Sowing the Seeds of Wellness: The Role of Soil Health in Human Microbiomes with Lee Holdstock

In this episode of the Microbiome Medics Podcast, we are joined by Lee Holdstock from the Soil Association, UK's biggest organic certifier, to explore the vital connection between soil health and human microbiomes. Our discussion highlights the benefits of organic farming practices for soil health, biodiversity, and ultimately, human well-being. We delve into the efficiencies of nature in organic farming, emphasizing the need to transition towards sustainable practices for healthier soil and more nutritious food choices. The conversation also addresses the impact of intensive farming on animal welfare, the nutritional advantages of organic food, and the challenges of promoting organic farming to consumers. We underscore the importance of upholding organic farming standards, certification processes, and the role of healthy soils in supporting human health. Ultimately, we advocate for supporting organic and sustainable farming methods, improving agricultural policies, and making informed food choices for a healthier future.

https://www.soilassociation.org/
https://www.foodforlife.org.uk/
https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/dirty-dozen.php

This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine.

Disclaimer:
The content in this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast.

Chapters

• 1:05 Introducing Soil Association's Senior Business and Trade Development Manager
• 13:57 The Origins and Objectives of the Soil Association
• 24:22 Sustainability and Productivity in Organic Farming
• 28:01 Soil Health and Climate Resilience
• 31:14 Quality and Nutritional Differences in Organic vs. Non-Organic Foods
• 40:35 The Cost of Organic Food
• 48:20 The Harsh Realities of Poultry Farming
• 53:22 Organic Certification Process
• 1:01:52 Streptomyces and Human Health
• 1:05:07 Interconnectedness of Soil and Human Health
• 1:23:05 Pesticides in Plant-Based Diets
• 1:30:45 Soil Association's Waterways Health Project
• 1:37:42 Food for Life Campaign in Schools
• 1:44:19 Tackling Food Waste in Hospitals

Transcript

Intro: 0:05

Hello and welcome to the Microbiome Medics Podcast. I'm Dr. Siobhan McCormack. And I'm Dr. Sheena Fraser, and we're your co-hosts. We are both GPs and lifestyle medics with a shared passion for microbiome science, and we have spent the last five years deep diving into the world of the gut microbiome. We'll be translating the evidence and packaging it into actionable, bite-sized chunks so that you could harness the power of the microbiome to improve your own health and that of your patients.

Sheena: 0:35

Thank you. And welcome to another edition of the Microbiomedics podcast. I'm Dr. Sheena Fraser, and today I'm joined with Lee Holstock, who is the Soil Association's Senior Business and Trade Development Manager, and he's the resident expert on soil health and nutrition. So I'm flying solo today. Siobhan is busy working in her GP role, but she'll be with us for the next podcast, but I hope she's listening today. But before I bring in Leigh, I just wanted to tell you that I feel really strongly about ecosystems. The quality of the earth that we are exposed to through farming and through the time we spend in nature is actually really important to the development of our human microbiomes. So it's actually one of the first podcasts we should have done, I think. It's one that I've actually wanted to do for a long time. So speaking to somebody about soil, about the health of the soil that we're exposed to at the moment, I think is really, really important. I've been a keen member and supporter of the Soil Association for over 20 years. So I'm really excited to speak to Lee today. They were my obvious choice because they're interested in organic farming, the promotion of that. I feel very strongly that it's through organic farming that we can expose our microbiomes to the best quality soil and the best quality microorganisms. So this podcast is all about finding out why that is and get lots more information on this from Lee. So hi, Lee. Welcome to the Microbiomedics Podcast.

Lee: 2:44

Hi, Sheena. Hi, Sheena.

Sheena: 2:46

So, I want to ask you a little bit more about yourself, but first of all, can you just explain to the listeners who may not have heard of the Soil Association, what the Soil Association is and what it does?

Lee: 2:58

Sure, of course. We as an organisation have now been around for a surprising length of time. So we were founded in 1946 and have just celebrated a fairly big birthday. In terms of our origins, I guess you could say we have our feet very much in the sort of Ayurvedic movement, really. Our founders were a group of thinkers and luminaries who traveled to South Asia at the time of the sort of British Empire, pre-Second World War. And they had various different reasons for doing that. Some of them were traveling purely as part of research. Others were actually sent there as consultants. But I think the thing that was important is they all made what they felt was a common observation that where they saw farming. Where there was a particular reverence for the soil and a care of the soil. They felt that they were also witnessing healthier populations in those places where farming practices took more care of soil. Soil um so all these years later we are we're still talking about this it's incredible uh over 70 years later this vital link between health of the soil health of plants animals and us and today the modern sword association we're a charity and we also own a limited company which is a certification company who i work for and if you're keen eyes you may well have seen out on the. Shelves of the shops and on the internet the sword association symbol which is our symbol of trust for consumers that assures them that a set of legally binding and additional private standards that predate those regulations have been applied and that that product has been certified and inspected right from the farm through to the fork and just finally sheen to say the actual charity uh themselves who own the certification company are campaigning uh on lots and lots of different issues and are working in partnership with many many organizations to deliver uh some solutions really to the climate and nature and health crisis that we are we're not facing it to we're actually living now uh so whether it's farming and land use or whether it's healthy sustainable diets soil association active in in i i'm overwhelmed as somebody's been with them for a long time by the level and diversity of activity fab.

Sheena: 5:27

So how did you get involved in the soil association and what's what's your specific role.

Lee: 5:32

Okay, well, I've been with the organization for an almost embarrassing decade and a half now. And I, like, rather like the accountant that ran away from the accountants to join the circus, I kind of ran away from banking to join a small and vibrant organization that at the time, I saw its activity is very much aligned with the things I felt were important when I was studying earth sciences. So I understood that this was an organization that was tackling the damage to wildlife and the collapse of the ecosystems through a novel mechanism and a mechanism I'd started to learn about as an undergraduate where we could actually, where possible, get markets to help operate as mechanisms for good and saw the organic movements doing this. So I joined as a very junior certification person looking after people's licenses and checking their products. And yeah, not a single day has gone by when I haven't felt. It's a privilege to be part of this band of dedicated people that are really trying to make the world a better place.

Sheena: 6:42

Okay. And I don't know if we should just start at the beginning. So let's start by looking at soil and talking about soil, because I think that's obviously fundamental to your organization. Soil is teeming with bacteria and other microorganisms and organic matter. But tell me, what should soil look like? And tell me why the state of our soil matters.

Lee: 7:08

Yeah i mean it depends where you are soil is is uh you know it looks like different things smells like different things but what i can tell you is if you were to walk into a grass pasture now on a farm and dig a hole and do make sure you've got permission before you do anything like that but if you're if you're picking up soil and you're smelling it if it smells like damp drains that's not good uh that's a sign of a soil which has been abused uh and it's not necessarily as alive as it should be um it should smell sweet so you know there is a there's an immediate our senses can tell us immediately whether the soil is healthy or not um and you're quite right regards the the way that we view soil i think for too long uh intensive uh industrial farming has viewed soil as essentially a medium for the three key chemicals that are added to it so essentially Actually, you could say we've been growing hydroponically using the three key chemicals out of a bag. And thinking of the soil as just a medium to hold those and hold the water. And actually, what we should be doing is thinking of it as a kind of rainforest under our feet. So in those critical few inches of soil, they're full of light. In fact, it's been said that a tablespoon of healthy soil contains more organisms than there are currently people on the earth. So, it's important to think of it as very much a living system and it has its own complexities and interactions and its own precise ecology.

Sheena: 8:41

Yeah. So why does that matter to the soil? Because obviously, yeah, I mean, hydroponics work, don't they? So, you know, we can grow things hydroponically and things still grow. So why do you think all the bacteria and the other organisms in there are important?

Lee: 9:01

Sure. Well, I mean, it isn't really just about N, P and K. So we need to think further than that. And in terms of nutrition for both the animals eating the plants that grow in the soil and indeed the plants that we're eating directly, there is a lot of complexity there. So those many different organisms that are shredding and decomposing or predating on each other or filling their different roles, that whole ecology operating in the soil is helping to liberate and make available a huge diverse array of minerals and compounds that the plants need to grow stronger and grow healthier. I mean, there is also an important consideration here that actually soil structure can be damaged by the use of agrochemicals. So if agrochemicals are used, there are other effects on the plant directly. So we know that synthetic nitrogen can weaken cell walls in plants and make them more vulnerable to pests. And as a result of making that plant defend itself, it's coming out differently. It's producing higher levels of things like phenolics. But a healthy soil can make particularly things like minerals and other micronutrients more available to plants. And that can change, as I say, how that plant comes out.

Sheena: 10:20

Hmm. And, you know, forgive me, because I'm not up on all of the terminology from agrochemicals and things. So which agrochemicals are you talking about? Which sort of chemicals are the ones that are influencing the health of the soil? Sure.

Lee: 10:36

Well, the key agrochemicals that we talk about in the organic world are certainly the synthetics, are the pesticides, they're the fertilizers and the herbicides. So I've said a little bit about the nitrate fertilizers and how they can impact on the soil. But equally, chemicals like glyphosate, which is a very widely used herbicide, there's increasing evidence to suggest that the use of things like this can influence microorganisms, whether that's actually in your gut when you eat the product and there are residues on, or whether that's directly by influencing those microorganisms in the soil. And it's incredibly important that we think about them because, of course, these agrochemicals, if they're killing these organisms and not completely sterilizing the soil, but certainly reducing the bioactivity, then the organisms that are doing particular jobs, like there are particular fungal organisms that produce a sort of glue that helps to glue together the particles and sort of give it that structure. Structure so yeah if we're using these chemicals they can impact the directly the organisms they can impact organisms that help build soil structure organisms that help liberate micronutrients and yeah we go from having a living soil to something far more sterile which is not optimizing nutrition for the plant and for us.

