Be Organic Podcast Season 3 – Episode 8 Finding Vitality Through Nature & Regenerative Farming
The power of healing can be found in the simplest of things: the Earth. It’s easy to take for granted dirt, farming, planting food, and what goes into the tomato we pick up casually on the grocery store shelves. Listen to hear a powerful story of healing, the impact that farming and soil has on our health, and the small steps you can take to make a difference in your health and the environment.
In this episode, Kat and Landon sit down with Jordan Rubin, co-founder, and CEO of Ancient Nutrition, a supplement company with a mission to restore our health, strength, and vitality by providing history’s healthiest whole food nutrients to the modern world. Jordan has an incredible healing story about his struggle with chronic illness, the dramatic toll it took on his body, and how he was able to heal with the power of food (and much more).
“We tend to take for granted that behind every organic food, every organic juice, every organic supplement – there are farmers so that you can eat the way you want to. It’s an under-appreciated trade.”
“40% of food in the world turns into food waste that goes into landfills.”
TIME STAMPS
2:52 Jordan Rubin’s Life Journey Towards Natural Health (jump to section)
8:57 Faith & Hope is Critically Important to Healing (jump to section)
16:50 Real Life, Real Food (jump to section)
18:03 Jordan’s Passion for Raising and Growing Truly Healthy Food (jump to section)
19:20 Producing Food is Not Easy (jump to section)
22:03 Defining Regenerative Agriculture vs. Organic Farming (jump to section)
27:08 You Can Farm Anywhere (jump to section)
28:02 The Ranch Project (jump to section)
30:26 Topsoil Quality and the Link Between Gut Health & Disease (jump to section)
32:06 The Importance of Physical Connection to the Soil (jump to section)
38:14 Tips and Small Steps to Start Moving in the Right Direction (jump to section)
Transcription Below
Kat Eckles: Welcome back, Be Organic listeners. This is Kat Eckles. We are so excited to have you all with us today. Thank you for joining us and choosing to learn about organic health, wellness, and lifestyle with us. We are so excited to have a very special guest with us today. His name is Jordan Rubin, and Jordan is the co-founder and CEO of Ancient Nutrition, which is a supplement company with its mission to restore our health, strength, and vitality by providing history’s healthiest whole food nutrients to the modern world.
One of America’s most recognized and respected natural health experts, Jordan is a New York Times bestselling author of The Maker’s Diet, and 26 other additional titles, including his latest work, Essential Fasting. An eco-entrepreneur and lecturer on health and nutrition, Jordan has shared the message of natural health in five continents and 46 states in the US. He also owns and operates Heal the Planet Farm, an organic farm and regenerative retreat center located at the base of the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. He is the founder of Garden of Life, a leading whole food nutritional supplement, and Beyond Organic, a vertically integrated organic food and supplement manufacturer.
Jordan has formulated hundreds of dietary supplements, functional foods, and beverages, including many number-one top sellers in the Healthy Food Channel. Jordan holds several patents spanning the categories of nutritional science, biomedical applications, and regenerative agriculture. Jordan is clearly a man on a mission to change our health and our planet, and we’re incredibly excited to have him as our guest on the Be Organic podcast. Welcome, Jordan.
Jordan Rubin: Thanks for having me. That’s a long intro, I think we sent you the encyclopedic version.
Kat: I mean, it’s just so impressive. I’m actually working on my first book, so to think about you writing 26 in itself is like a lifetime’s worth of work. Of course, all of these brands that you founded, Garden of Life is one of the most famous and well-known. I took those throughout my pregnancies, and Ancient Nutrition is off the charts right now. I think I can speak for everyone when I say your work is so impressive.
Jordan: Thank you. It’s been a labor of love, and it is one of those scenarios where necessity is the mother and father of invention. Everything that I’ve been able to do stems from my own life-changing experience with natural health.
Today, it’s a blessing to be able to help other people by sharing this message of health, but more importantly, hope. I think that’s the greatest deficiency we have, more so than omega 3s, probiotics, and zinc. We are deficient in hope and people need it. Hopefully, we can share a little bit of that today, freshly squeezed.
