Rethinking chronic disease starts with questioning what we’ve been told is “UnCurable.” In this conversation, Dr. Aaron Hartman, founder of Richmond Integrative and Functional Medicine, shares how his daughter’s diagnosis forced him to confront the limitations of modern care—and ultimately reshape his entire approach to medicine. This discussion explores the gap between acute care and chronic illness, the environmental and metabolic drivers often overlooked, and why standard protocols frequently miss the root cause. Dr. Hartman explains how foundational factors like food, air, water, and environment play a far greater role than most realize, and why there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Grounded in both clinical experience and personal stakes, this conversation challenges assumptions, highlights blind spots in the system, and offers a more nuanced, hopeful way to think about long-term health.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Rethinking Chronic Disease: What If “UnCurable” Is Just A Blind Spot? With Functional Medicine Expert, Dr. Aaron Hartman
Welcome back to the show. Our conversation is one I’ve genuinely been looking forward to. We’re joined by Dr. Aaron Hartman, a conventionally trained medical doctor who spent years challenging some of the biggest assumptions in modern healthcare. Dr. Hartman is the Founder of Richmond Integrative and Functional Medicine, and he’s the Author of the powerful book Uncurable. In it, he explores what happens when we label patients as incurable and how often that label reflects limitations in our medical model rather than the limitations in the human body.
His journey is also deeply personal. As a father of an adopted daughter Anna, who has cerebral palsy and was told what her limits would be. Dr. Hartman began asking bigger questions, “Are we missing something? Are their blind spots in how we approach chronic illness? What if some of what we’ve accepted as permanent is modifiable?”
We’ll talk about the hidden environmental drivers of chronic disease, why there are no cookie cutter protocols and what moves the needle when it comes to extending our health span. This is a thoughtful grounded science informed conversation. You’ll walk away feeling hopeful, empowered and maybe even a little reoriented in how you think about chronic disease. Let’s welcome Dr. Aaron Hartman to the show.
Dr. Hartman, thank you so much for joining us here on the show. I’m so excited to talk with you. Ever since I learned about the amazing work you’re doing, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. I’m excited to learn from you myself and from your vast expertise, experience. We have a lot of common interests as well. This conversation will resonate with myself but also with our audience. It’s great to have you on the show.
I’m looking forward to our conversation.
I always think it’s interesting where people’s passions come from. When we talked before, you told me a little bit of the backstory and how you ended up doing some of the things that you’re doing. Would you mind sharing a little bit about the catalyst with your adoptive daughter and some of the ways that you ended up where you are and writing the book that you wrote?
The Catalyst: Challenging The Experts For A Daughter’s Life
It was very typical when I started my career. I was in the military. I got my certification in family medicine in medical school. You’ve got all the awards, bells and whistles. I became assistant clinical professor at the local College of Virginia. I was going down like the typical academic path. Not unusual. Nothing extraordinary outside of the realm of the typical of what you expect like a hardworking, high achieving physician type individual.
I like to talk about other two inflection points in my career. They both had to do with my daughter. My daughter was one of my wife’s patients. My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. Anna was her patient from the time she got out of the hospital until we brought her home into our house as a foster child when she was about 12 to 14 months old. Her birth mother did crystal meth the entire pregnancy and has stroke before she was born.
She was born functionally blind. Her prognosis was pretty poor. The healthcare system said she’ll never walk, she’ll never talk, and she’ll never crawl. She’ll be a vegetable. My wife saw a spark. My wife saw something and told me there’s something in there. She’s going to be fine. When her foster home closed, when she was about twelve months old, we brought her in as a foster child and did the best thing. We’re hardworking individuals.
You work hard. You put your head down and go forward and trying to feed her. She had her follow up appointment with the GI doctor and she was still failure to thrive. She wasn’t growing. She was still less than 50%. The GI doctor said, “Next step of standard of care is you put a feeding tube. We cut a hole in your stomach, put a plastic tube in so you can pour formula in. It’s sugar water to put some meat on her bones.” Now all they were concerned about. Chewing and swallowing is part of learning how to talk.
Part of learning how to walk because you have to crawl first. These are all hard to do when you’re eating out of a tube that comes off your belly. It’s hard to crawl with that. We said we’re not going to do it. The GI doctor reported us to Child Protective Services for medical neglect because we refuse to do the doctors instructions. I was still young and naïve. I found it funny because I’m being reported to CPS for giving my daughter real food. That’s stupid. I blew it off.
My wife worked the whole process. That wasn’t as like, in your face to me. What happened months later changed my life. That’s when my wife found a growth chart for kids with Anne’s diagnosis of cerebral palsy. Anna was 50% tile. She was in the middle. She was 100% normal on that growth chart and the expert did not know. The expert did not know that there was a growth chart for my daughter. They didn’t know about it and they’re ready to do a procedure on her that would change her entire life.
