99: Is Modern Soil Making Us Sick? – The Shocking Link Between Farming, Nutrition, and Chronic Illness with Dr. Aaron Hartman

And he realized in India, he was actually put over in India to figure out how to maximize food production for the empire at that point in time. And one of the things he saw was that people who did traditional farming methods actually had healthier animals, and the people were healthier. The people had less diseases, less tuberculosis, less, you know, pneumonias. They lived, they were taller.

So I want to talk a little bit about dirt and its influence on our health. I do briefly talk about this in my book Uncurable From Hopeless Diagnosis to Defying All Odds. But I want to take a little behind the scenes, deep dive into sortal health and how it actually impacts human health. You know, again, you know, one of my people, I was talking with someone, I was doing an interview, and they were asking me, who are my mentors, you know, who do I look up to? And it was hard for me to pick one because every year it's someone different. For the last, you know, 15 years, I'd find an expert in a field. And what led me down the soil is health thing was actually meeting Joel Salatin, who I've interviewed on my podcast, reading some of his books, and then being introduced to other characters in the past, like Sir Albert Howard, who was a entomologist in the British Empire before World War I. And he realized in India, he was actually put over in India to figure out how to maximize food production for the Empire at that point in time. And one of the things he saw was that people did, traditional farming methods actually had healthier animals and the people were healthier. The people had less diseases, less tuberculosis, less, you know, pneumonias. They lived, they were taller. And so it was really one of those strange things like, huh, what's going on? So he actually started as a scientist, started studying it, realized that what the difference was is people using chemical fertilizers and natural fertilizers. In the 1800s, you may or may not know that initially we used bat guano that was being shipped from the Pacific over to Europe as a nitrogen based fertilizer. After World War I, we realized, hey, you can use chemical nitrogen. And they kind of moved away from using that, which was kind of hard to get and really expensive. And they were actually using that in India. And one of the things that happened was that the soil that that was used on became acidic and it actually didn't grow healthy yeast and healthy bacteria. So one of the things with soil science is, you know, soil is basically minerals, rocks that are kind of broken down and ground up with humus, organic material. What happens is Bacteria and yeast in the soil secrete acids like humic acid, fulvic acid, dissolved minerals. And the minerals actually get incorporated into the plant. So you have to have this healthy symbiosis between healthy soil that has a mixture of crushed rocks, basically crushed minerals, and humus, which is organic material compost. That's kind of where compost comes from. And you need a healthy soil like that, because then the soil can incorporate all of these rare. There's like. There's like 98 rare earth minerals that mammals need, for example, for health. If animals are fed only grain, they get about 60, 65 of those minerals. So if you're fed a grain diet and you're a. An animal, human whatnot, you will actually automatically develop nutrient deficiencies. And he was seeing that the places where animals ate only stuff going on, chemical fertilizer, that the soil is acidified, that those animals weren't as healthy. And then the humans that consumed the milk from the. Believe it was goats and sheep eggs from the chickens, et cetera, so they were not as healthy. And he. He kind of narrowed it down to there's something about the soil. Soil and Health is actually the name of his book that changes the health of plants. And so I started thinking, well, cows are mammals, humans are mammals are the rarest minerals that we need for our health. How would we get them? Because we. I'm not eating, you know, tons of grass a day or whatever and chewing, you know, 18 hours a day. Like we're omnivores, not ruminators, right? So I started thinking, how do humans. And what I realized was animals, ruminators will concentrate minerals from the soil in their bones and milk. I mean, that's where calcium come from in milk, it comes from the cow concentrating it from the grass, whereas protein come from in beef and in milk, it comes from the cow fermenting grass, turning into amino acids that then that animal's body turns into protein. So all of a sudden realizing, is there a connection between. How do that affects humans health? And so one of the things I also was learning about is the history of nutrient deficiencies and how we still have nutrient deficiencies today. And we've talked about this a lot in other places, but started to realize these rare earth minerals that humans get through eating organ meat, through bone broth, is one of the biggest sources of those things, and we've removed those from our diet. So one of the things I started doing is incorporating minerals, trace minerals, rare earth minerals, minerals sourced from sea salt that extracts the sodium that has just the rare earth minerals, bone broth, and that humic acid, fulvic acid is another form of some of these trace rare earth minerals. These are kind of popular right now. They come into vogue. But I was using these 10 years ago with patients with connective tissue issues. Because with connective tissue issues you need more of these rare, these trace minerals to make really good collagen and whatnot.