Kat: Aw, that’s beautiful. That was going to be my first question. I would just love to know the driving force and how you got to where you are today. As you said, I’m sure it’s been a journey, and I just think if we could share that hope with our listeners, they would love that.
Rubin’s Life Journey Towards Natural Health
Jordan: Absolutely. I’ll take you back some 27-28 years ago. I was deathly ill and just about to turn 19. I was ultimately diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and inflammatory bowel disease, which was a lot less common back then. There were no commercials about medications. No one really knew anyone with this debilitating, embarrassing disease.
It ultimately caused me to suffer from 18 additional illnesses or health challenges from diabetes to kidney and liver problems, and ultimately wasting away to 104 pounds in a wheelchair. If somebody wants to check out a Google image search, you can put my name in there, Jordan Rubin. It’ll come up likely where you’ll see some before and after photos.
I was really blessed to have just enough faith that at my lowest point, I asked my mom to take my picture. This was on an old-school camera, nothing digital, and she didn’t want to. I was skin and bones. I had this ugly beard because I couldn’t have the strength to shave very often, I was in my boxers, and looked like someone in a prison camp.
My mom asked me, “Why do you want me to take this picture? Can’t we wait until you’re well?” I said, “Mom, you need to take this picture because you’re not going to believe what God’s about to do in my life.” When I tell you that one flash, one snap of a camera changed everything for me, I really mean it.
Now, I didn’t get better the next day, the next week, or even the next month. A year later while following a diet based on the Bible, history, and science, I was able to overcome my illness and start on a journey to help other people, one at a time, be rescued from their health challenges. During my illness, I remember saying, “God, if you heal me, and if I can just help one person overcome disease, or better yet avoid it, then this living hell will all be worth it.”
When I say hell, I mean hell, but today I’m not alone in what I went through. There are people with all manners of autoimmune diseases. Cancer is just destroying people. I’ve had three people that I know in the last two weeks die of cancer. It’s just awful. When you think about the fact that with a little bit of faith and the right principles, you can rebuild your body even in light of all these crazy challenges we’re going through, that should be very comforting.
Better yet, I didn’t just get well, I started a journey that ultimately sparked the creation of Garden of Life. I started writing books and sharing this message in all manner of media around the world. It’s just been amazing, and today we need it just as much as we did when I first started sharing in the late nineties. I’m just as passionate, if not more so, to see how we together can heal the planet, feed the world, and eradicate disease.
Kat: Wow. Well, I give you so much credit because I think in today’s landscape, this kind of health, wellness, organic, and even just awareness about autoimmune diseases, it’s so much more prevalent. I can’t imagine 25-30 years ago that was going on, so you probably had to figure a lot of this out yourself.
Jordan: Yes. Back in the day, I think the information challenges were greater and I was blessed to meet a man who was an early health and natural health pioneer or adopter. I met him, and he infused faith, hope, and encouragement into my life. He got me to understand this ancient way of eating and living, which started in researching biblical times.
That really was the spark that helped me get well, but I think the other area that was important for me during my illness was I made a decision. Whatever I was doing before I got sick, whatever my path was, it’s all changing now. Now that I know what it’s like to be deathly ill, to literally wish for death every day because it’s better than life in that prison that I lived in that was my own body. I remember saying, “Whatever helps me, I’m going to tell the world about.” When I tell you I tried some crazy treatments, I tried some crazy treatments in two years that I can’t even mention on this podcast.
It truly is a testament. Sometimes the treatment or the cure’s worse than the disease in this case, but it was a blessing to me that what I learned that allowed my body to heal is something that was replicable everywhere, in every country, and in every state in the US. These principles are foundational, and it’s a blessing that I didn’t get well through some expensive treatment using a machine that is shooting certain currents through my body, this potion that I consumed from a Native American healer that didn’t have a label on it, or Venus fly trap infusions from Germany.
The fact is, what I did to get well, anybody can follow, and best of all, Kat, today it is so much more available, and so much more approachable. For example, when I was getting well in my healing program, I consumed raw juices all the time, but I couldn’t go to a Clean Juice every day and pick them up. It wasn’t available the way it is today. The information wasn’t, the foods weren’t, and the supplements weren’t, so we’re in a very blessed time. There’s never been a better opportunity for you to get well and give your body the tools to heal.
