Discover The Mold-Dysbiosis Connection

Introduction to Mold and Gut Health 0:00

Welcome back. We continue our conversation on Reversing Crohn's and Colitis. And today I am joined by my dear friend and colleague, Evan Brand. He's a Board Certified in Holistic Nutrition and Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner who has transformed the lives of thousands of clients with his online practice by finding and fixing the root causes of fatigue, depression, anxiety, digestive and other issues. He sold his own health struggles just like I did, using the same advanced lab testing strategies and protocols that he now uses in his clinic, and he has accumulated over 25 million downloads.

That's right, millions of his podcast and has been featured on hundreds of other health podcasts, webinars, summits, and practitioner training events. He offers at home functional medicine training courses in his Functional Academy of Medicine and Epigenetics (FAME) on gut, mold and energy issues. And I wanted to bring Evan on today to talk with you about something that I see overlooked in Colitis and Crohn's issues all the time by even the most advanced practitioners. So welcome, Evan. I'm so glad we get to do this together. Hey, Sinclair.

Yeah, let's have some fun. Help some people. Yeah. So, let's just dive right in, because I think most people are just fundamentally not understanding how, mold toxicity can actually create digestive issues. And that is still like an answered question for them, like. Yeah, really? Okay. Yeah. I was exposed to mold, but how big a deal is that? And my overall health picture, I'm the digestive issues guy, not the mold guy. You want to speak to that and do a little bit of myth busting right off the bat?

Sure. Well, I didn't know anything about mold until I got sick from it. I was the parasite guy for many years. I was helping people after solving my giardia issues. I had cryptosporidium, I had H. Pylori. I had a ton of gut issues that created a lot of mood issues, a lot of fatigue, depression, anxiety, skin issues. And it wasn't until my wife and I built a brand new house, ended up with mold we had no idea about until a friend of mine, Jack Wolfson, pointed me in the direction of mold because I had dizziness and my blood pressure was crazy.

It turns out that mold opens the back door for Candida and also for many different bacterial infections, including Clostridium and Cluster. It is a beast because it can affect enzyme that break down neurotransmitters. So when we see children on the spectrum, we see behavioral issues, ADHD, we see spouses that have irritability, they have anger, they have all sorts of mood problems. We're literally saving marriages by fixing the gut and fixing the mold. I've been very thankful to have emails from skeptical husbands that say, hey, I finally believe you, and I finally believe my wife because

How Mold Drives Dysbiosis and IBD 2:51

if I were to say your wife's here debility, anxiety, PMS, and her dead sex drive is because of the mold, that that sounds like a stretch for a lot of people. They can't connect the dots. But what's happening is mold is doing several things as it starts to increase the overgrowth in the gut, it's screwing up an enzyme. One of those is beta glucan a days. We'll see this on a stool test and when this is elevated, we know that we're actually recirculating toxins and hormones. We're not conjugating. We're not wrapping those toxins up and escorting them out of the body like they should.

And over time, ten, 20 years in, there's massive increases in colon cancer. We'll see autoimmune diseases ramp up. We'll see intestinal bleeding ramp up all from the mold exposure, lowering your defenses, allowing the dysbiosis to take you down. So that's why when you look at a GI map it says opportunistic bacteria. And the opportunity is you being weak and you being immunosuppressed, immuno compromised by these airborne toxins, that then says, hey, come in and knock him down even further. And that's how you end up with the IBD.

I really think that some of the early cases I was seeing seven, eight, nine, ten years ago, I was giving aloe and gut soothing nutrients and all these things that we know help repair the gut lining, zinc, harnessing all these clinically shown leaky gut remedies. But I feel like I was probably missing the mold back then, and I bet if I went back and retested those people, I would see where the dysbiosis came from. So just treating the SIBO, just treating the SIFO, I don't think it's enough. I think you have to go to the root of the root, which it appears that it's environmental.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to say it. It's perfectly encapsulates what has gone wrong in the Colitis and Crohn's world. For example, when you're finally ending up at a GI doc that, okay, you've suffered for years and decades and okay, you are finally so low functioning that you merit a diagnosis and you ask your doctor if you know hope in your heart, what can I personally do to fix this? Like, well, you know, food doesn't make a difference, you know? Or you can do like these acid diets. Maybe, you know, if they're edgy and a little integrative and they're not even talking about environmental toxins, they could have been building up for years, if not decades. Yeah.

