EMFs & Mold: A Toxic Synergy

Nicolas Pineault

My God, well, these days specifically, I’m doing summits such as these, but I’ve created my own, the EMF Hazard Summit, where I interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and attorneys, EMF mitigation specialist, EMF scientist, and wanted to bring this to the public during a free event. So it’s running in March, but that’s a project I think I’m gonna do every year because I saw such a good response from these summits, people, they can choose a few interviews that they like, and the topic of EMF has been, I think, underappreciated among all the summits that are available. So I’m trying to do my best to bring awareness now.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Yeah, really appreciate that. So, yeah, let’s just dive right in then I guess, here. So what are EMFs exactly? Can you give a little bit of an explanation to that?

Nicolas Pineault

Sure, so EMF stands for electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic forces, and there’s many different versions of that. I like talking in terms of electro pollution in this scope of my work because people really get it. And I’m talking about the cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell towers, smart meters, and also household electricity as a whole, and basically how these fields impact us. And these are brand new fields. That’s why we’re referring to them as electro pollution really. There are brand new fields that our biology has not evolved with. Whereas you have other EMFs like visible light or invisible light spectrum also emitted by the sun, for example, that is very biocompatible, that is very compatible with all of biology, because we basically depend on the sun for day/night cycles, for the melatonin production, for the vitamin D production when the sun hits your skin. 

So we know that these signals are safe. We also know that if you get in the sun for eight hours in the middle of the summer, maybe you’ll burn. So there is also so such thing as the right dose of natural EMFs, but for sure, these EMFs are recognized by our body and they know what to do with them. However, the new EMFs, the electric pollution that I have been studying for the past five or six years now, they’re brand new. The electrification of America ended in the 1950s. So it’s been completed in 1950s. So even the use of electricity is very recent. 

We’re just four generations, maybe six generations down the road for people who were in the early cities, getting electricity or the telegram at first. So it’s very, very new that we are surrounded by electricity and the understanding even at that time in the 1850s was that very, very low exposure of electricity could lead to harm and to all sorts of symptoms. And unfortunately I think that societal excitation about using electricity, which completely changed modern civilization and also the telecommunication aspect when we first launched the cell phones, and now they’re so part of life that most people couldn’t even live without one or they’re trying to add owning a smartphone or telecommunications as part of almost the Maslow pyramid nowadays, it’s almost to that point where, okay, being able to communicate with whomever you want to and stay connected with people and have access to that telecommunication, even if you’re in the middle of nowhere is almost becoming a fundamental human right. 

And I’m okay with that part. However, the reality is that what we’ve rolled out as far as telecommunication goes, has consequences on our biology. And we’re still in that bizarre spot where the science is increasingly clear on the dangers, but the denial is also increasing at the same time. Because for a lot of reasons, and you said before the interview, a lot of people are glued to their phones and they kinda don’t wanna hear about it. So it’s kind of a unpopular topic because even people who care deeply about their health, well, they do own a cell phone, they do use Wi-Fi, they do have these Bluetooth devices. And thinking about the fact that maybe these are exposing them to unnecessary risks or overall added stressors is very uncomfortable. 

But the good news is you can minimize your exposure without necessarily going back to the stone age or anything like that. I do own a phone. I do own computer. I have computer screen, the laptop over there. I have many things that are … I’m still part of modern society and technology is my everyday life as an indicator. That’s what I use. I’m always on the Internet, right? So it does not mean to … A reduction of EMFs does not mean a reduction of how connected you can be. These things are separate. You can go through wired technologies and other alternatives, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later in this interview.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Oh yeah. So when you say newer EMF technology, are you referring to everything from the electrification of America to now or are some of those things maybe worse than others?

Nicolas Pineault

This includes it, just the fact that we use electricity can have detrimental effects. So for example, the average person in America has about 3 volts running through their body at night. And most people don’t realize what it means. So you have a, let’s say a 9-volt battery, those little square ones that are rectangle ones, that are used for medical devices and such. When you have 3 volts running through your body, you don’t feel anything. Most people wouldn’t feel it, but it’s a low level electric shock. And what we find among building biologists that go to people’s homes and reduce that amount of electricity coursing through people’s body at night, the ability to sleep more soundly, more naturally, goes way up when you reduce that amount of electricity. So that’s electricity alone. 

Then you add electricity in the air, and that’s called the wireless, right, that’s electricity being conducted in the air between the tower and my phone or my phone and the router, the router and my computer. So all these signals are bouncing around and they’re also impacting sleep and many aspects of biology. But mainly I think that the main area of damage is really happening when you cannot get the restorative sleep that you need. And this is one of the many factors, including light pollution that impacts sleep negatively. But it’s one that people tend to forget or ignore, depending on where you stand on the issue. But the reality is when you look at statistics, most people keep a phone in their pocket during the day and then most people fall asleep with a phone under the pillow, on them, or on the nightstand. 

So it’s very, very close to their head. And most people don’t understand these dangers or put the phone on airplane mode or turn it off. So they are exposed to unnecessary signals during the night. So it’s hard to tell which is worse, the wireless, the electricity, or there’s other types of signals that are studied in the building biology profession or by doctors who understand these electro pollution risk. But I think we can consider that they’re all environmental toxins and that when each type we try to minimize them, then good things happen in the sense that it will alleviate some of that weight that you have on your shoulders that prevents you from either feeling like a super human, if you’re already very healthy or just getting back to normal health, if you’re chronically ill. 