Faith & Hope is Critically Important to Healing
Kat: Yep. I want to get into, if we can, a little bit about your diet and stuff that you’re doing. Before you do that, anytime any of my guests bring this up, I really want to pause and highlight it because you said it a couple of times: what you got was faith, hope, basically positivity, belief in your body, and belief that God was going to heal you.
I think there’s this huge emotional piece of sickness that we often don’t talk about or often gets overlooked. I think what probably was a spark plug to heal you, was just that faith, that hope, and this man infusing that in really every cell of your body before you then could go onto your diet and stuff. I think that’s a really important point.
Jordan: Absolutely. There was a time when I was so sick, I was bedridden, and didn’t want anyone to visit me. My eyes were starting to get weak to where I couldn’t even read because I was so malnourished and wasting away. I was at the time, and still am, a man of faith, and I read the promises of God. There’s a scripture that’s Hebrews Chapter 11, Verse 1 that says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” When you are in a challenging circumstance, whether it’s the health that you’ve lost, a relationship, finances, or your kids, it’s so difficult to have faith in something that you can’t see, especially if it’s something you want to happen.
We can have all kinds of faith in a negative sense, which is called fear. We’re easily fearing what we don’t want, but having faith in what we want seems impossible. That is so difficult, but I do believe that faith led me to have my mom take my photo, and that was kind of a spark that started the flame that ignited my healing.
I didn’t see a change. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a skeleton that looked nothing like I ever imagined in my worst nightmares, but I knew that there was a chance. That mustard seed-sized faith, you’re absolutely right, it triggered something. In addition, when I was getting, well, the man whose name is Bud Keith, he’s no longer with us and passed away about 15 years ago, he told me I couldn’t speak negatively anymore. I had to start thinking about what I wanted and speaking life instead of death. That was huge for me.
Kat: Huge, absolutely. I tell that to my kids all the time. My teenagers, I see them and this whole generation of kids, as a joke, they’ll come into my house and be like, “I just want to kill myself. I just want to die.” They think it’s funny. I’m like, “You have to stop, it is not a joke. You have to stop that because it’s really serious.” Your words have power, the power is in the tongue, and it’s scary what this generation thinks they can do with that.
Jordan: Yes. I have, four teenagers in the house and I can attest to that. It is amazing what we allow to come out of our mouths. It’s a powerful weapon one way or another, but I believe it is very exciting that we can speak about great things and great promises. I can sit here and tell somebody today that if you are down in the dumps, if you’ve been diagnosed with an incurable disease, or maybe there’s just a nagging functional health condition that you can’t easily overcome, I promise you that the decisions you make today can impact your body as early as tomorrow in a massive way. I’ve met thousands of people who have defied the odds, who have beaten their diagnoses. I’ve seen people come out of hospice, so have hope. If you’re listening, there is a way for you to experience the health, all of it that God created you to experience.
Kat: It’s so beautiful, I love that. Well, awesome, let’s talk about step one is that emotional and spiritual piece that has to be the foundation and solid ground that all this healing is built on. Let’s talk about what you did next and maybe what changes you made in your diet, your supplement regimen, or your routine to really start your healing.
Jordan: Absolutely. Again, this is dating back quite a ways and I do write about this in two of my early books, Patient Heal Thyself and The Maker’s Diet. If you want a more expanded version of my original health plan, you can check those books out wherever books are sold, but really, Kat, it was pretty simple. During the two years of my illness – my dad’s a chiropractor and a naturopathic doctor – I was eating almost every version of a healthy diet you could think of from macrobiotic, to vegan, to something that would now be more akin to a gaps type diet with low starch, no starch, et cetera.
During this point in my life, I really started consuming nutrient-rich and in some cases calorically dense food. I did have a high consumption of raw juices, usually carrot juice and green juice, and I would put raw cream in them. I was in California at the time where I could get raw cream. Now we have our own farms and we’re able to do that, but the cream makes the beta keratin in the carrot juice more absorbable. I consumed grass-fed meats, and the grains I consumed were more heirloom, at the time Spelt and Kamut. Today, we consume iron corn as a form of unhybridized wheat that’s really healthy. I consumed healthy fruits, tropical fruits, et cetera, but everything was real.
