Gut Health and Mold Exposure: Why Some People React to Mold, and Others Don’t

Introduction to Gut Health and Inflammation 0:00

People wanted to learn stuff about inflammation. There's a woman called the glucose goddess, and she's on YouTube and all kinds of stuff. And honestly, that is a great way to understand your microbiome and its relative dysbiosis is to understand how food is impacting your blood sugar. Because we have a really complicated system, but you need to have data to make those cost benefit decisions. You've tried everything. You've changed your diet. You've detoxed. You've even moved homes. And yet, you still feel sick.

Headaches, brain fog, fatigue that no one can explain. What if it's not you? What if it's your environment? Welcome to Mold Microtoxins and More. I'm John Bode. Each week, I sit down with experts uncovering how mold, microtoxins, and environmental exposures affect your health and what real recovery looks like. Let's get into today's conversation. The information provided on the Mold Pros podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Listening to the podcast does not create a doctor-patient or professional-client relationship between you and the podcast host, guest, or the Mold Pros. The content shared should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. And always seek the medical advice of your physician or qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding the medical condition, potential mold exposure, or health concerns. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast.

And while we strive to provide accurate and up-to-date information, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, expressed or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, or suitability of all the information discussed. A guest's experience and outcomes discussed on this podcast are individual cases and should not be considered typical results. Your situation may differ significantly. As always, if you think you have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. By listening to the Mold Pros podcast, you acknowledge that you understood this disclosure.

So, what does your gut have in common with farmland? Probably a lot more than you think. We will learn all about that on today's episode. Welcome back to Mold Microtoxins and More, the podcast where we explore the hidden connections between environmental toxins and human health. I'm your host, John Bode, co-founder of the Mold Pros. Today, we have truly a fascinating guest joining us.

John Bode's Mold Pros Podcast Intro and Disclaimer 2:25

Dr. Andrea Macbeth is a naturopathic physician, a biochemist, and the CEO and founder of Thena, a groundbreaking company that's revolutionizing how we think about gut health. Andrea has a degree in biochemistry with an emphasis on molecular biology from the University of San Diego and a doctorate in naturopathic medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine. She grew up with an environmental scientist father who studied groundwater contamination, and she learned at an early age that you can't separate internal health from environmental exposures.

And she approaches gut healing through regenerative principles, understanding that addressing the microbiome without addressing environmental toxins is kind of like trying to grow healthy crops in contaminated soil. true healing requires both an ecosystem, restoration, and environmental remediation. It happens in a community, not just in isolation. Andrew, you and I met years ago at a medical conference, and we had the most interesting conversation on poop, of all things. You recommended that my wife and I watch this documentary on poo, which we did, and it really helped educate us on the importance of gut health.

And I'm very excited to have you on the podcast today. Thanks so much for having me. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so when I was in school to be a naturopath and for other periods in my life, I've thought about mold a lot. And like I mentioned, when I was writing the intro bio, I wanted to just speak to the fact that I think about environmental medicine as central to human gut health, even though we don't always think of it that way. So it was a pleasure to meet you years ago, and it's a pleasure to reconnect again.

And it's great to hear about what you're doing and how you're doing and how we can kind of continue to support each other with ideas and inspiration. You bet. You bet. One of the reasons why I was so excited to have you on the show, and I hadn't shared this with you prior to today, but you sent us on this rabbit trail. that actually made a huge impact on me personally. Before we had met, I was on a prescription just like hundreds of thousands of other people for GERDs. And I would wake up in the middle of the night just choking on acid reflux and aspirating.

And it was kind of a scary deal. But my primary health care provider said, hey, this is just kind of the way it's going to be. You just got to deal with it and manage it, right? There's nothing I could do about it. But after meeting you and we went down this rabbit trail of gut health, And we changed what we did and we started focusing more on that. And man, I can't remember the last time I had an episode where I woke up in the middle of the night. And so just that chance meeting has really improved the quality of my life.

