Interview: Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride MD
Transformative insights from a personal journey at the intersection of medicine, healing nutrition, regenerative farming and making sense of the world.
This interview explores the profound journey, revolutionary insights, and current work of Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. Graduating with Honors as a Medical Doctor in 1984 from Bashkir Medical University in Russia, she embarked on a path of exploration that would reshape her understanding of health and well-being.
After five years as a Neurologist and three years as a Neurosurgeon, life led her to the UK where a pivotal moment changed everything. Her son's diagnosis of autism propelled her into an intensive study of its origins and treatments. This journey marked the genesis of her groundbreaking theories, linking neurological disorders to nutrition. Through this process, she achieved a second Postgraduate Degree in Human Nutrition from Sheffield University, UK, pivoting her career towards nutrition.
Dr. Campbell-McBride's impact reverberates through her role as a specialist nutritionist, especially renowned for treating children and adults with learning disabilities, mental disorders, as well as digestive and immune issues. Her legacy crystallized in her landmark 2004 book "Gut And Psychology Syndrome. Natural Treatment Of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Depression And Schizophrenia." This work unveiled the GAPS Nutritional Protocol, a transformative approach that has garnered global recognition and a devoted following.
Her insights extend beyond neurology and psychology. In 2007, her second book "Put Your Heart In Your Mouth!" confronted prevailing misconceptions about heart disease, offering a fresh perspective and advocating for the inclusion of natural animal fats and cholesterol-rich foods.
As her work unfolded, she encountered the adverse effects of plant-based lifestyles, inspiring her 2017 book "Vegetarianism Explained. Making an Informed Decision." With scientific precision, she dissects the digestion and impact of animal and plant foods on the human body, revealing the nuances of diet choices.
The year 2020 marked a pinnacle in her journey with the release of "Gut And Physiology Syndrome. Natural Treatment For Allergies, Autoimmune Illness, Gut Problems, Arthritis, Fatigue, Hormonal Problems, Neurological Disease And More." This comprehensive work completed the GAPS concept, embracing the entirety of human health and its intricate connection to the gut.
Beyond her academic accomplishments, Dr. Campbell-McBride has transformed her knowledge into action as a regenerative farmer, cultivating a thriving organic and biodynamic paradise that stands as a testament to sustainable farming practices.
A sought-after keynote speaker, Dr. Campbell-McBride shares her insights on the global stage, influencing both practitioners and the general public alike. As a Member of The Society of Authors and The British Society for Ecological Medicine, and a Director on the Advisory Board of The Weston A Price Foundation, her contributions to the realm of nutrition are substantial.
In this interview/podcast episode as we unravel the life's work of Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, a visionary whose journey has ignited a paradigm shift in understanding health, nutrition, and the intricate connections that bind us to the world around us.
Photo Credit: Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride
More information on Dr Natasha and her GAPS work
Leafbox:
Dr. Natasha, do you prefer to be called Dr. Natasha? Dr. Campbell McBride. What's your preferred title?
Dr Natasha:
Dr. Natasha is fine. It's shorter, easier yes?
Leafbox:
Well, thank you so much again for being so punctual and taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to me. I actually learned about your work, Dr. Natasha, from another interview I did with author Tao Lin, and he's an interesting novelist and nonfiction writer who's a Taiwanese American, and he had severe health issues, borderline autism. He followed a pretty traditional American diet, used a lot of alcohol, drugs, all kinds of things to try to alleviate his problems. He moved to Hawaii and then pretty much eliminated everything and now kind of follows a mixed carnivore diet where he eats local meats from Hawaii, local eggs. He does eat fruit and some chocolate, but basically eliminated all vegetables, seeds, seed oils, and it was just such a radical transformation. His voice, his mannerisms, his ability to concentrate, all radically changed. And some of my listeners obviously were taken aback by that. He's kind of an alternative guy anyway, and he writes about interesting things and that led me to find your work. And I listened to some other podcasts with you and I'm really intrigued in what you're doing. So Dr. Natasha, maybe before we start, could you give us just a little bit of background about your family, about your medical experience, about your maybe growing up in Russia, anything you think relevant?
Dr Natasha:
Well, I'm a medical doctor trained in neurology. I worked as a neurologist and neurosurgeon in Russia before I moved to the UK where I started with my family. And my first child was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, which threw me into a very steep learning curve. I had to save my own child. So the result of that, long story short was the discovery of the gaps concept, gut psychology syndrome and gut physiology syndrome. My health has recovered fully. It's leading a normal life. And that's how my clinic began. That's how my work began. That's what pulled me out, the mainstream medicine and into the alternative fields and the gaps concept was born based, starting with my own child and then thousands of other children. And initially I started working with autism quite logically because I was trying to help other families in the same situation as we were.
But then I've discovered that other learning disabilities are caused by the same thing as autism. And then I've discovered that the siblings of these autistic children are not well either, that they have allergists, digestive problems, fast eating habits, headaches, various other health problems, and the parents are not healthy either. And as I went further and started treating whole families, trying to help the whole family, not just one child and a family, I've discovered that all chronic diseases really are gaps, all of them. And that's what Hippocrates, the father of modern Medicine has said thousands of years ago. He came to that conclusion that all diseases begin in the gut. And today we know that he was absolutely correct, that all diseases begin in the gut. So the gaps, nutritional protocol, which have designed and developed over years, working with people with various health problems, not only learning disabilities in children and adults, mental illnesses, autoimmune disease, allergists, neurological disorders, hormonal disorders, all kinds of health problems that they all start in the gut, that their roots are in the digestive system. And when we heal those roots, when we heal the digestive system, all sorts of illnesses disappear. They start gradually disappearing and that rheumatoid arthritis can disappear and multiple sclerosis can disappear. And schizophrenia and epilepsy and what, asthma, eczema, psoriasis, cystitis, any illness, no matter how far away from the digestive system the illness might manifest, make no mistake, the roots of that illness are in the gut and might be fixed. The gut, the disease disappears.
Leafbox:
So Dr. Natasha, maybe we can just rewind a bit in time. I'm happy that your son or daughter are healthier now. How old are they?
Dr Natasha:
It's a son. It's my first son. He's 30 now.
Leafbox:
- Wonderful. Was he born in Russia or was he born in the UK?
Dr Natasha:
No, he was born in the UK.
Leafbox:
I'm curious about the shift. I know you did your medical experience and your medical training in Russia. How do you think that differs to, I mean it's a western country, but do you think, what role has that had in kind of your exploration of your son's disorders or being a foreigner or naturalizing to the UK? I'm curious how that shift has made you more open or not or just what's the role of the Russian education you think, in your path in discovery of this gaps concept and whatnot?
Dr Natasha:
It wasn't a Russian education, it was a Soviet education. I grew up in the Soviet Union and I moved literally at the moment when the Soviet Union, that's how my faith dealt my cards to me that I moved to the UK at the moment when the Soviet Union ended, when it was ending. So I'm a Soviet doctor and I was trained in the Soviet Union, and that was a very unique country. There is a huge nostalgia in rationale for that country, for what was lost with that country. The medical education was very, very different from what it is in the western world. Very, very different. It was far more holistic. There was no commercial element to it at all. There was one pharmaceutical company in the Soviet Union. It was run by the state, so there was no competition. And the impetus for every doctor, we were trained to use all sorts of natural methods first to help the patient before any pharmaceutical was even considered.