In addition, I added a probiotic supplement that was what you’d call soil-based organisms or SBOs. If you think about it, I did for my gut the same thing today that we do for our farms. I basically inoculated it with good organisms that made my body resilient to the germs that were attacking me, boosted my immune system, and helped me absorb my food. Then I only consumed highly nutrient-dense foods and I ignored anything that would detract from my health. I consumed green foods and liver tablets. Obviously, it was a healthy omnivorous diet, not plant-based, but there were plenty of plant foods in the form of juices and salads, et cetera, and healthy nuts and seeds.
I began to rapidly rebuild my body. My inflammation went way down and in a matter of 40 days, I gained 29 pounds. In 12 weeks, I was back to my old self again, except it was nothing like my old self. I was impassioned to share this message with anyone who would listen, and even some who wouldn’t.
Kat: That’s absolutely unbelievable how quickly that happens. I think people think it’s going to take years, and I think that you probably continue to see improvements over the years and years, but the fact that within essentially a month you are 30 pounds heavier, that’s unbelievable.
Jordan: It really was. I remember distinctly, and I don’t talk about this as much anymore because it’s been so long, but my parents came to visit me. I was from Florida and I was getting well in California. When my parents got off the airplane, when I’d gone from 122 to 151 pounds in such a short time, my dad hugged me and said, “There’s so much of you to hug.” It’s interesting when you hear that because it’s not something you often say to anyone, but in this case, it was such a difference for me. From literally being a lifeless skeleton to somebody who had hope, and I was just envisioning a future in my life instead of almost dying in a hospital bed so many times. It’s really a remarkable story that I need to think about more often, frankly, and I’ll be more thankful for.
Real Life, Real Food
Kat: Absolutely. I think something else you noted that is really important to me, I think sometimes people think because we own an organic juice bar, we’re super vegan or eat only plant-based. It’s funny, every single year on Thanksgiving, someone different will be like, “So what do you guys eat for Thanksgiving?” I’m like, “Turkey and butter.” Meat is so important.
Of course, we drink juices and smoothies every day and we do lots of beautiful plant-based things, but we do really awesome grass-fed meats. Actually, my producer that’s sitting here just sent me a local farm that we can go buy a cow from. We’re going to buy a cow, get all the organs, make the bone broth, and the whole thing. We’re super into eating like that and just really using God’s creation to feed us in the way that it was meant to.
Jordan’s Passion for Raising and Growing Truly Healthy Food
Jordan: That is very awesome. It’s interesting, there’s a lot of angst between the camps of diets. I’ve learned that there are amazing plant foods, obviously, and some I think are more nutritious than others. There are amazing animal foods. I think it really all comes back to where was your food raised? Where was it grown? Of course, another element to it is how can we positively contribute to the environment that’s providing us the food?
When I was 20 years old, and starting to get well, I made a commitment because of how difficult it was for me to find the right foods back in the day. This was right around the time when raw juices were being dumped from health food stores, everything had to be pasteurized, and raw dairy was being fought against left and right. I knew that one day I would need these foods to be healthy and to feed my family and feed others, so I made a commitment then and there. I didn’t have anything to my name except an old 1968 Chevrolet Motorhome that I was living in. I made a commitment that one day I’m going to have a hand in raising and growing the world’s healthiest foods. I’m blessed to say today that we’re doing just that. It isn’t only about what we can eat, what we can drink, and educating people. I think we need to play a positive role on the land that supplies these foods because without the soil, without the land, and without the ecosystem, we can’t consume these amazingly nutritious foods that some of us are counting on for our health.
Kat: Absolutely. One of my favorite movies that I’ve probably seen in the last decade is The Biggest Little Farm. It is such a good movie, and to me, it encapsulates everything that you just said. What’s going on? Our soil is so devoid of everything that we need, like you said, the probiotics and the nutrients that are supposed to be in our soil aren’t there anymore. How the whole ecosystem works together to provide what we actually need is so beautiful, and I think that’s what you’re doing right with your regenerative farming and your agriculture.
