646: Dr. Aaron Hartman on Functional Medicine and Biohacking to Rewire the Brain and Heal the Body

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from Wellnessmama.com and this episode is all about functional medicine and biohacking to rewire the brain and heal the body. And this one definitely goes in a lot of directions. I’m here with Dr. Aaron Hartman who is an MD. And his journey with functional medicine started when he and his wife adopted their first daughter from foster care and she has cerebral palsy and countless dietary issues. He explains their story in this. But as a physician he felt let down and confused by the way that conventional medicine was saying that they should handle her condition and her health struggles really forced him to confront an uncomfortable realization, which was that our current healthcare system doesn’t have all the answers. And he says his wife refused to give up hope and ultimately pointed him to functional medicine and his daughter and now his other two kids began to thrive.

And so after years and family practice as a physician, he made a dramatic shift into functional medicine. And he now helps patients identify leverage points in key areas of lifestyle and health that harness their body’s remarkable power to heal and begin the vibrant life they deserve. We go in a lot of different directions related to that today. He’s also a clinical researcher and has been involved in over 60 clinical studies and as founder of the Virginia Research Center.

In this episode, we talk about his amazing story. We talk about things he used in helping his daughter that now apply in his practice. He gives reasons to avoid processed foods and oils like vegetable oils, and how eating those foods can affect the brain. He talks about his foundational principles of health that are important before considering more advanced methods. We go into the real data on omega-3 and omega-6 balance and what we can learn from this and what happens when we can consume too much omega-6 and how this affects our brain and our hormones and our cell membranes and so much more.

He explains why women actually need more protein per pound of body weight than men, how the average American is dehydrated and how this impacts the body on many levels, including electrically, how trace minerals can improve health, his first principles of diet. He talks about what peptides are and how he uses them within children and with his patients and so much more. He also talks about kids or adults who are hypermobile and how this comes with a 400% increase in chance of spectrum disorders, but how these can be largely mitigated and what we can learn from this and so much more. So very wide ranging episode. I think you will learn a lot. And let’s join Dr. Hartman. Dr. Aaron Hartman, welcome to the podcast.

Aaron: It’s great to be here.

Katie: Well, I’m very excited to get to chat with you today. And there’s a lot of different directions we’re going to be able to go, but for kind of broad and to start broad and with context. I would love to hear a little bit of your personal story, maybe also about your kids a little bit, because your story is really, really incredible and I think it’s going to resonate it with a lot of people. And I’d love for you to also work in a little bit about the homestead because that’s personally interesting to me. I’m sort of slowly moving in that direction as well.

Aaron: You got to jump on. You got to do it, especially if you have six kids. They will absolutely love it. So what got me, this was me and my family. My wife actually is an occupational therapist who worked with kids with special needs, and we ended up adopting one of her patients, Anna. And Anna had a lot of health issues. She has cerebral palsy, which is a brain damage issue related to a birth trauma. And we were told she never walk or talk or crawl. Actually, the medical community was told she’d be a vegetable. And even her therapist, who is one of my wife’s best friends, was kind of like, why would you even consider this? This is going to change her life.

But Becky saw something that no one else saw. And I just kind of followed her, not knowing better. I’m like, okay, we’ll see what happens. And one of the first interactions, and as a doctor, I’m always in the back end of things. I’m always like talking to patients. I’m never on the patient side. So one of the first recommendations for our daughter was you should cut a hole in her stomach and place a feeding tube in it and give her sugar water or formula and make her gain weight. And so talking to my wife, even though my daughter was never supposed to be much of anything, we hoped she’d walk, talk, crawl. We had great plans for her because we had faith that things would not be as people said.

And just putting a feeding tube in affects a child’s ability to talk, like just grappling, grasping all the things. Chewing and swallowing is a huge part of kids developing speech skills. Crawling, like, just the idea of crawling, actually, kids learn motor sequences one after another and skipping that. A child like her would not get to the point of walking without practicing that. So we opted not to put a feeding tube in her.

Well, the doctor, the GI doctor called Child Protective Services on us for child neglect because we refused their recommendations. And that was like, whoa. In the special needs community, this happens all the time when parents, usually moms, are fighting for their kids and they say, no, this is not right, they actually, a lot of times will get in trouble. And so we got investigated and ultimately it was not a big deal because my wife actually knew the nurse to investigate us because she’s an occupational therapist. And so that was my first foreway into like maybe the doctors don’t have the best thing out for us. And the thing about that, the inflection point was six months later when we actually found a growth chart for kids with cerebral palsy and my daughter was right in the middle. So the specialist did not know that for a kid with CP, my daughter was normal.

And so if we followed that path and done that procedure, that would have led to surgery after surgery after surgery. And like the AHA moment was maybe the expert doesn’t actually know everything. And the exact same thing happened about a year later with eye surgery that was recommended to us and a year after that with orthopedic surgery to cut her heel cords and other things on her. And that’s been our experience. Every time we hit a roadblock and someone says, hey, do this ridiculous surgical procedure, I’ve researched and shows a different angle. And my daughter is getting ready to turn 17. She texts and emails me, she types her friends, she doesn’t stop talking actually. She’s able to self dress herself and she’s actually doing great. And it’s like I have no idea where she’d be if we actually hadn’t bucked against the system and gone a different path. And that’s changed my family’s, changed my practice and ultimately it’s changed all the patients that I care for now.