And indeed, the majority of people recovered with natural methods, natural approaches. We had in every GP surgery, we had a large physiotherapy department. So physiotherapy was used extensively before you would consider antibiotics or anything else for common cold or any infection. So it was a very, very different approach. And the whole medicine was structured around prophylactics, around preventing disease. That is why there was an extensive system in the Soviet Union of Sanatoriums and the rest places and holiday places where the whole country would go on their holidays. And the holidays were usually a month, it was usually in the summer or any other time of the year. And it was this extensive system of literally thousands of these places all over the Soviet Union in the best natural locations on the sea, on the rivers, mineral waters, whether are natural muds or any other natural resources where these places were set up where people would come there for a month, they will be examined by a doctor on the first day when you arrive and a prescription was made, what you need, what kind of diet you need, what kind of gymnastics you need, what kind of treatments perhaps massage, special bath, special mud treatment, special electro treatment, physiotherapy, all sorts of things.
And practically every member of the Soviet Union went through that at least once a year, an MOT for your car.
Everybody went to the sanatoriums and I grew up with this system. I went to the sanatoriums throughout my childhood from a very, very young age myself because I had a trauma when I was a child. I broke my spine and I was sent to two, three places like that per year throughout my childhood to prevent any complications when I had treatments. And all of that was paid by the state. When I tell people in the western world about this, nobody can even imagine such a system. That's what we had in the Soviet Union. That is what the state is capable of when it is really put to service to the population of the country. So it was a very, very different medicine, very, very different approach, very different bed manner for the medical doctors than in the western world. And the pharmaceuticals were just not an item at all. They were unimportant. They were only used in situations when they were absolutely essential when all other options have been explored.
Leafbox:
What was your experience then? What was it like? I mean, with the U S S R collapsing, obviously that had its own challenges, but as you entered to the UK medical environment, I'm curious what your experience was in that shift
Dr Natasha:
As it happened. When I came to the UK, my child was already one year old and as I have a second son as well. So I was pregnant with a second one, and I looked at entering the medical system in the UK and it was quite a serious challenge because you had to go through very serious exams, you had to prepare for those exams. So I started the whole process. I started working on all of that planning to go into the mainstream medicine in the UK. But then as my child got diagnosed with autism, and I quickly realized that my own profession had absolutely nothing to offer my precious child, I had to put all of that on the back burner and focus on my child, focus on finding ways to help him. And when that happened, we had no internet. I'm sure people can't even imagine such a thing nowadays.
We had no internet. All I had was a telephone and a local library. That was all, that was all. So I just contacted the local library when we got the diagnosis, I remember asked them to send me every book they can find on autism, and a week later, a bunch of books have arrived. And one of those books was very helpful. I found some contact details at the back of that book, started phoning all of these people because there were phone numbers there from some of these people were in the U Ss A and we shared information and they shared lot of information and then more contacts. And that's how it all went on, and that's how we found my husband and I found ways of helping our child. And there were conferences that I went to and I met wonderful people. That's how information came to us and we started helping him.
And it was a spectacular success. Yes, of course, yes. And as I was in charge of that situation, obviously I had no time at all because my second baby was born at the same time. I had no time to try and enter the medical system in the UK. I built quite a strong community of other families with autism, with autistic children. We were all sharing information and trying to help each other and find what we can find to help our children. So as I started discovering the gaps concept, I started helping everybody I knew around. That's how my clinic appeared and grew. And at that point I realized that the most important basis of human health is food. Food. There is nothing that can come close to the effect of food on human health and know disease too. So at that point, I decided that that's where I need to look and that's what I need to focus on.
I went and got a master's degree in human nutrition here in the UK, qualified as a nutritionist, and that's how I basically started my clinic, my education of a medical doctor. Nobody can take that away. And I was allowed to call myself a medical doctor in this country, but I was not allowed to work in the mainstream medicine, to prescribe pharmaceuticals and to witness death. And I didn't need any of those because I was working exclusively with diet and natural approaches. That's how life basically redirected me and our children. That's what I've learned. Our children come to us as teachers. My son was my teacher. He came to me and he just took me by the scruff of my neck and said, you're not going to the mainstream medicine. You're going to look here, and that's where you're going to go. And I'm very grateful that that happened to me, and I'm very grateful that I've taken that direction because it brought me true professional satisfaction and happiness and the feeling that I'm really doing something worthwhile in this world.
Leafbox:
So Dr. Natasha, when you had your first son, what was the experience of approaching autism like in the early nineties, both in Russia and in the UK?
Dr Natasha:
Well, all over the world, it was considered to be incurable. And the mainstream doctors were more focused on the parents than on the child. They were telling you that you need to start looking for a residential care facility to get rid of your child, basically put him there forever and there's nothing you can do. We don't know what causes it. It's probably genetic and so on and so forth. All of that was unacceptable to me because I felt that there is something that can help my child. So that was a very, very hard time as a parent, very, very hard time. But human beings need to be uncomfortable in order for us to change anything in our lives because if we're comfortable, we don't change anything. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, so to speak. So through that very traumatic time, very difficult time, something beautiful came and it changed, transformed my life, the life of my whole family, and the gaps concept was born and the gaps nutritional protocol was born, which is now helping millions of people around the world.
I've written my first GAP book in 2004. It was called Gut and Psychology Syndrome. Naturally, I focused on the brain at that stage in my life. So that book focused on all the pathology that can come from the brain. So it focused on mental illness, on autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, A D H D / A D D, and other learning disabilities in children. And that's what I described, the gaps, nutritional protocol. And I described what causes autism, and I described what causes schizophrenia and epilepsy and addictions and depression and eating disorders and A D H D, any kind of pathology coming from the brain is gaps from my point of view, all of it. And I've explained where these diseases come from, what causes them, and I've given a solid protocol on how to heal yourself from them, how to reverse these situations. I never expected that this information will be so needed in the world, but obviously it is because the book just took off like a rocket and it's now translated into 27 languages.
We have more translations coming. I'm not translating them. People in various countries read it who speak English, they read it in English and then use the protocol, get results, and want to bring that information to their own countries so they translate the book. And so it became a global phenomenon. Gaps became a global phenomenon as a result. I have a second. In 2020 I've written a second gaps book called Gut and Physiology Syndrome, both abbreviate to the same gaps in the English language. And that one focuses on the physical illnesses on the rest of the body, on all the autoimmune diseases, on allergists, on hormonal problems, neurological problems, chronic inflammation, chronic infections, various form of arthritis, and so on. So every disease begins in the gut and gaps. Nutritional protocol is designed to fix the gut, but once you fix the gut, the roots of your disease are removed and the disease then just disappears and some people faster in other people slower.
Leafbox:
Could you summarize some of the issues you find with the gut and maybe your protocol just for people who aren't familiar with it?
Dr Natasha:
The premise of GAPS is that human body is a microbial community. There are more microbes in your body than there are human cells, and nothing in your body is microbe free. You've got microbial communities in your blood, in your heart, in your lungs, in your brain, in your joints, in your muscles, in your bones, in your skin, on all mucus membranes everywhere. There are microbes in your body. They are in charge of you. Pretty much the biggest microbial community in your body lives in your digestive system. Why? Because if you ask any microbiologist, what is the most powerful influence on the microbial community in nature, the answer will be immediately food. You change food supply to any microbial community, whether it is in a pet traditional laboratory, or whether it's in some natural environment. And everything will change literally within hours because microbes produce trillions of babies per hour.
