Could Mold Be Making Your Menopause Symptoms Worse?

Introduction to menopause as a tipping point 0:00

Today's conversation is for every woman who has wondered, is this really just menopause or is something else going on? Hormonal changes are considered a natural part of this transition, and many women notice that symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, digestive issues, anxiety, night sweats. They become a lot more intense during midlife. And the question is, are hormones the whole story? Or is menopause exposing deeper imbalances that have built underneath the surface for years? My guest today is Evan Brand.

He's a functional medicine practitioner who specializes in uncovering hidden root causes things like gut dysfunction, mold exposure, environmental toxins, parasites, Lyme impaired detoxification. Today, we're going to explore why menopause is often the tipping point. And when the body can no longer compensate for these underlying stressors and how addressing them may help women feel healthier, more resilient, and more like themselves. Welcome, Evan. Hey, Laura. Always good to see you. You're the best. And yes, this is a huge deal.

I mean, 80 to 90% of functional medicine, it's females. It's females that are admitting something is wrong. You know, there's ten, 10% of guys I work with that admit something is wrong, but 90% of the time, it's the ladies that know, hey, something's not right. And I'm actually humble enough to ask for help. And when I start looking at them, you know, you can run a Dutch panel and you can look at the estrogen and progesterone and see, okay, maybe some things are off here or you need a little bit of testosterone help, but a lot of these women come to me and they're already on hormone replacement.

But yet their sleep still sucks. They still have hot flashes even though they're on hormones. Their anxiety is bad, their moods bad, their libido is still bad. They can't recover from the gym. And then they come to me. And usually we see a bunch of things that other people just simply ignored or they didn't even look at. You know, unfortunately, your conventional GI is still not running advanced stool testing. Your endocrinologist is not looking deep enough into antibodies and looking for the auto immunity that's so easy to find.

Now, I mean, I'm pretty impressed with these new at home blood panels. I mean, you can even put these things on your arm. Now, send a vial back to the lab and get more data than what your doctor is going to run at Mayo Clinic. It's embarrassing, but it's also amazing the times that we're living in. And most of these women have never had a good functional workup. Maybe they've bounced around to a nature path or a functional practitioner. Maybe they did do a hormone panel, maybe they did a gut piece, maybe they did a toxin test.

But most people, due to marketing and since functional medicine in the last ten years, you and I have been doing this together. Functional medicine has become more of a marketing word and a buzzword. And so what you're seeing now is you're seeing MDS and Dos that are slapping functional medicine onto their website or slapping the sticker on the front of their building. But when you actually look at what they're doing there, zooming in and they're not zooming out enough. And so I hope today what you and I can do is show, okay, what should be in that constellation of labs for you to look at.

Because if you're the hormone guy, everything's hormones. If you're the thyroid guy, everything's thyroid. If you're the gut guy, everything's gut. But unfortunately it is a big, complex piece and it's all interwoven. And so for you to just go all in on Sibo, you're probably not going to get where you need to. Totally. You know, I see this all the time in my own community, in my own practice, where people come in to start working on some foundational pieces. And that's exactly it.

Why hormone therapy alone may not solve symptoms 3:25

They say, my doctor never looked at this. My doctor never told me about this. So I want to know, Evan, you know, when when a woman comes into you and she's told, you know, she's telling you I've got bad fatigue, I'm on hormones. I'm doing all the things. My brain's not working. I like. There's no peace in my digestive tract. I've got anxiety. As soon as I wake up in the morning, I'm thinking about everything I got to do all day. My body hurts, it aches. I bend over and I. And I've got pain. And you know, my doctor keeps telling me this is menopause.

So how do you help someone determine when these symptoms may actually be pointing to a deeper root cause, rather than hormones alone? I'd love to know those labs. And what's your approach for sure. Let's just dive in. I'll do a screen share here. This is a 71 year old female who, quote, had menopausal issues, postmenopausal syndrome, and we ran the organic acids test on her. And within 30s of looking at page one of this woman's oat test, we can change her life. And so you can look at these markers here five hydroxy methyl two for acid.

