Off The Grid News Better Ideas For Off The Grid Living
How is it that 50 to 100 million head of buffalo could roam the Great Plains area several centuries ago, with no loss of topsoil, with no requirement for fertilizer, and no pesticides to keep the grasslands going, yet on that same acreage today, with only about 45 million head of cattle, we’ve got topsoil erosion that is taking all the chemicals that farmers and ranchers are spraying onto their pastures and crops, running them down the great Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, and creating a dead zone the size of Massachusetts? What has happened to our agriculture?
What has happened to our health?
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Off The Grid Radio
Ep 051
Released: June 3, 2011
Brian: Ladies and gentlemen, once again as the announcer says, welcome to offthegridnews.com – the radio version, our little show that we do from time to time, for all of our fans on Facebook, on Twitter, on offthegridnews.com. I’m Brian Brawdy, as always here with Mr. Bill Heid. Bill, how are you sir?
Bill: Greetings to you, Brian. I am well, as always. Feeling good. Feeling chipper – especially because of our guest today. We’ve got someone that has taken pretty much an off-the-grid approach to almost all areas of his life since way back. Some of these areas – Brian, really, one of the things we talk about most on the show is not outsourcing every single thing in our lives. We all believe the division of labor’s been a great blessing. We’ve got electronic components here in this studio we couldn’t have without them. But to say that we’re going to stay the course and outsource everything – outsource the education of our kids, our nutrition, our … every way of life … part of our life that we have is a ridiculous assumption. To say because something works to make an auto part or something that therefore every system is something that Ford would have given approval to in making a Model T. And all systems are not created equally. Some systems don’t work that way, in the same linear sense. Our guest today is a great guy to talk to about systems, about what’s wrong, about what’s right, about where are we, where can we go to, to get healthier, to get maybe wealthier, to get wiser …
Brian: Very cool. I say all the time, Bill, about our dirt and your DNA. Then when I read our guest’s bio and he talks about the “farm is pharmacy,” I was like “I can dig that.” That sounds like a pretty cool topic. So let’s get to it. Ladies and gentlemen, our guest today, is a highly demanded lecturer and speaker both nationally and internationally – Bill, as you know – on topics that include soil fertility, animal nutrition and livestock health. As a result of healing himself of a life-threatening episode of cancer using holistic modalities, he is often speaking to audiences about the relationships – foods as medicine was one, as I said earlier; farm as pharmacy. Jerry’s “connect the dot” systems approach helps farmers and ranchers – and I think our listeners, Bill, will know by the end of the hour – helps us as well, understand how the health of people and their communities are linked to a healthy land, healthy animals, healthy produce and, I think, we’re going to find out a very healthy mindset. Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Mr. Jerry Brunetti. Jerry, how are you sir?
Jerry: Greetings. I’m fine. Thanks for inviting me.
Bill: Jerry, Bill here. We want to talk – Brian mentioned communities – you don’t hear that word as part of this collective – we say “where are we at, where are we going …” I wanted to get an impression from you today about where are we in 2011 on the whole biochemistry health scene, the human being. Where are we psychologically? I really appreciate your perspective on crony capitalism versus free enterprise. Do you want to talk a little bit about an overview? Where are we right now? What’s an assessment of – here we are, summer 2011 – where are we?
Jerry: That’s the fundamental $64 question. I think – and I get asked this a lot – like, what’s the prognosis and where are we headed? Being in this work for 32 years, that is primarily sustainable agriculture and holistic kinds of things related to agriculture and human health and seeing the attrition – you mentioned outsourcing all that. We’ve outsourced all of our farmers too. Back in 1978 we had 400,000 dairy family farms in the United States and today we’re down to less than 50,000. So we lost 80 percent of all these family farmers with all this knowledge, all this talent, all this experience. Four or five generations of on-the-land experience. That started back in the ‘50s with the Committee for Economic Development wanting to depopulate rural America to get people in urban areas. The point being is that the centralization of everything – centralization of the food system, centralization of our monetary systems – and you said something earlier – they were franchising all of our basic needs to corporations – education, transportation, energy, food production, medicine … look what we’ve got. We’ve got unaffordable, unsustainable, and toxic side effects from all of this. So I think where we have to recognize – the founding communities of America were based on townships which created power for counties which created power for states which created then very limited power for the federal government. We now have recognized that communities – and we still have examples of this going in the Amish and Mennonite “Plain” communities, or the Hutterite communities, where those people still focus on the cohesiveness and the reciprocity between people being able to participate in community endeavors. They self assure themselves. They build a house within a week after it burns down. They don’t worry about all these different intrusions that have all these caveats and all these hooks and distractions that create for a very inefficient system. The centralized food system – it’s a mess. Now we’re coming out with more and more regulations to try to protect ourselves from unhealthy food. Well, where’s the unhealthy food coming from? It’s not coming from the farmer’s market, it’s not coming from the dairy farmer who sells raw milk from his grass-pastured cows. It’s coming from a centralized food