That was when I realized I have to figure this out. The experts don’t know. I have to be my daughter’s expert. That’s what led me to getting up at 4:00 in the morning, reading research articles on gene-based therapies, epigenetics, using nutrigenomix, which is using food to change your gene expression because I have to feed my daughter because the experts didn’t know.
The typical kid her age with her diagnosis has had thirteen surgical procedures at the stage in life. She’s had zero. Every recommendation, the specialists of recommend her do for us, we’ve not done. We’ve basically been like, “Let’s see the eye specialists. Let’s see the orthopedic. Let’s see the neurologist.” They’re recommended, “Cut this. Cut that. Put it back up and pump in. Cut her spine here.” Knowing what the standard of care was recommending, Alice was forced to look for another option.
Strangely enough, those options worked good. It changed her trajectory but also, as I was learning this, I started someone like use, Zach will comment and be like, “I’ve got chronic fatigue fibro. I’ve for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” I’m like, “I’ve learned some new things. Do you want to try these things?” A patient’ trusted me, so I started dabbling with this with patients and seeing cool outcomes. Eventually, I changed my entire practice to this medicine.
You’re saying that the experts didn’t know? What do you think is the reason why an expert would want to go straight to a procedure like, “You got to have a feeding tube?” You’re critiquing from the inside and I’m cautious to critique. The medical industry and the medical field is amazing. It’s done so many wonderful things but we do need to take some accountability for our own health and our own research. Can you break down that distinction for us a little bit there?
Our healthcare system is good at acute care. If you have a heart attack or a stroke, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world. If you’re diagnosed with metastatic stage 4 or lymphoma, you might get a cure here in the United States with some cool biologics we’ve got. In a world of these of great advances and surgical procedures, we can now do a colectomy for colon cancer. We can cut out mesocolon with a couple of little bud holes in your belly.
That used to be a massive cut and months of rehab. Now, it’s like a couple days in the hospital and you’re out. We do some cool things in our country, but we translate that to chronic care. Not acute care. We say, “Since we’re all these things, we’re not all about managing chronic things.” They’re two different realms of expertise and we tend to conflict the two. For example, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. Until ten years ago, it was largely considered a psychiatric issue of women. “I’m sorry. You’re tired. You’re depressed and you ache. It’s a psychiatric issue. Here’s your Prozac. Have a good day.”
Now we know that’s a brain on inflammatory condition of microglia. Knowing what it is, we can treat it in my world. We treat it. It can be from Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr reactivation or mold exposure. It’s a whole host of things related and you find the cause and you can treat it. Still now, chronic fatigue and fibro is treated as a largely psychiatric issue with psychiatric medications or pain medications. It’s one of those things like realizing the limitations of our system.
Our system is slow to make adaptations and change. It takes 30 to 40 years for new research to become standard of care. Barry Marshall, the guy who discovered the bacteria called Helicobacter pylori. From his discovery to acceptance, it was like 15 to 20 years. Think about this, when you get stomach ulcers, you get surgery. They cut your vagal nerve. It would be a massive surgery, which doesn’t happen anymore because we give this people some antibiotics to treat. Eighty percent of ulcers are related H. pylori. We use a proton pump in better medication.
Our healthcare system is slow to adapt, often taking 30 to 40 years for new research to become standard of care.
We’ve almost eliminated 100% of that surgical procedure. That was almost a 15-or 20-year process when Dr. Marshall and his colleague were ridiculed. They’re called quacks. They end up winning Nobel Prize, by the way. That’s how our system works. It’s taking me 25 years to figure this out. I didn’t learn this in Medical School. You hear a cool story in medical school about agnostic advice basically going to jail for hand washing. You learn about the first cancer cure in the ‘50s and how that I lost his career.
Acute Vs. Chronic Care: Understanding The System’s Limitations
You hear these little data points, but you don’t realize this happens all the time with all kinds of different things. It’s taking a while for me to cut my teeth on it and learned and accept that. Also, learn how to work around the system. We can fillet what we’re good at with everything else and it’s not the case. We’re not good at everything. Our healthcare system is amazing at acute care. You look at the numbers for the most expensive country in the west with the worst outcomes. We’re bad with chronic health stuff and no one denies that. Let’s figure something out and move forward. That’s what I’ve done with my practice.
You’ve achieved it with your own daughter. That’s wonderful. Thank you for being a foster parent and adoptive parents and taking on a child that had those difficulties and all the work you did. It’s amazing that you’ve been able to avoid so much for her and give her such an amazing quality of life through your own diligence, research and hard work. Can you walk us through some of the things that you did to get her to the point that she’s had and have twenty years of life with no procedures done? What are some of the things besides nutrigenomix? I’d love to dive into that, too but can you walk us through those things?
Zach, are you married?
Yes.