That's Aspergillus. This woman had mold exposure years ago. She thought she remediated, but apparently not because look how bad this is. You've got another Aspergillus marker here, another one here. You've got Candida Rabinowitz right here. You've got bacterial dysbiosis here, you've got Clostridium infections right here. So just in one page of this, which it's kind of odd because some people have been to 20 practitioners before they see me and they still haven't had this done. I'm like, really?

It's that easy. You pee in the cup, you send it back to the lab, how have you not had this done? And so this woman was already doing and taking hormones, but yet she still had all these symptoms. It's like, well, yeah, absolutely can't eat is going to drive potentially the brain fog, the sugar cravings, the mold colonization could be affecting the amygdala where you're stuck in fight or flight. You can't relax. She needs wine at night to chill out. We go through the whole thing. I know you do this all day, every day, but when you look at issues with mitochondria, this explains why the woman can barely get out of bed.

She she's like hypo metabolic. Yeah. And the look at nutrient levels, I'm sure it's not good. It was actually average deficient in riboflavin. Vitamin C is usually low in these people. So just that one test can be life changing. And I look at the GI as well. I do toxin panels because everyone's toxic. Unfortunately unless you're in a sauna three, 4 or 5 times a week, you're going to be toxic. On paper, it's kind of scary, but I've seen people that are, let's just say, 40 that are more toxic than someone who's 80.

If the 80 year old is actually doing detox work, doing sauna, doing the proper things for lymphatic support, kidney, liver, it's all something that can be accomplished within a few years. But unfortunately, most people just they bounce around and they listen to podcasts and they never actually dial themselves in. They do. I want to talk about the organic acids for a second, because that's what you just showed. And, you know, you made a comment like, how come you're how come people are coming to us and they haven't had this test done?

And what I find, Evan, is that very few people know how to accurately interpret and organic acids. In fact, I had an experience with my own husband where he went to see a doctor. It was a Western medicine doctor who was integrative, right? So they were bringing in some functional concepts and integrative. And this doctor ordered a organic acids on. My husband, and I was in the room when she interpreted it, and I was appalled. I and the car on the way home, I said, Hun, I'm actually when we get home, I'm actually going to interpret this for you and show you what's actually happening in your body, because she just didn't understand and connect the dots.

So I feel like a lot of women listening right now don't even have a good resource for people to do this test. And if they do do it, they might not know how to actually interpret it. It's a big test. There's a lot of pathophysiology on that. And you got to work with somebody like you, Evan, who has interpreted literally thousands and thousands and thousands of these. It's a skill. Yeah I know I'm in the top ten worldwide, according to the lab for how many I've run. And so now, a couple times a year, the lab will reach out and say, hey, can you train doctors?

And a lot of people in the room are Dos and MDS, and it's not their fault. I have a lot of friends that are doctors. They're simply not taught this stuff in medical. And you know, people are doing the best they can, right? I always say that the doctors you're seeing, they're doing the best with what they know, but maybe they haven't had in-depth interpretation, in-depth training to interpret that. So do it. Even teach the world how to do this because people need it. Yeah, well, here's the thing too.

I want people to understand that you are not just your body. And so these menopause issues you're battling, you are not just this little flesh vehicle here. You are the environment. And so you cannot get well in a sick building. There's so many cases where and sometimes okay, this is not just like people living in trailers. I mean, I've seen multi-million dollar homes that are absolutely poisoning people. But yet the husband doesn't believe that it's a factor. So we test the environment. We show them on paper.

Hey, here's the health score in your bedroom. This is why your wife has no libido. So if I bring that up, maybe he gets a little interested. But other than that, they'll blow it off. And so I want you to know if you have a perfect protocol, but yet in California, I've seen it a lot. You have a dirt floor crawl space, some of these old, old school beach homes.