Katie: That’s so incredible. And to just call out and highlight a couple of things you said, I think for one, how much of a blessing for her to have both you and your wife as advocates for her in her corner before she could speak for herself. And I think your story speaks to that incredible love of parents for children and it sounds like you guys really fought that battle from the very beginning for her.

And to know now that she’s doing all of those things is so incredible and also reminds me of my experience on a much smaller scale, but just being told by doctors that certain things were normal and knowing that they weren’t. But how that definition gets so convoluted and how sometimes maybe even if something is common, that doesn’t mean it’s normal and certainly not optimal. And I say on here a lot, people probably are tired of me saying it, but that we are each our own primary health care provider and at the end of the day, we can work with amazing practitioners to be our partners in that. But the responsibility lies with us or in the case of our children, with us on their behalf.

And so it sounds like you just have really advocated for her and really fought to give her the best options in her life and how incredible that she’s thriving now as a 17 year old. And I’m sure that was not an easy road. You mentioned, though, that this also really influenced your practice and your work as a doctor. And I’d love to hear a little bit more about that and how you’re now using that with other patients who maybe have probably quite different things going on in their lives and how that works out.

Aaron: First thing, we start with my wife. Feeding is a big thing in the occupational therapy world and started with just real food, eating real food. And so we realized the power of using things like lipids, healthy fats, real food, using food as medicine. But then I started researching, well, how about genes? Is there a genetic thing behind this? So I spent a year researching these things called Snips, which are small variations in revised genetic material. You may have heard of the Mthfr gene. That’s one of thousands of these. And started researching that. I took a deep dive into that and finding certain nutrients that helped my daughter based on her genes, then started researching away.

Second, there was energy therapy. This is over in Europe. They’re doing this thing called suit therapy, which is almost like this thing you wear that has rubber bands in it and actually what cosmonauts would use in outer space to activate their muscles, not to lose muscle mass. So we started doing suit therapy with her, and that was actually my wife that started that part of the journey. But then I kind of gotten this whole thing with using electromagnetic field therapy, which they used in Russia and Poland since the 1960s. Actually, high end race horses, they actually use this to help race horses fractures and injuries heal quicker. And it’s used by elite athletes. And I learned that you could actually use this to activate a kid’s brain by putting it on this electromagnetic mat and activating it’s called MICER, magnetically induced cellular exercise.

So I went down all these pathways, and every time I go down path threads, take a deep dive for a year to come back up, look around, and that kind of led into the functional medicine for you as well, because I was like, where’s a home that can go where there’s lots of people like me doing lots of weird stuff? Because it’s kind of lonely when you’re the only person researching and you kind of ask yourself, like, is this right? Like, how can this be that there’s a whole other continent doing this stuff in the world that I’ve never heard of it in my medical career, you know? And so we I just did thing after thing after thing. And the result has been, I’ve learned about how diet is crazy important, nutrition is crazy important. I’ve learned about how other therapies, like magnetic therapy, light therapy, laser therapy, hyperbaric, IVs, a whole bunch of things, but also how energy like using electrical stimulation can actually you can actually change a kid’s brain by activating their muscles in the periphery.

Then I started experimenting with patients. I’m like, well I’ve learned all these cool things. I’ve got these additional board certifications. Maybe I should try this on patients. And the strange things was it actually worked on real people too, like other people besides my daughter. And so it just has been this journey. Even today I’m still learning, I’m still practicing. I feel like I know less now after three board certifications and 20 plus years of practicing than I did when I started this journey. But I’ve developed a healthy respect for what I don’t know. And I think that’s one thing, if I get one thing I really know what I know is a drop in the bucket compared to the actual information out there that’s accessible to people to find answers when they can’t find what they’re looking for and searching for.

Katie: I think from a mindset perspective that’s huge as well because that keeps you in a mindset of curiosity and constant learning versus assuming you have all the answers. So you’re not even going to ask the questions which I would guess people listening have maybe run into in a medical setting in the past is being told by an expert like you guys were, that this was the only option and having to do the research themselves and forge their own path. Which sounds like it is much more difficult with kids because of a lot of the limitations in what you guys faced as well.

And I had a similar experience. I got to study in Switzerland briefly and it really struck me how differently they approach medicine there and how some of the things that would be considered fringe here in the US are so common there and so accepted. And even in a medical capacity they talk to people about their nutrition and their sleep habits and if they’re getting sunlight and their stress levels and then they are more open to things we would consider biohacks. But to them it’s just part of their normal medicine system.

And it sounds like you kind of take biohacking to a whole different level both with what you do with your children and then also with your patients. Now as an extension of that.

Aaron: That’s one of the things. Biohacking is a popular term using different things to change your physiology. And so what I saw with my daughter was she has these significant neurological health issues. Can I take that to the next level? With hyperbaric medicine, with doing lipid therapy or peptide therapies, we put probably 10 pounds of muscle on her over a period of six months doing peptides, which is there’s one peptide called cerebral lysine. Actually, strangely enough it’s approved in Austria for use for traumatic brain injuries, autism, Parkinson’s, that’s got an indication for ADHD and you can’t get it here in the United States. That’s a special shipment from Austria to use on my daughter.

And so all of a sudden, it’s like taking that to the next level and not letting there’s one thing called ponds, for example, that is FDA approved to treat balance issues and multiple sclerosis, but actually found research in Russia, they’re using it with kids, with CP. So I have to go to Canada, to Ontario to find a clinic to get the device, then bring back here and use with her. And it’s like realizing your body has this amazing capacity to heal. And people don’t always have to do all these crazy things because the foundation for all this for us has been diet, exercise, different forms of exercise with therapy, adequate sleep, and even the homestead.