Sheena: 12:00

And actually, what you're talking about is just so similar to what Shiv and I have been talking about in terms of human microbiomes, because it's the same thing. Our human gut microbiome is this massive, diverse population of microorganisms. And once you take on board a chemical, for example, an antibiotic or something that knocks out a number of these species, it changes the whole ecosystem and that can change the function of that ecosystem. And so it can be metabolically less active. And some of the metabolites or the products that are produced by that ecosystem are vitally important to our health. So, of course, then our health can suffer if we are. So it sounds to me like it's exactly the same in the soil, that you've got a very complex ecosystem. You've got all these microorganisms that are doing different jobs and and without all of them there you've not got as healthy an ecosystem and you knock out certain strains and and that's what happens and and actually I've looked into the impact of pesticides on our gut microbiome because of course we're ingesting foods that contain pesticides all the time our our plants are very heavily sprayed with pesticides. And actually, we can be consuming quite huge quantities of them. And they do knock out significant populations of bacteria and different pesticides will knock out different bacterial strains. And actually, there's not a lot of research on this. I was actually quite surprised at the lack of research that I found when I looked into this. I don't know, is it the same in the in the soil world what's what's the research like on pesticides.

Lee: 13:57

Yeah i mean there is there is uh there is research out there it does exist i think the challenge for us in the organic world is that um it's the difficulty complexity and cost of doing those longitudinal studies the studies that would help us to eliminate all of the different effects that could ultimately influence our overall health so we can monitor whether people are eating organic diets or not we can control for that but over over long periods of time we would also have to eliminate things like how much exercise of course you do whether you live in a polluted urban, landscape or indeed a rural environment where there might be heavy pesticide usage where you live not to mention all the other things related to your genetics and and your lifestyle it's incredibly important to control for all those and i think uh you know the the nature of our research and development in the world today is very much around, creating resource available for researchers who were looking to create a saleable product of course or service afterwards now what we're selling here is not a product we're selling a set of principles and a method of farming so we often refer to organic farmers being knowledge intensive rather than chemical intensive as there is an awful lot for landowners to understand and appreciate as they move into this transition to this more ecological way of farming yeah.

Sheena: 15:24

I think we'll talk a little bit more about pesticides in a minute but can we just talk about the difference then between an organic farm and a non-organic farm.

Lee: 15:34

Yeah absolutely it's a very very good question sheena and i think it's something that we um there's there's a quite a lot of complexity here and a big challenge for us is how do you get that across quite quickly on a on a label in a supermarket when you're picking up products um but if you want to understand the fundamentals then, very much the system is, well, let me start at the beginning. When our founders first talked about organic farming, it was referred to as closed farming. So there was an intention here or an effort to try and close the loop around the farm, to make the farm itself a self-sustaining system. So some of the features you would see in organic farming would be, of course, the avoidance of synthetic agrochemical inputs, which i think is probably uh particularly pesticides is a common understanding of organic people are motivated to buy organic food because many people understand it's helping them avoid, residues of pesticides but there is some there's more to it than that so some of the. Methods that we would choose would be things like crop rotation in organic so, that would be not growing the same thing in the same place year on year to stay one step ahead of pests and disease, also to allow those soils to recover. There are certain crops that are very hungry, particularly when it comes to certain nutrients. So working on soil health and balancing that is all about moving your crops around and staying one step ahead. So I'll give you a quick example. If you're growing an organic wheat crop, this would typically be done by an organic farmer as part of a fairly long rotation. So the land would be laid down for grass production, Often that grass would include things like legumes, clover, for example, that help fix nitrogen in its roots from the atmosphere. So if you've cast your mind back, listeners to your GCSE biology, you'll remember that peas and vetches and clover can got this magical ability almost to pluck nitrogen from the air and get it back in the ground. So, you might do that for anywhere between four and maybe even eight years or longer before you then switch to a hungry wheat crop that will mop up all that nitrogen. So, that constant rotating, the same with animals. We would see them moved around so that we don't allow the disease burden to build up in the soil where they're living. So, there are certain parasites that if you keep them in the same place for too long, you're going to make your problems bigger. We are solar powered farming so again the way we get our nitrogen is not from fossil fuels and most modern synthetic nitrates are actually produced from natural gas and use a huge amount of energy to do so and release a lot of pollutants in the process so we're solar powered we use crop rotation we recycle everything so whether it's composting manures growing green manures and and digging them back into the soil. Nothing is wasted on an organic farm. It's very much about doing that. We are also, one of the key principles is about working with nature. We're living on a planet where we've been evolving nature for over 1 billion years, well over. And nature by its nature is very efficient. Evolution will ensure that something is pushed out of the system quite quickly if it's not very efficient. So, we in organic believe that that efficiency should be, we should harness that, we should optimize nature and work with those efficient natural systems. So, this is the reason why we encourage biodiversity on organic farms. It's not just nice to have wildlife around, that biodiversity, diversity of life gives us some resilience. It makes it very difficult for individual pest species to take over and become a significant problem if there's an abundance of life there. And you're going to get those predator insects that are controlling your pests. And of course, finally, there's a piece around livestock on our farm. So about making sure that they are as healthy as possible, positive health through reduction of stress, eating the right diets. If they're a ruminant, they should be eating predominantly grass. and also again this idea of closed farming persists in organic in herds we still talk about closed herds so not buying in your replacement stock from markets but actually breeding your own animals because one of the advantages of doing that is you can manipulate their genetics a little to suit exactly where you farm so the same breed of livestock will work less well in in different landscapes and different different environments.

Sheena: 20:10

So it sounds like it's really sort of back to a very, very natural way of farming and essentially utilizing all of the things that you have available to you in that ecosystem and using it to your advantage, but also helping to encourage a wider, broader ecosystem of nature in and around the farm as well. I mean, it all sounds wonderful. What about the productivity of an organic farm? Because a lot of people argue that, you know, that's just not sustainable, that you would need to use, you know, modern farming methods with, you know, lots of fertilizers and lots of chemicals in order to increase production, make things more streamlined. And I, you know, using the same field year on year for the same crop, which is what we see in the countryside, you know, it's been the same rapeseed field outside my parents' property, you know, where they stay for the last 10 plus years. You know, that's what, that's modern day farming. So how does organic work and how does it manage to maintain productivity?

Lee: 21:28

Yeah, that's a really good question, Sheena. And I think to answer it, this is quite big picture stuff. And I think we struggle in terms of getting policymakers to join the dots here and see this bigger picture. So to begin with, you're quite right that this is a farming method that yields of product per hectare will change depending on the experience of the farmer, where they are, how long they've been farming organically, what varieties they're using, how, you know. And right now, we're in this position where climate is directly affecting arable growers in the UK's ability to get spring crops in. I know a lot of the arable guys are holding off, are praying this rain stops so they can get something in the ground. So the productivity can vary. But on the whole, we accept and we know that in organic systems, we're not going to be rivaling the kind of yields that you can see in chemical systems where all the energy is being piled in in the form of chemicals. And then that's turning into food and if you ignore the fact that you're kind of eating, fossil fuel energy there because the it's got to come from somewhere and that we should on the on the road to net zero and decarbonizing we should be thinking harder about whether we want to do that but on the point are we all going to go hungry which i think is there is a common question about organic if we are producing lower yields what i would say is that there's some key things to consider here so interestingly some years ago a major french think tank called idri looked at exactly this problem and they spent many years modeling what europe would look like if there was a descent plan uh through to 2050 where with the end goal being that the entire europe was effectively growing organically what they concluded is yes we could do it we could we could actually ensure there was enough food. And in fact, we could ensure there was even a surplus for us to export out of Europe. But this was contingent on a few other key things that we need to factor and do. We need to do things like embrace techniques such as agroforestry. So land managers need to move away from their fear of people planting trees on land because it devalues it. We need to think about growing horizontally as well as vertically. There are so many great advantages to doing so, not just around productivity. The second thing that needs to be considered is land loss due to poor management. We are losing enormous amounts of productive soils. One third of our global soils are said to be heavily damaged or eroded or depleted. So we need to actually bring land that is increasingly not productive back into productivity to compensate. And finally, if we're going to continue to eat the same diets that we eat now as what's referred to as the typically Western diet, then this is not going to be possible. Meat reduction is going to be important. and a big big chunk of our land area is used to grow feed for animals and livestock by no means do we need to give up on it completely but what we do need to do is cut down and our meat consumption per capita is rocketed particularly in white meat in the last half century so we're suggesting that a change in diets and move away to more vegetable-based proteins may eating when we do eat meat eating less meat but eating better meat from from systems that are better outcomes for nature and for animal welfare and and then we believe it's possible we can do it but it requires some intelligent policy thinking and it requires a change on the part of us as individuals yeah.

