How Mold Prevents Your Nervous System From Relaxing

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

Thanks for having me. Nice to see you again.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Indeed. I always enjoy talking with you. A wealth of information and in particular, today’s topic, we’re talking how mold prevents your nervous system from relaxing. And how this gets couched in a Bioenergetics Summit is without our nervous system functioning well, we’re not able to have our receptors open or tuned in to receive all of the information that these glorious things we call bodies are able to receive and create what I like to say, the more beautiful world our hearts know and desire. So I wanted to bring you on to the summit and really dive, deep dive into this topic of how mold prevents our nervous system from relaxing.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

Yeah, this is a huge problem. And really, I think the manifestation as a whole is mast cell activation. So mast cells are a type of white blood cell that are full of histamine and tryptase and many other mediators that can act as inflammatory cytokines. And I know with your work on neurodegeneration and other brain problems, we talk a lot about inflammatory cytokines, like on organic acids, for example, we can measure quinolinic acid. And when you see this elevated, you know there’s a problem with the brain, with brain inflammation. The question is, what is driving this? And I had no clue about mold until I got sick. My wife and I, and our children, we built a brand new home. Moved into the home, and I started having blood pressure problems, and then dizziness, and then heart palpitations, and then fatigue. I could barely walk to the mailbox and back without being out of breath. I thought, okay, something is severely wrong. And I texted a friend of mine, Dr. Jack Wolfson who calls himself The Paleo Cardiologist. 

And I texted him ’cause it was the heart, right? And so I was freaking out. I told him what was happening, and Jack texts back one word in all caps, MOLD. And I thought, there’s no freaking way. Brand new house, like how is this possible? Well, sure enough, in the winter, I had planted some trees, and I connected a hose to the house, and I left that hose on, and the water froze in the hose and busted the pipe, we had standing water in the crawl space. Ductwork was down there. I’m breathing in mold toxin. And sure enough, I got sick. Now, one question you probed me on before we hit record was you said, “Well Evan, how do we dive into this? Because mold’s everywhere and people are gonna say this and why me, and why am I sick and why others aren’t?” And so the answer is, I don’t know if it’s fully discovered yet why. I know we have some information, so I’ll tell you why I’ve seen and why I think more people are sick now than ever from mold toxicity. Number one, we’re inside all the time. Look at your grandparents, they were not inside nearly as much as you. They were probably on the front porch swing during the summer because the air conditioning wasn’t invented, and you had to be outside where you were breathing fresh air. And the solution to pollution is dilution. 

You look back at the Amish community, which were very big in Kentucky, and those guys are outside 24/7. And many of them don’t even have indoor plumbing, they don’t have electricity. So they’re outside getting fresh air, and you don’t see the level of chronic disease and obesity in the Amish community that you see in your typical Americans. And you typically don’t see the neurodegenerative diseases as well in the Amish community. I mean, you’re not seeing these guys that are 70 and they have dementia. You see a lot of older generation. I visited with Amish who’ve built cabins. These guys are in their 80s on top of a roof 30 feet up, and they’re still banging hammers like nothing. So obviously diet has an impact on this too. If you have issues with the gut, specifically, there’s a pathway called glucuronidation. And this is very important for your work on the brain too because the glucuronidation pathway is how we can conjugate toxins. This is essentially wrapping up toxins in a straight jacket and then getting them out of the body. So this could be through urine. This could be through bile. This could be through feces, so stool. 

When you’re pooping, you’re pooping out toxins. The problem is when you have a diet that let’s say it’s high in refined carbs, sugar, maybe your eating food that has antibiotics or hormones, or you’ve taken antibiotics for routine dental procedures. And now all of a sudden you have dysbiosis in the gut. This was my bread and butter for years before I figured out mold. But if you’ve got bacterial overgrowth in the gut, what’ll happen is that’ll elevate this enzyme called beta glucuronidase. And you can quantify this. Data is key. So you can measure this via stool testing. We use a test that’s a DNA stool sample at home. And if you see elevated beta glucuronidase, we know that you’re now recirculating toxins. And so what I’m telling you and the listeners, all of your toxin issues can be made worse, which can then affect the brain and neurodegeneration that can all happen due to the gut. So when we’re thinking about the brain, you don’t wanna ignore the gut because I did, and when I looked at my stool, I had high beta glucuronidase. So when you treat SIBO, you fix that, and then the brain works better because you’re not recirculating toxins. 

