We don't want the glyphosate. We don't want the Agent Orange, which by the way has a bunch of other names, but it's used widely in agriculture today.

It is? Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Wait. Stop. The Vietnam thing?

Yeah. Same thing. It just has new names.

Welcome to the Christy-Faith Show where we share game changing ideas with intentional parents like you. I'm your host, Christy Faith, experienced educational adviser and homeschool enthusiast. Together, we'll explore ways to enrich and transform both your life and the lives of your children. As a homeschool mom who values a family together approach and leans towards the classical and Charlotte Mason styles, I often struggle to bring my educational vision to life with my kids' diverse ages and learning needs. With all our interests and super packed schedule, bridging that gap between the dreamy homeschool I want and reality, I gotta be honest, it's a challenge.

Now, yes, I know perfection isn't the goal. But if you're listening and you could use a little easing of your mental load in your day to day, I found a resource that has become the quiet hero of our routine and it could be a really great option for you too. BJU Press homeschool curriculum. Now, many think that BJU Press homeschool is solely an all in one option, and though it does excel in that role, did you know you can also opt for specific courses and tailor them to fit your family's needs just as I have?

BJU Press Homeschool provides the perfect balance of structure and flexibility, and easily complements my family's mixed age, family together on the couch learning style. They are second to none in integrating a biblical worldview, stimulating critical thinking, and offering tons of hands on activities in the lessons. To find out how BJU Press Homeschool can come alongside you in your homeschooling goals too, visit bjupresshomeschool.com or click the link in the show notes. If you've ever wondered how that breakfast plate might be affecting your kids' attention span or why a sugar rush can turn into a mood swing marathon, you're exactly where you need to be today. Today, we're gonna be talking about nutrition.

I know many of us have those moments where it feels like every new food report is just another thing that's gonna get us like the boogeyman and everything feels conflicting. All that information, it can be overwhelming and enough to make us really just wanna give up. Well, take a deep breath with me today. Breathe in. Relax.

Because my special guest, David Stelzer, is here to cut through the clutter and to encourage us. David is a pioneer in organic food and healthy soil and has dedicated his life to promoting health and abundance in nutrition. His family has farmed in the Pacific Northwest for over a 100 years, and he is the founder and CEO of Azure Farm and Azure Standard, a leading producer and nationwide distributor of natural organic and non GMO food. David began organic farming in the 19 seventies driven by his passion for providing nourishing, healthful foods grown in a chemical free, healthy soil. Amidst all these accomplishments, David and his wife Kimberly homeschool.

He understands first hand what we are all juggling every day. We put our kids first and care about how they are doing physically, academically, and emotionally. He's gonna help us put healthier food on our tables today. So, we are gonna dive into how nutrition significantly influences our kids' learning and development, and he's gonna offer us some straightforward, actionable tips that are perfect for real families like you and me working on a budget. So get ready for a dynamic discussion that blends healthy living with effective education.

Thank you so much for being on the show today, David. I wanna begin with your journey in nutrition. What inspired you to enter this field? And I also wanna know how Azure came into existence.

Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on, Christy. It's been a long journey. When I was a baby, I got very ill. My parents took me to every doctor.

The medical establishment said that I was probably not gonna make it. This was a chronic problem that couldn't be addressed. My parents were not willing to settle for that. They kept searching, finally found a naturopath that found out what it was. I had a defect in my microbiome, and it was acting as a extreme allergen, pretty much every animal product with very few exceptions, which we eventually figured out.

So that required dietary changes right from the very beginning. My parents changed our family's diet radically, not you know? But while they were changing it as far as these allergens, they also other things like white sugar and white flour and some of those things. And they just said, hey. Well, we won't use those things anymore either.

And not only did I recover and completely, you know, completely get well, I mean, I still have to be very careful with my diet. What changed our whole family? My grandfather had serious heart disease. He changed his diet. He completely recovered.

Years later, he was killed in a farming accident when he was farming 16 hours a day again. It was real life experience that really brought us to natural foods. As far as starting Azure, that was much later. My dad started farming organically in 73. That was really my dad that started the organic farming.

I was a part of it, but I was pretty small. There wasn't a lot of market for organic food in the seventies. That was right when I was barely starting, but he had made it. He knew Bob Moore, the founder of Bob's Red Mill. So he made a deal to grow for Bob, and that went on for about 10 years.