And this is not a rare problem. I mean, I know when you when you join these podcast or summit, you might think like, oh, like I'm just that one freak show and this is I'm just unlucky. I've measured thousands. In fact, the labs told me I'm in the top ten worldwide for running the most organic acids and mycotoxins urine screen. So I've got a lot of data, and I can tell you with confidence, probably eight out of every ten people that are suffering have some level of toxicity like this. And when I say toxicity, we're talking metals, chemicals, mycotoxins.

Bacterial, fungal, yeast issues all together at the same time. So this idea that you're going to have this silver bullet to cure your Crohn's, this magic supplement to cure the colitis, it's not like that. We really have to fix all these different levers, all these different variables, all these gears that are jammed up. You have to fix all of them. And that could sound overwhelming. But if you've done it a thousand times, it becomes a lot easier. You just know you got to just go through the checklist of things you need to fix here.

And if you've just been treated by your your GI doc or maybe a functional GI doc, even let's say they put you on berberine and neem and a rhino and they've given you all these like herbal antibiotics and you're still not better. Or maybe you've had a relapse where you were better for a few months and then you've relapsed. That's a sign we have to look deeper. I totally agree, I know you inherit these guys too. I get all the gluten free yogis who still feel like crap. They're playing a perfect game and they've managed to shrink down the size of their symptoms.

But if they do even one thing off plan, they're toast, you know? And that's because we didn't lower the toxin load. It's because we didn't increase resilience. You were working with a practitioner that was helping you tread water and that was it. Yeah. And that's that's not a, it's not to disparage our colleagues. It's just to, you know, request that we look further upstream so we can make people's lives easier. What was. And it's hard. No stressor. Yeah. And it's hard. I mean, practitioners are busy.

I mean, I've got three kids. It's insane. And so when you're a practitioner, you try to do what worked for other people. And as you get older and your neuroplasticity decreases, as a practitioner, if you're 40, 50, 60, 70, it's going to be harder for you to adopt new strategies to fix people. And so this, this one way track that you've done to fix everybody for the last ten years, it might not work anymore because we're seeing increases in toxicity. The whole microplastic study, that stuff is scary about how it's affecting the gut, how it's affecting the heart.

The average person is supposedly eating something like a credit card size worth of microplastic every week. So these are new variables that we have to be able to be scrappy and adapt to like a fighter jet, not the Titanic. I mean, we can't turn too slow and it's like every year I feel like there's a new boogeyman and you could be right. You could be fear mongering by that. But I just look at it and I go, okay, what do we do? And I just jump straight into action mode. So I agree with you that it's not that we're we're trying to put these people down.

It's just that I'm getting the, the person who's been to 10 or 20 people, and it's actually kind of crazy because it's like, why me? Why do I have to be the guy to say, why didn't these other 20 people,

Why Toxic Burden and Relapse Matter 8:12

they're very well credentialed. Why the hell did they not look and just do a simple urine Michael screen like this is not crazy stuff that we're doing, and it's not that expensive either. Like it's for the for the price of a new iPhone. We could have gotten you a couple of good functional medicine labs. Thank you for saying that, because a lot of people will spend 5 or $10,000 on functional medicine labs, and they actually didn't look deep enough into the root causes. So now they know a lot about different markers, but they're not actually looking at their total toxin burden.

So that's that's a really important distinction to make as well. So one of the things that I want to cover with you today, because we're both so passionate about the more topic Molder, in my life also, is first of all, it's easy to look at this guys because we know that it's fixable. You know, one thing that I always say is this is complex, but it's not mysterious, right? So we want to make sure that we're really understanding by the end of this interview for you guys. So you're really armed with this, with these data points when you're talking to a practitioner, how this could be impacting you.