Sheena: 25:10

And and i think that's you know if if you were to be able to roll out more organic farming um then it would create a change in the type of food production we were having. At the moment, we're producing huge quantities of cereals and oils like rapeseed oils and things like that. A lot of these plants don't necessarily work well in organic farms. And things like corn, corn production in the world is huge. isn't it? And actually, I've heard that corn is particularly damaging to the soil because of its very, very shallow root structure. And, you know, you were talking about the, you know, the effect of the climate on the farming environment. And, you know, we've seen a lot of flooding in the UK. And if you continually plant the same crop every year, year upon year on the same field, and if it's a shallow rooted crop. My understanding is that that then makes the topsoil more shallow because you're using heavy, heavy farm machinery to harvest that crop. And that's then compressing the soil. And so what you have on top is a very shallow root structure with a very thin layer of topsoil that's not very nutrient dense because it's lost a lot of its structure. Like you say because we've used so much of these agrochemicals and the heavy farm machinery and everything on this soil so it's not a very healthy soil and then when we get extreme weather like flooding um that topsoil is being washed off um is that is that what you're seeing um.

Lee: 27:07

Absolutely that's a really good summary sheena and i think uh you know it's important to bear in mind that a well-managed farm with soils delivers a certain level of climate resilience so we know that well-managed organic soils in terms of the sort of science out there then studies have shown that we're actually we're we're building much more humus in the soil so humic matter humic acid which is is essentially the carbon being stored in the soil so we know that organic soils sequester 3.5 tonnes more carbon per hectare than their counterpart soils and 44% higher levels of humic acid. So that's a huge difference. And what you're getting there is not just a lot of carbon sequestration, but you're also, as you say, getting resilience to flood. So if that soil is able to hold more water... 1.5 times more water stored in a healthy soil and as you say if it's compacted then all that runs off and it ends up you know causing problems elsewhere and i think it's really important when we're talking about humus and humic acid i was fascinated to to learn recently that the word human and the word humus come from a common ancient origin so there's a little clue in there that reminds us that we literally are of the soil so whether we like it or not and so that For me, it underscores that essential link between us and the soil. And I find it really interesting that, again, you're looking at flooding on one side, but what about drought resilience? The soil that can hold more water, the nutrients are not just captured in a thin layer at the top where they've been sprinkled on from a sprayer or a spreader, but actually they're distributed throughout a much deeper, healthier soil profile. Those roots will root deeper. they will therefore be more resilient and and i very much uh recall the the late uh peter melchior who. Was our policy director and one-time greenpeace uh director who was a a farmer of arable crops in east anglia and he would he would marvel at his his barley still standing up nice and green his organic barley went in during a heat wave where his neighbor neighboring conventional farmers they have long since gone yellow and started to fall over so i think we've we've seen there is evidence of it happening in trials and we've certainly witnessed it on farms so um and going back to your point around corn and these are things this is the reason the soil association are also part of the conversation about ultra processed foods we don't want to ban them and we don't mind if you eat some of them and indeed some of them are uh you're going to find the odd product which depending on whose definition you use of what is ultra processed and i think it is still a bit confused um there are organic products that might qualify so our position is actually we eat too many of them in the uk and we definitely need to produce them and i think one of the motivations for us being part of this conversation is uh the healthy piece is is i think a big part of that conversation but for us the ultra processed foods on sale are actually driving and pulling these crops through our supply chains they're creating a market for these empty calorie crops that we can heavily process and add things to them to tingle our taste buds and seduce us into eating things that are not particularly good for us, not particularly good for the land.

Sheena: 30:30

Yeah, that's right. And I think we're up to, I think the average person consumes about 65% of their diet is ultra processed now. Which is frightening. As a GP, I just see nothing but ill health now because of this diet. I am absolutely certain that these ultra-processed foods are playing a massive role in our health and the creation of chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes and things. So for me, I would like to see a move away from ultra-processed foods and a move to more natural whole foods. And I think, again, that's what the Soil Association stands for. On the sort of food side of things, you know, how does, let's talk about the quality of food that we get from organic farms versus the non-organic farms. Farms um because you know the quality of our food is affected by you know how we farm it and how we create it so so what does the soil association find on this.

Lee: 31:41

Yeah again it's an area that i think i would qualify by saying we need more research we need those longitudinal studies but what we can uh what we can know through the science that we've seen is that if we farm differently if we we look after the soil then yeah and the animals in that system we and we farm with nature then we do see differences in the way products come out i think one area of science which i think we need to see more research on is nutritional density there are studies that have been conducted in the u.s that suggest that because we are pulling more and more crop yield from the same area of land and we are not necessarily restoring and regenerating soils then the nutritional the nutritional density of a pound of flour now versus 50 years ago is reduced. There are some specific things that we've seen around... Products that actually change so fruit and vegetables for example a significant meta-analysis led by newcastle university some years ago looked at 343 scientific papers that were past the criteria very transparent and rigorous criteria and they concluded that the the meta-analysis concluded that in some cases there were phenolic compounds so when we're advised to eat the rainbow these bioflavonoids are of course the the things that give the plants you know they're they're your indicator you're eating a good dose of flavonoids when you're eating different color fruit and veg um well some of these polyphenolic compounds uh were up to 69 percent higher in the organically farmed fruit veg so flavonoids specifically were 69 percent higher but there are also higher levels of other things like still beans which are uh some researchers are connecting them with with an ability to control cancerous cells there are all kinds of interesting things that we're starting to learn we don't know enough about the effect of these polyphenolics on our health yet but again there is there is emerging research that suggests there are health benefits for us there are a few other things that have come out of that research so lower levels of cadmium. In fruit and vegetables so it's a heavy metal there's a byproduct of synthetic fertilizer the production. An interesting thing about cadmium is once it's in you, in your system, you can't excrete it. So you build it up throughout your lifetime. So these are clearly things we'd like to avoid in organic farming is. And interestingly, the Newcastle Nefferton team started to look at about a year and a half later, as I recall, at milk and dairy products. Unsurprisingly they found a similar similar similarly significant differences so the omega-3 and 6 balance of organically produced milk was much much better for us in terms of you know what we need in our diet for controlling things like inflammation and of course we've skewed that by eating by avoiding certain fats we've all been told to avoid animal fats. We've been told to go for those vegetable fats more and more. And we've been farming livestock, feeding them a significant amount of grain and carbohydrates and starches that changes their meat and milk and doesn't give us that fatty acid balance. So they found 23% more desirable polyunsaturated fats in organic meat. They found 47% more beneficial omega-3 three fatty acids in organically reared meat and milk, and less of the undesirable saturated fatty acids. So yet again, we feed these ruminants that have evolved to eat grass and forage. We feed them the wrong things. We keep them in poor conditions. We exaggerate their genetics in a certain way. And the last laugh's on us because we're eating that food and it's not doing us a lot of good.

Sheena: 35:35

Yeah, no, I totally agree. And it's a completely different product when it is fed an intensively reared diet. It's like us eating an intensively reared diet. You know, when we fill ourselves with processed foods, our metabolism changes dramatically. We gain huge quantities of weight and we become obese, diabetic. Lots of heart disease, our muscles weaken. You know, we develop a lot of fat stores and the fats within us aren't very good. So it's exactly the same with the battery hens that we're producing or the intensively reared salmon in our salmon farms. And, you know, everybody still believes that salmon's healthy. And, you know, I grew up with a father who was a wild salmon fisher in the summer holidays. Throughout the whole of my upbringing we went up to the west coast and we um we were fortunate enough to eat nothing but wild salmon um in my childhood um and wild salmon is an incredibly different product to to um intensively reared um salmon in salmon farms um and you know my father did research on the effect of pesticides on these animals and the amount of lice within the the populations of farm salmon and how that impacted on the wild salmon population. But in addition, as you say, the wild salmon contain a lot of omega-3s. They're a very lean fish. They don't have a lot of fat in them because they're exercising so much. They're swimming such big areas. And so you're getting a meat that is very lean. The fats that they do contain are very good fats because they're consuming a natural diet. Whereas the animals in the intensive farms who are fed a sort of grain-based diet or an abnormal diet for that species because they're intensively rearing it to gain weight very, very rapidly. These animals do have a very, very different fat profile and that's what you're consuming and that's what you're then taking on board. So I completely agree with you. I've always felt this way about organic food. I think, unfortunately, you know, the way organic foods are viewed is still not wonderful. I mean, people still view organic products as overly expensive and only really for posh people. And it's quite interesting. I mean, I always bought organic milk for the surgery when I was, when I joined. I said, well, you know, one of my stipulations is that, you know, when I'm changing the milk to organic. And then I actually went off cow's milk, cow's dairy, and I started drinking goat's dairy for various health reasons. But when I stopped buying the organic milk, my team stopped buying the organic and started buying the non-organic. And I said, well, why? Why did you do that? It's not like we can't afford it. You know, I'm saying you can get the organic. Why would you not? Oh, that's just posh stuff. There's no reason for that. You know, they don't understand that there's any kind of beneficial difference in eating or consuming organic milk versus the non-organic milk. Milk, even when I tried to explain to them that there was a difference and that, you know, it was actually a better product to consume because of the fat ratios and things, they still didn't buy it. And I found that really, really interesting. For me, it's a no brainer. But, you know, how can we get the profile of organic food to be a better one?