Producing Food is Not Easy
Jordan: Absolutely. The Biggest Little Farm was an awesome movie. For someone like me, it was really great because my wife and I watched it on an international flight. I felt so much better when she saw that other people have struggled in farming the way we have. She literally thought everything we ever did on our farm went wrong and we must be the only ones. The truth is, when you’re a suburb slicker and you have a vision to farm, you learn the hard way that producing food is not easy and you learn to appreciate how simple it has become that you can go and buy a little clamshell of organic raspberries for $2.99 or $3.99, depending on the season. Some people complain about the price, but I think to myself, “Well, geez, you’re guaranteed to get all the raspberries. No birds ate them. No insects destroyed the plants.” I mean, this is amazing.
We tend to take for granted that behind every organic food, organic juice, and organic supplement, there are farmers that are sweating and struggling so that you can eat the way you want to. It is an underappreciated trade. If you go back thousands of years, everyone wanted to be a farmer, and I sure hope that we start seeing that again, but I am passionate about regenerative agriculture. There’s nothing better than eating something or drinking something that came from land that you cultivated.
It’s interesting, Kat, I’m not a farmer, but I’m learning. Since 2009, I’ve been doing this: I’ve planted seeds from Papayas that I purchased at Whole Foods. I’m talking about three papayas. I planted all the seeds and we have some greenhouses. Today we have 500 mature papaya trees, we’ve already harvested fruit, and replanted the seeds. I know some farmers think, of course, that’s how agriculture works. To me, it’s a miracle that you could buy a piece of fruit and end up with hundreds of fruit-producing trees. Talk about multiplication.
Defining Regenerative Agriculture vs. Organic Farming
Kat: Absolutely, that is so cool. How would you define regenerative agriculture versus organic farming?
Jordan: I think the simple way to say it is organic agriculture is a great system that prohibits the use of most chemicals. Organic is a way to produce food that is largely chemical-free, more nutritious, and does not harm the land. Keep that in mind: does not harm the land.
Regenerative agriculture makes sure that the soil, the environment, animals if you raise them, and plants if you have them, are demonstrably healthier year after year. You are adding to the soil and making the plants and animals healthier. You are not maintaining, you are increasing, improving, and transforming. That’s a huge difference. Regenerative is literally taking something dead and bringing it to life. Organic is a fine starting point, and our farms are certified organic, but regenerative is the only way that we can transform our environment and make what the United Nations said, which is that we have 40 or 60 farm years left doing it the way we have done it, and then we’re finished. We need to prove that to be wrong. We need that to be false, and the regenerative movement is critical. We need to shop regenerative local. We need to encourage farmers to go through the regenerative certification process. It’s not easy, but it’s a necessity.
It’s absolutely what we have to do, and here’s the best part: We’re not doing anything new. This is the ancient way, we’re returning to the past. I don’t have to ask you if your great-grandparents or grandparents farmed, I just have to ask you where they farmed and how they farmed. More often than not, it is regenerative.
Kat: What are the things that you do on a yearly basis to keep this improvement? Are you adding species of plants, different worms, and animals, or what improvements do you make to continue getting these gains year after year?
Jordan: That’s a very loaded question, and I would love to share it all with you, but I’m going to be as brief as I can. Everything you mentioned, yes. There are certain components that are critical, but I believe this wholeheartedly, to have a regenerative system, you need animals. Animals improve the land, they don’t destroy it. Now, certain animals can be a little more destructive in environments than others, but large and small animals can make a big difference: how they eat, how they stomp, or depending on what species you have, how they flop their feet around like ducks, the pest control that they provide, and best of all the fertilizer. The urine and manure that livestock provides, and I’m talking from turkeys to goats, is a way to bring life to the soil.
Then, you want to plant what the industry calls cover crops. You always want to have the ground covered. You want to plant a variety of grasses, herbs, forbs, and legumes. You might be saying, “What’s a forb?” Trust me, these are different species of forage. We would call it grass, but they’re not all grasses. They capture sunlight, their roots go deep, and they create more life in the soil.