And Bob lost his contract with a big store chain called Fred Myers out here. So we had no market for our organic grain as organic farmers. Hence, I went out and tried to find the market. And when I started doing deliveries at stores, you know, I'd go to the store and they'd say, you wanna buy organic grain, flour, this stuff? And they'd say, oh, yeah.

Take 5 pegs a week. And I've got 50,000 bushel, but instead of saying no, I said yes. How about every other week? So I started doing these little routes here in the northwest. Pretty soon, people would say, can you bring something from here to there, especially out in Eastern Washington or Central Oregon?

This would have been about 1987 or 88. I realized there was a demand. If I was gonna be running these routes, I may as well do it both ways. So we started distributing some other people's product. My wife and I sat down and made the first catalog on a word processor.

People don't even know what that is anymore. Hence, Azure was born. Obviously, very small, just here in this 100 mile circle the first couple of years, but the demand continued to grow. We now have delivery, and we deliver directly to communities We call drop points. I can't tell you how many of our drop point coordinators are homeschool moms.

It's very common. Almost 4,000 drop points around the country where we deliver into the local communities. So we're able to do perishable products, produce, frozen, all of that because we're going into the communities and not really doing the last mile. You pick it up at a central spot. Most of the time, those are at churches, Grange Hall, sometimes people's homes.

But, you know, various places wherever the drop weight coordinator, most common are churches and sometimes unrelated businesses like hardware stores and things.

What makes it so appealing for families buying in bulk is really affordable with you guys because you're cutting out that middleman, isn't it?

Well, there's 2 things. 1 is, yes, we're cutting out the middleman. But probably the even more important part is we have created a more efficient delivery model than anybody else has. So you're we're cutting out the middleman, and we're many in many cases, we're cutting out the retailer as well. So we're going direct from the farm to the consumer And our delivery model, because pretty much all the food is moving across the country anyway, most supermarkets do not sell local food.

I think Azure sells more local food than any supermarket does. And we're we delivered all 50 states. So by being able to use full size over the road semis for both delivery and transport, we're able to do it as cost effectively, if not more cost effectively than any, retailer or even, you know, wholesale type store would be able to do. So by giving our customers bulk options, we can help families, and that's been a big part of my call. And we raised 11 children.

I know what it's like to feed a big family. Eating healthy food is even more important when you have a big family, especially if you're homeschooled. A lot of people have the idea that it's too expensive. I couldn't possibly afford to eat healthy food, organic food, even non GMO food or non processed food. This concept makes it completely possible by buying in bulk, you can save money on food ingredients.

And if you're cooking at home, you can eat for way less healthy organic food than you could even eat junk food using highly processed foods.

I wanna ask you, I know I've heard you on other podcasts and it's like you're an encyclopedia for nutrition and health. I really wanted to talk about GMOs today. They're still a little bit mysterious to me. Could you explain for everybody here what exactly is genetically modified food? What it what are GMOs?

And what is their impact on our health? And then I wanna talk about how it impacts our learning too and our kiddos learning.

A lot of times on the label is now called bioengineered. In many states, food traditionally came from wild plants that became domesticated. Farmers chose the plant that had the biggest fruit or the best tasting fruit to save the seed from to plant again. That's called selective breeding, done for 1000 of years. That's how we get all the huge wide variety of heirloom plants and food sources available to us today to selective breeding.

Then science went one step further, and they began to do what is called hybridization or hybrid food. So hybrid food is from a plant that will naturally cross pollinate. It's basically like 2 different species, like the horse and the donkey becoming a mule. You do the same thing with plants, and you use a particular combination of breeding within the same species. So if you want hybrid corn, you take a corn that is very slow maturing and a very good sweet corn that makes a large kernel to and you combine that, you create what's called an f one hybrid.

That means it's 1st generation cross. And then you create a super sweet corn that will not go starchy in 2 days. Most corn when it's in the milk stage, when you're doing sweet corn, if it's a heirloom, a lot of times they'll go starchy really fast. Whereas with hybridization, it'll last for a week or 2 in that stage. Does that make sense?

So that's what's a hybrid. The downside of a hybrid is you can't save the seed from that and expect to get the same thing because you won't. Once a plant using selective breeding, if you do that over and over, you get a plant that's true to type. You plant the seed and you get the same thing. You plant a lemon cucumber, you're gonna get a lemon cucumber, unless it's crossed with some other cucumber by accident.

So then science comes in and they decide that we wanna take this one step further, and we want to be able to get traits that don't naturally occur in any plant within that species. Obviously, number 1 is we want a plant that doesn't die with glyphosate, which is a weed killer.

