Biohacking: Your Defense Against Mold

Ann Shippy, MD

Welcome to Mold, Mycotoxins, and Chronic Illness Summit. I’m your host, Dr. Ann Shippy. And today I get to have a really great conversation with my dear friend, David Asprey. He’s the founder of Bulletproof, 40 Years of Zen, True Dark, Upgrade Labs, Danger Coffee, and many other things. He’s the father of biohacking. He’s got multiple New York Times bestsellers. And Dave, thank you for coming. I just want to start with a compliment. One of the things among many that I really love about you is how you take very complex data and situations, the newest science, and really create real-time solutions, which is such an extraordinary, unique gift. Thank you so much.

Dave Asprey

Oh, you’re so welcome, Ann. It’s not that I wanted to really be good at this. I am a computer hacker by training from Silicon Valley. Much like I don’t know if you talk about this much, I know that you were a chemical engineer before you became a doctor, and you have a really good mind for this stuff as well. And what I found was when I got sick from mold and from some other things, that’s what caused me to create the biohacking movement, which is now a multi-billion dollar global industry. I run the largest conference and the first conference in biohacking every year where people come together and I would guess 20, 30% of people really into biohacking are people who have had toxic mold. And when you’ve gone to the doctor and the doctor says, “Well, your lab tests are fine”. You’re like, “Well, I’m not fine”. And then they go, well, maybe you should, you know, try to lose weight and like, and how would you do that? And by the way, doctor, maybe you look like you need to lose some weight too here. And you just realize.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s really funny, Dave, that’s the last regular medical conference that I went to, I was looking around and seeing what they were eating and drinking and they all looked unhealthy. I was like, What am I doing here?

Dave Asprey

Yeah, and I’m not, this isn’t fat shaming. I weighed 300. Okay. You know, the estrogen from mold can have a profound effect on your ability to lose weight. And I know that was one of the issues with me, but it was the almost gaslighting from well-meaning doctors who were overworked and were just like, well, it has to be in your head because I don’t see it and I just want anyone who’s hearing this to understand. No, it is in your head because your brain isn’t working. I had toxic mold-induced brain damage according to Dr. Eyman. I’m on his board of directors now with Eyman clinics, and I’ve seen my brain scans on mold and off of mold. So it’s not a willpower problem. It’s not a moral issue. It’s not a lack of trying. You’re actually, if you have mold and you even have the energy to watch this, you are a willpower athlete. You are using more willpower to get through your day than most Olympic athletes use to win. It’s that big of a deal. And you don’t get a break because they do that and then they go rest and you’re doing it every day just to put, well, hopefully, gluten-free bread on the table and all the things. Well, yeah. And so this summit is important and your work, Ann, is really important as well because you can fix it biologically. So I became a biohacker. I spent $2 million at this point on first fixing my biology. It costs about half a million dollars to get over mold and other biotoxin things that are happening to me and the rest of it has been on upgrading myself and becoming, you know, the more the creator of the biohacking movement. 

And that’s let me share it with millions of people. And a lot of the things that I learned that people who don’t have mold are doing to perform better are exactly what lets people who’ve been exposed to mold recover their function. And what you’re going to find when you go through all this knowledge is that you can get back to normal. And right now that may be your goal, but it’s not the right goal. Normal is another word for average. I think with these tools you can be far, far above average in the areas that are most important to you. And that’s what biohacking is about and that’s what recovering from mold is about. Like it’s really important. So if you’re at that point where you just feel like, I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the day. I’ve been there. When I was 26, I made $6 million in Silicon Valley and I had a mold brain, and I bought disability insurance and I lost it when I was 28. And at the end of every day, I couldn’t remember anything in a meeting. I would drive home and I had no recollection of how I even got home. My brain was so foggy and I would just kind of collapse. And then I would drink some coffee and then I would study biochemistry to just fix myself as best I could do, and then I would fall asleep on my desk. And I did this for four years because my doctor said nothing was wrong with me. I’m like, I will hack this. So I’ve been there.

Ann Shippy, MD

Saying a couple of really important things, and one of them is this, this inner knowing that you had that there was something really wrong and that you had the brain to figure out what to do about it. That’s really important to be able to pass on like this hope and really help people to tap into that, knowing that they can get better and actually be better than ever. That’s really that whole mess. That’s the big message of the summit. And you and I and you know, a lot of people in this field, we actually look back and we feel like it was a blessing in some way because it helped us to actually propel our health forward. So as hard as it was during those times when we didn’t know the path and know how we were going to make it, it was that knowing somewhere deep inside that we could get through it, that we could find answers.