So it's not just are you currently living in mold, you know, did your basement flood when you were a kid? Did you play a lot down there? You know, yes. Your moldy college bathroom counts at all counts in terms of total body burden. Do you want to speak to that even prior versus current exposures? Sure. And we try to distinguish whether like, is this a current exposure based on active mold colonization on the old, or are we just seeing mycotoxins that are present and sometimes we cannot find the source at all.

And sometimes the levels are off the charts, and primarily the females that are working with this, the men just don't want to admit they have problems. They're just grumpy and just don't want to investigate as much the women that are willing to look into it. They'll say, I literally have no history of this. I lived in the desert. We had a woman in Arizona. She was off the charts. She's like, it's dry. It never rains. How do I have this? I'm like, well, who knows? What did your mom have? What did your grandma have?

You know, I've been fortunate enough to test several different generations, and we've seen multigenerational toxicity as well. Meaning grandma has got Okotoks and mom's got Okotoks, and baby granddaughters all got Oka toxin, but yet they had no memory of exposure. And these things go through the placenta and they go through breast milk as well. So this idea that you're just going to track down this house and you're going to just rip off your walls and then you're frustrated, your husband's mad at you, wants to get rid of you because you spent 20 K on like a mold or mediator.

But now is maybe not the time you got this crap. And so what we'll do when we measure the urine, we can look at specific fungal metabolites on the Oat test. And we can't test all the molds. I hope that in the next 5 to 10 years we'll be able to test more. But at least right now we can test Aspergillus really, really well, which is probably the most common mold growing in a water damage building. And we can test Fusarium and Fusarium makes what's called zebra lenon, which is a highly estrogenic mycotoxins.

So when we're talking about IBS, along with that there's usually PMS, maybe there's PCOS, there's infertility, there's other problems. So it's rare that you're just going to have this irritable bowel disease in isolation. Okay. I suspect you're probably going to have a hormonal issue as well. Maybe some cognitive issues with that. And the Oat is going to help us to say, okay, are they growing that Fusarium and they need antifungals? Or do we just see positive mycotoxins in the urine. And therefore we need to just focus more on grabbing on and pulling out the mold rather than killing it.

So the difference is, do you have to kill it and pull it out, or do you just pull it out and maybe you're not growing it? And I actually got an email a couple days ago from a guy named Andrew Campbell. I interviewed him a few years ago. He's an MD who he basically poops what I'm doing. Like, we did a podcast together and it was very it was very it was very like cordial and nice. But he sent me an email and he's like, hey, you know, I've seen some of your patients. And I reply back, yeah, I've seen, you know, dozens of yours as well.

So practitioners like to do that behind the scenes if folks are listening, don't know that. Oh, I've seen your patients meaning kind of indicating, that you failed. Right. And you got. To see that. Yeah. Yeah, but but his strategy is it's just it's reconnaissance.

Current vs Past Mold Exposure 12:21

And so I want to just briefly give people a couple strategies about, you know, how would you approach this if you have an IBD, if you have Crohn's, colitis, if you see positive, indication that you're growing mold or other fungal infections on your OTC test, what do you do? Well, Campbell says it's recognized as the only way. That's the only way to fix it. And I've sent him back. Case studies showing before and after lab results using no prescription antifungals, just using herbs. Good for. You. And and we've done really, really well with that.

Same thing happened with Neil Nathan. which I've interviewed him a couple times as well. Same thing on the interview. We did Pooh poohed herbs. It's not possible to fix this. Naturally. You got to have fluconazole. You got to have nice statin. You do not. Yeah. I've got labs proving you don't. So these old school MDS. I guess it's probably frustrating for them to see a guy like me who's not an MD, helping people. And so maybe it just sets off a little bit of fear. But the tangent here is to say that these issues are able to be fixed.