They change very, very fast. Certain microbes will disappear, other microbes will appear, and the whole microbial community will change. So food has a profound, profound effect on every microbial community in nature. Because the human body is a microbial community, food becomes the most profound influence on human body. And because we place our food that we eat into the digestive system, the majority of that microbial community lives in yoga. That's where the big ministry is of your microbiome, the big government, all the general subir offices, all the commanding echelons are there in the gut. And when you change what you eat, when you change your diet, you change the food supply. That microbial community changes. And because it's connected to the rest of the microbial community, everywhere else in your body, in your brain, in your eyes, in your blood, everywhere else, they will change all of that too.
So if your body is in a diseased state, your microbial community has a certain characteristic, it has certain microbes proliferating and commanding the whole thing, the whole place. When you change the gut flora, that ministry in your gut, they will change the lot in your body and they will create a healthy state in your body. And that is what gaps diet does because the core of the gaps institutional protocol is gaps diet. We remove all the foods that are difficult to digest for human being and which feed pathogenic microbes. Instead, we focus on the foods that heal and seal the gut wall, the gut lining. They build you a new shiny, healthy gut wall, basically healthy gut and the rest of the body, they build you beautiful, healthy tissues in all of your body. And at the same time, they change the microbial community in your gut and make it beneficial for you, rebalance it, reharmonize it, bring it into harmony with your body and with good health. And as a result, the whole body heals. That's how gut nutritional protocol works.
Leafbox:
And then what are some of these in your elimination diet? What are you finding or you're theorizing are the most difficult foods that need to be eliminated first?
Dr Natasha:
There is a fact that we have known in our sciences from 1930s, and this fact is that the only things on our planet that can truly digest plant matter plants are microbes. What are plants? Vegetables, fruit, grains, beans, nuts, seeds, greenery, whatever the plant kingdom that human beings consume, whatever from the plant kingdom they consume. The only things on our planet that can truly digest any plant are microbes. Microbial community. Mother nature used that fact in designing the digestive system of a cow or a goat or giraffe or another herbivore animal, it gave them several huge stomachs full of microbes. A cow has three enormous stomachs called rumen full of microbes, and it's these microbes that digest the grass for the cow. No big animal, no animal, no bird in this world can digest plant matter itself. It's the microbial community in their gut that does that job for them.
We human beings do not have a woman. We have a small stomach which produces hydrochloric acid. The acidity can go below two below one pH when we are hungry, very hostile environment to any microbe to survive in. That is why human stomach has virtually no microbes living in it. There are only few microbes that manage to survive in there. Tiny, tiny numbers. So what does that do? That tells us that plants are indigestible for a human stomach. Human beings are not designed to digest plants. If your digestive system is strong and healthy, then you can eat a fair amount of plant matter and your digestive system would cope with it. But the more your digestive system is damaged, the less you're capable of surviving and eating. Plant matter, the hardest things to digest within the plant kingdom are seeds, all seeds. What are seeds? All grains, all cereals are seeds, nuts, beans.
Many other things are seeds. Plants, you see, they fix to one place in nature. They can't run away from a predator. So when the predator comes, the plant doesn't want a predator, an animal to eat. Its babies because its seeds are its babies. It wants its babies to grow. So every plant equips its seeds with a whole host of chemicals which damage the digestive system of an animal that eats them. They're called antinutrients. And this can be lectins, enzyme inhibitors, phys., salicylates, phenols, and there's lots of other. It's a new area of research and it's quite rapidly developing research. So all seeds are pretty much indigestible for the human digestive system. On top of that, they're equipped with many poisons, specifically designed by the plant to damage your digestive system. And when this poison is absorbed, the damage your connective tissue in the body, what is your connective tissue?
All your joints, your ligaments, your fascia, capsules of your organs, all the sheaths between layers of muscles. The shafts where your nerve struggle, the blood vessels, the whole system of blood vessels and the heart are connective tissue. So your bones are connective tissue. The skeleton of your muscle is connective tissue. So all of that gets damaged in your body by these chemicals. So unless you have a cast iron and very, very healthy digestive system, majority of people cannot handle plants very well. And the more their digestive system is damaged, the less they're capable of digesting and processing the plant matter. When we look at the animal foods, however, meat, fish, eggs and dairy, we find that they're easy to digest for the human digestive system. Hydrochloric acid, pepcin and other elements of your stomach juice are ideal for unraveling and digesting meat, fish, eggs and dairy.
These are the things that digest properly in the human stomach and then they're passed into the several meters of intestines where absorption of food happens. And the only things that can be absorbed are the things that got digested properly, broken down properly, and then they feed and build your physical structure that you live in. The skeleton, the muscles, the brain, the heart, the lungs, the liver, the whole physical structure that you live in, your body or the human body. And when we look at the human body, about 70% by weight of your body is water. When you remove water, what's left, the dry weight is almost half and half protein and fat. When we analyze human protein and fat in the lamp, we find that in this biochemical structure, it's very similar to proteins and fats which come from animal foods, meat, fish, eggs, and dairy.
Plants have lots of proteins, lots of fats, but in there biochemical structure, they're inappropriate for building human protein and human fat. On top of that, the indigestible, the most well-researched protein coming from plants is gluten. And I think in the western world, certainly everybody heard this word by now because majority of people cannot tolerate it. Gluten damages them and they get all sorts of gluten intolerances and symptoms and diseases and problems from gluten, and that's only one protein. There is a myriad of proteins in plants and all of them are indigestible for humans and very damaging for humans. So gaps nutritional protocol is based on this knowledge, the easiest for human beings to digest and the most nourishing and building and supporting nutrients come from animal foods. That is why the staples in the gaps. Nutritional protocol are meat stock that we make from bones and joints and the other bits and pieces of the animals.
We eat a lot of organs that is liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, brain glands, all sorts of organs from the animal because the structure of the body of any animal in this world is very similar to the structure of the human body. So whatever organ in your body is ailing, you need treat the same organ from the animal. So if your liver is not very well, you need to eat liver over other animals. If you have a kidney disease, you need to eat kidneys. If your brain is struggling, you need to eat braids of other animals. If your lungs are struggling, you need to eat lungs. If you've got a chronic pneumonia, for example, or you had a pneumonia and you can't recover, you're just struggling to recover from it. You get the lungs of a healthy beef, beef, lungs or pork lungs or long lungs, you put them through a mincer, make a lovely chili for yourself or make some burgers with this lungs, one meal like that, your lungs will be off. They'll recover literally from one meal because your lungs will receive the perfect ideal combination of nutrients to rebuild themselves after the damage, after pneumonia, bronchitis or any other infection. The same with the heart, the same with the kidneys, the same with every organ. So
Leafbox:
Dr. Natasha, a quick question. When you studied nutrition at Sheffield, what was the response? I mean, I would call yourself an alternative nutritionist. What is the framework for nutritional studies right now in the UK? Are they still pushing kind of a traditional pyramid, US kind of U Ss d A type food diet, or what's the framework like in the traditional nutritional world? I mean, what are other doctors thinking about what you're advocating?
