Dr. Aaron Hartman explains how diet, stress, infections, and other environmental factors control whether your genes actually express themselves. He uses the Dutch famine and BRCA mutations as examples, then walks through SNPs like MTHFR and VDR, showing how his daughter's genetic report led to targeted interventions with B vitamins, vitamin D, and lifestyle changes that produced real improvements.
Questions this episode answers
About 23,000 genes.
December 17, 2025.
About 60 pages.
He states BRCA was associated with ~20% risk in the 1950s and ~80% risk today (described as a fourfold increase over ~70 years).
He states roughly 60% are spontaneously lost (not carried to term) and about 40% are born.
Chapters
Humans have about 23,000 genes in our genome, yet we're not that much more complicated than certain species of worms and frogs. You know, think about it. You are way more complicated than some of these species that have, you know, 20 to 30,000 genes. But yet why are you so more complicated? I want to share something with you that I wish I'd put into the book From Hopeless Diagnosis to define All Odds that just did not have space for it. But I want to talk about it here briefly, because it does talk. It does have to do with my, my daughter's story and potentially your story as well. And the idea of genes causing diseases. You know, I kind of quit with colleagues and friends that, you know, the gene cause of illness, it's very 20th century, it's very, you know, last century kind of thinking the idea that genes cause diseases. Now, I know saying this right now for many of you is going to be like, oh, what's going on here? You know, I want to explain myself. Humans have about 23,000 genes in our genome, yet we're not that much more complicated than certain species of worms and frogs. You know, think about. You are way more complicated than some of these species that have, you know, 20 to 30,000 genes. But yet why are you so more complicated? What we've learned is this thing of the epigenome. There's a whole world on top of the genes that determines what they do and how they work. And what we found out is you have a million genes from bacteria in your gut. So all of a sudden there's all this poison post, it's called post translational, post transcriptional modification where you have genes printing off their stuff. And then this whole system in your body, it changes how it's expressed in your epigenome. And so we've learned that actually the bacteria in your gut can change expression of genes. And then, aha, 8, maybe 10% of your genes are actually viral. So what happens is you get a viral infection and certain viruses will inject themselves into your genome, your genes, and be passed on from generation to generation. So what happens is your genes actually change over time and certain ones get turned on and off. So for example, during the Dutch bread famine, we saw that women who came from middle class upbringing and make sure it's recording middle class upbringing, who, who lacked food and got pregnant during the bread famine, if they then had children during that point in time, during that, those kids were programmed for austerity. If they went back to a normal diet, they were more prone to diabetes, obesity, and Heart disease. So actually and strange thing was is these grandmothers that are pregnant with their moms had the eggs for the babies in them. So literally you were in, you were actually in grandma when she was pregnant with your mother. And we're seeing how this actually affects gene expression, this idea of epigenetic modulation. So all of a sudden now we're realizing that your genes themselves, it's like the blueprint of a house. Yes, genes are important. I mean I'm not saying they're not important, but I'm saying that they are not determinative as we used to think. You know, one example I talk about, I think I may mention the book I mentioned. Otherwise two things. One is the BRCA gene for breast cancer, which in the 1950s was associated with a 20% risk of breast cancer. To date, 80%, you know, four times increase over 70 years. Or even something that we know is genetic. Genetic like trisomy 21 or down syndrome, you know, about 60% of Down's kids are spontaneously avoided. They're not born a normal gestation, the either like the mother body, there's something going on. They're not viable for life. And so they, and a lot of women don't even know they are born. They pregnant, they think it's a late cycle. And then of the ones that are born, which again is 40%, you'll have some that grow up to be 50 years old, maybe some mild cognitive issues, mild intellectual issues, but they can get a job, they can be productive members of society and some get dementia. I actually had one patient in their late 20s that had already had Alzheimer's type dementia.
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What's the difference in this genetic thing? And the thing is the environment. And what we learned is the genes are important. They're the blueprint for your health, but the environment determines how they're expressed. And this is the world of epigenetics. And so you have. You know, when my daughter, one of the first things I learned about was these things called SNPs, which are like typos. And SNPs are little gene typos that affect how nutrition, how different things in your body work. And one of the most famous ones is the MTHFR gene, which affects how your body recycles folic acid, which is vitamin B9. It's also one of the reasons why you have folic acid in prenatal vitamins is to minimize the risk for neural tube defects. If you have a SNP for this, all of a sudden you might recycle folic acid at maybe 30, 40% efficiency. And that can set you up for different diseases. You know, neural tube defects, cleft palate. If you're prenatal in adulthood, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune issues. The thing it's easily to address with B vitamins. You can test for it. So one of the things, this is one of the early things I came across my daughter. I realized there's a whole world of checking for these gene SNPs. We can look for hundreds. I remember one test I did on her. It was about 60 pages of these SNPs, going through it, learning how to actually read and interpret it, and then plugging in nutrients for where my daughter had genetic weaknesses. Another one's vitamin D, vitamin D receptor, vdr, tack and fork genes both mean that you need a higher vitamin D level, get the same interaction on someone. So the point is that, you know, knowing what these things are and taking a deep dive in this enabled me to actually nutritionally start to change my daughter's gene expression and change her phenotype, which is what it looked like. Cognitively walking vision. You know, today she's. She's no supposed to be able to see today. 19, she's able to read her. Her. Her iPhone as well as type. That was, you know, 17 years of a lot of interventions, but start small. It started with some basic testing, looking at where she had gene weaknesses and nutritionally plugging those holes in. And the reality is this technology is accessible to most people, whether it's doing, you know, genetic ancestry and taking the raw data and plugging into Prometheus or MTHFR support and one of those other kind of gene things out there. There are ways you can figure this out. The point is, is there's so much information out there that's not currently being used in our current healthcare system for many reasons. We can talk about that at a later point, but the point is that learning little small details like this enabled me to change my daughter's trajectory. And a lot of these were built on the foundations of diet, exercise, sleep, clean environment and stress reduction, which is sometimes hard when you have young kids. Point is, is that there's hope. There's other things to do out there in the snp. The gene stuff, the epigenetics are one of the things that we briefly touching the book but I didn't go too deep in and there's and there's more information about this on my website if you want to take a deep dive in this and I've talked about my podcast before but hopefully this helps give you a little more deeper behind the scenes. Look into the book and some of the things you might read in there about gene things and how you can they can be changed nutritionally and diet's probably the single biggest changer of gene expression. Just eating real food. Of course we started there as well and I'll probably share a little later on these little snippets about how we actually became became a farmer and raised my own cows and chickens to help change my daughter's health trajectory. So take care. I'll talk to you soon.
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