system where so much of the food now is concentrated in the hands of a few giant corporations that slaughter all the animals in the abattoirs that are huge factories that raise livestock in these big confinement, concentration camps, that use mechanized methods of petroleum-based agriculture to grow foods with a lot of petroleum-based pesticides. Now we have the new DDT, as I call it, genetically-modified organisms with massive amounts of glyphosate, Round-Up herbicide applied and we’re starting to realize that the promise – the delivery to the farmers has been nothing but deception. We’re not getting higher yields. We’re getting higher cost and, more importantly, we’re starting to create what they’re finding out is to be new diseases that are naturally occurring in the soil anyway but when the plant is weakened by an herbicide like glyphosate, which works by removing trace elements out of its diet, so to speak, like zinc and manganese and copper – that plant, like an animal, deficient of these critical trace elements now is susceptible to these naturally occurring organisms that are disease organisms that the plant, when it’s healthy, immune competent – like a person or an animal – can throw off. Now we’re seeing Ross’s Wilt showing up in corn. We’re seeing Sudden Death Syndrome showing up in soybeans with fusarium molds. We’re going to see a lot more of this because we’re completely trying to pretend that we can genetically manipulate our way through higher levels of food production and sustainability. I don’t know how we’re going to feed 9 billion people in the world with this kind of monopolistic cabal of seed and piracy, of ownership of the genetic spectrum, when most of the food … most people don’t realize that most of the food that’s grown in the world today – 75 percent of the food that’s grown in the world today is grown by peasant farmers in Asia and Africa and Central and South America, that have 5-10 acres worth of crops that feed the community. That’s where 75 percent of the food is still grown today. That being said, how are you going to displace those people and then say “now you have to buy patented seeds and you have to use patented chemicals that are toxic, that are unaffordable, to grow – for not only feeding your family, your local community, but now – for what, export?” It’s a big myth. So when people say “what do you think’s going to happen?” I’m saying “you know what? What’s good’s getting better; what’s bad’s getting worse. You’re going to have to pretty soon pick what bus you’re going to get on.” I think the movement toward decentralization of all persuasions – whether it’s the backyard inventor who’s creating energy efficient devices or the market gardener or the pastured, raw milk dairy producer – all those people are seeing great results with a community that wants that material or that product or that health item or energy saving device and a community that will support them. This is where the new economy is because if you realize that for every dollar that’s generated with raw materials – like on agriculture or forestry or the marine raw materials like fisheries – every dollar that’s generated in the raw materials sector, which is what the United States is really rich in and always was rich in – when that becomes a value-added product it generates about $9 downstream. That’s where, instead of worrying about outsourcing – more jobs to get cheaper imports, where all of our employment leaves – we need to have, in my opinion, about 20 million local, small farms of any persuasion out there producing anything and all the artisans and the craftsmen that are associated with raw material communities. You’ll see an economic renaissance like we haven’t seen probably since the ‘50s when we were in the gilded ages – from the ‘40s and ‘50s. That’s what a lot of people don’t realize, is that during World War II – the main reason we came out of The Depression wasn’t because of the war machine, that’s a myth, otherwise we’d be in prosperity right now with the war machine raging right now in Afghanistan, Iraq plus the 737 military bases that Ron Paul talks about that we don’t need all around the world. We would have ultimate prosperity if war was the ultimate generator of wealth.
Brian: Jerry, we’re going to – if you could hold that thought for just a second, we’re going to have to run to a quick commercial break, but we want to talk about those military bases spread out around the world when we come back. Ladies and gentlemen, one quick commercial break and then come on back. Mr. Jerry Brunetti – here with us for the full hour. Off the Grid News.
[0:10:49 – 15:03 break]Brian: Ladies and gentlemen, as the announcer says, welcome back to Off the Grid News. Bill, before we throw it back to Jerry – do you know what I find interesting? Twice now, in as many months, and I’m thinking back to the interview we did with Arden Anderson – twice now a guest has equated the new DDT or the new plague with genetically modified foods. That’s what stuck out at me in that first interview and that first segment with Jerry – there’s two experts now that have both said – because we’re always asking people to read the tea leaves around here – “what do you guys think? What’s going on?” Two guests. Two experts. Both of ‘em saying “the greatest plague facing us now, in this day and age, is genetically modified foods.” I figured once you get it back I want to talk a little bit more about the military bases with you and Jerry …
Bill: But that all fits hand-in-hand, Brian. Here’s where it fits hand-in-hand – I think one of the great – Jerry mentioned a population – a bubble. There’s bubbles everywhere. We’ve created a population bubble by being able to produce terrible food as a substitute for good, slow growth, good food. That population bubble, in a sense, has been artificially produced by these same folks whose favorite – we’ve got to exports, right? Entertainment and big ag – monoculture – the stuff that Jerry’s talking about. These bases all around the world and these seeds and this DDT-friendly – the new DDT – this Round-Up friendly cropping – that’s the reason those bases are there. I know I sound like a black helicopter nut in saying that but I’ll bet you Ron Paul would agree with me. Jerry, what do you …?
