So, I wanted to start this today by actually showing you one of the driving factors that we often evaluate first when it comes to gut issues and relating them to some of the things I’ve already mentioned, whether it’s heart health, thyroid health, reproductive health, bone health, so many of these. If you have a condition in one of these areas and you have a gut condition, we start hearing alarm bells going off and we actually start looking for mold and mycotoxins. So it’s one of the reasons why we test our patients, our clients, and our students so early in many of our different learning formats because we want you to have this information right away. Have you been exposed to mold in the past and is it affecting you today? Because it’s one of the biggest misnomers that we see out there. People think if they can’t see mold on the walls or if they can’t smell it in their home that, it’s one not there, which is not necessarily true. Mold is often hidden in crawl spaces in your HVAC system, or in your basement. You know, it floods once a year or floods once. And now mold is just percolating down there or it’s actually hidden behind from view in your drywall. We had one family who was just absolutely devastated by mold and they thought they had gut conditions, they thought they had skin conditions and in fact, they had moved into their brand-new dream house. This couple did, they were such a beautiful couple. And they had these two beautiful baby girls. They thought they were living their dream life together. They worked so hard to get here and buy this brand-new home and it turned out that the home was improperly constructed and there was a lot of mold behind things in the drywall and they didn’t find that until Michael and I pushed them over and over again. Please assess the home for mold, because all of this just screams mold. So when you start seeing more than one system in the body shut down and really struggle and become very reactive, then we start looking for environmental triggers and toxins like mold. So one of the things I wanted to highlight for you today is just how pervasive this can be and how to arm yourself with this information right away.
And to do that, we actually have to unpack this a little bit because, and I call this the mycotoxin masquerade. So you think it’s digestive conditions or neurological conditions, sinus distress, lung conditions, joint muscle pain, skin issues like we just mentioned, hormone dysregulation, or even depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts? You might think it’s all separate things, but it’s all really driven by mold. So how can more be so powerful if it’s like that amazing edge shutting things down because didn’t we always have mold in our world? Yeah, we absolutely did. But today’s mold is very different because we changed our building codes back in the 1970s for everything to be more watertight and more plastic-heavy, essentially. So we started choosing more building materials that created an airtight seal, which means natural air is less likely to get into the spaces in between and bring in spores from nature that would actually help to regulate mold and keep it in check and also to simply dry out any water damage that takes place. So temporary water damage would be just that, you know, but now we can have a long-term mold issue from a short-term water issue.
So, and we’re going to use words interchangeably, and I really want you to understand what they mean. So mold, there are thousands of species of molds and they do occur naturally. Mycotoxins are the poisons produced by mold and by other fungi. So this is the part that’s important. You might actually come into contact with mold and breathe an air spores, mold spores, but they don’t actually release poison into the air. They actually don’t release it until those spores hit something. What, like you, like the inside surface of your lungs? That’s when they start to release Mycotoxins. So inhaling drinking or eating spores will release mold into the body as soon as they’re saturated with bodily fluids. And then the mold is working on you, snacking on your cells, eating your tissue, trying to colonize, elbowing other organisms out of the way because it’s a colonizing entity. It thinks within a colony and it wants to thrive. And it’s here to help break things down. And it’s also going to release Mycotoxins to help it do that. And those are the poisons that you’re reacting to. And that’s the part that really starts to take shape in terms of your health so you can have a short-term exposure to mold, but then mold actually sets up shop in the body and then it continues to affect your health long term. It can shut down your liver efficiency pretty rapidly, which leads to an accumulation of industrial toxins buildup and heavy metals and all sorts of other stuff. Also means your liver is less efficient at converting hormones like, oh, yeah T4 into T3 and then it’s also less efficient at breaking down hormones like your old estrogens, for example. And mold is highly estrogenic, so you can start to get some very distorted hormone pictures just because the mold that you’ve inhaled for a few weeks and that is now set up shop because it’s a perfect environment, is now starting to throw things out of whack over time. So it also suppresses the immune system because again, remember, it’s elbow and things out of the way. It wants to thrive, it’s a colonizer and this also means that the presence of mold allows parasites to set up shop. Remember how we talked about in my talk on day one with you was the very first talk of the summit parasites and how they set up shop and how they’re really here to help you do a job. But it sure does come at a really high cost. So I have never seen a case in my practice or intergroup courses of somebody who had mold, who did not have parasites. So it’s something to consider and it’s something that’s really easy to test for, too. So we’ll talk about that in a second.
