Terrain and Germs, Both True

The old debate

This, along with other articles, is part of the first zine of 2025, which will hit mailboxes soon and inboxes after that!

If you have hung around in alternative circles long enough, you’ve probably come across this fringe book titled “Bechamp vs. Pasteur”. With all the talk about raw milk and pasteurization, the collective subconscious is thinking about germs again. And… re-thinking them, since we’re realizing all this stuff about “gut health”, “soil health”, “probiotics”, “prebiotics”, “biological inoculants” and so forth. So… what’s the controversy? Germs exist, right? So germ theory must be “true”, yeah?

Well, here’s what the mainstream says: "In the 1860s, French chemist Louis Pasteur developed modern germ theory. He proved that food spoiled because of contamination by invisible bacteria, not because of spontaneous generation. Pasteur stipulated that bacteria caused infection and disease. Before Pasteur’s discovery, scientists believed that living matter (like bugs and disease) were born from non-living organisms (like dust or dirt)." - Johnson & Johnson’s website

Modern medicine accepted germ theory not by appending it to terrain theory (as it ought to have), but by supplanting it. We have now reached the end of the usefulness of germ theory. We seem to think that we can eradicate or cure disease - but this is not even the right frame of mind.

Consider the following:

1. Upwards of 25,000 bacteria can be present on a square inch.

2. Cleaning, antibiotic materials are advertised as killing "99.9% of germs". Twenty five bacteria remain on this square inch, not zero.

3. Bacteria multiply readily in the right conditions.

What this means is that pathogens will always be among us - practically speaking, spontaneous generation is true. Consider also the fact that diseases killing Americans are not caused by germs. Cancer: 30% of deaths. Heart disease: 30%. Alzheimers: 6%. Stroke: 5%. Diabetes: 4%.

Tricks such as antibiotics have reached the end of their usefulness.

It is time to admit: Germ theory and terrain theory are both true.

Health is not the absence of pathogens. It certainly is not caused by their absence. Pathogens cannot thrive, or at least not cause havoc, in a healthy body.

I submit that, just like weeds, pathogens diseases cannot be eradicated. We claim to have "eradicated" many, but the pathogens still roam the earth, albeit in pockets, or in labs. Any approach to health that depends on genocide is flawed. It is flawed in large part because it refuses to acknowledge the role of weeds, pests, and pathogens: to clean up the world. We know that insects only eat low-brix (that is, nutritionally deficient) plants. We don't want nutritionally deficient plants. The pest is only a sign of a deeper problem which must be addressed, not covered up.

The same logic applies to higher species as well. We must address the mineral-nutritional-biological imbalances that allow pathogens, or the human body system itself, to inflict harm upon the body.