Episode 34: Is Mold Stopping You From Getting Better?

Would you believe the very air you're breathing might be sabotaging your health? Imagine my surprise when I learned that mold - something we often dismiss as just a minor annoyance - is actually a silent invader wreaking havoc on our health and well-being. So, I decided it was time to talk about this topic again. And who better to guide us than my guest today, Jason Earle., founder of GotMold? in the MycoLab USA and a self-proclaimed air quality crusader?

This episode is a revelation, exposing the hidden dangers of household mold and its three main components - spores, mycotoxins, and volatile organic compounds. Jason's own life-altering battle with mold allergies led him to become one of the leading mold experts. His personal journey and professional insights shed light on the unseen perils and the link between mold, dampness, depression, and mental health. We also unravel the unexpected impact of mold in our food supply, especially in imported food, and the alarming role of mycotoxins in triggering health issues.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Jason shares invaluable tips on mold remediation and water damage prevention. This episode underscores the urgent need for vigilance and proactive measures in managing mold exposure for our overall health and well-being. 

So tune in, arm yourself with knowledge, and take the first step towards a healthier lifestyle. 

And don't forget to share your thoughts and ideas - your insights not only enrich our discussions but also help shape the future of this podcast.

Follow Jason Earle - 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gotmold/

Website: https://www.gotmold.com/about/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gotmold 

Go to  https://www.gotmold.com/lifestyleisyourmedicine/ and get a 10% discount with code lifestyle10 on a mold test kit.

Watch the video of this episode on YouTube

Connect with me

Website: www.edpaget.com

email: ed@edpaget.com

Thanks for listening! Send me a DM on Facebook or Instagram

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to the your Lifestyle is your Medicine podcast, where we do deep dives and topics of mind, body and spirit. Through these conversations you'll hear practical advice and effective strategies to improve your health and ultimately add health span to your lifespan. I'm Ed Padgett. I'm an osteopath and exercise physiologist with a special interest in longevity. Now, do you know the difference between having a mould problem and having a mould in your house? Did you know that having a mould in your environment could be the cause of chronic health conditions and even the culprit holding you back from losing weight?

Speaker 1: 0:37

Today's guest is Jason L. He's founder of GotMould in the MycoLab USA and an outspoken air quality crusader. Now, when he was young, jason was allergic to nearly everything in his environment. Jason's asthma was so severe that he was initially diagnosed as having cystic fibrosis. Unfortunately, absenteeism due to battling the symptoms of Lyme disease and the asthma and his mother's suicide led him to drop out of high school at 16 and go and find work in a local gas station. This could have been the end of his story, but through a fortunate turn of events, jason found himself becoming a stockbroker on Wall Street, which led him to become the youngest licensed broker in history and earning a Guinness world record at the age of just 17. So how did this Wall Street whiz kid end up becoming a mould expert? What does this have to do with his early childhood, growing up in a mouldy farmhouse? Now he'll explain all of this and more in today's episode. Jason has spent the last 20 years performing countless sick building investigations, solving many medical mysteries along the way and helping thousands of families recover their health and peace of mind by discovering and treating mould problems. He's been featured on the Good Morning America show, extreme Makeover, home Editions, the Doctor Oshow, entrepreneur Wild, and he is featured in at least two college textbooks.

Speaker 1: 1:56

Now, mould is a really important topic and it's not well understood in the health world, and I learned a lot from talking to Jason. I'm sure you will too. But before we dive into that, I want to remind you that if you're my direct help with lifestyle coaching, maybe you're too tired, you're in pain, maybe you're lacking drive and the doctor said you just need to change your lifestyle, but you don't know where to start. Give me an email at edpadgetcom or visit my website edpadgetcom. While you're there, you can also sign up for my weekly newsletter packed full of great advice about using lifestyle medicine to add health span to your lifespan. Time to get on with the show. Jason, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 2:33

So good to be here.

Speaker 1: 2:34

All right, so we're going to have a great conversation today. We're going to look at the topic of mould how you got into mould from being a Wall Street Whiskid to mould, how mould can affect people's health in ways they don't often realise, and how to detect it and what to do about it. Is there anything else you want to add into that before we get going?

Speaker 2: 2:53

I think that's a great start.

Speaker 1: 2:55

All right, so tell us what is mould, and why should we be worried about it?

Speaker 2: 3:02

Well, mould is part of Kingdom Fund, which is, by Paul Sammits' description, the Earth's immune system and communications network, so there's potentially a benevolence land to this, although mould does evoke fear in the hearts of many. Mould is known as micro fungi, up there with yeasts, as opposed to mushrooms, which are the macro fungi, and mould is often referred to as nature's great recycler. Its job is to turn dead plant matter back into dirt, and so it's doing its job if it's doing that in your yard, not so much if it's doing it in your living room.

Speaker 1: 3:43

Okay, yeah, mould. We actually had a lecture on mould in our osteopathic training, but it wasn't anything to do with mould breaking stuff down. It was really interesting. It was to do with when you expose mould to an anaesthetic, it freezes. I don't know if you've heard this. It's called slime. Mould does this and when the anaesthetic wears off, the mould pulses again or it moves in a pulsation, and the rhythm of the pulsation is the same as our craniosacral rhythm, and the time it takes for the mould to wear off is the same time it takes for sorry, the analgesic to wear off. Is the same time it takes for it to wear off in humans.

Speaker 1: 4:24

So there's this weird connection between the rhythm of slime mould, the most ancient thing on the planet, and our cerebral spinal fluid mechanisms in the body.

Speaker 2: 4:35

That's fascinating. That is a first for me. I'm always amazed at our relationship with mould because or fungi in general, because, in fact, we are genetically more closely related to fungi than we are bacteria, which is part of the reason why antibiotics work well on us and why antifungal medications can actually be very harmful for us, so it does not surprise me that you'd see similar rhythms.

Speaker 1: 4:59

Yeah, okay, all right. So that's what mould is, and why is that detrimental to be in our households?

