Uncovering the Root Cause of Chronic Illness to Boost Health and Resilience with Dr. Aaron Hartman

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Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Welcome and thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert. Here I put the power of health in your hands and give you access to the top people in health and wellness. In each episode I share safe ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut, detox, and lots more. So if you want to get healthy and get off the dieting for life merry go round, I'll give you strategies that will help you look and feel better fast. Have you been like tired, achy, etc and you, you know, you know, you're not quite feeling like you should, but you don't think you're feeling bad enough to do anything about it. Then something happens. Like you travel somewhere, you get food poisoning or something happens, you just, you're done. You're like kicked off your game. Well, we are going to be talking about just that today. What was what creates these like weird, complex cases, chronic illnesses or mystery illnesses, what things precede them, what could be triggers for them and what you can do so they don't happen. And I have someone amazing to share with you today, Dr. Aaron Hartman. He is an expert in mystery illness, diagnosis and treatment. This journey into this field of medicine started when he and his wife adopted their first first daughter from foster care. She has cerebral palsy and countless dietary neurological issues. And they went from specialist to specialist and realized that our current healthcare system just doesn't have all the answers. This changed his entire career path to specialize in complex and mystery illnesses which are actually way more common than you may realize. He's an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at VCU School School of Medicine, founder and lead researcher at the Virginia Research center, and president of Chesterfield Family Practice Board certified. And he's also board certified in family medicine, integrative and holistic medicine, anti aging, metabolic and regenerative and functional medicine. Lots of stuff. And actually all of that, really a lot of those advanced, advanced certifications happened once he started to look at what was going on with his daughter. It sparked a whole lot which you're going to hear about in this interview. And you're also going to hear about what you should be looking at right now so that you are never falling prey to one of these mystery illnesses. Or maybe if you are, right now, what you can do. So we're going to have a really cool dialogue about this. He also has a book, what to do before youe See youe Doctor, which is super helpful. You can grab that@jjvirgin.com what to do and I will be right back with Dr. Aaron Hartman. Stay with me.

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Chicago, IL Dr. Aaron Hartman welcome to the show.

JJ. It's great to be here with you.

You have a like, you know, goosebumpy story about your Daughter. So I would love to start there because it's a great way for people to get to know who you and your wife, Becky, are and how amazing you are as beings and how amazing you are as a doctor.

Gotcha. Well, thanks for that. You know, it's. You know, my daughter is what got me into the field of functional medicine. My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist, and her field of specialties was kids with special needs. And Anna, when she was about 2, was losing her foster home. And so my wife was like, hey, would you consider bringing this little girl home? And I said, sure. Over the process of doing that, I fell in love with her. And so I wanted to do what was best for her. And one of the first things we ran into was kids with CP are notorious for not gaining weight.

CP is.

I'm sorry, cerebral palsy.

Okay.

Cerebral palsy is basically brain damage in a child before they're born. So usually they use oxygen to the brain due to a placenta or something like that before they're even born. And so one of the things is they don't eat. And so the doctors recommended putting a feeding tube, so putting a hole in her belly so they could pour formula into her stomach so she could gain weight. And my wife and I were talking and we had hopes. She was never supposed to walk or talk or crawl. She was supposed to have severe. Mr. And we just didn't.

Mr. Is what?

Mental retardation. Sorry.

Okay.

