Aaron Hartman, MD argues that evidence-based medicine moves too slowly on harms like ultra-processed foods linked to early-onset cancers and excessive screen time in children. The biologic mechanisms were clear years earlier, but the system waited for large studies before acting. He calls for personalized care, preventive action like removing processed foods from schools, and using social media to educate the public.
Chapters
Evidence based medicine has kind of become a bad, bad word. So what I mean by that, how has evidence based medicine not lived up to its standard? I posted this past week in our social about the literature now coming out this past year that ultra processed foods, there's a direct correlation with an increasing cancer in the younger population. Many of you've heard about how cancer is getting common. More young people, particularly young males, are getting earlier, as early as 30, 35 years old. And so they've lowered the screening. And now published literature says, oh, there's a direct correlation with ultra processed foods. You know, five years ago that was considered bunk. That was, there's no data, no evidence that there's an association with ultra processed foods and colon cancer. Fifteen years ago it was like you're crazy to even suggest that ultra processed foods might even have a glint of an association with colon cancer. And this is where evidence based medicine fails us. If we wait for that published article to. That connects the dots for us. One, we practice the siloed medicine, that nothing's ever connected. It's all disjointed, Never kind of quite feels right. And we wait decades to find out that ultra processed food causes colon cancer, or 50 years to find out that smoking is related to lung cancer, or 30 years in the 1800s to figure out that hand washing is a good thing. Right? This happens over and over and over again. So what do we routinely do? Well, there is biologic plausibility 15 years ago for ultra processed foods causing colon cancer. So what does that mean? What does that mean there's plausibility? Well, we know that processed foods high in rancid fats, seed oils as well as sugar affect energy production and cause insulin resistance. And we know that metabolic syndrome or insulin resistance is associated with epithelial cell cancers. That's your prostate, colon, breast cancer. So it just makes biologic plausibility. Hey, you know, eating ultra processed foods, particularly seed oils, which are like in everything, you look at the box of any food you get, any fast food, you go, they're cooking everything in canola, soy, sunflower. It's just, it's everywhere in our food system. So we learned that, hey, you know, insulin resistance, diabetes, seed oil, hey, there's associated with insulin resistance and insulin resistance is associated with epithelial cell cancer. So it just makes sense. It's, it's 3 degrees or 4 degrees of separation, but it just makes biologic plausibility. Yet our healthcare system laughed at it, joked at it. In the functional medicine world, we were called kind of not quacks, but kind of quacks. Because we're making something as ridiculous a suggestion to say that processed foods are related to cancer, for example. Well, now we have a published article. It's really interesting. I posted this in social media this past week. There's two massive studies. One looked at over 9 million people, the other one over 60,000 people. So these are massive meta analyses showing a direct correlation with ultra processed foods and cancer, particularly colon cancer, particularly males. And so this is a massive blind spot in our healthcare system. We're waiting way too long to connect the dots. But that, you know, we can't expect these monoliths, these universities, academics to practice outside their scope of expertise. And their scope of expertise, these publish literature is, you know, rules based, you know, algorithm based, standard of care based, you know, but people don't want that anymore. People want cutting edge, up to date stuff. They want to know, hey, what's the risk of cutting out seed oils in my diet? What's the risk of cutting out ultra processed foods? Oh, there's no risk. What's the potential benefit? Massive. What's the risk for quitting smoking? No, what's the potential upside? Massive. What's the risk for getting my kids? Here's another great one. Oh my gosh. Screenshot. If you told people 10 years ago screens were bad for kids brains, they would have told you, you're bonkers. Now we know that the dopamine, the addiction neurotransmitter is stimulated by things like pornography, drugs and screen time, video games. Oh my gosh. The worst kid to give this to would be an ADD ADHD kid. Give them screen times and all of a sudden they're getting their brain addicted. And all of a sudden if you're two years old and your brain's wiring to your mid to late twenties and you and you're wiring it exposed to screens for hours and hours a day. Jonathan Haidt actually wrote a book about this called the Anxious Generation. We now have research showing, hey, screens are bad for kids. And we're seeing changes at the state level. States are now saying, hey look, we probably should limit social media screens to kids maybe 16, maybe 12. Who knows how that's going to pan out. But the idea that waiting for published literature and public sentiment and political will to align to change our healthcare, we'll be waiting for way too long. And that's evidence based medicine, that's academic medicine. We have to ask and demand more for ourselves than the quote unquote standard of care. Standard of care is like what I learned in medical school. It's like your basic introductory. Yeah, you learn the basic about how to treat diabetes and diabetic medications and those things. But once you become an expert in your field and then you continue to practice, you realize that that's basic. You know, you get your board certification, you get your license from the state of Virginia, which is where I was from, or Florida when I was in the military. And that's like, congratulations. You get to come to the party, you get to show up. That's not the end point. That's your starting point. And so people need to start realizing that, starting demanding more from the healthcare practitioners, from the system. I'm hopeful that we're gonna see changes in our healthcare in the next year. I'm hopeful we actually will see things like fluoride removed from the water. We'll see things like ultra processed foods removed from schools. I mean, literally, the American Pediatric Association's recommending using ozempic. National organizations are recommending GLP1s for obesity in kids. Why don't we just remove the vending machines from schools? Novel concept, right? Why don't we just stop giving kids poison the food? Why is it okay to like, oh, it's just a little snack every day, you know, a little crack, a little smoking, a little poison every day. Yeah, maybe once or twice doesn't hurt you. But giving that to kids from birth and formula, kids snacks, all of a sudden it gives us obesity as a very common thing in kids. Like, you know, almost half of kids are have metabolic syndrome. Now about 35% of Americans are pre diabetic, 15% are diabetic. We're seeing all these crazy numbers. So point of this is we need to ask more than just basic evidence based medicine. We need to ask for the next level, which is personalized care. Your personalized care that tests you, that gives care specifically to you. That's what we need to ask for. It's what we need to demand if we want to have the best health for ourselves and our families. You know, there's a saying, one of the groups I'm in, you know, guy Joe Posh says this all the time. And what he says is, you know, he who has his health has a thousand dreams, and he who does not have his health has but one dream. And that's what we're seeing right now. We're seeing a whole generation of kids, young adults, struggling just to live because they're losing their health. And they can't have those crazy dreams of conquering the world being the best version they can be. And we need to ask for more, we need to demand more. Anyway, what spurned this was me just realizing, wow, ultra processed foods. We, we now have literature on that and I've been saying that for 10, 15 years now and now it's official. You know, don't wait till it's official. You wait that long, you wait too long. So if you want to get more good information like this, we're putting tons of information out there on social media. We have a podcast now, YouTube channel, I've got reading list of books, over 70 books on our website. We have over 300 blog posts. If you want to find reliable information that start educate yourself about this. We're creating this curated platform for anybody anywhere speaks English in the English speaking world. You can probably with AI now actually convert it to whatever your preferred language is. But just to be a resource for people to get educated. We believe in education, encouragement, power. That's the only way you can take back your health and be the best version of you can be. So take care. Hopefully it was helpful. Post your comments before, like share. That's the only way we're gonna get this information out there is by liking it and sharing it, commenting and then basically asking more for those around us because that's the way the new media, the new communication system is going to require us to get involved. So take care, we'll talk to you soon.