Speaker 2: 5:09

Well, mould is really the tool of decay, it's a function of decay, and so whenever, if you think about us on an evolutionary basis, most people recoil viscerally from the smell or the presence of feces, vomit or dead animals, rotting animals. Right, there's a visceral repulsion to that, and mould is the precursor to real decay and rot. And so if you dial it all the way back, it's no surprise that we have a visceral and immune response to the metabolic activities of fungi growing indoors. And so the other thing is that moulds, as it's, growing the spores. So there's really three fundamentally important components to mould. This is a hyper simplification for conversation purposes, but essentially you have spores, which are the hardy reproductive capsules that are kind of seed-like, that break free, become airborne and go forth and prosper. Your job is to go find a place where it's going to get wet and damp and then they're going to proliferate. Then you also have the mycotoxins, which get a lot of the headlines, but disproportionately so, because only about 100 or so of the 100,000 species actually produce these chemical toxins that are actually to inhibit growth of other microorganisms, but also because, like I said before, we're closely related to fungi that can also have an adverse impact on our health.

Speaker 2: 6:50

And thirdly, there's the microbial gases, and they're called MVOCs, and that's microbial volatile organic compounds. And most of us are familiar with VOCs, specifically the man-made ones, which are unfortunately abundant in modern buildings, Paints, finishes, personal care products, cleaners. Many of them emit VOCs or comprise of VOCs, and so the microbes make them too. In fact, microbes make VOCs that are very similar to industrial solvents, almost identical to the man-made ones in many cases, and so when the seeds or the spores land on a surface and the right conditions are present, by the way, which are the same conditions that we enjoy as humans, so mold just likes to hang out with us. The spores are waiting for the stars to be in alignment, like a combination lock.

Speaker 2: 7:44

Where you've got the right temperature, you've got a food source, a nutrition source, which is basically what we build our buildings out, of, which we can dig into a little bit later. We essentially build buildings out of mold food. And then you've got to have the right temperature, you've got to have oxygen. These are aerobic organisms, contrary to popular opinion, people who think that they're growing in their gut and stuff. This is a false narrative. And then, of course, you have to have the right amount of moisture and of all of those things, the only thing that really is variable, that we can control, is moisture. And so when the right amount of moisture comes into play which is just outside of where we like to maintain in our buildings then you start to see condensation form, and then you see this really elegant biological process start to unfold, and so when the spores start to germinate, they release hyphae or sort of like these roots that go into the material that it's going to grow on, and then they start to release enzymes, and so they digest what they're eating outside of themselves, right, they don't have a stomach like we do. They digest outside, and when it's extracting the nutrition that it's seeking, it's also digesting and releasing digestive gases. And, without being crude, essentially these micro-bill gases are like mold farts, right, and they are releasing digestive. And, by the way, the micro-bill gases are also micro-bill gases. We don't really digest our food so much as we have an ancient partnership with these critters who do most of the digestion for us. I would argue that we're more like ambulatory composters than we are digestive organisms, and so these gases that are produced are emerging as a primary source of mold-related illness in current research, and they are known to cause initial symptoms like headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, anxiety and depression. Potentially, mitochondrial damage is showing up in animal studies.

Speaker 2: 9:51

This is the musty smell. To just bring it to the simplest term, the musty smell, which is long been considered an aesthetic nuisance, is actually a health hazard and can cause in chronic exposures. Can even lead to things like chemical sensitivities, and so it's in chronic inflammation. So when you think about the way this can cause adverse health effects, I like to say that if you're sucking on the tailpipe of any organism long enough, you're probably not going to feel well right, and so that's really what we're dealing with.

Speaker 2: 10:26

Here is you're dealing with the exhaust of an organism that's doing its best to eat your house, and the biggest problem that we have now in our society and this has been a slow process it began around World War II with the baby boomers, the demand for cheap and fast construction materials to build the houses that were necessary. We began building buildings out of paper mache and when drywall was first rolled out, and then we began tightening up the houses in the 70s due to the fuel crisis, and so we began having less and less air exchange to save energy and then we started painting our walls with toxic chemicals and floor finishes. But while we're doing this tightening up, we're also reducing air exchange. When the buildings get wet now, the mold growth in those bi-products the digestive bi-products, the mycotoxins and the MVOCs and the spores accumulate indoors. Thank you, it's always fun to kind of look back and say well, you know, why is that really a problem?

Speaker 2: 11:30

Well, in recent past we've also stopped going out of our buildings. We spend 90% of our time indoors. It used to be that we spent 90% of our time indoors and we'd go from building to building. We'd go from our house to the car and the car you know indoor air In your car it's still indoors and then the workplace. Now we don't even leave the building. We'd stay in the same place and we breathe 13 to 15 times a minute. If you do the math, that's 20,000 times a day. It's extraordinary, and, and and. If you think about the volume of air in total I've done the map on this and done the done, the actual, the actual experiments you breathe about 30 pounds of air a day. 30 pounds of air and, and and. That's remarkable because if you drink eight, eight ounce glasses of water, that's half a gallon. That's four pounds If you eat three meals and many of your listeners probably intermittent fast. But if you eat three big meals you might eat four pounds of food. So you're talking about air being your largest environmental exposure by sevenfold. It's remarkable.

Speaker 2: 12:38

Yet this is a blind spot and you know people often ask me why. Why do you think that is? Well, you know, if I think somebody sent one say if, if, if. Whoever discovered water, what was the fish right? And so we have a problem with this. We can't, we can't see past the tip of our nose is hiding in plain sight and and this constant rebreathing of these same chemicals and I mean that by the VOCs and the microbial chemicals that constant rebreathing has gotten us to a place where we've got outrageous autoimmune issues, We've got outrageous cancer issues. People's looking at food and water as a primary cause, and I'm here to suggest that we need to look more closely at what our largest environmental exposures are and start dealing with these things proactively through a combination of source control, ventilation and filtration.