And that’s oftentimes in doctors who study environmental medicine and who understand EMFs such as Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt or Dr. Schaffner, and many doctors I’ve had the privilege to interview in the last years, all of them have told me that with chronically ill patients and people who have become pretty much sensitive to anything, whether they have many food intolerances, they have many chemical sensitivities, they have mold toxic at the same time, and they have the perfect profile for electro sensitivity as well where they cannot handle much exposure before they start becoming symptomatic, before they get insomnia. And this is really where like what is worse? Is it the mold, is it EMFs? Well, it’s probably both. And if you eliminate EMFs and eliminate mold, then you give yourself even a better chance of recovery. 

If you eliminate the mold, keep the EMFs near your head at night, you might recover or sometimes you might not. And certain patients, EMF is the missing factor where it will bring you back to an environment that has a better chance basically of making you recover. And the thing about EMF removal or reduction, if you are trying to have this room, let’s say this room. I’m in Montreal and it’s very electro polluted. All the big cities are. So if I shield that room and create, let’s say a Faraday cage, a completely enclosed environment where the EMF signals in the microwave radiation range would be zero, I’m not creating something new. It’s not something fancy or futuristic, I’m just going back to the normal levels of EMFs that are ancestral. So a lot of people talk about the paleo movement, a few years ago was really trendy and it still is. 

But the reality is that our signal diet, our signal exposure is really far from being paleo, but most people don’t realize it. It’s little bit more abstract or hard to grasp than food, which is something that we really see, we taste, we experience the effect. The invisible signal, it’s a little bit more, they’re ubiquitous, and it’s really a little bit harder to see the effect. But the reality is maybe people listening to this have already done a no EMF experience and even a no mold experience, right? When you’re in a moldy home, you go in nature. That’s something in an environmental, a medicine that is oftentimes recommended to patients, get out of your sick environment, of your toxic environment and see if it changes how you feel. If you feel way better outside the home than inside, then you know you have one of multiple things. Maybe you have too many chemicals in the air and so bad air quality. It might be mold also. It might also be EMFs because if you go in nature, let’s say in a zone where there’s barely any cell phone signal and you don’t touch your phone, you try to really disconnect for seven days, a lot of people see their illness really changing. 

A lot of people sleep more soundly, maybe you feel calmer. Some people even get symptoms of tinnitus or ringing in the ear, all of a sudden vanish after a few days. So something really profound can happen if you get out of your sick environment. So this is how you test it for yourself because electro sensitivity may be present, but be masked by the fact that you’re always in it. you’re always in the EMFs. So for you, this is your normal baseline, you don’t realize all the potential you have just … and that’s easy to unlock if you clean up your environment, but you can realize that if you get out of that environment for a while. So I guess going camping is a very good idea after all.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Yes, yeah

Nicolas Pineault

Yeah.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

So it’s kinda all about toxic burden overall, whether it be-

Nicolas Pineault

Yes, yes.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

mold and then how many different sources of EMF. And you mentioned sleep disturbances and tinnitus, are those some of the most common manifestations statistically of EMF exposures for people or what do we think about usually?

Nicolas Pineault

Yeah, there’re a few researcher, well, several researchers have looked at the question of electro hypersensitivity and there’s many symptoms that vary depending on the degree of sensitivity. Dr. Magda Havas from Trench University in Canada, she says it’s about a third of the adult population that has mild to moderate symptoms of electro hypersensitivity. About one to 3% might have debilitating illness as a result. And if these statistics are even half true or a tenth true, it means it’s millions of people across the world that feel sick in a city or feel sick when they’re on a subway train exposed to cell phones, for example. But if you’re in the mild to moderate zone, what does that look like?

Well, a lot of people have unnecessary fatigue, excess fatigue when you wake up and can never recover. So poor sleep quality is another one. There’s also depression and anxiety and brain fog or memory loss. And right there, you have all the Alzheimer’s, dementia that is at the moment still exponentially rising. So is it old age or is it the combination of all these toxins we’re exposed to that yes, it’s part of aging, maybe your memory isn’t where it should be at, but are you really … Maybe you should still be here and you’re in the floor because of all that toxic burden. So in reality, when I look at certain people who … My grandma, I remember she passed away very recently, but I remember her as someone who always remembered everyone and what they did in the family. And we’re a very large family in the Pineault family. 

So she has eight children and they have, I don’t know how many cousins I have, like 30 something, I don’t know. It’s really a tremendous amount of people to remember and she remembered every one of them. So she was super sharp even and she passed away unfortunately at 97, almost 98. You have examples in your family probably where people in their very old age don’t have this dementia symptoms, just have incredible memories. So it’s feasible. The thing is we’re at the generation of mild child who’s four now is the first generation to be exposed to these signals 24/7 starting at birth.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Yeah.

Nicolas Pineault

Even 10 years ago, the levels of electro pollution in cities were not where they’re at in 2022 or beyond. And then if you go back to 2000, you didn’t have Wi-Fi in cities, you didn’t have people with cell phones, or you had a few ones with bricks and my dad was one of them. He was a realtor, so he had that big brick connected to his car with the antenna, the no kid 9,000 or something.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Oh, yes

Nicolas Pineault

Exactly, and we think about it, it’s almost, oh yeah, the good old times, but it’s like 20 years ago, 30 years ago.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Right, right.