Organic acids testing and hidden root causes 8:43

You have a dirt floor crawl space and you've got evaporation, you've got moisture, you've got things coming up into your subfloor, into your breathable air, and there's no air purifier that's going to fix all that either. So sometimes it involves you encapsulating your crawlspace, you checking your ductwork, you replacing your blower fan and your HVAC unit. I mean, when I just moved into this house, I just had a weird hunch everything tested fine. But you know what? Let's just double check. We pull off the door to the blower, and that door was completely covered in mold.

And so luckily it was easy to replace and were set. Did a retest hit everything with hydrogen peroxide? Now we're fine, but I want ladies listening to know if you're doing all the things you've got the huge supplement list, you got your pill organizer, your baggies, whatever, and you're dialed in there. But yet you haven't even looked at your blower fan and you are at home. A lot of these women, either they're housewives, they work from home. The man's gone all day, so he's out of the exposure for 6 to 8 hours.

She's home breathing this stuff in all day, and that could be the hidden place that you're spending your wheels. And in fact, when it comes to the hot flashes and the anxiety and the insomnia, I would argue mold could be the biggest factor for those symptoms. And I am a male, but I had hot flashes, I had anxiety, I had heart palpitations, I had horrible sleep when I had mold. Now, I also had a little bit more complicated story with Lyme, Bartonella and babies. So if we can let's talk about that for a minute, because a lot of these women have aggressively pursued hormones, thyroid.

Hopefully they've looked into the gut. Hopefully they've looked into toxins. But the other hidden piece of the puzzle are Lyme and co-infections. Now Lyme gets all the attention, which is actually not fair to these other bugs because in my opinion, the co-infections actually created more issues for me than Lyme itself. So Lyme is Borrelia burgdorferi, and the government's been messing around with ticks since the 1950s. Go look at the podcast I did with the author, Chris Newby. She's a Stanford researcher.

She wrote the book called Bitten The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Warfare. So the government has been paying scientists since the 1950s to forcefully inject ticks with various diseases. They then have made hundreds of thousands of tick bombs where they drop the bombs of ticks from planes. Okay, this is all declassified government documents. There's nothing conspiratorial here. It's all declassified. Now, the point is this. You could be in California and say, Evan, I don't see ticks.

We don't have ticks here. Yes you do. I promise, and I see plenty of cases out in the desert in Arizona, New Mexico. These women that come to me, they have these weird symptoms I've never seen to take of my life. Yeah, but your symptoms are weird. You've got this random joint stuff. You can't sleep well, you feel real anxious, you got brain fog. And so we'll run a DNA urine sample, and sure enough, there's Lyme or Bartonella or or an a plasma or, and in some cases, it's sexually transmitted. Now there's a couple papers on this, but Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria can be transmitted through semen.

There's some good documentation on this. So I had one case of a woman reached out for what she thought were hormone issues. She was in Arizona, never seen a tick in her life. Her husband went up to Colorado. He was a big hunter. So he tests positive for Lyme. She has Lyme. She has co-infections as well. Once we work on those, all of a sudden her symptoms, which were labeled as hormone issues, they magically disappear. So this is why I'm saying it's you can't just zoom in so far that you missed the whole thing.

So in that case with this woman, did you end up treating her husband as well or would he have crossed just continue to cross, contaminate and infect her? Yeah, exactly. Unless they're boring, they don't get together. Right. So yeah, we did pursue some herbs for him as well. And what's he into it? He was like, okay, let's do this. He was game only because he had enough joint issues that got marked as aging to then say, okay, I'll accept some help. So once we worked on him, his joints got better. Surprise, surprise.

And then her hot flashes to sleep. All that stuff improved. But if she were to just take more progesterone or more testosterone because that's what the OB or the endocrinologist told her, well, she would have never gotten to those infections which were tearing her apart. She would have felt like hormones just don't work. I have to tell you a crazy story. And so I grew up in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Truckee, which is outside of Lake Tahoe, and we had a pet deer growing up. True story. Yes, she was.