And what I hope we get out of today's episode is that somebody out there that suffers kind of like what I used to suffer will hear something and it'll improve the quality of their life as well. Yeah, we have so much power to make change. And I think it's like just an unfortunate part of the system that we're told we're on these one way paths. But the reality is we have so much agency. And I think the most exciting part about the microbiome is that once you start to understand and appreciate how much interaction we have and how much it's a new thing, and we have so much capacity to impact it through diet and simple things, we can really do a lot for our health outside of the realms of kind of what traditionally is thought possible.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's dig in this a little bit. Now, you grew up with a kind of a background in environmental sciences, right?

Meet Dr. Andrea Macbeth and Her Environmental Medicine Background 6:00

And around these conversations around like contaminated groundwater. So how did that shape contaminated groundwater? How did that shape how you think about microbiome and gut health today? Yeah, I would say, you know, I was reflecting recently on, you know, I read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which was a book from the 70s about DDP and how it made egg shells really thin and it was sort of the beginning of an understanding that this era of better living through chemistry or everything we invent and put into the world is inherently safe was challenged.

So herbicides and pesticides were starting to be discovered as potentially harmful in this period of the 70s. And I grew up around scientists that were studying that, and they were studying groundwater contamination from paper mills and dry cleaning. And I was just acutely aware of the fact that we have to pay attention to our environment because there's a lot of things out there that can cause harm that we either don't know exist or isn't regulated, right? And I had been working in cancer research as a molecular biochemist and doing a graduate degree there.

And I actually ended up leaving that program, leaving academia and becoming a naturopath because I was really frustrated by this mentality that the only solution was to you know, fix something at the end of the problem and not prevent it in the first place. And I knew fundamentally that there's so much we can do about our environment to prevent things. So becoming an atropath was kind of a way to do that. And I pretty quickly got excited about gut health because it bridged that gap between nutrition and wellness in our environment and the mechanism biochemically to how it impacts human health.

And it's just so cool because it's an organ system we only discovered 20 years ago. And so The application of understanding why some people respond differently, somebody can walk into a moldy house and be totally fine and other people can't, has a lot to do with their microbiome because that's our kind of sensing organ that tells our immune system to whether or not our environment is safe or not. And so it was a really cool process to get excited about the gut microbiome and then start to think about how we could be our own remediators, right?

That's the language in. mold and has waste, you have to remediate the environment and then repair and let it like kind of heal itself. And the gut microbiome is like a very similar thing. Like you mentioned, once you sort of give it the conditions to re-equilibrate or get back into balance, it can do that really well. And so I become really passionate about gut health and helping patients as a naturopath and then kind of stumbled upon the work that we're doing now with Thena from there. Well, let's dig in that a little bit deeper.

It's our business. We deal with a lot of folks that have mold exposure or environmental illness. And so for someone that's dealing with mold exposure or living in a water damage building, can you explain exactly what's going on? their microbiome on like a metabolic level and then why is it so often it seems like this population is like really reactive to traditional probiotics or even fermented foods or things of that nature. Yeah, so I'll start with sort of the basic concept. We have microbes, right, bacteria and small viruses and fungus that live in us, normal.

They're commensal, which just means like they're our friends. And it's an organ system that's essentially three pounds. It's like you're going to take it out by mass. weight. And it makes all these molecules in the way that your microbiome, it's best to kind of think of it like soil of a farm. So a really healthy soil is going to be making all these nutrients and telling your immune system, everything's okay, you can digest your food, you can take a deep breath, you don't need to be stressed, you don't need to react with histamine.

But what happens, and can happen from a variety of environmental exposures, mold not least of which, is that that microbiome organ kind of soil can get poisoned by mycotoxins. And what happens is it's that organ system's job to adapt and help us prepare for whatever else is out there. In the same way we think about our nervous system being on this teeter totter of rest and digest or fight or flight, like preparing to run from a bear or relaxing and eating a healthy meal, our microbiome has a pretty good lever on that teeter totter.