Speaker 1: 13:38

Wow, that's quite the quite the introduction and that's a bombshell because you're right, even in the world of functional medicine or lifestyle medicine as well, we look at nutrition and we look at food. We may look at water if we're, you know, into the, the more sort of the liquid aspect of things, but we're certainly not looking at air. And to have that, you know, in pounds, like 30 pounds, that's a huge amount of air we're breathing in every day and I think the from a government point of view, they're aware of pollution being a problem in the main cities, but we're not aware of pollution in our homes coming from organic sources. And when you did that sort of introduction there, I've actually had people talk to me on this podcast before about mold and we didn't really get into the, the MVOCs. We more talked about the spores being a problem and I wasn't even aware these MVOCs were a problem. How does, how does the gas interact with our nervous system? How does the gas cause these problems in the body?

Speaker 2: 14:42

Well, sure, you know and I'll actually rewind a bit on this because it's a this, this was a series of awakenings for me about this. I, I, when I, when I was a kid, and I and I moved out of the moldy house and my symptoms went away I it was chalked up to adolescent remission, so I just went on, my went on with my life. My mother, two years later, committed suicide. Never thought about that in the context of how our buildings may be related to this. But then fast forward.

Speaker 2: 15:14

I got into the mold business and the healthy home business and in 2008, brown University did a remarkable study. It was a rather large, involved 6,000 participants, and they were curious about the connection, potential connection, between mold and dampness and doors and depression. They were actually trying to debunk a study that was done at Oxford University and what they ended up doing was confirming the findings, and so what they did was they asked these participants whether or not they had a mold problem unresolved, and then they also inquired about their, their general wellbeing, through a quality of life questionnaire, and they found a very strong correlation between mold and dampness and doors and depression. Now, they stopped short of pinning the tail on the donkey and saying mold causes depression, because that was not the purpose of the study. In fact, you know, what they did was ended up asking a lot of questions afterwards. For example, was this due to a disempowerment, right? People who know they have a mold problem and haven't fixed it? There might be a lot going on there, financial issues, they might not be in control of the building because their husband or wife or boss or landlord, whatever the case may be. And then they also asked is there actually a chemical or a biological connection? And so they stopped short of being able to answer that. But what that did was get the wheels in motion and began to get researchers looking at what this relationship might be.

Speaker 2: 16:41

And in just a few years later now, my mold inspection business the first name of the company was Lab Results, because we use Labrador Retrievers Strain DeSif, I hidden mold in buildings and laboratory testing, and we thought that was cute and we got a lot of national press as a result of our nifty use of rescued, highly trained Labrador Retrievers. And so one day I got a phone call from Dr Joan Bennett, who is a fungal geneticist and mold researcher at Rutgers University, and she said I read a story about you and your dog. I'd like to meet your dog. It's okay if you come too. So we lived in Princeton at the time and she was just up in New Brunswick, just a couple of exits up Route 1. So we drove up and did a little demonstration for her and then she began to show me her research and what she had done. This is in response to her actually having a mold exposure down in New Orleans.

Speaker 2: 17:36

She had a house down in New Orleans. She was a teacher, a professor at Tulane. Hurricane Katrina came through. They were evacuated.

Speaker 2: 17:45

She went back to investigate the house and see what had happened to the house. Being just a curious researcher, she went with a backpack full of sampling equipment and a 95 respirator. She walked in knowing that the 95 respirator will stop spores and stop mycotoxins, because mycotoxins actually have to have a carrier particle. They can't go, they're not airborne by themselves, they're not volatile, so they're sort of sticky substances and so they become airborne on the spores and so a 95 respirator, which we're all familiar with from COVID, will arrest those particles.

Speaker 2: 18:17

But as she's going through her house she notices a very strong smell coming through and she recognized it clearly as the musty smell, a very dank but very dense odor, and she had to take a few breaks before she was able to finish her inspection and ultimately she fell ill. She was sick for a spell afterwards and this really got her thinking, because she had testified as an expert witness in defensive insurance companies who had been sued for mold-related illness and she thought maybe I got this wrong because she had said you can't inhale enough mycotoxins. That was her thesis. This mycotoxin through air exposure doesn't seem to hold up, and so now she started to think well, geez, maybe it was this musty smell. So she went back to the lab and began isolating chemicals and figuring out what she could actually procure and, being a basic scientist, she found one octan-3-ol mushroom alcohol and she began testing fruit flies that fluoresce when they produce dopamine pretty nifty little critters and also on plants, and she found the plants had real problems in exposure to this compound. But the fruit flies were fascinating because they first of all stopped producing dopamine, they also stopped reproducing. They also stopped flying to light, which is their instinctive nature. Instead of flying down, they developed local motor disorder, the way she characterized it and Parkinsonian-like symptoms.

Speaker 2: 19:43

She later, subsequent studies, found that mitochondrial damage and premature death to be also very common, and so she essentially decided that these should not be called microbial volatile organic compounds, but volatoxins.

Speaker 2: 19:57

She identified that these are neurotoxic, and so this opened up a completely different thought process around the idea that mold the toxic mold, is relegated to the few toxin-producing species, and this actually shows that all mold growth in doors of significance can lead to toxicity.

Speaker 2: 20:22

This is a remarkable finding, and it also explains why you can have mold-related illness in buildings where those toxic genetic species do not exist. This is a very common thing that I've seen over the last 21 years doing thousands of assessments, and so this also connected the dots for me between my mother's early demise, the Brown University study in this very strong correlation and these animal studies, and so now we have yet to get this out into the zeitgeist, which is part of the reason why these conversations are so important. But make no mistake, the microbial VOCs are neurotoxic and they are gaseous, which means that they become airborne and stay airborne, and they disperse in the air much more evenly than spores and other particles do, and they can come through the walls where spores can't and microtoxins can't. So that explains why hidden mold growth or sequestered in a space can actually have severe health implications.

