Mold Wants To Kill You

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Thank you, thanks for having me.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, I’m super excited ’cause you’re literally one of my favorite people. You’re a chiropractor, you’ve been studying and practicing what you call “hardcore” holistic nutrition since 1993. And you own the Nutritional Healing Center of Ann Arbor. You have six other healthcare practitioners that work with you and it’s the largest free market, non-insurance nutrition clinic in the country. That is amazing. You are also a mentor and you teach to practitioners and you conduct seminars around the country. That’s actually how I met you by attending a couple of your trainings. 

And our viewers here can find you on your YouTube channel that has over 140,000 subscribers. And if you’ve never seen Darren speak on his YouTube, you need to, because it’s really fun. You break down really complex concepts and make it really easy to understand. I know you are an absolute expert in all things, mitochondria, parasites, mold. And we’re gonna jump into that today. So one of the things I learned from you right off the bat is mold wants to kill you. You taught me early on parasites, not so much, they don’t wanna kill you. They want you to live so they can live, but mold wants to kill you. So we’re gonna get into that and how it affects your mitochondria. But first, can you tell me a little bit about you, how you got here and then we’ll get into your own near death experience. Okay.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Okay, so how did I get here? So I was pre-med in college and I grew up on a farm. And so I didn’t have much experience with medical doctors or the profession. So I interviewed a dozen students of medicine and doctors of medicine before taking the MCAT, you know, the test to get into school. And nobody encouraged me to go into medicine. So I decided to not do that. If they don’t like it, then why would I? So then I spent some time with some optometrists, podiatry. Then I spent some time with a chiropractor and I saw that what he was doing was holistic. So you can have pain down the leg caused by something in the back. And I was like, okay, that’s holistic. And I thought holistic from working on the farm. So once I was in chiropractic school, I went to a nutrition seminar, one in particular that I really got inspired and I wanted to be a chiropractor who focuses on nutrition. 

So I had studied a nutrition beginning in ’93. I graduated from chiropractic school in ’97. And then in 2005, I stopped all insurance, November 1st, 2005. So now I’m in the free market. I have no third party payers telling me what to do and it’s just me and my patients and they’re paying me to help them with their health. So I have to keep improving my supply. So they have this demand and I have to meet that demand. And it’s just a matter of studying and figuring things out and experience. And within the parameters of nutrition. So I keep trying to find the boundary of where does nutrition not work anymore. And I’ve not found that boundary. It’s been pretty interesting. So that’s my background. So then I’ve moved into a moldy office in 2004. I didn’t know it was moldy until October of 2016, but in October of 2015, I started having some heart palpitations, pounding of the chest. And that got worse November, December of 26, 2015. 

And then by February of 2016, now I’m thinking I’m gonna die. My blood pressure is 155 over 95. My feet are swollen, I’m cold. I couldn’t eat red meat for six months. Symptoms from head to toe. It was a total disaster. And so, but I didn’t know I had mold until October of 2016. And the reason why that I found it was because I had to cut back on my work hours. And I had a three day work week and a four day weekend. So during those weekends, I was just taking a lot of supplements, exercising, getting into ketosis. And then in October of 2016, at that point I had no chest pain. 

I mean, I was having chest pain for a year, but I got that down to zero and I started my work week on a Tuesday morning, no chest pain. And then by one o’clock lunchtime, all my chest pain was back. It was like a six out of 10. That’s when I realized, oh, the problem is in the building, it’s either a dirty electricity. Maybe there’s some bad wiring behind the walls. Or it was that one spot where the paint had chipped off and it was black behind it. And there was water intrusion when it rained sideways. Water would go right through the exterior wall ’cause it was porous and it would touch the drywall on the other side. And then mold was growing behind on the other side of the drywall, But there was a spot where.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So for 10 years, Darren, I mean you, when I think about this timeline, you were exposed and exposed and exposed to mold for probably 10 years based on your symptoms.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Yeah, what’s interesting is this bookshelf right here. I just cleaned this up and I created this little studio in this room and as I was going through, threw away some books and I found some old notes and in 2009 I wrote my symptoms down and one of my symptoms was left chest pain and left jaw pain. So that’s a heart issue. So yeah, I had black mold in ’09.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Wow.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