Lee: 39:33

Yeah, and it's a really interesting point you make about the perception i think price remains the still the biggest barrier for consumers when we we survey consumers why you would steer away from organic i think it's inevitable that we we built an organic movement with the some of those early businesses coming into it thinking fundamentally how do we explain all this complexity and if we could take our audience here to a farm for the day show them all this stuff coming to life i'm sure that we'd have a significant number who were much more motivated to buy into organic. But unfortunately, it's tough to get that complexity and that level of insight knowledge across to consumer. When you've only got a very small amount of time in a supermarket, we all shop on autopilot. We largely grab the same things we grabbed when we were last in there. So I think it is a big communication challenge. And we're certainly working on that through our campaigning and working with those key organic brands. But in the early days, it's not surprising that But without that explanation and that difficulty in getting it across. Businesses found it easier to create a premium product now we all buy premium products anyway we buy them for their quality their taste the fancy packaging they might come in we understand they're not low budget tier they're not mid-tier they're premium tier products and i think in the the initial foundation of the organic market it was much easier for those organic producers and brands to play the premium game so they could bring in the additional cost that is real additional cost to grow things organically into a product without having to necessarily articulate it i'm pleased to say that the idea that organic is always more expensive is a perception if you go out and shop differently if uh recently a one danish supermarket i loved their campaign where they talked about buying their own organic own label or private label products the same shopping list versus a list of conventional non-organic branded products and the and the price was the same so um we we routinely do a very bruce forthine style guess the guess the price that training sessions we do with our industry and our own people in our own sector are quite surprised how many products on the shelves the organic version is actually no more expensive so there is a perception but i think it's important to bear in mind that there are some products where there is a big difference so poultry for example if you're expecting to go into a supermarket go. Back to the days of buying two chickens for a fiver when and expect the standards behind those chickens to be the same or to be acceptable even uh you know you're not going to get there and and i think what's really important to bear in mind is that there's a thing of course a concept we talk about called true cost and when you buy something cheaply. You're not always paying the true cost that that product has on the environment, on society. Often there's corners cut and those costs are moved elsewhere into different parts of your life. So it might be the water bills that you're paying for the removal of the nitrate fertilizer from your drinking water. And as a doctor, I don't need to tell you, Sheena, the cost to the NHS of dietary-related disease is monstrous. And so much of that we think could be addressed by eating food from better farming systems and better dietary choices. And I think finally, a stat I'd like to kind of finish this point on is from the ONS who show that we used to spend approximately a quarter of our household budget on food if we went back to the late 1960s. And adjusted for inflation, take that up to about three years ago. I think inflation has gone a bit crazy and it's skewed it, but up to about three years ago, those figures suggested we dropped down to about 9%. So, reality is there are some in society who really genuinely can't afford good food. Good food should be a right, not a privilege, and we need to find other ways to address that. And the soil association are very involved in that with our food for life campaign and lots of other projects to try and get healthy food into people's hands regardless of their spending power but i think what it does show us is that really in society we don't value food as much as we should we think we like cheap food we don't think it should take up a big part of our household budget we've got other priorities and i think for many people in society that's not an issue they're struggling to pay the bills full stop and i think we need to be conscious of that but for others i think yeah uh it it's a the challenge is that we're not prioritizing food it's.

Sheena: 44:14

Interesting i mean i've i was fortunate my my parents always brought me up on a on a pretty natural diet and we avoided intensively reared animals um my my parents were very very against uh the use of um um, agrochemicals and pesticides and, and very against intensive farming. And I, you know, I was, I was put in front of the telly to watch documentaries on intensive farming, um, you know, when I was about 10. Um, so, you know, I've, I've been exposed to this and I've realized, I mean, I think a lot of people don't actually understand the realities of intensive farms and, and actually how grim they really are. In terms of, you know, the type of life that those poor animals have. So just from that perspective, you know, it's pretty dire. I would much rather that, you know, I eat meat and I would much rather that, you know, the animals that I ate were actually given a little bit of a decent life for the times that they have. Have and they were exposed to daylight and allowed to run around in a field rather than being chained to the floor or, you know, or kept in a tiny coop and unable to move. So, you know, just from that perspective, I'm very against intensive farms. But also, I mean, you know, I'm somebody who would take a chicken and use every bit of that chicken. And so, So, you know, I have friends who would buy a chicken, eat the breast and throw the rest away. We've got quite a wasteful society now of people, you know, whereas, you know, that meat for me, if I bought a chicken, I've got a family of five. So the meat that is in the chicken would do me two meals for the family of five, either, you know, as a roast, or I would then take the leftover meat and make a curry or makes a pie or, you know, make something out of it. But then I would take the bones and I would boil the bones. And that's the basis for all of my soups. And I would utilize those. But one thing that I think people don't realize is that if you boil the bones of an intensively reared animal, you'll get very little out. That animal hasn't been weight bearing that much. It hasn't been developing a decent bone density or, you know, it's got quite, it's quite a sick animal really with a poor immune system. There's very little bone marrow and the collagens are lacking in that bird. And so, you know, you actually can't create a good stock from a non-organic bird, you know, a non-free range bird even, you know, an animal that has been treated like that, you know, you get very little nutrition out of it, like you say. So for me, it would be pointless because I need that bone stock to make my soups. And I sort of, you know, believe quite strongly that these are the sort of things that enhance our own nutrition and enhance our own, you know, human health. So I don't know if you have any more information on that, but I've certainly felt very strongly about the quality mattering in terms of my own nutrition.

Lee: 47:44

Yeah, I mean, there's several points to pick up there. I think before I forget, food waste is another part of that equation that answers a question earlier you asked me about yields. And we can feed ourselves on better farming systems that yield lower if we do some of the things I talked about. But equally, if we start wasting food, that's one of the big things. Why should we go for intensive volume-focused production, whether it's plants or animals, in order to waste so much of it? We're cutting all those corners and doing all that damage just so we can throw more product in the bin i mean it doesn't make sense but i think going back to poultry specifically. You're quite right i mean there's another great example where the last laughs on us we we speed up the production of poultry so typically a table bird will be from chick to kill weight in just 40 days in an intensive unit it's approximately twice that in organic so the animal has as you say say, longer to build up its strength. So we see these appalling images of overly populated poultry sheds with animals that are sitting in litter. And the ammonia in the litter is causing hock burns. I think those of you out there that are really keen-eyed, I know that people have been told to look out for those in the supermarket on the chicken's legs, because that's a sign of a low welfare production system. So yeah, you're absolutely right. And it also, while you're talking about that i'm very mindful again you know as as a doctor yourself uh sheena you i'm sure and i'm going to assume here i'm sure you've been been uh trying to persuade patients to not take antibiotics when they don't need to take them um we're only beginning to understand the implications for our public health system in the last 10 or 20 years of overuse of antibiotics well i think it's it's not brilliantly well understood that 45% of antibiotic usage is in livestock and farming in the UK. And if we're being careful about how we use them in public health, so we don't encourage the evolution of resistant bugs that reduce the effectiveness of antibiotics when we genuinely are ill and when we need them. We're not doing that also in farming, then the resistant bacteria don't discriminate between our public health and us as a community and the farm animals. And indeed, I've talked to pig farmers who've said when swine flu turned up, we weren't surprised. We routinely, we know that we can give our pigs colds and they can give us colds. There is a movement of these kind of viruses. So, the idea that we might be weakening or reducing our armory of antibiotics that are effective in public health by overusing on animals that actually, in some cases, the conditions are kept in are so poor and so stressful that But in parts of the world, we use these antibiotics as a sub-therapeutic or a prophylactic. So we're essentially giving them these drugs to prevent them from becoming ill. And I think on that final point, when you consider that in parts of East Asia, there are actually some of the antibiotics that we, and I think in the NHS, would consider last line of defense. I think things like varamicins that are reserved for people who are not responding to commonly used antibiotics, these are actually being used in pig farming as a prophylactic. So I think that gives you some idea of how irresponsible we are being globally with antibiotics by the way that we're using them in farming. And again, there is anecdotal evidence, I haven't seen anything peer-reviewed yet, I'm going to hold my hands up here, but of antibiotic residues coming through in some of those meat and milk products. And again, affecting things like how fast curds and waste separate in cheese made with organic milk versus non-organic milk. So some anecdotal stuff out there that's quite surprising.

Sheena: 51:31

Yeah, absolutely. And actually, we are taking on board these antibiotics when we consume these products. So when we consume meat that has been fed low-grade doses of antibiotics, not just to act as a prophylactic to prevent infection on these farms, but also because farmers know that the animals grow faster. I mean, you take low-dose antibiotics all the time. You put on weight. And again, that's through dysbiosis of the animal's microbiome. So you're actually worsening their metabolism in order to make them put on lots of weight quickly. And that's exactly what happens to humans as well. So if humans are given low-dose antibiotics or even high-dose antibiotics for periods of time, we gain weight. And actually, that's another reason why intensively farmed animal meat is actually making people put on weight. So it's, you know, I think it's, again, it's a no-brainer. The organic system, if you have to give an organic animal an antibiotic because they have a genuine infection, my understanding is that animal can't be culled until that antibiotic is out of their system. Is that right?