Isn't that Roundup?

Yes. Roundup is the retail brand Mhmm. Of glyphosate. They insert a gene with a virus. So the plant will accept a gene from a foreign species.

In the case of corn, what's called Roundup ready corn, genetically modified corn, which is about 90% of the corn grown in the US is roundup ready.

Wow.

You're inserting a gene out of a fish because fish is immune to glyphosate. It will store it in its tissues. It doesn't just die from it. They insert the gene from the fish in the corn and create a and in order to make the corn, they also have to insert a virus to make the corn sick, so it doesn't reject the stray gene. And then they can now grow corn and spray Roundup or various forms of glyphosate right over the top of the crop.

While it's growing, it'll kill the weeds and it won't kill the the corn. Wow. They've also inserted BT into a different kind of corn, which is a bacteria that makes certain kinds of insects sick. So it's a poison pretty much. It's a naturally occurring pesticide that the corn actually grows in and of itself.

That isn't as popular now because they've found that feeding that to chickens can eventually, degrade the production of chickens because it makes them sick too.

That's incredible. Does it always require this this fish

part

or an animal part?

For the Roundup ready. Okay. I just use that as an example. But what you're doing is you're doing across species.

Right.

Anything that's genetically modified, you're crossing the species. In the case of corn, it would never breed with a fish. That would be completely impossible. But they're doing that through insertion of the gene and the bacteria. Wow.

Nor would corn with the BT bacteria.

So then how does this affect us and our bodies? What does it do to us when we consume these things? Before we continue, I wanna share with you a program that has been a game changer for our family. At our learning center, we instructed and helped kids through pretty much every program on the market. So we know firsthand just how important a solid math foundation is for our kids' futures.

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Number 1, the most important part of it, in my opinion, is the reason that they're doing it. They want to be able to spray Roundup glyphosate directly on the crop. And you're eating that without, you know, there's no filter. It didn't even have to come through the ground, and Roundup will do that. It can get in ground water.

It can be uptaken through the roots of the plant. But in this case, it's right on your food.

Wow.

Roundup doesn't kill a plant because it's just dying. It actually is a mineral blocker. So it uptakes the plant's ability to uptake minerals out of the soil, particularly manganese. By doing that, it makes it susceptible to disease, primarily fusarium wilt, and the plant dies. What does that do to the uptake of minerals in our bodies?

Now we have mineral deficiencies. How many children are being plagued by different mineral deficiencies that most of the time are misdiagnosed, but no weak bones of osteoporosis in the elderly, all these things. There's a reason for those. And then you add in genetically modified and Roundup ready. Roundup has absolutely been proven in court.

In fact, if lymphoma, you can get money from Bayer because they will just pay you off. They don't wanna be sued again because they lose every time. They'll pay you if you have lymphoma and can prove that you use Roundup. It's that well proven, but it's still available in every hardware store. There's millions of tons of it being sprayed onto our fields every year.

So the ability to spray, that's number 1. And number 2 is see is you're changing the protein of the plant that we're eating. And there's almost no research available on what that actually does in the long run to our microbiome. Our microbiomes have been developed with us. It's passed down from our mother.

We get our microbiome before we're even born, and it can even be cultural in the foods that a particular culture eats. Frequently, our microbiomes adapt to our diet type. If we radically change it, a lot of times, for instance, people from North African descent have a very large percentage of dairy allergies because they don't use milk in that area, And the microbiomes of the mother don't have that. What about when you're introducing proteins that aren't even found in nature because you're combining these genes, it creates a protein and the body eventually either adapt to it or it will create an autoimmune response. Why are we having autoimmune diseases coming out of the kazoo?

You probably know a dozen people or more with autoimmune disorders. They're frequent. Same with autism. When I was a kid, autism was unheard of. No one ever heard of it.

If you read the statistics, there was 1 child in 500 in 1980 had autism. This was right before Roundup and glyphosate became a thing. Today, that number, last I heard was 134. Wow. Nobody can make that connection.

Or they won't. Right? Yeah. That's so fascinating. I remember when I went through my own gut healing journey, I was startled when my nutritional therapist told me, I'm gonna get this statistic wrong, but it was over 80% of our immune system is our gut.

Right? You think, you know, oh, just if someone sneezes, go wash your hands, but she was a big proponent of no, like, this is the and I bet you she believed in more of that terrain. Isn't that called the terrain theory? Do you know about that?