She was in a forest fire rescued from the American River. Ended up being given to us because we had acreage in a place to raise her. So we fed her from a goat's bottle. Point is, we used to sit there as kids and pick the ticks off of her and throw them in an ashtray where my mom would then burn them. Pick, pick, pick. When you say there's no ticks in California, I will tell you right now when other people say not you, there are plenty of ticks in California. Oh yeah. Yeah. And they're spreading. They're spreading too.

You know, we've moved into their neighborhood, so to speak. And so, you know, I've seen some crazy stuff this year. I've probably seen at least 30 cases of fresh tick bites this year scattered across the US. And there's a lot of articles which it could just be fear mongering. If it bleeds, it leads, right. So who knows? Like what's real in the media. But some stuff I've read, they're saying, hey, this is the worst, you know, tick season we've had on record and it only appears to be getting worse when the winters are more mild.

Apparently the ticks don't die off. So back in Kentucky, if we had a major hard freeze or into the teens or the 20s, tons of ice and snow generally. February, March, you're okay. But I had some property back in Kentucky and I went for a hike, ten minutes of hiking.

Environmental mold and toxin exposure 14:17

I had 20 ticks on me and some of them were so tiny. I mean, they were a speck of microscopic. Yeah, and these nymphs can actually transmit diseases to you as well. So I know people think it's going to be like this big scary thing you're going to see. No, unfortunately, some cases they're extremely tiny. And this idea of a bullseye rash, the studies show that only about 20 of cases do you actually get the bullseye rash, which is what a conventional MD is going to look for to properly diagnose you.

So we could do a whole hour online. But I just want you to know that also mosquitoes, fleas, lice. If you're someone who's rescued cats, it was a cat on the side of the road. One day it was in a ditch. I'm like, this thing looks like it's going to die if I don't help it. Well, I grabbed the cat. Sure enough, tons of fleas on that thing. The fleas are jumping all over me in my car. We go to the vet, we get the flea medication, all the fleas start jumping off. I could have gotten Bartonella from that.

And so it doesn't have to be a tick. It could also be mosquitoes. And Bartonella can cause a lot of weird symptoms. In fact, Doctor Neil, Neil Nathan, he wrote a great book called toxic. And in that book he has a graphic about Bartonella symptoms. It could be very confusing to someone who doesn't understand to look for Bartonella. And you could go to the psychiatrist for the anxiety and the panic attacks. You could go to the GI doctor for the IBS like symptoms. You could go to the rheumatologist for the joint stuff, and now you're on 4 or 5 different medications, but you still haven't found Bartonella.

It's way more common than people realize. And I've had it. My wife's had it, my oldest daughter has had it. And it can be a beast. And once again, if you pursue Lyme, you'll miss it. And so this is why you got to have a good workup. You got to be laser focused with these protocols. If you really want to get yourself better. You need the data. But unfortunately, you know, one stool test, one hormone test is not enough. And people are going to say, oh, Evan, but now you're telling me I got to spend like five K no you don't.

You can get a great workup done for 1 to 2000 us anywhere in the world, international distributors. So if you're listening internationally this can be done. Absolutely. It can be. I want to switch gears a little bit, and I want to talk about gut, because I know that this is a big topic in your community and something that you work on heavily with your clients and patients. So can you can you break it down for our audience? How gut dysbiosis. Well, maybe first define gut dysbiosis for somebody who doesn't know what that is.

And then talk about how that affects estrogen metabolism and why why maintaining a healthy gut is so important for women moving through menopause and perimenopause. Well, the story begins potentially as early as your childhood, depending on if you had ear infections as a kid because you were eating a bunch of dairy. So then you get put on antibiotics as a young child, so then you have killed off the good guys. You've now promoted bad bugs, which we can look at here, the same woman. Let's go ahead and use some some visual.

