Mold Exposed: Michael Rubino on the Hidden Health Hazards in Your Home!

Introduction to Indoor Air Quality 0:00

Getting fresh air coming into the house. Diluting the amount of particles that are inside the house is an important thing. Modern construction has us living in these super tight homes, right, with very little air exchange. So essentially all the stuff that we do in our house, between the microplastics, the VOCs, the chemicals, the off gassing, bringing new stuff in, that off gases, the paints, the flooring, everything right. Plus the mold, the bacteria, the viruses, all of that stuff is just constantly recirculating in the modern home because we don't have enough fresh air exchange from outside, inside.

And so what does that do to our health? Welcome to Doctor Talks, the podcast where every episode leads to a healthier you. Join us as we navigate the world of optimal health, uncovering groundbreaking strategies to conquer chronic disease. In each episode, we'll bring you the latest insights from leading health experts, medical innovators, and wellness warriors. If you are seeking to transform your health journey, or if you are looking for answers to burning questions. You've come to the right place.

Get ready to unlock the secrets of lifelong health and vitality. This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Hello. Welcome back to the Integrative Health Podcast with Doctor Jen. Today we are going to dig into air quality and mold. And I know this is such a hot topic for so many of my listeners. We're going to be talking to Michael Rubino. He is an air quality expert, environmental wellness advocate, founder, speaker, podcaster, author, and father and husband.

He is on a mission to bridge the gap between our homes and our health. Michael put his background in construction and remediation to good use and founded All American Restoration in 2017, which more recently became Home Cleanse, an organization that operates in 50 states. Home funds has become an America's go to source for information, services

Michael Rubino's Background and Mission 2:00

and products to create a healthier living through cleaner indoor air is also the president of Change The Air Foundation, a nonprofit organization giving every person the knowledge, resources, and support to achieve better health by breathing safe indoor air through education, impacting public policy and funding research. So thank you so much for being here, Michael. I'm so excited to dig into what you do and why you got started in this important field. Yes, doctor Jordan, thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for having this amazing platform and and for sharing your wealth of information with people on getting healthier. I think it's very important. Yeah, it's it's very crazy how many homes have mold. And I know that you are a trusted advisor to multiple Hollywood A-list celebrities, athletes, doctors, CEOs and medical experts around the country. So why don't you tell us your why why you got started in this? Yeah. I mean really it's interesting story. I mean, I was pretty much in my mid 20s. I was finished up with college, move back home, was working for my dad.

My dad does fire restoration or did fire restoration at the time and moved back home to the the great city of New York City. This is right around when hurricane Sandy hit the northeast, and so homes were devastated. My dad's company was underwater trying to help as many people as possible. And, you know, here I am and I start integrating myself into the business. There's new marketing genius, right? I went to school, I come back, I think I'm going to help transform my dad's business and make it, you know, more modernized with some of the technology that we have today versus, you know, when he started his business 20 some years ago.

And naturally, I start knocking on doors and as I'm going house to house with my dad, trying to understand what people are going through, I started to notice this pain point that people started to not feel well, and they were attributing this illness to their house. And in my 20s, this was a remarkable thing for me to to ever because I just nobody talks about how the air you breathe impacts your health. And I never would have imagined, like some of the smells people were smelling, you know, aren't just a nuisance, right?

They're actually mvcs, which can cause issues. They're indicative of breathing in particulate and fragments and mold spores and bacterial spores, and also the toxins that that these things can produce. But again, in my naivete at the time, you know, I just started seeing this pattern of people not feeling well, and I took an interest in trying to understand, well, how can this be? And I think to tie this up in a pretty bow, you have to understand something. I think that a lot of these people, they already have their houses remediated by, you know, these big, you know, billion dollar companies.

And so I couldn't understand, couldn't fathom how, you know, people would come in, these houses would get restored. I mean, I'm walking into these homes and I see freshly painted walls. I see no signs of mold. I see no signs of bacterial overgrowth. And so I'm like, how could this be right? And yet I'm looking at lab reports. Levels are off the charts, things are completely abnormal. People are sick. And so I decided, you know, and I'm going to start taking some courses. I start taking some courses on the subject.