You know, symptoms and I go on, but one time I entered into an airplane at Detroit airport and they hadn’t turned the air conditioning on yet and it was summertime. And my seat was in the back and I was the last person, one of the last people to sit into the plane. Everybody was already seated. So I started walking to the back of the airplane and now I can’t breathe. So I turn right around and I go back to the front and I said, I can’t breathe back there. You have to turn on the air. And she said, you can breathe, go back there. And I was like, oh God. So I start walking back. I start taking big breaths in. So the point is my lungs were compromised even back then. But the reason why it got really, really bad in 2015 was ’cause I’d moved my desk into a room with really poor circulation. And that’s where the most of the leakage came from the rain. It would hit the top of the window and it would cascade down around the sides and it would like actually rain on the inside.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Wow. So you found this, so there’s this little chip of paint and you see black behind it.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

That’s it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You saved it?

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Yeah, I pulled this off.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Put in this baggy and then I drove around the corner and there’s a lab and they tested that and they found penicillin, aspergillus, stachybotrys. And so the aspergillus and stachybotrys, those are the toxic black molds.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

And I got the report back like, okay, I know what it is. Now it’s time to take action.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Long story short, I had to move out, get a new office. But then that’s when CellCore Biosciences came out with Biotoxins binder. And so that product was absolutely my favorite for removing the mycotoxins out of my body. So that was that’s my mold experience. Horrible. But I learned so much. And now I see honestly I had heart disease symptoms. I had four EKGs in 2016 and one of ’em even showed, it said possible MI you know, myocardial infarction, heart attack. It said it right there on the report. And it felt like my heart was, this is how I say it. It was like I had a hamster covered in spikes, break dancing in my chest, just this twisting in a sharp pain. And it’s funny, but it’s not funny.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

No, it’s not funny. I can’t imagine, here you were a chiropractor, really successful practice and here you were getting sicker and sicker and sicker and you’re doing everything, you know how to do, but it’s not working. And then finally all these years later, you find out it’s mold. So this is what I really want our viewers to learn about today. I want you to dive into how mold is trying to kill you, how it’s affecting your mitochondria. And then we’ll get into how to find it in your office, in your home, how to fix it in your environment, how to treat it inside the human body and just give people hope. Because we test mold all the time in my practice, in your practice. And people have mold toxins, mycotoxins and they could have been there from years and years ago and the body can’t get it out itself without support, without help. Even with everything you knew about nutrition, you were sick. So tell us about this connection. Why is mold trying to kill you? Whereas other things like parasites are not trying to kill you. And then let’s talk about how you fight it.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Okay. So parasites by definition, they eat your food. Mold, you are the food. And so imagine that there’s mold on this poster board right here and it’ll release spores into the air. And then on those spores are toxins. Those are called mycotoxins and then you breathe it in or you swallow it or it can even land on your skin and the mycotoxins then will kill your cells. And then spores grow more new mold on your dead cells. So when you take something like Biotoxin Binder from Cellcore, you’re removing the mycotoxins. Whereas before that, I was always trying to kill mold or candida, yeast, fungus, whatever you wanna call it. I was supplying clove and garlic and things like that that are antifungal. But the point is, if you have mycotoxins in your body, they will continue to kill your cells. And the mold will continue to grow. 

So you gotta remove the toxin out. Now, mold in and of itself does no harm to the body. And I sued my landlord and we settled outta court. But the defense attorneys there, they had access to reports showing that mold doesn’t affect a human body. And my lawyer showed this to me. And I was like, yeah, I know that, like I know it’s not the mold, it’s the mycotoxins. And so I sent her a report of from PubMed showing it’s the mycotoxins. Then I sent her another one, then another one. I ended up sending her 331 studies showing that it’s the mycotoxins.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Break that down for us, Darren. Break down, because we have a lot of people watching now who are probably wondering mold, mycotoxins, isn’t the same thing? It’s not the same thing. What is a mycotoxin?

