In Their Words: Ethos Farm's Ron Weiss, MD

Dr. Ron Weiss is a primary care physician who owns and practices medicine on Ethos Farm, a 342-acre historic property in Long Valley, New Jersey. A strong believer in the healing power of food, Dr. Weiss counsels his patients to eat an organic plant-based diet for optimal health. His farm grows a wide range of certified organic produce, all of which is available for purchase at an on-site farm stand. In addition to offering healthy organic produce, the Doctor’s Farm Market, as the farm stand is known, also provides consumers with information about the specific health benefits of the fruits and vegetables it sells. Dr. Weiss joined OPN to talk about his interest in food as medicine, his farm’s many programs, the disease-fighting properties of organic produce, and more!

How and when did you first become interested in the idea of food as medicine?

My father was diagnosed with end-stage metastatic pancreatic cancer the year after I had finished all of my medical training. Despite us taking him to the best cancer hospital in the world, there was no treatment for him. He was given a prognosis of one to three months to live. And it was during that time, I moved home to take care of him. One day, I walked down to the public library, and I started leafing through some books, and I found one that detailed the testimonies of people who had eaten a diet of whole plant foods—it was called the macrobiotic diet at the time—and I brought it home to my father.

Dr. Ron Weiss, Ethos Farm

My father decided to give it a shot, and he had a remarkable transformation very quickly. He had been in severe pain, but within two days of a macrobiotic diet, he was off all of his pain medicine. Within a week, he was back in his law office. Within two weeks, he was back at the gym. In three weeks, he was running. Three months later, we got a CAT scan, which showed a one third reduction in size of his major tumor masses. Six months later, we repeated a CAT scan, and it showed a 50 percent reduction. And that was the point at which I knew that I would change my belief system about healing and what whole plant foods could do for people.

Dr. Ron Weiss, Ethos Farm

Can you talk about your journey from that point to where you are today—a doctor who owns and practices medicine on an organic farm?

I was in primary care, and primary care doctors are overwhelmed by chronic diseases that are undoing our health care system. We’re on the front lines, and I began to realize after my father’s situation and as the years passed, that what my patients were eating was causing their diseases, and what they were eating was coming from our industrialized food system. I decided that I had to create a new paradigm for myself and my patients. I just couldn’t do this any longer. And that paradigm was to reimagine a new food system joined with a new way of taking care of people.

And so I sold my struggling practice. I took whatever money I had, and I bought this farm. It’s a preserved farm (under an agricultural easement held by the county and the state). It’s one of the most historic farms in New Jersey and is almost 300 years old. Its soils are some of the richest in the nation.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman and Dr. Ron Weiss on Ethos Farm Day

Can you tell us about about some of the programs on your farm?

Yes! The Ethos Farm Project consists of three initiatives. The first is a research project called EFECT—Ethos Farm Ecosystem and Carbon Trial. We are restoring a 100-acre corn and soybean field to native prairie and are partnering with Rodale Institute and Rutgers. We hope to demonstrate that native North American prairie grasses are champions at sequestering atmospheric carbon and offer a solution to climate change. We’ve been awarded a National Resources Conservation Service grant to do that. 

Second, we have our Young Farmers Incubator Program, where we take a young person who wants to be an organic farmer and bring them onto our farm. We give them housing, land, and mentorship. We teach them how to be a regenerative organic farmer. The last part of the Ethos Farm Project is our Ethos Farm Days. They’re beautiful events on the farm, open to the public. People come to listen to world-renowned speakers and learn about our health’s connection to food, agriculture, and planetary well-being.

Dr. Ron Weiss with guests on Ethos Farm

And then we have my medical practice, which is called Ethos Primary Care. We treat people who are seeking to reverse and prevent chronic diseases through lifestyle by changing their behavior. I am board certified in internal medicine and lifestyle medicine. Lifestyle medicine is about changing people’s behaviors to reverse and prevent health problems. So for example, even if a person has had diabetes for 10 or 20 years, or they’ve been on high-blood-pressure pills for a long time, commonly they can come to our practice, and we would work with them to change what they’re eating, and that alone can completely reverse their diseases.

What role does organic produce play in your treatment of patients?

Produce in general plays a most important role. We tell patients good health is about eating a diet that consists of whole plant foods. As far as organically grown produce, we think it’s very important. There is evidence that organic produce differs from conventional produce in a number of ways—for example, in phytonutrient content. Phytonutrients are special plant molecules that plants use to fight their own battles in the environment, and human beings have commandeered these molecules to fight our own battles and ward off disease. Organic produce has been shown to have higher levels of these disease-fighting molecules—sometimes as much as 50 percent higher if the produce is grown well—compared to the levels in conventional produce.

It’s also important to remember that when produce comes from a living soil, its surfaces are covered with a completely different probiotic microbial population compared to produce grown in conventional soil. We are beginning to understand that the microbiome of a regenerative organic farm’s soil can imbue its human inhabitants with good health as well as the people who eat its produce.

Dr. Ron Weiss, Ethos Farm

Do you counsel your patients to buy only organic food?

Always. We encourage our patients to eat not just any plants grown any which way but to select well-grown whole plant foods. It doesn’t make sense to focus so much effort on what we eat, then serve it up with a dose of poison. A lot of pesticides are known to be endocrine disruptors and carcinogens, and many of them are known to eventually cause epigenetic mutation down generational lines, and these epigenetic mutations can then cause dreadful diseases.

In light of the COVID-19 situation, can you talk a little bit about the role of organic produce in immunity?

We still know so little about COVID-19, so I cannot give you specific references to the power of lifestyle behaviors in dealing with COVID-19, but we can draw conclusions from previous information we have. A diet of whole plant foods produces some of the lowest inflammatory states known in human beings. When a person is attacked by COVID-19 and becomes critically ill, excessive amounts of inflammation are unleashed by the immune defense system in an attempt to kill the virus. These highly inflammatory responses are responsible for creating respiratory failure and are moderated by eating diets of whole plant foods.

The other thing is that people who eat diets of whole plant foods are particularly good at fighting viruses borne on exhaled respiratory droplets. The immune response and levels of antibodies—the missiles that our defense system manufactures to fight these respiratory viruses—are heightened by certain plant foods. So it is not uncommon for people who consistently eat diets of whole plant foods to be fairly immune to getting many viral respiratory infections. And if they do get sick, usually their illnesses are tempered.