How Mold and Dysbiosis Affect the Microbiome 11:00

And when people, and again, because everybody's microbiome is a little bit different going into it, you can see this big discrepancy between one person in the family being super sensitive and other people that don't even register at all. And that makes those people that are really sensitive kind of crazy, right? Because they're like, What's going on? Am I being gaslit? But what's different is that their microbiome is just more sensitive. And then you kick off this feedback loop where that microbiome gets out of balance.

There's lots of different ways for us to think about dysbiosis. But fundamentally, I think microtoxins, it's fair to think of it as like a poisoning in the same way you can get poisoned by eating a bad mushroom. that whole ecosystem gets out of balance. And then everything else you're getting input-wise is setting off that fire alarm because the set point is just so much higher. And so then you walk into a room with perfumes or you eat a food or something that's fermented that would be normally fine for somebody else, but your system is like already on high alert and it just hits that fire alarm way, way faster.

And so You know, mold is one of those things, but I think... If we start to understand that we have this complex mixture of soil that is setting the fire alarm level, right, we have to tell it to calm down, we have to get rid of the poison, and then we have to just give it space to re-equilibrate. And that sometimes means just walking away from stuff that should be in theory good for us, but maybe isn't the right fit while you're at that high alarm state. So you created thantabiotics, specifically as a postbiotic?

Can you explain why that matters for someone who has mold illness or severe gut reactivity? And what's the difference between giving someone like a live bacteria versus a metabolite that those bacteria would produce? Yeah, so we'll introduce slowly. I work with something that we've named Thena Biotic. Thena is the name of our company. But really, it's fecal transplant. And if you've watched that documentary, Hector Health on Netflix, you might have heard of it. Or if you haven't heard of it, it's kind of what it sounds like.

It's healthy poop. from a person who's healthy and you give it to somebody who needs some support for the microbiome. In the case of hospitals, live microbiome fecal transplants are used for a diarrhea disease called C. diff. Super interesting, super cool, reintroduced to our kind of Western health in the last couple decades, what we did is we took that idea of like a super probiotic in the form of healthy poop, but then we had to sterilize it so that there's no risk of infectious disease and just focused on sort of the nutrients that that soil makes.

The way I like to think about it is if you imagine healthy microbiome is like the whole farm or the whole forest of a healthy person. The soil is where all those nutrients and good stuff come in when you have all the plants that are working well and feeding the soil and adding to it. We just kind of take those small molecules or postbiotics or metabolites, it's all kind of the same word, means the same thing. It's all those nutrients that the healthy microbiome is making, and we put that from healthy poop into a capsule as a supplement to balance that dysbiosis that can happen, whether it's mold or you know, anything that would kill the microbiome or just put you out of whack.

I mean, honestly, one of the things we're really excited about is looking at it for people to help them who, if they can't poop, have a regular bowel movement every day. This nutrient mixture for whatever reason seems to help people have regular bowel movements, which is important if you're trying to detox or get rid of something like a mycotoxin exposure. Makes sense. So for like some of our listeners who may be going through a mold remediation currently, so they're still exposed. Can these probiotics or post-biotics help support their system now while they're still in that environmental place?

Or what would your recommendation be with the get the environment fixed first, start the post-biotics first? What's the kind of the cadence that works best? Yeah, mold is really tough. And I know the people that are listening to this probably know that firsthand. And I would say if you're dealing with mold and you don't feel well, you are your own private detective. And anything you can do to turn down that fire alarm, that makes you feel better in your like lived experience in your body is a tool you want to keep in a toolbox.

And sometimes our product, the Thanabiotic, is really helpful. Sometimes it's not, it's better for after. But whether it's a glutamine or like a bland diet or a low histamine diet or a Anything that gives your gut a break and isn't going to be turning on that fire alarm and or you know tools like glutamine and IGG and even just working with a functional nutritionist or somebody who has some background in understanding dysbiosis, is gonna go a really long way to making that process smoother and you feeling better because we all have to build our own toolbox, unfortunately.