Dave Asprey

Yeah. One of the things I did, Ann, and I’m going to be sharing this interview and this summit with everyone who’s seen it is I filmed a documentary and it’s a moldy movie icon. And I did that because no one believed me and it made me so mad. I’m like, Are you kidding me? Like I am? I like to think I’m smart. You know, I’ve been really successful in my career. I have an MBA from a big school, but during the MBA, I did almost fail out and I had to learn how to fix my brain just to graduate. But I did graduate. So, like, I think I’m doing okay. But I was like, I’m fine. I’ve got to validate this by having normal people like you and me or I have a hedge fund manager now, doctors that just normal people who were fine and they were kicking ass in their life and they have great relationships and then they remodel, they get a new house and all of a sudden it’s like someone took away the sun and one or both of them are really sick. So you start seeing I’m not alone. And then you start hearing from all the experts that you’re interviewing here and you go, Oh my God, this is an epidemic and it’s an environmental epidemic. And this is a real epidemic that’s actually killing a lot more people than the ones that are good at marketing. So we need a marketing campaign for this kind of epidemic like we’ve had for the other famous ones because this is something that is affecting autism in kids. It’s affecting human fertility in a major way. And there are some things about mold and biology that people don’t know about. So I want to share some of the things that have been most effective for me. I know you’ve already covered in other interviews things like basic detox and binding and glutathione that are core principles of biohacking. But let’s start with brain stuff and then let’s get into some of the weird cellular biology. Does that work?

Ann Shippy, MD

Let’s do it. Let’s nerd out.

Dave Asprey

All right. One of the things that will happen to you is that your body will feel fear and anxiety. And the way this works is cool. And I’m saying this because I run a brain training company where people come and spend five days with neurofeedback. It’s called 40 Years of Zen. And what we.

Ann Shippy, MD

I’ve been three times, you know. I love it so much.

Dave Asprey

Yeah. That’s true. Okay. Yeah, three times, right? Yeah. And when people who’ve been exposed to mold come. You see this but everyone does this. Here’s what our bodies actually do. Something happens in the world around you. Could be a noise. It could be a light, it could be a smell. And then the body in about a third of a second before your brain even knows it happened, the body decides whether it’s a threat or not. And then the body gives you an emotion or a feeling about what happened. So there’s a window for a third of a second where the body knows before you do, or at least a part of you that is conscious knows. So if you’ve been exposed multiple times, you’ll be like me. You be able to walk into a room, and if it’s a moldy room, you will feel a sense of doom. You’ll feel a sense of anxiety. You may have a panic attack. When I was filming a moldy movie my producer had been exposed to mold and we went into a mold-damaged basement after Hurricane Katrina. I wouldn’t go down there. I said, I know what happens when I go into one of these, and her name is Kiki. She walked down there and she came out and had a meltdown, a full-on panic attack. And it ended up where I literally put my arms around her and just held her for 20 minutes as her body processed the absolute feeling of panic and despair and brain fog that was turned on by mold. If this happens to you, it is part of your body’s operating system to keep you alive. The issue we have is that mold makes these little toxins that are hard to identify. Your body can see mold fragments, but the toxins themselves are too small biologically for you to really see. In fact, they look a lot like cholesterol to your body. They’re very tiny. So it says, I don’t know what’s going on, but someone’s trying to kill me. You need to do something. And that can be really ungrounded. So if that happens to you, you can, as you fix your biology, retrain yourself so that when you smell mold instead of getting this run, which is exactly how I used to be able too, I’ve got this, I am safe. And so part of being fully healed is retraining your brain. You can do this with heart rate variability training, which is where I started. And eventually with EEG like we do at 40 Years of Zen. But the idea here is you can do tap it.

Ann Shippy, MD

Can you explain what EEG is?

Dave Asprey

Yeah, what? Oh. EEG? EEG is when we measure electricity coming off your brain. So EEG is you put little electrodes glued to your head and you show your brain what it’s doing so you can learn to consciously control it. So if you are having that effect, which certainly was a major thing for me, I would literally walk in and smell mold, like take a deep breath, hold it, and run out. And I don’t do that anymore. I don’t spend time in moldy places on purpose. But if I do, I can tell it’s a gentle degradation instead of a panic attack. And then I go and I take my detoxing things. And I’m just fine to the point that after all of this training, including knowing how to reset my nervous system with things like EFT or tapping, I lived in a house with forty water incursions.

Ann Shippy, MD

All of that happened.