Jerry: Well, if you look at – what are the exports? We export commodities and we export military hardware – we’re the number one merchant of death in the world. The military bases are primarily unpaid police forces that protect the multi-national, free trade sort of arrangements that keep those resources flowing back to the multi-nationals that want to ultimately market them where the market is. The United States is still the market. That’s why all these other foreign countries want to sell to the United States. Ironically enough, we’re trying to outsource exports when a lot of our customers are right here in the United States where everybody else is trying to market their stuff. So, yeah, the GMO thing – the problem you have is the whole “patented of life” issue and also the fact that the Round-Up research that’s coming out shows that these plants are actually, by growing them this way, are creating ecosystems that are collapsing in the soil. The soil is the basis of terrestrial life and the reality is we are terrestrial organisms that rely on an ecosystem called topsoil. Every civilization that’s collapsed, and it’s been studied by the United States Department of Agriculture as a result of the last Dust Bowl – they sent Professor Lowdermilk over the Mediterranean basin, right before World War II broke out, and he spent a number of years examining all the decayed and collapsed civilizations in Syria, in Tunisia and all throughout the Mediterranean basin. What did they find out? All these civilizations, which were highly centralized, highly sophisticated – in Tunisia they had an amphitheater there larger than the Roman Coliseum – that’s how many people lived there and how centralized it was. But when they lost their topsoil – what happened? The civilizations just blew away. No matter what kind of technology you want to come up with, if you lose your topsoil, you’re losing your culture. You’re losing your species. You can’t live on – you just mentioned how we grew the population in this human bubble – how did we do that? We discovered a cheap source of prehistoric sunlight called fossil fuels and we’re able to convert those fossil fuels of that prehistoric sunlight into very cheap nitrogen fertilizer during the green revolution when we created hybrids that were able to grow on this addicted substance, 200-300 percent more than their open-pollinated varieties. But those varieties depend very critically on high caloric inputs from prehistoric sunlight or oil. Cheap oil’s over. There’s probably going to be oil for a long time in some form or another, but cheap oil – affordable oil – it’s over. We now have to either find a way to grow crops and foods on current sunlight with a topsoil base that’s able to create an immune system and a digestive system for the plant so we don’t have to rely on fungicides, insecticides, parasiticides and homicide, suicide, if you want to add those in there.
Bill: Jerry, let me interrupt here for a second. What happens to food prices real quick when hybrid heroin is no longer available?
Jerry: That’s it. You nailed it. You’re … we are literally one degree removed from eating oil itself. So if oil runs the price of your heating bill or your car transportation costs, it’s right in there with growing your food, because you can’t grow it without oil the way we’re growing it now.
Bill: So what’s happening then? We pay our farmers, basically – we’re up her in grain country. We’re along the Mississippi between Iowa and Illinois. Acres and acres of grain country.
Jerry: The best soils in the world.
Bill: And we happen to be in the Mississippi Valley – the soil here is $7,000 to $10,000 an acre soil. It’s beautiful stuff. But what’s happened since we started paying farmers to grow bushels rather than nutritionally dense foods? How has that affected the whole economic landscape, as well as what we eat?
Jerry: It’s highly subsidized. The farmers are forced to grow the stuff right now because the Farm Bill, which is enacted by our Congress, is designed to basically make sure that the uninterrupted flow of affordable commodity grains – like soybeans, corn and small grains – end up where? In ethanol plants and also in concentration feeding lots where animals can be fed quickly or grown quickly with grains. Now, when people say “we can’t feed the world if we didn’t use grain” – think about it. Once upon a time, we had that area you live in – it’s still the most fertile part of the world but this is the most blessed part of the world soil-wise you’ll find anywhere. There aren’t any soils that compare to the Great Plains and even the High Plains, if you want to include those, which are more arid. We used to have a biomass living on that part of the geography of the United States that was rivaling the dinosaurs. They were called American Bison. If you go to some of the museums – we don’t know exactly how many bison there were but the estimates are somewhere between 50 million to 100 million head of bison. So ask the question – how many cattle, United States cattle, are there currently today? Currently about 45 million head, mostly on feed lots … growing corn which is causing all this soil erosion – all this wonderful, blessed topsoil that was given to us through glaciation and years and years of what? Rotational grazing of pastured animals called bison that never lost an ounce of topsoil, never required a pound of nitrogen fertilizer, never required an ounce of pesticide. Now we’ve got all this soil erosion laden with all these chemicals running down the Mississippi River, accumulating in the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone the size of Massachusetts. This is an estuary and estuaries are the most fertile food producing places on earth. The Chesapeake Bay is our estuary out here. It’s the largest estuary in the United States. So when you wipe out all your estuaries, you’ve replaced really high-quality proteins like shellfish and fish and plants that grow in those estuaries and you replace it with poor-quality proteins like corn and soybeans which require a huge input of chemicals and, again, prehistoric sunlight called fossil fuels. So I say the diabetes epidemic and the obesity epidemic in children is directly correlated to the dead zone that’s in the Gulf, which is directly correlated with the loss of our topsoil with this kind of farming practices and feeding, basically, a starch-based diet. These people that lived on the Great Plains, when they were discovered by the Conquistadors that came up from Florida or that came up from Mexico, whether it was the Pizarro – not the Pizarro