Have you ever lost trust in your own body or in the doctors who were supposed to help you heal? It happens to millions of people who are stuck in the cycle of prescriptions, tests, and more questions than answers. That's why Dr. Aaron Hartman wrote his new book Uncurable. As a physician and a parent, he's lived through the pain of being told there's nothing more we can do. But instead of accepting that, he built a new path, one that combines traditional and functional medicine to uncover what's really driving illness. Uncurable is more than a book. It's a roadmap to help you find the root causes your doctor might have missed, reactivate your body's natural healing systems, and finally believe in what's possible again. If you've lost hope or trust in the system, this book will help you take back control. Go to UncurableBook.com and grab your copy along with Dr. Hartman's free resources to help you start your healing journey today.

But that's how I learned from animal husbandry, from a scientist, you know, almost 100 years ago how important some of these rare things you might think aren't important, how important they are. And then from that led me down the pathway of Weston A. Price, who was a dentist in the 1940s. I believe his son died from a dental abscess. And he went on his crusade around the world to figure out why. And he realized that people who eat it didn't matter where in the world they were, whether the Mari whereas the Logan Stahl Valley in Switzerland, people who eat a traditional diet, not processed grains, but they can grow, catch in their local environment, they tend to be healthier, taller, and they didn't get cavities, which was really amazing for that time in history because cavities were rampant throughout Europe and the United States at that point in time. They had broader palates and in facial. It's really interesting when people are malnourished. It changes your head structure and your facial structure. So one of the first things that happens is your jaw will become smaller, your mid face becomes smaller, your body wants to preserve your brain, right? And so he would see that People and you see families like in the aborigines in Australia, for example, who moved out the bush, moved into the city, their kids and grandkids, they would have, their facial structure would be different, they would have crowning of their teeth, they would have smaller jaws. And essentially now we're seeing more sleep apnea related to some of these mid facial things as well. But another, another topic for another day. But the point was, is like learning from these individuals how important diet was for facial structure and for health was taught to me by Weston A. Price, our guy who died on their probably over half a century ago. And so part of my journey has not just been, you know, studying are smart people currently. And it's been learning from the past, learning from traditions and wisdom in the past. And so another caveat, if you want to go back, you know, 4,000 years ago in Arabic texts they were talking about using ghee to treat neurological conditions that today we'd consider like Parkinson's, like illness. And so I first heard about that, I'm like, that's kind of weird. Like, why would ghee help with these kind of things? Well, as I got into lipid medicine and I was learning under Patricia Kane, one of the things I learned about that is butyrate actually is the thing we use in lipid medicine all the time to actually burn off toxins and mitochondria. It actually helps rejuvenate cell metabolism, mitochondrial function, helps get out lipid rafts as well as long chain fatty acids, which are horrible for cell function. It's one of the things help burn that off. But nature's so butyrate, great. And there's actually an FDA approved product that's currently used for symptoms of ALS that has phenyl and butyrate in it. But the point is like, what is nature's best source for this? And I learned, wait a second, it's ghee. So that's one of those things. How did these ancient people 4000 years ago connect the dots? And that's where intuition and observation, I mean that's one of the things the Greek, ancient Greeks did, was just observing things and learning through observation, which unfortunately our current culture is kind of left behind. But that enabled me to realize there was actually wisdom and ancient wisdom. But you have to parse out things like obviously illnesses aren't called bad, you know, evil humors in our body and stuff like that. But the point being is that each step of the way, whether it was my wife introducing me to the real food or which let me down a pathway. And then me meeting therapist and reading a book that let me down Pathway. Doing that year after year after year, that's what enabled us every year to have new therapies, new things to do with my daughter. And it's bled into my practice of medicine. So much so that there'll be times where I'll be reading and learning things and see a new patient in the clinic a couple weeks later. I'm like, I did not know this a month ago and I'm literally seeing you now and I know it and I can help you. So it's really a cool place to be, but also a little stressful because you know, you can't ever stop learning, you can't ever stop looking for new things because people are going to keep on coming to you, asking you questions and wanting you to help them. And we become pit stop for individuals looking for outside the box thinking, outside the box care. So I hope that was a little help behind the scenes on how I think, what's shaped my thinking. And hopefully this helps, helps give you a little bit deeper insight into the book. Incurable From Hopeless Diagnosis to the Final odds. And the question is, how can you apply this to yourself? It's in the book as well, but hopefully this information is helpful. Take care and we hope to talk to you soon.

If you've lost trust in your body or in the system that was supposed to heal you, don't give up. Dr. Aaron Hartman's book Uncurable will help you rediscover what's truly possible. Visit UncurableBook.com to get your copy and start your healing journey today.