I start reading books. I started following the very small community of doctors that were talking about mold as a health hazard back in the day. You know, they're early 20 tens when I'm looking at it wasn't as big of a community as is today. And so I just started diving in headfirst. And what I found was pretty remarkable. And as I started to zoom out, because, you know, mold is such a hot, contentious topic just because there's so much there's so many types of molds, so many toxins. Some don't produce toxins, some do. Right?

So it's a the subject gets convoluted. But as I started to to just take myself out of this, I realize, you know, we take 20,000 breaths per day. We consume enough air to fill up a normal sized swimming pool every single day. And yet when you're sick and you go to a doctor, most doctors, they don't ask you, well, are you drinking a lot of water? What sort of food are you eating? How's the air that you're breathing? And I look at those as three foundational questions that need to be asked in relation to human health.

Because if we're not breathing clean air and we're not drinking clean water and we're not eating clean food, well, we're not actually providing the right fundamentals of the body needs to thrive. And I just found it just remarkable. As I zoomed out, I said, you know, we've got a pretty big ideological transformation that's needed, I think, to to actually restore the health that we have clearly evaded, because, you know, if you look at where we're at, you know, we've never been sicker than we are today.

And and this is something that I think is very foundational. Yes. I love your passion, and I love that you went out and you asked people that we're going through this whenever there's a hurricane.

How Common Mold Is in Homes 7:00

I, I'm just like, oh my gosh, the mold. I hope they're ripping out the drywall. And I hear from a lot of patients, they new homes aren't even built, you know. Well, sometimes my one friend, they were devastated her family by mold. And she said that the the air conditioning duct just ended into a wall, like it wasn't vented properly. And it created all this mold. So it's very common, but we don't think it is. And when you get your home inspected, they don't. They're not looking for mold. They're not mold inspectors.

So how common is this to experience mold in a home are too common. So the the largest survey we've ever done was really this joint study by the EPA and, and HUD. And they did this American Healthy Home Survey. And essentially what they had found is that 50% of the homes had visible signs of water damage. So I find that remarkable statistic already. But I just want to bring up this, this point of visible, you know, a lot of people know me as the guy who thinks Gwyneth Paltrow homes, right in pop culture and I just want to let you guys know that when I went into her home, there wasn't a visible sign of anything.

I mean, visibly, that house was perfect, pristine. It's it was in magazines. Okay. I mean, this is so we have this ideology that, you know, in order for a house to make a sick, we've got to see, like, mushrooms growing out of the walls and like, you know, it needs to be some sort of visible representation. And that's not true. Unfortunately, most of the time, actually, this stuff is hidden. It's behind walls. It's in Hvac systems. It's up in attics or crawl spaces in places that, you know, if you think about it, it makes sense where they would be located.

But you don't really you're not looking for it. Right. And so it's often unseen. And so if we know that 50% of homes had visible water damage, my mind goes to, well, what about all the homes that don't have any signs but still have problems, just like when it's house, right. And I think those those homes are the ones that I'm most concerned about because there's no alarm bells. There's no red flags. And people get into these spaces and they just get sicker and sicker and sicker and have no idea why.

And again, because we're not asking the right questions, right? We're not getting the right answers. And so I think that statistics probably a lot higher than 50%. But we have to go with what we have. Right. And so we say 50% of homes have a have a water damage problem. That means, you know, if you live on a block and you're one of 20 homes. Yeah, half of your neighbors have issues. Right. And so I think that's pretty remarkable statistic that tells us this isn't just like a rare problem. We've we're dealing with an epidemic on our hands.