but the Cortez guys that came up from Mexico or the fellows that came out of Florida, the Desoto group – the Franciscan friars were scribes that took notes fastidiously of what these people looked like. They dwarfed the Europeans. These people looked like Amazons. They were handsome, they were healthy, they were tall, strapping people. Why? Because they lived on this really omnivorous diet that was basically a solar-based diet. Solar energy growing grass, raising grass-fed animals, whether it was elk – we had estimated 10 million elk running around at that time. 50 to 100 million head of bison. Not to mention 200 to 300 species of plants growing on the prairies, replaced now with one species at a time – an annual crop that doesn’t have any reserve root system, that won’t hold the topsoil, that won’t bring in the sunlight and dump the carbon back into the soil. This whole thing with global warming and climate change – the argument that’s never discussed is where is all the carbon dioxide primarily coming from? Well, yeah, it’s coming from emissions from volcanoes or car exhaust, but the real thing – the elephant standing in the living room that nobody ever talks about is all the carbon that we’ve lost in our topsoil that’s up in the sky. That carbon that should be in the soil is a sponge for not only carbon dioxide, it’s also a sponge for water, it’s a sponge for nutrients. Interestingly enough, you measure the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, it runs about 375 ppm. They’re saying if we didn’t have it as high as 275 parts per million we might not have climate issues. OK. Interesting. But if you measure with a carbon dioxide meter the amount of CO2 respiration coming out of the soil, it’s almost 4,000 parts per million. Why doesn’t it end up to be 4,000 parts per million upstairs? Because plants catch it and they catch that CO2 and they turn it into sugar in combination with water and photosynthesis and then they dump it back down to the roots. Up to 50-60 percent of the carbon that’s fixed in the top part of the plant is dumped down into the soil creating more and more humus which is also another word for carbon. That’s the argument that’s never discussed. Instead of saying “we’re not producing all the CO2 it’s coming from natural sources. Where a lot of it’s coming from is the fact that we’re not sequestering it because we’re letting it all blow up. We’re all letting it leave.
Brian: Jerry, we’re going to have to take a quick commercial break. When we come back we want to talk about that and then also get into food as medicine. Ladies and gentlemen, come on back. A quick commercial break and then Jerry Brunetti, here with us for the rest of the hour at Off the Grid News.
[0:26:05 – 0:30:18 break]Brian: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Off the Grid News – the radio version of offthegridnews.com. Brian Brawdy, here as always with Mr. Bill Heid and our very special guest today, Mr. Jerry Brunetti. Bill, I’ve got four pages of notes and we’re only through two segments.
Bill: I’ve got tons of notes and I want to talk, Brian and Jerry, a little bit about hybrids and non-hybrids. I think, as we talk about food as medicine, we talk about the difference – we’ve got this big ag, big corn – “king corn” as they say – mentality. Jerry, what’s the difference between hybrids, in terms of their nutritional uptake and open-pollinated varieties? And why do we need all this rescue chemistry on the hybrids and why are the open-pollinateds slow-growing but going to contain more of those rare earths and broad spectrum minerals that we all need?
Jerry: Yeah, that’s a good question. The hybrids were obviously developed to produce more volume and more starch. You mentioned the word earlier that’s getting to be really popular now – it’s called nutrient density. Well, what does that mean? OK, if you look at grains – and the USDA developed this years and years ago – when you buy grain or … when you buy grain, you should be buying grain not based on “I want x number of bushels,” but what you want to do is you want to buy grain based on the weight and the volume. So, for example, according to USDA, a bushel of corn should weigh 56 pounds minimum. Alright. I’ve found corn that weighed 62 pounds a bushel and I’ve found corn that weighed 48 pounds a bushel. They’re both a bushel – same volume. Huge difference in performance when you feed it to animals in terms of whether they stay healthy or whether they grow. What’s missing? They both could be open-pollinated – excuse me, hybrid corn – but the difference is the uptake of all the nutrients that create not just carbohydrates but minerals, proteins – which include all the spectrum of amino acids – fatty acids. All the complexities that are in food is what we call nutrient density collectively. So if you feed 48 pound-weight bushel of corn to livestock, you’re going to have a problem with your immune system or you’re going to have a collapse. This is what we’re seeing now. GMOs are focused on primarily splicing genes into the plant so that it can be resistant to the poisons that they want to apply. The poisons – we call it rescue chemistry – the reason why the poisons are applied is because the plant’s immune system is faltering. Now, most people that are in conventional ag say “that’s baloney. Insects attack any plant and a healthy plant just is a tastier morsel.” Not true. We do know, based on the research – and there’s textbook upon textbook that proves this – that plants are in the business of creating higher value proteins for themselves because proteins that are complete – OK, amino acids are like bricks. Bricks hook together to make a chain – they call that a peptide. Peptides that are hooked together make a wall. So the brick wall is peptides consisting of bricks of amino acids. There’s 22 amino acids that make up the protein family. You have eight essential ones which means you must eat those in the diet and the rest of them are called non-essential – not because they’re less important but because your body can manufacture them if the body eats the eight essentials. What we’re finding out is when we’re using a lot of nitrogen hybrids and we’re forgetting about other elements like trace elements in calcium and phosphorus and so forth, we’re finding out that these plants are taking up nitrogen and they make protein out of nitrogen along with other things. If they don’t have the whole suite of nutrition, then they make what we call incomplete protein – I call that, in my lectures, funny protein. What is that? It’s nitrogen or some free amino acids that