Yeah. So basically what you're talking about is that the vast majority of disease, even communicable diseases are not spread through germ theory. It's spread through our bacteria in our body being unable to fight tremendous amounts of bacteria, billions of bacteria. And not just in our gut, but in our gut is the vast majority. But it's the same in the soil, and I could get into the whole thing, but it's very similar in the microbiome or the gut of a person or in the soil.

Nutrients that are made available by the bacteria, our bodies can use. Ones that are not made available by bacteria cause problems. When we're eating food, our bacteria are not able to break that down and bacteria goes through the lining into our bodies, then it destroys our immune system. We get sick and have to throw that off. So whether a cold's going around or not, we're gonna get a cold from the slightest infection if our body has to throw off these toxins.

If our body doesn't have those toxins to throw off because of the bacteria's digesting our food and we're getting the nutrients in the proper balance from bacteria, we don't have to worry about it because we're not gonna get a cold no matter how many people with colds are around.

That whole thing is so fascinating to me. I know the mamas are listening because a lot of us are homeschool mamas and we already don't like the system. So we're like, what other system should we disagree with? But it's so true. Right?

It's our health care system. It's how our food is grown. Now I gotta ask you something because one thing that I wanna always make sure with my episodes is tangible takeaways. So for the mom who's listening to this, who yesterday just spent $400 grocery shopping, she has nonorganic apples, non organic bananas, all this. She's listening to this.

I wanna say don't feel shame, don't feel bad. But how should she wash those vegetables and those apples? Is there a magic formula? Is it baking soda? Is it vinegar?

If you have to get something that's not organic, how should we be washing our food?

There are really unfortunately, there's not really an answer to that.

I know it's in it, but you also said it sprayed on it.

It is. But on the things that we're talking about, these GMOs, like the corn and stuff, you can't wash that anyway. You know, it's ground into your cornmeal. If you make cornbread or corn chips or Doritos, or whatever, you're getting a full dose. If you ate chicken or pork, for instance, that's fed almost entirely GMO corn because that goes straight into their tissues.

There are certain chemicals that may be on an apple or something like that, that you can definitely wash some of it off. Vinegar is great because of the pH factor, just apple cider vinegar, but where we really see a difference in our family's health, it's not really about the washing. It's really about choosing foods. If it's apples and stuff, you're already a step ahead of the processed food market. About 60 to 70 percent of the food consumed in America is highly processed.

Not only is it genetically modified and raised with chemical agricultural chemicals, it also has food additives, preservatives, dyes, colorings. So you're already way ahead if you bought apples and potatoes. That's a big step in the right direction, getting away from processed foods. 2nd step is if you can buy foods that or grow them, it's a great homeschooling project. There's nothing better as a homeschooling project than to work in the garden with your kids.

That reminds me, I have a daughter who loves pickles, and I love pickles too. For Christmas, it was one of her favorite gifts. We gave her a fermenting starter kit for yeah. And what was great is they're they've said don't start with cucumbers, start with carrots because easier. What was so cool about that, David, is we sat there.

It completely turned into this phenomenal homeschooling science lesson with the our microbiome and why this is healthy and we're building bacteria and what exactly is happening. We even had pH bacteria and what exactly is happening. We even had pH strips. It was very much a basic starter kit for kids. It really sparked interest.

What are we gonna pickle next? This kind of stuff, this nutritional stuff, we often talk about with homeschooling, we talk about this in Thrive Homeschool Community a lot. In fact, we talked about it yesterday in office hours. This is where we have a nationwide community of homeschool mamas. We mentor them.

We teach you how to homeschool. We help you when you're been homeschooling 10 years and you're burnt out. Part of it is we have these live office hours but we're always trying to get to the why of homeschooling. Is education about just stuffing our kids with facts and figures and information or is it about giving them really useful, valuable skills and character development? And so that's why I, in particular, loved that lesson because this is about her future, right?

Just learning about bacteria and food and why, what exactly are we doing when we are pickling these little carrots. And one thing I will say it was depressing because we spent hours doing this pickling and we only did 2 jars. I know people that are into pickling for a long time. It was gone one lunch. It was gone.

I was like, oh my goodness. All that work. Now they're gone.

Next time you can do it in a in a 5 gallon crock.

Yes. Exactly. That's what we'll do next time. But sanitizing those ball jars was really hard for me. I'm a I grew up in the city, but at the same time, we really try our best to to source our food.