Yeah, so she's supposed to have severe mental retardation, and we just didn't believe that. We saw there was something there. And so knowing that if you put a feeding tube in a kid's belly, they don't learn how to talk. Like, there's so much into breastfeeding. I mean, one of the things kids first do when they're learning to eat actually stimulates talking and chewing and a lot of stuff. And we didn't want our daughter to bypass that. You know, having a feeding tube in your belly, you don't learn how to crawl. And we had. Even though she was never supposed to crawl, we. We had hopes, so we just opt out of doing that and realized it was going to be a lot of work trying to figure out how to get food into her mouth. Six months later, my wife, who is a pediatric OT occupational therapist who works with kids with special needs, found a growth chart for kids with cerebral palsy. My daughter was right in the middle, so she was average for cerebral palsy. And so the specialist who was supposed to know all these things looked at A regular kid growth chart and had these unreal expectations for my daughter with cp. And the result was going to be she would have had a unnecessary surgical procedure. And that was like smokes. Well, that was my first aha moment. Like, wait a second. Like the. The expert didn't actually know everything. And so this was repeated again about a year or two later with her eyes. She has this thing called strabismus, which is kind of wobbly eyes, where eyes kind of just kind of wobble over. It can. It's usually associated with brain. Brain injury and damage. And so they're like, let's do surgery to cosmetically make her look better. I'm like, well, why? Like, what is the benefit? And so we found another ophthalmologist who was more seasoned, who was like, you know, actually, you don't need this. This is the thing you need to think about brain development. And so from that the get go, we started questioning. I don't want to say question authority, but questioning the experts. Like, if something was told to us that didn't resonate, that didn't like, feel right, our default became question research, find out. And that's what led us into functional medicine with my daughter. Because she wasn't. There was really no hope for her. And we're like, we had great hopes. We found you suit therapy or intensive therapy, which is used in Eastern Europe. It's actually used. It's one of the things that cosmonauts would actually use to maintain muscle strength in outer space. I'm like, well, why can't we use that here on Earth? We went down all these little rabbit trails and rabbit holes. And over the period of 14 years, she's now 16, walking with forearm crutches, talking. She actually won't stop talking. To be honest with you, my wife have to remind me, which you did. My wife reminds me you paid a lot of money for that. She loves playing chess. She's a great kid. And it's been years and years and years down these rabbit holes. And that's what eventually led to me opening a functional medicine practice was like how I feel now compelled to start offering this to my regular patients. How can I help other people find these answers? That many of them are super basic. Eating real food, working on sleep, exercise. One of the biggest things that changed my daughter's brain. The average kid practices walking six to eight hours a day. Well, my daughter wasn't walking. How can I replicate that? And so we're using things like tens and nms and a bunch of other Stimulation things. We went to Ontario and actually used the Pons device, which is this electrical dice in your tongue that activates the brain, just all kinds of things. And it's, how can I get this stuff to my patients, to regular people? And so that's what I've kind of how my practice has developed.

You know, you don't know much about my story. And I'm just sitting here going, this just makes me so happy to hear. When Grant, Grant. The first night Grant was in the hospital and the doctor's explaining why we have to let him die. And I'm looking at the doctor going, and my other son's looking at the doctor like, yeah, no. You know, but all along the way, we had to keep putting this bigger vision out there. Like, all along the way, they kept telling us what they believed was possible. Right? He was never going to walk. He was never going to talk. He wouldn't wake up. And I was like, okay, well, I'm going to hold the vision of this. And, you know, it is really challenging if you go into a healthcare practitioner and they try to limit that vision and they don't have the hope. And I think they don't realize the impact. Like, if you don't personally have the hope or vision or the person who's taking care of you doesn't, like, you're going to get. You're going to get limited by their limited belief. So just you having that hope and vision to start with and going, well, asking the right questions, how do we get her to walk? How do we get to do these things? You know, what are the basics? Just because it didn't work before doesn't mean that it can't work. Right?

And it's one of those things where also, when they're so used to seeing poor outcomes, they just assume the next outcome's gonna be the same. And so it's just like, well, I don't accept that. And I've. I don't accept that for my patients. You know, I don't stop fighting for them. If someone comes in, is having issues, I just. I'm patient. I stay there because I know I've seen, for lack of a better word, near miraculous results. So I don't accept the status quo. And I don't think anybody working with people, you know, should accept the status quo.

Well, it's because you expect to see those results, right? You expect them. This is why you have a big waiting list, because of that. And I know that you're treating a lot of what you know there's, there's not really a term for them or determined to figure it out because, you know, some might call it a mystery illness. They can't find the diagnosis, or they finally find the diagnosis and it's this complicated thing or this chronic thing. And as you're unpacking these, and these people are coming into you and you're seeing that you've got the hope and the bigger vision for them and you know what's possible, you know, what are you finding with. And I know these people have searched all over to get a thing and a diagnosis and they're not any better. And then they come to you kind of doctor of last resort. What's going on?