Absolutely. And the crazy thing is, like you said, visible signs of mold. You can look at that. You know, if you look up at a ceiling, if there's a ring in the ceiling, if you look at a basement, if you can tell there's water stains on the walls. So those are visible signs. But a lot of the times we don't see it. What are some warning signs? So I tell patients that if it smells musty that's VOCs. That's mold VOCs that are put off. What are some other things that are easy clues. And then we'll get into the harder stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, you want to look at signs of water damage. And sometimes they're very subtle. Right. And so I think water obviously is the big clue that there's a problem. Because if we're going to have a microbial imbalance in our homes, which unfortunately a lot of our homes do have these, these issues, they have an overgrowth of microbes in our homes that are affecting the air quality and affecting the human bodies by breathing in these particulates and these toxins, we actually have to start and take ourselves again, zooming out and saying, all right, well, what causes this?

Well, too much humidity, too much water coming into the building. These are the types of things that we want to look for. And so, you know, getting a $20 hydrometer from Amazon with literally just getting little humidity meters, they're like, you know, yay, big. You can get a couple of those and spread them across the house just to understand the humidity readings across your home. I think that's really important. When you get above 60% relative humidity, you're in that danger zone where mold can start to grow, where bacteria can start to grow.

And so I think you always want to be able to understand at a quick glance what's my humidity rating.

Warning Signs and Hidden Mold Sources 11:30

And can I can I have that under control. And I think that's where dehumidifiers come into play. Or if you live in a dry climate, you know you might use humidifiers. You just don't add too much humidity, right. And I think that's the danger there. From there you want to look at just your roof leaks, right? Roof roofs do leak windows and doors they leak. You want a look at any sort of migration from from outside. Like I've literally seen sprinklers have 360 heads, meaning they pop out of the ground and they're spraying water in a 360 circle.

Well, guess what's on the other side of that? 360 your house. Right. So that sprinklers just blasting your house while it's watering the lawn, you know, changing those 360 heads to 180 heads so that they only hit the lawn and not the house? Probably a good measure, because eventually water is going to follow the path of least resistance, the path of least resistance inside your house. That's where it's going inside your house. And when it gets inside your house, you're going to have problems. Right?

And so I think from that standpoint, you want to look at all right, am I sprinklers hitting the house. Are they gutters taking water away from the house. Right. Because any water seepage coming in at the foundation level is going to seep inside the house, and it's going to create problems down by your baseboards. So you could also look on the inside at your baseboards. Do I see any cracking or swelling at the baseboards that are indicative of water coming in at the ground level? I'm looking around your doors and windows.

Do I see any signs of water intrusion around doors and windows? So that's another weak spot, right? Checking your attic space. Do I see any signs of water intrusion in the attic? Can be really helpful. And then, of course, you know, we have bathrooms, kitchens where there's plumbing devices. Those are other hot spots to look for. I always check underneath sink cabinets. Do I have any water stains and drips from sinks? Even the most subtle things. Sometimes it's just the tip of the iceberg. I can't tell you how many times people had small leaks underneath their bathroom sink. They didn't think anything of it.

It dried right. They wiped it up. There's a stain there. It's not a big deal. And lo and behold, through testing, we actually realize is a massive problem there. And by pulling the vanity away, you see all this mold all over the back of the vanity, all over the underneath the very the back of the drywall in the wall cabinet. It's a lot of mold. I mean, 250,000 spores can fit on the head of a pin. And so when you start seeing like how much mold is actually proliferating in the area, and then you factored into other considerations such as air flows and air patterns, well, you might have negative pressure in your bedroom where that bathroom air is actually pushing in to your bedroom, and you're inhaling that stuff 24 over seven as you're sleeping.

Right. And so these are all things you want to take into consideration so that you're improving the quality of air that you're breathing. Right. And so I think these warning signs can kind of tell you where to look and give you some indication that there's something worth checking out there. And then testing can help us validate, you know, what's there, how much is there and how big of a deal is this? And do we need to to to proactively remove it. Because I think that's that's part of it. Part of the issue is, you know, you don't want to start cutting your house open like Swiss cheese.

You want to really be definitive about what am I doing and what's the net result of that. Absolutely. And some of my patients with the sickest health concerns going on, you know, autoimmunity, kidney, brain stuff. And as we've traced it back to mold, now, sometimes we trace it back to a moldy childhood home or they lived in dorms, you know, or, gosh, the worse is our military, their housing. But sometimes they're living in it still. And sometimes, like I said, they're new build, sometimes they're older builds.