Dave Asprey

And I didn’t realize that when I moved down that smells a little bad. But I lived there for four months and my health was fine and I moved to a place that doesn’t have mold because I knew it was bad for me, but it wasn’t a life or death feeling. So, number one, if that’s happening, you can retrain it with those technologies, just training your sympathetic nervous system or training your brain. Now, what else is happening? There is something very important, and it has to do with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and even long COVID. They’re all caused by something very similar. I was diagnosed in my twenties with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, and I don’t have them anymore. They’re caused largely by molds, but they can be caused by other infections or traumas like long-Covid. And what’s really happening there is that your immune system has these cells. They’re called mast cells like the mast of a ship. And what they do is you can imagine that they’re landmines and they’re in your immune system. And their job is if there’s an infection or an invader, they get set off and they do a really good job of swelling up to stop the invader from moving anywhere. And they release inflammatory signals. They release other things like hydrogen peroxide and they release histamine and they release heparin, which causes your blood to get thin. Now what’s supposed to happen is like a random mosquito bite. It swells up, it itches and then it’s done. 

But when you have chronic mold over time, your mast cells become more and more sensitive because the threat is always there. So now instead of taking a normal amount of pressure to set off a mass cell, now it only takes a feather touch. So all of a sudden that food you weren’t allergic to, you’re allergic to it now, or you walk down the stink aisle of laundry detergent and fabric softener at the grocery store and you can’t breathe when you’re done because it now sets off the mast cells. And when one of them goes boom, it releases enough histamine that it triggers all the other mast cells around it. And mast cells line your gut. They’re inside your brain, they’re in your skin, your sinuses. And what you’ll find there is that you get a systemic response that includes anxiety, panic attacks. Even what I would get from mold was growing up, I lived in a moldy basement. That set me up for real strong success, and I had ten nosebleeds a day minimum for most of my teenage years. So I would just carry around a bottle of Afrin and Kleenex in my pocket all the time because I’d just be in class and have it just come out of my nose. What’s happening there is the mold would set off the mast cells in my nose, which would then release heparin, which is a blood thinner, and it was just a chronic thing. So if you’re getting nosebleeds all the time, that’s a pretty good sign that you have toxic mold and it’s affected these mast cells in your body. So I want you to understand that’s a thing. And one of the effective things that’s happening in the world now is that so many people have got the same mast cell sensitivity from getting COVID, that when these long COVID people are the ones who I don’t know, I just have I’m so tired all the time, like, yeah, welcome to the world of chronic fatigue from toxic mold. Doesn’t matter what causes it. It’s the same thing. It’s mast cells.

Ann Shippy, MD

And I’m actually saying a relationship. The people who tend to get long COVID do have an underlying mold condition as well. When we check their micro toxin levels, there’s mold there. So they were already heading in that direction. And then COVID just tipped them over.

Dave Asprey

You’ve nailed it. And it’s funny because once you’re sensitized to mold like that, it makes you more susceptible to anything else. And once you’re sensitized by the environment, you’ll also notice something that caused me to quit drinking coffee for five years, and it’s that I would drink coffee. And about an hour later I get a sense of anxiety and tiredness. I’d want sugar and more coffee. And I get this jittery feeling that led me to create mold-free coffee and I’m very well known for starting bulletproof coffee. My new coffee company is called Danger Coffee because who knows what you might do? And danger Coffee is lab-tested mold-free, and it has a specific kind of trace mineral that actually binds to mycotoxins in your body when you drink it. And I drink Danger coffee and I feel great all day. But I was in Europe two weeks ago and I thought, you know, European coffee standards, how bad could it be? And I drank a cup of coffee at a fancy coffee shop in Estonia. Oh, my God. For 2 hours later, like, this is the worst afternoon I’ve had because it set off my cells even though I’m pretty, I’m pretty good.

Ann Shippy, MD

So it’s like a good distinction. Like we don’t have very good regulations for protecting us from mold in food compared to other countries.

Dave Asprey

We do not in the U.S. In fact, when it’s illegal to sell coffee in Europe, they sell in the U.S. That’s why I’m pretty picky about drinking Danger coffee. And yes, it is my company, just to be really clear. So, you know, I’m endorsing something that I put my life into because I think it matters. So you don’t have to drink Danger coffee, but be careful of coffee in the US.

Ann Shippy, MD

And even then, it’s probably not even strict enough.