Dr. Darren Schmidt

So a mycotoxin is a chemical poison that the mold makes to kill your cells so that the spores can grow mold. Now, the bigger picture is this. Why does mold even exist? And this is true for bacteria. They return your dead tissue to the soil. So it’s just like a log in the forest. It’s down on the ground and you see mushrooms growing on it. And that’s what mold wants you to do. It wants you to lay down and it’ll turn your body back into the dirt. And there are times when I felt this and other mold patients that I have where their body just, they wanna collapse and there’s no pain. Their legs give out. And now they’re boom, they’re on the ground. One guy, he was in the shower and he collapsed on the ground and he crawled out of the shower into bed. And just picture the shower. It’s humid, it’s warm, mold loves that. And they love it at nighttime when it’s dark and you’re warm inside your bed as opposed to standing up, and the lights are on and you’re running around. Mold will just calm down a little bit. But once you go to bed now things change. It’s different when you’re in bed.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. So thank you for establishing mold is trying to kill you. It’s the mycotoxins that are the problem. Now link mitochondria demise to mold. I mean, obviously I think it’s apparent, mold is causing cellular damage, but bridge that gap for us.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Right? Mitochondrial damage. Yeah, so I got, that’s why I got this poster. Let me grab. Okay. Get this out of the way. Right, so here we have mitochondria, there’s a blue line right here, and this is the inner membrane. And then there’s a smaller blue line right here. And within that, that’s the mitochondria. So all this stuff right here.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You’re talking about the functions inside the mitochondria. What’s happening inside the mitochondria is on this.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Yeah. All these biochemical reactions are inside here and here. So what’s essential is that there’s this one chemical called pyruvate and it needs to slip into the mitochondria and go through both of these membranes. And right here, that’s where trouble can start. And so you can have like heavy metals, chemicals, and then it includes mycotoxins and it prevents pyruvate from going into the mitochondria. So the cell membranes have to be smart and healthy, and then you have to have remove these toxins so that all these chemicals can function properly. Nutrients. I’m gonna use the word nutrients. Now throughout the Krebs cycle here, you can have barriers, toxins preventing this from going around.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And just real quick for listeners, the Krebs cycle is where your ATP energy production occurs, right?

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Begins.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Okay.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Yeah. And then the electron transport chain is the second part. And then the end right here is ATP. And that’s the final result is energy, ATP.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

We’re bringing everybody back to biology class right now, almost all of us had to take biology to get outta high school. So this is about the time we tune out in high school in biology. It was really fun until the Krebs cycle.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

But it’s easy though because it’s a map. It’s just like looking at a map where you’re gonna drive your car and if you wanted to get really into it, you just look up these words. But the point is for this, the point of this interview is that there’s all these things that need to occur. There’s a lot of reactions here. And then the mycotoxins from mold can prevent one or more of these reactions from occurring. Then you have less ATP and your whole body energy depletes, and it goes down. And when you have a lot of energy, then the cells can detoxify. Your immune system is strong and your body is stronger. Your muscles are stronger. Your brain’s faster, all that stuff. So mycotoxins block proper function. Now let’s say this is blocked right here. None of this let’s pretend none of this is happening, right? And now you have two other options. One is burning sugar. And the other one is called lactic acidosis right here in this corner. 