Dr Natasha:
That's a good question you're asking because I was nearly thrown off that course. I kept arguing with the professors on the course because it was very mainstream and there were no other courses at that time. They were just mainstream nutritional courses in the UK it was at the university, and we were told all the dogmas of the mainstream, and it was drilled into our heads that fat and meat cause every disease in the world that you must not eat eggs and butter and bacon and kind of with some condescension that would tell us that fish is okay to eat while you fish, but otherwise everything else was evil. Absolutely. And carbohydrates were pushed in a very, very strong high carbohydrate diet. That high carbohydrate diet is the best thing in the world world and everybody should be eating high carbohydrate diet. And some of our professors will start their morning lectures from, have you had your Kellogg's conflicts for breakfast? They're fortified with B vitamins. They're very good for you, so on and so forth. So I remember that I was naively arguing with some of the professors about the dogma we were taught. And when I was threatened that I'll be thrown away from the thrown off the course, I had to be quiet about it and just get my degree. But obviously I came to that course already with a lot of knowledge because I was already, my child was already 90% healed. I was already working with many, many other families, so I knew better.
Leafbox:
What was the role of medical or nutritional studies in your medical education? I know in the West, they barely study nutrition at all, if at all in traditional MD roles.
Dr Natasha:
We started nutrition, but a little bit more than in the west, but I wouldn't say a huge amount. But we did have a nutrition study of some sort, and we were given various knowledge about various diets for various illnesses, what was appropriate to eat for stomach ulcer, for example, for another digestive disorder, what was appropriate to eat for mental illness or any other. So we did have some basic, basic knowledge, but again, it was quite mainstream in that sense. I wouldn't say that it was anything on the par with what I know now today, but this course that I went through, it was very helpful for me to know what the other side wants to say and what the other side thinks and where it comes from and why. So that gave me a good understanding of that, and that helped me to write my books because I have a book on heart disease where I explained that fat and cholesterol do not course heart disease.
So eggs and butter do not cause heart disease and bacon doesn't cause heart disease. They actually reverse it and prevent it. They heal you from heart disease and that what causes heart disease is all these high carbohydrate nonsense, those breakfast cereals and vegetable oils and sugar and wheat and processed carbohydrates. That's what causes heart disease. And I've written a book on that subject called Put Your Heart in your Mouth, where I explained the whole concept and it's fully referenced. Then I have a book on vegetarianism. I started talking about the plant foods versus the animal foods. I explain all of this in that vegetarian book, and I explain to the audience in the vegetarian book that veganism is not a diet. Veganism is when the person eats no animal foods at all. Only animal foods are the feeding, building foods for the human body. Plants do not feed us.
They do not build your body, they do not nourish us. Plants are clean that provide powerful cleansing substances for us. That is why we eat them, because it's important for us to be nourished well, and it's important for us to be clean on the inside. So plants are cleanses. So when a person goes on a vegan regimen, and if this person has a lot of toxicity accumulated in the body, a cleaner body feels better than a toxic one, they start shredding all that toxicity and they start feeling better. And many symptoms start disappearing. And this is the time when these people start the evangelical blogs and talk about to the whole world about veganism, that it's the best thing in the world and maybe even write a book or something like that. But then after a few weeks, usually the majority of people know more than 40 days, the body finishes cleansing and it gives the person a signal, I'm hungry now feed me the way this signal is given.
You are given a desire for a whole roast chicken or a lamb chop or steak or a pot of cream or eggs and bacon or something animal like that, which will feed and build your body. Problem is many of these vegans by then have convinced the whole world that veganism is the way to go and written books and written blogs. And they're doing this for religious reasons or political reasons or emotional reasons. They don't listen to their body. They force it to continue cleansing when the body needs feeding. So at that point, the body has no choice but to start breaking down muscle bone to feed vital locals to feed the brain, the lungs, the heart, the liver, other organs you can't survive without. So the person starts losing bone mass and start losing muscle mass and start losing brain mass because about 40% of brain dry weight of the brain is cholesterol.
Another 40% are saturated fats and it's very heavy on protein, the brain and many, many other substances, which can only come from animal foods. So they start losing the brain capacity, their cognitive ability declines, their memory declines, and they're not able to even realize what is happening to them, what is happening with their produce. So veganism is not a diet, it's a fast. It is a form of fasting. And in my vegetarian book called Vegetarianism Explained, I have a chapter on fasting where I describe different forms of fasting. The simplest form of fasting is when you just drink water and eat nothing. And then there are juice fasting, and then there's mono diets when you can eat, adjust apples or just grapes or just drink milk or do something else. And veganism, veganism is a form of fasting. It'll cleanse your body nicely, it'll provide you with a lot of cleansing, which is wonderful for some situations, but nobody can fast forever.
So veganism is not a diet. It is not something that a human being can live on for long periods of time and definitely not for the rest of the person's life. Vegetarianism can be sustained as a lifestyle as long as the person consumes plenty of animal foods to sustain the physical structure of his or her body. And such vegetarian cultures exist in India and some other places in the world where they eat plenty of dairy, high-fat dairy, cook everything on ghee and they eat lots of eggs. And whenever they get the chance to eat meat or fish, they never say no to it. So they do eat them and the rest they take with their plant mat, with their rice or vegetables. So whatever else they Len, whatever else they eat. So that's where I explain what vegetarianism is and what mechanism is. And I don't know of any other book that puts it that way and how plants work in the human body and how animal foods work in the human body.
So coming back to the GAPS diet, the staples in the gaps diet are animal foods. And it's interesting that you started this interview with giving an example of a person who went carnival, who stopped eating plants altogether. We have this movement now, and I will tell you another story. Some 10 years ago I was contacted by a group of parents, group of mothers who were breastfeeding mothers. They had a few weeks old babies vomiting, diarrhea, vomiting, diarrhea. The child is not growing, is not putting weight on, not developing mentally or physically. Doctors do testing find that the child is allergic to all protein on the planet.
And so at that point, the mothers were recommended to stop the breastfeeding. The child was put on the elemental formula made out of Sawyer and all sorts of other ingredients, and they could not give the child anything apart from some boiled carrots or something that doesn't have any protein in it. And the children were just not recovering, they were not thriving, they were deteriorating. So I knew then that plants are difficult for a human being to digest. And the more the digestive system is damaged, the less the human being is able to handle plant plant foods. So we put these children on the first stage of the introduction diet. That is a gaps introduction diet where the only plant matter we consume well, well-cooked vegetables and only soft parts of vegetables in tiny mouths. Even that was not enough for these babies. Diarrhea continued. So the next logical step was to remove all plant matter for these babies.
And that's what I did. That's what I recommended to these mothers. We put the babies on a no plant gaps diet, not a leaf, not a vegetable, not a speck. Out of plant kingdom was consumed. These babies lived on meat stock, on organs, on boiled meats, on fermented milk and on raw egg yolks. And we started recovering diarrhea, started stopping, vomiting, stopped. Children started putting weight on, and then the rest was history. Now all of these children have recovered beautiful children, bushy tailed, bright eyes, intelligent, doing well at school, no disabilities, no residual damage of any description, physically, mentally, a hundred percent children, beautiful children, they recovered. But it took us many years before we could introduce the tiniest amount of plant matter into their diet. Some of these children were on no plant diet for 4, 5, 6 years, some even longer before we were able to introduce the tiniest amount of crochet, well cooked and mashed, even the small amount of plant matter would cause the diarrhea to return in these children. What these children taught me is that human beings can live without plants perfectly well, strictly speaking, we do not need to eat plants at all.