The Science Of Nutrigenomics: Bypassing Genetic “Typos”
My wife has been a very big part. She’s like been a little person nudging me behind the back. She was the first show said, “You should eat real food.” I’m like, “It doesn’t matter.” You should stop putting roundup on our yard and putting pre-emergent down. She was a big part of that but she was under the radar saying, “Let’s change our diet. Let’s eat real food.” I was like, “Okay, Honey. You do that thing.” While she was doing that, I hopped on and started researching gene-based nutritional therapies.
The idea was you do a gene test and look for these typos called SNPs or Single nucleotide polymorphisms. These typos make it so that you recycle stuff or process that worse. Once we know about the most is an MTHFR Gene which affects how you recycle on folic acid or methyl folic acid. If you’ve got two mutations here, you recycle it about 20% as efficient as someone who doesn’t have it. If you have one, you recycle it about 60% efficient. Which means you’re at a risk for folic acid related deficiencies, even if you eat adequate amount of folic acid.
The neural tube defects or neurological issues or neurotransmitter issues. There’s a prescription of folic acid called Methylene that is used to treat treatment-resistant depression. There’s a prescription drug called Leucovorin that can help. Some kids with autism have these receptor issues and you can bypass it with this drug. The idea of this is common knowledge in the science’s world for these drugs. I did this testing and applied it to every single nutrient, every B vitamin and vitamin D. Everything. I put together a supplement plan based on her jeans.
That was the first thing I did. That took me probably six months to research and learn about that. I learned about it from Dr. Amy Yasko, who’s the premier person who started that whole field. While studying that, I learned about gut health. Dr. Brian Wolfe is a pediatrician. He works with kids with autism. I hopped in his world and learned about organic acid testing. We’re doing advanced stool testing, and 75% of all neurotransmitters are made in your gut.
If you have a kid with autism or learning issue or OCD or whatever, it makes sense to do advanced gut tests. As I was doing this, my wife was changing our food. She was like, “Maybe we should have a homestead. Maybe we should make your own bread.” We had two tracks going on and ultimately, they both came together when I started having some more of my a-ha moments. I started combining those two.
The foundational stuff from my daughter’s story was real food, nutrient-dense, chemicals and toxins. As I started learning about new fancy stuff, we’ve done stem cells with her. We’ve done exosomes and peptides. Hyperbaric medicine was amazing for her. She started to write at the fourteen after her first treatment of Hyperbaric. We’re doing IV fossil lipid therapy with her and it’s had a big impact on our vision.
In 2025, her vision has gotten so good that she can now read on her iPhone and type on it without magnifying stuff. It’s been a journey. We’ve done a lot of cool things. What I like to tell people is, Zach, is I’ve done a lot of cool things. We can talk about your muscular stimulation, which took a tone away and prevented a half a million dollars spine surgery. That was all built on top of real food.
Let’s used food like a drug, a clean environment, reviewing chemicals and toxins clean air, clean water, and having support like having meaning and value in her life. She’s all had people around her that loved her. She has the most infectious laugh and the best outlook on life. She’s my hardest worker. All that support was the foundation on which all the magical things added on has works so well.
I love to dive into some of those foundational things that all of us can do that aren’t super expensive that we can do and have some micro things. I want to go back to something you said a little bit early before we leave that too much. For something that become a standard of practice or standard of care now, it’s usually discovered 30 years before or 15 years before or 50 years before.
Things that are becoming standard of care now in the medical world are not new. How do we circumvent that or how do we get around that? How did you go about? Are you doing things that aren’t necessarily FDA approved or trying things out? How can we use breakthroughs that are happening now instead of waiting seventeen years to utilize the next technology?
There’s been a saying in science for centuries or decades if not centuries that science advance is one funeral at a time. When I was in seminary, one of the books I read was The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science. It was a book about world views like how do we look at the world. For a long time, we thought the world’s flat and we interpreted everything based on the flat Earth. When ships go over the horizon, they’re being eaten by sea monsters. That wasn’t the case. Once we realized the Earth was round, nautical miles. That’s the reason we have to curve like this around the planet.
Now I understand sunrise and sunsets because the Earth’s atmosphere is like a prism. Once we change our paradigm, all these other phenomenal that we didn’t quite sure what they meant, we now understand. In science, it’s the exact same way. Science is not scientific. It goes one paradigm to the next, relativity. We understand Newtonian Physics. How do we explain things? We don’t explain movements of Earth. With Einstein’s relativity, we now understand how things work a little better like quantum physics.
A great example is light. light is weird. It moves like a wave but it’s massless but yet gravitational forces act on it. Once we understood the nuances of wave motion, we can understand how light work. Science always works one paradigm to the next, to the next and medicine is exact same way. In realizing that, what do you learn in medical school? You’re learning the current paradigm and the current way of thinking. Do you stop there, though? That’s the thing.
