and movement, the squalid conditions lead to rampant infectious disease, so much so that 70 percent of antibiotics in the United States go toward conventionally raised animals. Astonishingly, 70 percent of conventional soy grown in the United States and nearly 50 percent of the corn go toward animal feed in a cycle that hurts our soil via conventional agriculture, then sickens animals by overloading their bodies with omega‑6 fats, which then sicken humans who eat them.
Our conventionally grown food is contributing to over 6 billion pounds of ultra-toxic pesticides being invisibly sprayed onto our food each year, slowly poisoning us, animals, our air, and our water. Interestingly, most of these chemicals are produced by non-US companies, like ChemChina and Monsanto-Bayer which is German owned.
There are an estimated close to 300 million acute pesticide poisonings per year and 11,000 deaths, which is just the tip of the iceberg on the billions of people impacted by the sublethal chronic impacts. These are toxic substances. Just because they are invisible and tasteless, doesn’t mean they are aren’t there.
Avoid conventionally grown foods at all costs: they hurt the soil, the environment, our water systems, farmer well-being, global biodiversity, your microbiome, and your cellular health. Eating nonorganic or non-regenerative food is promoting an environmentally devastating industry that uses extensive fossil fuels.
Organically Grown Food
Organic farms can tend to still be quite structured and linear in appearance and still may rely on monoculture practices, but use fewer synthetic chemicals for pest control. This is Driscoll Farms, which produces a lot of organic berries.
Organic farming refers to adherence to a strict set of standards overseen by the federal government that includes restrictions on the use of most synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. However, organic doesn’t necessarily mean that the practices focus on regenerating thriving and biodiverse soil. Organically grown food is a significantly better option compared to conventionally raised foods because it minimizes the use of some of the most toxic chemicals in our soil and on our food.
Organic meat and dairy products come from animals who did not eat food grown with synthetic pesticides; however, this does not mean that the animal ate a natural diet. It very well may have eaten exclusively organic grain feed (like corn and soy), which is still omega‑6 rich and promotes metabolic dysfunction in the animal. The best thing to look for on a label is “organic” and “grass-fed” or “pasture-raised” for meat and dairy, as this means the animal had access to pesticide-free natural diets like grasses and moved more freely.
Regeneratively Grown Food
An aerial image of regenerative Apricot Lane Farms, where biodiversity and mixed species of plants and animals create a resilient ecosystem for farming. And it’s beautiful!
Regenerative food practices focus on soil health and biodiversity, utilizing diverse crop rotation, avoiding synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, minimizing tilling, and employing composting and other practices. Regeneratively grown food increases soil microbe count, enriches soils with nutrients, improves watersheds, decreases water runoff, and requires less water. Animals are incorporated into the regenerative farming ecosystem to roam freely in pastures and orchards and to naturally and gently agitate soil through grazing. In doing so, they replete and regenerate soil with nutrients and biodiversity from feces and urine. Regenerative farming leads to cleaner water and air, 30 percent less water use (since the healthy porous soil can store more water and it won’t just run off), nutrient-dense foods, and enhanced carbon capture in the soil through significantly increased root-system growth. (Larger root systems are necessarily built by taking carbon from the environment to print carbon-based plant tissue.)
Animals raised regeneratively have higher levels of omega‑3 fats by large margins, and their milk has six times more antioxidants and phytonutrients than conventional milk. (These nutrients are undetectable in milk from conventional cows.) Animals don’t receive routine antibiotics (unless they are acutely ill) on regenerative farms, since the animals have resilient health from being able to move, eat, and socialize freely.
Some people argue that conventional farming is cheaper and more efficient than regenerative, and therefore necessary to feed our large population at scale. This argument is a narrow view focusing on extremely short-term gains that are only possible through Farm Bill subsidies. Conventional farming is fragile because it renders ecosystems fragile. Dr. Mark Hyman points out that we pay at least four times more for conventionally grown food that is artificially cheap: we pay for the taxpayer subsidies to prop up the unsustainable practices, for the food itself, for the detrimental health effects, and for the disastrous environmental outcomes. The winners are the ultra-processed food companies. Moving to regenerative farming practices at scale would slash our health care costs, rate of environmental damage, energy use globally, and reliance on fossil fuels. Additionally, by converting to regenerative practice, farmers are saving on input costs (like pesticides, insecticides, and pesticide-resistant seeds). In the film Common Ground, one farmer notes that he can save around $400 an acre on input costs with regenerative practices, translating to $2 million in savings yearly.
Choosing regeneratively grown foods is one of the most powerful choices you can make as a health seeker or environmentalist. Regenerative plants, cover crops, and healthy soil sequester carbon from the atmosphere and 3D print it into extensive root systems that grow immensely larger than conventional root systems that must battle through hard, lifeless dirt. The aggressive composting in regenerative farming practices produces little to no waste. It also drastically decreases the use of fossil fuels (which get converted to synthetic fertilizer), protects water systems from pesticide and fertilizer runoff (which kills marine life), and mitigates drought by capturing rainwater in porous, absorbent regenerative soil that would otherwise be lost to runoff. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that a 1 percent increase in healthy soil increases water storage capacity by over twenty thousand gallons per single acre.
If you want to learn more about this topic, I wrote a full length article on the Levels blog about the ways in which regeneratively grown food actually impacts our health.
In the article, I discuss these four main points:
Our body’s microbiome is influenced by the soil’s microbiome
Poor soil leads to micronutrient-depleted foods
Animals raised on good soil have more omega-3s and phytochemicals
Pesticides are toxic “obesogens” making us fat and metabolically ill
If you feel like you have heard from people that “organic is unnecessary,” I implore you to understand that the companies making the chemicals that are being sprayed on our foods want us to be confused. In de-classified documents from the company Monsanto, it was revealed that Monsanto has sponsored ghostwritten papers and the lay media to promote a favorable opinion on pesticides, amongst other shady tactics.
