Some of the Biggest Health Decisions Were Based on Incomplete Data – The Shifting Story of Hormones and Dietary Fat with Dr. Aaron Hartman | Hormones | E138
In this April 2026 podcast episode, Dr. Aaron Hartman intertwines a personal narrative about his daughter Anna—who was told she would never walk, talk, or see yet is thriving at 19—with a broader critique of long‑standing medical misconceptions. He argues that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for post‑menopausal women can cut heart‑disease risk by up to 50%, lower dementia risk by up to 38%, and may produce less invasive breast cancers, contrasting these benefits with the 2002 Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study that led to a black‑box warning on HRT. Hartman explains why the WHI’s use of oral Premarin and Prempro, lack of blood‑level monitoring, and a smoking‑heavy older cohort produced misleading results, and notes the warning’s removal in November 2025. He estimates that 140‑160 k women may have died prematurely and 40‑70 million may have been undertreated because of the warning. Hartman then shifts to another “blind spot”: the demonisation of dietary fat. He describes the 2026 reversal of the food pyramid, emphasizing that healthy fats are essential for heart, brain, and metabolic health, and that the previous low‑fat paradigm contributed to obesity and metabolic disease. Throughout, he frames these errors as examples of medical gaslighting and systemic fear‑driven practice, noting that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. He calls for a “medical feminist” approach that prioritises women’s health, highlights micro‑aggressions, and urges both patients and clinicians to identify and correct current blind spots. The episode repeatedly promotes his book Uncurable (also titled In Curable), offering a “blueprint” and free tools to help listeners navigate these issues. Key take‑aways: 1. HRT may be far more cardioprotective than traditional blood‑pressure treatment for menopausal women. 2. The WHI study’s methodology (oral synthetic hormones, lack of monitoring) likely produced false‑negative conclusions, leading to decades of under‑treatment. 3. Dietary fat is now recognised as vital; the old low‑fat paradigm was a major error. 4. Medical practice is often shaped by legal fear and systemic bias, especially against women. 5. Personal experience (Hartman’s daughter) illustrates that alternative, evidence‑based approaches can defy dire prognoses. The episode ends with a call to action: obtain Uncurable for detailed protocols and resources.
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Patients who've known me for years thought they knew my story. They had no idea. My daughter was never supposed to walk, talk, or crawl. And not only is she thriving at 19, I found the exact blueprint that made it possible. In Uncurable, I share that blueprint plus thousands of dollars in free tools and resources because I got into this work to help people just like you, not just the people sitting in my office. The link is in the show notes below. Get your copy today.
Hormone replacement therapy for women will lower your risk for heart disease up to 50%. So to put this in perspective, if you're a female and you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and you're in menopause, you know, treating your blood pressure will lower your risk for heart disease about 35, 36%, plus or minus. Hormone replacement, 50%. So hormone replacement therapy is literally more helpful for lowering your risk for heart disease than actually treating blood pressure, which is a crazy statistic. Medical blind spots, things our healthcare system has got just plain wrong. This is going on today, it's gone on in the past, and one of the things I 100% believe is you have to know, um, the past in order to prevent things like this from happening in the future. You know, there's a saying, you know, history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes a lot. So point of that is if you know what things we've gotten wrong in the past, what blind spots, medical gaslighting things, you can actually take charge of your health and be more aware and be more educated so you can pick things up today. So I wanna talk about two specific recent things that have happened as of I'm recording this, February of 2026. You may know that hormones are back and fat is back. What am I talking about? So 2002 Women's Health Initiative, there's a study, you know, women's health study, Canadian study came out. Don't wanna go into the details, but basically it said hormone replacement therapy can causes breast cancer, increases your risk for cancer, strokes, thickens your blood. It's bad for women. And hormone replacement therapy got a black box warning that was just removed in November of 2025. So 23 years went by before those were removed. What has been the result of these last 23-odd years? Depending on what you read and how you look at the numbers, potentially 140,000 to 160,000 women have died prematurely. Due to lack of access to care to hormones. That's a pretty staggering number. Another number is between 40 to potentially 70 million women have been undertreated in general for all the things related to hormone replacement therapy. So how does this even happen? And what's the current data? Well, when the study came out, it was really interesting. Within 2 to 3 weeks, the physicians like myself were looking at the study, asking questions, saying, wait a second, this doesn't look right. It's a smoking population. It's older women. It's, Nurses, like there's so many different things about it. One big oops with that study is they were taking oral Prempro and Premarin. So some of you may know that Premarin is conjugated equine horse estrogen. So basically horse urine estrogen by mouth and medroxyprogesterone, which is a synthetic progestin. The synthetic progestins were already known to research to cause tumors in lab rats. And the oral estrogen, in order to get it systemically, to get your levels high, you have to take anywhere from 5 to 6 times like a topical or pellet dose by mouth, your liver breaks it down to a lot of metabolites. And based on your genes and SNPs, which are these little typos in your genes, you can actually turn it into cancer-causing metabolites. And also they weren't checking blood levels and they weren't looking for metabolites. So lots of errors with it, but they're using a product that hopefully no one's using anymore. I know people are still using it and shouldn't be doing hormones by mouth, by the way, because of this whole phenomenon. And even sublingual ones, you still swallow a significant amount of the hormone. But that's another topic. We've talked about that. Previous podcast. I won't play with that here, but it just does so many wrong things with it. And because it got out, the horse was out of the barn, it got pushed in the media. Lots of women were scared, and no one wanted to get sued. Physicians never get sued. And unfortunately, a lot of medicine we practice in the court of law. If you go to courtroom, something's a bad outcome, Dr. Hartman, Dr. XYZ, you know, why did you do this knowing XYZ? And then you, you lose, and you lose your license. So a lot of times you practice medicine more from a place of fear than facts and more of a place from avoidance of running risks than actually trying to help people. So fast forward, what do we now know about hormone replacement therapy?