Right. Pictures of 1000 words. So in this case you'll see right out of the gate this woman had H. Pylori which I also had years ago. I lost 30 pounds without trying. I didn't know if I had cancer. What was wrong with me? It was H. Pylori. And so this is a bacteria that 51% of the world population has. When it grows too high, it will affect parietal cells. Parietal cells are what secrete HDL. That's your stomach acid. So you could have had this as a very young child. My oldest daughter, she had it when she was two.

We tested her and she was positive, probably from sharing cup sharing spoons. It doesn't have to be intimate contact with someone, although couples men listening, you can definitely pass it to your wife. And then she does this expensive protocol and then you're infect her. So keep in mind, most couples and families you should probably pursue this together. But dysbiosis could have occurred at a very early age where you get infections like this that start to grow. Your keystone bacteria can be affected.

You see, in her case, she had zero detected occur, which we now know. Acrimony is a very important strain to build up the gut barrier. So when you hear the term leaky gut, well, you can go take all the colostrum and glutamine and zinc harnessing that you want. But if you don't actually improve the disc biases, you're kind of going to spin your wheels. And then when you look at page three here, this is also stuff you may recognize from your childhood. How many of you had strep throat and you get put on antibiotics for strep or now I see tons of kids, half my practice or children.

I see a lot of kids with pandas. I know today is not a pediatric call, but if you have kids and you're listening, your grandkids and they're going wacko with behavior, they're biting, they're hitting, they have emotional outbursts that don't make sense. They have OCD, they have motor tics and and vocal tics. This is where you have to look. So this dysbiosis diagnosis is something that you can see just based on one GI panel. And then you were talking about the collateral damage and how this affects hormones.

Well this is a perfect case because right here you can see elevated beta glucuronide. Now this is an enzyme that will go high when you have gut dysbiosis.

Lyme, Bartonella, and tick-borne infections 18:58

And you're going to start to recirculate your hormones. And so if you're on hormones it can actually backfire. Because now you may be overdosing yourself and feeling weird and you don't know why. So we'll have to use things to not only clear up the disc biases, but we have to get this glucuronide pathway working better. And once this goes back down into the green, all of a sudden you can detox better. Your hormones do what they're supposed to do, everything is conjugated and excreted. And then you stack that with this. Here look at the elastase.

So your pancreas will start to crash out when you have long term H. Pylori. And if you're not breaking down your proteins, well now you don't have a no acids to fuel the brain chemistry. So now you're low serotonin. And so now you're anxious. You're a worrier. You can't sleep well because serotonin is not converting to melatonin. So your sleep sucks. So you take a CBD gummy. That doesn't help. So now you now you don't know what to do. And then you combine that with the outer crit right here. This is fat digestion.

This is a fat malabsorption issue likely due to the amount of malabsorption. And so you're wiping your butt ten times to get clean your stools floating. So the practitioner says take more enzymes and they're correct. But you also have to clear this stuff upstream. And so this is something that probably eight out of every ten people that I test look like on paper. So this whole dysbiosis messed up gut thing, it happens to the best of us. Even if you're eating 100% organic. Some of these people have been dialed in with nutrition for decades.

And so they blame themselves. Like, what do I need to tweak with diet? It's like, maybe it wasn't diet after all. Maybe it wasn't. And on that note, I want to talk a little bit about that elastase one marker and it being low. And in this example you showed that age pylori being high. And I don't know if you find this in your practice, Evan, but but what I find is, you know, there's some really solid things you can do to solve H. Pylori and to bring back that elastase. And one of the big issues is, as you mentioned, the parietal cells are overwhelmed.

They're not making hydrochloric acid. So bringing back the hydrochloric acid production. And I feel like a broken record player. I can't tell you how many times I will teach in my classes. Batten HDL challenge, betaine HDL challenge, but teenage still challenge and they won't do it. And then people come back to me six months, 12 months later, I still have these. Did you do the baton that. No, I didn't do that, I did. Okay. Do the baton challenge, find out what your ideal level of hydrochloric acid is, and then let's see if we can solve some of these symptoms.