I have been completely healed of my gut. That process took about 3 years. Of course, it's a I don't wanna say completely healed. I wanna say that I was very, very sick. And through working with somebody over an extended period of time, we had parasites.

Our whole family had parasites that we naturally got rid of and it was a lot. But that's why I was so excited to have you on today. But I wanna connect this with learning. How do these GMOs affect our kids' learning, specifically? Hi there, podcast family.

If our episodes bring a smile to your face, challenge you, or spark your thoughts, tap that like and subscribe button to stay connected with us. Also, we'd truly love to hear your voice in the comments. Your insights and stories are what makes this community special. And not only does it allow us to hear you, but your engagement helps us reach more people and spread our message. So go ahead and don't be shy.

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Well, again, the the GMOs are making and and the chemicals that go along with this are making our kids sick. It's autoimmune disorders. It's autism, even on the slight part of the scale, but all over it. It's brain fog. It's these kinds of things that we're dealing with.

And a lot of times, we don't even know. We just think, oh, I am just so frustrated. My kid just doesn't seem to be learning. It just takes forever to teach them how to read or whatever. Hey.

I've gone over the alphabet 37 times with this 6 year old, and they just can't seem to get the concept. Well, it may be, and it's not just the GMOs. We also have all the processed foods that go with that and the high sugar content. Polysaccharides are extremely important for our health. I'm not a sugar basher per se, but refined sugars, monosaccharides are very, very harmful, especially when we're talking about children.

We were never meant to eat refined sugar. We were meant to eat fruit or vegetables. It's one thing to eat dates. It's quite another to eat high fructose corn syrup. Even though dates are very sweet, our body deals with that differently.

When we ingest things like high fructose corn syrup, along with the genetically modified that's already creating brain fog, you get hyperactive because that goes straight to the blood sugar. There's no buffer except the insulin that eventually starts wearing out if we're not careful. When we eat a poly complex sugar, the body cannot break that down quickly. It goes to the microbes. The microbes break it down and feed the sugar slowly into the bloodstream for energy for our body, and we can get energy off of sugars.

We We can also get it off of fats, but it's basically only those two things. And all life, including the creation of fats, is from sugars. I mean, that's where life comes from. The whole photosynthesis, plants creating sugars out of water and sunshine. That's the foundation of life.

But when we process that, it becomes beet sugar, cane sugar, pop, high fructose corn syrup, all those things to the blood sugar quickly. These are the things that cause major grief when you're trying to teach children. They're not thinking quite as straight as they could be because the brain fog from some sort of autoimmune response to these genetically modified, then they're getting pitched with high blood sugar levels and their natural inclination to fight that is to just move like crazy. They're trying to burn that up. It's not healthy for them to sit in their desk in that situation.

They need to be moving, but at the same time, how can they be educated when they burn that up, then they crash, it goes up and down, or they have to have another piece of candy, they get cravings. And that's what you can see. It doesn't need to be that way. We can feed our children a balanced diet that the microbiome of our body gives us the nutrients that spreads into the blood sugar at a moderate level, and we have good energy without the brain fog, the hyperactivity.

Well, I think you're hitting on some really important things here. I think so much gets worse when we are not feeding our bodies nutritiously. So rather than the kid when they're hungry and they need a snack and they're grabbing that Z Bar that is really, really high sugar, what would be some great swaps for next time mom is shopping? One rule that I heard along the way and we just say it. In my household, I have 3 girls and I wanna make sure that the word fat is not a bad word.

It's a good word in our food. For example, we have this rule that whenever we eat fruit, we eat a fat with it. What would be some great swaps for our families today where it's like their snacks and their snack bin or z bars and high sugar stuff?

Well, if you want sweet snacks, fruit is number 1. Go for fruit, berries, whatever's in season. You know, at our house, if they wanna snack, it's some blueberries, it's some cherries, those kinds of things if we want a sweet snack. The other thing that we have pretty much available all the time, and maybe this plays into your fats, so we do a lot of nuts. Yes.

And the fruit and nuts, I think, is a really good snack combination.

Yeah.

Healthy raw fruit, especially, or even canned fruits if it's off season and you can't get fresh fruit. Mhmm. Most of the time, we can get fresh fruit most of the year. Add nuts to that so you get the protein fat component for in between meals. I'm not talking about meal replacement here.

You asked about snacks. Those would be my go to's, and most kids actually love that.

Mhmm.