Leafbox:
We just talked to my daughter, she refuses all vegetables and just loves beef. That's her favorite food.
Dr Natasha:
There we are. There we are. You can leave her alone. She knows what she's doing.
Leafbox:
Yeah, I think
Dr Natasha:
So. Listening to her body, we do not need five a day. We do not need rainbow colors. We do not need any, any of this variety. We can live without plants perfectly. Well. Then I started using this no plant diet with children with all sorts of colitis, Crohn's disease, adults with severe mental illness, people with cancer, and everybody started improving. And I now have a community of young people and older people who have been on a no plant diet for many years, and they have no intentions of introducing plant matter because they're doing well. They're afraid to eat plants. So the no plant gaps diet basically goes in parallel with the carnival movement, the primal diet, and all the other movements where people eat no plants when they live entirely on animal foods. And all of these people prove, again, the fact that human being can live perfectly well entirely on animal foods.
Of course, plants are nice to have. They give us tastes and flavors and colors and fun, and it's lovely to have them, but your digestive system needs to be strong enough to handle them. And plants need to be prepared in a certain way to make them more digestible. And one of the major ways of doing that is fermentation. Lactic acid fermentation. Fermentation. Fermented foods are a big part of the gaps. Diet, human beings around the planet fermented everything. Every kind of food in nature can be fermented. Everything meat can be fermented, milk can be fermented. Yogurt and cheese, that's fermented milk. Fish can be fermented, even eggs can be fermented. Chinese have fermented egg recipes, and not only Chinese, but some other cultures around the world. And of course, all plants in nature can be fermented. And people fermented plant matter for I don't know how long, at least for thousands of years to make wine and to make pickles and to make fermented foods like that.
When we ferment food, we employ microbes. Remember that fact that we knew from 1930s only microbes can digest plants. So we use that knowledge to predigests plant matter outside our bodies in a crockpot somewhere or in a jar. We allow microbes to digest plants for us, and then we consume that digested plant. And with it what we consume, we consume a whole host of probiotic microbes. So these are probiotic foods. We boost our microbial community in the body with a balanced community of microbes. It's full of enzymes, which help us to digest food and which help us to dissolve scar tissue and sclerotic tissues and inflammation, all sorts of problems in the body. And we consume nutrients in that plant matter in a pre-digested form, in a bioavailable form. I'll give you an example, A helping of sauerkraut , which is fermented cabbage will give you 20 times more bioavailable vitamin C than the same helping of fresh cabbage, because in fresh cabbage, vitamin C is locked in a cellular structure of the cabbage.
And your human digestive system cannot extractive. It'll go right through you do you know good in a sauerkraut, in a fermented cabbage, which will ferment it outside our body somewhere in a jar, in a crockpot, the microbes have done all the work. They've released the vitamin C from the cellular structure of the cabbage into the juices, into the whole mixture. So when we consume sauerkraut weeds, large amount amounts of bioavailable natural vitamin C. In fact, fermented vegetables and fermented fruit are the best vitamin C supplements in the world, much better than any supplement in a capsule you would buy. So that's just one good example. So whatever food the person cannot digest and it's causing health problems for the person, we ferment that food and then we cook it, and then the person tries it again. And in many cases we find that in that form we can digest it and we can start with that and build the gut wall and heal the gut wall and seal it, close all the holes in it, and then gradually, gradually the person, many of these people then can start introducing that vegetable or that fruit or that other plant matter without fermentation when the gut becomes stronger and healthy and it's capable of handling that.
Leafbox:
Dr. Natasha, it just reminds me, I was one of my neighbors works for PETA, and he's a strong vegan, and I was arguing with him that I think ice cream is healthier than all the broccoli he eats. And I'm just curious how you approach the evangelical kind of religiousosity around nutrition. I mean, some of the carnivores are just as bad as the vegans in terms of advocating for their religious belief in their nutritional practice. I'm curious how you remain neutral or evidence-based in your approach.
Dr Natasha:
Every human being is different. We need to understand that we are all very different. We all have different genetics. In the last century, people started traveling all over the world. We're all mixed up. There are no people now. There are very few people who are born in one place, grew up in one place, and spend the rest of their life in one place. Majority of people travel and the father is from that end of the world. The mother is from the other end of the world. The grandparents are from all over the world. So the genetic stocks and the racists got all mixed up around the world. So genetically, we've all mixed up. And another fact is that if your ancestors, all of them come from some tropical hot area of the world, chances are you can live on more plants, you can digest more plants, and you can handle more plants, and you'll do better by eating more plants and only have a smaller amount of animal foods to sustain your physical body.
But the further north we go, people whose ancestors come from some northern Europe and northern countries in the world, chances are you need to eat lots of meat and fat. You need to subsist largely on animal foods. And every human being has to find this balance for themselves because we are all very different. So what suits one member in the family may not suit the other member of the family at all. Every human being needs to find that fine balance and the cells. And in my blue book, I have a very large chapter explaining how to do that, how to figure out what is right for you, what works for you, and what foods you can have. There's another dogma in our world that we should have a great variety of foods. It comes from supermarkets that you should have cherries from Chile in January and strawberries from, I don't know, Israel in the middle of winter and all of these colors and varieties and rainbow colors and what have you.
But if you look at a human baby, what variety does a human baby half when it's breastfed? No, it lives on one food, on breast milk, and it drives beautifully. It doesn't need any varieties at all. And majority of humanity until the last 200 years lived in one place and produced their own food because there was no food industry, there was no agrochemical industry and there were no supermarkets. People basically ate what grew in their local area, what they could get and what they could produce themselves. So their diets were very limited, particularly in the winter. So they didn't need variety. And in those days, people were much healthier than the modern populations of the western world who had all these rainbow colors and variety and are all sick all over because the health crisis we have in the Western population is unprecedented. Practically. Everybody's got some kind of chronic disease and taking some kind of medication. So you need to figure out what is right for you, what your body needs.
Leafbox:
Dr. Natasha, do you have any concerns about some people who eliminate all these diets than becoming more resistant towards a variety of foods? For instance, if someone lives on a carnivore diet for years, you said they fear introducing a plant matter. Do you ever see cases where people become so intolerant that they almost become allergic to those plant matters again, or it actually worsens their potential health outcome?
Dr Natasha:
Well, it comes to intolerances. There is a phenomenon which has been described a long time ago now. It's a well-known phenomenon in the alternative medical circles, which is called a masking phenomenon. If you're intolerant of some food, but you continue eating it for breakfast, lunch and Zina, your body reacts, but you are not aware of it. You don't assign your symptoms that you have. You may have migraines, you may have some lapses in memory. You may not sleep very well. You may have a skin rash or chronic cystitis or maybe some other niggling problems, but you would not assign them to this particular food. And you are not aware that you are allergic, that you're reacting to that food. It's not doing you any good. But when you remove that food and after a couple of years, it takes at least two months for your body to cleanse the debris of that particular food.