Dave Asprey

And oh, in Europe, no, I don’t think it is. What you’ll find though, is that all food, especially plant foods, has some amount of mole, but some foods are much more likely to have a mold in them than others. Grains, nuts, seeds, coffee, beer, red wine. Not only do they have mold in them quite often, they also have histamine in them. If you’ve been exposed to toxic mold, you likely have a sensitivity to histamine, and histamine is a direct trigger for those mast cells. So you eat a food like soy sauce. Very few people who’ve had mold should ever have soy sauce because soy sauce is naturally high in histamine. And when you eat that, our fish sauce is even worse. You eat that. And then 10 minutes later, like, what is going on? Like, I’m kind of dizzy and I feel weird. Well, what’s going on is you triggered the mast cells in your body because you took histamine directly. So you learn to avoid the foods that are triggers for you. But they’re triggers because mold makes your mast cells sensitive. The two things that work best for fixing mast cell sensitivity are over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. There are a lot of natural things like black cumin, seeds, oil, a turmeric. You can use that help. But I have found incredible results and people have had mold or long-covid by blocking histamine one and histamine two receptors. And the way you do that is Claritin blocks histamine one and Pepcid AC blocks Histamine two. So the protocol is you take one of those in the morning and one at night, it’s a double dose and that can give you amazing clarity and relief and it can reduce anxiety, but especially Pepcid, AC it turns off stomach acid production. You need stomach acids. You don’t get a leaky gut. So when you’re doing this protocol, you also take digestive enzymes and betaine HDL, and you take those with meals, which preserves your gut integrity. And you do this for six months after you’ve removed yourself from a moldy environment and magically then the new mast cells that replenish and replace the ones you had, they grow up in a calmer environment and then they’re more resilient. And then you taper off the protocol and you’re much healthier. So these are the main things.

Ann Shippy, MD

How many times have you done this protocol, Dave? Is it just one?

Dave Asprey

You know. I really became aware of this at the beginning of COVID, I did a lot of work around understanding inflammatory cytokine signaling and really getting to the bottom of it, which of course resulted in my blog post about it getting taken down by the authorities. Oops.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yeah. I got that one.

Dave Asprey

So what you’ll find, though, is that.

Ann Shippy, MD

You couldn’t write anything that would help. Could you?

Dave Asprey

Actually, I put it all on Telegram was the one place that they saw but all of my other platforms, even my blog, I had to take some stuff down, even though it worked. And so this works really well. I’ve really only done that protocol probably twice, and I still play around with it. And what I’ll find is if I wake up and it like, you know, my immune system is a little overactive, I don’t mind taking on Claritin. I’ve had allergies my whole life. And managing allergies is really important so that you don’t get systemic chronic inflammation and you can work on improving your liver. Ozone therapy is also something that helps mast cells and something that restored my brain the first time when I was really in a bad place after mold. I did a little bit of the doctor’s office. I learned how to do home-administered ozone therapy and it really turned my mitochondria back on. So I’m imagining that you might be covering ozone therapy in another one of your interviews.

Ann Shippy, MD

I haven’t covered that yet. It’s a possibility that it might be. So if you want to spend a couple of minutes on it, that be great.

Dave Asprey

I’ll spend a couple of minutes on it and then I want to talk about oxalate and food and how that affects. So ozone therapy works because ozone, it will directly kills almost any biological thing. Surprisingly, the cells in your body, make hydrogen peroxide, which is chemically similar to ozone. They make this to kill invaders so your cells can handle a certain amount of ozone or a certain amount of hydrogen peroxide, but bacteria and invaders can’t. So you can use it at the doctor’s office intravenously. And you do that, you think, Wow, I feel so much better. Well, part of it’s because it’s killing stuff. But the bigger part is that it is like weightlifting for your mitochondria, the little power plants in your cells that control a lot of these immune reactions. It tells them that they need to learn how to make their own antioxidants again. So it gives them a brief thing like high-intensity interval training or like lifting weights so they get stronger over time.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s actually the best description that I’ve heard. Data therapy. That’s awesome.

Dave Asprey

The first time I did it was in therapy. That was a long time ago. I was living in Silicon Valley and an 88-year-old dentist who’d been doing ozone therapy for 30 years taught me how to do it. And he said, Dave, you can just do it at home. You don’t need to come into my office. So I got my own ozone machine. They run about $1,000. And the way you do it at home is you introduce a small amount of ozone gas rectally. And if that sounds rough, it’s not. It’s a tiny little hose. And I’ve done it during social media and I just do hashtag reverse fart. It’s not painful. It takes three minutes.

Ann Shippy, MD

You know, you can weigh out to go get IVs or do you do?