And when we fix the fungal infections by using, in my case, anti-fungal herbs. And if you're going to do prescription, I'm not judging you for that. We'll see the IBD stuff calmed down in some of the markers that we're going to match. So we're going to look at the OTC for the fungal stuff. And then in the stool we're going to be looking at intestinal bleeding. So we had one guy who was 16 years old and he was leave. I won't forget him. He had the highest levels of bleeding I've ever seen. And it freaked me out.

And so the dad's on the call and he's like, yep, there's blood in the toilet every day. I'm like, okay, noted. Because these levels are freaking me out. I would expect you to see blood. I'm glad you're seeing blood, because I would be scared to know that there's this much internal bleeding and you guys not knowing about it. And so the gastro doc and the immunologist and the rheumatologist, all those people, there's multiple autoimmune diseases involved at this point. It's more steroids immune suppress immune suppressing immune suppressing immune suppressant. And I'm like, God guys, you're just literally this dude's intestines are destroyed.

Let me just do some of these herbal soothing remedies. Let's do some of these antifungals. Let's get this mold under control. And by getting the mold, the fungal, the Sibo, CFO, whatever you want to label it under control. His bleeding dropped by like 80% such that the doctors they wanted to credit the drug, but he'd been on the drug for years. How all of a sudden, is the bleeding just going to go like that and just drop inflammation markers? His caliper Tekton was just maxed out. I remember the number is like the highest number they'll give you.

The inflammation dropped significantly as well, even though they were the goal in the conventional world was just another drug. Add a steroid to that, add an anti-inflammatory to that. And so this is a fixable issue. It does get scary. It does get a little complex. But I just want people to have a little bit more personal empowerment that if you're not getting these labs run, you can request that these labs get run. If they won't run them, reach out to somebody like Sinclair or myself will run these labs for you and at least give you the data to put it in front of their face.

And if they just read the cookie cutter report from the lab, even that should give them enough to say, oh, crap, there's something here. Yeah, I agree with you. And I. I really appreciate you drawing the distinction too. We do not need pharmaceuticals to actually tackle this. In fact, we see results faster with just an herbal only approach. And that doesn't mean all herbals are created equal, not herbal. Not all herbal protocols are created equal. So, you know, please be discerning. That's not what I'm asserting.

I'm just saying it's actually we've seen it be easier on the body and also more effective it you know, what is important about this conversation too, is that when you look at something like colognes or collider equivalents or colitis colognes, you know, for short, that's bad. Those in the know. Cologne is bad. Also, the fragrance is terrible, actually. Oh my God, it's that true? That guy Levi, he actually that was one of the big things to I was like, man, I got to make sure we, we do a once over.

Turns out he was spraying like fragrance body spray every day. Oh God. That was using again or tied like some synthetic fragrances in the laundry product. So I just want to call this out in case people like, we're getting kind of geeky here. I want to make sure you guys have covered the baseline stuff. If you're using any fragranced soap, shampoo, body wash, if it's organic and it's essential oils, it's probably okay. But any scented laundry dryer sheets like please make sure you've covered all your bases there, ladies.

Make sure you've covered all your personal care products. They put fragrance in everything. The foundation, the creams, the concealers, your hair dye, your nail, toxic nail stuff.

Testing Mold, Fungal Overgrowth, and Bleeding 17:00

Just try and get as pure as you possibly can. Even those things, like removing the fragrance, sometimes can calm down the mast cells, which are already so aggravated from this internal battle. So you cannot afford to be getting these external toxins if you're already full of this stuff. Yeah. And if you are having any kind of immune distortion response whatsoever in the body, you cannot afford to mess around with fragrances. Period. End of story. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. One of the things I want to make sure people understand, too, though, is that we need to connect the dots here further.

Like if you are having it's not just digestive conditions that we want to help you understand. Mycotoxins could be affecting, you know, I call it the micro toxin masquerade. You know, it could be, yes, bloating, constipation, diarrhea could also be nausea, Gerd, acid reflux. Like it's not just a lower intestine issue because you have distorted your liver's ability to respond to any or all toxins you could be having an extremely compromised, you know, immune system that could be showing up in your joints and you could think, oh, I'm having early onset rheumatoid arthritis.