Once your body cleanses off it and stops reacting to that because you stopped eating it, and then you try to have a little piece of it, you will get such a reaction that you will have no doubt whatsoever in your mind, gosh, I can't tolerate this. What's happened before? I was eating it every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I didn't react. And now after this diet, I suddenly started reacting to it. So it's the fault of the diet. Something's been done to me, to my body. No, what happened? You were reacting to that food all alone, all of your life, but because you removed it for a period of time, that reaction got unmasked.
Your body now gives you a clear signal to your mind that you cannot eat that. This is a typical situation with bread and pasta and other things made out of wheat flour. People who lived all their life eating bread and pasta and breakfast cereals and other things made out of wheat, biscuits and cakes and what have you. When they stop eating wheat, it takes at least two months for the body to cleanse the debris of whatever elements of wheat were stored in your body and were in your body. And then if you have a piece of bread or you have a biscuit or something like that, the reaction will be very serious and you will know in non certain terms, your body will tell you you cannot eat wheat. And it's basically unmasked. That's what happens. Majority of humanity in the Western world cannot eat wheat.
They do not tolerate it, but wheat is addictive. In fact, many plants are addictive and many seeds are addictive. When you go to Asia, rice is addictive and rice is the major cause of allergists and problems in the population. If you go to Latin America, you find that maize is the number one cause of allergists and other problems. It's the staple, whatever is the staple in a particular population that is the major cause of problems, health problems in people. And it's a hard decision to make for many people because that's their comfort and that's what they say they love and they can't live without. You tell an Italian that they can't live without their pizza and pasta, particularly somewhere in Napoli or areas like that. It's very difficult for people to accept that. But the body will let you know after you've removed it for a period of time, the body will let you know.
Leafbox:
Okay, fascinating. Could you tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on the changes in the processing of food and the industrialization of food? I know that you have a small farm and you grow vegetables and have livestock. I'm just curious how your relationship to the production of food has changed or evolved over time.
Dr Natasha:
What is done to food in the western world in particular in the industrialized world is appalling, absolutely appalling. Starting from seed, starting from plowing the soil, starting with all the chemicals, industrial arable agriculture, which is a number one cause of planetary destruction, it's industrial arable agriculture. And then what the food industry does with all this commodity stuff that they grow for us and what's in the supermarkets, the whole thing. When you learn, and as I was working with food for years prior to becoming a farmer, an organic I am an organic farmer and husband, have been now for 10 years, you come to a solid conclusion that you cannot trust anybody in this world, in the western world to produce your food. You have to produce your own food. That's what I've realized some 15 years ago and my family, we started looking for a farm for a piece of land, and we found one, and now we are self-sufficient.
The piece of land that we managed to find here in the UK was very damaged. And we are still surrounded by industrial wasteland, by arable industrial fields sprayed and sprayed and sprayed, and commodity crops are grown in rotation, but we are like an oasis in the middle of that in industrial wasteland. And when we started, we had virtually no top soil on our farm because it was found conventionally for many years. Old industrial arable agriculture destroys soil, it kills it, it turns it into dead dust that is incapable of sustaining any life, and that's what we will inherited. Basically, it rains in Britain, thank God. So the land was covered in grass, but when we tried to plant our first few trees, we broke our folks and broke our backs trying to dig up holes because the topsoil was maybe an inch thick, thick or maybe a couple of inches thick, no more.
And what was underneath was clay and huge boldness of flint stones. You could not dig a hole. So what we had to do, we had to employ a local farmer who came with a big digger, dug great big holes for us for these trees, and we bought tons of organic compost. We filled these holes with compost, and we planted our trees into that compost. That's how we started. We planted about a thousand trees on our land and lots of bushes created gardens, and then we got animals, and it's animals, particularly grazing animals, cows and habi virus, animals and pigs who created top soil on our planet in the first place. They are the creators of all life because all life on our planet begins in the soil and ends in the soil. If we lose top soil, there will be no life on planet earth.
The soil topsoil in our planet was created in the first place by enormous herds of herbivore animals in Africa that would be zebra and wildebeest and antelope in northern hemisphere. That will be the bison and the deer and the cows and the sheep and all the other animals and the goats. There were million heads, herds unless they move. And the way they interact with the grassland, the way they eat grasses and the way they move and the way they cover the land. As they move, they t trample whatever they haven't eaten, and they cover the whole land with their excrements. With manure and urine. And the urine and manure are the most precious things for our planet, for the soil, they create the microbial community in the soil because soil is a very complex microbial community, and it's the structure of that microbial community in a healthy soil under your feet is very similar to the structure of microbial community in your digestive system.
There are great parallels there. It's a microbiome of our planet. And every time I heard of cows or heard of other animals move across the land and then they come back in a few months, the top soil gets thicker and thicker and thicker. They have created in the first place and they continue creating it. There is a savory institute in the world. Alan Savory is a wonderful man who discovered how to graze cattle correctly in order to build top soil. With his methods of grazing, we can build enormous amounts of top soil on the planet in a matter of 20 years, 15, 20 years, capture all that carbon from the atmosphere and lock it in the soil because the soil is the major reservoir of carbon on our planet, and it is stored in the soil in the form of humus. That's the carbon polymer, very stable carbon polymer.
And humus is like a sponge. It absorbs huge amounts of water and holds water in the soil. It doesn't allow the soil to dry up. Dehydrate and hummus is created by microbes, and microbes are put into the soil by cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys. So we need more animals in order to restore our planet and save our planet. We need more animals because we need to create more top soil. And the thicker the top soil we create, the more hummus we create, the more water will be locked in there. So we'll be protected from droughts because a soil full of hummus, no matter what drought you have, it'll stay moist. Hummus will not allow that water to leave, and it's fertile and productive. And that's what we've been doing on my farm. We do not dig anything. We do not plow anything. We use no dig, gardening.
We have cows and we have goats, and we have pigs and chickens and turkeys and bees and what have you. And in a matter of 10 years, a piece of land that has been practically a desert without top soil has turned into paradise. And it provides us with all the food we need. And not only us, we have volunteers on our farm. We had probably more than a thousand volunteers in this last 10 years. They keep coming and they come from all over the world. They say young people and not so young people and children as well, families who want to produce their own food and they want to learn how to do that. Quite often there are people from cities who have no experience in gardening or having chickens or milking goats or anything like that. And we teach them all of these skills so they can go home then and start their own whole small holding and start producing their own food. And it's a wonderful transformational experience for everyone. We have beautiful transformations here. I'm now writing a book on this subject specifically for this audience, for people who want to leave cities and start living on land and producing their own food. In that book, I will describe everything with land, how to work with goats, how to work with pigs, how to work with chickens, how to work with gardens, how to grow vegetables, fruit, and so on.
Leafbox:
Dr. Natasha, who is your main form of resistance or criticism from, people who are in the mainstream, from other doctors, from traditional farmers. I'm curious, where do you find the most feedback or negative feedback to your ideas?
Dr Natasha:
I have no criticism. People ask me this question. I'm just all the people. The whole world absorbs this information like a sponge. They love it. And perhaps the reason for it is that I don't address people who don't need my information. When I discovered gaps, I knew in my bones that there is no point to go to my colleagues, to other medical doctors with this information. Absolutely no point whatsoever. They will not accept it. They will reject it. And it wasn't information besides they didn't need it. This information, I went with this information to people who need it badly needed it to Parents of children with learning disabilities, of children with allergies, children with asthma, eczema, diabetes type one, and juvenile arthritis and other chronic illnesses. And these parents, the mothers in particular, mothers are my heroes. They've grabbed this information and they've used it, and they've run across the world and they made this information available to everybody.