I think that's the other part that makes people just so crazy because they see somebody else do this thing and it helps them on the internet and then they try it and it just doesn't help as much. And it's really because each of our microbiomes are so different and our environmental balance between that immune system is so different. So you kind of have to trial and error everything on your own. And the reason we made this tool is because I just knew that there were people that needed this tool in their toolbox amongst all the other things.

And I was laughing because I was getting ready for this and I have this kind of disgusting tumor drink that I make, you know? And I was like, oh, I'm going into the gut mold podcast drinking my like turmeric super smoothie because you know, something as simple as turmeric could be really helpful. And I wouldn't say there's one choice, but I do encourage people to look at their gut and like support beyond just these really hardcore detox pathways because We all just have to live our lives. And like, again, having that kind of tiered ability to have a toolbox can be really helpful.

making sure you're not having diarrhea, making sure you're not having constipation, making sure that you feel like you're getting nutrients and they're getting absorbed. And then, you know, it takes sometimes a couple years of trial and error, but you can really be a different person in a couple of years.

Thena Biotic, Postbiotics, and Gut Support 18:00

And like you, I mean, I think it's probably a couple of years ago when I saw you last. I think so. Yeah. It's like amazing what can happen with relatively subtle changes in the process of remediation, just to get you out of there and then recover. You've cleaned, repainted, and replaced filters, and still, you're not getting better. Headache, fatigue, brain fog? The doctors can't explain it, but your environment can. At The Mold Pros, we specialize in uncovering what's hidden in plain sight. Our environmental testing looks beyond surface mold, identifying bacteria, volatile organic compounds, and even micro toxins in the air that you breathe.

Then we correlate those results with your clinical data, showing how your space may be affecting your health. Next, we use our patented remediation process to safely remove toxins, restore balance, and prevent them from returning. It's more than just a cleanup. It's a science-based system designed to help your body heal by healing the environment first. If you're ready to breathe freely again, visit TheMoldPros.com and schedule your free consultation. Because wellness doesn't start in the doctor's office, it starts where you live.

So dig into your biochemist background a little bit. So when someone that has mold exposure, right, and they take phenybiotic, how does that, what actually goes on inside the gut? How does it support like that, that gut barrier function or reduce inflammation? How, without getting too super nerdy to where it doesn't go completely over my head. Can you explain to me actually what happens on that biochemical level? So the reality is we don't totally know. These metabolites and microbiome interface has really like, I mean, the basic science has been around for like five to 10 years.

Like nobody even has started looking at these postbiotic metabolites until very, very recently. So mechanistically, what we know they do is they change the environment of the gut itself. So the microbes are all kind of talking to each other. They do this thing called quorum sensing. And mycotoxins can affect quorum sensing too. But they're all kind of like eating your vegetables and sending molecules to each other. And sometimes that communication, again, similar to the analogy of the fire alarm says, you know, we're going to switch from one kind of metabolism to another.

We're going to go into a state of oxidative stress and we're going to shift from making kind of the good healthy metabolites like butyrate and anti-inflammatory ones to making pro-inflammatory metabolites. And so you have this kind of local environment of microbes talking to each other. And we think that the theanabiotic can impact that on a just basic oxidative stress level. There's also this theory, I call it the theory of modern day scurvy. So scurvy is a deficiency of vitamin C that pirates used to get.

And then they discovered that if you brought oranges on the ships, you could not get scurvy. But what actually happened was vitamin C deficiency would cause all these weird neurologic symptoms, muscle skeletal symptoms, neuroinflammatory symptoms that kind of like have some parallels to mold poisoning, which is interesting. And what we think has happened is that people have had such depletion of their microbiome that we're actually missing a bunch of vitamins like vitamin C when our microbiome is out of balance.