So back to the molting real quick, people are inside more, buildings are tighter, water leaks are common, high humidity is common. Up in the Pacific Northwest, you got tons of humidity, tons of rain. Same in the South and the Southeast, you got tons of moisture. If your house is 70% humidity all the time, you don’t have to have a water leak to start growing mold in your ductwork. And if you have mold in your ductwork, mold farts. It can’t bite you, and it can’t bite other molds. So to stake out its territory, meaning it wants to eat that wet paper backing on your drywall, it has to excrete mycotoxins, and these are basically mold farts. And so for example, aspergillus is a mold, and what it produces is called ochratoxin. And we know that ochratoxin massively damages the cerebellum. I don’t know how much you’ve looked into this, but if you just look up in PubMed, Aspergillus Cerebellum, we know the ochratoxin made by that directly impacts the cerebellum, which is probably why I struggled with dizziness so bad was the damage to my cerebellum. It also damages the kidneys. 

And if you look into the literature, you’ll also find an impact on neurotransmitters. So if you just put in like, aspergillus or ochratoxin, there’s another one called zearalenone, spelled with the Z like zebra, that’s made by fusarium mold, which also grows in water damage buildings, which are epidemic by the way, water damage buildings are epidemic. So these mycotoxins directly impact the brain and they’ll also affect neurotransmitters. So if you look up ochratoxin dopamine, you’ll find the studies on this where dopamine levels are significantly lower in people that have ochratoxin. And I’ve seen this on paper, this is not just in the clinical research. I’ve seen this by looking at a thousand plus Organic Acids Test in people that have mold toxin. We’re always gonna see lower levels of homovanillic acid on the OAT test, this confirms low dopamine. And you can come in and a lot of brain people like you’ve got Dr. Amen, the psychiatrist, who’s doing a great job by promoting amino acids and helping with brain chemistry, but he’s not necessarily bringing up the root cause. So he’ll sell you a amino acid brain supplement that has tyrosine or phenylalanine, or 5-HTP. Some of these amino acid precursors for things like dopamine and serotonin to help with these neuro symptoms. 

But the problem is you can take all the tyrosine in the world and you’re never gonna get rid of the mold toxin that’s driving that low brain chemistry in the first place. And so I encourage people when you’re working on yourself, or if you’re working with a practitioner, it’s okay to do this natural care. So instead of Adderall, you take tyrosine, that’s great. But the question is, why is your dopamine so low that you need tyrosine in the first place? It could go all the way back to mold exposure that you had as a kid, when you grew up in your grandmother’s moldy basement, like I did, or you went to school or a dorm in college that was moldy, or even the placental transfer, we know that mycotoxins go across the placenta and mycotoxins are also transmitted through breast milk. And so breastfeeding is amazing. It’s the best thing you could do for your child. But unfortunately through that breast milk, you could be passing numerous amounts of heavy metals, pesticides, chemicals, and mycotoxins. 

And so for me, every woman out there suffering with fertility problems, which I’ve seen a ton, all of those women need to be looking at mold and considering this as a root cause of the impact on your fertility. Last thing, then I’ll pause, I know I’m saying a lot. The zearalenone that I brought up that mycotoxin from fusarium mold. Zearalenone is far more estrogen than soy. So when people talk about diets and nutrition strategies, and don’t eat this and eat that, zearalenone has a much bigger impact on estrogen. So women that are having these issues with the brain, brain fog, fatigue, but they also have PMS and irritability, and breast tenderness. You gotta look into this mold toxin because if that’s there, I don’t care how clean your diet is, you’re gonna have these issues with hormones and the bioidentical hormone doctors not gonna fix it. They can give you all the progesterone and pregnenolone and DHA they want, but if you’re not fixing zearalenone you’ve missed the boat.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah. So you just unpacked a ton of information there. So let’s go back to the metal level and talk about it because some folks might think, “well, I don’t have a mold issue.” And you’re saying over 50% of buildings in the United States have some mold toxicity that there is exposures happening, right? We know in certain areas of the country with higher humidity, there’s definitely more chances of you getting exposed to mold. How would somebody know, you know, in general, there’s a whole list of symptoms that you went through for different conditions, but on, you know, what are some common symptoms that you found over time in working with people around mold toxicity.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