That has been a healing environment to be somewhere where she’s always getting lots of weight, she’s always outside, she’s always getting stimulated. And one thing I want to tell my story to people, I don’t want them to focus on all the weird, expensive, fancy stuff. Because the foundation of all this is eating real food, using food as if it’s a drug, using lipids and healthy fats, using fermented foods as if they are a drug, using healthy green vegetables, using different things as if they are a drug, because they have the power to actually help your body heal. And so that’s been the biggest thing, is realizing that the foundational stuff is foundational, and this is stuff that’s accessible to anybody.

Katie: Yeah. I have always found it amazing that people will accept that something like a very small capsule of ibuprofen can give them pain relief immediately, but not be willing to consider that the volume of all the food we put in our bodies in a given day couldn’t have an equally or more therapeutic effect.

I’d love to go a little deeper on some of those foundational things. You mentioned diet. Any guidelines you have kind of as like foundational pillars of health that people should start with? Because I’m 100% in alignment with this. I think there’s this trend to get sucked into the newest exciting supplement or biohack. But I’ve seen, at least in my own life, if you don’t have those foundational things, and I would put on the list like sleep being huge, morning sunlight being huge, hydration, and good diet. If you don’t have those dialed in, any of those expensive things you do aren’t even going to work as well as they could.

Aaron: So, for example, you mentioned the whole food thing. My first principle is eat real food. It’s that simple. The problem is, what is real food? When 80% of what Americans eat is processed and 60% is highly processed, the highly processed means it’s not even close to food. It’s like margarine, it’s fast food stuff. And so all of a sudden, now 8% of what we’re eating is fake. So it’s eating real food and then, like, starting there and removing processed oils orals are an important part of our brain function. Your brain is mostly fat. All of your cells, actually, the surrounding structure of them is actually a lipid membrane that consists of cholesterol. 40% of the fat in your cells is actually cholesterol. You need healthy cholesterol for your brain to work. How many for 20 years, we were told, don’t eat cholesterol because it’s bad for you. One of the results is if all these kids know neurological issues because they’re born the moms that didn’t eat fat for the reproductive years.

And it’s amazing how these basic things like healthy fats, real fats, and one of the ways we use that as a BIRAC is we get this balanced omega three, omega-6 oral. It’s a clean oral. We make mayonnaise out of it. My kids put we make homemade French fries out of kamote, which is like a root vegetable, like a yam. And now they’re shoveling this balanced omega-3-6 in their mouth, getting massive bumps in their omega threes and sixes from a food that’s acting like a drug. I’m making this granola. That’s a nut based granola, and they’ll just make it like a cereal. And all of a sudden, now beginning omega-3-6 trace minerals and pharmaceutical doses. One of the things I talk about, people with omega-3, there’s actually a medical product called BAYER. It’s actually FDA approved medication for ADHD. It’s concentrated fish oil that’s FDA approved for ADHD. So really taking real food and then find what’s your health issue? Do you have a gut issue? Maybe you need lots of fiber. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you need lots of Prebiotic fibers. Maybe you need lots of fermented foods and kind of taking your the real food to the next level. Like, what are you lacking if you’re someone who’s hypermobile? As a connective tissue issue, you need tons of bone broth, you know, which is rich in trace minerals. You need actually lots of organ meat. You know, 30% of meat consumption in the United States before the 1950s, were organ meat. No one eats it anymore. We have we have a whole subset of the population who actually need this stuff. So all of a sudden, the real food thing is the basic premise. And then based on you as an individual, what’s your niche that you need more of this particular real food, like a drug?

Katie: I love that. And I have definitely taken heat before for saying that. I think processed vegetable oils are one thing that we shouldn’t not consume it any amount ever, if possible, to avoid. And I’ve taken heat from people who quote the studies about, we don’t want to have too much saturated fat, which you already addressed a little bit and talked about the cholesterol side. But I always go back to and you can probably explain this better. It’s that ratio, like you mentioned as well, with omega-3 and omega-6 and whatever you think of those oils, they’re extremely high in omega-6. And it seems pretty irrefutable that Americans are consuming a lot higher ratio of omega-6 than previous generations did. But I would love your take on that because it’s definitely a soapbox for me of avoiding the processed oils.

Aaron: Oils are literally food for your brain. If you have a kid, you want them to have to grow. When I see pregnant patients, my thing is you’re feeding brains. You’re making brains in your belly. So you need lots of healthy fat. So to your point about the omega-3s and 6s, there’s actually a lot of interesting studies looking at the appropriate ratio being like a four to one to six to one, probably closer to four to one ratio. The issue is we have too much of the sixes, and the average American has about a 16 to 1 ratio, which is way too much.

And so your omega-3s are your antiinflammatory fatty acids, and your omega-6s are your pro inflammatory. So rachidonic acid, for example, people say it’s inflammatory. That’s an omega-6. EPA fisher oils in omega three need both of them because if you get hurt, you get infection, you need inflammation to kill the bugs, right? And then you need antiinflammation to calm that down. You need this balance. So that one of the big issues with the pandemic was people were getting sick and inflamed and they couldn’t calm down the inflammation. And so you need these things in balance. And the seed oil thing that nugget I give people is these oil, these processed oils are partially plasticized. Oils petroleum comes out of the ground and we turn it into plastic, right? When you take a natural oil and you change its structure, you are partially plasticizing it, margarine for example. That’s semi solid used to be a clear liquid, right? And so now you get these partially plastic oils in your cell membranes that’s going to affect neurological function. It affects detoxification of your liver. For women, it affects hormones. So all of a sudden, these things that are, quote unquote, healthier are incredibly, incredibly toxic, especially to young developing minds.