Speaker 1: 21:15

That's fascinating and just to quick aside, you would have thought that a fruit fly which seeks out rotting fruit would have some sort of natural immunity to the microtoxins produced by the rotting fruit, or you know, assuming it's the same stuff.

Speaker 2: 21:31

I don't know, that's just one One would think yeah, one would think. One would think A little aside.

Speaker 1: 21:37

Okay, so she's done this research. She asked you to come up and with your dog, or asked your dog to come up with you, and what was the outcome of that? Why was she interested in you?

Speaker 2: 21:47

Well, the dogs are trained to sniff out the source of that musty smell. That's what that's there. The way they're trained is to find the source of that odor. That odor is the musty smell.

Speaker 2: 22:00

So for her it brought it all the way around, because what was happening for us when we were doing all these inspections was we were going to homes that were primarily the inspections were primarily driven by health concern, and we were doing lots of testing, of course, and a very detailed physical inspection, and the dogs would find hidden mold where we would drill into walls, pull out air samples and we would often find huge infestations that were not showing up in standard air sampling. But the people were experiencing major health issues, and then, when they got remediated, the spore counts and everything else seemed to be about the same in the ambient air, but the musty smell had gone away and so did the symptoms. And so, as I began sharing these things with her, we started having sort of a meeting of the minds and recognizing that the information, the knowledge, the wisdom has not. This needs to get out, because, again, there's a hyper focus on spores and also a hyper focus on mycotoxins, and this leaves out probably the most important aspect of mold growth indoors.

Speaker 1: 23:08

I'm going to ask this because I'm sure some of my listeners will be thinking what about the dog? Does the dog not get sick?

Speaker 2: 23:15

It's a really good question. So dogs have first of all. You know, if you watch a dog, the first thing it does is it goes out and it puts its head in the, it puts its nose in the, in the, in the soil. Yeah, and dogs don't actually inhale through their nose the way you think they do.

Speaker 2: 23:29

They actually do this sampling, and then, purge and then they purge and that's how they cleanse their olfactory, but they're also cleansing it of of of, you know, accumulation of particles and things like that. Dogs are designed. They're basically air samplers, four legged air samplers, right, and so no dogs don't actually now. Now I might. I should also mention that if we go into a building where there's visible mold, we wouldn't use a dog, because you don't need a dog, right, you don't need a dog for the visible mold, and we would never bring her into a space where there was any sort of hazard you know construction site or if there were distractions that were insurmountable. You know parakeets or litter boxes or bowls of dog. These things were.

Speaker 2: 24:14

It was a very we would control the environment before we brought them in.

Speaker 2: 24:17

And also, oreo was so efficient that we would do large homes and be done in 15 minutes. Our part was done, and then I had to go back in and interpret her, her data and make sense of it all, and so she would actually enjoy the air conditioning and and I would leave classical music on for her too. So she, she actually had the cushiest of all the jobs. She got paid, she got a lot of attention, and so she lived quite, quite a beautiful life and, by the way, I also lived as a laboratory receiver. She lived to 14 years old, which is, you know, a good, a good long life, and she helped thousands of people live healthier lives along the way. So now our dogs were, were were very well taken care of, and and and and we, all we did was use their innate biology in order to, you know, just sort of refocus their attention on this thing which which which they were compensated with love and food for. So no, the dogs were were not at risk and they were certainly never harmed.

Speaker 1: 25:15

No, I'm sure they weren't Okay. So you've gone through this process with the dogs and then from there you developed some different testing with the, with the labs as well. Is that correct? That's correct. Did that replace that? Replaced the dogs?

Speaker 2: 25:31

Well. So unfortunately, we'll never be able to replace the dogs, and we are working on on some devices and some technology around the microbial gases. Well, the the the main thing that that we did in terms of innovating around the testing space was, right now, if you want to have your house tested for mold and you and you call a professional, they're going to come over with a whole bunch of equipment, tools, devices and after they do their inspection, they will usually bring out an air sampling kit or an air sampling device. It's a vacuum pump and it pulls air through a spore trap. The spore trap is a precision engineered cassette that looks just like this for the people who are watching us, and the air gets pulled through that cassette almost like a filter and captures the airborne particles. At the lab they're analyzed for mold spores, pollen, whatever. Whatever target particle is being analyzed for.

Speaker 2: 26:30

We like to look broadly, because air quality is multifaceted. It's not just about mold but but those. Those tests are very expensive, done by a professional, such that the the cost of an inspection is is is out of reach for most people. It's a mortgage payment. Just a simple mold inspection, a detailed mold inspection by qualified, independent professional, not one of these free inspections, which are not actually inspections, that's a sales call, but. But an actual mold inspection by qualified professional can cost you $1,500 or more, and so it always bothered me that the people who needed that kind of testing were the ones who couldn't afford it. Right. And, by the way, the people who who live in you know, the poor are disproportionately affected by this because, of course, they're living in in areas that are usually low, that often low, lying on the buildings are not well maintained. They also have lifestyle issues, often too many people living in the building, and they're dry and closed. And there was just lots of reasons why. Why people that are on the lower socioeconomic, lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, experience a lot more mold exposure and the and the and the unfortunate results.

Speaker 2: 27:32

So what we decided to do was figure out how we could get rid of the issues related to that testing, which is, first of all, get the conflicts of interest out of the way, get the mold inspector out of the way, and then, how do we make an air sampling pump that actually is, is reusable, that we wouldn't have to take back? And so what we did was we developed one that looks like this it's people, some people call it the egg. And so this is an air sampling pump that duplicates a thousand dollar device exactly. It pulls exactly the same airflow rate. I mean it's identical, such that we actually have the chief inspector at HUD now buys these pumps. He won't use the professional pumps anymore, he only uses ours and he supervises 278 inspectors and he just buys these from us in bulk. And so the interfaces with, with the, with the pump, the kits, that's interface with the pump that runs for five minutes, the same way a professional pump would. And then, when you're done, you put it in a prepaid mailer and it goes to our lab partner where it's analyzed.