Nicolas Pineault

So the first cell phones, basically no one used a cell phone in the 2000s or a few business people. But the reality is that things have completely exploded and that our ability to study the harms of such an increase is vastly surpassed by our ability to develop new exciting technologies. So the technology comes and then we backtrack through epidemiology and we say, “Hmm, we’ll study these populations that are dead “from something and figure out, “oops, is it from their cell phone kind of thing?” So unfortunately we’re very behind. And this is why, when it comes to EMFs, the scientists are sounding the alarm and saying that at least we should follow the precautionary principle and stop putting new technologies in place that expose us to more radiation like 5G, for example, or even the most powerful routers nowadays have three, four antennas, they’re stronger than ever. 

And one of the reason that I’ve been told by an electronic engineer, who’s an expert in EMF, he told me, “Well, everyone is kinda … “We’re still within the safety limits “and they’re very, very high, those safety limits.” So basically it’s almost anything goes at the moment, as far as wireless radiation goes in the Canada and US, especially because in other countries they have limits, orders of magnitude lower than in North America. So we’re really, really permissive when it comes to exposure. Not only that, but if your router is stronger and your phone becomes stronger as well, more EMFs, well, now the neighbor has a harder time connecting to his router and his phone in the long run because of the interactions between devices. So there’s more and more noise in the environment. 

So it means that technological development is going exactly in the wrong direction, where everyone is increasing the levels of noise. So it’s kind of with time, we’re gonna have to increase the level of power of these devices so they can sift through noise and connect to the tower, right? So it is this invisible noise that we don’t realize and there are consequences. There’s a recent study that showed that just the rollout of that 5G network, a lot of people have been talking about it, a lot of hyper bowls on the Internet about the effects and whatnot. But what I can tell you is this, 5G is more bad news, and it’s more electro pollution. And we have the scientific confirmation that came out a few months ago that showed that in cities where 5G is rolled out, the levels are going up and up and up, and that’s not surprising. 

That was to be expected because of the number of towers, the power emitted by these towers, and then the power of the phones that have so many tiny antennas in them for 5G. So people that use a 5G phone, they’re happy about it, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that they don’t know what the downside is. They don’t know that there are links between phone use and brain cancer, for example. Or they don’t know that if you keep a phone in your pocket, you are that much likely to have poor sperm quality and sperm count in men, and probably lowered fertility in women as well. So there are consequences to all that connectivity. And at the moment, it’s just increasingly more difficult to lower exposure because all the new exciting machines are more and more toxic in reality.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Yeah, you’ve mentioned safety levels, how do they determine these proposed safety levels as far as like how far we can push this, if there haven’t really been long term large population studies?

Nicolas Pineault

Yeah, this is really, really old science from the 80s that basically looked at rats and they determined safety threshold based on heating. So when the rats were overheating, then they saw damage of all sorts and they lost appetite and they became lethargic and it’s really … And then they looked at that limit and probably had a safety factor of 10. But even then, it is based on the fact that you should not overheat from your phone. And for sure heating can create damage, especially if it’s a microwave will heat your food from the inside out. And this is how the microwaves work and that’s a microwave oven. A microwave oven is over sometimes a 1000 watts or more in power. A phone might be one, 2 watts in power. 

So there’s definitely not cooking an egg, that’s a myth. And that’s not cooking your brain, but it’s not the question. Even at very low level, the science is very clear. There are thousands of studies that show that even at levels that do not heat tissue, do not overheat your brain, you have oxidative stress, you have a reduction of your ability to create energy. So that mitochondrial function goes down and you also have a loss of antioxidants. So in the long run, you have glutathione levels that go down, catalase, SOD, superoxide dismutase. So it’s the same thing I think from what I know from multi-oxicidity, these two agents, EMFs as an invisible toxin and mold as a well, otherwise invisible toxin as well, because most people would not really see signs of mold or maybe they miss it because it’s hidden by a wall and whatnot, or it’s just the type of mold that is very hard to detect, both of these act the same way. 

And the problem is mostly in the long run, a lot of people can feel immediate effect if you’re sensitive enough, but for most people it’s exposure over time that maybe you’ve been living in a home near a cell tower or maybe you have just started using your phone to the head more for your new job. And you’re talking a few hours per day, and maybe you’re fine on year number one and year number two, you start getting fatigued and eventually it is too much. So it’s really the cumulative effect, the overall cumulative effect, just like mold, where over time if your antioxidants level gets so down, so depressed that now you’re unable to cope with the oxidative damage, then everything can kind of crumble and fall apart. And what makes it difficult to heal in a very high EMF environment, it’s like trying to heal or to sleep soundly in a high light environments. Because in the end, there are many mechanisms that are similar between the microwaves and the visible light. Like for example we know that excessive blue light in the evening with the wrong timing can lead to loss of sleep quality, it can keep you up, right? So you-

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

It stimulates your brain.