Earthworms, we have a worm farm, they’re amazing. Bees are critical. When you start regenerating the environment, more insects, and more native, and even wild species of animals come in. Here’s a crazy statistic, most people think insects are bad because we spray pesticides and insecticides everywhere. There is an amazing statistic I heard from an entomologist not long ago that said for every one pathogenic or bad insect, one pest, there are 1,700 beneficial insects. So, we’re killing all the insects, when in fact we just need proper ballots. If your plants are dying, they’re unhealthy. Make the soil resilient, and you will have disease-resistant plants. It all works. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it all works, and guess what happens, Kat? When we eat or drink juice from a disease-resistant plant, we become disease resistant.
Kat: Yep, absolutely. Where’s your farm located? Are you in Nashville?
Jordan: We are south of Nashville and in the southern most part of Missouri. We have two farms. One is a little larger in Missouri and a total of 4,000 acres that will become the first ever regenerative farms in Missouri and Tennessee. We are really excited about that. We raise what you’d call exotic livestock, and it is a real joy to learn how to steward the land properly.
Kat: Well, that’s really encouraging for me because I think in my head I was always like, “Oh you have to be in California or something to have a farm correctly just because of weather.” It seems like Missouri probably isn’t exactly 70 degrees and sunny all year round.
You Can Farm Anywhere
Jordan: No. In fact, some people mispronounce it as “misery”. It is not only that, Kat, our farm in Missouri, they told us when we bought it, “The only thing you can grow here in the Ozarks is rocks.” The greatest part about this regenerative plan is that truly, if you could grow healthy foods and raise healthy foods in the Missouri Ozarks, you can do it anywhere in the world, we believe.
Kat: Absolutely. I know that you partner with the R.A.N.C.H. Project, and that’s something that you’re really passionate about. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
The R.A.N.C.H. Project
Jordan: Yeah, so the R.A.N.C.H. Project is very new. It stands for Regenerative Agriculture, Nutrition, and Climate Health. This is a project that I believe will go on 14 or more years. It just started, and we are going to objectively measure all manner of ecosystem health, from soil health to animal health, to species of microorganisms, macroorganisms, the whole gamut, so that we can truly prove conclusively that you can rebuild what we’ve lost. Everyone here should know who’s listening.
We were a land that was highly fertile in America. That’s why so many people came here. What used to be inches and feet of top soil, which is critical for what we eat and what we drink, has now in some instances, gone down to millimeters. There was a home that was being excavated right next door to my house which was a farm. This was not some gravel road or some pavement, it was a little bit of grass. I said, “This is a great opportunity for me to get a snapshot of what the soil strata looks like.” When I tell you I couldn’t see any topsoil to the naked eye, I couldn’t see any. It might have been millimeters. We in America used to have feet of topsoil.
In fact, I’ll prove it to you. The reason people are buried six feet under is so their remains, the casket, won’t move around because topsoil is much more like a sponge. It’s very malleable. If you buried somebody in the topsoil, they would end up moving down the line. We have lost more topsoil in the last 50 years than we have in the entirety of recorded history.
If we can prove through the R.A.N.C.H. Project and our million-member regenerative food for us, we’re planting a million trees that produce superfoods. If we can prove that you can rebuild topsoil and transform the ecosystem, then the answer that we’ve all been looking for is clear. We can feed the world healthfully, and all of these dire predictions can be just that, false predictions.
Topsoil Quality and the Link Between Gut & Disease
Kat: Yep. Well, I think as you said, you can look at this probably in a bunch of different ways, but the topsoil, quality of our soil, and essentially pro and prebiotics in our soil have gone down while gut disease has been through the roof. This leads to rises in everything from ADHD to autism, to cancer as an autoimmune, so I think the correlation there is huge.
Jordan: There is no doubt. The more that I study the soil and the body, the more similarities there are. Particularly what you call probiotics in the soil that creates a more disease-resistant soil and disease-resistant plant. Our gut is a garden, it’s the soil of our body. When you can get your gut right, all good things will emanate from that. For me, having a gut disease, it was obvious, but when you have osteopenia and soft bones, it may not be as obvious that your gut needs help, but it does. It’s the soil and the root system, all of those analogies make sense.
Here’s the way I know it: man came from the dust of the earth, but it wasn’t dust. Man came from topsoil. We were made up, and we are made up, of the same components that are in the ground. People say, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” It’s not dust, it’s soil. The components of soil reflect what we were and are made of. We are connected to the soil, at least we should be. The more we can get back to that, the healthier we’ll be.