Lee: 52:55

That's right. There are withdrawal periods associated as statutory with veterinary medicine. So an animal can't be culled or its milk can't be sold or any product of it until that withdrawal period is expired. In organic, we tend to take a precautionary principle where we do, where there is a lack of research, but our intuition is there could be risk here and nobody but it's convinced us that there isn't, we can put in standards which are based on that precautionary principle. So for withdrawal periods, as we call them, we've increased those with an organic to give us a bit more safety margin. There are, interestingly, one of the few areas in which US organics arguably is tougher than European organics is, for example, where they're treated with antibiotics. Those animals have to be removed from the organic system altogether and can never a return. We don't have the luxury of huge parallel herds in the UK where we can simply take that organic animal out, pop it into the neighbouring non-organic herd. In fact, we have rules that prevent us from having... The same animal in the same farm owned farm unit at the same time organic and non-organic because we think chances of someone sneaking under a fence and finding themselves out of the non-organic herd into the organic herd or you know it just it just how that level of proximity and overlap we think creates risk of integrity so we don't allow it so it gets quite complicated around this whole issue of antibiotics but again i think it's about positive health and i think while you're talking about intensive farming systems, I think it's really important that we sort of stop and pause and say, what we're not saying is that we don't want to polarize farming to the degree that we say all farmers who are not organic farmers are bad farmers. I think there is a continuum. And we see farmers who choose not to be organic doing excellent things for animal welfare and practice. I think the point here is that as a consumer, if you're buying directly from the a farmer and you can go and talk to them and understand what they do and you've got that connection which we really encourage in the sword association because our disconnection from the land of farmers is partly a part of the problem we don't even know what questions to ask if we did meet a farmer but if you are dislocated if you're if you're out there in this anonymous supply chain where you're going to a retailer buying a product and you can't you can't talk to the farm you don't know where it comes from that's when things like organic are really important because it gives you you that certainty gives you that assurance that actually this supply chain has been checked to ensure nothing has been contaminated or substituted and it really does come from a farmer who is meeting those minimum thresholds for practice.

Sheena: 55:38

And I'm going to go on and talk about a little bit about human microbiomes but before we do so on that point what does the soil association do to certify something a farm is organic you know just to reassure people that this system actually works and and you know the product should be one that you can trust.

Lee: 56:03

Yeah well we we everything in that supply chain right from the farm through to the final end product once it's packaged and it's labeled and it's safely contained every operator in that supply chain needs to have an annual audit at least so we will visit and we will check every aspect of their operation check their documentation the record keeping ensure fundamentally they've not added anything to that product that we wouldn't allow and the organic standards do restrict. Things like additives and processing aids so there are over you know there are hundreds of e-numbers i'm really was excited shana that they were going to be renamed b numbers after brexit but that hasn't happened yet there's still e-numbers but nevertheless there are lots of them permitted still and we only permit a very small number of those in organic so if an additive is controversial in any way for human health or indeed environment we take that precautionary principle and it's surprising how we don't have a problem really in terms of the breadth and width of the organic food opera out there even without them so um again it's an area that we suspect there's additives give give us a bit of an ability to cut some corners sometimes on food which is not what we're about at all uh so we will be checking for that we'll be checking that the the amount of organic material purchase balances the amount of material that goes out as a final product that the the labeling is accurate and that they haven't done things like cleaned machinery with things that would contaminate the product so there's an awful lot to consider in the uh in a factory in terms of pest control record keeping cleaning separation uh and on a farm again it's it's arguably even more complex because it's all about maintaining those many many standards around the management of the land and the livestock uh and and i would also finally point out that uh listeners might be surprised to hear that we do in excess of 10% unannounced inspections. Which is considerably higher than for other certifications and assurances. So if you're unlucky, the soil association certification auditors will spring upon you at zero notice to find out, see if they can find anything wrong. And again, we tend to find actually rather than finding that an inconvenience, our licensees are often reassured by that because it's only emphasizing and underpinning the rigor the harder we are on them the more they can confidently claim for their consumers and shoppers that their product is a very high integrity offer.

Sheena: 58:31

Yeah i think that's really reassuring and and i agree with you there's lots of very good farms out there that aren't organic that are doing a great job and a lot of them are are raising free range animals for example or or, you know, using crop rotation, natural methods. And I think that it's definitely worth finding out what's in your local area, because, you know, I have a local farm to me, just about 10 miles away. And they're actually delivering me some chickens and some ducks tomorrow that are, they're not organic, they're free range. And they pride themselves on bringing these animals up in a very natural way with natural feed. And the product is superb. You know, it's a very different product to the one that I see in the supermarket. And so, you know, I like to support local farms. Um, so I don't always buy organic, but, um, but I like to support both. Um, and, and I agree if it's a really good product like that, um, then I think it's worth supporting. Um, so, uh, I wanted to talk a little bit about human microbiomes because, um, we've talked a lot about soil and stuff and, and we've mentioned a little bit on human microbiomes, but I think just to emphasize the point, um, you know, it's, it's really important because I'm a microbiome medic, you know I'm all about what's doing to us um and I think you know we've always recognized that like you say people that are living in rural areas with good farming techniques they tend to have healthier lives uh they tend to live a little bit longer uh have less disease and I think we have recognized that over the years and in fact there's um you know there's a thing called the hygiene gene hypothesis that was talked about many years ago and still very actively talked about today in medical circles. And essentially, the hygiene hypothesis is that if you're exposed in early life to lots of viruses, bacteria... And then, and the endotoxins from those bacteria, then you tend to have much less incidence of allergies, atopy, which is things like eczema and asthma and autoimmune conditions and things. And so the theory, because this was all sort of the hygiene hypothesis theory was sort of pre a lot of the microbiome science. And they felt that this was because we were essentially training our immune system early on in life. And that early training of the immune system and largely through the gut was actually enhancing our immune system and making it less likely to go a bit haywire and create these diseases. And that still stands to this day. But what's really interesting to me is that nowadays we're finding out a little bit more nuances around this because microbiome science has really kind of taught us a little bit more about the microorganisms and the ecosystem so now that we can study these microorganisms within the ecosystems and we can understand what these microorganisms do we're now beginning to home in on why the hygiene hypothesis is a thing and. Why it's important and I actually came across a really interesting study from 2018 and it was by by a couple called Alireza Boulourian and Zahra Moshdahedi, right? I can't say their names very well. But anyway, what they looked at was an organism in the soil called Streptomyces. And I don't know if you know much about Streptomyces, but it's a type of actinobacteria. And it's really interesting because our pharmaceutical industry uses this bacteria. And they use it to create two thirds of our antibiotics. And they also use it to create a couple of other very important agents. One's called tacrolimus, which is an immunosuppressant used in cancer therapies and for lots of skin disorders and things as well as a cream. And rapamycin, which is another anti-cancer agent. So this is quite an interesting bacteria that has been obviously quite highly studied by the pharmaceutical industry. But it's present in soil, in good soil. And interestingly, it's also present in the human gut, but it's one that is not in really high numbers in urban dwellers. It's in higher numbers in rural dwellers and in hunter-gatherers. And we think that it's one of these organisms that's kind of on the way out because of the urbanization of humans. But interestingly, as you can tell from the pharmaceutical industry's use, it has really important effects on our health. So it actually is very sort of antibacterial, so it helps us to fight infections. But it's also got this incredible anti-tumor effect, so anti-cancer effect. And these scientists were suggesting that the lower rates of this streptomyces in our gut might also be making us more liable to develop things like colon cancer. Which is really, really interesting. So, so again, you know, if you're exposed to soil, more readily, so if you're a gardener, you have a nice, a nice patch of land that you can be exposed to the soil regularly, or if you're in the countryside and you're able to step out into nature and be closer to the soil and get exposure to dirt, you know, readily, or if you have pets, you know, pets will expose you to dirt, dogs, cats, you know, they will bring the dirt into your home. These kind of things will actually help to enhance our microbiome by increasing the biodiversity of our human microbiomes on our body and hopefully help to protect us from all these diseases. And I think, you know, it's interesting to watch the science develop and I think we'll find more and more of this type of information from the studies of our ecosystems ecosystems and and why you know the biodiversity of the soil is so so important for the biodiversity in our own ecosystems.

Lee: 1:05:08

And i think it's absolutely fascinating and as i hear you talk sheena it's kind of triggering all kinds of uh reminders of this interconnectedness and this complexity so our founders as i said at the beginning of the recording it right back in the 1930s and 40s they They felt intuitively there was this vital connection between us and the soil, and that's why we're the Soil Association. And I find it truly exciting that the science is actually starting to move with us, and not just in terms of dairy farmers who've really gone down the rabbit hole on nutrition and are starting to work out what herbs they need to grow in their pastures to help animals control worms. You don't have to use synthetic wormers to do that. That chicory is a natural antithematic, and it will control the worm burden inside an animal. In fact, animals will, given the freedom and space to do so and enough diversity, will go along the hedgerows, and there's evidence that they'll self-medicate. So, you know, it's absolutely fascinating how complex this all is. And you're also reminding me of the research that's recently shown that we have a higher propensity to have a strong community of bacteria that are responsible for breaking down cellulose in, again, rural communities versus urban communities. And if we are going to shift more to a plant-based diet we don't have to give up on the meat. It's got its place in smaller quantities got great concentrations of b12 and other things that, you know its carbon impact may be higher in certain systems but actually if you think of its nutritional density it starts to kind of change the equation and our conclusions about whether it should be out of this out of our diet altogether and i think there's an important conversation there about what you measure in metrics when you try and talk about sustainability but equally you know this idea that. Yeah, we've got that interconnectedness. These bacteria could actually help us get more out of plant-based diets, which, as I said earlier, is part of solving the bigger problem. I find that exciting. And I think it reminds me that we're fortunate to live at a time now where this idea of one health science is coming out, which is really the idea that there is this link between, as you say, the soil bacteria and the bacteria in our gut and our own health. And in surprising and unexpected ways uh and and it's interesting here you're talking about the the pharmaceutical industry interest in these things because if we do have to rely on pharmaceuticals if things get really bad and we need that kind of the heavy guns then the healthy soils are where our future antibiotics and drugs are going to come from they are the reservoir and when they're healthy and they're diverse not only is there going to be more more for us to play with, more organisms to develop the future drugs from. But equally, the research is increasingly suggesting that if those soils are healthy and diverse, there's less likelihood of harmful pathogens growing in their populations, expanding in those soils and then being transferred to our food and those ending up in our diet. So again, it's about balance and diversity. As a Buddhist friend said to me many years ago, getting it right and and again those surprise i'm never i'm truly uh truly never felt to be surprised by the complexity of the food and farming system how many interactions and connections and organic is essentially a movement and an approach that understands and respects that and tries to work with those connectivity with those connections and uh and i guess you could say we shun that oversimplification and those silver bullets and the very linear reductionist way of thinking about.