Well, I was told as soon as I have an autoimmune disease like colitis, I am more likely to show up. You know, other autoimmune issues. You could have a thyroid issue. You might have, yes. Lung conditions. You know, we think about that more in sinus distress with mold that's more commonly known. But it could also be skin conditions. Right. Psoriasis, eczema, rosacea and of course hormone dysregulation. Anything I missed. I mean showgrounds we see a lot of showgrounds with he's got issues as well.

So there's an autoimmune eye component. And the cool thing is even if you suffered for 2030 years, you can calm stuff down. Now the damage is unfortunately in the gut. It is cumulative. And if you're 16, it's easier to fix than if you're 60. But I still think there's hope for you to relieve at least some of your misery. So, and unfortunately, a lot of these people are chronically depressed as well, because their gut so thrown off that their neurotransmitters are still thrown off. So a lot of these people, we end up trying to give them specific amino acids to help regulate the brain chemistry while we're working on the gut, because and these really chronic cases, these people are typically exhausted.

They've had diarrhea, they've had bleeding, they've had malabsorption. So they're completely nutrient deficient, even if they're eating a whole foods diet. And so what I'll do is I'll try to just boost these people up. So I'm using specific adaptogenic herbs. We may use rhodiola, we may use Eleuthera, we may use some cordyceps, I may use some acetal l-carnitine. We might use ribose or taurine. We're going to try to use nutrients to fuel these people up because if I'm dependent upon just willpower, I'm not going to get them that far.

A lot of these people are so damn tired they can't even do the protocol. So I've got to just dig them out of that hole. They're in this energy debt from years of mitochondrial dysfunction. They're in such a debt that if you put that perfect protocol in front of them, you still might not get them better. And that's really where I think a lot of this comes in, is having a good rapport with people, good bedside manner. You're you're making it conversational. You're keeping people engaged. The perfect doctor with the perfect protocol still can't get everyone better.

Yeah. I really appreciate you saying that. There's a lot of setting the body up for those sensitive folks, to actually be able to heal. There's foundational work that most people don't realize is is the crucial factor. So they're trying to get to those antifungals as fast as possible. Like, I've got to get into hunting kill mode. But if you haven't opened up your drainage pathways or if you haven't gotten your mitochondria semi functional to start, you know, being able to keep up on this backlog of repair necessary.

You're right. The perfect mode protocol will not work for you. Yep. Yeah, that's really well said. Thank you. So what other clinical gems do you think are crucial, for people to understand like the word is getting out about mold. It really is. But people still aren't taking it seriously enough. And, you know, they're approaching it in a way that causes unnecessary suffering. What myths still persist around that? I would say the outdoor environment is completely ignored. I've seen people living right next to golf courses where they spray a ton of chemicals.

I've seen people living next to agricultural areas. I had a family not too long ago in the Midwest. Yeah, it might have been Iowa. I can't remember the exact spot on the map, but it was in glyphosate country and I looked at her address. I see that she's completely surrounded 360 degrees, surrounded by farms, and we know that these pesticide chemicals, they can drift for miles. They're in the rain water. They're in the soil. It's impossible to avoid unless you're just in a healthy bubble. You're in a forested area or something like that where they just can't spray.

And the problem is this woman had young children. They did have mold in their house as well. And she was like, hey, but when I go outside, I feel worse.

Environmental Toxins Beyond the Home 22:00

My eyes burn, my nose burns, my lungs burn. Like, look at your map. So here she is trying to get out. She's opening the air to, you know, she's opening the door. She's opening the window. She's like, I want to bring fresh coat, fresh air in. I'm trying to dilute this. I heard that, you know, the solution to pollution is dilution. That's what you said on your podcast. Why is this making me worse, Mike? Well, you told me your nose was burning. And every June or whenever they start spraying all summer, your kids have allergy flare ups.