And what we think might be happening when I give somebody healthy poop post-biotics is that this is replacing some component of those micronutrients that the person who is not feeling well or is out of balance lost when their microbiome got poisoned by mold or just depleted by antibiotics or life or all the things that kill microbes. So there's a local level, there is like a nutrient level, and then we know that these small molecules bind neuronal cells and they convert immune cells. And so one of the more important immune cells for mold people is called T regulatory cells.

And I think of T regulatory cells as the like, calm down, everything's going to be okay, cells that we lose when we're in a state of inflammation or acute mycotoxin exposure. And so the other thing we see is that people who take the thanabiotic and other stuff that can induce Tregs have more tolerance. So maybe when they go out and they eat that food that wasn't agreeing with them before, they're a little bit more resilient to that than they were before, even though they still have that inflammation from the mold at the house.

So there's kind of a bunch of different levels of stuff, and we're doing a bunch of basic preclinical research and just doing data tracking. And we're kind of piggybacking on work done by other scientists in the space too. Neat, neat. You mentioned mycotoxins, and I think three times if I'm keeping count. Are there, there's lots of mycotoxins that are out there. Is there a particular type of mycotoxin that you see that creates more issues than others, say like ocrotoxin A or aflatoxins or gliotoxins?

Any, any mycotoxin exposure in particular that's worse than others for this? So I don't know a ton about the nuance of different kinds of toxins, but I would say that if you, I think it's important to take a step back and think about mold exposure, not as like you're taking a pill of the same toxin that I'm taking. It's more about what does that molecule do when it hits our lung environment, our gut environment, our nasal microbiome, right? So we have microbes in all these places. And the reaction that you get to these mycotoxins can be different depending on, again, where that set point is for that microbiome.

And certain people are going to have more resilience because they have a bunch of good fungus. We can have good and bad fungus. And if you have a bunch of good fungus and it's going to outcompete and turn down and be able to absorb and excrete, the environmental toxins, you're going to have less impact from that exposure than if you've been doing a bunch of like, I mean, it's tough, right? Because like mouthwash and nasal sprays and antibiotics are all kill. But what happens when you kill off everything that's supposed to be protecting us, you're just more open to exposure of an opportunist thing.

Supporting Recovery During Mold Exposure 25:00

I mean, there's crazy stuff growing in our sinus cavities. And The goal is to figure out. how to bring your body back into resilience. And sometimes that's as simple as like making sure you're not killing too much stuff or you're only killing the stuff that's problematic and making a toxin versus the good balance part of that ecosystem. And a lot of my colleagues, if you were kind of to move away from fungus and look at microbes, are moving away from lots of probiotics and they're actually just focusing on prebiotics and postbiotics.

Because you can then grow back the good bugs you need to protect stuff if you're just feeding it the right precursors and making that ecosystem healthy. So I would say on the mycotoxin level, I have not done kind of the same nerdy deep dive I have to other small molecules, but I do know that each individual person's exposure and reaction is gonna be dependent on the environment that it's hitting and what their baseline is for that and how like sensitive their nervous system is to it. So if you're a kid who had a bunch of trauma, you might be more likely to react to a mold exposure just because your nervous system and all that interplay with your immune system is already kind of at that trigger point, which is crazy to think of, but then you take a step back and you're like, actually, it kind of makes sense.

If you had a bunch of trauma as a kid, your body is ready for something to be assaulting it, and it's on guard, and it's actually a protective mechanism for us. in the context of having mold in your house, the problem is you're protecting by harming and there's collateral damage in that process. You know, it's interesting. We talk about how like antibiotics and a lot of people don't realize that, you know, penicillin is actually a micro toxins that's derived by, I think, two species of penicillium.

And we put that in there and obviously that can certainly have major impacts on what goes on in our gut health, right? It kind of kills out. It is a micro toxin. It really is. And we just don't call it that, right? Right. One of your core principles, I think I saw is honoring place and context and that there's really no universal protocol, which is I think is kind of that's where you're, you know, what you were just speaking about. So as we think about these getting recovery through or kind of get on that road to recovery.