Sheena: 1:08:54

Yeah. And I love what you were saying about the cows self-medicating. Because of course, the cows these days aren't able to self-medicate on most farms because they're just, it's couch grass or something like that that's grown in their fields, isn't it? And essentially, that's just one strain of grass. And if you only expose them to one strain of grass, they're not able to self-medicate with all the lovely herbs and other grasses that benefit them. And again, the biodiversity of their microbiome in their gut isn't as good as a result of that. And that's going to affect their health as well. And interestingly, I have a friend who, I stayed at her farm once, and she has an Aberdeen agneus herd, and she raised pigs as well. But she raised them all organically, and she herself has a degree in homeopathy. And she actually managed them all um health-wise with homeopathy and I was like wow how does that work you know because I'm I'm a fan of homeopathy I've used it on myself and my family um but I um but I was thinking how does that work in in a large farm situation and and she she actually had found that um when she moved to homeopathy she had to um her antibiotic usage for a start plummeted. She hardly ever used an antibiotic on her on any of her animals. She managed to treat them homeopathically for most disorders that they encountered and she found that they were a much healthier species. She had much lower rates of disease than the local farms around her, And that was reported by the vets that came and visited the herds. And she was just, you know, much happier with the response. And those animals were then, you know, being given very little of anything artificial. And they were allowed to self-medicate on her land as well because of the, you know, the exposure to all the natural herbs and things. And I think we shouldn't forget the centuries of learning of herbal remedies and homeopathy and all these ancient medicines because allopathic medicine in comparison is very new. So we've got lots of answers in allopathic medicine, but we don't have all of them. And we shouldn't forget all these ancient forms of medicine because they have a lot to teach us and just the very fact that that animal knows to go and self-medicate with certain plants, there's an instinct in that animal that's creating that. I find that really fascinating and I think naturally we probably all have a bit of an instinct to know how to self-medicate but we're not harnessing that and we're not able to in the current food climate that we're in.

Lee: 1:11:56

No, so our diet has been reduced down to, I haven't got the figure to hand, but vast, vast majority of the food that we eat globally comes from less than nine commodities. And we need to bring that diversity back in because that's part of the story around food security. That isn't about industrial solutions such as genetically modified products that attempt to compensate for people's poor diet by elevating levels of vitamins or giving other the properties novel properties to plants to compensate for the fact i'm thinking of things like vitamin uh a rice rice that was uh read i won't mention the name of the big biotech company but a rice that was designed to elevate vitamin a in the uh in their consumer because of concerns about eyesight deficiency and i'm always reminded uh by a contribution at a conference where this was this was discussed where uh the the one of the audience members said put the hand up and said i'm not i'm not really clear why we need to engineer uh this right and why so many people in this developing this part of the developing world is short on vitamin a when there is ample uh quantities of vitamin a in a tablespoon of green veg if you only eat that once a week so once a week you know it tells you so much about the loss of food security the loss of horticulture the fact that people's diets are becoming so concentrated that they're not even getting getting access to green veg. And it feels a bit disingenuous that the industrial global agricultural complex is coming along with a no doubt expensive solution to a problem you could argue they caused in the first place. So I think for me as an organic kind of proponent, I think that's one of the many arguments against inappropriate technology and technology that is not needed, has risks and is unproven. And going back to that point, you know, you make about that sort of connectivity again. You know, if you understand the subtle interconnections, then it's easier to see whether we're talking about a silver bullet or whether we're actually talking about embracing complexity and trying to understand. Because the challenge for us in organic is we've both got to be retrospective, thinking about that traditional wisdom you're talking about there. You know are we why have people in south asia been eating bitter aromatic herbs in food for so long because they've eaten very little livestock product and actually those bitter aromatic herbs help you absorb protein from the vegetable matter more efficiently so there's a lot of things that are founders of the organic movement again inspired by the link between healthy soils and healthy communities but also many of these many of the people i've met in the organic movement It turned out to be important actors and stakeholders have had an early life experience traveling to the far-off corners of the world, making themselves quite sick, as more adventurous people can eventually do. And really experiencing local wisdom and the idea of food as medicine and actually how food has gotten back on the road to recovery. So I think there's a lot for us to learn from that ancient wisdom. But equally, we need to be future-facing and not be anti-tech. And I want to emphasize that because in the organic farming sector, there's plenty of technology that we actually like and we really embrace is helping us to work with nature in a more optimized way.

Sheena: 1:15:22

Great. So there's obviously quite a strong movement at the moment pushing people towards plant-based eating and supporting getting rid of animal farming. What's the Soil Association's stance on this?

Lee: 1:15:37

Again, going back to, I think, what I mentioned earlier, our position is really about, you know, we don't have a particular view that people should give up meat. We think meat and livestock farming has a place. We certainly recognize that in those long rotational systems I talked about earlier on, where a farmer may be needing to grow grass and clover and herbs that plants to help us fix nitrogen uh for a number of years before they switch into a higher hungry arable crop you know you need to ask the question what are you going to do with that grass for those those uh those interim years so mowing that with them mechanically would be extremely expensive would have a big carbon footprint you'd if you had gone out to mow your lawn when the weather's nice the stuff grows pretty quickly and you're back there with your mower before you know it so So, it would be, it's not realistic to do that. However, if you use livestock, then not only are they great lawnmowers, they're also fertilizing the soil and adding to the nutrient in that part of the cycle. And equally, you've got something to eat at the end. So, I think the problem we've seen is that there have been some very outdated and poor methodologies and metrics which have excessively demonized meat. The science that has informed those measures is necessarily not the latest science. It's always behind the curve. And we're learning a lot more every day about the carbon in the system. Actually, we see that livestock has a place in farming systems. In some systems, it isn't necessary. But I think, in summary, what we would be saying is pointing back to the issue that there's too much in our diet. We eat too much of it. And actually, when we do eat meat, there is scope for us to eat a meat which is of a higher standard, that is higher welfare and comes from a more sustainable farming system.

Sheena: 1:17:29

Yeah. And I think the other thing about meat, I mean, meat's got a very bad reputation as being, you know, very bad for our health and, you know, all this sort of stuff. But actually, you know, what you don't find is very good studies looking at the difference between, you know, the organic meat and the non-organic meat. And, you know, you and I have already talked about how, you know, it's a very different product. And I think there's an awful lot more nutritional content from, you know, something, an animal that's been brought up properly or even a wild animal and something that's been intensively reared. And I, you know, I can see why meat has a bad press nowadays because, you know, intensely reared animal meat is terrible. It's an awful product. It's not particularly healthy for us. So, you know, unless you're going to incorporate good quality meats into your diet, I think that it's not particularly great for your health. Um so you know as a as a gp i would encourage people to at least try and aim for good quality free range uh animals or even you know wild you know you know going for something like you know deer pheasants you know things that you know have been out of fashion for a while and but you know they've had a natural diet and um and they they contain better nutrients and um you know they're they're better for us. And, you know, I've studied a lot of nutrition and, you know, personally, I find it easier to have meat in my diet to get all the B vitamins and all of the proteins, the amino acids and the omegas that I need in my diet. You know, I prefer that. But that's a personal choice. And a lot of people can manage on a plant-based diet very effectively but you know it takes a lot of effort to get that balance in a plant-based diet and i think if you're able to do that then then that's a great diet for you as well.

Lee: 1:19:38

Absolutely and if if somebody's choosing not to eat any livestock products they're helping us you could argue compensate for the people out there in our community they're eating too much so it's all incredibly helpful from a sustainability perspective but for you as an individual i would completely agree uh and uh you know i think what we're doing in livestock systems in organic is is arguably the very antithesis of of what we're seeing for example in us zero grazing systems where animals are not eating grass they're eating these these empty calories that we talked about they're eating byproducts of the arable industry and unsurprisingly when we give animals a ruminant food that is not really what they've evolved to eat and we keep them in concrete yards where they're up to their bellies in. Effluent and waste then i think the situation in us beef production got so bad that if anyone wants to watch the food the film food inc again it's a bit long in the tooth now but it's still highly relevant i think it got so bad that they were actually seeing significant uh growth of dangerous e coli populations within those animals that were being transferred into the meat supply supply chain, to the extent that after consumer deaths, the meat industry in the US, which was then controlled by a couple of very, very large companies, were tumbling meat in sodium hydroxide in order to effectively kill off any potential bacteria on the meat. Now, when we've got to start tumbling meat in chemicals to kill dangerous bacteria because the farming system is entirely malfunction, it should be a red flag that we need to change something quite urgently.