All summer, they have tummy pain. You all have headaches. You don't sleep as well. Like you're not going to heal in that bubble. So this idea that you could just perfectly fix the internals if your external environment is screwed, it's hard to heal. Like this sounds like a stretch, but you could almost be better off in like, a high rise in New York City than in farmland. Just in terms of your overall exposure to to to toxins. And for me, I mean, I've been through hell and back with my environment.

I mean, we had a beautiful house that everybody thought was a cool house. But we were in we were in the farmland country, and I had no idea that they sprayed as much as they did. And I was doing the binders. I was doing the antifungals, like on paper. My mold illness was healing my Lyme was healing, my Bartonella and the bezier issues were healing. I had had tick bites all throughout my childhood, but as soon as the farmer started spraying chemicals, it was like I lost all my progress. My gut flared up, my brain fog flared up, and so everyone's saying, well, Evans is complicating it more now I have to have a mold free home and it has to be a healthy external environment as well.

And so I've downsized several times. I went from having a lot of land to not much land at all. So I've been doing moves as well, just to try to find those healthy bubbles of air. And so I just encourage people, even if it's just a vacation that you could take for a week, it doesn't have to be some extravagant thing, but just to get out of that bubble and just see how you feel somewhere else. So if you're in agricultural land, get to the beach, get to somewhere sandy, get to the mountains, get to somewhere dry, you know, get out to the desert.

You just my advice would be to change your environment just for a couple of weeks. We call this unmasking and just see how much better you can feel. And usually what people report is when they get back to that environment, they feel way worse and like did did did mold like get worse? Did it grow more while I was gone? No, it's that your body was playing ding dong ditch. It's been ringing this alert bell. Get out. Alert, alert. Danger! But it can only send that signal for so long before your system just shuts down.

You go into the free State. So it's fight. It's flight where it's freeze. And when you're in that free state, you can't even get out of it. So in mold, I feel like is very hypnotizing. I noticed that a lot of people are into antiques. They like to go to vintage clothing stores, like I used to like to hang out in bookstores, and I would just breathe it all in and get kind of drunk from all the air. I'm still seeing. This from the old glass. Me too. Yeah, yeah. And so mold will hypnotize you to not escape.

So this is your wake up call. If you feel like garbage escape, get the hell out of there for a week. Go back to your environment and see. And if you get hit in the face when you get back in that environment, that's likely a clue your body was trying to tell you. But it gave up. Sending the message. It's a great way to put it absolutely. It's so weird. We've joked about that a lot in our practice about how molds, is such a great colonizer, like it's had thousands of years at minimum to train us into being subservient to it, to be passive, you know, because I'm watching these, like, forces of life really, really smart, intelligent, caring people not care enough to take themselves out of poison.

And I really think it's the, the mold doing that. I agree. I mean, I've had people that I had one lady in Oregon, it was like a $2.5 million house is beautiful, like impressive like, wow. And it was completely moldy. And the husband didn't believe her. And I'm like, okay, you've already had breast cancer, you've got irritable bowel, you've got major, major hormone issues. Why doesn't he believe you? Well, because we spent so much on this house we don't want to move again, yada yada. Interest rates like, I don't know, like he's got to prioritize you more.

I don't know what else to say. Like this dude cares about his house more than his wife. Yeah. Sell the place, cash it out, break even, lose a little bit, whatever you got to do. But it's like you're falling apart. Like you could downsize it.

Hormones, Fertility, and Organ Damage 26:30

You don't need 4000ft² for you and your husband downsize, and. And he'll. But unfortunately, I blame the men. Mostly we are just stubborn. We're stubborn creatures. For some reason, women are, like, intuitive, and they're sensitive to it. And like, yep, this is it, honey. And the guys, the guys, we are the problem. So I apologize to the women that feel like their man has just ignored them. I don't know what the hell's wrong with these guys. I guess truthfully, they have to suffer enough. Here's what you have to do.