There’s a ton, probably 50 to 100. I was gonna see if I had a list that I might be able to pull up and share my screen. I’ve got a little text document here and it looks like you’d have to enable me to do screen sharing. So it’s no big deal.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Okay, I can do that though.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

Can you? Okay.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

‘Cause we can show people this, and this is such an easy thing to blow off until you get sick from it. So I’ll pull this up for you here. Let me know when it appears.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

It’s there.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

Okay. So this is a big list. So for people, maybe if you’re just listening on audio or maybe you’re driving, don’t wreck your car while trying to read this list, but I’ll run through some of this, not all of it.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Sure.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

And what I’m telling people is, it’s very easy to disregard mold. You see something in the bathroom, you see a little something on the ceiling and you just blow it off. But until you end up sick, like I did, you gotta just believe me before you hit rock bottom, that this is a real problem, and you need to take action on this now by either getting out of that an environment, treating and remitting that environment, which we may talk about if you’d like, and then also working on the body by protecting your brain, protecting your organs, to get damaged by these mycotoxin. So that would include things like taking glutathione, which will give you some antioxidant protection, but it’ll also mobilize and excrete these toxins. Maybe taking things like calcium-D-glucarate, which will help that glucuronidation pathway we talked about. Binders like zeolite, and charcoal, and silica, and pectin, and micronized chlorella, and folic and humic acids. These can bind up to pesticides, but also mycotoxins. Okay, so symptoms. Fatigue is the biggest one. There was a guy who ran a chronic fatigue clinic for years named Dr. Brewer. 

He did a study on his chronic fatigue patients. He found that 96% of his chronic fatigue patients had at least one mycotoxin. So I believe the biggest contributor of chronic fatigue syndrome is mold toxicity. There’s other things in that big bubble, but I think mold’s the big one. I told you about barely getting to the mailbox and back. It was was embarrassing, that is what it was. So pale skin. My wife, when we were in the house, she goes, “Honey, you just look pale.” My skin tone, my complexion was not good. And you can see this in your children. Children manifest differently. Generally the children are gonna experience belly pain. So they’ll say, “Daddy, mommy, my tummy hurts.” They may have pale skin. They may have trouble focusing or concentrating at school. They may have also skin rashes or histamine intolerances, food sensitivities, diarrhea. So look for your children because they may not be able to describe some of these other weird things like excessive thirst, tingling, vertigo, trimmers, twitching, blood pressure issues, tinnitus, so ears ringing, swollen lymph nodes, chemical sensitivity. I didn’t even know chemical sensitivity existed until I got sick for mold. And I couldn’t stand within 50 feet to somebody wearing tide, I swear to you that laundry detergent, dryer sheets, the perfumes, all that stuff wrecked me. Fortunately, I’m a lot better, but obviously I’m completely chemical free in my personal care products, which are very minimal anyway.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

Just a free and clear laundry, Dr. Bronner’s organic soap, and that’s it.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

That one is a big one, you know, I talk to a lot of patients where, say, I can’t even walk down the aisle in the grocery store, right? So if that’s you out there that could be an early sign to get checked here, right?

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

Yeah. So the chemical sensitivity, the biggest things for that are gonna be mold toxicity, Lyme disease, and then the co-infections Bartonella and Babesia, which unfortunately I have, because I had many tick bites growing up in Kentucky. I love being in the woods. I love hiking. I love camping, but unfortunately one tick bite could change life forever. And so those infections will drive the mast cells. We talked in the very beginning about MCAS, mast cell activation. And that’s really just kind of like, the manifestation, okay. So don’t get too caught up on this. If you’ve been diagnosed, there’s very few mast cell experts in this country, but if someone gives you that clinical diagnosis, don’t get too caught up on it because you really need to work on finding and fixing root causes. But mast cell activation can create a lot of issues with the brain because once these mast cells are activated, you are just dumping histamine out into the system. And histamine is kind of a Goldilocks neurotransmitter, right? And so many people think histamine, they think Claritin, and all they think is a histamine blocker and histamine is bad. It has this negative connotation, right? But the reality is, if you have too low histamine, you’re not gonna be very alert.