Sheena: 1:21:17

I totally agree. Yeah, it's worrying. And actually, I heard recently on that new Netflix program that Tim Spector was involved in, and they were talking about that and how actually there's still quite a considerable amount of the meat available in America that actually has quite harmful pathogenic strains of bacteria in it, like salmonella and E. Coli. so yes um you know these these meats are better cooked for a long period of time in order to kill off these bacteria but not not nice to think about your meat containing these things um okay i wanted to mention um in terms of the plant-based eating uh i also wanted to mention that you know the pesticides within the plants because um you know if you do have a fairly plant-based diet um there was a an interesting study just a few years ago which showed that if you switch to a sort of mediterranean style diet with a lot more plants in your diet um but you don't go organic then your exposure to pesticides um in those plants went up seven times um and and that can be considerable because as far as I'm aware, the way they work out the pesticide dose per vegetable or per portion is very much worked out in that respect. It's a dose per vegetable. But actually when you consume a lot of vegetables, so if you have quite a high plant-based diet, you could actually inadvertently be exposing yourself to quite huge quantities of pesticide when you add all of these vegetables onto your plate. What does the Soil Association say on that?

Lee: 1:23:11

This is a really complex space because I think, on one hand, we don't want to discourage people from eating vegetables. I think if you could only afford to eat, you can't afford to eat organic. And I would say there are ways that you can find organic produce, go and buy directly from farmers, reduce your reliance on processed food and pre-prepared food and brush down those skills, get those cookbooks off the shelf. There are ways and methods that you can use to kind of make good food more affordable for you but if you really are struggling again i think it would be a case of uh following tim speck's advice picking one or two things you eat a lot of and maybe prioritizing those i think that there will be people listening to this potentially who are from the kind of uh i would say uh you know the the arable or agricultural industry rather who will say you know lee there are safety levels on all fruit and vegetables. We have minimum residue levels and the levels of pesticides in your food are incredibly low. What I would say is, again, and it comes really from the SORT Association, A, trying to create a holistic system. I hesitate to use that word because it sounds so terribly hippie. But, you know, a system that it's all interconnected and it works and we're not thinking about things in linear terms. We don't see pesticides as particularly helpful to making the whole work well. But for you as an individual. It's really important to think about the unknowns. And again, a precautionary principle for you, we do not understand the potential synergistic effects of low residues of multiple pesticides on the same product. Some products are sprayed multiple times with multiple chemicals during a growing season. And I think we need more research to demonstrate. There is research emerging suggesting that certain pesticide residues have a role in endocrine disruption potentially have a it could still be carcinogenic or mutagenic there are various neurological disorders which increasingly there is a connection between the amount of these chemical residues we're ingesting and and brain fog and certain other neurological diseases and i think we're just at the start of a rigorous academic journey, I noticed that there are nutritionists who are starting to survey organic consumers or consumers who consume hyaluronates. And the soil association are getting quite interested in this to see if there are any different experiences in terms of cognitive function. But again, it's a precaution principle. And I think we published a report a couple of years ago called the Cocktail Apex. And I think you can download that online if you you search for it it'll give you a full breakdown of some of the concerns and the unknowns around the use even at low level of of you know the use of multiple pesticides and the residues existing on single products sometimes from multiple chemicals and how they may interact yeah.

Sheena: 1:26:12

And it's probably worth people being aware that there are some plants that are more heavily sprayed than others um for example the cereal crops because don't they spray glyphosate just prior to harvest of things like oats and cereals um which helps the grain to open is my.

Lee: 1:26:30

Understanding i mean the trouble the challenge with uh with agriculture is we want uniformity because we want efficiency and there are certain crops where different parts of the crop will dry out at different times so uh oats are a good example and glyphosate is quite it's quite frequently used i I think it's fair to say on oat crops that are grown non-organically as a desiccant to evenly dry out the crop prior to harvest and it can happen in other arable crops as well. My sympathies are with those producers because of course on the one hand they would like not to use these things but on the other hand they're no doubt being reminded that the alternative is to put those grains through maybe gas dryers, use large amounts of fossil fuel to dry those grains out so it's it's easy to see how they've been persuaded. There are other ways to do that is again we need some restructuring in our supply chains to accommodate some of this lack of you know nature by its nature is a is diverse and a little there's variety but we love uniformity and this is what i think uh and the efficiency that that can drive that's what we like and that's why our food systems are geared up to it so yeah we we we'd like to see a move away from the use of glyphosate glyphosate uh you know go online google it you will find endless studies that are increasingly starting to implicate glyphosate in all kinds of health issues. And going back to your point earlier on, Sheena, about gut health, that's one of the latest biggies is that there is evidence, and I'm thinking of a paper by Lehman Caddy et al. Looking at low-dose glyphosate exposure, altering gut microbiota composition and modulating gut homeostasis so there is research suggesting that these low level residues in our food are having an impact on our gut health and as you've so eloquently illustrated earlier on that has spit at spin-off effects for all kinds of uh other issues related to our health yeah.

Sheena: 1:28:31

And it worries me because you know you could cumulatively be um dosing yourself up quite quite highly with pesticides without realising. Of course, if you do want to get rid of pesticides on vegetables and fruits and grains, you can actually get rid of them in your house as well to a certain extent by washing and washing with salt water in particular, I think helps to remove pesticide um some people use sodium bicarbonate um and but you know you can use that um to try to to rinse off more of the pesticide from your your products if you don't want to buy organic for um whatever reason.

Lee: 1:29:16

Absolutely but i would point out that if for example seeds are treated with something like nicotine-based pesticides then you'll still be able to detect those in the plant when it's grown from the seed so some of these chemicals are very systemic and they get right into the plant and i'm not certain that you'd be able to remove them in all cases so um a caution there um for for the the would-be vegetable scrubber and i think it's also worth mentioning the pesticide action network have a really really useful resource online called the dirty dozen which gives you a list of those fruit and veg that see the most application of pesticides so if you don't want to go organic you don't feel that's for you you can at least look Look at this and try and, or if you want to go organic on a limited number of things, those would be the ones to focus on.

Sheena: 1:30:03

Yeah fab um that's definitely worth looking at i used that myself um so um yeah going on a little bit um can you tell us what the soil association's involved in now because i was thinking about one of your projects when we were talking earlier about intensive farms because um you're i was just reading recently about your project to um improve the some of the waterways in the uk the health of the waterways because of course it's not just soil it's you know our rivers and our our water systems as well that are quite heavily polluted in some parts of the country um so tell us about that project that's going on yeah.

Lee: 1:30:46

Um it's born of really an increasing focus for us as a as a sort of organization with a strong uh a hand in sort of influencing policymakers makers and influencing the public to persuade those policy makers to make better decisions about our food and farming so we've been talking a lot recently about nutrient cycling so if you drift over the channel towards holland you'll you'll get an impression of what a political hot potato nitrogen has become as as an issue uh it's it's influencing decisions on house building building, waterways. There are farmers being paid large sums of money by the Dutch government to actually get out of farming altogether because the areas that they're farming in have become so nitrate vulnerable. Uh that actually the only solution now is to stop any kind of farming happening them so that's a pretty desperate situation uh where where agriculture has become quite concentrated as it has done in the netherlands so um just in terms of you know we could talk about phosphate cycling and that's really uh why our campaign around uh stop killing our rivers uh that we're looking for as many members of public to sign up to that um trying to draw attention to the fact that we do have various elements of industrial agriculture. Particularly big poultry units where the actual nutrient leaking out of that system is ending up in our rivers through poor agricultural management. And that's killing those rivers. And it's part of our story about our love affair with cheap poultry and cheap chicken and the pure amount we want to eat and the damage it's doing to our environment but i think in the in the you know that's a phosphate story i think largely if we look at the nitrogen cycle and there are all these nutrient cycles have been operating quite nicely for millions of years until we came along and we've seriously disrupted them so just to give you an example of how much we disrupted the nitrogen cycle quickly 55 of england is designated as a nitrate vulnerable zone now so we're edging towards the situation that they have in holland where we're really going to have to start thinking about how much nature and the ecosystems are going to be damaged by the pure amount of nitrogen finding its way into the wrong place and you might find and that creates all kinds of problems so nitrous oxide is released from farmland that's 120 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than co2 that's problematic and finally studies from leicester university um you you will read in the news particularly in urban environments we're much more concerned about the small micron particulate pollution. And if, like me, you've stopped using your wood burner and you've changed the car you drive and all these things because you're concerned about it, you might be surprised to learn that a quarter of the particulate pollution in London is actually not from sources within the city, i.e. combustion. It's actually from farmland outside the city and is blowing into the city. So, agriculture and getting our nitrogen cycle wrong, is doing damage to our waterways, our wildlife, it's even damaging our lungs. So this is the reason that the Sword Association are focusing on campaigning around correcting these things. So our strapline for one of our camps last year was there's no net zero without fixing nitrogen. So it's an incredibly important topic that we're quite passionate about.

Sheena: 1:34:17

Hmm. And, you know, that does make a lot of sense. I mean, at the end of the day, I'm not sure about the climate side of things, but certainly, you know, I want to live in an environment where my waterways are clear, you know, they're not polluted by either human waste or agricultural waste. Um you know i want my countryside to have a really healthy ecosystem i want a big diversity of plants i want a big diversity of animals out there and insects and you know that if you have that lovely diverse um community of organisms in your countryside they then help keep the countryside free of disease and free of uh you know healthy and and and you know the the soils maintained. And, you know, it's all very good for us. Whereas, you know, we are abusing our ecosystems and the intensive farming techniques are abusing that. And we need to find ways out of this system. And I like to look a little bit closer to home on these matters, because at the end of the day, this is where I've chosen to live. And I would like for my ecosystem out there to be good. I'd like to be able to jump in the local river or the sea and go for a wild swim because that's another passion of mine. But, you know, I'm worried now because of the, you know, the amount of pollution that there is out there. And, you know, I want to be able to step into the countryside without worrying about the pesticide exposure from the farms and worrying about, you know, what sort of, you know, what I'm going to encounter chemical-wise. So I think what you're doing in the Soil Association is really, really good. You've covered a few of the things that you cover. I just wanted to mention the work that you're doing in schools.