But finding it is hard and then testing where where in their house or if it is their current house, because with mold you need to remove them from the mold first. They need to get out of that moldy environment or they will not heal well. It's very frustrating. So how if someone's listening out there, they're like, I think there might be hidden mold right where I don't have visible symptoms, so I don't know where to start. And this has happened with patients before where they they were doing construction remodeling on their home and they found mold.

She just she had a mold inspector come in and there's there's slimmer pickings in different areas as you know. And he missed under under the window of their master bedroom. And that's where it usually is, like the master bedroom or closet or bathroom. And you're just breathing all these in while you're sleeping, while you're supposed to be healing. So it's very frustrating. So what are some good ways to test the air quality in homes? Yeah, that's a really great question. I mean, you know, with the world of AI and ChatGPT, like there's no ChatGPT for this, right?

Like every unfortunately we have to there's no perfect process. There's no perfect test. We have to kind of rely on experts to mechanically do an inspection of our home and figure out what's going on. And that's actually one of the reasons why I developed this product called the dust test. And what the dust test does is it collects dust across your house. You know, it's a kit that you can order in the mail. It comes in a vacuum sealed package. You collect dust across your house. That test goes back to the lab.

And in that lab, we're using PCR technology to identify what's actually in your dust. Now, the reason why we're testing dust is because if you've got a problem in an Hvac or behind a wall or behind a ceiling, those microbes are going to migrate their way into the living environment. You know, people often say like mold can't get get to you behind a wall, so you don't need to open up the wall. And it's like it couldn't be further from the truth, right? I mean, we live in mechanical buildings. I mean, every time you open a door or a window, you are literally changing the building pressure of the entire house every time your Hvac system turns on, every time you walk through a space, you are changing the building pressure throughout the entire house.

Right? And that's because you're you're you're the force of opening doors and windows and air pressure coming in from outside, the Hvac machine turning on, I mean, everything the exhaust fan, you take a shower and put the vacuum exhaust fan like you are constantly changing pressures across your house. And with that being said, you're constantly pulling stuff from interstitial cavities across your house into the living environment. And so those hidden microbes become aerosolized inside your breathing zone.

Testing Air Quality and Dust Samples 18:00

And then enter your body with every breath that you take. As a matter of fact, if you have mold or bacteria in your house, if we all have some level of that right, we're worried about the overgrowth of that. If we have an overgrowth of that, guess what? All those microbes are going to become part of our dust. And if you've ever sat near a window on a sunny day, you know exactly what I'm telling you. When I tell you that your dust is everywhere. You are breathing that stuff in, and a lot of these microbes that become attached to the dust particles, right?

They can settle in our mucous membranes, right? They can enter our body where we're not only worried about the inhalational effect, but also the the ingestion effect, because once you inhale it, these particles are so small that you basically ingest them afterwards. Right? You also have the dermal exposure, right? Our skin, our largest organ in these things are very small. Right. They're they're going to absorb into our skin. So we have, you know, different modes of, of exposure. Right. And these roots of exposure are pretty severe, especially when we have a massive problem inside our homes.

And we have no idea that this problem exists. And I think that's the real danger. And so collecting dust tells you what's going on and what you're being exposed to really, regardless if you could see the problem or not. And that's where it gets really interesting, because then you can start to look at, okay, well, I've got a few hydrophilic mold species, meaning those species require a lot of water to grow. So I need to figure out what is leaking. This isn't this isn't just like I've got a little, you know, humidity spike in the summertime.

This is I've got an I water event that I got to uncover. And so I always tell people start there. And I wanted to create this product to help empower people to start on the right foot so that when they, you know, then because the next investment you're going to make is I want to develop a team of an inspector in a room there who are going to help me kind of figure this out and put my my air quality back on track. Well, to do that, having a good starting point of what you're looking for is pretty helpful because a lot of people, they make that mistake of calling the inspector and they come in and do a couple air samples.