Well, I'm seeing a lot of different things. I'm seeing a lot of times people skip over the basics. They kind of. Everybody's looking for a magic bullet. You know, either they're looking for, you know, blue lipped muzzle extract pulled from the Marianas Trench, or Sheilajit that was pulled off for the Himalayans on the eastern side. You know, they're looking for all these crazy kind of things and they' they're skipping over the basic stuff, which is, is your diet really clean? I mean, people don't realize how important fat is for their immune system, for gut function, for a whole host of things. They don't realize the bacteria in their gut, like feeding those, those gut bacteria is feeding your brain. What are you feeding them? The environment. You know, people think, oh, my house is clean, my school's clean. You know, people talk a lot about mold, you know, but what else, what other chemicals are in your environment? What other things in the carpet? There's a whole host of things people ignore. So one of the things I do is just basic things. Gut, stress and sleep. If people aren't sleeping, your immune system's not resetting, your brain's not resetting your GI tract, you're not going to digest your food properly the next day. So once we work on the basics, then we take it the next level. Okay, let's do some advanced testing. What nutrients are you deficient in? And it's really interesting how a lot of people will skip a basic fatty acid analysis, a basic nutritional analysis, just really super basic stuff in my world, at least. And then like, okay, what, what things are, what other things can we use? And it's really interesting how many people have trauma. You know, I think, you know, having a kid with special needs, you know, who doesn't have some degree of trauma these days, and that can affect, yeah, and that can affect people's immune system. The high cortisol from that can affect their gut health how? Well, their brain heals when they're sleeping. And so, yes, I take these deep dives down, you know, you know, mold and CRS and Lyme and mast cell and all that stuff. Chronic inflammatory response syndrome. It's the official. When people say they have mold illness, it's actually they have cirs. But it's not just finding those technical, deep, cool things. It's like the basic stuff. And so a lot of times I'll see these complicated patients that have been to Mayo or I'm in Virginia, so they're usually coming from the University of Virginia or Mayo or Duke, and they've been in these really high end places and they missed the fact that this rare disease is actually induced by environmental chemicals or toxins or things like overgrowth of bacteria in their gut called SIBO or dysbio. So they don't realize these super basic things that tons of people have are the major driving factors for this person's complex mystery illness, rare disease kind of thing.

Well, and here's what's really interesting about this. Those things don't happen overnight, right? For the most part, a lot of these things you're talking about happen over time. And it's a compound effect. Maybe you're in a traumatic event, you're living in a house with mold, you're eating a crappy diet. You know, it's like a compound event of these things. So what can someone do? Because, you know, what are some of the signs coming up that someone is going to, is getting into a place where they're going to kind of tip the scale and get, get into, you know, an illness like this. What are some of those signs? And then what are some of the things that someone can start doing now? So they never get there. And I know prevention's hard to sell, but, you know, here's the thing. You do these things and you're gonna have better energy, you're gonna feel better, you're gonna slow down aging, you're not gonna have aches and pains. You can get rid of your belly fat too.

All right?

Correct. So like those things, like, difficult to lose weight, you know, someone's eating sticks, leaves and twigs. I'm fasting, I'm doing all these crazy things. They're not losing weight. It's not just a calorie thing, it's a metabolic thing. You know, people waking up with poor restorative sleep. I wake up feeling foggy in the morning it takes me two hours to get to get my energy up. I wake up multiple times during the night. Is something in your environment like that low grade infection causing that? People just don't. Their memory is not quite right, they forget things, they, they have problems focusing, concentrating. There's a lot of these basic things that people have issues with. Guts, gut stuff. It's amazing how many of my patients with long Covid illness had gut issues, had dysbiosis and sibo years and years and years before. And I'm diagnosing, actually one lady I was on this little Facebook messenger things with and I was diagnosing her SIBO across the country in a little room with her on long Covid and she was like, I was like, I think you have sibo. She's like. And she googled it while I was talking to other people. She's like, oh my gosh, I've had this for 20 years. And she had no idea that this thing exactly was setting her up. And the thing that pushed over the edge was this virus called the SARS CoV2. You know, and so those are the kind of basic things. Aches and pains in the morning. Do you wake up in the morning feeling stiff and like you're.

See, these are all the things, Aaron, that are, that were. You're just getting older.

Yes. Another limiting, another limiting belief. I don't, don't, don't.

Right. I don't accept that one at all.

I mean, how can you have the 80 year old who's hiking the mountains, who's skiing, who is living life up, traveling the world, who looks like they're 60 and you have the 60 year old who is like on death's door, who looks like they're 80. Like one person is physiologically 20 years younger, one person's physiologic. There's almost like a 40 year gap between the two of these. It's all these inflammatory things that revolve around their daily lifestyle that then set them up for the triggering event, which could be a car accident, concussion, tick bite, moving into a moldy house, traumatic relationship. And these triggers push them over the edge. And now they have this weird mystery thing that you have to go back and look, well, you're hyper mobile, you're a gymnast, you're an athlete. And people don't realize being double jointed or super mobile sets them up for inflammation. And so one of the things I do is connect these dots and kind of layer them, 1, 2, 3, 4 for the individual. And this is the Part about individualized healthcare, you know, how do we find out for that individual what their layer is? Because it might be first their gut, then their diet, it might be their environment first. It might be treating their acute infection from mono aligned first. And you have to figure that out for the patient. And it can't be this one size fits all kind of thing.