This right here is the death cycle. Most people die because of lactic acidosis. It’s the usage of lactate as a fuel, right? You may have never heard of this, and then here we have use the usage of sugar as a fuel. And certainly you’ve heard of that, that’s called glycolysis. But if you do a lot of this, look, there’s an arrow right here. And this arrow leads us out of glycolysis into lactic acidosis. So I wrote an ebook about this, and I figured this out because I had mold. And in February of 2016, February 3rd, 2016, was the worst night in my life. And I’m thinking, should I call an ambulance? Should I drive myself to the hospital? Which hospital should I go to? Cause my chest hurt so bad, pain down my arm, pain in my left jaw. Blood pressure is 155 over 95. My pulse is over 100. It’s three o’clock in the morning and I can barely breathe. It’s like what the heck is going on? So right after that, I found seminar notes that I had attended a few years earlier. 

And from those notes, I started taking some supplements and these supplements were actually designed in the 1930s. I started taking them and then I felt better. In two days I knew I was on the right track. And those supplements though, after further study, I realized that they don’t fix the cause. They fix the mechanism. That mechanism is lactic acidosis. So those supplements kept my head above water through the summer of 2016. Then I found the mold in the fall of 2016, then I could detoxify. And then that’s how I saved my life. But I figured out this mechanism, the most common mechanism of chronic disease and the way that most people die is from lactic acidosis. Now the death certificate will say heart disease, cancer, it might say diabetes as a complication, but certainly toxicity and the mycotoxin mold, parasites, excess sugar consumption. It all leads us you know, back to this, This used to be called sugar acidosis. There’s been a bunch of different names for this over the decades. So I went back in the 1930s and beyond and have studied this quite a bit to figure that out.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So this is really eye opening I think for people watching right now, practitioners and patients alike, and I worked in Western medicine for 20 years before I discovered functional medicine. And just curious in your estimation, how many people are walking into emergency rooms and urgent cares thinking they’re having a heart attack or some other problem, and really it’s toxins in the body. Like mycotoxins, what do you think?

Dr. Darren Schmidt

It’s the majority of people. And I think, I mean, you can certainly get heart plaquing causing a blocked artery and then you get a heart attack. But again, what actually causes that plaquing? Well, I’ve studied this for how many years, and I’m very confident that it’s an infection. And so what caused the infection? Well, the standard American diet, high sugar intake, low protein intake, it breaks down your tissues and now you have bacteria and other organisms that create biofilm, or mucus. Parasites also make mucus, that’s their home. So they live in the mucus, but it’s a poisonous chemical. And so your body tries to heal that and there’s a healing cycle or healing process. And the end result of that healing cycle is calcium. So like when you break your bone, like you break your wrist, it calcifies the bone, it takes six weeks, maybe a little bit longer. So that’s what plaquing is. It’s a calcification caused by infection, caused by a bad diet. So like I’m picturing all the people walking into the emergency room. My first thought is you have mold, your diet sucks. You probably have parasites and let’s get you on a low carb diet, number one, and clean your body out. That’d be my approach for sure.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. And you know, Darren in my practice and I’m sure the same in yours. I do mycotoxin testing on nearly everyone. We start with gut work and gut cleanup. And once they start to feel better and like now it’s time to really look and see what toxins are in here. We do toxin testing. I think I’ve had one person ever that had no mycotoxins on their test. It’s so rare to find somebody. And people are astounded. They don’t expect it, myself included, when I did my own mycotoxin test, I was like, whoa. Now I know why I almost flunked outta college my first year and couldn’t wake up. And all I wanted to do was sleep. I remember being in a moldy building and it affected everything. I was on academic probation my first year of college because all I wanted to do was sleep. And I spent the next 30 years beating myself up thinking I’m not smart enough. And it was mold, Darren, I’m positive of it. It was mycotoxins.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Yeah. So it’s like 70% of buildings in the United States have enough mold to negatively affect the inhabitants. And that’s true too, in the UK, it’s probably true all around the world, 70%, but yet the most common source of mold is not even water damaged buildings. It’s actually food.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Let’s talk about that, because that surprised me when I did my mycotoxin tests, that I had all these molds that are found in coffee and corn and wheat and so tell us about that.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