The practice has taking me four years of college, four years of medical school, three years of my first board certification, two years of another one and two years of another one. Plus, twenty some years of practice to get to the point where I am at because I’m learning new paradigms. When you learn new paradigm like with lipid medicine, you find out this paradigm is 50 years old. This is not a new paradigm. At the conference on December 2025 in Las Vegas, I learned about Neural therapy, which is using injections of procaine to reset your nervous system.
The term was coined in 1925. I’ve never heard of it before. I’m learning it for the first time of this new therapy that we do in my practice but it’s been around for 100 years. The reality is, there’s so much stuff like that. Once you get out and start practicing and getting this medicine, you start looking for these new cool things. Every year, you find some new thing or never heard it before. Take this deep dive to come up with a new toolkit to apply my patients.
That’s how patients look for that. You have to find someone like me who’s literally your life is a life of research. Usually, you’re driven by some reason. For me, it’s my daughter and my family because you don’t go on this speed. People don’t go around this pathway if they don’t have a good reason. It’s like the 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of people figure out 8% of the novel things and the 20% and the 20%. The top one percentile, the people that are thinking like crazy stuff. You don’t do that typically unless you have a health crisis, a loved one has a health club crisis.
That’s where you want to find someone who’s had that life event, how they built it around these rabbit holes and figure out all those cool stuff. For me, it started with my daughter and my family. Now, my entire practice is doing this stuff. It’s not the way our system is set up. Most Physicians are not going to practice this way, but most physicians don’t need to. You just need enough to do it, to talk and do things like we’re doing here to educate people so people can take charge of their health.
Foundational Building Blocks: Clean Air, Water, And Environment
Thank you so much for sharing that. That’s amazing. This new novel therapy that’s 100 years old. I’d love to dive into those foundational things. As I said, every one of us could do now like clean air, clean water, whole Foods, and nutrigenomix. When someone comes to you or just for our general readers out there, what would you tell them to do to get started? There’s a gene test as you mentioned. How do we start to put these foundational building blocks in place? Do you have a framework or anything like that you can walk us through?
I usually do with people. First, you need clean water, clean food, clean air and clean environment. Let starts super basic. Jumping to gene testing and not doing the basics, you’re going to waste your money. I don’t do that much gene testing anymore. I do more metabolic testing because ultimately, you can have a bad gene and never gets turned on. You can have a good gene that never gets turned on and the metabolic testing looks different. There’s two people.
I don’t do as much gene testing as I used to do, but the basics like clean water. Have you tried water testing before? You can take the water check database from the environment to working group. We have those links on our website that can take people there. Put in your ZIP code and see what’s in your water. You will be surprised what’s in your water. Everybody needs a water filter. No one should be drinking water out of the tap. Maybe there’s some place in America that has clean water but haven’t founded it yet. Figure out clean water.
With clean food, it’s eating real food. All of a sudden, what does real food means? It’s non-pasteurized, non-chemicalized, and non-adulterated food. It sounds basic and simple, but when you realize, 80% of what Americans eat is processed and 60% is ultra-processed. Evil food, all of a sudden, is hard. We have a food sourcing God on our website that literally helps people walk through the principles of finding real food. The fats in our food system are almost all rancid process. Margin, for example, is partially plasticized oral.
Clean food is eating real food.
You take your liquid. Oral is liquid and we turn it into plastic. We turn a computer, these mics, these lights and stuff, it used to be liquid. That’s what margin is. It’s partially plasticized oral. Crisco is crystallized cotton seed oil. We took cotton seed oil and crystallized it and ate that. How is this a good idea? It took me a few years to figure out how to source my food. We provide that to people in our website. You can download it and get access to it. It can speed your process down.
With clean environment, do you have mold in your house? Do you live close to golf course? Are spraying your house for bugs? Do you have an infestation? Do you put pre-emergent on your yard in the spring and the fall? Do you put fertilizer down? Are you exposing yourself to lots of chemicals? All of a sudden, your environment can have a big impact on your health. There’s an interesting article. I think it was WaPo, one of the big news places put it up last fall. If you live within two miles of a golf course, you have an increased risk for getting Parkinson’s.
Eighty percent of heart disease and 70% of most cancers can be prevented through diet and lifestyle alone.
Hopefully, Zach, you don’t live near golf course. It sounds like crazy, basic and simple, but these chemicals are everywhere. With clean air, something simply for air. Have a HEPA filter in your room and in your house. HEPA filters will remove about 99.95% of the thing called PM 2.5, which are air particles. Most chemicals and toxins are attached in air particles. Removing those air particles removes almost all the toxins in the air.
You can get HEPA filter and put in your bedroom. Put one on your main living space. If you have like a three-bedroom house, it would be three for your bedrooms and probably one or two for your main space. It’s super simple to do, but it’ll have a massive impact on air quality in your home. Clean water, clean food, clean air, and clean environment. The other thing is just toxic relationships. That’s the stress of news and politics. The stress of people who are just negative.