Katie: Yeah, you explained that so well. And that’s what I always love if we can work in an explanation, because I feel like that alone can make a big difference for a lot of people. And I know, like, I didn’t know any of that when I was in college, for instance. And when I started paying attention to that and shifted the balance of those oils in my diet, I not only felt so much better, mob my labs improved, my skin improved. So much happened related to that. And obviously there’s much more that goes into health than just that.

You also mentioned, like, fermented foods and green vegetables, things like that. Any other guidelines or things that you found helpful related to protein consumption, for instance, or micronutrients from vegetables or fiber?

Aaron: One of the things with protein consumption. Women actually need more protein per kilogram by weight than men. So that’s one of the things a lot of women don’t consume enough protein. And when you realize that protein is important for making hormones, detoxifying hormones, all of a sudden women are if you’re eating a lower protein diet which it’s kind of hard to get if you’re a 70 kilogram female, weighs about 140. I’m just using this because it makes the math easy. It’s kind of hard to get 70 grams and if you’re mildly active, you probably need closer to 90.

And it’s really interesting there’s now these trending diets that are high protein actually improving weight loss. Why? Because especially women need more protein. The other question you asked in relation to other things – water. People don’t drink enough water. The average American is dehydrated. And so water is an important part of your kidneys detoxifying getting chemicals out of your body. There’s some things you only sweat out some things you only poop out some things you only pee out and some things you only breathe out. If you don’t have adequate water especially clean water that actually has rich in minerals. So mineral water is actually super helpful. And the trace minerals is a really important thing because our diets consist largely of processed foods. We process out all these trace minerals.

One thing that I learned having a farm was you actually need certain things for animals to be healthy in the animal husbandry world. It’s common knowledge that for example, cows, goats, horses need certain amounts of trace minerals selenium, strontium, barium, silica for the bone health, muscle health that we process all those things out of our food system and wonder why people get chronic infections, get recurrent ebv, get recurrent weird heart cardiomopathy heart issues from viruses. And when literally sometimes the trick is just giving people the right mineral that their immune system needs to fight these things off. So plenty of water, trace minerals and that’s one of the reasons why I love bone broth is because bone broth is an organ. Meat are natural sources for humans of large amounts of these really rare, rare earth minerals.

Katie: Yeah, one thing I’ve mentioned on here a little bit before but in the past few years it’s really helped is shifting my mindset away from looking at even just calories or macros and looking more at what is the nutrient density, the highest nutrient density for volume of food. Like I’m going to eat food every day anyway. How can I get the most nutrient density in that food? And especially for my kids as well in their growth phases, how do we maximize nutrient density in food? And I feel like it does actually kind of take some focus in today’s world because like you said, the majority of people’s diets are ultra processed and low in a lot of those really necessary things.

I would love to also talk a little bit more about the homesteading because you’ve touched on this, and it seems like you’ve learned a lot from that experience that’s translated into your practice as well. So I’d love to know what you’ve learned and also what all of us can apply from that knowledge, even if we aren’t going to jump full into homesteading.

Aaron: One of the things we got some cows, right? And so before I got cows, I started researching it, because cows are expensive, and you don’t want to lose 1000 pounds of meat. That’d be a bad loss. So started researching and found a guy named Joel Salatin, which I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him before, but he’s, like, shaking his head. The most well known or gang farmer probably in the English speaking world. He’s from Virginia, so I met him a couple of times, talked to him, and I was talking to him. He’s like, if you ever go to these organic farms, sometimes you’ll notice you see blind cows. Your cows get flies around the eyes. They get an infection in the eye. And if you’re an organic farm cow farmer, you cannot give them antibiotics. So a lot of the cows go blind, which is kind of sad, but you have to keep it organic. That’s what kind of happens.

And he was like, well, I just supplement my cows with kelp, and I haven’t had a cow go blind in 20 years since I’ve been doing that, and, like, the light bulb went off my head. Sea vegetables are Mother Nature’s source of concentrate, ultra trace minerals that you get from eating around the ocean and whatnot. And by giving this to the cows, he’s actually boosting that part of the immune system. One of the things that happens with cows that are fed in the conventional world called KFOs contain animal feeding operations, is they give him lots of grains, whether it’s soy, corn. Forget the jima, forget the glyphosate. Just focus on that part. These things have about 60 or 62 trace minerals that a mammal needs. Well, there’s another 30. A mammal needs about 96 trace minerals for healthy functioning.

So automatically, by feeding cows grain, they are nutrient deficient. These cows are going to get sicker. They’re going to need more antibiotics. They’re not going to be as healthy. And so I realized, wait a second, what’s the human version of that? It’s like a processed food. And all of a sudden, it makes sense to me why in in Japan, for example, they can eat large amounts, be exposed to chemicals over there and smoke, and not have an increased sense of certain cancers because they’re consuming nine milligrams of iodine a day in the Japanese diet. And it’s interesting because it comes in sea vegetables, and so it’s balanced. It’s not an overdose, and it actually helps their health. And so it’s kind of like having a being a medical doctor.