Kat: I’ve read too, it’s like even our grandparents were out there in the soil with their hands, their feet, and their toes digging in the soil. Even as kids and children, just playing in the dirt with their hands digging. Then as they got older, they were gardening and planting. These kinds of traits have been lost entirely on my generation and certainly my kids’ generation.
The Importance of Physical Connection to the Soil
Jordan: You are 100% correct. My good friend and colleague, Dr. Josh Axe, wrote a book called Eat Dirt, which was based upon work that I had done 10 years previously. In our first booklet, “Beyond Probiotics” and all of our messaging around the soil-based organisms, there is no doubt that having contact with soil, and eating fresh foods from the soil as a child, will make an adult that has less allergies, less gut issues, and a more balanced immune system. We have struggled and suffered because we have become too clean and too hygienic. Boy, over the last couple of years that has been reinforced even more: stay inside, wash your hands with alcohol solutions all the time, and sanitize everything. If you want to be clean, go get dirty.
Kat: That’s so true. People come over saying, “Your kids don’t have shoes on, they’re outside playing.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s by design. Don’t tell them to put ’em on because it’s so important and something that’s totally missing.” Sadly, they’re outside on this land that probably is devoid of most things anyway, so even though they are out there doing that, it is soil that’s not as healthy as it should be.
Jordan: Absolutely, and minerals are so important. We know that there are farms today and farmers that will admit, “Hey, our soil’s dead. We’re just using it to hold plants up. All of our fertility is purchased from the chemical company.” That is so sad, and we’re going to change all that. It is going to take time and it’s going to take getting the word out to support organic. Better yet, support regenerative and local. No matter who you are or where you are, go plant something and compost something.
Forty percent of our food in the world turns into food waste that goes into landfills primarily. We have amazing programs we’re doing where we are picking up all of the food waste from multiple health food stores and restaurants and composting it, feeding our ducks, chickens, and turkeys. It’s absolutely amazing. In fact, boy, would I love to have every Clean Juice give me all of your pulp. That would be amazing, but the point is that’s what we call trash to treasure.
This is what we’re capable of. In my own family, I did a little analysis because we compost in our home. We’re going to go through a thousand pounds of food waste in a year. We fill somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 pounds a week. I mean, that’s more like 10,000 pounds, it’s amazing. I’m sadly pulling banana peels out of the garbage and yelling at my kids because they’re wasting something. I mean, that is all able to be converted into topsoil.
Kat: Absolutely. I know that you have traveled a bunch, to five different continents, and you speak about natural health and everything that you’ve learned. You probably also learned a ton from them. I’d love to hear about any differences in their acceptance of these ideas, cultural practices, or just things that you notice in different countries. I think in America, we can get really focused and pigeonholed on what we have going on here, and there are so many places in the world that are doing it correctly already.
Jordan: Absolutely. Well, there’s one I think of: we partner with an organization called Mully Children’s Family. They’re known as the world’s largest family, and they’re in Kenya. On our trip to Kenya, we had a chance to work with them. They are so advanced, they’ve gone to the desert area, and not only have they fathered and mothered this couple, they rehabilitated 18,000 children who were abandoned, in sex trades, horrible things, or impoverished on the streets and the slums. They’ve planted 6 million trees and they have an institute that’s like a college that teaches how to improve the ecosystem. Despite that, the surrounding villages are absolutely wasting resources and not truly appreciating the little that they have. There’s a dichotomy there.
We went to Italy not too long ago, and in many cases, the vineyards in Italy have really good composting and soil-building practices. For them, it’s not anything new, it’s absolutely old school. We went to farms in New Zealand a couple of years ago. I toured more than a dozen farms in Israel in 2020, which has basically in the last 30 years gone from being a horrific landscape that was degraded to now beautiful with avocado orchards and prickly pear or cactus pear growing all over the place.
I think in general, the rest of the world who have less than we do, they’re less industrialized. They understand the concept of not wasting anything. I’m proud to say that even during the Super Bowl there was a commercial to tackle food waste. Their take on it was, “don’t throw that away, repurpose it in your diet,” which is great. The fact that somebody spent $7 million on a Super Bowl commercial to tackle food waste made me happy.
