Dr. Arden Anderson, DO, PhD: “A Doctor’s take on Soil, an Agronomist’s take on Health.”

I came into Arden Anderson’s talk about halfway through, since a friend sent me a frantic text message telling me it was amazing. Arden Anderson (PhD, DO) has a private practice in Goshen, IN, and received his PhD in biophysics. Given the listed degrees, I was expecting a very scientific approach to the topic “A Doctor’s take on Soil, an Agronomist’s take on Health.”  What I heard fell into the pseudoscience category. I found myself agreeing or disagreeing with statements (and questioning many statements), but not being assured of any results backed by evidence.

Dr. Anderson’s main point was that people have accepted a pre-diseased lifestyle, and that we need to fix nutrition, hormones, and exercise, in combination, to be healthy. A scientific analysis would likely back this position; those three things are necessary for health. He talked about Brix measurements, glycemic indexes, nutrient density, free radicals, and other measureable aspects of nutrition. So far everything is testable.

But he goes further. He attributes our pre-disease lifestyle, to our stepping outside God’s laws; we are relying on man-made food rather than God-made food. He went on to say that health and disease cannot exist in the same space any more than light and darkness. That Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease are not genetic, just as being a drug abuser, a smoker, or lazy are not genetic. The study of genetics is not needed for humans, crops, or animals, because we already have superior varieties of crops and humans only need better nutrition to become healthy. Gene therapy is not necessary. He said that all human diseases could be cured by fixing problems on the farm, and presented a list of diseases that included the Ebola virus and AIDS.

He talked briefly about statistics, clarifying that pharmaceutical companies can easily manipulate numbers to show us what we want to see. This is part of what makes us accept a pre-diseased lifestyle that keeps us on pills and in hospitals, and their books in the black. Dr. Anderson was speaking his truth, and a lot of people in that room agreed with him. My problem was that his truth was presented as a scientist, a PhD, and a physician, but many of his claims went against accepted norms in the scientific community, and some seemed faith-derived. I understand that it takes people working on the fringes to advance science, but I felt as if we were out on several different fringes, and had lost the foundation of scientific rigor that is testable, falsifiable, and data-driven.