Right. But someone listening kind of going, all right, but like, so I'm, my sleep's not so great and I've got some joint pain, so what should I do? Like do I go see a doctor? Do I do things before? Like what would someone do? Because the reality is, you know, if you hear now that what, 70% of the population's overweight are obese and 12% is only metabolically healthy, I'd argue it's much lower than that. Like, so you're looking at the majority of people probably are sitting, listening, going, I've got brain fog. I've, you know, I'm not sleeping well. Like what, what are these things? And then, you know, then they, that triggering event pushes them over the edge. So what should they be doing? And they go to the doctor who does, says there's nothing really wrong. Right.

Well, there's two things. People typically, if they don't get the answers, usually they'll go and start looking at books. They'll Google stuff and find, you know, book XYZ and start following them. And so I think what that individual needs to do is either decide whether they're going to kind of do it theirself or find a practitioner that can walk them through this stuff. That's the first. So there's a lot of resources out there. We actually set up, we've talked about our community. That's one of the reasons we kind of set up our community and our educational stuff on our, in my practice is for these people who the do it yourself first, who want to figure themselves out, but they need a guide. Yeah, so, so that's kind of, you know, we've set, in my practice, I've set a lot of educational things for those people and that's what they need to do. You need to find someone to help work with you, you know, but if you're not, how would you know if.

You have the right person though? Like, how do you know, walking through this? Right. I know that's asking questions, tough questions.

It's true. Like everybody, you know, that's true. You know, first you need, someone's going to listen to you, that's going to listen to your story, your Whole story and understands what's going on. You obviously want to check out their reps, look at their online reviews and stuff, but also just you have to feel like they, that you connect with them. You know, you want to make sure they're properly educated, properly trained. You connect and they listen.

Properly educated and properly trained. How would you know that?

That you have to look on the website, research them.

You know, I don't believe that someone without training in functional medicine could really do this type of work, like integrative, functional. Right, like correct that they've learned lifestyle, the lifestyle side of this.

Well, you're talking to a medical doctor, so I'm, I'm, I'm like, so I'm going to say, look, you know, first, you know, a physician, you know, have they been trained through either Institute for Functional Medicine? Are they certified there? Have they been certified through a 4mm, which is like one of the biggest. I think it actually is the biggest integrative training organization in the world. AIHM has a training organization, has a training program as well, one of the high level tiered training programs that take two years, two to three years to finish that, you know, that's the standard I typically use for.

And I think it's important for people to understand this type of training because this is layered on top of medical training where you're going to learn all the key things you need to physiology, biology, et cetera, however, endocrinology. But this is really then digging into much more of a root cause approach to this. And then also and looking at things that you didn't learn in medical school, like, you know, what happens when you eat bad seed oils and you live in a moldy house and you have trauma.

Well, exactly what all of it as well is like in school you don't learn how the endocrine system connects with the neurological system and how the gut system connects with the psychological system. And so they don't learn how the body connects with the mind, connects with your environment. And that's what this kind of training teaches you, how to connect those dots. You know, someone has abnormal thyroid level, let's give you some thyroid medication. But what, what's the root cause of that? And so that's where the training kind of educates you how to connect those dots and then put a plan together that's it's more than just one pill, one medication, one supplement. It's. They're usually pretty, I mean, I don't. They're in depth, you know, they're pretty comprehensive.

So someone who is wanting to. Like right now you're listening to this, you're going, all right, I'm 40 plus. My sleep isn't quite what it used to be. I'm tracking it. And hopefully you're tracking your sleep because this is a super. I always think what you measure, monitor, you can improve. You should be checking all these things because if they all of a sudden start to shift, then you can start to go, what's going on? Or maybe you're going to the gym, not recovering like you used to. Any of these types of things. Again, I think most people have gone to their traditional doctor who was like, you're fine, you know, so part of this is to start dig, to dig deeper to find a functional medicine doctor who's going to look at all of these things. But are there things that they can be doing right now and is there a hierarchy? Like when you take people through this in the community and I know you've got an ebook, you're going to be also giving. But is there kind of like a hierarchy that you would take people through if they were going to be a do it yourself or. Because, you know, it's great with, with the Internet and having all this information and it's terrible with the Internet and having all this information. Right, exactly.

Yeah. There's everybody's, you know, my thing is I've called my triangle of health. What are the three top things everybody needs to do? Well, that increases your resilience, your health, decreases your inflammation. The first one is your gut. The next one is stress. And the third one is sleep. I use the word gut more as a universal term. That includes diet. It also includes how you engage with your food when you eat. It also includes sleep and how sleep affects your gut, stress and how it affects your gut. Just the overall realm of gut health.