haven’t hooked together to make the peptides which make the brick wall. Why is that important? Well, insects and diseases are primitive organisms. They have primitive digestive systems so they’re attracted to primitive foods which are these incomplete proteins. Human beings, cows and higher life forms have sophisticated digestive systems and therefore they’re able to break down complex proteins – complete proteins, not funny proteins, not nitrogen compounds. So nature, in its wisdom, has the predacious elements that come in that take out the weak. Why is that? Well, it’s the same relationship that the wolf have with the caribou or the elk. The predators take out the weak so they don’t reproduce. That’s how the gene pool gets stronger in nature. So, in effect, there’s a co-evolutionary arms race. Plants that are healthy start producing other compounds. We find out that when you have good nutrition in the soil and it’s taken up into the plants and plants are able to make these complete proteins – these higher proteins – they also make a whole suite of other compounds called plant secondary metabolites. Get this – there’s about 100,000 of them thus far identified. A lot of people have heard of beta carotene – that’s one of them. That’s one carotene out of 600 thus identified. Other carotenoids are compounds like lutein which is found in kale, it’s found in egg yolks. Lycopene – the red pigment found in tomatoes – very important for the prostate health. Lutein is very important to prevent macular degeneration. Plants make these plant secondary metabolites not because they’re thinking of us. They make these plant secondary metabolites to protect themselves from who? Insects, diseases – fungal diseases, bacterial diseases – and ultraviolet radiation, because plants can’t run away from their enemies. They’re stuck in one place and they are either going to get eaten by, let’s say, an herbivorous animal … so what does it do? It changes its own chemistry. If it has the nutrition in the soil, it has the genetic expression capability of turning that nutrition into these plant secondary metabolites which protect it from their enemies. It can’t make this immune byproduct – I’ll call it an immune byproduct – of lycopene or lutein or let’s say brassicas like broccoli – they create these sulfur compounds called glucosinolates. If you bite into broccoli it’s got that sulfur, tangy mustard flavor – that’s called glucosinolate. They repel almost every insect except the one that’s figured out how to get around it which is the cabbage looper. Then other compounds are produced to repel that particular pest. All plants are able to do this provided that they’re well nourished. And, the heirloom varieties – the old varieties – seem to produce the highest concentrations of these compounds. So when you’re breeding with hybrids for the sole purpose of creating volume, with less nutrient density, what do you end up with? You end up with a lot of bulk and a lot of non-nutritional substances that fill the starch cravings, the sugar-addictive cravings of a society, whether it’s livestock or whether it’s people, that are addicted to glucose. Thus we have diabetes and all the diseases that are fueled by this sugar/carbohydrate addiction. And what are those diseases? Cardiovascular diseases, inflammatory issues like Alzheimer’s, cancer. These are all fueled by inflammation. Inflammation is the root cause of all these so-called incurable, chronic diseases which are completely preventable and mostly reversible if people get off the dope called glucose.
Bill: It’s a race for the starch, right? At the end of the day …
Jerry: Race for the starch – yeah.
Bill: It’s a race for the starch.
Jerry: it’s the most addictive substance known to man. It’s more addictive than cocaine, it’s more addictive than nicotine, it’s more addictive than heroin. And anybody doesn’t know, check your glucose – fasting glucose levels – which should be in the 75 to 85 range. Most people figure they’re healthy at 100. That’s not healthy. That’s not diabetic yet, but it’s what we call Syndrome X. So look at the statistics. One out of every three Americans is either diabetic or pre-diabetic – Syndrome X.
Bill: Jerry, because we’re running out of time – talk real quickly about the apple that grandpa ate – in line with what you’re saying – starch-wise – maybe the apple is similar in its starch capacity, but talk – I know this is just another fascinating thing before we move onto the next segment. We’ve got about another minute here. What about the apple that grandpa ate compared to the apple that I’m going to eat this afternoon?
Jerry: I don’t know what you’re going to eat this afternoon but we used to have hundreds of varieties of apples and the flavor – the bouquet – what Europeans call the terroir – that’s the flavor of the earth. The terroir – the land – the flavor of the land. That’s where artisan cooking and artisan growing of food is related to the land. The land gives out a bouquet based on its geology and its biology. So the apples that we used to raise based on the genetic capability of that food to produce the flavor and the nutrition that you can experience with the taste, because you can taste nutrition, is basically based on the fact that we had these very good varieties of apples that were able to have a very, very strong relationship with the land that it originated out of. So that’s different.
Bill: So how much copper, how much magnesium, how much calcium …
Jerry: Oh, it could be a huge difference. USDA’s done some pretty interesting work on that up until the ‘90s. We’ve seen a huge collapse of the mineral elements, particularly the trace elements, and the subsequent vitamins that those trace elements are cofactors in producing – in all of our foods, even the grains, but particularly the vegetables and the fruits have really skyrocketed downward in terms of the nutrient density of those elements. Those elements are extremely critical because trace elements are just that. You need them in very, very small, small, small amounts but they have such a potent effect on what? The production of enzymes. And what are enzymes? They’re everything your body runs on – your immune system, your ability to see, hear, walk, talk, your heartbeat – every function that your body does depends on enzymes. And every enzyme, without an exception, depends on mineral nutrition to be taken up by plants and animal foods.
Brian: Jerry, we’re going to have to run to a quick commercial break. We’ll be back right after these words for the final segment with Jerry Brunetti, here at offthegridnews.com.