Speaker 2: 28:26

This looks for airborne spores and this is important because, again, mycotoxins travel on spores and spore fragments and dust. So if you've got a high spore counts, you have the potential of being exposed to mycotoxins. But also it's clearly indicative, if you've got high spore counts relative to the outside that there's mold growth going on in the building On the. On the other side there's microbial, there's VOC testing. We don't offer that. There is a company that called enthalpy labs that does MVOC testing and we partner with them and our test kit and their test kit go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Speaker 1: 28:57

Well, that's interesting that you mentioned peanut butter because, as I understand it, you're doing a mold summit soon or next year and in there you're going to be talking about some of the common myths with mold exposure, and one of the myths is that the focus is on what's in our house, exactly what we've been talking about right and testing the house and so on and so on, but there's a, as I understand, there's another area that is commonly missed. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Speaker 2: 29:28

Indeed, and thank you for bringing that up. We get calls, emails, social media DMs every day, sometimes dozens a day, with people saying I have a mold. I have a mycotoxin urine test that says that I have mold in my body and, and, and, and. So I'm looking to find out if your test can find the one that makes ochric toxin A or vomit toxin or any of these. These, these toxins and I have to let them down slowly sometimes, but these are not mold.

Speaker 1: 30:05

These are not toxins that are produced by, by molds that grow and build links in most cases they're trying to ask you where is the source of that mold and can your test find it in their house?

Speaker 2: 30:17

That's right, that's right, okay, so where is the source? Well, so, the vast majority, according to to the research, it, the vast majority of mycotoxin exposure is actually coming from food. Now, where is that coming from? Well, we import tremendous amounts of food, right? I mean, go look at the blueberries, and whole foods are coming from Peru, and and, and. We all learned during the beginning of the Russian invasion that Ukraine was the world's bread basket, and so so we import grains and and, and, spices and all sorts of things, nuts, and and, and, and.

Speaker 2: 30:55

So we, we, we, and, and, by the way, a lot of the practices overseas are not exactly as robust as the ones that we employ here and then they put those foods that may or may not have been cured or dried properly on a shipping container for 30 days, and then they land here. And so a group of food scientists actually took a look at some, some statistics that had been thrown around since 1985, the, the UN, used to say that 25% of foodstuffs were contaminated with mycotoxins, which is a big number, but this group of food scientists couldn't find actual backup data. So they said, well, let's do our own study. And they concluded, in fact, that that the food at the port being exported in most cases had less than that, probably closer to like 10%. But by the time it got to the port of destination, between 1680% were contaminated and and often below the legal threshold to actually stop the shipment. Although we have the United States as the highest threshold, we will take food that has been turned away at other European ports.

Speaker 2: 31:53

So it just it's remarkable, and but what's scary about that is that these things are cumulative. They're they're lipophilic, they get stuck in our fat cells and they're also hydrophobic, so they don't excrete well, and so we end up with it's a real, it's a real problem. And they're also, they also amplify each other, these toxins. They can, they can have a cascading effect and and and so you might have a food that doesn't, that doesn't, fail at testing, but if you have five of those foods on the same plate in aggregate, you've exceeded your, your sort of allowance, if you will, even though there's no such thing as really a legal, a regulated allowance for these things, and so so what we're seeing is that and of course, you know, dave Asprey built an entire built business around the mold, you know mycotoxin free coffee yeah.

Speaker 2: 32:41

Yeah, and so you know this is not exactly news, but there's an entire industry that has emerged around. Functional care practitioners are using these mycotoxin tests, and I'm not sure how many are more aware of this or not, but then turn around and recommend that, recommend them to inspectors, who then turn around and use ERME ERMI, which is a kind of dust test developed by the EPA, which is wildly prone to false positives to do an inspection, and this whole thing keeps going. But but they're all missing the point and it's a gravy train, unfortunately, and a lot of people ended up doing a lot of unnecessary work, really disrupting their lives, all because of data points that are assembled in a way that actually don't tell the truth. They tell a story, but it's not the truth.

Speaker 1: 33:28

So they're pointing them to a mold problem in their home, when it's really a model problem in their food, which is not just specific to that person, specific to you know, all, the, all the citizens in the.

Speaker 2: 33:39

United States. That's right. I would argue that when there are numbers thrown around Dave Asprey likes to say 100 million Americans are affected by by mold, and between property damage and health effects, I'd say that number might be low, but but if you add in food, I think we're all affected by it.

Speaker 1: 33:54

To some extent, and I'm sure that we have a certain amount of sort of detoxification systems in our body that can deal with a low dose of mold, being that, you know, once full of time we didn't have refrigeration and we would have eaten potentially moldy food or we slept in places that were damp and moldy during certain times of the year. But I guess there's, there's, like you say, if we're staying in the same house and it has a mold problem and we're eating the same foods, which we do now, we habitually eat the same foods year round then we're, then we're building a problem for ourselves.

Speaker 2: 34:27

Yes, and I'd also. There are two big things that happen in our food supply that are unique to modern life. Number one is hyper processing. We can't see if our grains are moldy. Only the people processing them know that, and even they probably don't want to know and and so, and they're not obligated to do this testing. They're very minimum. There's very minimal testing done on this stuff. So we're not, we're not built for that. Where our metabolism isn't built for hyper processing, for turning everything into sugar, essentially highly assimilated, and just it's really just causes problems.

Speaker 2: 35:03

That that all your, all of your colleagues probably speak about every day. But the other one that that's really unique is that we now feed our farm animals foods that they don't eat in nature, and specifically grains. We feed cows, corn and and and pigs all sorts of stuff and and chickens as well, and these are the. These are often not human grade. And what makes them not human grade?