Bees are a great example. A queen bee can live three to five years and the worker bees will live like maybe 40 days. There’s no difference genetically between those two bees. The only difference is one is fed one’s fed royal jelly and the other one isn’t. So, literally, this is an extreme example of feeding the queen a certain food, makes her live 20-30 times longer than a standard bee, and all of a sudden it’s like, okay, how does this apply to humans? And just sitting back and thinking, reading articles, looking into some of the research with trace minerals and realizing in our country is a population about 20% of people who have hypermobility, who all MACKLEY need more of these trace. Minerals and seeing a connection between those people and chronic fatigue, fibro, chronic lime mold and realizing part of their issue is no one recognized.

They need more protein, more trace minerals, more collagen. And so realizing we have this big population in our country that’s an elephant, sorry, the canary in the birdcage, so to speak, and they’re everywhere. And so what got me there was my farm was taking care of animals, caring for them, applying to my family, and realizing it’s all connected.

Katie: How might a person know if they have that hypermobility type issue? Is that like a genetic test based thing or how is that diagnosed?

Aaron: It’s a clinical test. An extreme version of it is Elder Stanley. But usually you can do a thing called a bait and score and actually put a little quiz together for doing that. You look at your hands, hypermobility in your hand joints, elbow joints, knees. Can you lean over and touch your palms to the ground? And it’s based on your age and whatnot, but it’s amazing. In the pediatric literature, 20% of kids have this, and it’s kind of, sort of like a superpower, actually. There’s a lot of elite athletes that are hypermobile. You’re, Michael Phelps types. There’s certain athletic sports, like volleyball, for example, or swimming, that actually attract people that can jump a little higher or have a little longer wingspan, for example.

But at the same time, those people need higher, they basically are like, my son’s hypermobile. I tell him he’s a maserati, good looking car, he’s fast. At eleven he was already running faster than me, very throw a ball, fired me at eleven. But if you don’t put the right gas in the gas tank and do the right maintenance, they break down and they’re really, really expensive to fix. And so this hypermobile group is just like that. They need. If you can catch it early when they’re kids say, look, these kids avoid processed foods, get lots of bone broth, clean meats, lots of protein, and these kids can be super athletes. But if not, they’re also more prone to mold and lyme, and they tend to see more ADHD and asperger’s and a bunch of other neurological issues in this group of people.

Katie: That is fascinating. And as. You were saying that. I’m thinking of one of my daughters who I would guess would probably be diagnosed with that if we tested her, who is extremely athletic and it was like second in the country for pole vaulting last year and can touch the ground all the way with flat hands without even trying standing up. So that’s great to know. I’ll make sure we already prioritize protein and nutrient dense diet, but I’ll be extra careful with her. It’s good to know.

Aaron: It’s actually related to families and so once I see one person with that, I always look at the others. So you have six kids, you and a husband. You know, the question is, anybody else like that? And people tend to think hyper mobility is only flexibility, but it’s like, you know, can you bend your thumb to touch your wrist? Does your pinky go back 90 degrees? And I actually have a quiz that goes to this, but it’s 20% of the population, so it’s largely overlooked.

Katie: That’s so fascinating. You touched on things like bone broth, organ meats and iodine and green vegetables. If someone just wants to sort of hit the 80/20 and sort of maximize this at a high level, are there any other checklist items that you would say like focus on making sure you’re at least including these things in your diet or any other kind of just good principles for that?

Aaron: Well, the healthy fats are part of that as well. Making sure you’re getting lots of healthy fats, avoiding seed oils and this is where it’s tricky because omega-3s and six come from seeds and nuts, but you don’t want to get those processed expeller expressed oils, focusing on healthy saturated fats. We actually need healthy lean meats and that’s a big part of that.

Fermented foods are a superfood. We have all this data on probiotics and prebiotics being good for this, that and the other. But the reality is there’s a whole field of science showing that actually we need these pre, pro and post biotics. And so what’s the one place you get a prebiotic which is the thing that actually is like the fiber kind of stuff, the probiotic, which is the bacteria and the postbiotics are actually the things like butyrate the short chain fatty acids that are actually made well. Fermented food is actually where you can find all those. So adding fermented foods is another huge, huge thing.

And I really like mineral water, getting a clean mineral water or a trace mineral add in. It’s interesting, there’s a place in Decoria, Costa Rica that has one of the lowest cancer rates in the world and they have a very high mineral content of the water and it’s a blue zone, actually. And the interesting thing is that 50 km from Decoria, there’s this place called Tui to Dialba, which is the gastric cancer capital of the world, which is where they have these, I was actually spent a couple of weeks with my family there. Went to a place a little mission complex to learn about some Spanish and stuff and had no idea I was taking my family to the cancer capital of the world and learned it was all about the chemicals and the pesticides there. But literally 50 60 km away was this blue zone and one of the keys to the blue zone there was the fact that they have very mineral rich water which I thought was really fascinating.

Katie: So that seems like it’s worth even. What do you think of trace mineral supplements or drops of adding to water? For people who know that their water supply is not going to be great for that?

Aaron: I recommend that to a lot of patients particularly patients with POTS of Dynamia, chronic fatigue, people with like a lot of blood pressure, brain fail kind of stuff. Those people tend to be deficient. People focus on magnesium and potassium and they don’t realize you need the other 96 minerals for those two minerals to actually do their job appropriately. So I definitely recommend it’s just getting a really clean source for those trace minerals to make sure that people are getting what they need and not other chemicals and heavy metals and all that kind of fun stuff.