Nicolas Pineault

Exactly, it simulates your brain. It will lower your ability to release melatonin at night, but there are researchers that say, well, the microwaves do the same thing. The pineal gland is not able to release that melatonin. So it looks like our bodies are able to detect very wide frequency, a wide range of frequencies that are both visible and invisible. And the proof is there. We can also react to the far infrared or the UV spectrum. And we do react to obviously the x-rays and nuclear radiation. And we do also react to other invisible waves, such as the very, very, very low frequency waves being emitted by the earth. 

And if we’re disconnected from the natural earth magnetism, there are consequences to human health. And the NASA studies and Russian astronauts have also studied that and realized that when you’re in space far from the earth, you’re missing something, you’re missing the light. You’re missing the earth’s natural magnetism and many aspects that make our biology work the way it should. If you get outside that planet, you don’t get the electro’s mag, thank God, but you get other things, you get space radiation, and also the lack of natural frequencies in a human body. So all of this has not been taken into account when developing safety limits, anything like that. So-

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Sure.

Nicolas Pineault

That’s why the safety limits are fundamentally wrong, is that they’re based on the assumption that, oh, no, only the heating part alone matters, but the non-heating effects are not only known, they’re shown in most studies. It’s the vast majority of the studies that do show oxidative stress, for example. So if you have oxidative stress, we do need some amount of oxidative stress, but unabated 24/7 oxidative stress from exposures that are otherwise avoidable while it’s probably not something that serves us. And that’s really the message is reduction, minimizing that risk.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Yeah, so you already started talking a little bit about EMFs and mold and how they’re interrelated in the biology too, it’s really fascinating. I would imagine that these EMFs affect other biologic beings, bacterias, maybe viruses, or other things like this.

Nicolas Pineault

Definitely.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

And some people will definitely … I’ve heard rumblings out there of like EMFs might supercharge mold or make it more active or something like that. I don’t know if that’s entirely true. I do know that molds and fungus definitely don’t mind being around radiation spaces,

Nicolas Pineault

Yeah.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

They seem to thrive in those particular regions and everything too. But yeah, I’d like to … Do you have any information on sort of some of the possible biome effects of the radiation too in our body, in our own cells, and maybe in even other beings and why mold might be maybe not as affected by that too?

Nicolas Pineault

I do, yeah. Well, the one study that has been, especially quoted is a study that was never published, so that’s unfortunate. I did talk with Dr. Klinghardt, who’s the doctor who kind of put that online several years ago and it’s been going around in circles. So in that unpublished study from his colleague from Switzerland, and he told me I had email communications to clarify, okay, who was that person? And unfortunately that researcher passed away before he was able to publish. According to his experiments, he was a researcher in mold. And he showed that certain strains of mold, under the influence of Wi-Fi could produce more biotoxin, more mycotoxins. 

This is not necessarily surprising. In nature what you find when you study certain strains of candida, so fungi or you study certain bacteria in particular, when they’re exposed to Wi-Fi or cell phones, there are study groups that have looked at the effects. Sometimes it might make the bacteria weaker, sometimes it might make them stronger or reproduce faster or suppress their ability to reproduce. And it varies a lot. So there’s no cookie cutter answer on this. What we know is there are real concerns about what the EMFs from our everyday devices, are doing to, for example, antibiotic resistance in E.coli in particular. And that’s the Taheri Group, T-A-H-E-R-I from Israel. If I recall correctly, they published in 2015 and beyond, a few studies showing that certain strains of E.coli that are commonly found in hospital and can lead to deadly infections in the hospital. 

And we know antibiotic resistance is a modern problem that we’ve created with, let’s say the abuse of antibiotics, and just maybe Wi-Fi is contributing to it without us realizing that in hospitals, they’re installing these Wi-Fi machines everywhere, the routers, but also also the Bluetooth monitors, cardiac monitors. My wife, when she gave birth, had that baby monitor, I guess, was just tracking the metrics of the fetus, which I’m not necessarily against. And some people will come back to me about that one, but I’m not necessarily against, if it’s extremely short exposure, it was a few hours. So we have to put things into perspective. However, the personnel exposed to it is for hours every day. And also if it exacerbates antibiotic resistance, which it looks like it can, then probably we should not have that in hospitals considering antibiotic resistance is such a big problem in the first place. 

So will it make mold more aggressive overall? We don’t have the definite proof, but it is plausible that it might make certain agents react or certain pathogens react in a way that we don’t know. Will it make parasites more stronger in the human body? We don’t know. There are some studies on the microbiota that shows that certain strains of beneficial bacteria have a hard time reproducing when under the exposure of cell phones or Wi-Fi signals or things like that. But there’s not a lot of studies really on the effect on the microbiome. I did talk to a very prestigious scientist, Marco Ruggiero, PhD, who is an Italian researcher with over a 100 peer reviewed papers. And he’s an expert on the microbiome and also on the EMF effect. And very recently, I had a conversation with him, where he shared, according to him, he considers that most of the effects are caused by cell phones and Wi-Fi and electro pollution are not caused because of direct cellular damage. 