Can you kind of list out maybe steps that someone would take or how would they get more information? What does that look like? Yeah, I, you know, I love naturopathic medicine and I think functional and nutritional support outside the context of just in compliment to your gastroenterologist if you're not feeling well is really important. And I think that because context is so important and we're all so individual, we all just need to learn how to build our own toolbox and listen to our bodies because The reality is that even in the place of, I mean, there's good mold protocols out there and there's good tools, but they're not going to work for everybody in the same system.

And so I think when I'm working with patients with IBD or when I was working with patients with SIBO, it was really about letting people have permission to try things and trial and error and know that there is going to be people who really benefit from colostiramine or binders or charcoal. And there's other people who are going to do that and feel like absolute garbage. Similarly, there's going to be people who take N-acetylcysteine, which is a really cool supplement you can buy that breaks a biofilms and they'll take it and they'll start to feel better.

And other people who are going to take it and they're going to blow up some biofilms that have been building for decades that hold a bunch of toxins and they are going to feel horrible. And so I, I, I do think there's good information out there in the world on the internet. There's naturopaths who I really trust and there's resources. There's also stuff out there that's totally bunk and not helpful. And so everybody has to sort of be their own detective putting that together. But there's a level of getting rid of the toxins, getting rid of the environment.

I mean, that's, I think, why I was so excited to meet you. I can't help people who are living in a toxic environment. whose car is moldy. I mean, I have been in moldy houses enough that I am like pretty sensitive now and I can walk in and like instantly, you know, I'm a mold sniffer, which I'm sure you are and a lot of your people you work with are. But if people don't know that, that like has to be where they start. And meanwhile, you can do all this stuff that's palliative to help you feel supported.

You can sleep well, you can manage your stress, you can take secretory IgG supplements, you can take glutamine, you can do nutrients, you can take poop pills, you can take prebiotics and polyphenols that are going to reduce that inflammation as you rebuild and detoxify.

Biochemical Effects, Mycotoxins, and Immune Regulation 31:00

If you can get into a sauna, great, and that feels good for you. If you can exercise, great, and that feels good to you. But if you get into a sauna or you go exercise and you feel like you want to vomit or you can't get out of bed or whatever, then you got to revisit that later in the toolbox cycle. So I know people want a protocol and I've named a bunch of tools, but it's about kind of putting that toolbox together and trial and airing it based on what you know about your own body and like where you are in place and time, to be honest.

I think that's important and one of the things that I think is really appealing about functional medicine more so is that it isn't just, okay, here's the protocol and this is one size fits all because we're just not that way. Now, having said that, we all kind of want a pathway. So if we're struggling, okay, so what are the steps to get us there? And then, of course, that's going to look different for different people. So having said all that, if someone's listening and they have confirmed mold exposure and they have this severe gut reactivity Can you walk us through maybe what some sort of realistic approach would look like and how the antibiotic could kind of go alongside with some of those other things that you mentioned, like obviously the remediation, getting rid of the environmental stressors or, you know, the binders or dietary changes.

So what in general would that roadmap look like? What's actionable? Yeah. I think our product is a good tool. You could try it. So you would take one or two caps a day with food. And I would take it and see, does your bowel, do your stool look better? Do you feel better when you poop? Are you pooping every day? Is it well-formed? The other place I would pay attention to is, do the foods you're eating feel less reactive? Do you have less histamine response to the foods that you know inherently are healthy or nutrient-rich or good for you, but for whatever reason, the molds made you really sensitive to everything?

And I think if you can answer yes to either of those questions, this is a great tool in your toolbox. And you can use it for a week and take a break. You can use it for three days and take a break, come back to it. Or you could just take one cap a day for like a few months as you're going through this process. I think, you know, it's roughly equivalent. It's 100 milligrams of freeze-dried, sterilized, pooled, you know, post-biotic-derived poop. So it's not very much, but it does seem to really impact people within like a 10 day to 30 day span.