Dave Asprey

I mean, IVs are also painful and they cost money and time, but they get to places that it doesn’t. So what I did, I did this and I was like, oh my God, for 5 minutes I got my brain back and it was so precious because I had lost hope. And then the next day I did it and I got 6 minutes and the next day I got 7 minutes. And so each time I did it, I got a little bit stronger and stronger and stronger. And it was what helped me climb out. And if I’d have known all the biohacking things that I teach at the biohacking conference, I think it would have taken me three months and I’m taking me maybe $3,000 and I’d have been fine. The reason I spent half a million dollars was because I didn’t know what to do, because I went down all these paths of thinking I had Lyme disease, even though I interviewed a guy from UCLA who did genetic analysis and 80 to 90% of people who think they have Lyme have moles. I tested positive for Lyme because people have mold. It activates Lyme. Life is not the cause. It’s a symptom of toxic mold. Some people just have lyme but if you got chronic Lyme, you probably had mold in the first place. So, do you agree?

Ann Shippy, MD

Yeah. And usually, once we get the mold handled, the Lyme will go into remission. Just kind of like the chicken pox virus and shingles, you know, it just goes into remission again once the immune system can actually work again.

Dave Asprey

I love hearing that and I wish we talked about that more in the world of functional medicine because it’s so powerful. Right?

Ann Shippy, MD

Because if you just treat the Lyme and you don’t address the mold, all those antibiotics that are being used, whether they’re nutraceuticals or pharmaceuticals or both, it ends up making them microbiome the even more precarious and out of balance. So it’s so much you just have to deal with the mold first and see if you can get that to take care of the lyme.

Dave Asprey

If you think about it, most antibiotics are actually mold toxins, and penicillin comes from that. So maybe adding more fuel to the fire isn’t the right plan, But something that happens when you live with toxic mold, is you’re exposed. Is the bacteria that line your sinuses and your lungs. They sense the toxic mold. Bacteria and mold are ancient enemies, so they arm up and they start making biofilms. In fact, a major cause of chronic strep throat in sinus infections is environmental mold. Now, growing up, I mentioned my nosebleeds. I also had strep throat once every month, and I went on antibiotics once a month for 15 years. Because it always happens.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s your story that’s crazy.

Dave Asprey

Since about third grade all the way up through all the way up through my first four years of college.

Ann Shippy, MD

Okay.

Dave Asprey

And it was just something I just knew would happen. I’d feel it happening. I didn’t understand. It was mold in the environment and making this happen. So part of treating mold is oftentimes getting your sinuses in order and treating a biofilm there.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yeah. So can you explain a little bit more about what a biofilm is for our audience that doesn’t know?

Dave Asprey

If you’ve ever seen Kombucha the way they make it. There’s this thing called a SCOBY. It’s like jellyfish agglomeration of bacteria and yeast. That’s a biofilm you can see. But what about is when bacteria are under threat, they team up just like people do. You’ve seen like those Roman legions where they have the shields all around the edges and they’re poking through it and they all move well. Mold does that as well. It causes that in bacteria. So a bacterial biofilm is when bacteria line up and they create a barrier on the edge and they actually create a sewage system and a nutrient system and they act more like a multicellular organism. And this is a major issue for surgical implants and for people who have PICC lines or things on their pounds or even on your teeth, plaque is a form of biofilm. If it’s a bacterial plaque. But since that’s triggered by toxic mold exposure, not exposing yourself to mold would be important, but also breaking up the biofilm. 

In my case, I do something you can just Google Dave Asprey Sinus rinse. It’s different than a neti pot, but it’s warm salt water with a little bit of xylitol, which helps to break up bacteria and some iodine, and you bend forward at your waist and you sniff it in like from a bowl. And the reason you do that is it creates suction and you can actually feel it going up here where neti pot doesn’t. And then as long as you don’t turn your head up, it won’t go down your throat, it just comes out your mouth sounds gross, But it was the cheapest and fastest way I knew to wash my nose out. And I do that if I’m exposed to this day. But you can also get antibiotic nose drops that will usually work and even antifungal nose drops are oftentimes important. Amphotericin B is the most common nose drop that I know works for that stuff. But sometimes you need a biofilm breaker like EDTA as well. And then you’re the doctor. I’m an unlicensed biohacker. I’m just talking about what works.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s a little different than what I do in the clinic. But for people that can’t come to see me, it might be worth trying. So it’s important, like good addressing the biofilm in the sinuses is an important part of recovery and getting the immune system back into balance to be able to work better again.