Cool, let's go, let's unpack that further and go key into. What would you say to someone, you've got, you've got, you know, one thing you can do with them, it's focusing here. What are the key things you're going to tell them to get started with?

Well, the first thing I tell people is eat real food. Which that alone, it like is mind blowing. Like what is, what's real food? You know, it's like things that's unprocessed, unadulterated. That's like the. One of the biggest things with this diet, just eating real food. One of the next things is removing and we can argue back and forth, which is number two or three. My opinion Will change based on the time you ask me. But removing sugars, high fructose corn syrup, processed sugars, all these things that basically feed the wrong kinds of bacteria in your gut. Removing rancid orals, removing toxic orals, trans fats. It's amazing how inflammatory these things and.

Explain exactly what those are for people because I think there's a lot of. Especially with the keto world now and eat more fat, I think it's like, no, it's eat the right fat, make an oil change. So what are these damaging oils? So people know to look out for them.

So I mean a general rule of thumb and assume it's damaging unless you've researched it. Right. That's. That's probably like a pretty global term, but that's probably right more times than you're not. So like your canola, Canola oil, which isn't everything, rapeseed oil or the other term for it, it's actually a deodorized hexane extracted oral that is omega 6 predominant. That basically makes your cell membrane sticky and not fluid. Soy oil, which is in everything, comes from genetically modified soy. It's full of glyphosate. And when they heat these orals to process them, they create trans fats, the next level. So your seed oils, it's really interesting. Nuts seeds, they're incredibly healthy for you. But when they make the orals the way they do the exp. Expeller pressure and they actually burn the orals, almost like when you're cooking on your stovetop with butter and smokes. So all your seed oils, basically, unless they, Unless you've researched how they get it out, probably have been heated. Those are like the first three ones. Then they're all like your, your fake oils, your margarine.

Do people still do margarine?

You know what it's. If you look at, well one, they still sell in the grocery store, so it's still there.

The other thing is that maybe it's.

Just because it's ingredient down the list.

You know, they could have made it 20, 30, 50 years ago and it's still, it's still okay today.

It just wants to think it never goes back. It's kind of sort of like embalming fluid, kind of sort of like if you take this oral and hydrogenated it, bacteria can't live in it, yeast can't live in it, bugs die in it. It just, it lasts for. I don't say forever because. But a really, really probably pretty darn close.

You know, I had a great nutrition Mentor early on and when he was talking about margarine, he goes, listen, if the bugs won't touch it, you shouldn't touch it. You want competition for your food.

I'm like, okay, then we focus on margarine. But there's other hydrogenated vegetable oil. So, you know, they might say vegetable oil. They might have some other term. Hyaluraic oral. Right. Well, that's basically something that's been processed. Anything that should be liquid at room temperature, that's solid has been hydrogenated to some extent. And those things are hidden in all your boxed shelf food. Foods have these oils hidden in them. So real food, sugar oils. And then it's like a lot of people have. Our immune systems are so activated that we start reacting against our food. And that's when doing things like in the basic elimination diet can be super helpful to figure out like, hey, maybe for this person right now at this time of their life, dairy, soy, corn grains are really super inflammatory. Let's remove these for a time and let your system kind of calm down. So those are kind of like the three or four top things I start with with the gut because ultimately food is medicine and if you don't start there, everything, you know, supplements by definition. Supplement, Right, Exactly.

Think of the name.

Yeah.

If you're not exactly. If you're not doing the basic stuff, then what's the point of supplementing a terrible diet, you know?

Yeah.

It's amazing how quickly you can turn someone's health around by just changing what's at the end of their fork.

Correct.

And you know, probably just listening to this right now, if you can start with that, you might find that when you do go to the doctor, maybe you just need a tune up. You don't need a full overhaul because you've already done some of the heavy lifting.

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Okay, so gut, the next thing you were saying was what?

Stress. So stress is such a hard one because I'm seeing so many people. It's not just the stress, like, ah, I hate my job. You know, life is stressful. The economy, the world. But it's like people internalize this and they have trauma. I think one of the things my eyes have been open to over the last several years is how much trauma there is out there. It's not just the numbers that probably 10% of males have been sexually abused. Up to a quarter of females, major adverse childhood events, people dealing with issues in childhood. But there's all these things, like being a female with a breast lump. Someone tells you, hey, it might be cancer. Three months later, after multiple biopsies, after a lumpectomy, you're told, ah, have a great life. It's fine. Like, that's trauma. That's traumatizing. And what opened my eyes to that is just being a parent of a kid with special needs, knowing other parents with special needs. Like, your kid almost dies two or three times every year, et cetera, et cetera. After a while, it's like wasting it.