Do you find the same thing where you're a broken record player on getting people to correct this. Yeah, I embrace it though, because, you know, you don't know what you don't know. And what really turned me on to this, I mean, this is over 15 years ago now. Was this this graph right here. And this is from Doctor Jonathan Wright's book called Why Stomach Acid Is Good for You. And so if you're listening, then you won't see it. But if you're watching, you'll see it here. I want everyone that's watching to find your age on the horizontal axis.

So a lot of you here probably going to be 41 and up. And you're going to notice on the vertical axis here you have your stomach acid levels on average with a Heidelberg probe, which is what Doctor Wright used to study his patients and figured out. Now if you look over here on the far left as a teenager, you have an iron stomach, essentially because your CL is on average four times higher. And that's amazing. So by the time you hit 30, all of a sudden the reflux creeps in. Maybe you get diagnosed with Gerd or Barrett's esophagus.

And so by the time you're over here, if you want to replicate a younger gut, you have to build back up those acid levels. And this is something that I especially do when I travel. If I ever go out to a restaurant, I'm going to take the acid and enzymes, because if you and your friends sit down and you get a meal together, you take acid and enzymes and they don't, you're actually going to get more nutrition from the same meal. And also you have more protection. So when we're talking this biotic flora, we're talking bad bugs.

I mean, heck, what if the hot water wasn't hot enough when the restaurant ran their cutlery through it? And now there's H. Pylori on the fork from the last girl who put it in her mouth. And here you are getting bacteria through the cutlery or something like that, right? So scary when you think of it, right? Like gross. I know, I know, sorry, I know, but I mean, you're at risk every time you eat out, right? Yeah. So I guess that's why they put that warning label on your your thing, right? Like foodborne illness is in the fine print on your on your menus.

And I don't say this to make people paranoid. I just want you to be prepared. And if you're prepared and if you have these tools that you can integrate, all of a sudden you can travel without fear. Because really, that's what all this is about. At the end of the day, what are we trying to do? We're trying to help women feel better and feel like the old version of themselves, usually. And that is by boosting the gut, improving detoxification and clearance of toxins, improving hormone function, correcting dysbiosis, getting rid of mold, addressing Lyme co-infections.

At the end of the day, you just want to feel good so you can get back to the thing you want to do. You want to get on the tennis court, you want to hit the gym. You want to have energy. You want to have good sex. Okay, great. Well, you got to get these roadblocks out of the way if you want to achieve that. I got a question for you. Now, you know, a lot of women here listening are finding that they feel like menopause is the tipping point, right? Like everything was fine until they hit menopause.

So we just talked about these kind of years of accumulated problems like Lyme co-infections, like mold exposure in the home, like environmental toxins. And what we saw in the gut test the bacteria overgrowth. And then there's this whole group of women who feel like they suddenly become all more sensitive during menopause.

Gut dysbiosis, H. pylori, and hormone recycling 24:18

And this is where the foods they that they used to eat bother them and they react to supplements, maybe that they used to tolerate, and they become potentially more chemically sensitive. Like they walk into Nordstrom perfume department and they're like, oh my gosh, I got to get out of here. So can you shed some light for our listeners why this happens? And like, what is this thing around menopause. What's happening beneath the surface that all of a sudden they just this is all coming to a head. Yeah a lot of it is the estrogen and progesterone issues that are happening.

So Maslow activation has gotten way more popular in the last five years. I think there's more education about Maslow activation, which is great. I definitely had some level of MCAS during post Covid. It definitely flared up my mast cells, Lyme, Bartonella, mold, all the things we've covered today, especially the gut bacteria. So these gut bacteria can produce more histamine. So let's just roleplay. You have this histamine bucket and you have bacterial overgrowth. You have parasites. You have candida.