Dave Asprey

It’s important, but there’s something that isn’t even well-known in the world of nutrition or functional medicine, or in the world of mold recovery. And it’s that toxic mold when you’re exposed, especially if you get a fungal infection inside the body, in the interstitial tissues between the organs, which is more common than people realize. Or if you have yeast as a result of mold exposure, a lot of people get Candida because they’re around mold. I had that. What that’ll do is they’ll start making this calcium thing called calcium oxalate. And calcium oxalate comes because oxalic acid that’s made metabolically by fungus, but is much, much, much more of a problem coming from your diet. And when you eat foods high in oxalate, a lot of us who have mold go on special diets that are supposed to be healthy but that aren’t. And I’ve made this mistake as well when you eat certain foods and I’ll tell you what they are in a minute that contains large amounts of oxalic acid, it comes into the body and it seeks out calcium and it finds calcium in the blood and it forms tiny razor-sharp crystals. Some of them are as big as grains of sand, and they damage the lining of your arteries and they can accumulate in your sinuses. They can cause a leaky gut. They particularly harm your kidneys. 70% of kidney stones today are made of oxalic acid. Some of that’s because you’re exposed to mold, but more of it’s exposed or more of it is created because you’re exposed to the foods that you’re eating that you think are healthy, that aren’t.

Ann Shippy, MD

And I would add Vulvodynia. 

Dave Asprey

That was my next one. Yes.

Ann Shippy, MD

And Cystitis to your great list there.

Dave Asprey

Thank you. Vulvodynia is a horrible condition. One of my partners had it as a result of mold exposure and eating a high oxalate diet at the same time. And it’s so painful that your vulva hurts. They have razor-sharp crystals in them. So you can’t even wear underwear when you have that. Fortunately, I have not had a vulvodynia. Thank you very much.

Ann Shippy, MD

But the really are a lot of physicians who don’t have any solutions for treating it. So it really is an important thing to get information at.

Dave Asprey

The fact that it’s correlated with mold and in part caused by mold as a thing and interstitial cystitis. One of my friends told me she had it last week and she doesn’t have mold exposure, but she has a very high oxalic acid diet. She was eating two cups of raspberries a day. They are one of the fact that second or third-highest oxalate foods and she was eating two cups a day because the raspberries are healthy. I told her to stop that and stop raw spinach, which is another very big offender. Rock kale is also a big offender. Not as bad as spinach, though, and some forms of kale cooked properly are lower. But all kale has oxalic acid in it. The Lacie form is the worst, and almonds are another massive, massive source. So if you’re hearing this going, Dave But. But I’m healthy. I have a spinach kale smoothie with almond milk every day and I eat raspberries because they’re healthy. Well, yeah, they’re not. Those are the foods that cause kidney stones, but they also cause calcification in your joints. I have had joint pain my whole life. Gout is a major cause of this. So you’re exposed to mold. You wake up the next morning, your fingers are all stiff. Some of its inflammation, some of its oxalic acid. And if you ate those foods and a few others, even sweet potatoes and potatoes are high in oxalic acid. When you do that.

Ann Shippy, MD

Beets, I like beets so much. And I, I really have to be careful now, realizing if I make beets a small amount of them, not a whole big beet salad.

Dave Asprey

I won’t eat a beet salad anymore. I used to do it when I became a vegan as part of trying to heal myself. And.

Ann Shippy, MD

Okay, you were eating all high oxalic acid.

Dave Asprey

Oh, and it actually causes systemic pain everywhere. I had arthritis in my knees since I was 14, and when you have razor-sharp crystals throughout your body, would that set off those mast cells we talked about? Would it create systemic inflammation and make your symptoms worse? Yeah. So I find that when people who are recovering from mold become aware of the fact that some of their favorite foods are probably putting a burden into the body. 

Let me talk about how toxic this stuff is. The lower level lethal dose of oxalic acid is five grams per day, which is not that much. But if you have a spinach smoothie, which frees up the oxalic acid to absorb very quickly with almond milk, you could easily just in one smoothie, you could easily have 1 to 1.2 grams. That’s 20% of the dose that starts killing people. And there are case reports of people who probably had mold, too. We don’t know. But in a 10-day green smoothie cleanse with tons of chard and kale and spinach and almonds and sweet potatoes and beets, especially raw, especially blended, where they actually die from kidney failure.

Ann Shippy, MD

Oh, my gosh.

Dave Asprey

So if you are in a mold environment, your kidneys are already stressed because we eliminate mold through our kidneys. Animals like rats use their livers, which are actually better at the mold. So this is a bigger issue for us humans. And it turns out pigs are also wired like humans, which is why you need to be careful when you’re eating pork that is from animals that are not fed moldy food. So this is a big deal. And if you’re looking at healing from mold and you’re doing green smoothies, stop, and replace raspberries with blueberries. Blueberries have zero oxalate and they’re actually much better for your brain. So these strange things are weird. And my friend who stopped eating raspberries and almonds in three days said, Oh my God, my interstitial cystitis that’s plagued me for four years just went away. And I know this.

