The Hidden Half Of Nature: Why Invisible Microbes Are The Key To Health & Life.

Ben Greenfield (0:01)

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

David Montgomery (0:04)

If you think about like a grain of fine sand, that's about as fine an object as we can see with the naked eye, and that's down in that sort of millimeter kind of scale. You get smaller than that, we can't detect them with our own senses. So nobody has ever seen a microbe without technological assistance.

Anne Biklé (0:21)

We're eating plants that are not only deficient in the basic essential minerals, like Dave talked about, zinc, calcium, a little bit of copper and so on. They don't have nearly the level of phytochemicals coursing through what we call their green bodies.

SPEAKER_4 (0:36)

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness.

His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Ben Greenfield (0:59)

Whatever it is for you that's the natural movement, get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

SPEAKER_4 (1:11)

All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Ben Greenfield (1:34)

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And as I've mentioned on the podcast before, I read a lot of books. And plenty of those books are about gut health and the immune system and alternative medicine. You know, these are topics that I really dig.

And one of the best books that I discovered, just randomly, when my brother-in-law gave it to me for Christmas, actually, in the past several months, was entitled The Hidden Half of Nature, The Microbial Roots of Life and Health. And at first, when I looked at this book, I thought it was just going to be about gardening and perhaps a little bit about, you know, nature and soil and things along those lines.

But when I delved in, I found it to be full of brand new insights that I hadn't discovered before, insights specifically into microbes and how they affect not only our bodies, but also the food that we eat and the environment that surrounds us in a very intimate way. And I found the book absolutely fascinating, especially when it comes to the human gut and how we're really not what we eat. We are the product of what our microbes eat. And this just sent my head spinning as I began to delve into this book.

And it does things like draws parallels between, say, a plant and the roots that it puts down into the soil and our own guts that almost act very similarly to a root. It delves into agriculture, medicine, soil and beyond. After reading it, I decided I had to get the authors on the show because I think that you are really, really going to get a lot out of not just this book, but also what the authors discovered while writing this book. So my guests today are the authors of The Hidden Half of Nature, David Montgomery and Anne Bickley. And I'm hoping, Anne, that I'm pronouncing that last name correctly. Am I?

Anne Biklé (3:54)

Yeah, that's good. Yeah, Bickley, you got it.

Ben Greenfield (3:58)

Bickley, I'm good. I'm good.

And Montgomery, of course, was far easier. So welcome to you also, David.

David Montgomery (4:04)

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Ben Greenfield (4:07)

Yeah, absolutely. Now, for those of you listening in, if you want to access the show notes as you listen, and if you want to access the resources for everything that Dave and Anne and I discuss, you can just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/hiddenhalf. That's bengreenfieldfitness.com/hiddenhalf.

So that being said, Dave and Anne, I'm curious how you first became interested in this topic in the first place, this topic of microbes.

David Montgomery (4:42)

Well, you know, we kind of backed into it. We had started writing a book that turned out to be a different book, and we were focused on looking at soil restoration. I'm a geologist and a biologist. We were trained in the sort of the natural history disciplines that study the world we can see around us in our everyday lives.

And so part of what we tell in the book is the story of how people like us would actually become aware of the importance of microbial life as the foundation for good health not only just in the soil, but also in our own bodies. And so the book takes us on the journey that goes through there. But the story really started in our yard when we bought a house in North Seattle, where when we peeled the lawn back to try and put in the garden that Anne so desired, we realized we had really bad soil.