About food?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

I mean. Well, okay. So if you look back at shelf life of bread, before it was processed, it was a three day shelf life, five days at the most. I mean, five days, you should throw it away. So then they took out the nutrients of bread and they had it just simply, it was only carbohydrates. So in 1934, they put vitamin B1 in bread, and that stopped a lot of heart attacks. It actually saved a lot of people’s lives, but you know, you can still have a mold issue from grains or from food that’s sitting in your refrigerator for three days. So, I mean, there’s been pandemics of toxic mold, like St. Elmo’s fire. That’s from mold toxicity and it affected people’s brain and they went crazy. And that’s where that term comes from is from a mold that grows in wheat. And I grew up on a commercial farm and we raised sweet corn and like 300 acres a summer of sweet corn, but we would walk up and down the rows of corn and we would knock off the mold that grew on it. And I forgot the name of that mold, but it would be big and black like this. It would take up the whole ear of corn. We have to knock it down on the ground.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I literally have chills. I’m envisioning you as a young boy doing this. I literally have chills when you tell me this story and here you’re breathing this in, it’s coming in through your skin.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Yeah. And it can just be overwhelming. So the thing is you get these mycotoxins in your body and is your body able to detoxify that out? And especially if it’s just an overwhelming amount. But then you have the environmental chemicals and the heavy metals that your body has to deal with. So I’ve been running a lot of lab tests too. And every single lab test shows chemical toxicity and including Roundup or glyphosate, including myself, everybody’s got Roundup in their body. So throw this all together and stop mitochondrial function. So that’s why detoxing currently should be every single day for every single person.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And be absolutely priority in your wellness plan.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Right.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

If you’re not working with a practitioner, that’s prioritizing environmental toxin and mold toxin and parasite toxin detox, then you’re gonna have a really long road to recovery. Look at just you, Darren. It took you years and years and years until you finally, oh, it’s this mycotoxin. I gotta detox that.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Yeah. And I got a holistic cardiologist in Toledo and he is fantastic, but he didn’t ask about mold. And he prescribed nitroglycerin and Prevacid for my heartburn and inability to digest food very well. And then I went to three other holistic doctors and chiropractors and every response, or every theory that I got from them, it’s like, no, that doesn’t make sense. Because my diet is so good. And my lipids are so good and everything that I do, it’s my profession. I do everything right.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

And it’s like, but why is it worse when I work outside in the summer? Why was it horrible in August in Florida? Cause it was hot and humid, you know? Like putting these pieces together. And when I sued my landlord, my lawyer, she was the first lawyer in Michigan to ever bring a mold lawsuit in Michigan. That was 1999. So she’s the best in the state. But she didn’t know about mycotoxins. And she told me, she goes, don’t bother even going to the University of Michigan hospital ’cause there’s no doctors there that know about mold. And I completely agree. I didn’t do a survey, but why would any doctor, conventional medical doctor, study mold, right? Because they’re taught in school. Well, mold is natural, it’s outside. You walk outside, you breathe in mold. Yeah, but the excessive amount in all these buildings really kills people. And I think a lot of people that have heart attacks, the original problem is an infection of some kind, whether it’s mold or bacteria.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

You know, and of course I have no plaquing at all, but yet I had a possible heart attack according to the EKG, so.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. So now we’ve established in this talk how common this is, how dangerous it is. So let’s get into, I know people wanna know, how do I find out if this is in my work, my home, the buildings that I’m in. So give us some tips on finding this, how do we do it?

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Okay, so how do you find it in your building? You have to look for water stain spots, maybe around the windows. You have to look for, use your eyes in your nose. Maybe you can smell it, but you look for damaged parts of the building. If your gutters aren’t working right. If they look at the foundation on the outside of the building, maybe water’s running like underneath the brick, into the foundation. You gotta go to the attic and go to the basement and look for damaged material. Whether it’s rotting wood, which is mold, and paint that’s peeling. I have a girl, a patient in Chicago and real estate’s pretty tight there and she doesn’t make a ton of money, but she has a place where she lives. And four years ago, she was a patient. And I said, you got mold in your place. You gotta move out, just move out. 