This is why a Benadryl knocks you out because too low histamine is a problem, too high histamine in the case of a histamine intolerance or a more severe case would be a mast cell activation. Now you’ve got flushing. Now you’ve got dizziness, vertigo, chemical sensitivity, insomnia, maybe a rash on your skin, maybe a strong reaction to foods, you know, this is a very extreme manifestation. It can happen instantly. Mast cell activation would be very quick, meaning you smell the perfume, you’re immediately dizzy or drunk feeling. You eat this food, you immediately have bloating, that’s mass activation, I have been there. And so we can use nutrients like quercetin, and perilla leaf, and other flavonoids to stabilize these mast cells. And there are drugs to do this, but I’m not a medical doctor and I don’t prescribe, and I have better results with the natural formulas. And there’s so many beautiful things on the market.

The problem with histamine blockers is they’ll down regulate DAO, which is the enzyme that breaks down histamine. So when you have these quote “allergies” which is probably mast cells being active and you take allergy medication, you’re actually driving yourself deeper in the hole. That’s a whole separate podcast, but the long story short of it is any of these symptoms that your doctor would describe as weird could be related to mold toxicity. I was up peeing. I’m too young to have prostate issues, knock on wood. I was up four or five times a night to go pee in the middle of the night. Your average physician is gonna look at that and say, “Well, you’re just getting older, it’s your hormones, it’s your prostate, you drink too much water.” No, that’s a symptom. And after I treated mold, I could sleep through the night without having to go pee.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Awesome. And so those are things that people aren’t really considering when we’re talking about mold and what that looks like in the body. How about specifically around the gut and the brain, you know, what kind of issues from mold toxicity can we see there?

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

Well, here’s the biggest smoking gun of all, I mean, and this is the biggest thing I figured out. I haven’t been practicing as long as you, but I’m a decade in now. And what I found was a huge smoking gun, which was that all these SIBO clients that I was dealing with, these people that had the previous diagnosis of intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or dysbiosis, or parasites, or worms, or H. pylori, I’ve seen it all. What I would notice is, we’d get ’em on these herbs instead of antibiotics, we would do herbs and they would do great for two to three months. And then all of a sudden they’d go, “Well, I’ve had a relapse, my gut’s messed up again and because of my gut, now I’m anxious, now I’m depressed, now I’m irritable.” I’m like, “Okay, well let’s rotate herbs let’s throw in some Saccharomyces, let’s change probiotics, let’s rotate this, rotate that.” And we would do really well. And then that stopped working as good. And I thought, “Okay, something ain’t right, what am I missing?” Boom! Then I got sick with mold. 

So then I started running this urine screen on everyone and sure enough, 90% of these clients that were having these relapses, they had positive tests, confirming mold toxicity. And then I discovered Dr. Neil Nathan, he’s a great MD, we did a several podcasts together. He wrote the book called “Toxic” all about Lyme and mold toxicity. And he really just opened my eyes to how common this really is. And so once I started running these labs and getting all this clinical data under my belt, I go, “Oh my God, so here’s what it is.” So this bacterial overgrowth, this is really further downstream. And of course the brain issues that are happening, those are even further downstream, too. Those brain issues are an effect caused by the gut dysbiosis, producing lipopolysaccharides, and endotoxin, and gut inflammation, and leaky gut, and all of this. But higher than that is the mold. And even the lab will tell you this now, on their clinical readout, they’ll give you a little cookie cutter response to your testing. 