But according to him, it’s really the damage to the microbiome. So there are different opinions. Some researchers would not agree with that assessment, but the reality is it’s a big black box and that’s a problem. Like I said in my book and like I’ve been saying, I’ll still say it, it’s not what we know about EMFs that concerns me the most, it’s what we don’t. And that’s really the problem. That plus the combined fact that it’s so hard to study because of a lack of funding, because scientists are being defunded and there’s a lot of industry pressure not to study the topic. So it’s also a very charged topic, controversial and not a lot of scientists want to get in that line of research. It’s pretty much career suicide when you study EMFs, it’s very unpopular, let’s put it that way. So-

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

It’s true.

Nicolas Pineault

We don’t know exactly what it’s doing. What we do know is that it’s a stressor. What we do know is it’s extremely likely that there’s a big synergistic effect between EMFs and mold and also heavy metals and other toxins in that if you study researchers like Dr. Martin Paul, for example, from the University of Washington, WSU, he says that these things act in synergy, there’s no doubt in his mind. And he’s an expert on multiple chemical sensitivity. And he started studying EMFs later saying, “Oh my God, it’s actually the same mechanisms “that can explain why people react “in such, an almost exaggerated manner to certain chemicals “where they smell a little bit of perfume “and they almost faint.” And doctors are in disbelief, they are in disbelief themselves, these patients, because that sensitivity is so high that they have have a hard time living in society. Well, the same thing applies to EMFs and the same things are seen in these people who have developed multiple sensitivities that are environmental in their nature and that they are reacting to everything. It’s just that oftentimes they forget that they can also react to a phone, for example.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Sure, so you mentioned before too, about some of the mechanisms of how EMFs and mold both disrupt the physiology. I believe you mentioned mitochondrial stress as an impossible mechanism.

Nicolas Pineault

Yeah.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

And then I’ve heard some things before about oxygenation also in general or coagulability or thickening of the blood, like mold can do that sometimes. And I’ve heard EMF sometimes mess with that mechanism as well. Could you speak to any of the other sort of what you mentioned, the negative synergy, so to speak of EMFs and molds and how we can think about it as doctors too mechanistically?

Nicolas Pineault

Yeah, sure. Well, especially, I think Dr. Martin Paul is really the best researcher to study. And I think it all comes down to the nitrogen species, peroxynitrite and the peroxynitrite, now there’s a paper in 2007 that Dr. Joseph Mercola really pointed me towards from Pal Pacher, P-A-L P-A-C-H-E-R, Pal Pacher. And it’s over a 100 pages, I think, that paper. It’s a landmark paper on peroxynitrite and disease. So it talks about all the mechanisms. And if we really believe that this is correct, that peroxynitrite can be at the root of all diseases, and there’s many reasons why it could be considered one of the most dangerous nitrogen or oxygen species out there. One of them being it’s so small that it can travel and damage the mitochondria directly. 

It can hop from one cell to another and it can get into the cell nuclei. And to be honest, the B biology is really elusive to me, it’s way above my pay grade. But what I understand is that this is plausible. This is fairly new science also. So will it be recognized that EMFs really exacerbate the peroxynitrite problem? If you believe Dr. Pal, this is what’s happening. So he talks about the voltage-gated calcium channels, two types of voltage-gated calcium channels in particular, especially the L type that he mentions in his research. And he says that when the EMFs, and he did talk about all types of EMFs, including household electricity, including magnetic fields, and magnetic component of that EMF, or wireless. 

So he says there’s no difference in the biological effects. So this is really why the message from the scientific community is to minimize all these sources equally, because we cannot really quantify that the cell phone is worse than the Wi-Fi. They’re all in the same or they’re all toxic, in a sense, especially in great quantity of exposure and over time. So all of them contribute to excessive levels of peroxynitrite in the cell. And basically you have the cell left to try to mop up that damage and it requires a lot of cellar energy. It can deplete levels of NED, so leading to mitochondrial dysfunction or reduction of activity over time. And then it can also deplete antioxidants. So this is really why the acting synergy, it looks like it basically, at a basic fundamental level creates the same damage in the body. And it’s also interesting to know that these EMFs are, there’s a lot of researchers that say they’re more of a co-carcinogen than a carcinogen. You have several studies where EMFs alone have no effect on rats or mice or maybe in vitro. And then you add an agent, you add maybe a little bit of lead exposure that could be nontoxic. 

You could have EMFs nontoxic, lead nontoxic, and together they’re now they become a carcinogen to these rats or mice, for example. Or you see the damage in vitro, whatever this is. So there’s a Dariusz Śledziewski and other researchers that have said it’s very, very likely that it’s a co-carcinogen and you have studies on synergistic effects of EMFs. And Dr. Kostoff is one of them, Ronald Kostoff. I think that paper is almost funny to me because he does talk about how many experiments would it require for us to look at the synergies between EMFs and a few known environmental toxins that are commonly found in the air, in water, on our food, like, could be arsenic, could be lead, cadmium, could be, I don’t know, the major pesticides out there and fungicides and rodenticides, herbicides. 

There’s so many of them, right? So he talks about the millions of experiments that we will require for us to look at just a few agents that act in synergy. So EMF plus arsenic plus lead or EMF plus arsenic or EMF plus lead. And it’s basically what he says is, well, even with the kind of attention we gave to the Manhattan project, it would take decades. So the only logical thing to do is to try to minimize exposure, start bringing down the levels of exposure with new technologies, instead of doing the opposite, which is what we’re the doing right now. So this is really … We’re stuck facing a wall here as far as science goes. The more we study EMFs, the more damage becomes apparent. And at the same time, there’s a bigger position and a big industry that wants to keep things just going and going. And then you have users in the middle that say, “Ah, I love my phone, “but I’ve heard about this EMF thing and I hate it. “So what do I do?” 