But essentially mold, this increases stagnation and it speeds up decay, which reduces the body’s ability to deal with other issues. So you can have serious thyroid dysfunction because of mold and you can have serious reproductive hormone dysfunction because of mold. And you can also have. Oh, yeah, all those just straight-up digestive issues because mold is so good at shutting down bile flow, that means that you are not now excreting bile as efficiently as you need to so that when that, remember we talked about this in my liver stomach acid coming down with the bolus of food into that delicate small intestine must be met and actualized. So pancreatic enzymes are coming in sodium bicarbonate for the pancreas, but you also need a huge influx of bile that’s also going to alkalis and meet that acidity. All together at the right. Perfect timing. That can’t happen if mold is shutting down bile flow and your bile ducts are getting sluggish and sticky and full of weird sludge because you just can’t let go fast enough.
So the starts to matter because then you get a buildup of stuff in the gut that never should have been there because your body knows, okay, you’re not excreting bile efficiently enough. Why don’t we lower the stomach acid so that when the stomach acid is met in the small intestine, it doesn’t get to burn a hole through the small intestine. So always modulating, the body’s always talking to itself. And that means that you’re not killing off pathogens the way that you should, because that’s what your stomach acid is there, in part to help you do, to kill off anything coming in on your food and make sure that nothing gets in that shouldn’t. So then we have what happening? Well, our slowed-down gut motility, right? Because bile is supposed to be helping us encourage gut motility, moving things out at the appropriate pace. And if that all slows down, you could to have great fermentation with parasites, all of because that means that your food is rotting and fermenting. And that’s great because they love those sugars and those alcohols. Fantastic. So that means that you start to get really persistent gut conditions and that you’re not eliminating efficiently either. So now before, long after, a little bit of mold exposure, your gut is no longer running the show. The mold is on the parasites. Ah, so you’re happy? A healthy microbiome is not quite as resilient as it was before. And this all fits together, right? So the important piece that I want you to think about is like. Do we have to be afraid of mold? No. Do we want to understand its power to affect our future? Absolutely. And it also means that we have to look and investigate back in our past, did we, in fact, get exposed to mold like that sweet family that moved into their brand new dream home and just did not believe that a brand new home could have mold the dad totally shut down. His body was covered in these terrible rashes and it terrible upset his stomach was just, I mean his digestive tract was unlivable is what he said. And he was covered in these terrible rashes in a way that he just could not function. And he did not want to look into the fact that he had known. He just didn’t believe it to be true. But then when we finally got it tested and we got him onto the mold binders and we started drawing it out of the system in a very gentle way, he was actually able to reclaim his health in just a few months. So that’s the important piece.
I want you to remember that all of this is absolutely fixable. You just need to be able to assess for it and to recognize it and see the signs, which means you get to be a detective of your own help and reconsider what have been your prior exposures. Right? What do I need to know about where I’ve been? What has happened to my body before now that might still be impacting me today because remember, your gut is super resilient. It’s remaking itself all the time. So if you still have a chronic condition like I did for years, you have to ask yourself what are the things in place that are perpetuating the problem? This isn’t just holding your body in place. You’re actually recreating that because you’re recreating your gut lining. Your microbiome is reproducing itself. So what is the condition or the number of factors that haven’t budged yet so that the problem has to keep remaking itself, which actually costs you a lot of effort? It’s easier to heal than it is to maintain that problem. So that’s the piece that I wanted you to most hear today as you consider all of the amazing gems that our speakers have to give to you today about all of these related health conditions and how essential it is to take care of the gut first because of what can happen downstream in other areas in the body. You have totally got this and this is totally fixable. We just need to know what to look for and when in order to address it and so enjoy today and let us know what you think.
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