They will tell you straight up, mycotoxins promote the opportunistic overgrowth of Clostridia, Candida and other bacteria. And as I know, you know, with your work on the brain, Clostridia could be very damaging to the brain and specific, it’ll produce a toxin called HPHPA. We can measure that on organic acids and that’s been linked to all sorts of problems, including autism. And so here I was for the longest time working on the gut, but now I have to go upstream. So if I see a gut issue, I’m always like, “Okay, well, is there mold too?” Because if we just treat the gut and we don’t get rid of mold, here’s what happens two to three months off your SIBO protocol, you’re gonna come right back to where you started. And those are the people that reach out to me, “Hey, I’ve already been to the naturopath, I’ve been to the acupuncturist, they’ve done this for my gut. I’ve done this herb, and berberine, and ginger, and biofilm busters, and caprylic acid, and a regnol oil. Why am I still suffering?” Well, it’s because you got mold under your kitchen sink and you’re ignoring that.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Those are huge, those are huge. Thank you for those insights there. And you definitely have had some great giants in the field of the mold toxicity with Dr. Nathan, Dr. Brewer, I mean, these guys wrote the textbooks on this stuff, so that’s awesome. What would be one actionable item for folks to do that are suspicious of mold or one thing that they can do at home to kind of get a lower body burden? I like to, kind of finish off with some specific actionable items to get people into action.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

Totally, piece of cake. So you can spend three bucks, or you can spend 33 bucks, depending on whether you want the lab to analyze your petri dish or not, but Petri dishes are an amazing, inexpensive, very effective way to get a good baseline of your indoor environment. So a lot of companies that do mold testing and inspections, they will actually do air sampling, meaning they take a little vacuum, they suck a little piece of the air out of what we call the air column, the air columnist from your floor to your ceiling. They’ll suck something out of the middle of that air column. They’ll compare that to the outdoor environment. And then they’ll give you a reading or they’ll give you a score. The problem with that is mold spores typically fall to the ground, as well as Candida. Now we briefly talked about Candida, but Candida is an opportunistic yeast that can produce acetaldehyde, which can cause dizziness, and brain fog, and sugar cravings, and a white coated tongue, and many other problems. I’m sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with yeast or thrush or Candida overgrowth. I did a whole summit years ago on Candida. Mold drives Candida by the way. So if you can’t beat your yeast, it’s ’cause you got mold. So in metals, you and I talked about that last time, about metals and Candida hanging out together, same with mold, metals, mold, Candida they all like to be together.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yeah.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

But with these Petri dishes, which are not perfect. So to the few haters or trolls out there that may say, ‘Well, I did Petri dishes and they didn’t find it.” Well listen, I’m not saying it’s gonna find something behind the wall, or in the ductwork, or some of these hidden ducks and crannies, okay? There’s still a place for a qualified mold inspector to do a good job and possibly probe the wall or do thermal imaging, okay? But for a great, low cost, easy to do at home method, I would get Petri dishes. If you just put in the link, Evanbrand.com/petri, P-E-T-R-I, that’ll take you to a page where you can see these Petri dishes. They’re literally $3 a piece, or if you wanna pay 33 a piece for the lab analysis, you’ll set these out in your home, or your office, or your children’s school, very important. ‘Cause if your kids at school all day, eight hours a day, breathing in mycotoxins and they come home, “Daddy I’m tired, and my tummy hurts, and have a headache.” Well, they could have mold at school. It’s very common. The schools cut the budgets. 

They don’t run the air conditioners as much during the summer, the humidity builds up on summer break, and then you come back in the fall. I’ve got hundreds of teachers as clients. They all complain every time they go back to school in the fall, all they quote “allergies” ramped back up. That’s the mold in the building. So a lot of children’s schools are molding. You need to test these schools. And so Petri dishes are set on the floor for an hour, you put the lid on, you send these back to the lab for analysis and you’re gonna get a health score. Now we’d like to see four or below, that’s normal, okay? So zero mold is not the goal, that’s pretty much impossible. Especially if you have pets, if you have dogs, they’ll go outside and they’ll bring in spores from the outdoor environment. So we do have an essential oil shampoo that we use for pets. We have that for humans too. We have laundry solution that we use for clothes. So there are treatment options available, but the Petri dishes will at least give you a good idea of how much and what do you have, meaning, do you have a bake candy to problem in the home? So if you move into a rental house and the previous tenant had a Candida problem, or they had pets with Candida, those humans could have off gas Candida spores into your air and when you move in this new rental home, or apartment, or whatever and your symptoms flare up, well, you’re probably breathing in the previous tenants Candida, and that’s gonna recolonize your sinuses and then colonize your gut. And so you have to think outside of your body. We’re so focused on us and our body, but then we exclude this external environment that we live in, 99% of the time we’re inside. So it’s like, you’ve gotta consider this bubble. 