You have a couple glasses of wine. At night. You went and did the cute little plate with the salami and the cheeses. Okay, that's all histamine overload. Then you eat some strawberries. That's high histamine. You had your avocado toast. That's high histamine. You sound like my diet charcuterie boards and, like, really good stuff. Go, go. It is. It's wonderful. It's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. But, you know, these are all higher histamine foods okay. So let's add up all this stuff on the bucket.

You've got the high histamine foods, the histamine rich foods or the histamine liberators are called like dark chocolate delicious. But it's a histamine liberator. And a lot of people will crave these foods as well. Some of that's brain chemistry related. But here's the thing if the bucket is already 90% full due to the environmental allergens that are aggravating the mouse cells, causing you to release histamine, you have the dietary histamines, you have the gut dysbiosis producing histamine. And you hit menopause where now progesterone drops, which it can even drop in the 30s.

Okay, this doesn't sound. This doesn't have to be like an older woman conversation. I'm seeing women in their late 20s, early 30s that are, quote, having menopausal like symptoms. Well, as that progesterone drops now, you have no stabilization of the mast cells. So the mast cells can go haywire releasing more and more histamine. So the cool thing is when you add in progesterone, whether that's like a mucosal version, whether that's topical oral no matter what across the board there's some there's some favorite ways to administer it.

Regardless, though, progesterone helps calm and stabilize the mass cells. And so this is why if you are doing hormone replacement, the progesterone can quiet the storm, if you will. That got worsened when the ovaries are like, hey, we just can't keep up anymore. You probably had histamine and Maslow issues brewing for many years, potentially decades before. And then when you throw in estrogen, estrogen is going to activate the mast cells. And so if you're doing a patch or whatever you're doing, well now Estragon can actually cause more histamine.

And it's going to affect and reduce Dow diamine oxidase which is your histamine degrading enzyme. So now you have a double whammy. If you've pumped in some estrogen you don't have enough progesterone. You have not calm mast cells. Now you have stimulated mast cells from the estrogen. Plus you still got out the other stuff in your crock pot of histamine, if you will. And so this is why things spiral out of control. Now one cool thing is cannabis. So THC actually stabilizes the mast cells. There's a website called Ticked Off Mast Cells where they did a patient survey, and they looked at all the different medications that are used for histamine intolerance and Marcell activation.

Only about 20% of these patients had a benefit with often or Crommelin, which are the standard medications for Marcell activation. 85% of these patients in this survey had benefit with medical cannabis. And there's a book on mast cell disease, this guy named Doctor Theo. And in his book he discusses how THC and cannabis in general is one of the few plants on planet Earth. I would argue perilla leaf. I would argue course atin can be helpful as well, but it will actually stabilize the mast cells in a way that you can actually get yourself better.

So if you've noticed, if you're a medical user, recreational user, and all of a sudden the gummy or whatever you took is making you better, well, that's a good clue. That's a good clue that there's an underlying mast cell issue. I hope that you can still dig deep enough, though to resolve that. Oh yeah. I mean, you still got to get to the underlying root causes of this. Otherwise, cannabis is just a Band-Aid. Like like every other thing out there. It's not solving the actual problem. So what I'm hearing is once you once you solve the underlying issue, then women can successfully eat the eat the chakra board, take the hormones and feel good.

But you got to solve those underlying things. And I think a big message for people is that mast cell problems are not like a genetic problem. People think like, oh, this is genetic. There's no escaping this. You know, there's there's an underlying reason that this is happening. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people will say, oh, my mom had allergies. Yeah. That's crap. That doesn't that doesn't change anything for you, in my opinion. Yeah. Your mom may have had mold exposure. And did she pass those mycotoxins through the breast milk and through the placenta?

Because that happens to. So I see babies I work with a lot of babies, six month old babies that have higher mold levels than their parents. And so when we try to, like, think, oh, it was genetic. And my mom and my grandma, it's like, that's a good clue.