Lee: 1:36:11

Yeah, I think it's an important one to mention. I think going back to the point about, you know, we have a strategy which we're working on called Organic for All, and we're really focused on how is it we can take organic further out of that niche where the perception is, and the reality sometimes that it's more expensive. Expensive uh we one of the things i didn't mention earlier on is one of our challenges in organic around the the cost it's not because just because there is additional cost in doing it right and there's no cutting the corners um but equally we are 1.6 percent of the food market at the moment so we're quite small there are other countries with much more support more enlightened to absolutely kicking our backsides on this so in denmark they're at 12 organic um they're higher than us in a lot of European countries, where there's more government support to facilitate conversion. The US have just put $300 million into organic transition funding. We're seeing a target in Europe of 25% of all land area organic by 2013. Indeed, Scotland has its own ambitious targets for moving to organic, which we've really encouraged the Scottish government to pursue. you. So I think, you know, there's a great deal of movement in the right direction. But equally, we suffer from, we're still at 1.6% because we don't get that support in the UK. It's part of the story. And whilst we're there, there are inherent scale of economy issues. Things are more expensive for us because we're small uh proportionally so we believe that by expanding the organic market by pulling out some niches by if the right interventions and levers we can start to move towards the sort of levels of organic uh sort of penetration in the market that we're seeing in those other european countries and there that will help us make parts of the organic sector more affordable and more accessible to more people but this isn't a new thing and i'm glad you mentioned the school food because in denmark one of the things that's really helped them is that they have a national cuisine mark and over the last 15 years they have a gold silver award and they've moved to a policy where all public canteens be they schools government buildings hospitals they have to meet the silver mark now the silver mark is 30 percent sorry 60 organic uh ingredients is required and that's mandatory uh across denmark so i think it's incredible how they've managed to kind of support through government mandate this and help build up the scale we haven't had that in the uk so many years ago uh as a response to the a report that we we wrote jointly was supported by the food brand organics the baby food brand And we exposed the children's school food was at the time down to as little as 36 pence spent per child. And we exposed the levels of salt, sugar and fat in the food that they were eating. And just really... I think it always astonishes me, Sheena, that when people are at their most vulnerable life stages, when they're young, when they're sick, when they're old, when they're in a care home or whether in a hospital or a school, we give them the worst food. And, you know, this is one of the criminal things about nutrition and state, I think, that we need to resolve. So for 20 years now, we've been moving forward the Food for Life campaign. We reached a peak and i think we've fallen back a little bit because of public local authority and public sector spending restrictions but we reached a point where we were certainly. Approaching two million meals served every day in the uk that were meeting our food for life bronze standard at least so the bronze standard was about freshly prepared food moving away from the bucket in the microwave and reheat it so um and that involved quite a sea change for some kitchens which we you know we found that the cooks and the kitchen uh staff actually really enjoyed getting the cookbooks down getting a great vegetables coming in from an organic farm and saying wow what on earth do we do with a celeriac we'd better get the cookbooks open and the the satisfaction for them uh as as somebody who can be creative again and not just reheat it as somebody who's paid to reheat food um so we we've rolled this out in schools hospitals etc and at the silver and gold level then you start to see the introduction of organic and other ethically sourced ingredients such as rspca is recognized and it's about building those points slowly there's even a point in there for a meat-free day so food for life has been an incredibly important project for us over the last two decades and one that we hope there will be future support and i I note, finally, that although we can have no political affiliation as a charity. The shadow DEFRA secretary spoke at our Soil Association Certification Conference in the autumn. And not only did he agree with us that the UK is falling behind quite badly compared with some of our European counterparts on encouraging agroecological farming like organic, But equally, he underscored the need for a rethink of public procurement of food and the idea that your tax money and my tax money should be buying food that washes its own face and doesn't create downstream impacts that more of our tax money needs to be spent on sorting out.

Sheena: 1:41:43

I mean, I think it would go a long way to helping the health of our nation if that was the case. I think it's wonderful what you've done with the Food for Life project, because, you know, I've certainly seen changes in our own schools locally. The primary school in particular, you know, has reduced the amount of processed meat. It's reduced the amount of sugary foods available. It's now cooking the majority of the foods on site. Although I have to say, you know, there's still not enough work going into education of cooks because, you know, my kids' biggest complaint is not about the actual food and the menus. It's the cooking of the food. And sadly, that's an issue still because, you know, places like schools and things are not putting the effort into teaching people how to cook properly. And so when they're serving up these beautiful vegetables burnt, the children are leaving them. And unfortunately, that is happening in our local school. But what I would say is that I would like to see, and this is a shout out for anybody who might be interested in improving the health, the nutritional aspect of food in hospitals, because I have, multiple complaints from patients about the state of the food in the hospitals. It's so dire, so poor. I had a load of photos from a friend recently who went in with appendicitis and he photographed all of his meals, which were all inedible, all yellow or gray in color, no fresh fruit, no fresh vegetables. When you're recovering from a a serious gut disorder, what you need is good nutrition to re-establish a healthy gut microbiome. And without it, you know, this is dangerous. And I think one of the reasons why people are susceptible to infections in hospitals, why their health is deteriorating in hospitals, is because they're not getting adequate nutrition through the diets that they're given. And in fact, in some cases they're not even getting sufficient calories um you know so i i for one would love to see um you know a campaign on on hospital food and a nursing home food um because i know for a fact that a lot of uh the food that's brought into our local hospitals and nursing homes is is all ultra processed and all just heated up on site and absolutely.

Lee: 1:44:20

And i think also Also, unsurprisingly, where food that's that unappetizing is being offered up to potentially people who are not well enough to eat, even if it was appetizing, it's unsurprising that some of the studies conducted by colleagues of mine in Food for Life have discovered that in certain hospital trusts, the food waste percentage was edging up towards sort of 70% in one authority. So, yeah. In that authority, the majority of this food was going in the bin. So again, it's a criminal waste of food. It's not helpful for context. And again, when we look over the continent, I'm sorry to, if there's any Danes out there listening, and I'm sure they'll be delighted to hear me bigging up Denmark again. But the hospitals in Denmark had kind of resolved these problems with practical interventions like clinical staff being joined up with catering staff and communicating properly so that meals were not going out to people who were nil by mouth or discharged themselves um there were uh there were smaller portions put out and then if people were still hungry a top-up trolley comes around three times a day with snacks and top-ups for people who have got an appetite want to eat so with these simple interventions something like uh not even talking about nutritional content of food which is so important as you say in that context but just looking at food eliminating food waste plate waste specifically um there are a bit of imagination and coordination and we can do much better so yeah there's a food for life i think has been diving into all of these things and i and i finally i'm i'm i'm heartened by uh uh stories of of these team members going out to care homes and ending up going from a care home where people are eating poorly and and locked in their rooms and not engaging to uh residents actually being outside digging up the flower beds outside uh in these are people in their 70s and 80s and starting to grow their own food because they so much want to be part of the um the journey of changing so food can bring us together in surprising ways definitely.

Sheena: 1:46:25

Okay wonderful well on that um can you tell me lee how do people who are inspired by this conversation how do they support the soil Association how do they get involved in any of that.

Lee: 1:46:39

There are lots of ways to do that. I mean, I would say quite simply start off by visiting us at www.sortassociation.org or follow us on the social media channel of your choice. You'll get a good insight into the different activities where we're asking citizens and consumers to engage with us. We are a membership charity so we're always grateful for people supporting us directly and joining us because you know this is a big mission that we're on and we've got a lot of work left to do whether it's in improving forestry which we haven't even talked about and peatland codes right through to the issues we have talked about like improving our nutrition and making communities healthier so absolutely do visit us and and i would say you know the other thing that you can do is when you're shopping, do you think about these ideas? Think about these choices, look out for the organic logo, maybe give it a second thought if you've listened in today and have been inspired and learned more about what we're trying to achieve. Because I think one of my biggest frustrations is that I know there are a chunk of consumers out there who I am sure look at it and think it's just a marketing ploy or something like this. And there's so much more to it, so disappointing to learn that. But I can understand how some people who are not not familiar with what we do might think that but actually as i say as we've discussed there's so much more to it so yeah and there are big problems we've discussed big problems but don't get anxious you know i was listening to someone on radio 4 yesterday who begged me to kind of write myself a personal 10-year list of the different things i'm going to do is my own personal action plan and i would like to think eating a bit more organic would certainly be on on my action plan along with a few other things so speak to power go and talk to your retailers tell them what you want vote with your feet vote with your pound vote in the ballot box for a better food and farming system fantastic.

Sheena: 1:48:33

Thank you so much lee i would urge everybody out there to consider joining the soil association um they're a brilliant charity they're doing so much good work um and i continue to be inspired by the work that they're doing um i'm a member um join everybody it's fab um it's been such a pleasure talking today i actually could talk to you all afternoon i've got so much i could say because it's a real passion of mine i am obsessed with everything that the soil association's doing so thanks so much um and uh that's it for today listeners um thanks for listening take care bye.

Intro: 1:49:14

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Microbiomedics Podcast. We really hope you enjoy the content and we welcome your feedback. We'd love to hear any suggestions you might have for microbiome topics that you'd like us to cover. And we also appreciate listeners' questions and will endeavor to answer them in the next podcast.