Katie: Got it. Okay. And I’d love to circle back because you mentioned peptides earlier and I feel like at least in the US this is kind of like the new kid on the block that people are starting to talk about but don’t really fully understand. It seems like there’s maybe some dangerous level experimentation going on with people who don’t know what they’re doing but also that these maybe do have a really profound ability to help with certain things if we understand them. It sounds like you use these with your patients and also you’ve used them with your children. So I would love kind of a brief primer on peptides.

Aaron: So peptides are short protein, very miniature protein molecules is the way to think about them that your body naturally makes. And they’re signing molecules. So they’re not like hormones. They’re like the molecules that tell hormones what to do. So for example testosterone is a hormone but you have growth hormone which is a peptide actually or a Cjcf and Merlin or peptides that can tell your body’s testosterone what to do. And so your body makes these things naturally and people don’t realize the very first peptide was insulin. How long we’ve been using insulin? 70 years. And so the science is actually very very old. It’s just now that these can be reproduced at like this crazy fast rate. We have over 100 peptides now you can purchase.

The issue with peptides is people are using them indiscriminately. So there’s certain things like human growth hormone I’m sorry Hcg which human granite granitropin which was used for years and years as a growth factor that can actually increase your risk for cancer. And so that’s one thing that’s not saturated but other peptides like Cjcf and marillion are they won’t actually overdose your body. So that’s one of the things people that are hopping in this world don’t realize that these signaling molecules actually some of them actually you can’t overdose on them. Some of them you totally can. Some of them like the one I just mentioned if you give it to a female in menopause 50ish, 51 ish type A high stress you can actually jack her cortisol up and give her a lot of weird symptoms. And so it’s a very unique world that has a lot of benefits.

I’ve used it for patients with great results but it’s being used indiscriminately because it’s not regulated. You can buy them online. Anybody can buy these into. Problem is that a lot of them are coming from these third parties that aren’t clean. You’re not getting what’s in the product. And so I only use certain pharmacies that actually I can guarantee what’s in them but they’re a great tool particularly in patients when you hit walls sometimes you hit a wall to patient with their chronic fatigue or the fiber or the mold for example or their autoimmune issue or their gut and you’re like I need something. I don’t want to use a steroid. I don’t want to use a crazy drug. Can I use something else that actually might get me over the hump that your body naturally makes that’ll just help push your body’s physiology downstream and that’s kind of where peptides come into play.

Katie: So it sounds like a good rule of thumb is to work with someone who knows what they’re doing with peptides if you’re interested in that. And make sure you’re sourcing them from a high-quality source before you start experimenting.

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You’ve also mentioned the connective tissue aspect a couple of times and I’d love to know if there’s anything else related to this for people to know, because it seems like just anecdotally we’re seeing a huge increase in things like knee and hip replacements in people who are pretty young still and it seems like these are on the rise. If that is actually the case what do you think is the reason for that? And what are some things we can all do to protect our connective tissue?

Aaron: Well ultimately connective tissues connect everything. They hold your organs in place. They are part of your body’s electrical system. They actually innovate. They’re innovated by your nervous system and so they give a lot of feedback to your brain which is super duper important. But what we haven’t realized is the connective tissues have been ignored in medicine ever since they’re discovered the stuff you have to go through to get to the heart. When you’re doing an autopsy here or you’re doing your cadaver work they actually sort of function and we’re finding out is for example kids with spectrum disorders, which is your ADHD, autism, OCD, Pans, Pandas, dyslexic kind of kids. If you’re hypermobile you have a 400% increased risk of having one of those things. 400%. Well, why is that? Because of the hypermobility.

One of the things with those individuals, they have a quicker starter response, a little quicker fight or flight which actually in certain situations can be a good thing. You can be like the quirky scientist but if they grow up in a low fat environment, processed food, multi house, a traumatic environment, high stress they put in front of a computer screen at age one, their brain can’t handle it. It’s the maserati, it’s going to crash.

And so I think one of the reasons we’re seeing like for example with females particularly these really bad arthritis in their 50’s, they have mild hypermobility and you can just wear a little more and organ meats. Again, we’re a part of our diet. 70 years ago, we’ve removed these things and replaced them. Now. I mean, for a while veganism was all the rage. If you’re hypermobile, being a vegan, I mean, I know people love it and it’s great, but it’s actually probably the worst diet out there for someone’s hypermobile because they need lots of these trace minerals and lots of protein. You can’t get that from a vegan diet. So that’s where I think there’s a whole lot of things at play.

But the connective tissue thing is really big and it’s overlooked and it relates to neurological issues, gut issues, autoimmune issues, even the people with chronic climate mold. Having this makes it harder to detoxify and makes you have more that trauma brain response. So it just plays into a whole lot of different things.

Katie: Yeah, and it seems like this is great to know like in the case of our kids at an early age, like you mentioned, so we can give them the foundational understanding to nourish themselves for their whole life. And I’ll mention a couple of recommendations I’ve made on here before that are typically not popular ones, but that make a big difference for me and how I feel, which are that a few times a week I’ll eat, a little bit of raw liver that I’ve cut into tiny pieces and I just sort of swallow it because I don’t love the taste. But that’s an easy way to get liver in pretty easily. I’m also a big fan of things like sardines for lunch because you get protein, you get a lot of micronutrients. They’re small fish, so they’re typically lower in things like mercury. I know people don’t prefer those foods because like you mentioned, we’ve moved away from them in the modern diet. But they’re inexpensive and like you said, they’re kind of like nature’s multivitamins in a sense.