Speaker 2: 35:29

Well, lots of different things, but one of them is that they can potentially moldy, and so then you end up with carryover effect, which is where animals eat moldy grains. It goes into their. Like I said, they're lipophilic, they go into fat. So lipo meaning fat and philic meaning love, and so they love the fat and so they get stuck in the fat cells. And so you see, this with with conventional dairy is a big problem. Conventional meats in general are a big problem, and so it's not just the grains, sugars and grains and and processed foods, it's not just the peanut butter which you very artfully say we had us into this conversation with, but it was. It's it's much broader than that and it's hiding in things that you would never think, like that delicious steak with Bordeaux laise sauce, right, potentially be in both the steak and the sauce.

Speaker 1: 36:17

And so we ingest these things. And how does that affect us? And does this make us fat as well?

Speaker 2: 36:24

It can. It has all sorts of potential ramifications. Right, I'm not a doctor, never even played one on TV, but what we see consistently is that that these mycotoxins I mean there's, there's, there's a wide variety of them. Some of them make you fat, some of them make you skinny, right, some people, some people can't sleep, some people can't get out of bed you know a lot of emotional dysregulation. You know some of these are carcinogenic, mutagenic, and so some of them are hemorrhagic and cause blood vessels to burst.

Speaker 2: 36:54

These are specifically with the trichothesines, are hemorrhagic, and so you know that can lead to all sorts of issues in our digestive system and our bloodstream, you know. You know you think about things like aneurysms and strokes and all these kinds of really scary things. Who knows how much these toxins might be involved in that and and so and we're already overloaded. Our livers are, generally speaking, very overloaded because of the VOC exposure in buildings. Right, we all know that drinking alcohol taxes your liver. Alcohol is a VOC. Well, when you're breathing this stuff, it's also being processed in your liver, and so we overload our liver. And then the mycotoxins were taking in with these hyper processed foods and these unnatural conventional meats especially.

Speaker 2: 37:42

You know we're just piling on, and so the the symptoms are wide ranging, but I would argue that that the most autoimmune disease is a byproduct of this overload, this allostatic load, but it's cumulative and it's. There's no way to say that it's mycotoxins, mvo, cs, vocs right, this is the. This is like a snowball at the bottom of a hill. You can't really figure out what came from where, but it's a mess and so it's. It's. It's. What I try to suggest is that people become air aware, but also food aware, and and just try to make better decisions Most of the time, because you're not going to truly be able to avoid any of this stuff. It's so embedded in our buildings and our food supply. But you can make better decisions most of the time, and what I find is that people who do that tend to get better.

Speaker 1: 38:39

Okay, so now you scared the pants off most of us. Let's think about what we can do about this. So there's food things that we can do and I don't think that's the within the scope of this particular episode to talk about it, but you mentioned a few things. But let's bring this back to a person's house. So how would a person be alert to the fact that they may have mold? Can you tell us, like right from the visible to the invisible, how they may? How do they know to get a test?

Speaker 2: 39:10

Sure. Well, I boil it down to if you see something, smell something, or feel something, do something. And so, to sort of unpack those a little bit, if you see something, we're always looking for moisture, signs of moisture. That's blistering, paint stains, discoloration, trim, pulling away from the wall, water bugs, rust, right, any indication of excess dampness in the building or any, any signs of moisture. And so and that also means looking outside the house to do you have puddling and ponding in the yard, right? Is your landscaping soggy? Are you over watering, which a lot of people do? And then so you just it's.

Speaker 2: 39:53

The vigilance here revolves around maintaining a normal moisture level in and around your home, and that's also maintenance, right. If you see your siding is an issue, or if the grout around your tub or shower is missing, you know that's clearly a red flag that moisture can and probably will get through there. And I've seen amazing amounts of mold behind the tiles that look pretty good, but there's a missing piece of grout. I've seen tubs, tub and shower rotting out inside and everything looks beautiful, you know, but there's a missing piece of grout or caulk. So that's see something. If you smell something, of course, by the way, visible mold, right.

Speaker 1: 40:31

So you know it's quite common in bathrooms or where I grew up in the UK anyway where it's pretty damp. You go into the bathroom there's even the caulking has black spots in it and the ceiling will have these little black spots on it. That's that's mold?

Speaker 2: 40:46

Yes, it is. Well, you could argue that that is mold, technically often referred to as mildew, which is sort of a diminutive term and sort of a scientific misspeak, but but that's that's more of a hygiene issue. Now, if you see the mold on the ceiling and you see, you know, a lot of it around the ground, what that means is you probably are not ventilating your bathroom at all or insufficiently, and so you know, managing that moisture for people using squeegees and getting the moisture down the drain is a really good idea, and then running bathroom exhaust vents that go outside, not into a ceiling, not up into the attic, right, the moisture has to go outside. So we get a lot of calls for that. But again, I'm more concerned about missing grout and caulk.

Speaker 1: 41:35

And.

Speaker 2: 41:35

I am about mold on grout and caulk because that's more of a hygiene issue.

Speaker 2: 41:39

And by the way, mold is growing not on the crowd or the caulk, it's actually growing on the soap residue. It's actually eating the soap residue. It doesn't have much interest in caulk or grout, because it's not. These are inorganic substances that don't support growth, but they do. But so if again goes back to a hygiene issue, if you get that clean and, by the way, you don't need chemicals to clean mold, that's a really important point. If mold doesn't require to be killed to be cleaned, you can just good old fashioned elbow grease get rid of the. If you want to clean it so that it's not visible, using bleach on things like grout and caulk, that's a different story. Do that judiciously, though, because those chemicals, bleach in particular, is also, you know, an unhealthy thing to be breathing, and so but the smell something. So we see something and then we smell something, and we talked about the musty smell at length here. So smell that musty smell which is so distinct, right? I mean, everybody knows that that musty smell is, and so if you get a whiff of it, it doesn't have to be a very strong. Find out where it's coming from. You don't have to be a mold dog, but you can follow. Follow, like people say, follow the money, follow the moisture, and so you know you want to go look around the house and say, well, if I smell it over here but not over there there, there might be something brewing over here. And if that's beyond your scope and abilities to to to diagnose the source of the moisture, that's often where people find value in bringing in an old inspector who has experience in diagnosing these things. So the smell is a big, big, big, big clue. It's the primary clue. In most cases it's not always, by the way, it's not always detectable, and this is important. You can have a major mold problem and I have a smell because of the way air moves through wall cavities and through buildings, and so that's not always, it's not a silver bullet, but it's, it's indicative in many, many cases.