If you do that, if you work with love, basically everything you've got to give you, give with love to the very people who need it. They will be so grateful, so respectful, and they will carry that information and they will spread it and they will help you. But if you have some kind of professional ambition to become a hero amongst your profession, and instead of giving the information you've discovered to the people who need it, you go to your professional community and try to publish in some high ranking journal or something like that, expect lots of trouble because you're carrying information to the wrong place, to people who don't need it, don't want it, and who will feel threatened by that information? I've never done that, never. So I've never had any resistance. All I have from the universe is great help and respect and gratitude.
Leafbox:
And then Dr. Natasha, could you tell me a little bit more about the coach training program and how you're kind of empowering other practitioners in some of your ideas?
Dr Natasha:
I've been training medical practitioners for more than 10 years now, and in the last seven years, we've put this training online as the whole world went online gradually. So we have gaps training.com. It's a wonderful platform. Please visit it. We have many courses there for any need, for most needs that people may have. We have a course for medical practitioners, people who have prior training and already running clinics to learn about gaps and to learn how to use it effectively because it's very complex. It's a huge amount of knowledge that we've accumulated with my practitioners and people who graduate There are called Gaps practitioners, certified Gaps practitioners. Then we have a course for people who do not have prior training, but there are people who use the gaps nutritional protocol for themselves, for their families. They heal themselves from various illnesses, and through that healing journey, they've accumulated enormous amount of experience and they would love to share that experience with other people around the world.
So we train these people, we give them a qualification, we call them Certified Gaps Coaches, and they open clinics and they work with people and they're more hands-on people. They're actually the kind of people that can come to your house and cook for you and take you by the hand and deal with every day-to-day problems that you're going through and answer all your questions. So these are the gaps coaches. And then we have courses for families who would like to have a healthy baby who perhaps may already have another child with an illness who had bad experiences and want to make sure that their next child is healthy and vibrant. We have a course for those parents, or maybe they already have a baby and they want to put things right because the things are not going right for them with the baby. So that's a Gaps Baby course.
We have a course for families who have fussy eaters. Many children in this world just would not eat properly. They're addicted to processed carbohydrates usually and would not eat any proper meals. So we have a course run by fantastic practitioners who are very, very experienced, who will teach you how to pull your child out of those addictions and get your child to eat pretty much everything you put in front of your child to eat properly. So that's for the Fussy Mealtime Plan Management. It's called for Fussy Eaters. We have a course for people who are using animals, a very comprehensive animal course because animals are used for adults in the gaps. Nutritional protocol for people with constipation, for people with compaction in their bowel and other problems, it's very important to remove that compaction. So animals are used quite extensively and there's a lot of knowledge in there.
So we have a very good animal course. We have a course for people who are sensitive to electromagnetic pollution. We all live in a soup. We don't see it, but our wifis are working. Our mobile phones are working, internet is working. Human body is an electromagnetic being. It works on electricity and we live in the soup with all sorts of vibrations, which affect the way our bodies function. So there's quite a comprehensive course there, which will explain how to avoid these things and how to help you to recover from that sensitivity. Many people are sensitive in this world and they do not realize it. They do not know that they're sensitive to their mobile phones and wifi and other electromagnetic pollution in the environment. We have a course on farming, which is, that's Joel's course. That's a wonderful farmer, great visionary, and a person that's transforming farming in the world.
So we affiliated with his course. We have many other courses in there, so please go there and have a look. We also organize online conferences once a year in February. That's GAPS, online Gaps Online conference. We will have fantastic speakers and lots of new information for people. So I invite everyone to join us. You will find all the information about gaps Online conference, all gaps training.com on that platform, on that website, and there will be a link as well to Gaps Science Foundation. We started this foundation a bit more than a year ago now. We are putting the gaps concept on a scientific basis. We publishing, we've already published three studies in peer review journals and we are working on more studies so the scientific community of the world can have something to dig their teeth into, sink their teeth into, and to have a scientific basis to have some evidence as they call it.
Leafbox:
Yeah, I saw that you're working with Dr. Seneff from MIT, That's right.
Dr Natasha:
Dr. Seneff is one of the people on the team working with us, which is wonderful. We have a wonderful team of researchers. It's a charity. We've set it up as a charity, so we rely on support. So please support us for people who can support us. And my main website is gaps.me. There are many gaps websites out there because gaps is a global phenomenon. There are thousands and thousands of gaps practitioners working all over the world. Every one of them has a website and many people who have gone through the protocol have websites and blogs. So there's a lot of gaps. Information online. I've got only one website and that is Gaps Me, which has a lot of information and all the links to other websites and to my blog.
Leafbox:
And then Dr. Natasha, my last two questions are, is there anything you've really changed your mind on in the last few years? Like one topic or something that really, I don't know, something that just changed your mind recently. I'm curious on that. Something you believed before.
Dr Natasha:
We had quite a tumultuous few years, haven't we?
Leafbox:
Correct, yeah.
Dr Natasha:
Around the world. We had this amazing entertainment for two years is and that entertainment opened the eyes in many, many people on how the world works and what's happening in our world and what many people understood that whatever the mainstream is telling you, we live in an upside down world. And this is not a new idea. This comes from ancient Greek philosophers and from other philosophers over ages throughout the world that will live in an upside down world. So whatever the mainstream tells you, you have to turn it upside down and then you will see the truth.
So if the mainstream is telling you that we should all become vegetarian and vegan, turn it upside, you will see the truth. This propaganda comes from global corporations, and I've understood that actually that's a fact that I solidly learned with my farm. My farm has taught me that fact that on an organic natural farm where you don't cut any corners and you do everything honestly on an organic farm, regenerative farm, when you do everything with love, you do the best for the soil, the best for the animals, the best for the birds, the best for the whole ecosystem of the farm. And I realized the solid fact that an on an organic farm like that natural farm, the easiest thing to produce a meat, milk and eggs, you are busy one hour in the morning feeding the chickens, milking the animals, letting them on pasture, and you're busy one hour in the evening, again, feeding them and putting them out to bed the rest of the day is free.
You can even hold a full-time job having an organic farm. But when it comes to growing vegetables or any other crops, that's where the full-time hard labor is. It's hard to grow. Plant matter on an organic farm, the yield is completely unpredictable. You can do everything by the book and your carrots just don't grow and you don't know why. And next year you get lots of carrots but no cabbages. The previous year, the cabbages grow and every year is different. The weather is different, the environment, everything's different. So the yield is completely unpredictable. You never know what you will get. So running it commercially and trying to sell vegetables from an organic farm is very, very difficult to do without cutting corners and without introducing some industrial farming techniques into that. When it comes to the industrial agriculture with lots of machines and chemicals and hybrids and GMOs and the rest of it, it's easy for them to grow.
Plant matter. The scientists have worked out all the seeds and hybridization and chemicals and so on, and it works. They get the yield year after year, not the weeded amongst those plants on these fields, on the industrial fields, and they get the yield and they get their profits. So it's easy for them to grow. Huge amounts of plant matter, profitable, easy. But when it comes to animals to producing meat, milk, and eggs, that's what the big headache is. That's where it's unprofitable and difficult for industrial farming because animals and birds just don't comply with industrial model. They get sick and they die so expensive. Antibiotics have to be used, expensive steroids have to be used. Expensive bills come in all the time and the yield is not so good and it's just difficult for them. So the industrial agriculture wanted to get rid of animal husbandry for a long time.