[0:41:05 – 0:45:22 break]Brian: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the final segment, unfortunately, of Off the Grid News – today with Mr. Bill Heid and also Jerry Brunetti is here with us. Bill, what a great conversation we’ve had this morning. I’ve learned so much. I’ve gone through …
Bill: Again, we’ve both got … I think we’re probably the only guys that actually when we do these interviews that we’re actually taking notes as people are talking with us. We’ve got tons of notes here. One of the last segments here that we’re doing, Brian, I wanted to get Jerry’s take on something. A lot of people that we know will get sick. We may get sick. For whatever reason – perhaps because of some of the reasons that we’ve been discussing. But then what happens when you get sick? Is there an off-the-grid approach to getting sick and how do you heal yourself? Do you get on the conveyor belt? I had this rotator cuff thing. I went in to get it analyzed. I was on a fast track for surgery and this and that. Every disease – these folks have learned how to – many times good doctors and good folks, so there’s no disparaging theme here, but the fast-track can grab you before you can step back away from your disease and analyze what you’ve got and how you want to treat it. Jerry’s been through Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and beat it. Just to talk to him a little bit about how to be your own doctor, how to use other doctors, how to know yourself … it’s just unbelievable.
Brian: I would add to that, Bill, that there was a story about – and I know Jerry can comment on this – on the state of Massachusetts where you wait weeks, if not months now, in a study done last week – you wait weeks, if not months, just to get on the fast track. So maybe Jerry’s going to say “being on the grid is what gave you the malaise in the first place. Don’t put yourself on the fast track.” If you’re in Massachusetts you are going to wait. I don’t care who you are, how much money you have, you’re going to wait weeks, if not months, according to this report, put together by their own doctors. So Jerry, can you …
Bill: We have great diagnostic equipment. Instead of Jerry … his approach is beautiful. Instead of saying “no, I’m all natural and I’m going to get these natural cures and cure myself” – which no one should do, by the way – we’ve got great diagnostic tools to find out what’s wrong and what’s going on. Then, that’s the beauty of Jerry’s story. Sorry for that long intro, Jerry, but I think it’s necessary to get people to understand where you’re coming from and how you beat this thing.
Jerry: I was diagnosed in ’99. I didn’t know anything about lymphoma. I’m not a lymphoma expert. Of course, you get a life-threatening illness, you go to the guys who are supposed to know the most that anybody knows about this illness. So I went to a couple of oncologists. Long story short was, I realized that all they knew about was the tumor. I had these masses growing in my abdomen and my groin and places like that. Their thing was “you’re loaded with these masses. You’ve got to deal with this right away. You’ve got to get chemotherapy.” They wanted me to have over 30 chemo infusions. I said “first things first. I want to see what this stuff is. What is MOP? What is CHOP?” They were taken back that I could even ask such a question. I always tell people that ask me, you’re the customer not just a patient. You’re the customer. The customer’s king. I’m in business and I know the customer’s always right even when you think he’s a little weird. So you’ve got to address the need. I said “I want to see the MSDS sheets” – the material safety data sheets. They looked at me like I had two heads, like “what?” I said “yeah, I know you have them because I have to use them even for herbal remedies for livestock. So I know these chemicals have MSDS sheets on them. I also want to see the Physicians’ Desk Reference which gives you basically the scientific commentary on the side effects of these drugs. Well, I looked at the MSDS sheets and I looked at the PDR and what did I see? Some very, very serious side effects, including possible death – cardiac arrest. These are carcinogenic compounds. They’re nerve gas poisons derived from World War I technology, basically. I said “there’s too many risks here. Liver damage. Kidney failure. Possible cancer at a later date.” Horrible quality of life while you’re getting this poison. Their thing was “you’ve got to do this or otherwise you’ve got six months, maybe two years, to live.” I said “you know what? The problem is, you guys didn’t ask me anything about me.” The question was “what do you mean we didn’t ask you anything about you?” I said “obviously you didn’t even ask me what I ate, even if I smoked cigarettes, if I was a heavy drinker, what kind of workplace I was working in, what my emotional life or psychological life was about.” All these things have a lot to do with how healthy you are or how resistant to disease you are or how able you are to recover from a serious illness. All those things matter. That’s the whole person. And I’m a fingerprint. I’m different than you and everybody else on this planet. Everybody’s unique. So when they don’t ask you obvious questions – again, another elephant standing in the living room – I felt like these guys don’t know anything about healing. They might know how to cut out a tumor. They might know how to poison a tumor. They might even know how to shrink a primary tumor. But one of the things they don’t know how to deal with is take care of me. I’ve got to take care of myself. So I felt pretty OK. I didn’t like the diagnosis, believe me, but when I walked out of that oncology interview – and I interviewed them more than they interviewed me – I thought “you know what? I’ve dealt with agriculture that was supposed to not succeed based on using holistic remedies on animals and holistic practices on crops and we did it for 20 years and it works. So I’m going to look at myself like I’m a client of myself and we’re going to