So I would say it's, you know, $200 for a bottle, which is 30 caps, which is like a month's supply. So sit down and be like, okay, cost benefit wise, is it makes sense to try $200 bottle of these and see if it works for me? Or should I spend that money on getting polyphenol powder, organic berry powder, or should I spend it on buying good vegetables to make soups every day? Should I spend it on a gym membership so I can relieve my stress? I think that's where that cost benefit comes in for every person, but we have a money back guarantee.

I think it's worth a try. Mold people are just really, really sensitive to all kinds of stuff. So we feel really confident that this is pretty safe. We don't see really serious or any side effects. But if anybody's going to have a side effect, it's going to be a mold person. So I would have them take one cap and then wait a couple days. If it doesn't feel good and it doesn't help them feel better, it's not the right tool for the toolbox. And that goes for everything else that somebody is going to give you.

There is some places with the supervision of a practitioner where you can have worsening of symptoms before you get better, but that's not what I would look for here unless you're, again, like really under the supervision of a provider who can help you navigate the difference between die-off or like clearance and detox from just actually seeing improvement in your overall symptom health. And I think that's a really complicated, nuanced conversation, but important for mold people because sometimes things are going to make you worse and it's probably just better if you don't do that at that time, you know?

This is, I mean, this is a complex thing, right? And then as you kind of mentioned earlier, it's the learning is really the last 10, 15 years or so, right? It's so much more to be discovered, but you have a money back guarantee. So it's almost like there's no harm, no foul. If someone wanted to learn a little bit more about Thena or improving gut health, do you have resources? What's the best place? Where would they go to learn more? Yeah, because originally I was a provider and then I became the CEO of a supplement company, right?

A lot of our emphasis is on education and we originally just worked with providers for the first five years of this company. So we only started selling direct to consumer last year. Okay. And so we're building a lot of education and people ask us all the time for what's the protocol. And so I've started to do some writing on Substack and our website, thena.com has a bunch of resources and videos. I think there's a lot more to come. And I am like somebody who's suffered with chronic disease my whole life.

So I get, I get it. I get how frustrating that like two steps forward, one step back can be, but We're all learning and there's so many tools.

Recovery Roadmap and Practical Gut Health Tools 37:00

And so I just don't want ever, I just don't ever want somebody to feel like. It's a foregone conclusion and they have no hope. Because there are so, so, so many cool things that have never been studied in a placebo controlled trial because nobody could pay for it. But they've been used for thousands of years in Ayurvedic medicine or thousands of years in Chinese medicine or been a part of indigenous medicine. Like fecal transplant was part of Chinese medicine. They called it yellow soup and they used it for diarrheal disease.

It's been around forever. It is that we didn't rediscover it until, you know, 2008. Wow. Interesting. Yeah. There's just so much to it. Like I said, every day we change. Every day we take our special breakfast cocktail with our probiotics in it. I learned so much. I had no clue that your microbiome and your gut, if you eat a lot of carbs, that's going to have a whole different... And it makes sense. That creates one type of soil. And then if you eat a lot of protein, then that creates something completely different.

There's a lot to learn, but it's impactful. I'm curious, what did you guys change? You kind of alluded to it, but like, did you change your diet or what were the things that you guys modified? Yeah, so we did that. We did change diet. We cut out a lot of the carbs that we had, started going to more proteins and vegetables. I mean, doesn't sound like it's really heady stuff, but also diet makes me every morning, I call it the witch's brew, but it has all kinds of things like a lot of fiber that's added into it.

Oh, turmeric. There we go. So yeah, that's like what my drink is. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, you, you, you mentioned that. Uh, and so she has this thing loaded up. Uh, she ran it through, uh, uh, AI in a city. Oh, this is a therapeutic drink. And she's, so she's, we've had our own little recipe for the last two years that, you know, it has blueberries in it and some other things, but it's really made a big difference. And acid reflux doesn't seem like the end of the world, but it's a thing. Yeah, but it impacts your quality of life.