The limitations of air samples are pretty severe as a screening tool. And so a lot of times you these air samples look good when the house is actually a problem. And the reason they look good when the house is a problem is because the technology is pretty limited in so fact that, you know, you might remember during Covid times, we were told to stay about six feet apart from one another, right? That's because particles like viruses, bacteria, mold, they're very, very light. They actually take a long time to travel.

And so the further you are away, obviously the velocity of coughing or sneezing changes things a bit. But you know, the further you are away from the problem, the more it doesn't look like there's a problem. Right? And so think about it from that perspective. I mean, most people that have been through a mold inspection, they might remember somebody coming over and they stick that machine right in the center of the room or the center of the room is the furthest possible point from any problem. Why is that?

Because a problem is either going to be on an interior wall where a plumbing fixtures running through that wall, right? Or on an exterior wall, we have a roof leak, a door or a window. Right. And so the center of the room, I mean, how often do you look up at the center of the room and just raining down from you at the center of the room? I mean, never, right? So that's the furthest possible point away from any potential problem. But yet the ideology from the inspector and the technology as it's been sold to inspectors is that, you know, you just this is what you do.

You take a sample in the center of the room that gives you an idea of what what you're breathing. I mean, as as funny because as I'm sitting here in this room, I'm not in the center of the room. Yeah, I'm in the corner of the room, actually. And so, you know what? When am I ever in spending all day in the center of the room being exposed? I'm there. Right. And so you don't have your bed or your bed in the middle of your bedroom? I don't it's just it's really weird, but I don't write and so I don't think but I think most people don't.

I think most people's exposure point in the center of the room is just it's just not a practical approach, but yet and and it gives us a false sense of security. So my son's preschool, where he had severe mold exposure after a flood in their basement, they refused to acknowledge the fact that the church has mold. And they're like, well, we'll do some. We'll have an inspector come in. And they did air samples and I'm like, no, no, they did worse. They did the, the plate samples. And and I'm like, this is false reassurance.

You can smell the mold in the must when you walk in. It hits you like a wave. So it's it's almost like these tests that inspectors that aren't like really mold literate. They, it's, it's a, it's detrimental because it's giving this false assurance that everything is okay. And it's really frustrating to me because this will happen mainly with patients where we know the mold exposure is at a workplace, and that's really frustrating. But I have my patients test their homes with the dust tests, so do you have any tips on where and how to collect the samples to get the best, you know, assurance of what's going on?

Yeah, I usually like to collect it on top of baseboards, on top of door moldings, on top of doors, on top of shelves. You know, I try to stay from the floor as much as possible and mainly just because, you know, you get these arguments. Oh, it could it came in off the shoe or you know, what have you. And so yeah, I think staying away from the floor, which obviously is going to be the most contaminate surface in your environment and you know, going going more towards, you know, the baseboard moldings, right.

And baseboard moldings coincidentally also don't get cleaned well enough. They're usually ignored pretty well. And then just like shelves and ledges and countertops and things, you know, places where dust settles, right. And the idea is to just get an average, like collect dust from a bunch of different places. We're not we're not looking at, you know, we don't want to use the technology in a way that it's not intended, like we should be using air tests to target where we think the problems are.

And using dust tests to answer that question as a screening tool is there a problem? And we should stop using hair tests as a screening tool because it's the worst screening tool possible, you know, and and go from there. I mean, the only thing worse than using an error test would probably be to, you know, do a swab test of one area and say, okay, well that's that, that's the that's the entire house. Right. And so I think if we're collecting dust from across the house, that gives us a much better average and a much better screening capability than any other testing technology.

But the limitations of that is it's not going to tell you exactly where the problem is. Right. And so why I love this tool, especially if you're if you're doing like mycotoxins testing, organic acid testing. Right. You could actually correlate some of the biomarkers in your body with some of the molds in your home or at your workplace or at your church, right. And say, okay, look, this mold produces this toxin that I'm having trouble with. And, you know, as as people, we're all a little different, right?