Well, she hasn’t and I lost track of her during COVID. And then she contacted me again very recently. And her apartment has leaked five more times because of plumbing behind the wall leaking. And she had a file cabinet that the mold remediation company had pulled the file cabinet away from the wall and the wall came with it. Like it was stuck to the back of this file cabinet, but now she’s got cancer. And now she’s got ascites which is the bloating of fluid retention in her gut. And now she’s seeing a holistic MD that I referred her to, but it’s like if she had moved out three years ago or four years ago, she wouldn’t have cancer right now. So it’s a matter of like being a mold detective and a water intrusion detective, because the original problem is water intrusion. And even, especially like in bathrooms, after you take a shower, run the fan for at least 15 minutes, use the squeegee to dry off the shower walls and look around for black spots, mold.

And maybe it’s under the tile. You know, maybe you can’t see it. Now you can get an air filter test. You can buy that at Home Depot or Lowes for 100 bucks. And if you have the cash, I’d actually recommend that you get a professional to come in and they can do the air capture test. And we just did this for my office about six weeks ago, just to make sure because we did it three and a half years ago when we moved in and he said, yeah, everything is clear. There’s a little bit of something in a conference room, but not a big deal to fix. And so we’re gonna take care of that, but he also spotted that the ventilation system is not equal. So some of the rooms are hot and stagnant and other rooms are cold and the wind is blowing, right? Like out of the ceiling, it’s blowing too much. 

And so I’m actually in one of the rooms that where the circulation, isn’t very good. And it’s a lot of heat that just kind of pours in very gently. And it gets really stuffy in those rooms and I’m already compromised, right? I’m 95% better now than what I was in 2016. But even yesterday I had a little bit of like tightness right here and difficulty breathing. So the air circulation needs to be correct too. You gotta have enough oxygen, low humidity below 45% better. It’s even better if it’s less than 40%. Once you get above 45%, now you’re growing mold. And even like, even if you have no water intrusion, even if you have no other predisposing mold factors, just a high humidity, you’ll start growing mold inside your body or inside your house and inside your body too, possibly.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And you know, people often think, well, I live in a hot environment. I live in New Mexico or Arizona or Texas, or you know, a place where it’s hot all the time. Bust that myth. Because there’s a lot of mold in these very places.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

It’s the ventilation system, the air conditioning, you gotta clean. You gotta be a mold detective and clean that stuff out, clean out the air conditioning, the filter. Make sure there’s no moisture in the ventilation ducts and get somebody to clean that out once a year and make sure there’s no humidity in there. I mean, once I started talking about mold on my YouTube channel, you can’t believe the stories that people tell me. Like one couple built a house and the plumber was bad. The plumber did a bad job and the water was leaking and their brand new house was completely trashed because the mold growth. And then now they’re gonna try to sue the plumber, like good luck, you know? So there’s a lot of factors.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It’s really common Darren, out of the multiple homes that my husband and I have purchased and sold. We’ve had two immediate like plumbing, water damage problems in two of our homes. It’s so common.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Yeah. So, I’m in my second home right now where I’m standing. But my first home I bought in 06 and that was moldy. So I was living in a moldy house and driving to a moldy office. And the moldy house caused constipation on month number five. Five months after I moved in, constipation. And then on the six months I’m losing my hair. So I’m washing my hair. I got shampoo on my fingers and I’m counting 25 to 30 strands of hair on my hands. And it’s like, what the heck? So that took four years to figure out the house.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And here you are eating perfectly, doing everything right, And I think a big message here is you cannot eat your way out of this.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

No.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You cannot eat your way out of a mold toxin in your body. You must get support with binders. You mentioned CellCore. They have, in my opinion, the best binders on the market, they’re incredible, and now they even have more. I mean, they started with biotoxin binder. Now there’s even better, but you have to have a practitioner guiding you through this and helping you.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