That puts a stressor on your nervous system that affects your quality of sleep. That’s neurotransmitter of production. That affects how you digest your food. Looking at your food, breathing it, sitting and relaxing, you will produce 25% of your digestive enzymes before you can eat a thing. I look at social media and the world’s coming in. I looked at my stock market, everything’s going down. I find that people don’t like me because I think different in them.
Are you going to digest your food? Probably not. Get yourself away from that stuff, which is hard these days. These are basic things. It’s not complicated. They’ll have more impact on your health and all the cool bells and whistles. I’m in it with this. Eighty percent of heart disease and 70% of most cancers can be prevented by diet and lifestyle alone. All of a sudden, the basic stuff is the most important stuff.
The foundational things are the big biggest impact.
In our website, we have a whole blog series on detox and a whole healthy home building. I realize even when I see people for two hours on intake and an hour for follow-up. You don’t have all the time to talk about all the stuff during your people’s visit. I try put the education materials out there for people to learn on their own because that’s what’s going to change people’s lives and their health trajectories if they learn about it, digests and then incorporate it in their lives.
Natural Detoxification: Supporting The Body’s Systems
Thank you so much for putting that information together and sharing it with us. I live in Naples Florida. We have a golf course here at Shell Point where I work. We’re surrounded by golf in Southwest Florida. I know there’s neurotoxins in the chemicals that are used and the treatments that are used or just even in our water, our air and our food. Do we need to go through the detox or just putting those things in place that you already mentioned? Will our bodies naturally detox on their own or do we need to do some detox as well?
Your bodies were made to detox stuff naturally. There are heavy metals and chemicals in the environment naturally. Fire has been around for a long time. It releases a lot of stuff in the air. In Rome, they lead for the aqueducts. They stored wine in lead, which give it nice sweet flavor. We’ve been around the stuff forever. It’s just super concentrate. There’s over 80,000 chemicals that are listed that are being produced in America. How do your account for all that? That’s where all the foundational stuff but then ramping it up.
Your body is designed to detox naturally.
Do you sweat? Saunas are great for moving certain chemicals, particularly solvent based chemicals. As far as bowel movements, are you pooping every day? If not, doing like bowel flushes or cleanses your colonics. There’s clink in Texas that dealt with a lot of miners, welders, and first responders that had a lot of weird symptoms. Part of their detox was two weeks of IV, nutritional, and vitamin C and stuff. Colonics which is basically using clean water to flush out your colon and sauna to sweat.
There are ways you can ramp up your body’s detoxification capabilities. There are herbs. I love vitamin C. If you’re around pesticides. I love vitamin C and vitamin E as well as NAC and milk thistle because vitamin C and E help reduce the load of toxins and their effect on your DNA. It’s called inflammatory index. It reduces that on your cell walls and membranes. NAC or N-Acetylcysteine helps ramp up your liver’s ability to detox things. Silymarin is the antidote.
If you’re in California and you eat this white mushroom called death cap mushroom. The antidote is silymarin which is an extra milk thistle. We can get that as a supplement. It can help your body detox. There are basic things you can do to help diminish the effect of the exposure if you’re around a golf course. When you’re exposed up your body, get it out easier. If you’re in that environment, there are extras you should add on.
Metabolic Testing: Identifying The “Construction Dust” Of The Body
That’s helpful. You mentioned you do a lot of metabolic testing. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What test someone take on their own or through your website to check that?
There are different types of metabolic testing. The general one we refer to as organic acid testing and amino acid testing, where you look at byproducts of your body metabolism. You look at your yearn and amino acids. That can tell you neurotransmitter status and nutritional status. What it’s doing is it’s like looking at construction dust. It’s coming and looking at the metabolic byproducts and saying, “You have a deficiency in this. You need more of that. You’ve got more toxins in your body.” It’s a cool way of looking at what you buy is doing with whatever you’re exposed to.
I also do straight up nutritional testing looking for your B vitamins, fat soluble vitamins. Essential fatty acids are essential. Looking at a Omega-3 levels and Omega-6 levels. What is your lumequeic acid, α-linolenic and linolenic acid levels. If those are low, that’s going to affect everything else downstream. You have an elevator linolenic acid level. These are all things you can pick up on a fatty acids analysis and heavy metals.
According to the US ATSDR, which is the branch of the EPA that tells us what chemicals in the environment supposedly. According to them, arsenic is number one toxin in our country of concern. It’s in groundwater and some runoff. Arsenic is in a lot of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides that are used in agriculture. All of a sudden, checking for heavy metals, mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, cobalt, and aluminum and seeing if you have it in your body. If you do, you probably don’t want it there. You work on getting that out. That’s basic nutritional metabolic testing we do through our patients.
Is there a reference to some of that on your website?
We do have references for people who are considering our practice and some of the testing we do. I don’t think we list them out individually. We do mention some of the testing we do as far as the membership with our practice. I talk about this a lot with the blogs I’ve done. Some of our protocols I’ve done are like a mold. I did a detox blog series. I walk through all the different environmental toxins, pesticides, and forever chemicals.