And when you take a proton pump inhibitor, so you take the medication for acid reflux, it does this thing where it turns off your stomach acid. And what happens is then you don't digest your food because stomach acid is central to digesting food, and you don't absorb nutrients. And that contributes to this long-term scurvy of miscellaneous things that we didn't know we didn't know. And I would say the other cool thing about what you did without even really knowing it is blood sugar is one of the biggest things that turns the fire alarm on.

So when we eat a lot of carbs and don't have fruits and vegetables and proteins, and we're constantly getting that blood sugar spike, we are creating a systemic inflammation that sets us off at like a higher set point to then have responses to inflammatory inputs. And so diet can be as simple as increasing your fruits and vegetables and increasing fiber, but we all have access to continuous blood glucose monitors now. even if we don't have diabetes and everybody needs to go buy one and put it on them because we are told this makes your blood sugar high and this doesn't but the fascinating thing is our microbiomes are totally different and I could eat a tomato and it could make my blood sugar spike to 200 and you could eat the exact same tomato and it does nothing to your blood sugar and so blood sugar is actually microbiome mediated individual responses to food that we have to discover on our own.

And carbs contribute to that, but everybody's different. So it's a really important thing for us to do. And again, one of those pillars, people are like, what stool testing should I do? I'm like, don't do a stool test, go get a continuous blood glucose monitor. And if you really want to know, look at your sleep data and see where your heart rate variability is, because those are better metrics to test what your, you know, what your diet and lifestyle are doing in terms of benefit for you. Did you use a continuous blood glucose monitor?

We have. Yeah, we use Stelo is the one that we use this kind of app. And actually, we just got, we did not use it during the holidays. You know, it's the ostrich approach. We didn't know want to know how bad it was traveling, right. And so we were eating that like we would not normally eat when we were overseas, but they just arrived, I think three or four days ago. And so we'll start that back up here this weekend.

Blood Sugar, Continuous Glucose Monitoring, and Closing Thoughts 42:00

And yeah, it's really doesn't hurt. You forget that it's there for the most part. It's really easy to do. And like not something probably a lot of your mold patients are even thinking about, but maybe is the place to start fundamentally. Yeah. and you know it's like you just there's I do have a favorite influencer so people wanted to like learn stuff about inflammation there's a woman called the glucose goddess and she's on youtube and all kinds of stuff and honestly that is a great way to understand your microbiome and its relative dysbiosis is to understand how food is impacting your blood sugar because You know, we have a really complicated system, but you need to have data to make those cost benefit decisions.

And I cannot fast because I have too much stress and cortisol. And if I fast, my blood sugar spikes when I have a meeting at three o'clock in the afternoon. even if I don't eat food. And I would have never known that if I hadn't used a blood glucose monitor and you may do really well fasting and that's like your superpower. So I do think there's a place for us to understand and have data. It's probably not going to be in stool testing. It's going to be in something like blood glucose monitoring.

I'm so glad you were able to carve out time. I know you're traveling right now and I really appreciate you doing this. You're such a wealth of information and I know this is going to help some folks. So thank you once again. And our listeners, hey, thanks for joining us. I hope you found this episode helpful. If so, please subscribe and leave a review and share with somebody. If you know if they're dealing with some exposure, have some gut health issues, some inflammation or reactivity, just send them a link.

This small action may help some other folks just like it helped me a couple years ago. So if you want to learn a little bit more about what we do at the Mold Pros or you're navigating a remediation situation or want to understand the building side of a health equation, you can find this online or on social media. We'll also put everything we discussed today along with Andrew's links. We'll get those in the show notes for everybody. So you just click on that. But thank you for listening. This is John Bodie.

You've been listening to Mold, Microtoxins and More. And we will see you next time. Thank you. Thanks. You've been listening to Mold, Microtoxins and More with John Bodie. If you're ready to take the next step towards a healthier home, follow the show and visit TheMoldPros.com for your free consultation. Because clean air is the first step to true healing.