Like, I might have an issue detoxing aflatoxin where you might have an issue detoxing oak or toxin. Right. And so we're going to react a little differently to even the same places, even though those places might have a little bit of mold growth in them. And so, you know, I always try to look at this from this holistic approach, but more of a personalized approach where people because I'm saying, look, yeah, I remember vividly, you know, when clients are like, I've got this issue, it's Citron and I've got this issue with oak or toxin.

And I'm like, okay, good. Let's look at the look. Let's look at the Aspergillus species that produce those toxins, those Olympics. Let's make sure that your house is as healthy as can be with those specific molds that you're having trouble with. So we can really be targeted. It's not to say that, you know, molds, they they both they all typically fight for the same real estate. So we're we're going to obviously try to get rid of as much mold as possible in this endeavor. But when we can take this personalized approach, it's like, hey, why don't we why don't we make some investment?

Cost-Effective Ways to Improve Home Air 26:00

And that first we know that there's a couple other molds here and we know where they are. Let's start there. Let's see how you're doing and let's see if you need, you know, if you need to go the extra mile. And depending on the person, some people are really sensitive and they will need to go the extra mile and some people aren't. And, you know, I want to help people make an impact with the money that they have and not go crazy and go bankrupt trying to, you know, make the house perfect because the reality of it is the world in which we live in perfect is not going to exist, right?

You have mold. That's part of our ecosystem. It's going to come in from outside, right? You're gonna you're going to go to a grocery store, and that grocery store is probably not going to be the best environment, but you need to be able to go there and tolerate it and live a normal life. Right. And so, you know, it's going to be a balance of how do I make my home, my sanctuary, my place of healing? And then also how do I also empower myself and with the information that I need, where I can go places and not be fearful that I'm going to all of a sudden bring back all these issues at home, because that's that's really the key, right?

It's like I want sustainability. And so part of my job isn't just, you know, let's put together a plan, but like, let's put together a plan for just life. Because if we've got good air filtration in our house, if we've got good air purification in our house, right, if we're kind of building this foundation of clean air, clean water and clean food, well then guess what you can go to. The more the the moldy church and come back, you know, and your exposure is going to be a lot less. And when you bring that exposure with you, you've got, you know, your three laundry additives, you're cleaning your clothes, you've got air purifiers are going to help pick this stuff up.

You're protecting your Hvac system so that, you know, this stuff's not going to cross contaminate and start to breed in your Hvac system. Right. And so I'm looking at this from a holistic approach. How do we live on planet Earth. Right. Without feeling like we're powerless? Because, you know, it's it's part of the issue is like you need to be able to take those steps outside of the work that we're doing, so that you have the confidence that you're in control. And I think so with social media and everything we see on a daily basis, that's so difficult sometimes.

And so we want to make sure that you're empowered and not not feel and powerless. Yeah. That's absolutely I love how you said it's not going to be perfect because I you know what I've said to patients, could we have a 100% mold free home? Probably not. Because you're going to have some plants and things happen. But also we need to be intelligent about it and we need to make sure our home is not putting off tons of mold spores and, you know, VOCs in the my season and all this stuff that can actually do damage.

And what happens when our body gets overburdened, when there's too much, that's when we have symptoms. Our body can't detox because our body can detox mold, but it's when it gets overboard and is the problem. So what are some cost effective strategies that we can use to keep our home air healthy? Yeah. So I think there's there's many different things that we can do cost effective wise. Right. Like first thing that everyone should be doing right now after listening step is to figure out what sort of Hvac filtration you have.

A lot of people unfortunately have very little Hvac filtration. I can't tell you how many families houses I go into. And it's like they got like the cheapest filter possible. Like, I'm talking about stuff that doesn't even collect dust. Like it. Basically, it might as well just not even be there. Wait, you're supposed to change filters in your home? I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But my husband just changed our. So we just moved into a new home and they were disgusting. Like they were disgusting.