This is really where individuals can choose to minimize exposure while unfortunately, I think there’s still a few decades to go of scientific battles and policy before we can make the phones tremendously more safe, in my opinion. And many scientists kind of make the analogy with seat belts. At first, they were almost ridiculed from what I read from history. It’s like, oh, okay, we don’t really need car safety, but after you realized really with the studies that, “Hmm, yeah, cars are kind of responsible “for all these people dying and we can have airbags “and seat belts and many other features,” and now cars are millions of times safer than they used to be. 

Same machine, and we don’t stop using cars, right? So we still use them, but they’re way safer. So can we do that with cell phones and make them way safer? We probably can, but it will require the acceptation, we all have to accept that there’s a problem in the first place or else things are not going to move. So for a moment, it’s more of a, I’d say it’s a grassroots movement of people that say, “Hey, I want safer technologies.” And a lot of scientists that have been partially successful in sounding the alarm to the UN and regulatory bodies and governments, but they’re, I would say mostly ignored. And there’s a lot of scientists that are putting their career on the line trying to make things change, but it’s a slow process at the moment.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Sure, sure. Well, in our remaining time here, this has probably been discussed before too, but what are some practical first step things that an individual can do to try to start mitigation in their own life, knowing that there’s some things we can control and some things we can’t right away? The broad society at large as it stands, but do I have to go move to the country? Or what are some basic things though to start off, some palpable things, some things we can start implementing today?

Nicolas Pineault

Sure, well, it really depends on your degree of sensitivity. I think that the first thing you should mitigate is your bedroom. And this is my bedroom/office. So if I have anything wireless in this room, it should be turned off or set on airplane mode at night. And that includes your cell phone, also a Bluetooth alarm clock, a cordless phone. Some people have a laptop open. Maybe they download movies during the night, or I don’t know what, or they just keep it open, they don’t think twice about it. They don’t realize that it’s still connected to Wi-Fi whooping every few seconds. So these are all sources that are close to your body. And at night, this is where most of the problematic effects of the damage can happen by preventing you from having the deepest sleep you can have. 

So this is really where you wanna do most of the mitigation. The number two place would be, where do you spend your time during the day? A lot of people are on the move with a phone in their bra, in their yoga pants, in their pocket, in their shirt pocket also. And two different cardiologists I’ve heard from have told me that some patients get heart arrhythmias or other heart problems that can be directly linked to the presence of a phone in their shirt pocket. So they have a sensitivity or is it a blessing or is it a curse? You choose, should you realize, should your body give you a signal, if you have a phone near your heart, probably should. So the people who have no signal are probably in more trouble in a sense than those who do. But anyway, you should not keep it right next to your body.

It’s in fact, it’s written in the phone, if you look under the RF regulations that this thing should be, depending on the phone, a few millimeters to a few centimeters away from your body. And I don’t know how they expect us to do that because it’s glued to us most of the time, right? So no one follows these instructions. And usually no one or I’d say, not even 1% of cell phone users even know that it’s in there and that you should create a distance. So it’s very important also to turn off that device, put it on airplane mode, or try to have other things. There are certain cases from companies like Shield Your Body or Defender Shield, there’s several good companies that do cases. But even then, let’s say it’s a half solution, which you should not initially live with the idea that it makes your phone safe, for example. I would not put it to the head. I would create distance between the phone and your head. If you talk on it all day, especially if it’s part of your work and you’re always two, three hours talking on the phone per day on a cell phone, you should create distance. 

You should use wired earbuds, such as these and hold it in your hand, put it in front of you, so not in your pocket, right? Or if you’re driving and you have something like this, if they’re legal, just follow the regulations in your country, but just put it in the other seat, not between your legs. And I see a lot of men put it between your, a lot of women as well, put it between their legs and that’s a bad idea. If it causes cancer of the head here and the data is pretty, pretty clear on that, what do you think it does if it’s in the growing area? It’s probably not better. So you choose where you want damage. Ideally you want no damage to your body. So that’s creating distance. And then look at other areas where you’re spending a lot of time with machines that are plugged with wireless. And the biggest mitigation you can do to reduce your exposure at work would be to have a computer that is wired. And that’s not always feasible, I understand that. 

There are other things you could do to bring the Wi-Fi antenna very far from your computer using, for example, a USB extension and at the end of the USB extension, you can put a USB Wi-Fi adapter. So that adapter would act as Wi-Fi and would be very far away from your computer and your computer would have the Wi-Fi function turned off. And that’s a little bit of a trick that I have on my YouTube channel, where I share how I travel with my laptop and still use Wi-Fi. But I use Wi-Fi and the Wi-Fi is not immediately on my computer, which would’ve been a foot from my head, I create about a 10 feet distance between the Wi-Fi chip and my head in that way. So it’s a little bit of an alternative.