peel the onion and we’re going to get to the root of why do I have this.” I had blood tests analyzed. Did I have viral loads? Because I found out that viruses seem to be an indicator of your propensity to get lymphoma. So I had blood tests on viral loads. I found out that my natural killer cell functions weren’t optimum. There weren’t a lot of natural killer cells there and the ones that were there weren’t active as much as they’re supposed to be in order to ward off cancer complications. What a lot of people don’t realize is that it’s not tumors that take out your life in cancer. It’s metastatic illness. What is metastatic illness? It’s when cancer from the primary tumor migrates to the bone, the brain, the liver and that’s what ultimately takes you in. The only thing that can prevent metastatic illness from running away from the farm is a vigorous immune system. So what does chemotherapy and radiation do to your immune system? It wipes it out. You might kill the source or the beginning of the cancer, but you didn’t eliminate cancer. All you did was bought some time – maybe – maybe. Then, if you look at the statistics you find out that the four major killers of cancer in the United States, which are lung cancer, colorectal cancer, prostate in men, breast in women – there’s a flat line on survivability on metastatic illness. In other words, once people get metastatic illness in those cancers, they don’t survive. They don’t survive. So what do they have to offer? My thing is I circled the wagons. I recruited an immunologically talented doctor in New York City by the name of Bernard Bihari who now passed away. His specialty was HIV and cancer. He was working with a medication called Low Dose Naltrexone which increased the endorphin levels released by the brain at nighttime and the endorphin levels when they go up activate the natural killer cells and they also increase the level of natural killer cells. I needed those. That helped me. I hooked up with an immunologist out in Arizona, Jesse Stoff, who did some recommendations on blood tests to find out where my immune panels were. Then I started taking compounds like herbal mushrooms and whatnot and supplements to increase, again, immune function. My other doctor, my general practitioner, MD, was all about giving me IVs and detoxifying – I removed all of the amalgam out of my mouth. I started getting IV Vitamin C cocktails with glutathione and magnesium and selenium in there. So I was seeing him on a weekly basis. At home I was doing saunas to burn up the toxins. I was doing coffee enemas to remove the toxins. Then I started doing tremendous amounts of juices. This is on my DVD, “Cancer, Nutrition and Healing.” You can get it from us or you can get it from Acres U.S.A. It’s a whole – I think about an hour-and-a-half of what I juiced, what supplements I took, the foods I ate, the smoothies that I made. I also made my own hyperimmune milk based on research that I did when Merck, Sharp and Dohme – one of the largest drug companies in the world – was the largest manufacturer of serum before Fleming’s penicillin hit the market in 1946 they were making remedies based on serums. Hyperimmunizing horses, pulling out the serum and making various kinds of products. They had a patent application for milk serum – hyperimmunizing a dairy cow with human antigens or vaccines to allow that animal to create transfer factor and other immunocompounds and proteins that they could harvest and process, purify and then put out there for every conceivable human illness that they had listed.
Bill: Jerry, were you actually – were you milking cows? I know you have …
Jerry: No, I had a client – an Amish client – that I rented a cow from. [laughs]
Bill: So you rented a cow and turned that cow into a super cow?
Jerry: Yeah. I basically hyperimmunized that cow with my blood and I did that on a weekly basis for eight weeks during the dry period – when she’s pregnant, the last two months of her gestation. I harvested the colostrums and the early milk for the first five days. Froze it in one quart plastic containers and then every morning I would take out about a half a quart – a pint – mix it with raw egg yolks, kefir – which is fermented milk – raspberries, blueberries, and a little bit of flax oil and I made it a smoothie. This is in the DVD. I drank that and then I also did wheat grass, barley grass, rye grass juicing along with beets and celery. I juiced that. So I lived, basically, on this very intense, highly digestible, highly live food of smoothies, of raw milk and kefir and such and then the grasses and the vegetables.
Bill: Were you getting any treatment from the doctors at this time?
Jerry: I got no conventional treatment at all. Nothing.
Bill: Zero conventional treatment.
Jerry: Nothing. And my cancer went in remission in about – it really started … I had some tests done – I really could see things were improving in literally six months. A year-and-a-half later I had some scans done and there was nothing there in my abdomen, because you can’t see what’s down in the abdomen. But my glands all shrunk in my groin and the ones that were in my abdomen, which were the largest one, down in the mesenteric area, all were gone. It’s a cancer that I found out also, I had a follicular variant of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma which means it’s an incurable variant which means it’s expected to come back within 5 to 10 years. I always expect to deal with this thing but I’m not worried about it because I know what to do. I know my body’s immune system is the best medicine I could possibly get anywhere. There’s nobody that can make medicine stronger than my own immune system, if I have an immune system.
Bill: So what do you tell your doctor? I know we’re getting ready to close this out … let’s say someone wanted to go in and get a panel – an immune panel – to say “how healthy am I? What’s my killer cell strength …” or whatever. What should you say to your doctor when you walk in and say “I want to know how strong my immune system is”?