Aaron: Your smash fish, your sardines, mackerel anchovies, your herring, these are all these small fish that, if you’re Irish pickled herring, it was poor people’s food. It was a thing people ate commonly, and now it’s like you have to go to foofoo french restaurants to get liver and, and organ meat stuff, and but these do have a lot of nutrient value. I have one of my patients, actually, young female, she’s 29, came to see me with chronic fatigue, fibropots kind of stuff, and she’s gotten off all of her stuff. Her gut is doing great, and she eats liver every day, and she actually craves it. She actually craves it when she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t feel quite right, and she’s someone who’s also hypermobile all the way and serves her mom. And it’s interesting how people sometimes will gravitate to what their body is lacking. The body knows what it needs, and sometimes it just has these cravings for these things.

Katie: Yeah, that is so fascinating. I know typically I think I’m pretty aligned with my body in that. But when I’ve done, like, five day water fast, mostly for, like, spiritual or mental reasons, I noticed that by the end of it, those are the foods I crave. Like, I will really strongly crave, like anchovies, for instance, or things that I wouldn’t normally think to eat. And it’s like my body is telling me, like, that’s the specific nutrients we need when you start feeding us again, that’s so fascinating. I’ve also heard you or read that you say in your work that everything is all connected. And you also mentioned that if you were going to give a Ted Talk, this would be something that you would work into that. So I would love to hear kind of the big picture of that and then also how that influences how you work with your patients.

Aaron: I tend to be a little nerdy sometimes. And the analogy I give is just if you’ve ever seen a compass, the needle shakes at about 8hz, which is about the same frequency as your brain activity. Well, that’s caused by the earth’s electromagnetic fields that are result from magma moving under the earth. So, okay, the earth magma makes the compass shake. Well, you all these electromagnetic fields also important for brain function for every mammal on the planet. The reason why astronauts lose muscle mass and bone mass is not gravity. It’s actually they get extrapolated removed from the earth’s electromagnetic fields. So all of a sudden now, something as basic as magma going into the earth is related to your mental function, your bone function, your whole body system is working.

And it’s really interesting that’s the macro, that’s such a big, big thing, and these electromagnetic fields actually protect the earth from having its atmosphere tore off by the solar winds. That’s how interconnected everything is like, literally liquid iron. You need it for life. And so that’s how interconnected things are. And it’s infinitely interconnected. And in my world, I get the big and the small. There’s things in plants called mRNA MICRORNA. You may have heard of these before, right? mRNA. Well, actually living plants have mRNA, and they actually signal your bias proteins to do certain things. So literally eating living plants signals your bias proteins, your DNA, to do certain things. So that’s how smallly interconnected you are to plants and to the Earth around you and how big things are. And the more and more I learn, I learned that everything is infinitely connected.

The analogy I use is like a 3D spider web, and it’s all these things going all over the place. And one of the things I love doing when I see patients is to see like their 3D image and start to figure out how can I connect these things in this person’s health? But that’s how crazy interconnected things are. I like to say it’s infinitely connected because it seems like the more I learned, the more I realize things are pretty connected.

Katie: That’s fascinating. It makes me think of I read a book a while back called The Body Electric that sort of talked in. You mentioned the body of electrical systems. I feel like this one gets largely ignored or only talked about maybe if people are concerned about like EMFS, for instance. But it seems like this is something that has extremely far-reaching effects into a lot of areas of health. Are there any other things we can do sort of to optimize the body’s electrical system in that sense?

Aaron: Optimized? That’s a great question. You really need a lot these trace minerals, because what happens is the energy differential between your membranes is determined by calcium and other minerals. And so one of the issues with that is if you don’t have enough potassium and magnesium and calcium, these trace minerals, your body has a harder time maintaining that electrical potential which is used in a neurological system.

The other thing is, like being outside in the sun, touching the ground, the Earth actually resonates energy. That’s what Lightning is. Lightning is the energy going from there. It looks like it’s coming from the sky now. It’s actually going from the Earth up. That’s how Lightning works. And the Earth actually has this energy that when you go out and you walk on the grass, you’re outside the sun. That we’ve actually discovered that now that there’s actually photoreceptors in your skin, that activate your nervous system. When you actually get infrared energy from the sun, that’s the reason why you got in the sun in the spring and you feel better. And so if you want to improve your body’s energy, being in the sun is super important. Being out in nature is super important. Actually having your feet touch the ground, which I know is kind of weird, and you don’t want to step on nails and stuff, especially if you’re on farm, but those are natural. And then obviously the minerals, those are ways you can actually improve your body’s energy.

But then there’s this whole idea of meditation and prayer, which is largely overlooked. Like we have this psycho, this mind body connection that you can actually get a PhD now up at John Hopkins in this field of medicine where how does your mind connect with the rest of your body? And so having a good state, what’s your personal regulatory practice? Do you meditate, pray? Do you do breathing exercises? Do you do yoga? What’s your thing you do that helps ground you? And all of a sudden that’s not kind of how you kind of maintain your body’s energy, so to speak. It sounds kind of weird and wonky, but when you have one of the top neurologists in the country, Dale Brenson, who uses this with his Alzheimer’s patients and published in this, you realize this is real, like, cutting edge medicine. It’s not woo woo stuff.

Katie: Yeah. I’m so glad you brought up all those aspects. And I think there’s so much more to learn on that topic and all these topics. Honestly, I feel like we could maybe do a Round two one day entirely just about that or entirely just about peptides, for instance, and we’d have hours worth of things to talk about. But you mentioned your practice and how you take what seems like an extremely unique approach that’s really effective for a lot of people. People may be wondering, are you accepting new patients? Can people work with you? And how can they find you online if they want to keep learning from you?