But at home, I see a lot of people at home, they have this home office environment and they still use Wi-Fi. And if your computer is in one place, why do you need Wi-Fi? It’s not practical. Sometimes the signal can drop off. For these interviews, I know I was frustrated because my Wi-Fi router is, I don’t know, 25 feet that way in the corridor, the other side of the condo and the Wi-Fi was very spotty and I wasn’t satisfied with it. I had a hard time doing interviews. So now I had a choice. Do I get a stronger Wi-Fi and even more electro pollution or do I run a wire? So I ran a wire from the router to my computer and the wire is called an ethernet cable. It still exists. Yes, you can still use that with modern computers. There’s an adapter. Most computers don’t even have an ethernet port these days, but you can have a USBC to ethernet or USB 3.0 to ethernet or other ports. There’s many options out there. So it’s easy to figure out and it’s pretty much plug and play and you don’t have spotty Wi-Fi anymore. And of course you turn off the Wi-Fi function on your computer because it replaces the Wi-Fi function. 

Now it’s a wired connection. And now you can just surf the Internet with no radiation and that’s still feasible. When it comes to mitigation, you wanna look at what will give you the most bang per buck. And it’s usually the longest exposures or the ones that are closest to your body. So start at night, then think about the devices touching your body, or the devices that’s use for hours on end. And for most people, it will be a tablet or a computer connected to your Wi-Fi or something you wear on your body or cell phone. So usually it’s the personal devices. And you really start there because these things you have control over. 

Then, I guess I have also to mention, I know a lot of people listening to this, a lot of them might be either sensitive themselves, know someone who is very chronically ill or doctors who treat these kind of patients. Some people cannot handle the agent called electro pollution for a long time. If they’re in a city environment and they feel hypersensitive to everything, maybe they go to a cafe and just by the time they grab the coffee and pay with credit card, the router is too much for them and it can be that bad. Well, for them, maybe it’s not the right environment to heal. And that’s a big decision to make, but it’s akin to having to move out of the moldy home while it’s being remediated or just deciding, you know what, this is too much, I have to find another place to live. 

And the reality is for some people living near a tower or in a city right now, it’s too much to bear. So I guess the action steps for those people is at least knowing what the EMF environment is inside their home. And the way to do this is with an EMFX inspector, the equivalent to a mold inspector, but for EMFs. So there’s the building biologists, there’s the EMF mitigation specialists that have other accreditations, such as my colleague, Brian Hoyer from Shielded Healing, for example, and there’s Geovital consultants as well. There’s good professionals out there that can go to your home and assess the EMF environment. 

They can also talk about mitigation strategies. They can shield bedrooms, they can recommend different shielding solutions and help you find the sources and whatnot. This is the first step usually that I would recommend doctors to refer to their patients. And then if it’s still too much, sometimes you need to go in lower EMF environments. It might be in the countryside, it might be in the city in certain locations where it’s lower, but then again, you’ll have to use meters and the specialized equipment of a building biologist to be able to assess, okay, is this new home that I’m looking to rent or purchase, is it safe? Is it low enough for me to handle? And the good news is there are people who recover. There are people who become tremendously less sensitive than they used to be. I could claim, based on what I’ve heard from functional medicine doctors, especially those that the environmental, sorry, I’m just losing the name here. 

E-H-C Dallas, if I recall correctly, Stephanie Carter or McCarter, sorry if I’m butchering her name, but they’re incredible experts as people who treat electro hypersensitive patients and also mold toxicity. So they see both of them. And oftentimes they have the two at the same time and they say it’s not all patients, but some people are able to recover. And some of them are able now to live in a city. For some people that I know, electro sensitive or electro sensitives, some of them live in a countryside and they can come in the city for a conference or during the weekend, but they easily feel depleted and they know, “Okay, it’s a short term thing. “I will not spend a month in New York City or San Diego “or Montreal, it’s too much.” So in this case, they become very attuned to what they can handle and they just take the recovery time that’s necessary after such exposures.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Yeah, but it’s more functional they just have a capacity and that awareness too,

Nicolas Pineault

Yeah.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

so there is hope then, so if you’ve-

Nicolas Pineault

There is.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

if you’ve been injured by mold and you become hypersensitized to mold, to EMF, to your environment, and despite your efforts, it can be very frustrating for some people that are chronically ill, but there is hope that you can kind of get on the other end of that if you go about it the right way and reduce those burdens appropriately and see one of your specialists here, one of your doctors who can help manage that. So are there these centers? That’s really interesting. I remember some, one last question here and I’ll let you go. But I remember there were some studies on kind of building safe houses and stuff like that for people too or completely EMF free or chemical free, free, all this kind of stuff. 

Yeah, I would love to see more of that out there in the world too, for some of these really sensitive people. I feel like they almost need some kind of reset. And maybe you can do that in nature too. Although I’ve heard they’re starting to try to put, although there’s controversy there, they’re trying to put some towers or some signaling in the parks and stuff, so people can still communicate so they don’t get lost or something like that. Which there’s probably a reason for some of those things too, but is there gonna come a time where we don’t have a lot of places to escape? I don’t know.

Nicolas Pineault

Well, it’s difficult and some people are working on projects of EMF free zones. I know Dr. Beverly Rubik is one of them, R-U-B-I-K. I had the privileged to talk to her a few days ago in an interview and she’s working on such a project. It takes a lot of money and they have to take to … It takes so much money because you have to purchase land. They’re looking for a 1000 acres. So where do you find that? How do you finance it? So it will go through people who can donate that money. So people that are philanthropists-

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Philanthropy, yeah.