Ann Shippy, MD

You play a doctor on TV, right? Like it’s Sony Pictures and then two and then nobody thought of that. Okay, so, Dave, you’re low histamine, low oxalate, healthy food. I’m sure there are people listening. They’re like, okay, there’s nothing left to eat. Let’s describe what you eat and what you find to be actually healthy. In addition to the blueberries.

Dave Asprey

And I’m a Breatharian. I just want to know how many people have you heard. I try to say that I don’t think that’s real. So here’s what you eat. Guess what the lowest toxin food on the planet is? It is not a plant. It is steak. Yeah. If you eat grass-fed meat, there is no oxalate. There would be no mycotoxins. If it’s grass-fed, grain-fed meat can have a meaningful amount of biotoxins because it feeds in moldy corn moldy soy, and moldy wheat, and then it accumulates in the tissues. And you don’t want to eat that. And you’ll feel different, by the way, between grass-fed and not grass-fed, especially when you’re starting your healing journey. So Grass-Fed meat is a center point of my diet. And there is a book called The Bulletproof Diet. People lost a couple of million pounds on it, and I am the author and I do that. I eat grass-fed butter. It’s very, very important when you’re healing from mold, to become religious about avoiding omega-6 oils like canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, and any kind of vegetable oil, even avocado oil is relatively high and it’s made with solvents and a lot of it’s fake. So what you focus on is clarified butter, which is ghee.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s where we’re still different.

Dave Asprey

Oh, ghee? Well, yeah, it depends. If you’re super sensitive to dairy, you can’t you can’t do butter. You might handle ghee. I find most people handle ghee, but some people don’t. And I know we’ve had these conversations about it. I actually went off of butter and ghee for about six months because you told me to. Going off of butter was helpful.

Ann Shippy, MD

That was when you were that four months in the moldy house.

Dave Asprey

It’s true. So going off butter was helpful, but going off ghee wasn’t. I have ghee in my smoothie every day, so I still eat ghee.

Ann Shippy, MD

You’re able to get it back. Yeah, it.

Dave Asprey

But I did take a brief break from it. And dairy protein oftentimes does cause inflammation, especially from old people. If you’re not allergic to mold, truly not allergic. More mold is something you’re not going to find in grass-fed dairy. So grass-fed, especially raw dairy, provides a great source of calcium which helps to reduce your oxalic acid levels. So it’s advisable if you’re going to eat these leafy greens or these berries, these things, to have them with grass-fed yogurt. And the best yogurt is sheep’s milk yogurt by far. For people with mold, it’s much less inflammatory, but the odds are you’re not eating enough protein and enough animal protein. Animal protein helps you detox mold. It gives you the amino acids that you need to give the energy you need. And it’s actually quite beneficial. So a lot of mold people are chronically hungry. I remember that hunger, no matter what you do, you’re hungry and you just want to eat, eat, eat. And having gotten up to 300 pounds from that well, if you have one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight, you’re probably not going to be hungry. And then what do you do for the rest of it? You have some healthy fats. You can do coconut oil, you can do palm oil, but you don’t want to do nut oils and seed oils. And you can do some avocados. But if you eat 10 avocados a day, actually avocados, one avocado has about 30 grams of oxalic acid. They’re a moderate thing. So you can have some avocados, but they better not be black avocados because if they’re blackened and they’re spoiling, they’re high in histamine. So avocados that are not overripe, or ripe, have a couple a day but don’t have 10 a day. The way I kind of want to, because guacamole is next to godliness. 

So what you want to do there is go, okay, where’s my fat come from? It comes from animals and comes from saturated fat and it’s some olive oil, but not a cup of olive oil a day, because that’s going to also unbalance you. What you’ll find is this helps you to repair your cell membranes. It helps you to make the lining of your nerves. It helps your brain stabilize. And if you tolerate them and not everyone does, or if you tolerate eggs, raw egg yolks blended into a smoothie they make. It tastes like ice cream, but they can be really healing or they can be really inflammatory. If you have a viral load or you have an allergy. Many people have egg allergies they don’t know about. But if you truly them, they’re a healing food. So what do I do? I eat some kind of grass-fed meat. I make sure there’s some kind of fat either in the meat or with the meat. And then the lowest toxin starch you can get is white rice and it doesn’t have oxalic acid at a meaningful level in it, but brown rice does. Some people will eat sweet potatoes that are high in oxalic acid. I like sweet potatoes, but if I eat two of them, I get enough of it that I get sore joints the next morning. So you learn how to use your environment. By the way, that’s the definition of biohacking that I wrote. It changes the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your biology. Well, remove the mold from the environment around you. Remove the mold from the environment inside you, and then control the food that becomes the environment inside you so that you feel good all the time. And the more you do this, the more you clean yourself out of oxalic acid, of mold, toxins, of dysfunctional mitochondria, of all these other things that built up over time, and you finally become stronger and stronger. And I’ve gone from that 300-pound computer hacker in my twenties to, well, the calendar says I’m 50. My lab tests say I am between 24 and 39, depending on which lab test you want. And I’m at well, 8% body fat and I exercise 20 minutes a day. 