I walk through a bunch of protocols and things to help your body detox. We have a lot of educational material. I have over 400 blogs I’ve written. I will go in depth and give people more exacting protocols and recommendations of things. They can either work on their own or work with their providers. Everything is for educational purposes only. I cannot diagnose or treat anything. That’s my little caveat. That’s on the disclaimer at the bottom of the website.
Beyond The Genome: Epigenetics And The Speed Of Change
One of the things before too, the gene-based supplement plan or supplement plan that you put together for your daughter based on her genetic testing. Is that still something that you do with your patients now?
I don’t do anymore because I worked past that phase in my career. Early on, that’s all I knew about. Some people still use it a lot. Let’s say you have the MTHFR Gene that I mentioned. The two main ones are C677T and A1298C. There’s like twelve other ones that most people don’t look at. The question is, are they causing issues? I look at the metabolic down. product of homocysteine, metabolic acid, organic acids to see if you have an actual functional deficiency in this.
I’ve moved past that. There are certain genes like in mold patients looking for all sensitivity to mold biotoxins and some other things. In general, I don’t do big. I have with some patients, but that’s not a standard part of my typical practice anymore. I’ve realized that the more important thing is not the genome. It’s the epigenome. It’s the stuff on top of your genes. That’s like a newer understanding in the past years.
We come to realize that your genes are the blueprint for the house. You can have five different architects and five different instructing people all of the same blueprint, create five different looking houses and structurally different houses. Your genes are the blueprint but what gets the workers to frame that way and the plumbing put in that way is the epigenetics. It’s the nutritional factor. It’s the metabolic acid and stuff. I’m coming to play some micro. I moved past that. I’m thinking more deeper level of understanding. I still do it a little bit, but it’s not a standard thing that I do with everybody like I used to.
Your genes are the blueprint for the house, but epigenetics determines how that blueprint is expressed.
What I’ve always learned about the epigenomics is that they can be changed. Your genes can be turned off or on, based your epigenome within just even a few months of changes.
It’s interesting. You can see changes in certain genes within 8 to 12 hours of changing your diet. Some of the stuff is fast. Some of the stuff is slow, but that’s the encouragement to start now and don’t give up if you don’t feel better in a day or two because some things take weeks or months. Some things take hours or days.
This should be an encouragement for people that think, “It’s too late for me. I’ve eaten terrible. I’ve not exercised for 70 years or 80 years. I can’t do anything about it.” You can make some significant changes even just in a short period of time. I’d love to hear and dive in a little bit more into your book Uncurable. Can you tell us what was the catalyst for you to write that book? That’s a big undertaking. I love to just hear what’s the main premises or things that you want to get across once you want to make enough money?
The big thing was, I want to get my daughter’s story out there. I want to make everything she’s gone through and everything she’s struggled through all worth it. The way I feel like to make it worth it, is it can help the most number people possible. I want to have something she could look at. She’s listened to the book so many times. She’s funny. We’ll get a book and she listens to it over and over until she basically memorizes them. That was the main reason behind this.
The second thing, the premise behind it. Only because someone tells you like, “I’m sorry, Zach. There’s nothing we can do for you.” There’s nothing they can do for you. There’s always something else out there. Never give up on your situation. Never get up on your loved ones. They’re always answers out there. It’s just that either haven’t looked deep enough or long enough or hard enough or I haven’t met the right person.
That’s my experience every month, every quarter, every year for many years. I don’t expect it to slow down. It speeds up. I’ve got stack of books and things I need to read. I’m behind in my reading now. Don’t give up on themselves and loved ones. Never stop learning. Find a group of providers or people that can surround you and help support you in your health journey. Whether it’s just to be super healthy.
My dad and granddad had this. I want live my 80s without a heart attack. It’s super easy to do. Let’s do these markers. Wherever you’re at, something that will walk alongside you can help you get whatever your health goals are with the most up-to-date data, taking your personal history and into account. As well as applying the clinician experience, which is what evidence base was supposed to be when it first was conceptualized many years ago.
Fats As A Drug: The Importance Of Lipid Therapy
Thank you so much for taking the time to put that book together. I love how you said you wanted to make her story worth it and to help as many people as possible and make an impact. That’s a beautiful motivation. Thank you for doing that. I’d love to love to hear more. These foundational pieces and building blocks are the biggest impact. The biggest bang for your buck, but you’ve tried everything out there.
You’re an explorer or discover of new or maybe old technologies or break throughs that haven’t been mainlined or mainstreamed yet. I’d love to hear in your opinion. What are some of the most impactful like biohacks or some of those top of the pyramid? After you’ve done all these foundational building blocks, what are some of the things that you would say are worth trying or can have an impact?