Nicolas Pineault

and that can say, “I’m the private owner of that land “and I’m not going to allow Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile to put those tower on there because it would defeat the purpose. That’s the difficulty with EMFs, finding those low EMF zones is increasingly more difficult and it’s true that there are benefits if you bring the towers in, but there are detriments that are not recognized. So for sure there are benefits if you can connect anytime. Maybe I would prefer to see the satellites phone is being rented out or I don’t know, having all phones have the capacity to have a satellite phone, I would rather use satellites that are already there than put a bunch of towers and eradiate nature and human beings. So we’re gonna have to find better solutions. For sure it’s very unsustainable how we use these EMFs. And they do have some benefits to connect the planet and not get laws and for emergency purposes, they’re very useful, so much that people have a hard time going back to no connectivity. They say, “Well, if something happens, right, to my kid “or to me, I have to call.” So we have to, hard at times-

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

It’s usually the first response, yeah.

Nicolas Pineault

I’m kind of torn in between myself. I would do that myself, if, okay, well, my kid is going with his friends. He’s 12, probably gonna hand them a cell phone, but what about the exposure? Safety exposure is gonna … It’s difficult. And in the meantime, we have machines that are inherently unsafe. And if we could have cell phones that were a billion times safer, maybe I would feel better about handing a phone to a kid. But at the moment, it’s definitely not in this direction. We haven’t gone in the direction of making these safer and safer every year and to the contrary, they’re getting more unsafe quite unfortunately.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Right, and then schools are integrating all that stuff too now.

Nicolas Pineault

Exactly.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Everybody’s in Chromebook or everybody gets a wireless device. There’s wireless devices in each of the classrooms. Yeah, no, I’m most concerned. I have two daughters myself. I’m definitely most concerned about our unseen harm to the developing brain, the developing immune system, and everything like that too. ‘Cause I would say, yeah, probably there are other forces that could affect development and naturally other adversities anyway. So adding these other things on top of them,

Nicolas Pineault

Exactly.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

just load, it’s toxic load. All right, well thank you very much. Any last thoughts on this subject? It’s fascinating. I’d probably talk to you for like three hours about this I’m sure, but we gotta cut it off for today, but I’m sure you’ll make appearance on future summits. Definitely, I’d love to have a biome summit at some point, if we have more answers on that even ’cause yeah, always fascinating, the biome project and everything out there. Yeah, so any last thoughts on EMFs and mold? Any takeaway messages you wanna give to the audience here?

Nicolas Pineault

Yeah, well, just get started and don’t hesitate to run a few tests for yourself. Turn off the cell phone at night, turn off everything in the bedroom, and see if it makes a difference in your sleep. And a lot of people, even sometimes I just do experiments. I talk to the clerk at Avis, random person from my life. I rent the car and talk to her and she says, “Okay, what do you do in life?” “Well, I’m an author about EMFs.” “Okay EMFs, what’s that?” And we kind of chit chat for five minutes and I say, “Well, just try to turn off your phone at night. “You would be surprised how it can improve your sleep.” And the real experiment is when it’s completely blinded, so the husband of that person, the clerk that was there, the wife, realize that, “Oh my God, “I don’t know what’s happening, “but I slept incredibly this week.” And it was because the phones were off, but without his consent or even knowledge. 

And that’s a perfect feedback that I get from a lot of people. It’s not like the husband was looking for it or having some sort of placebo effect. It was just something that happened. And that made me chuckle a little bit like you just did because it’s like, this is a perfect … A lot of husbands, especially men, are very skeptical of EMFs. Like, “Oh no, this cell phone cannot hurt me. “I’m stronger than that.” It’s a, I don’t know. So it’s something for sensitive people. I don’t know what they think, but it’s true that a lot of people are in disbelief. 

So if you wanna test it out for yourself or just run an experiment at home in the household and say, “I’m trying something new. “I heard about EMFs and it can impact sleep. “Why don’t we turn Wi-Fi off “when everyone is sleeping anyway?” And a lot of people would realize that, “I sleep more soundly” or it will just be something that’s automatic. And it’s great news for your entire family. At least you’re cutting off seven, eight hours of exposure. You can also put it on a Christmas light timer, the kind of outlet timers you plug it in and you plug the router in there and you turn it off at 10, you open it up at 6:00 AM, whatever you want, and no one’s gonna even notice that it’s gone. So-

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Yeah. 

Nicolas Pineault

it’s just something that is logical. We should cut off exposure that doesn’t serve any purpose in your life. So just start there, run your experiment, and see how you feel.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Great, yeah, it’s like just shutting off your lights at night. You don’t sleep with your lights on. You don’t need it.

Nicolas Pineault

Exactly.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

You don’t need light while you’re sleeping, you don’t need your Wi-Fi while you’re sleeping. All right, no, this is awesome. All right, well, thank you very much for your time and thank you very much for your expertise, and thank you very much for all the work that you’re doing for the world, for my patients, for us, docs out there trying to navigate these complexities all the time as well. So yeah, I appreciate it. You have a nice day and we’ll talk to you next time.

Nicolas Pineault

Thank you so much.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Thank you.