Read the full article on the Levels blog here.
12 ways to improve your relationship with soil and get AWAY from the pesticides🌱 👇️
1. Learn about sustainable agriculture and why it is a scalable and cost effective solution to feed a growing population. 🧑🌾 Check out The Biggest Little Farm, Kiss the Ground, and Common Ground, three incredible documentaries on regenerative farming. These make the case for regenerative farming being the least fragile and most cost effective way to farm, saving farmers potentially millions per year in input costs. Please, please, please, please watch one of these movies with your family.
Other great resources to learn more are my Whole New Level interviews (below) with Will Harris, the owner of White Oak Pastures, and Molly Chester, founder of Apricot Lane Farms - which is the farm featured in The Biggest Little Farm! 🧑🌾 In addition, read Will Harris’s Book, “A Bold Return To Giving A Damn” and watch him on Joe Rogan.
Watch the full interviews on YouTube here:
Two of my heroes, farmers and entrepreneurs Molly Chester (Apricot Lane Farms) and Will Harris (White Oak Pastures)
2. Find a local farmers market. 🍅 There are 9,000 farmers market in the USA today! Make a point to chat with a few of the farmers about how they grow their crops. Some farms may not be labeled organic (due to how cumbersome and costly the certification is), but the farmer can tell you that they use no chemical sprays. These are some of my favorite conversations of the week!
3. Grow something! 🌱 Try growing some type of food in your home to get in touch with the food production process. You can grow foods like broccoli sprouts in just a week (another instruction article here), which contain massive amounts of cancer-fighting phytochemical like sulfurophane. Interacting with indoor plants has a measurable positive impact on our stress levels while also generating appreciation and awe for how food develops and grows.
The hydroponic food growing tower brings me joy every day! We never have to buy lettuce! This is from Lettuce Grow.
4. Get your (and your kids’) hands in the dirt! 🙌 Volunteer at a community garden or local farm, or just do some yard work.
5. Start composting. 🪱 Check out Cornell Waste Management Institute’s tips and resources on small-scale or backyard composting. You can also search for a compost pickup service in your area.
6. Support CSAs. 🤝 Join a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program through a regenerative or organic farm.
7. Support farm-to-table and organic menu restaurants. 🍽️ Some chains like Sweetgreen are even supporting regenerative farms. As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, I am a big fan of Sweetgreen for their commitment to compostable materials and regenerative farming. Learn why plus my go-to order here.
8. Shop regenerative. 🛍️ Try to buy products and brands that source from regenerative farms. Look for companies with the Land to Market seal, or simple talk to farmers at the farmer’s market.
9. Go organic. 💚 When regenerative produce is not available, try to get some organic options. To keep costs down, look for what’s organic that is on sale, in bulk, or in the frozen section (often cheaper!). If something organic is on sale, buy a LOT of it and then freeze it! Costco has a ton of organic options now. Shawn Stevenson’s wonderful book Eat Smarter Family Cookbook has great tips for saving money on organic.
10. Get involved locally, and advocate for pesticide free parks for kids. 📣 Advocate for pesticide-free parks in your town! Many of our local parks and play areas for kids are covered in pesticides. 🤦♀️ Who cares about a few weeds when the alternative is poisoning kids!?! SPEAK UP! (Also, golf-courses are a huge consumer of pesticides).
It is both inspiring and disheartening that children are having to fight for themselves to have pesticide free parks!
11. Avoid toxic pesticides in your garden and lawns 🙅♀️ (like Roundup spray, which is very common), and ask anyone who helps maintain your yard or neighborhood public spaces to avoid them. There are several non-toxic weed management recipes online utilizing vinegar and salt. And we need to reframe our value systems from avoidance of weeds, to avoidance of disease.
12. Know the politics. 💡 Read up on the Farm Bill and sign up to follow the #regenerateamerica campaign, which will help keep you informed on how to use your voice and vote to support sustainability.
The Spirituality of Sustainable Agriculture: Choosing Life over Death
I’ll conclude by mentioning it’s also important to note the pesticide issue is a spiritual crisis: with our support of conventional agriculture by buying non-organic food, we are voting with our dollars to diminish the life force on this planet, creating mass biodiversity loss (an estimated 70% loss of wildlife populations have been lost in the last 50 years), and widespread chronic disease amongst children and adults.
If we humans are spiritual beings fortunate enough to be having a dualistic experience in a material body for a brief period of time, then our use of synthetic pesticides is giving a poor signal to God (Source!) that we want this miracle to continue. If we keep acting so reckless with death-promoting synthetic chemicals, I fear that Source may choose to pass this particular species by. I believe we can commit to choosing LIFE by making daily decisions to keep our mitochondria and our precious cells safe so we can reach our highest purpose in this lifetime and be stewards of harmonious biodiversity on this planet.
With good energy 💓
Dr. Casey
Try not to get get discouraged 💗 This is overwhelming information, but anything can happen in this wild universe, even the best possible outcomes for the future. Let’s believe it! 🌎️
👀 In Case You Missed It
🎙️ New podcast with Sarah Ann Macklin
In this episode, Sarah Ann and I delve into cutting-edge research that suggests many common health conditions - from depression and anxiety to heart disease and cancer - may share a common root cause in metabolic dysfunction. We discuss evidence-based strategies for optimizing cellular energy production and its far-reaching effects on both physical and mental health.
Watch the full episode on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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