You have to either take away sex, or you have to wait for the mold to cause such severe nitric oxide issues, because it does affect blood flow, that they have major erectile dysfunction. That might be the motivator. Unfortunately, men are hedonistic. That might be the only motivator to get them to care enough to acknowledge this stuff. But if they go hop on Viagra cialis erections are back. Hooray! Let's still party know. So that's that's the downside of the pharmaceuticals right. Is like you can supplement your way out of the indicator.

The check engine light is coming on these poor or no erections. He's low libido. That is the clue that you've got a blood flow problem caused from the issues with not only malabsorption, but also the mold creating nitric oxide issues. And sounds like a tangent, but it's all tied in together. It's not a tangent. It's I mean, what is your way of not want to have sex with you? Why does she have zero libido? When you guys used to have a really healthy sex life, it could actually just be the mold. Yeah, you know, because your body doesn't want to make babies when you're being actively poisoned and mold is highly dis regulating to reproductive hormones.

We know that. So. And then, yeah. So it shows up in both sides of the bedroom for sure. It's a really interesting and you can type in with you. You could type in mycotoxins testes. You could type in mycotoxins, ovaries. You can start looking in pop. Man. We know it affects the sperm motility, the sperm quantity it affects. So if you look at like a really, really zoomed up image of a sperm in the head of the sperm, there is a ton of mitochondria. And guess what? Get damaged by mold toxicity mitochondria.

So these people that are having infertility issues as well they're resorting to IVF. They also have gut issues on top of it. Ding ding ding. There it is. And we talked about Sierra Leone earlier and how it's highly highly estrogenic. And so these are the women that are just they're having major mood issues. They're having these PMS like symptoms. Even women that are perimenopausal or menopausal, they're still having these estrogen dominance symptoms. Exactly. It's it's I don't want to say easy, but it's possible to fix it.

But you have to look at the gut piece, the enzymes. We have to get the gut working better. We have to get the fungal stuff down. We got to pull the mycotoxins out. All in all, you could fix this with maybe 5 to 10 different supplements. But these people that come in with 30, 40, 50 things, it's usually overkill. It absolutely is. And you have to relieve pressure on the liver, because for a woman, if your liver is shut down from mycotoxins, you're going to get not just spilling over, distressing to the gut, but a ton of excess detox through your reproductive organs so you're going to be a mess until you really pressure on the liver.

Yeah, there was a study that came out of Guatemala of liver cancer and how it was linked to aflatoxin. So aflatoxin, I would say I see it less often than okra toxin, but they actually linked the aflatoxin to the corn tortillas, which were a staple in the Guatemalan diet. And so when we talk about buildings, buildings, buildings were primarily referring to airborne toxicity. I do think food toxicity is a factor, but I think it's maybe only 10 to 20% of the piece. I think airborne is the majority of the toxicity you're getting exposed to.

But it was interesting. So people can look it up type in aflatoxin, liver cancer. This stuff is very damaging to not only deliver, but the kidneys as well. So we've seen cases of colitis and Crohn's. There's also kidney disease. These people are getting recommended dialysis, get on the kidney transplant list. It sounds crazy but we had a guy mid-seventies he stage four kidney failure nephrologist says you need to get on the kidney transplant list. You're getting ready for dialysis. Measured, off the charts with mold.

We started working on this guy for the first time in years. His blood work, his kidney function is GFR starts to improve. It improves again. Nephrologist says the labs messed up. This is an anomaly. Run it again. Better better better. He's climbed his way out of stage four kidney disease.

Hope, Labs, and Practical Next Steps 31:00

These toxins affect everybody system the endocrine the gut the immune the liver. It's crazy. The brain. We didn't even talk about dementia, Alzheimer's. But the people that are having gut issues. That's highly neurotoxic, guys. So yeah, this is not just about anxiety and depression and even suicidal ideation, which mycotoxins are known to create. Like this is not you don't have a separate mental health issue. And a separate gut issue like this is one in the same. Just I'll tell you a quick story, because a lot of people resonate with this story, even though it's scary.