Yes, I use my company Upgrade Labs has all the biohacking tech that you can use to replace a workout. So it’s 20 effective minutes, but this is 20 minutes a day. There are guys who are way more muscular than me, but I don’t have to spend any time. I’m healthy, I have energy and I’m a mold survivor. And I want you to understand this isn’t bragging. I earned this. I had to do a lot of research. I spent way more money than I should have had to spend. But that means you don’t have to. This means that just listen to everything Ann is saying she’s the most trusted person you’re going to find about mold and listening to other experts and the summit and just realize, you know, switching out food that’s inflammatory, a non-inflammatory food probably is going to cost you very much. And if you have some voice in your head going, but I can’t give up my potatoes. Okay, then be in pain for a long time until you decide it’s up to you. You can do whatever you want to do and you can have a new level of freedom, a new level of power, and a level of clarity. When you get this right, when you start this biohacking thing, you realize that there probably isn’t an upper limit to the amount of energy you have to what you can do, because it keeps moving out more and more. 

And the reason I call the military coffee a danger coffee is because who knows what you might do, the people who get their energy back when you’ve been at the bottom of where molds can take you into those just dark, kind of foggy, wet places in your brain. When you come out of those, you have a zest for life that wasn’t there before because you know what it could be like. You know what it’s like. And you realize, Oh my God, what if I do this other thing? What if I do this other thing? What if I change something about how I sleep? What if I tweak my diet? What if I take a supplement? What’s going to happen? Or what’s going to happen is you’re going to start feeling better and better. I mean, why? Why are all my friends slower than me? It’s because you’re upgrading yourself so mods can become the thing that starts you on a path of improving yourself to levels you actually don’t know are possible because you never felt them before, even before you got sick.

Ann Shippy, MD

Thank you, Dave. That was just such a great way to encourage people to just keep taking the right next step. But whatever they think is the next best step, and as long as they keep taking the steps, they’ll get there. And I suspect that people will want to know where else to find you to know more about your work, your different companies, and what you’re up to.

Dave Asprey

Sure, you can go to 40YearsofZen.com to learn how to retrain your brain. This is an in-person five-day program in Seattle. It’s an intense neuroscience-based program. You can go to upgradelabs.com to see we’re opening 15 in the US and dozens more in our franchise model. So you can even open your own upgrade labs, if you like, in your neighborhood. You go to DaveAsprey.com where all my blog posts are. The Human Upgrade is my podcast, which has hundreds of millions of downloads two episodes a week about biohacking. You’ve been a guest on the show, Ann. And Danger Coffee is where you get coffee. And if you just want to say I don’t remember all that, I have my old brain. Yeah, I get it. Just go to DaveAsprey.com and there are links to everything.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well Dave, I so appreciate that you have taken these really complex subjects and things that at the time you were so sick were really, really challenging to find in your information and that you have really poured your heart into helping people to recover from this epidemic that we’re experiencing.

Dave Asprey

Well, thank you. And I appreciate your understanding at the very detailed levels of what’s going on with mold and environmental toxins. And your path as a physician is very, very unusual. So you’re one of the few doctors you can trust really fully to understand what’s going on. When well-intended doctors in mainstream practice, they just don’t know. They don’t know the stuff that you know. And just as a parting gift for our listeners, if your doctor or even worse, your spouse doesn’t believe you, you can watch for free moldy movie. Just go to moldymovie.com and make them watch it. And after that, they’ll watch everything at the summit. But that movie is just one hour. It’s designed to make people who are unbelievers into people who go, Oh my God, this is real, isn’t it? So this is the thing to pop the false reality that they’re living in so that they can just say, oh, my husband, my wife isn’t crazy. They’re dealing with something that’s real. Because once we know what’s real then we can fix it. But if you think it’s all in your head, then it’s a moral failing. It is not mold. It is a chronic problem affecting kids, affecting teachers, affect parents. We can do something about it and it starts here on the summit.

Ann Shippy, MD

Thanks so much for joining us and all your wonderful information and your big heart. Thank you so much.