Jerry: I do a couple of things. I work with Life Extension Foundation. They work with LabCorp which is a regular laboratory facility. I get huge blood panels done every year. I want to know what my Vitamin D levels are. I want to know what my hormone levels are. I want to know what my immune system looks like. So I have a lot of that stuff done. Lifeextensionfoundation.org. I do that and I do that annually. I also check intermittently for certain things, like heavy metals, Vitamin D levels and such. That I do on a regular basis. I have done it every year for the last 12 years. Then I tweak things. I say “this is a little high, I’ve got to work on that.” I focus on that with diet or supplements. That’s how people can get a handle. What they need to do is surround themselves with a team. First of all, get rid of crazy people in your life. Don’t hang around with people that make you sad or angry because if your mind isn’t in the right place, if your heart’s not in the right place, you’re not going to get well. Bruce Lipton wrote some pretty good material on this – “The Biology of Belief” – he’s a medical doctor – about the importance of the mind and the emotions. Dawson Church wrote a book, “The Genie in Your Genes.” The profound importance – and I did research on this and I’m finding out that people who typically call me – I get lots of emails now, phone calls – I always try to help people as much as I can and I answer everybody, believe it or not. I tell them “you’ve got to get your head in the right place” because if you’re a Type D personality, susceptible to depression and fatalism and pessimism, you’re going to have a hard time getting well no matter how many supplements and juices and colonics you take. You’ve got to get your head right so it means you’ve got to surround yourself with positive people and positive activities and positive thoughts. That’s number one. You’ve got to be willful and you’ve got to be optimistic about you having control over your life. You’ve got to do whatever you’ve got to do – I don’t care if it’s hypnotism, I don’t care if it’s having an affair – whatever it is – I know I’m talking recklessly here but just dump the toxic people in your life at the workplace, I don’t care where it is, because they’ll kill you. The other thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to realize that you’ve got a lot to say about your outcome. You’re the patient and you’re also the doctor. I’m not saying do it alone. I didn’t do it alone. I’m not suggesting anybody else does it alone. It’s intimidating sometimes to say “how much do I need?” So I got involved with people. I said “this guy’s good in this department. This guy’s good in that department.” And I can take and pick and choose the best from what I feel most comfortable about. You’ve got to feel good about who you’re related to. If the doctor you don’t like, get away from him. There’s some people that just don’t click, you know? If you’ve got a doctor that pisses you off or gets you very anxious, that’s not going to work. You’re not going to have a good relationship with those people. You’ve got to circle the wagons. Put a team together. Make sure that the folks that support you support you. And don’t take crap from people that are trying to manipulate you away from what you truly believe. Surround yourself with professional people who know their stuff. Read as much as you can. The internet is a huge universe of information. Don’t get overwhelmed with it. That’s why I made the DVD – even that’s overwhelming for a lot of people, because I threw a lot of mud at the walls, so to speak, because I didn’t know what all I needed to do. So I said “to hell with it, I’m going to do as much as I feel right about doing. I’m going to do as much as I think I’m going to do that works for me. Some of it’s going to stick.” Because people say “what do you think worked?” I say “well, everything.” They say “can’t you give us some simple advice?” I say “yeah, OK. I’ll give you two, big, strong pieces of advice. Number one: you’ve got to cut down the glucose levels in your blood because cancer loves glucose. It thrives on glucose. It needs glucose. Healthy cells can live on fatty acid compounds, ketone bodies. We’ve known that for years. So you’ve got to get on a high, healthy fat diet. The second thing you’ve got to do is get – number two is, get rid of all of the damaged fats – the Omega 6 fats, the vegetable oils, the fryer fats. The fast-food fats. Those are highly carcinogenic and they’re full of free radicals and they really take the oxygen out of the system. You’ve got to get rid of the sugar and the carbs and you’ve got to get rid of the bad fats. Eat a lot of healthy fats and stay away from the sugars and that alone is going to give you some life span that you didn’t have with anything else.” Those are a few things that I could say in a couple of seconds here that I know I don’t have much time. But if they look at the DVD, they go on my website agri-dynamics.com – there’s a PowerPoint up there called “Cows, Cancer and Consciousness” that I did. It’s about a two-and-a-half hour lecture. They can get the CD from us or they can get it from Acres U.S.A. or they can hear the audio component of the PowerPoint presentation “Cows, Cancer and Consciousness.” it covers a lot of this stuff in broad strokes as well as some details. Then the DVD is called “Cancer, Nutrition and Healing.” They can get that through us. It’s about an hour-and-a-half, or they can get it from Acres U.S.A. the publication that produced it.
Brian: Jerry, as I’ve been listening to you I’ve been on your website. I want to say it again for our listeners, although it will be linked to at Off the Grid News. Jerry’s talking about agri-dynamics.com. I’ve already ordered the “Cancer, Nutrition and Healing.” Jerry, we say all the time here – knock off, I believe it was one of Confucius that said “an hour across the table from a wise man is worth a year’s study of books,” and that has most certainly been the case with you today. Unfortunately, our hour is up. Bill and Jerry, we’re going to have to run. But we can’t thank you enough. So much great information, Jerry. We wish you continued success in your business and your books and also with your health. Thank you so very much for spending the full hour with us.
Jerry: It was my pleasure. Great to be with you guys. Thanks a lot.
Brian: Thanks so much. Ladies and gentlemen, as always, don’t forget we get information from our listeners. So, please continue to email us with questions, comments, critiques, even suggestions of guests we might interview at [email protected]. [email protected]. You can find us on Facebook – Facebook.com/offthegridnews. And of course you can follow us on Twitter @offgridnews. On behalf of everyone at Solutions from Science and Off the Grid News, I’m Brian Brawdy.
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