So some people might not even know that you're supposed to change your air filters for your Hvac. People may not even know that. I'm glad you're bringing this up because yes, not only do you need to have good filters, but you need to maintain them, right? And so depending on the filter you have, you know, depending on how long you often you have to change them. But I would say most of the store bought ones, you have to change every three months at at a minimum if they get clogged up pretty good, pretty quickly, you might actually need to change them every two months. Right?

So it's going to depend on just how dirty these filters are. You are going to want to, every once in a while, open up that Hvac filter slot and pull it out and take a look at it. But it regardless, if you've got a Merv eight filter, you can easily upgrade to a Merv 13 filter, right? So I have a Merv 16 filter on my Hvac unit. What is that? What does that mean? Sorry if I don't know. I'm sure other people don't know. Yes. So the Merv rating is an efficiency rating for the filter. I mean, just to get bring it down for you.

The higher the efficiency rating, the smaller the particle it can filter out. And that's so the goal is for like N95 masks and yeah yeah it's so similar. Okay. Well because maybe my husband is keeping track of this but I'm going to double check. So this is why we're here, right? Because you know listen, I'm the husband in my relationship and you know, I have to do a great job at educating myself and all the things about the home and making sure I'm on top of things. But I'm a human being. I forget stuff sometimes, too. Right.

And so I think it's really important that we have these, these honest and transparent conversations with one another because you know what? Air quality gets often overlooked. And I think it's something that we can easily do from a cost effective point to take the first steps. And just like every other biohacking thing out there, right, you can you can take some deeper steps. It's a bigger step. So you can start crawling. Then you can start running. Right. So I want everybody to upgrade the filter.

Like I said, the higher the Merv rating, the smaller the particle to remove. You want to know what filter I have in my house. You can go to home cleanse.com. You can go look at the product called the Intel or Super V. It's a whole house filled filtration system. It's awesome right? That's what I have in my house. You don't want to install something on your device. Just figure out what Merv rating you have and what Merv rating can you get up to and just make that upgrade. That's something easily you can do right now.

The second easiest thing you can do is depending on where you are in the country and you know what the temperature is right now open doors and windows more often. I think getting fresh air coming into the house, diluting the amount of particles that are inside the house, is an important thing. Modern construction has us living in these super tight homes, right, with very little air exchange. So essentially all the stuff that we do in our house between the micro-plastics, the VOCs, the chemicals, the off gassing, bringing new stuff in, that off gases, the paints, the flooring, everything, right.

Plus the mold, the bacteria, the viruses, all of that stuff is just constantly recirculating in the modern home because we don't have enough fresh air exchange from outside, inside. And so what does that do to our health? I'll tell you what. It's not good. Right? Because now we're kind of you ever been in the car and you have that little like, recycling button, you know, for the air conditioning you hit that when it's like, smelly outside. Well, the downside of is if it's smelly inside, right. You're recycling that smell because you're all you're doing is recycling the air.

You're not bringing any fresh air in. Well, think about that from your house perspective. The motor home. That's what we have. We have these that that button is pushed on with no way to turn it off. So you can look at, you know, opening doors and windows more frequently as a really cost effective way to exchange outside air with inside air and dilute the amount of particles you're breathing it. The third thing that you can do is you can switch to from chemical cleaning products. I imagine if you listen to this podcast, you probably already done this, but we're going to highlight it anyway, because if you've been on the fence, I'm going to push you over the fence here, those chemical cleaning products off gas chemicals that you're breathing in.

So it's like you're trying to clean and you associate this clean smell with this chemical, but it's not clean. That's just that. That's an association you've made in your brain. Does not mean that is clean. And actually that smell is VOCs that you are inhaling that's entering your body that your body has now fight to remove. Because guess what? Your your body was not made on this planet. Inhale bleach all day. Okay. So I had to break that to you. But we got to get rid of these chemicals. There's no reason for them because we have great botanical alternatives that are honestly amazing at doing the exact same things and are healthier and safer for you to breathe in if you've got pets or kids.