Lipid therapy. Lipid therapy is the big rubric. A couple data points. Zach, if you’re Omega-3 levels are low, you have the same risk for heart disease as a smoker with normal Omega-3 levels. Getting your Omega-3 levels normalized can be as impactful on your risk of heart disease as quitting smoking. That’s easy to fix. Check that level.
All of a sudden, fats can be like a drug. Using healthy butter or healthy ghee, extra virgin olive oil, clean fats then, based on your nutritional needs. I make chia seed pudding, which is basically coconut milk and chia seeds. It’s got a 3:1 ratio, Omega-3s and Omega-6s. It’s Omega-3 heavy. When I make the cereal stuff, that’s a mixture or combination of 1-to-1 ratio of chia, flax, sunflower seeds and hemp seeds and mix it up. You can put some sweetener in it and stuff. Some cinnamon and whatnot.
It turns into like a oatmeal type cereal that has a 3.5 to one ratio of Omega-6s and Omega-3s. All of a sudden, you’re getting this ridiculously nutrient-dense thing that’s healthy for your cell membranes. Giving you trace minerals, rare earth minerals, all these things you need for your cells to work. Using fat like a drug, healthy fats, healthy source of those. Real egg yolks are rich in phospholipids, which are important for brain function.
There’s a study came out that if you eat two eggs a day, you can lower your risk of dementia like 20% to 25%. It’s because of the phospholipids and the egg yolk. Eating healthy, real fats, coming from grass-fed, grass-finished, free range non-adulterated sources can be super powerful. If you want to upload that, check your levels. Get an advanced fatty acid analysis. Find out your deficiencies and your excesses. If you got a lot of trans fats for very long chain fatty acids, you need to burn those bad fats off. That’s when you can add in things like phosphatidylcholine or PC, which is a type of phospholipid. The nutritional idea is fat is like a drug and then you get into details. You can literally superpower it.
Most of our regular blood work that we did on our annual basis are not looking at that. Where do you recommend people go? Could we ask for that when we go to our normal checking?
You need to work with someone who knows what they’re doing. Go to your doctor to ask for this. They’re going to be like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean fatty acid analysis?” How do you interpret it? They studied for three months and ordered 100 of patience to figure out how it works. You need to work with a functional medicine practitioner. Someone who’s taking a deep dive into this medicine who understands it can apply to, not like a biohacker or a social media influencer who has like their one trick pony who are like, “I do this one thing.”
You need someone who is seeing patients, who’s worked with thousands of people, read the literature, spent the time in the library on their hands and knees figuring stuff out that they can apply to you. That’s the hard thing. Social media is full of one trick ponies people. It’s like, “I did the keto diet and it was amazing. I did the vegan diet. It was amazing. I did the plant.” You did three radically different diets which are amazing. How does that apply to the person in front of me? That’s why you need to work with a clinician, someone who’s expert in this area.
A Day In The Life: Practicing What You Preach
I’d love for you to just walk us through a day in your own life. How do you apply the practices and principles that you are helping others with? What are some of the things that you have in place like within your home or in your daily routines and schedules? How do you eat? How do you exercise? How do you maintain your own health?
We source what we eat. Nothing but real food in your house. In the morning, I usually get up about 6:00. I get my cup of coffee. It’s organic coffee. Not mold free coffee. I’d drink that while I’m reading the morning and stretching. I’m meditating and praying. That’s usually about 45 minutes. I’ll do like a little routine exercise. Usually, my lunch is leftovers the night before, which is usually something I made and that’s again real food I’m making it home.
I’ve seen horrible. I’ve been outside for like two weeks straight so I’m little copped up. We have a farm. We always go outside and work on the farm and walk around. Go to the gym twice a week. Plus, all my farm work. The night routine, I calm my brain down for about 30 minutes before I go to bed. Sometimes that means I hop in my bathtub in full of hot water or hop in the sauna were I just sit and meditate. That’s something I do every day.
That’s like my foundational stuff. Between that is being a doctor, a husband and a parent to my three crazy kids. That’s what I do on a daily basis. As I learn new things, I try to incorporate them. Twice a year, I’ll probably do my own lab panel to see where I’m at. I don’t personally have any health issues. Some all is just finding things and addressing them. The biggest thing for me is getting enough exercise. I’m at stage in my life where I’m not physically active enough. That’s where I need to be more diligent because I’m just not getting enough steps. I’m not getting to the gym enough, not working out enough and not outside enough. Life is taking over a little bit for me in regards to that. I will fix that as soon as everything falls outside.
The Blue Zone Blueprint: Realistic Longevity Goals
That’s great. I’d love to hear your perspective. When you think about what is possible for people, if we got these things right and had correct levels. We’re checking them twice a year, which is a great. Monitoring our levels twice a year is probably ideal. If we did eat whole healthy foods from good sources, cleaner air and cleaner water and then maybe even add in some of those other cool things like you mentioned before with some of these other technologies and things that are available. What do you think is possible for someone as far as their health span journey? As you think out over the next 10 years or 15-year or 20-years, what do you think will be possible? What’s coming?