That's not a hard to eat kind of a thing.

Yeah. Raw milk. The legal stuff regarding raw milk is interesting. It varies by state, but it's legal in Colorado when you do it with a milk share. You go to the person's house and it's in the refrigerator.

Not every time, but every once in a while, they have the most delicious pasture raised raw cheese, like a sharp cheddar. When I bring that home, the kids are immediately getting out the apples. Because apples and cheese to raw cheese like that, it's so stinking delicious.

That is actually something that we do at our house sometimes too. Of course, I can't do that because of my situation.

Right.

But, yeah, a lot of the kids love apples and cheese. And Azure sells a lot of raw cheeses, raw cheddar, and we even we have an organic raw cheddar that we use at our house that we even if you can't absolutely get it from, you know, from the cow share place. Yeah. But we have a 5 pound block that's actually relatively cost effective. I mean, obviously, cheese is a more expensive thing to buy, but a 5 pound block is still pretty cost effective.

Oh, yeah. And we would blow through that in my house for sure. Something fascinating to me is you touched on a little bit earlier on soil contamination. And you also mentioned, and there's a connection here, how most Americans we know for sure now that we're bay basically all magnesium deficient. Right?

Like, everyone should be on a supplement of some sort. At least this is what I've heard. You might disagree, but I'd love to hear about soil contamination, what is happening, and why it's so important that we know about the ground that our food is coming from. Whether you're newer to homeschooling or you've been homeschooling over a decade, the fact is creating a streamlined successful homeschool is hard. The pressure is high, and the weight of responsibility often leads to self doubt, second guessing, and feeling completely overwhelmed with the excessive amounts of opinions and curricula options out there.

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Okay. There's 2 pieces to the answer on that. Number 1, organic addresses this part very well. There's what's not in your food. We don't want the glyphosate.

We don't want the Agent Orange, which by the way has a bunch of other names, but it's used widely in agriculture today.

It is? Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Wait. Stop. The Vietnam thing?

Yeah. Same thing. It just has new names. They call it 24 d and some other fancy names. Everyone has their own brand name, but it's exactly the same thing.

Woah.

So that's what organic is about, What's not in your food? We don't want that in our food. We don't want nerve inhibitors that are used as insecticides. Organic addresses that really well. It'll give you what's not in your food.

The next thing is what do we want in our food? If we wanna have a healthy body, we need a modern agriculture conventional modern agriculture only looks at 3 nutrients in the soil typically. NPK. Go to any hardware store and look at the fertilizer for whether it's for your lawn or your garden. It's only 3 things listed on there most of the time.

It's gonna say, you know, 1252 or something like that. Those are just NPK. That's all that they're talking about. For a healthy body, we need roughly, at least known to science right now, about 72 minuteerals for optimum health. Agriculture only does 3.

One of the things we talk about war chemicals in World War 2, in the islands out in the Pacific, they needed to make airstrips really fast. So they found this chemical called anhydrous ammonia that would make the ground hard as a brick, and they could land airplanes on it even when it was wet and mucky. They found out towards the end of the war that all the jungle and stuff right along the edges of the airstrips grew a lot bigger. And so they started using anhydrous ammonia in the production of crops. And there's some other forms of it as well, but I'm trying to stay with the old fashioned simple form here.

Mhmm.

You know, it lives under other names like urea. But what it does is it synthesizes nitrogen. Nitrogen is the nutrient in a plant that regulates growth. It makes the plant know how big it's gonna get. The reason that God made it that way is because nitrogen is the hardest thing for the bacteria to convert.

There is untold amounts of nitrogen in the air. The air we breathe has huge amounts of nitrogen in it, but it's not utilizable to a plant until the bacteria breaks it down. And there are special bacteria that break down nitrogen from the air to be utilized the vault of plants. Chances are the other bacteria in the soil have produced all the other nutrients needed for a healthy human and healthy plant before the nitrogen. So the plant doesn't grow any bigger than the amount of nitrogen available in the soil.

If that nitrogen is available, then we know that we have the rest of the nutrients. What modern agriculture did is they synthesize nitrogen. It makes the plant think it has nitrogen that it doesn't have. So it grows great big, tries to pull the nutrients from the soil. They're not all there.

There is not enough nutrients in the soil to cover that. So that is when we started getting incredibly nutrient deficient foods. Before the use of synthetic nitrogen, our food had what was needed. Now there are soils that are out of balance naturally. It's not about magnesium as much as the ratio between calcium and magnesium.