Speaker 2: 43:24

The third thing is if you feel something and usually that means that there's initially a symptom that tends to get better when you leave and if you, if you notice that you're having sleep issues again, weight gain, weight loss, respiratory issues, sinus problems, you know mold rage is actually a real thing. So emotional dysregulation across the spectrum is a big deal. You know, people again experience chemical sensitivities as a result of these chronic exposures. So if you're noticing symptoms that tend to be building related, tend to abate when you, when you, when you go to a different place, that would be another clue that you need to start looking for a source. And again, we're always looking for a moisture source, because that's how you find the mold growth. If you find the moisture, that's where the mold will begin. Then the job is to figure out what the extent of the growth is. And again, that usually requires some professional guidance, because oftentimes this is happening behind wall cavities, you know, in areas that are not necessarily readily accessible.

Speaker 1: 44:27

All right, let's say you find, you find the water source, you fix the leak or you fix whatever the problem is. Do you then need to remove the building materials that have mold on, or is there a way to kill it on the on the building materials?

Speaker 2: 44:41

It depends on the building material. And again, you know, there's a, there's a common misunderstanding around around mold that we need to kill it, that we need to sanitize, and actually sanitizing is part of the reason why we have so many autoimmune issues, in my professional opinion. We have, we have, we're eradicating nature from our buildings were the microbiome. We have a microbiome on us and in us. We also have one around us and our building is an extension of our immune system and these are like matryoshka dolls that stack up, those Russian stacking dolls, and so if you mess with one of those, you're going to mess with all of them to some degree. There's an upstream and downstream effect, and so and, and, and you know the word human comes from humans, which is soil, and we are so far removed from that and soil. You know these, this is, this is our true heritage, right, we're from the earth, we're going to go back to the earth, but we have. We have hermetically sailed ourselves in these boxes with rubber bottoms on our shoes and the whole thing is hyper sanitizing, especially post COVID.

Speaker 2: 45:38

And so motor mediation is about removal and cleaning. Removal and cleaning. And what I mean removal is you remove building materials that support fungal growth. That cannot be cleaned. So what does that mean? Sheet rock cannot be cleaned any more than you can clean a newspaper. Okay, cause it's essentially that's what it is. It's, you know, chips and wrapped in paper. It's unbelievable what we build. Just to interrupt you there.

Speaker 1: 46:00

I'm obviously from the UK but I ended up in Canada. I remember buying my first time in Canada and we had a building inspector who was British as well. He's like, yeah, it's a good time, I would last about 50 years. And I was like, sorry, you know that's not a home. He's like, no, no, they're built out of. They're built out of like drywall and wood. It will fall down in 50 years time. And the home I grew up in is 200 years old. And my friends, you know parents, they all houses to 53, 400 years old some of them. And to hear a house for the last 50 years, it just, it just blew my mind that they, they build houses in North America out of wood and gypsum and and sheet rock, like you say.

Speaker 2: 46:37

Yeah, it's, it's amazing. I mean, even the dumbest of the three little pigs didn't build this house out of paper, but we do at scale. You know, and and also you know what's interesting is that sheet sheet rock, according to the, burjit Anderson is a renowned researcher on Copenhagen. She she was very curious about why mold and sheet rock are such good friends, and so she began looking at sheet rock and found that all the major brands come pre-inoculated with mold spores. They're actually already in the paper, specifically Stackey botchers and chytophomium, which are well known. That's the black.

Speaker 2: 47:10

The black mold that everyone worries about is loves cellulose. That's what it eats, that's, that's the, it's favorite dish. And, of course, that's paper. And so we basically build self-composting homes. Just add water, it's already there. You don't even need the spores to come in from outside. It's already there. It's. It's unbelievable what we, what we have done to our food and to our buildings. It's, it's. It's appalling to me, but so this is why it's so important to have these conversations, because people need to be aware of this. You know, if you just go on autopilot, you're in trouble. You have to become aware of these things and make better decisions and to navigate around it, because there's not a lot you're gonna do. If you look at the 114 million single family homes in the United States, almost all of them are light frame construction like the ones we're talking about, you know.

Speaker 2: 47:57

So mold removal is remove the building materials that can't be cleaned, that's sheet rock, carpet, carpet, padding, ceiling, tiles, insulation, things like that. The things that can be cleaned are structural elements. So wood wood can be cleaned unless it's lost is structural integrity, unless it's rotted, right. So wood can be cleaned. Glass, metal, plastic, plaster and, by the way, we used to build buildings, like you say, you know, out of plaster and stone and concrete and all, and you know we even had stone. Or you know, slate roofs, you know. Now we build out of paper, machete and petroleum. I mean, our building material companies are chemical companies, make no mistakes. So our food companies and our pharmaceutical companies. They are masquerading as purveyors of food and building materials, but they are chemical companies at their core, and so we have to learn how to overcome that reality through better decision making. So you remove the stuff and then you clean and that's mold remediation, okay so if someone's removed all the mold from their building, well, sorry.

Speaker 1: 49:03

Now if someone's found the mold in their building and they want to remove it, what are the questions they should ask a potential contractor who's gonna do that for them?