I went, this is back in Kentucky. I went to a Barnes and Noble with my wife and kids looking up at the ceiling. I was in the kids section just feeling kind of off. Just felt a little weird. Look up at the ceiling. Clearly, mold growth on the ceiling. Don't know what species don't matter. I could see it, I could smell it. I could feel it. Dump me. Get out of there. We're on the way home, and I just have this feeling like I've had a pretty good life. There's a really big tree right there. It'd be really nice if my wife just drove us right into that tree.

And I've told people that story, and my clients and people are like, that's friggin weird, because I've had the same feeling, like people in California, they're like, I wanted to just drive off that cliff. So this stuff does mind control on you. I don't know why. Like if the mall just going to have a party and eat your dead body. More like, I don't know why the mold would create that. It's it's probably the neuroinflammation piece, but it's bizarre. And luckily, I don't have that anymore. I used to step in front of traffic.

I used to have serious suicidal ideation. Michael had to yank me out of the road so many times. Oh, it feels so nice to have that truck hit my full body and like, it just it's a very strange persisting ideation and the the most healing thing. I hope you guys get out of listening to this interview is that that's not who you really are. Nope. Humans don't want to die. Humans love life. Humans are optimistic. Humans are daytime people. They're not night owls. They're up with the sun. Down with the sun like we are meant to be in nature of nature.

Right? And we are incredibly resilient. I know we're living in a culture that really values, you know, basically displaying how fragile you are and who can be the biggest victim. And honestly, I think that's about mold. And you're Michael, your toxic bucket being too full because we've been dealing with life's challenges ever since we were created. We are built to be resilient. And it is not too late to feel resilient again. Right? Amen. Amen. So what are the last? that's. You want to leave our audience with any clinical gems to give them hope when tackling their Crohn's and Colitis?

Sure. If you've not had these, what I call basic functional medicine labs done yet, you've already been to the functional medicine guy. Charge you three grand and all he did is blood work. That's just come on. So let's just let's start simple granular okay. Organic acids test I prefer and like mosaic there's other competitors I just like that one because we can run other things with it. We can run mycotoxins. We could run chemicals. We could add on glyphosate. They just redid and rebranded their toxic profile.

It's great. vibrant is another option. I don't care what you do, just get it done. You might need something like a Dutch or some other adrenal profile, either saliva or urine, to look at your overall cortisol rhythm. It can be helpful. I run less of those than I used to because everyone has issues and Adaptogenic herbs help them across the board. So if it's a budget problem, we might put that one aside and look at the gut in the urine. The Adaptogenic herbs stool test I love it. I've had some GI doctors message me why do you promote that?

It's too sensitive. It's like if it's sensitive enough to find something and I pursue that infection I found and they feel better, that's good enough for me. I just care about the results. So this debate about this test versus that one, if I find an issue which helps increase compliance and increases my laser focus protocol and I get them better, like that's what matters. So stool, urine really you could start there. Do I find bloodwork helpful in these cases? Yeah, but not really because blood is just showing what's happened as a result of the functional issues.

Right. So you might see issues with homocysteine. You might see elevated CRP. You might see elevated D-dimer saying, hey, there's some clotting issues here, some blood flow issues. But that is something that we could have inferred based on the other labs. If we see you're off the charts with mold, we'll probably going to work in some blood thinners. We might work in some natto or some lab, bro or some other things to help you with that. So I'm not saying don't do blood. Blood's amazing. You can look at cancer markers, you can look at tumors.

There's a ton of cool stuff on blood. But slowly. But but if you're guys just running blood or your gal's just running blood, please ask for more. Get the get the urine. And if they don't know how to read it, find somebody like Sinclair myself will help you run through this stuff, and we'll help you get dialed in. Thanks so much, Evan. Where can people find your work? evanbrand.com is the main website. I've got a podcast there called The Evan Brand Show 12 coming up on 13 years of of episodes on the podcast.

So check it out. And, I have the functional medicine training courses if you want to just dive in or if you want handholding consults are still available. Wonderful. Thanks so much, Evan Take care. Thank you.