Mast cell activation and histamine overload 29:28

But I don't think it's your destiny. I think it's a good clue, though, to think about, well, where did she grow up? What were her exposures? What got passed to you? Average study shows now 200 chemicals are passed from mom to baby through the umbilical cord blood. So, man, I think now is more important than ever to address these things and improve your kids. If you have kids or grandkids, get them detoxing. Now I see five year olds that look worse on paper than 50 year olds. Isn't that crazy? This is.

This is what we're dealing with right now. We definitely see this. Children are not as healthy as their parents. I mean, when I look back, you know, when I tell my story, when I look back, I probably wasn't that healthy as a kid either, though. I remember being 8 or 9 and my feet were freezing cold. My grandma's basement flooded. She didn't have a remediated it had carpet, had that 1970s wood paneling. And, you know, she dried it out with box fans. And it took weeks and weeks. And every time you'd go down there, you could smell that must.

And I love that old musty smell. But yet every time I was down there, I felt sad for no reason and my feet were freezing cold. And so I want people listening to look back and think about, was there a time in your life? Was it truly the menopause transition that happened where you got off? Was it the doorman college? Was it the injections? Was it the birth control? Was it something else? Like these chapters in our life can help you to get better. And I think it's important to look at all that. Some argue it's like retracing your traumas, but in a way you kind of have to look at this stuff because it helps me make a clinical decision how to get you better.

So so Evan, final thoughts here for the woman listening today who feels discouraged because she doesn't feel like herself anymore. What is the biggest message of hope? We've covered a lot of ground today, but what's the biggest message of hope you want to leave her with? There's so much potential for you, even if you're in your 70 or 80. I've seen these people that are at the bottom of their rope, and they've literally threatened me with suicide. Like, hey, if you don't fix me, I'm going to end it.

And that's crazy. I don't like that. Obviously, we send these people to get deeper help, but I see people at the end of the rope all the time, and so I'm used to it. I'm kind of immune to that level of despair. I've built the callus up over, you know, seeing 8000 cases now. And it's funny because in those cases, these people sometimes make massive recoveries and six weeks to six months to the point where one woman, she was depressed for 20 years, she tried everything, thought it was hormones. We did a six week follow up.

I'm like, hey, how's the depression? You know, it's your biggest priority. And she's like, I'm not depressed. I'm like, well, you said here it was 20 years of depression. You're telling me we're only six weeks in and you're just, quote, not depressed anymore? And she's like, yeah, I'm over it. And so I'm like, really? And so when you see cases like that, it gives you this glimmer of hope, like, wait a second, even the most stuck, the people who think they are so deep in the hole they will never get out.

Hope, recovery, and where to find Evan Brand 32:18

Sometimes it's like a light switch and you can flip this stuff back on. Now, I won't lie, as you've heard today, it can get tricky, it can get complex. And the mast cell piece is, you know, it's definitely a wrench in the gears. But put it to you like this. I was to the point where I couldn't drive a car because I was chronically dizzy. I had mold exposure. I had three tick bites in one summer. I had to hold on to the wall to walk at some points, and for me to get that deep in the hole and to be able to come out of it.

I mean, that's a testament that this stuff works. So don't give up. Get the data test, don't guess with your health and you can change your life forever. Absolutely you can. Evan, this has been wonderful and I want to thank you for the really important work you do in the world. If people in our audience want to get a hold of you want to work with you, how would they do that? Yeah, just check Evan brand. Evan. Last name? Brand, brand. Just Google my name. You'll find YouTube and podcast. I've been doing this stuff for over a decade, so there's at least 500 interviews out there where you can go stalk me, study me, and if you vibe with me, then sure, I'd love to be able to help and at least give you a second, third or 25th opinion on what's going on.

Hopefully we can move the needle for you. Oh, thank you so much, Evan. Until next time, everyone. Take good care. Bye now. Take care.