We look at places in the world where people lived to be 100 more than anywhere else. These are called blue zone. It’s places where they don’t have fancy labs and fancy stuff. You have more people living to be 100. You have ladies in the late 90s walking up these massive flights of stairs that I don’t know if I could do. You have guys going out with her goats and they are in their 80s. They’re going out, walking all day. That was my grandfather.
My grandfather didn’t retire until he was 85 years old. In his ‘90s, he was still doing all those yard work. What we can expect is to live like people live in places where they do the stuff the right way. I don’t think I’m going to go from living 90 years to living 150 years. That’s overstated. That’s what’s popular in social media.
I don’t think I’m going to live like that one nematode. I’m not going to increase my life 400% and say, “I’m going to live to be 400 years old.” I don’t think I’m going to be like that. That one whale that lives 300 years, that’s where people take things a little crazy. My expectation is a little long and healthy like people do in Sardinia, Loma Linda, Okinawa, Costa Rica. Live to be healthy and die. I feel like that’s reasonable and doable because people are doing it now.
You’re helping people do that. Thank you so much for the amazing work that you’re doing, that you’re willing to put in the hours in the library and the research as you said. How can people connect with you? If they want to do some of this testing and learn from your website and other resources that are available, can people work with you remotely and connect that way?
As far as getting in touch with, my website is UncurableBook.com. I’ve got AaronHartmanMD is the website for me. That takes you to my practice, my social media, and my show. We have four practitioners on practice. If someone wants to work with us or me, you can go to the website and sign up. We are a medical practice, a brick-and-mortar. Our first visit is in person. o I do have people flying around the country to see me.
I do have people coming from up Florida. I have Florida license. Virginia license from Virginia. As well as Arizona license. As far as my practice, people come there and see me there, then we can do things virtually after that. I’m a real practitioner, a real doctor with a real practice. You have to come see me for the first time around. If you’re looking for a non-brick-and-mortar, non-person then I’m probably not that person, but we’re pretty good at what we do.
You’re attracting people from all over the country. We can read Anna’s story at UncurableBook.com and all the things that you shared a little bit in greater detail. Your blog and your show we can find through your website at AaronHartmanMD.com.
This has been so fascinating and you’ve shared so many different practical things. I’m going to have to go back and read this a couple more times and take some more copious notes here. Thank you so much for just sharing your amazing expertise, experience and wisdom with us. I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk with you.
Thanks a lot, Zach. I appreciate it.
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What a fascinating conversation with Dr Hartman. I know we covered a lot in that episode. We’re going to give you the resources to go do a little deeper dive on his website. He has a lot of blog series and things like that where he covers a lot of what we talked about. You can go back and review that on his website at AaronHartmanMD.com. You can also find his book at UncurableBook.com and check that out as well.
I love how we talked about some of the basics, the building blocks, the things that we can all do and take action on to make a significant difference. He said even 8 to 12 hours after changing our diet, we can see different genes expressed turned on or off throughout the genetics. Some of the things that struck me too is 80% of heart disease and 70% of cancer can be prevented by diet and lifestyle. If we want to move the needle, the most, it’s getting these basic things right and then we can stack more technological things on top of that.
We got to get these basics right or it isn’t going to make that big of a difference, so clean air, clean food and clean water. He mentioned the water check database. You can go in and put your ZIP code in there. We’ve done that. You can see the levels and what’s in your water just coming out of the tap. You can go to WaterCheck.com and see you can order a water test on top of that to see what else is in your water even after you filter it.
There’s a couple things. He does walk through that on his blog post as well about detox, clean air, HEPA filters and clean food, non-pasteurized, non-homogenized. Sixty percent of the food that Americans can consume is ultra-processed. He does have a food sourcing guide on his website as well. The metabolic testing was another thing we mentioned. He looks at the organic acid and amino acid profiles. Another thing that I thought was interesting was, “What are we doing when we’re eating?”
That can affect our digestion. If we’re checking the stock market or reading something on social media while we’re eating, that could be affecting the way our bodies digesting and utilizing our food sources. Maybe just think about even how we’re eating and what we’re doing when we’re eating. That can be helpful. The last thing I’ll mention here that stuck out to me, too was about the lipid therapy and getting that advanced fatty acid profile analyzed by someone who knows how to use that analysis and how to dial in those levels. That can make a significant difference.
He said two eggs a day can lower our risk of dementia by 25% just from the fossil lipids that are in the egg yolks. Anyways, do a little bit more research. You can follow his work. You can go and utilize him as a functional medicine practitioner and enrichment there. He said people are coming from all over the country to come and see him and get started then you can do things virtually after that. AaronHartmanMD.com or UncurableBook.com is where you can connect with him. He also has his own show, so you can find that there as well. Thanks so much for tuning in.
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