Aaron: I am accepting patients, so people can just look for me. Aaron Hartman MD. I’ve written my practices. Richmondfunctionalmedicine.com I do a lot of education. We’ve had over like 200 blogs on our website. So people want to learn about mold or lyme or cardiovascular disease or whatnot. I have social media and YouTube as well. My website is the hub for all that. So if people want to start learning about what I do, I just have them go to my website- Richmondfunctionmesson.com.

But I think we really believe in education. We believe education empowers people to take charge of their health. And people don’t know they can’t really act. And so one of my beliefs as well is that our bodieswere kind of made to self heal, self repair, and people can learn what their body is lacking, what’s the implement. Then I really think 70, 80% people can get better on their own without lots of fancy tests and lots of fancy doctors. So I try to make my website and the things associated with it like an educational hub where people can go that’s reliable, it’s dependable. I’m a triple board certified medical doctor. I’ve got a lot of bells and whistles behind my name. And this is like quality information where people can learn more. So that’s kind of what I put together to help people empower people to take charge of their health.

Katie: I love that. I had another guest recently who made that point as well. She said, people feel like their body is ganging up on them or their body’s out to get them. She’s like, no, if your body wanted to kill you, it could do it in less than a second. Your body is always on your side and it wants to heal. It’s about how do we support the body and doing what it already wants to do, and kind of like partnering with it, becoming its friend. I’d also be curious to know, on a personal level, sort of what your own 80/20 first principles that you do that are your non negotiables when it comes to health? Whether it’s daily habits or regular routines, things that you take or do that you feel like are most impactful for you personally?

Aaron: One of the things I really need is my personal time in the morning. I get up in the morning, I read my Bible, I meditate for a bit, going to the gym, exercising routinely, sleep is huge. And eating real food and then spending time with the family. Those are the things that actually, if I do all that stuff, I feel pretty good. Life is good. No matter how crazy the work is or how crazy life is, I feel good. Those are my personal non negotiables. And they sound so simple. Oh, that’s so basic. But it’s like you try doing that every day for the last 20 years and see how easy it is. It’s actually quite, quite hard.

Katie: Yeah, I mean, I think those are two, like, profound things that stand out to me and in our conversation is how that idea of the more you learn, also the realize, the less you know, and that staying in curiosity actually makes you more able to keep learning and to keep iterating and improving. And then also what you just talked about, that the simple foundational things are often the most profound, especially when we do them consistently. A couple of other questions I love to ask at the end of interviews. The first being if there is a book or number of books that have really profoundly impacted your life, and if so, what they are and why.

Aaron: I read a lot and I’m reading all the time, so this book changes from time to time. The most recent book actually read that was profound was The Gulag Archipelago by Andre Soljitzen. And it was just a book about the camps in Russia from after World War I to the just to see not just what people can do themselves, but what people can do to their own people. And just to kind of get that, I can’t, I can’t understand what’s going on in certain parts of the world. I can constantly read about and understand it, but I just can’t. As a Western, I can’t fathom, like, why people do these things. It was just eyeopening that stuff still going on today. That’s probably one of the more ones.

Another one, Viktor Frankl actually, I think the most recent one I read was his Man Search and Meeting was really interesting just how in a camp in World War II actually started reading a bunch of these a couple of years, like two years ago, and things kind of went a little bonkers. Even the worst of situation in the world, if you have meaning, you can literally survive the most horrible conditions just if you have a purpose. And so it’s really interesting. And that kind of plays into the whole Gala Gar, capella go, because the people who survived these most horrible conditions, they had purpose. They didn’t have anything else but a purpose. And that is so impactful and profound because I feel like in America today, if we can’t find purpose in the richest country in the history of the world, it’s like we need to reevaluate our priorities.

Katie: Well, I’m excited to check those both out, definitely second Man’s Search for Meaning, that’s one of my most profoundly impactful books as well, and one that I try to reread every year because it really does help you refocus on being able to choose your own response in every situation, including for him, much more tough situations than I’ve ever encountered. Awesome. I love it. I know that you also are a very busy doctor with a time constraint. So lastly, any parting advice for the listeners today that could be related to something we’ve talked about or entirely unrelated life advice?

Aaron: Parting advice is just never, ever give up. Listen to your body. Trust your intuition. Don’t ever give up. That’s the one thing people ask me, like, what’s different about you and other doctors and your practice and what you do? And the thing is, like, just never gave up. My daughter. I’ve never given up on the rest of my kids. I don’t give up on patients. I have patients I’ve been working with for years that are every time they hit a roadblock, I learned something new. And it almost seems like I learned something new a couple of months before I need it in the clinic, which is kind of scary because it’s like, I can’t stop learning. But it also feeds me. It’s like, yes, I’m not ever going to give up. And so wherever people are at, I just would encourage them no matter how bad it seems like, don’t give up because the answers are there or you can find what you’re looking for. It’s just you can’t quit. The difference between amazing success and rapid failure is quitting. That’s the only difference.

Katie: I love it. Well, I think that’s a perfect place to wrap up. And I feel like we got to touch on so many amazing topics. And I’m very grateful for your time in being here today and for all that you’ve shared. So thank you so much.

Aaron: Okay, thanks a lot for inviting me on. I really enjoyed this time.

Katie: And thanks, as always to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time and your energy and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.