Have you been told there's nothing wrong with you, or worse, there's nothing we can do for you? We were told our daughter Anna would never walk, talk, crawl, or even see. We were also told to start surgeries when she was just 18 months old, and we said no to all of it. Today at 19, she's thriving. And here's what really shakes me to the core. Her story isn't rare. I've seen this happen in hundreds to thousands of patients in my clinic. In Curable, I show you exactly how you can do the same type of thing because you deserve the same fighting chance as my daughter had.
The link is below.
Get your copy today.
Hormone replacement therapy for women will lower your risk for heart disease up to 50%. So to put this in perspective, if you're a female and you have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and you're in menopause, you know, treating your blood pressure will lower your risk for heart disease about 35, 36%, plus or minus. Hormone replacement, 50%. So hormone replacement therapy is literally more helpful for lowering your risk for heart disease than actually treating blood pressure, which is a crazy statistic. The other thing is that hormone replacement therapy can lower your risk for dementia as a woman up to 38%. So the number one killer in our country is heart disease. Number two is cancer. And here's another thing that is interesting. If you're on hormone replacement therapy and you're diagnosed with a breast cancer, it's less likely to be invasive. So my question, hopefully they're gonna start research on this, but my assumption is if being on it means if you get cancer, it's less invasive. Is hormone replacement therapy actually protective? Is it actually breast protective? Great question. It's suggestive that that's, that's the case. Point being is we got this wrong for almost a quarter of a century. And this kind of bleeds into the topic of being a medical feminist. There were women, typically women physicians, pushing for this to be available because they— a lot of women physicians go through middle age. They all go through middle age if they— as they age. And then also like, oh my gosh, you know, brain fog. I'm actually kind of experiencing that now with a lot of females I'm close to, a lot of patients that have been seeing me for years going through change of life. And it's Horrible. You lose your brain or you lose your energy. It's, it could be, you know, a wife lovingly calls it the suck. It's just like, it's just not, not pretty, not good. But the point is, is that we took away the major treatment for that osteoporosis. You know, the, the, the major medication to treat osteoporosis is actually hormone replacement therapy. And we took that away from women. Another thing we got 100% wrong is fat. We just, fat's back. You know, fat's back. Well, as of January of '26, we flipped the food pyramid upside down. Now it's fat back. Now fat is back. Another great example of the blind spot that we got totally wrong. So you say fat's back. How's fat back? Well, now we know that good fat's good, bad fat's bad. We now know that you actually need healthy fat for heart, your heart to work, your brain to work. You need fat for appropriate metabolism, for you not to have sugar spikes. If you don't eat enough healthy fats, you can actually be more prone to obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and a whole host of things. And we got that so wrong for over half of a century. And now the food pyramid's changed. If you notice, one of the things I think is funny, the things that are politically driven and politically motivated, this is one of the things that, you know, for the first week it came out, people like, oh my gosh, you know, this is wrong. You know, not to get in politics at all, but it died away within a week. You know, we're out, you know, maybe a month and change now and no one's arguing. You know, it's funny how many Groups on both sides were like, yeah, this is a pretty good idea. Yeah. Processed foods are bad. Yeah. Lots of carbs are bad. Yeah. We need more protein. Like it's the consensus was already there. It was just under the surface waiting to pop up. And how long did we get fat wrong? Half a century. So the point is with this idea of medical gas— sorry, blind spots.
There's—
this happens all the time. We get these things wrong a bunch. So the question I have for you is, are there things you think that we're getting wrong right now? There probably are. Are there things in your loved ones, yourself? Yes. And if medical error, which I believe this fact to be true, is the third most common cause of death in our country. All of a sudden, knowing these blind spots, looking for them and preventing them can be a huge way you can help maintain your health and avoid medical error. Anyway, we're gonna keep on going through this series over the next several weeks, talking about blind spots, microaggressions, and being a medical feminist and what that means. Most of my patients at this stage of my career are women, about 80% of the population I care for. And so it becomes a big issue because we want to take care of everybody, especially one group of our population that's really been mistreated, miscarried for, for a long, long time. We need to reverse that. And so we'll keep on talking about these things that we get wrong. And the goal that you can be educated, practitioners can get educated, we can start getting things right and do better going forward. Thanks. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.
My daughter was never supposed to walk, talk, or crawl. And today at 19, she's thriving. And guess what? We ignored every single thing the specialist told us to do. Hi, I'm Dr. Aaron Hartman, and I wrote Uncurable: From Hopeless Diagnosis Defying All Odds, so you don't have to navigate this alone. In it, we share the secrets that she and thousands of my patients have used.
Grab the book or Audible wherever books are sold, or you can find it in the link below.