These people leaves a mark. I can tell you. It was one of the big things with my son. I went, how do I help my other son who had to look at his brother on a stretcher with bones sticking through his skin and glass, you know, fragments. Like, how do you get over that one? Right?

It's amazing how. And you start talking with people. It's, it's. It's the. It's the, ah. It's. It's the unusual person who doesn't. If you don't dig, who doesn't have some degree of trauma in their life. You know, I used to grow up thinking, oh, you know, my life is amazing. It's perfect. And I go, well, my dad almost died when I was in eighth grade and I was bullied as a kid. And then you start going through things, you realize, listen, we've all got something we've had to work through. And how's that affecting your sympathetic nervous system? Your fight or flight? How is that putting you on edge, making you anxious? And the anxiety and palpitations and the mind shatter you're dealing with now are not, you're, quote unquote, a weak person or aren't working hard enough. It's this thing in the past that's in your lizard brain, and you got to do things besides just working hard or you got to be. You got to do trauma therapy, basically.

So is that something that you. How do you do that with patients? Like, where do you send them?

Well, I personally, you know, where I'm at in Richmond, Virginia. There's not. We don't have a ton of options. So we do have some people do things like emdr, which as using eye movements to reset your brain or tapping or breathing or trauma breathing. So we have some people who do that. The hardest thing I have with patients is helping them realize, like, talking to someone's. Like, I was seeing a patient this past week who was telling me about how, you know, they grew up with a narcissistic father. And I was like, whoa. Like, literally one of her issues was like, she was always on edge her whole life. That her father would go off on her, like, like for 18 years of her life. Like, that's. It's. And it might take me three, four, five, six months for that person to realize and come to realization that's actually trauma. Because for them, like, wasn't that the norm? Like, isn't this normal? And so which means you live on.

Edge for the rest of your life.

I mean, it's amazing. It's amazing how many people are out there on a little or close to the cliff, you know. And so part of what I do is try to help people realize what they may have a little bit of trauma. And once they get to that point, like, hey, what resonates with you? You know, some people breathing exercises just helps them a lot. Some people praying, meditation. Some people need to work with a therapist who specializes in trauma. It just meeting people where they're at and what resonates with the person I'm talking to. So I have like a whole list of things, whether it's, you know, DNRs, whether it's amygdala retraining that I'll kind of talk to people about, and I kind of just lay a buffet out there and kind of come back to it every time I see them. What resonates with you? What do you think will work? Because ultimately it's not what I think as the doctor, it's what are they going to. What resonates and what will they do?

I think the biggest challenge with trauma and stress is, is trying to. It's. It's so intangible.

It's a. It's intangible in our society, our culture. Like, just work through, work hard, put your head down, and, you know, you'll make it, you know, you know, if it's a sign of weakness, if you can't work through it. And it's like, you know what, that's, that's very old school thinking and we need to move past that.

So beyond stress, we have the gut stress. And then was Sleep the other one.

Yes, ma'. Am. Sleep is the last one that we are. It's really funny to think about. In the late 1800s, the average person slept eight and a half hours a night. And now the average person sleeps between six and six and a half hours a night.

Wow.

Yes. So we as a culture, and that's people who don't have Oura rings, people who aren't tracking their stuff.

Wow. Well, my husband was. When I first met him, he slept five to six hours a night. And I'm like, this will not work.

I converted him while I was talking to him, you know, not so long when he was like bragging about he had like three or four hours of rem, you know, in deep sleep. And I was like, how do you do that, man?

I know he gets better. He has better Oura Ring scores than me, which is upsetting, but yes, exactly.

But yes, sleep. So it's amazing, first of all, how many people aren't in bed long enough. And then how do people. I think sleep is one of the hardest things to track because people will close their eyes and wake up and it's eight hours later. And they think they slept for eight hours and they didn't. They had multiple awakenings. Maybe they didn't get enough REM or deep sleep. They had, you know, aptic events. They stopped breathing. And I see a lot of. And this is one of the things I actually find. I see a lot of people with undiagnosed sleep apnea. You know, a lot of slender, athletic type folks. I call it skinny person sleep apnea. They have smaller airways. There's a lot of people have low level sleep apnea. And it's not, not that bad because they function. But over time, this not sleeping is a stress on your midbrain. It stresses your hormones, it stresses your digestive tract. It affects digestion and sleep. Medicine itself is one of the newest fields and specialties in medicine. It's one of those things we understand more about all the bad things that happen when you don't sleep. We're still trying to figure out why we need sleep, but it's just a big thing that impacts absolutely everything.