And step one is to remove yourself from the mold or to remove the mold from you like in your living space. So, but the other point here is that the moldy house caused constipation and hair loss. The moldy office caused heart problems, inability to digest food up here and then circulation problems. So different molds cause different problems in my body. Now I’ve said this a million times, but if I was a lawyer or an accountant in that moldy office, I would be dead by now with a very painful, miserable death. I’d be on a bunch of drugs, total disaster. And I think too, even if I was like a conventional MD, I’d still be dead.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Because you were able to biohack yourself because you did so right.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Because of the profession I’m in like, know what is a cause versus a trigger versus a symptom. You know, you gotta treat the cause and the other two things go away. So just being able to process the information correctly and know how to think with this situation.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. Well, we’re gonna, I could talk to you all day. We’re gonna wrap it here. We could go on and on, but give us some pearls on how to treat the human body as we close. And what do you really want people to know? Like what would be your message of hope so that people watching this know that, okay, I can do this.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Okay. So basically there’s two tools, one is supplements, the other one is food. And then, so we’ve mentioned already detoxing and we both love CellCore. And I have, and CellCore has maybe 28 products right now, but in my office I carry about, I think it was 900 different products from all these different companies. So there’s this huge arsenal of supplements that are available to you. Now I have two employees that previously worked in the medical field and one was in a GI office. And I asked her just the other day, how many therapies did the doctors have in that clinic? And she said, two. Prilosec, Prevacid, everybody got the same diagnosis. They all got irritable bowel syndrome. So you walk into a GI clinic, you’re diagnosed with this and you’re given one of these two products. And then there’s a pain clinic in Ann Arbor. And there’s five doctors. They’re super busy and they work with two drugs. 

They take people off Vicodin and they put them on oxycodone or Oxycontin. And that’s it, two. But the point is, there’s an enormous amount of supplements and they do a wide variety of good for your body, whether it’s nourishing or detoxing or facilitating drainage, the natural occurring cleansing of the organs. So I recommend that you start studying this stuff and then get a hold of a really good practitioner. And what I see on social media, cause I’ve been on YouTube now since 2013, there is an evolution and an improvement in the education and knowledge status of healthcare practitioners and patients. And it keeps coming up and up. And now, I follow a few people on TikTok that are contemporaries in CellCore. 

And they really hammer it hard. Like in 10 seconds they talk about mold, parasites, toxins causing all these symptoms and they’ll like show up, you know, whole list of symptoms. So it’s always just a matter of finding the next answers in the free market. And the free market is so important. You can’t necessarily rely on doctors that take insurance, unfortunately, because there are doctors on the planet who never get anybody well ever, but yet they are still paid because they are in the insurance racket and they can spend 30 years giving drugs, drugs, drugs to treat symptoms, symptoms, symptoms, and nobody gets better. Their health continues to go down and the drugs kind of try to prop ’em up as they’re spiraling downward. So it’s a whole new way to look at the body. You’re working with the body, you’re working with mother nature and you’re using supplements and diet that comes from mother nature. 

And then one more thing is like regarding the diet, don’t be afraid of eating meat. Meat is the most important food on the planet for human beings. There’s no science that shows that meat causes any disease. It doesn’t cause cancer, heart disease. There’s absolutely no science on that whatsoever. Actually the most nutritious food for human beings is liver. And then second is red meat and then third is white meat. So in that order. So, don’t be afraid of eating meat. I personally have been on, what’s called the carnivore diet now since August of 2018 and is, and you know, I’ve been in the nutrition field since ’93, the carnivore diet for me has been the absolute best diet. And I eat as much meat as I need or want every single day. It’s been absolutely amazing. So that I have to say that message like, frequently.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So Darren, I gotta, you dropped that. So now we gotta go there. You said, there’s no science to support that meat is bad for us. And I know that the American Heart Association would differ. And I know that we got a whole different message coming to us on TV and in the.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Right and they’re wrong. They’re 100% wrong.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And I know you’re a researcher. I mean, I know you, you will go back, back, back and look at studies and research. So go a little deeper there. I mean, you made a bold statement. There is no research that an animal diet.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