They had a few goals with it, and now they have a real goal because they have invested heavily into synthetic meat, synthetic milk, and synthetic X. These things are already in supermarkets. They're growing them from cell culture. If you want to see how it's done, you can see on some videos on Google where they use the three D printing machines and they can print out of the cell culture a stake for you of rare, medium, rare with any amount of fat that you want. They can print fish for you, they can print anything for you on these three D printers, and you can buy that. You can order that and buy it. And these things are already in supermarkets. So now the agenda of the mainstream authorities is to get rid of animal husbandry. They're trying very hard and in preparations for all the synthetics, they have launched pro vegetarian propaganda.
Very powerful. And many young people in particular, emotional youngsters, teenagers, young teenagers fall for this propaganda because they use the very films from their own industrial farms where the animals are abused, eat appropriate commodity crops and live in appalling environments. They fill their own farms and then they show it to the young populations to put them more feeding meat. They would never show them a farm like mine or other regenerative, healthy natural farms where animals are healthy, happy, and loved, and live according to the way modern nature designed them to live on pasture, all animals and birds must be on pasture to be healthy, happy, and to thrive and to have a proper fulfilling life. So cows must be on pasture, goats must be on pasture, pigs must be on pasture. In fact, the most ideal environment for pigs is a forest. A forest, because they dig pigs, they root, they eat a lot of what they dig out.
They eat a lot of insects and grabs and worms and plant mat and grass. They eat a lot of grass. No animal, no bird in this. Chickens should be on pasture, turkeys should be on pasture. Geese, ducks, geese and ducks need wetlands to be happy and healthy because they need ponds. They need water as well as pasture. These birds, what the industrial agriculture does, they want to plow everything because their biggest source of profit is growing plants, growing commodity crops. They don't want to waste land on pastures. They want to plow all their pastures and grow their commodity crops. So they've taken all these birds and animals off pasture and locked them in prisons called cafo, confined animal factory operation, where these poor little creatures live on concrete, they never see the light of then never see sun, and they're fed commodity crops which are grown on their pastures.
They're fed grain and they're fed soya and chemicals and a mixture with chemicals. These creatures are not designed by modern nature to eat grain and soya grain and soil make them sick. They get sick, they will have inflammation. If you allow them to live a few months longer, they'll get cancer and they'll just die. They all have arthritis, they're all sick, and they give you sick meat and sick milk and sick eggs, and all of that goes into supermarkets for people. So industrial model of agriculture is something that in the future, humanity must abandon. It must be abundant. We must all eat from natural, regenerative, organic farms, and that means that we have to abandon supermarkets today as consumers in the cities and anywhere else, we must abandon supermarkets because everything on the shelves of supermarkets comes from industrial agriculture.
Food is information. Information carries vibration. What vibration, what information does food in the supermarket carry? It carries information of abuse, greed, suffering, and disease. How can that information give you good health? When you eat food, you eating information, you're putting electromagnetic vibrations into your body and your body will then act upon it and build its own structure from that information. When you buy food from a natural, organic farmer who loves his land, loves his animals, loves his chickens, loves his cows, and goats and gardens, those animals that meat, that milk, those eggs carry vibration of love. Nature's is a solidified love.
The Einstein's formula and physics, you probably know that that energy is mass multiplied by speed of vibration squared. That's the formula. So energy and mass, energy and matter are one and the same. It's just that the speed of vibration is different slightly. So every matter, every piece that of food that you can hold and it made out of matter is vibrating. The whole world is jittering and vibrating. Your body is jittering and vibrating, and it's the frequency of vibration that matters. Love has a very high frequency of vibration. When you eat meat from an animal that was loved and only new kindness and love, that piece of meat will bring into your body the vibration of love and only that vibration can bring healing and good health. So if you want good health for your family, for your children, for yourself, you have to abundance supermarkets.
I know how convenient they are, how comfortable they are. Go to your farmer's market on a weekend, speak to the farmers, get their contact details. Ask, can I visit your farm on a weekend? And on the weekend, throw your kids in the car, get your dog, get the whole family and go and have a lovely Saturday or Sunday visiting a wonderful farm. Have fun and have a look how the animals are kept, how the chickens are kept, how the land is served, and look in the eye of that farmer. Is this a good person? Can I trust this person? Is this a loving person? And see if there are any bags of chemicals lying about or any refrigerators for one other pharmaceuticals. So once you found a few farms like that, buy all your food from these farms. All it takes is just driving one day on a weekend and getting your weekly supply from these farms.
And if you talk to your friends and family in the city and create a small group, many farmers, when you've got 10 people ordering things from the farmer, the farmer will deliver into the city for you into one place. So in order to get really truly health giving food, all it takes is just getting organized a little bit of organization. And by doing that, you will meet wonderful people, you'll make good friends, and you will bring real good health and prosperity and thriving into your family. Your children will behave better, they'll be better able to learn and to function. They will be more intelligent. The whole family will function better.
Leafbox:
Dr. Natasha, to end, are you optimistic of the future or you sound quite positive? I'm just curious what motivates you each day to keep going?
Dr Natasha:
Of course I'm optimistic. I know that with everything we hear nowadays and everything we've learned during the entertainment, many people feel that the world is coming to an end, that something terrible is happening, but what in reality is happening that every human being is given the choice and no one's allowed to sit on a fence. You either that way or you're this way. You either join the communities of people who now are buying land, growing their own food, are homeschooling their children. We now have unprecedented number of parents who are homeschooling their children, and it's wonderful, absolutely wonderful. People are leaving mainstream education because it isn't what they want for their children. Quite right, true. People are living mainstream altogether because they're disappointed in the people who run the mainstream and in the way it is run altogether and they're learning. And every human being is a powerful creature.
We are very powerful every one of us, but there's only so much energy every one of us has. We are creators. We create our own reality and we create our own environment, and every one of us has only so much energy. Whatever you put that energy into, grows. If you put your energy into the negatives of this world, fighting them and arguing with them and complaining about them and appealing to God, wants to change something, that's the biggest waste of time and effort that anybody can launch upon. If you waste, then all your energies gone into that negative and that negative grows, gets bigger, more prevalent. But if you deprive them of your energy, completely ignore them and put all your divine energy that you have into something positive, into an alternative that you grow, that you want for yourself, that you want for your children, the kind of future you want, then that will grow.
And as it grows and flourishes and blossoms, it'll push all that negative out. It'll replace it, and that's what every one of us has to do. That's what every one of us has to think. What do I really want in this world? I know what I don't want, but I should not put my energy into that because I don't want it to grow. What do I really want? What do I want to put my energy in it and what do I want to create that is beautiful and wonderful for me, for my loved ones and for everybody else around? So I'm very positive.
Leafbox:
Great. Well, Dr. Natasha, I really appreciate your time. I align with many of your thoughts and your teachings and your work, and I commend you. I mean, the farm is the most beautiful thing and helping other parents and other people come to solutions to their health are very encouraging. So thank you.
Dr Natasha:
That's a pleasure. And thank you for your work. Thank you for spreading the word.