Just a lot of folks get way too much calcium and not enough magnesium. Here in Oregon, we have extremely high magnesium soils. We actually have to increase our calcium even though the soil test would show that it's sufficient, we have okay calcium. But because our magnesium is so high, we have to increase our calcium to balance the magnesium. And so when we have conventional agriculture, the nitrogen synthesizer makes the plant grow big.

Farmers are stuck between a rock and a hard place in this because they have to hold out both hands. They say, well, how much do I have to pay for everything? Fuel for tractors, taxes, or all the things that are very expensive for a farmer. And then on the other hand, they go out and say, well, how much will you give me for my grain or whatever they're raising? And that price is set by the Chicago board of trade or something completely out of their control.

So they can control neither side their inputs or their x put price. The only thing they control is quantity. Hence the temptation to go down this path of bulk and volume. Because typically people are not willing to pay for quality. That's what I feel my real mission with Azure is to connect the people that care about quality with farmers that care about producing quality.

Willing to pay them a little bit more to produce a quality product that they did not use this anhydrous ammonia thing on. Everything has its balance. I don't think we wanna go into agriculture here, but everything has its balance. And balanced soils create balanced plants, which create balanced nutrients in our body. We live in an imperfect world.

I am not a 100% opposed to supplementation. I think there is a place for it. In a perfect world, if every farmer felt that they were the guardian of the nation's health, we wouldn't really need them.

And I was gonna ask you because it does seem like Azure supports the farmers even though you are paying them a little bit more because you can cut out the middleman at the retailer. You're still able to offer these organic wholesome products to us consumers at a lower cost even than some conventional items. Correct?

We do our very best. Yeah. And that's definitely our goal. We wanna offer it to the market, especially to families. It is so important that families, you know, that are raising children, that's the next generation.

We're just seeing, hey, you guys that are homeschooling, those of us that did it, we do that because we care about our children and about the impact that they're gonna make in the next generation. They are gonna be the next generation's parents, leaders, entrepreneurs. That's the children that we're raising right now. They're going to make the world what it is. We wanna give them an advantage, which in homeschooling, we're gonna give them an advantage.

They're not gonna have to learn all the craziness that's going on in the schools today, but even more important, they're going to be able to learn what they need in their life. Because most do not just go down this curriculum path, and the one size fits all, because that's not true. Our children are not a one size fits all. That's the factory school system. That's a very important aspect, but if they don't have healthy bodies, they still can't make that impact because they're sick.

And if we look out in the world today, a tremendous amount of the world is sick. I was reading statistics that are just absolutely atrocious. Like 50 percent of the adult ladies in the country are on antidepressants of some sort. Where does that come from? These are not all sick minds.

Their bodies, they're having brain fog. They're not able to think clearly. They're not able to count the blessings that are happening each and every day. So they go to the doctor and they put them on more poisons. And it's just an endless cycle.

I asked you on because I knew that you could give us some really great strategies, takeaways. One thing about people that are drawn to me in my podcast is we do wanna know the why. So I love that you kind of went there with the soil and all of that stuff because it really hits home to me when I know, okay, yeah, that apple is cheaper than this apple, but now I know why. Now I know why I need to go with this one instead. So I think that's wonderful.

And I'm thankful that you came on today to help us in our health journeys that definitely tied into our homeschooling journeys. Now I want our listeners to be able to look up Azure. Did you come today with any specials or anything for those listeners?

So it's Azurestandard.com for the website. He he set up a special promo code for those that find Azure through this podcast to get 15% off your first order of any size. Well, nope. $100 or more, I think, maybe. But it's christy faith show 15.

So just christy faith show 15 on the promo. When you go ahead, go to azurestandard.com. You know, the unique part is you can order just, like, through the mail, but what I totally recommend is that you go to a drop. So go to azurestandard.com. Down in the footer is a link that says find a drop.

Sometimes we have it up top too. But find a drop, the map is really very straightforward. You can just zoom into your location, or you can type your ZIP code in there. It finds the closest drop. And then you can, reach out to that drop point person if you wanna know anything about it.

We don't say the exact location for the privacy of the drop point coordinators, because some have it at their homes. A lot of them do say, what's it? The First Baptist Church or whatever. If you need to look, there usually is a contact either an email or a phone number for the drop point coordinator for each one of those. If you click on the blue dot, it shows the one closest to you.