There’s no science.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, or no science, no science.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

There’s a difference between research and science.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

There you go.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

So. And here’s the difference. It comes down to what are the steps in science? Step one is you make an observation and step two is then you form a hypothesis. Step three. I’m gonna go over here is now you do a scientific experiment to determine whether or not your hypothesis is correct. Then you publish that and you let other people replicate your studies. So most research in nutrition, we’re talking 95% is make an observation and then make a hypothesis. Then they stop. They stop there. And that includes epidemiology, cohort studies. These are surveys and surveys are opinion, and they do fancy things with numbers. Like they’ll gather up numbers from surveys and they’ll do biometrics and they’ll measure things, and they put it into an Excel spreadsheet and they manipulate the numbers and it looks like science, but they’re missing this. 

They’re missing the scientific experiment where you do something to people. You have like a control group. And then you have an experimental group and you do something to that experimental group. If you don’t do something, then it’s not science. It’s an opinion or a survey. So again, it’s unbelievable. A few years ago, I attended the meetings for the USDA dietary guidelines committee. ‘Cause every five years they have to update the food pyramid. And I stood there in front of this whole committee and I said, you are not looking at science. You’re looking at survey. The scientific method is at least five steps and you are stopping at step number two. So all the universities, all the standard nutritionists, dieticians, the mess halls in the military, the school lunches, it’s all not scientific.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I’m sure they loved you.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

I don’t care. They can love me or not. I don’t care . They’re killing people.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

They’re killing people.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

91% Of American men are overweight. It’s because of people looking at surveys and they think they’re doing science and they think they’re smarter than you, but they’re not. They’re stupid. And they don’t understand how to study research. Sorry.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You know, I’m really glad we went down this rabbit hole. It’s really important. People who take the time to watch this interview are going to walk away with so much to think about, to research more, go find Darren on his YouTube channel. What is your YouTube channel, Darren? How can they find you?

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Well, it’s just go on YouTube and search Dr. Darren Schmidt and my channel will come up.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Perfect, perfect. Now last question, ’cause I’ve been looking at it this whole time. Tell me about that lard canister and the potato chip canister behind you. That’s some good stuff there.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Yeah. So it says here, it says Schmidt’s Pure Kettle Rendered Preferred Lard from Toledo, Ohio. And I’m from near that area. And I just bought it because it has my name on it. Plus it’s lard. Now animal fats are healthy and they don’t ever cause any disease. So we’re talking lard, butter, gee, tallo, red meat fat, it’s all healthy. So this is healthy. Now this one. So this is from probably the thirties, or maybe earlier, now this one’s from the fifties and it says healthy food on the alkaline diet, the new era, scientifically processed potato chips. Now they’re using vegetable oils and they’re calling it scientific and they’re calling it healthy. And they’re trying to replace the animal fats. And these corporations are making way more money, you know, selling junk food to us. So anyways, they came in these tin cans and I set them up there as an example of.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Good stuff.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

The evolution of our diet, this was healthy. Everybody was healthy. You know, all the food was organic in the 1930s. I’m sure there was processed food and stuff, but they didn’t really explode on the market until the 1950s and that’s where that comes in.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Amazing. Thank you, Darren. This has been an incredible interview. I really appreciate the work you’re doing in the world and what you stand for and that you’re willing to like stand in front of the bullet and take it. You’re like, I don’t care. I’m gonna teach and I’m gonna tell the truth.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Oh, it’s truth, yeah.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

And your patients get well, your protocols work. What you do for people is extraordinary. And thank you so much.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

All right, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You take good care now.

Dr. Darren Schmidt

Okay, all right. Bye.