Can you see from one of the sleep trackers if you've got that type of sleep apnea, will it show on the sleep tracker?

Well, that's a good question. My Oura ring. Supposedly they're going to be updating them here sometime in the next month or two.

My Oura ring, an apple watch. And then I wore a Garmin too. And then all of a sudden I went, this is kind of ridiculous. But they all gave different information.

Well, that's the thing about it, because typically in the hospital when people are measuring your oxygen level, they're using a finger device, not a wrist device. And so I think they all have their issues. They're not 100% accurate. If you really want to diagnose sleep apnea, you really need to do a home device, which usually your physician sets you up with. But you can look at your tracking and see how much you're moving, if your limbs are moving or jerking around a lot. Sometimes those are episodes where you stop breathing or have restless legs. What your heart rate variability is, that's another great marker. Is it improving throughout the whole night or is it kind of jerky your heart rate? So there are indirect ways you can look to kind of get a feel for the quality of sleep. But the best way, obviously is doing a sleep apnea home based test.

Yeah, I hope that right now as you're listening to this, you're realizing what you really need to be looking at when you're going to a doctor, what you can do beforehand. And that this isn't just going in and getting your basic lab test done and saying, looking at your cholesterol and sending you on your way that this is that. What we now know is so much deeper than that. But it still goes back to a lot of the basics.

It does, it does. I mean, it's like, you know, the foundational thing. It's amazing how much like shift sleep work disorder, for example, is this disease. It's got a code that insurance pays for. It's basically people who work at nighttime have an increased risk for diabetes, obesity, hormone issues, endometriosis, cancer. So it's just like, you just work night. So what can you do to help combat that with your hormones, with your diet? And so it's just amazing how, how powerful the basic things are with our health.

You know, it's so crazy. When I was early on in my career, I had a nurse come to me who was a shift nurse. She worked the graveyard shift and she said, oh, I heard it was. And she was obese. And she goes, I heard it was like, if you do that, you'll, you know, if you work those shifts, you're going to be obese. I go, that's nonsense sense. I didn't know anything about it. And I was like, man, that's not the case. Not true. And so I just said, you just have to stay on this schedule the whole time. We're just going to fake your sleep. We're going to do like. I just shifted her, right? So I just had her using these special lights that made it like it was, you know, daytime, during the night, and it blacked her out and during the day and flipped everything. But then I started reading all the research and I'm kind of glad I didn't know it when she came in because if I said, oh, yeah, you are and you're going to. But like, but I didn't, I was like, nope, not going to be a case. So, So I, I just always say that because I think, you know, if that was the case, if you are forced to work like the night shift, if you have to do it, like, how do you then change this to mimic normal physiology? What are the things? And I think there's a lot of stuff that we can do out there.

I mean, I think the, what you said is JJ's right. Like, the best thing is the way our buyers are naturally designed or made. But the reality is, is we need nurses in the hospital at night. We need people, you know, shipping our food around the country at nighttime. We need. Without night workers, our country probably fall apart as far as things happening, you know. And so how do those people that are keeping our country together by doing these basic things we need, how do we keep them as healthy as possible? And some of the things are having a set cycle on the weekends. You know, people say, I'll catch up sleep on the weekend. Like, how can you make sure you're getting the most amount of sleep when you're working your shift? And then on the weekends, you know, know, working on your gut, working on all these things. And that's where things like using light therapy can be helpful. Using things like magnesium theanine to help you get into a deeper sleep when you're, when you're actually in that bed, the place you're sleeping, you know, make it as much like the nighttime as you can get. You know, sun blocking shade, so that's as dark as possible. And just, you know, it's really interesting some of the data. The most important time in the sleep wake cycle is when you get up, not when you go to bed. So just setting those times and keeping to them as best you can. And that's, that's, I think, where a lot of shift workers get in. It's almost like I got extra time. I work at nighttime and I'm with my kids and family during the daytime. It's like, no, yeah, I got some, I got Some patients who are, who are news reporters and they like, you have to get at work at like 2:30 and 3 in the morning and they're like, oh yeah, I'm with my family, I take my kids to sports. Then I'm like, you're sleeping like four hours a night. Yeah, it's not sustainable.