Tips and Small Steps to Start Moving in the Right Direction
Kat: Absolutely. A lot of our listeners won’t be able to wake up tomorrow and just start a regenerative farm as much as they might like to, right? It might seem overwhelming. It means that even some of the diet changes might seem overwhelming to them. What are some tips or small steps that our listeners could do to start moving in this direction?
Jordan: These are really simple. From a diet perspective, start with what you consume first thing in the morning. This is really simple. Now, obviously, juices are amazing, but I just tell people, “Hey, wake up in the morning, consume 16 ounces of pure water, and squeeze half a lemon in it.” That’s super affordable and it will get your digestive tract started. By the way, at night, go to bed an hour earlier than you normally would. Those two things can make a big difference, even though some of you are thinking, “I’ve been doing that for years, I need more meaty health information.” Just start with that.
On the regenerative side, plant something. My assistant told me, “Hey, my avocado plant is growing very big.” He took one of our avocado seeds, I haven’t thrown one away in two years, and did the old “put an avocado pit in a glass and put a toothpick through it.” He’s sprouted it and puts it near a windowsill. Half of the year, he puts it outside here in Tennessee. He’s growing an avocado tree.
Grow a potted plant. Literally, take some kind of container, it could be a plastic bucket, put it under your sink or on your sink, and put all the food waste in it. Once you collect all that food waste, either use it in the yard you have and start a compost pile, find a local farm, or go to a local compost center. Sure, it takes a little effort, but just by doing those three things, you’re improving your health. You are improving the environment by having literally one potted plant because even the indoor air quality is improved when you have living things, growing green plants. Compost something, and you’ll contribute in a small but meaningful way to transform the world. My mission statement is to heal the planet, feed the world, and eradicate disease.
That all starts with a small step that each of us can take in each area. If somebody is interested, we have a great new booklet – I should have mentioned this, Kat, I just remembered – called “Regenerative Reset: Transform Your Body, Mind, and Planet”. It’s available at health food stores, health food groceries, or on ancientnutrition.com. It’s a simple, easy-to-read booklet that will give you tips to help your body, mind, and our planet transform and thrive.
Kat: That’s beautiful. Well, Jordan, you’re amazing. I honestly would spend money to sit and pick your brain all day, but I would love to have you back sometime just to get deeper into this because I think it’s such an important topic and such a need. Like you said, it’s how we’re going to change the country and the world, and how we’re going to really help to save people. I appreciate all you’re doing and all the effort that you’re putting into this and your research. I just want you to know that you’re an inspiration and we’re just really grateful for all that you’re doing.
Jordan: Thank you for the kind words. I appreciate being here and keep fighting the good fight. We’re in this together.
Kat: Absolutely. Hey, real quickly, tell everyone where we can find you, your Instagram, and your website. I’m sure your books are on Amazon and all that kind of stuff.
Jordan: Yes, you can get the books on Amazon. Our website is ancientnutrition.com and most of our socials are under the draxe.com handles. We have a great YouTube channel that has thousands of videos, and we have draxe.com with over 4,000 articles that are more than 4,500 words each. Any condition, herbs, spice, food, beverage, or anything about farming is all available for free. Check out draxe.com, ancientnutrition.com, and any of the Ancient Nutrition and Dr. Axe social feeds. We’d love to educate you and partner with you to change your neck of the woods.
Kat: That’s awesome. Well, thank you again, Jordan. We’re so appreciative of your time and we’d love to have you back again.
Jordan: That would be awesome. Have a great rest of your week.
Kat: Thank you so much for tuning in today to Be Organic. We’re so excited for you to become healthier in body and stronger in spirit.
Landon Eckles: So if you like what you heard today, please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts to never miss an episode.
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Landon: All right, y’all. Thanks for listening. Have a great week and remember to be organic.
Kat: Just a quick legal disclaimer, we are not doctors. While we absolutely love discussing wellness and nutrition with our expert guests, you should always talk to your physician or other medical professional before making any dietary or lifestyle changes. They can assess your specific needs and come up with a plan that works best for you.
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