When you're checking out, put in the the Christie Faith Show 15 to get a discount on that, first order out the door. They set up just for this.

Oh, good. That makes me feel so special. So it's Christy Faith Show 15. Don't worry. You don't have to memorize that.

Those of you listening, we're gonna put a link in the show notes so you can easily access that. Now let me ask you, because it's a little bit different than how a lot of people are used to buying their grocery, what what do people usually buy in their first order? If it was me, I'd probably get my flour for the holiday. What comprises people's first orders just to kinda get used to it?

I always tell people on your first order, don't get overwhelmed. Azure has around 12,000 different items. So don't get overwhelmed on your first order. Just put in healthier versions of the things that you eat every day. So if you went to the store and you got those conventional apples, find some organic apples at azurestandard.com.

And we sell a 20 pound box, and I'll bet in a £20 box, you're gonna pay less than you would for those conventional ones.

Do you have to buy a £20 box?

I'm just recommending that for apples. I think we have £3 bags to Okay. £20 of apples. You're gonna pay $30.

You know? Can you get frozen meat?

Frozen meats, if you use a lot of meat, we have beef. We have chicken. We have non GMO versions on both of those, like pasture beef, and we have certified organic. Obviously, that's one thing where I think you can go a little bit both ways. There you know, beef, for instance.

You have pastured beef raised out, you know, on the range, not necessarily certified organic, but it's quite a bit cheaper than the certified organic counterpart. For those on a budget, I recommend the organic. But those that are on a budget, we have 2nd best beef, which is still very good and way better than the Iowa beef that you're gonna get in the supermarket. You know, if you don't have a neighbor that you can you know, or do your own, this is the best best way to go. And as well as chicken, we have Alaska wild caught salmon, the best available.

And, you know, we do that, like, in a £10 box, you know, so that it's not as, you know, not as expensive. But, you know, salmon's you know, meat's still more expensive than grains and stuff. If you bake for the holidays, the organic flour, it's very I mentioned the glyphosate that's in grain, what's also in other grains even if it's not genetically modified, a lot of the wheats have glyphosate sprayed on them as a desiccant. We don't even offer conventional most of the grains. We do some of the meats because they're pastured.

But in the grains, we just do the organic because it just hurts my heart too much to even think about somebody eating that glyphosate written stuff.

Azure has a particular standard where there are ingredients or methods that are banned. As a busy mom myself, I'm not going to get a degree in nutrition. It's hard enough to figure out even when I'm at Whole Foods which sunscreen to buy because I live in Denver and the sun is insane here and the skin cancer rates are just astronomical in Denver and especially when your kiddos play sports. Maybe the most, to be quite frank, is how you make it easier for us where we can trust your standard that you are doing the screening for us. People that know a lot of stuff are doing the screening for us so that we can go on that website and we just know that whatever we buy is at a particular standard.

Would you like to add to that at all?

If you wanna look at the standard, we publish it on our website about us and then to product standards.

Okay.

There's a very clear list. I also have a couple of videos on that that give the why.

Oh, good.

The the why of our standards. For instance, we don't allow anything that's genetically modified in Azure. You don't have to worry about it. Even if it's corn or soy, there's no genetically modified anything. We don't even allow refined conventional sugars.

We do allow some sugar, but it has to at least be certified organic.

Okay.

Because the conventional stuff is either genetically modified if it's beet sugar, or it's sprayed directly with glyphosate if it's cane sugar. Refined conventional sugars and sweeteners, nothing. Artificial colors, artificial flavors, artificial preservatives, artificial sweeteners. We even go into the natural flavors because some things are hidden under natural flavors.

Yes. It's so sneaky when they say natural flavors. I love that transparency that you put on the website. So you guys, please check out Azure if you're looking for an affordable way to up level your family's health. I know that right now groceries are just I can't even believe it when I go to the grocery store.

This is a great way to provide better food for your families from a trusted family who has started from a family ran business. I am so thankful that you came on the show today to dive a little bit deeper. Everybody, don't forget to have all these links in the show notes. You don't have to hold these things in your brain. Most people are listening to this while they're driving.

You can't necessarily click right this second. Have no fear. We always send out a, email to you guys that has links in it to remind you to click on any links you might be interested in after the show. So have no fear, ladies. We have that for you.

David, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This was a really awesome time with you.

Absolutely. Thank you. You guys are doing the most important job in the country, raising the next generation. I take my hat off to all of you.

Oh, not everyone says that to us. Thank you. I appreciate that.