For a while there I had all these rock stars as clients and they'd so train their body to go to bed at 3am that was when they went to bed. I'm like, okay, this is, you know, you're off the road now we have to fix this thing. So, yeah, crazy. So we have a great gift for everybody and it's what to do before you see your doctor. And maybe they won't even need to see you, which would be great because I know you've got quite a, quite, quite the list there. And it also, as you get this, I'd love it if you have some information about your community too because you've created a great community where someone can come in and get that support, get the support on gut and the stress and the sleep. And again, these things are the things that you want to have dialed in before you go see your doctor. Because what if you actually could fix the thing?

Yeah. Well, one of the things it's, I see sometimes when people come see me, they'll. We'll spend six months just getting their diet straight, working on stress, working on sleep, getting these basic things. What if they could do those before their first visit? Then all of a sudden that knowledge, having that knowledge beforehand accelerates everything we do. And so it's always, I'm always super excited when I see people who are prepped and ready to rock and roll. They come see me and it's like we're off to the races. They knocked out of the ballpark. And it's. But the more, the more normal thing as a person that we spend six months a year just figuring out how to like change the oils, get the sugar out of the diet. Is that really, do I really need to do this? And repetition, repetition is the mother of all learning. And so if the only learning you're doing is when you see me in my office, it's going to take a long time for it to catch.

Well, I'm sure most people would like to feel better fast. So here's a way to do it. I'm going to have all of this for you@jjvirgin.com Whattodo. How do you like that? Jjvirgin.com what to do and Again, these are the things that you want to get dialed in first. This is coming straight from a functional medicine doctor who. These are things that he'll spend the time working with the patients. You do this first and then, you know, hey, you may not need to see someone. I think you still should be doing this on having, having a functional medicine doctor on your team, seeing them at least once a year, getting everything checked up so you catch things before they become problems. Because we don't get. Get sick overnight, we get sick over time. And there's all sorts of signs along the way that we can, we can stop and turn things around before they get bad. Right. Or before we have a triggering event.

Absolutely. There's so many things that go on and people just overlook them because they say, well, it's normal for my age, for my health status, for my stress. Everybody's like this, you know, and unfortunately, like you said, you started this out, J.J. you know, half of our. The numbers were obesity. 80% of the population's insulin resistant. You know, 80% is, yeah. So if you look at that, 15 of the country's diabetic, 35% is pre diabetic. But if you didn't say insulin resistant, I. E. Their fasting sugars above 84, their insulin's up, it's 80% of the country. And that insulin being off and sugar being off, that pops up 15 or 20 years before they get the diagnosis of diabetes. The A1C creeps up about 8, 8 or 10 years before they get the diagnosis of diabetes. What if they could catch that out and not, not be caught when they're, you know, in the ER with their, you know, crazy high diabetes and headaches.

So while I, I still remember hearing this statistic a couple years ago, they said, you know, the year 20, 30, 100% of people will be diabetic in the United States. And I go, that is the most ridiculous thing. I think this was 10, 15 years ago. And now you're looking at it and I don't know, the pandemic kind of put the foot on the gas, but you're like, wow, wow, this could actually be happening.

In 1996, when I was in medical school, I was told I'd never see a kid with type 2 diabetes. In 2000, I diagnosed my first 16 year old with type 2 diabetes. Now, 25% of kids in our country are type 1 and type 2 diabetic.

Oh, God.

Like, this has been, this is like. And the thing is, this is. If you catch these markers early, you can I think prevent or at least greatly delay these progression of these chronic illnesses.

Heartbreaking. Yeah, let's turn that one around. All right, so grab the what to do@jjvirgin.com whattodo what to do before you see your doctor. And it has been amazing talking with you. You are fantastic. Everyone can get the sense of what you should be getting when you go to your doctor by this. So this is what you want.

Thanks a lot JJ for those kind words. I appreciate that.

Alrighty. That was amazingly fantastic. Like, there's so much stuff to unpack there, but I hope that you take action right away. First of all, with grabbing the what to do before you see your doctor book. And you can get that free@jjvirgin.com what to do and then to start to take some of these things and put them into action. Unpacking gut and what you can do there. In terms of diet, notice that everything always comes to do an elimination diet. So that would be the virgin diet, hint, hint. And then of course, working on your stress. That's been a big one for me over this last year of doing, committing to daily meditation a la Dr. Joe Dispenza. And then of course, working on your sleep. So lots of good stuff in this one. Probably one you're gonna wanna listen to again and share with your friends. And if you've not subscribed yet, make sure you do so you never miss an amazing interview like this. There you go. So I will see you next time.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I check all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the most moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.