Same thing, right? It's not just safer and healthier for you, it's safer and healthier for your loved ones or your furry loved ones and everyone else in between. The other thing that we can do is stop using things like Glade plug ins and all these toxic candles and stuff. Again, these are off putting particles and chemicals that you're breathing in, as it might smell beautiful, but it's it's not not a good thing. And honestly, again, there's essential oils and safer alternatives of getting a nice smell, you know, for a fragrance without, you know, having the, the added chemicals.

So these are things that you can do pretty simply and clean more often. Because if you've learned anything from the dust test, these microbes settle in our dust. So the more dust we allow accumulate in our environment, and the less the less time we spend removing these contaminants from our environment, the more that they're going to be entering our breathing zone and entering our body. Your lungs are essentially your body's air filter, right? Your and so, you know, the better you can do to kind of reduce the amount of particles that your lungs have to deal with the better.

And anything smaller than ten microns, according to the American Lung Association, poses the greatest human health risk. Right. So mold viruses, bacteria. Yeah. These are among a few of those things that are smaller than ten microns. And the reason being is because they bypass your self defense mechanisms. They bypass your lungs and they enter your bloodstream. Right. So that's where inhalation becomes an issue and then ingestion after that. And so I think it's time we wake up and start paying attention to these things, not to be fearful of them. Right.

We're not going to build bubbles around our houses, but to empower us to make right the right decisions and the right investments that our homes are truly healthy. I love that my goal, and I think that we we do live in a really toxic environment. And I also think it's a blessing that we know that mold can affect our health. There's more research going on with human data. We have all the animal data. That mold is bad and mycotoxins and just keeping our home clean and the first step might be to do a dust test.

So just consider, especially if you have mystery illnesses. You've checked all the boxes, don't know what's going on. What is very common.

Resources, Advocacy, and Closing Remarks 36:30

And it's very emotionally hard because it's where you live, it's personal, it's in your home, but you've got to deal with it. So thank you so much for giving all those practical tips. How can our audience find out more about you home cleanse the dust test in your podcast and book. Yeah, so probably the easiest thing to do would just be go to the Michael rubino.com. And there you'll kind of find pretty much everything that I'm involved in. I'm on a personal mission to to to make our, our lives healthier and easier and to make sure that people have the right resources to make their homes healthy.

And so we've got home cleanse, right. If if you're in need of that service, that's a service offering. They also have great products on there too to keep you healthy. So check that out. And from from there you'll also find the dust test but also change the air Foundation. So I have a 500 and C3 nonprofit called Change the Earth Foundation. I quickly realized that I couldn't solve this problem one house at a time without looking at the big picture. And so it was another zoom out moment for me. And Change Air Foundation exists to provide everybody with free educational resources.

If you go on that website, you click start Here. You've got tons of free information about how to get started about this. Just to arm yourself, almost almost like a become a mini expert really quickly. But from there, after the star resources, one of the things that we're doing is we're providing research, right? We've got a research project right now. We actually two research projects we've done recently. One was the policy, the policy brief to give to our legislative communities to understand what the impacts that indoor air quality has on human health, and the out and the burden that it has on our economics society.

And then we also have the the project we're doing with Doctor Neil Nathan and Doctor Jill Christa, which is a it's called the mold IQ project. Really cool project. We're trying to get really diagnostic information down to a science where it can be diagnosed better because it's often misdiagnosed, I'm sure, as you seen Doctor Jen. And then last but not least, policy reform. We already change laws in Illinois. Our goal is to change the laws in all 50 states. We have I but you know, the number changes daily.

But we've really proposed bill changes in 22 states so far. And so, you know, we're ambitious. We're trying to we're trying to help change laws to help save lives. And again, this is zooming out, not from a house by house perspective. So if you at all are at all interested in the foundation and what we're trying to do to change this on a large scale and you want to be part of that change, please check out Change the Air foundation.org as well. Wow. My goal that is that's so big. We really need reform.

We really need to open people's eyes to this problem. So thank you for all your passion and hard work that you're putting in. And thank you so much for having this, having me and having this platform to to share this amazing knowledge. Yes. Thank you. Have a have a great day. You too. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health. Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website w WW dot Doctor Talks on stay connected, stay healthy and join us next time on Doctor Talks.

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