Speaker 2: 49:11

So first of all, ideally you have an independent inspector that does the initial diagnosis and that develops a work plan. The way this should work the same way lead paint and asbestos work is that you've got a sort of a Chinese wall between the two, and so they do the inspection and the testing and the initial testing and then develop a remediation plan and then you go find the contractors. Now the contractors need to be certified in the IICRC S520 mold remediation standard. It's a mouthful and it's important because the mold remediation standard clearly states that you don't need to use chemicals during remediation. In fact, they're not advised and most contractors ignore that and they use lots of chemicals, which often leaves behind a legacy. This is not good. Adding chemicals to a home does not make it healthier ever, and even then quote unquote natural ones. Actually, there's really strong evidence that if you're concerned about mold producing toxins in your building, they respond adversely to being sprayed with toxins. They actually fight back with more toxins. So if you really wanna get that straightened out, don't add more toxins. But the contractors need to be. They need to follow the IICRC S520 and they need to. They need to commit to you that they're not gonna use chemicals during the remediation process. It's very, very important and you need to confirm that there's no financial relationship between the inspectors and their remediators. It's a there's a lot of room for abuse and that kind of a relationship and so. But you know, there's a really important aspect to this that's easy to overlook, which is how do we keep this from happening in the first place. And there's actually another document, it's also an IICRC document, it's called the S500. And if you follow that, you don't end up having to follow the S520. And that's called the water damage standard. And the water damage standard basically states that water damage or water intrusion that occurs needs to be dealt with within 24 to 48 hours. That's the sort of the safe zone or safer zone, and that means everything needs to be dried.

Speaker 2: 51:23

The materials that are severely affected should also usually be ripped out. But if they can't be ripped out, that means carpet, carpet padding and sheet rock, insulation, things like that if they can't be ripped out, they need to be dried thoroughly, and I mean really thoroughly. And if they do that well within the first 24 hours, 48 hours, then you're usually in pretty good shape and again, your nose will let you know that, in most cases At the 72 hour mark. Now you're in the mold world and what's important to know is that in the S500 world mold insurance will cover almost all of that, almost entirely, almost to the replacement cost of the building for water damage. Very important to realize that Oftentimes you can do some of that work yourself too, ripping out carpet as long as there's not a pre-existing mold problem, because you can spread it all over the place.

Speaker 2: 52:12

But if this is a first time, one time event, then you can usually rip that stuff out yourself.

Speaker 2: 52:17

But once you get to the 72 hour mark, insurance doesn't pay.

Speaker 2: 52:23

And now you gotta get the guys in the moon suits and the costs just went up 10 folds.

Speaker 2: 52:27

So not only do they not pay, but the costs just went up by an order of magnitude. And now, instead of it being a weekend warrior kind of a thing, now that you've got the guys in the moon suits, this can take a month if everything goes perfectly well, because the inspection takes a day and then the report takes a week, and then you gotta find the contractors and then you gotta do work that takes a week and then you gotta wait for the guy to come back and do a guy or gal to come back and do testing, and if you do all of that in lockstep it's about a month. So oftentimes people are displaced from their homes. So this is a matter of thinking in hours, not in days or weeks. 72 hours is the hard line, so I often encourage people to act immediately. Don't wait for your father or your neighbor or the plumber or anyone else, or even the insurance agent, to take action when you have water damage issue.

Speaker 1: 53:17

Okay, so we're talking about like a basement flooding, something like that. You gotta get down there within well, 24 hours, like it's to 48 hours, and just pull everything out.

Speaker 2: 53:26

Get it pumped, that water out, pull everything out, get fans and dehumidifiers Sometimes people use heat Again, very important that you and if you can contain the space. So in other words, put tape and plastic up on other cordon off the area, just in case there is a pre-existing mold issue that you're not aware of. The last thing you wanna do is blow that stuff all over your house. So fans can be really problematic in that regard. But extracting the water is the most important thing you can do, and doing it quickly, and dehumidifiers are really useful for that because they don't tend to disturb as much, as they don't generally create a lot of disturbance. So getting the moisture under control immediately, within 48 hours, is really the goal.

Speaker 1: 54:03

Yeah, okay, All right. Well, I think it's a great place to bring it to a close and I think for people in the US, they may have some more questions about this. How would they find you?

Speaker 2: 54:20

Sure, so we have created a welcome page. Bear with me a second. My apologies, I came back again. I did not blow this up. We're gonna have to do that again, if you don't mind Again.

Speaker 2: 54:40

Yep, okay, so for your listeners, we created a welcome page at Gotmoldcom, which is Gotmoldcom slash. Lifestyle is your medicine, and when you go there, you'll see that there's a link to download an e-book we produce called how to Find Mold, and it's filled with inspection checklists and FAQs. It's a guidebook for how to do an inspection in your own home. People give us lots of really good feedback about this. If you go through your house intentionally, you'll be amazed at what you see and what you learn about your building, and oftentimes you'll see parts of your house that you've never really looked at very carefully, and that's often where mold is hiding behind bookshelves, behind furniture that you haven't moved in 10 years. And so also in there are a number of the FAQs that I mentioned, where just really useful stuff for people that are early in their mold journey.

Speaker 2: 55:43

We also have a coupon code that we've produced for you, for your listeners, that gives them a 10% discount on any of our test kits at Gotmoldcom, and that's lifestyle 10. And so you'll find that link there. You'll find the coupon code there. So also, if anyone wants to ask questions, they can go to Gotmoldcom and go to the bottom of the home page there's a contact field. I don't answer all of the questions that come through, but I do see them all and so that's a great place. But if you'd like to ask questions that you'd like other people to benefit from the answer, take it to social media. Go to Gotmold on Facebook, which is at Gotmold, or to Instagram, and specifically on Facebook. If you ask questions there, we'd love to answer them there so that other people can share in the wealth of knowledge.

Speaker 1: 56:43

All right, thank you very much, jason. I'll put all that in the show notes as well and people can find that link and find your social media handles to find you and ask questions to you there. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 56:56

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 56:58

Thank you for joining me in my conversation with Jason L. If you've enjoyed listening to and learning from this podcast, please leave a comment, or so you can leave a suggestion for a future podcast guest that you would like us to feature. If you're an apple, you can leave us a comment and a five-star review if you're so inclined. Remember, if you're my direct help, send me an email, ededpagetcom or visit my website, edpagetcom. Now, whilst you're there, you'll learn a little bit more about how I can help you make your lifestyle your medicine.