The Petri dishes give you a window into that bubble. And then depending on how bad your issue is, most of the time you don’t have to move, although I did have a woman in Oregon, 2.5 million house, the worst mold levels, there were two numerous to count. So the lab they just gave up, they’re like, “There’s way too much to count on these Petri dishes.” It was penicillin, primarily. I told her straight up, “Hey, you’re never gonna get well in this house.” She had fertility problems. “You’re never gonna get pregnant in this house, you gotta leave.” Her husband was having all sorts of neurodegenerative problems. They were just seeking out different opinions for neurologist and I’m like, “Look, here’s the mold lady, this is doing it.” And she didn’t want to hear it. So she simply quit scheduling follow-ups and she stayed in the house. And so, unfortunately this is for some reason a controversial subject, I guess because it involves money that sometimes people can’t people face the truth.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

It’s a tough one. I mean that one is when you’re asking anybody move in their home, it’s just such a large, it’s a large one. So I feel for her, but it’s also like you’re saying, this is essential, like you’re living in your environment is toxic, right?

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

And you don’t have to move every time, I mean, we’ve saved many homes simply by removing the water damage material. So if there was a water leak under the sink, we removed that wood, put in new wood. A good friend of mine in the health space, she called me the other day because her washer overflowed and leaked down to her main floor, and there was water dripping from the drywall. If you catch it quick and you start to dry these materials out, replace drywall, replace insulation, treat the studs, hydrogen peroxide is amazing for this. You can use a 12% hydrogen peroxide in spray mold topically, don’t burn your skin or your eyes, but you can treat this at home. And so a lot of things can be salvaged and saved so you don’t always have to move. There’s very rare situations like that woman in Oregon, where her house was just so bad, I told her to get out, but she didn’t want to hear it.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Wow. Well Evan, thank you so much for your work and your service out there, and supporting folks on this journey. Great actionable items, and I really look forward to getting this out to the world.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

My pleasure, and I need to at least spend a minute here about the topic, because you mentioned the headline and I didn’t even cover the headline, which was, how does this not allow you to relax? And the answer is simple.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yes.

Evan Brand, CFMP, FNTP

We talked about mast cell activation. So when your mast cells are activated and you have a surplus of histamine running through your bloodstream, you’re not gonna be very calm at all, in fact, you’ll likely have insomnia, and anxiety, and potentially panic attacks and OCD. And so the limbic system is involved in this process and your limbic system wants to protect you. So in the case of mold, Lyme, Bartonella, potentially other infections, gut issues. The amygdala is part of that limbic system and the amygdala, I think of as sort of like the Rolodex of fear, meaning should I freak out about this or should I not freak out about this? And so when you’re exposed to mold, the amygdala will likely light up, giving you a warning sign, which may manifest as symptoms like anxiety, or brain fog, or depression, or other problems. 

And so what happens is, if you have emotional traumas from your childhood, you’ve got a lot of stress, you’re working a lot, you’re a new mom, a new parent, you are an entrepreneur, business owner, you’re a lawyer, some executive, a healthcare practitioner, a lot of these high executive people, they’re the ones that are more susceptible because their bucket is already so full that when they get this mold exposure, it puts them over the edge and the limbic system gets stuck. And basically what’ll happen is, you’ll focus on your symptom, I’m so anxious, I’m so depressed, I’m so tired, and the stress hormones, including cortisol and adrenaline that get produced from those negative thoughts, then make the amygdala grow in size and sensitivity. And I did a podcast with him, you and I were talking about him before we hit record, Ashok Gupta. He did an amazing job with the Gupta program, which is essentially a brain retraining system to help you work through this stuck limbic system. And he’s had amazing success, but I will argue you can’t just think your way out of this if you’re full of mycotoxin, so there’s still a need for appropriate binders and appropriate treatment to get this out of you, especially if you’re colonized, meaning you’re growing mold. 

So I’m all for acupuncture, emotional freedom technique. Ketamine, I did a whole podcast on that with Dr. Stephanie Coleman about ketamine assisted psychotherapy. It’s an incredible tool to help reset the brain, but it’s not gonna get mold out of you. So I love these tools, but you still gotta think root cause. And so whether it’s the psychedelic medicine, whether it’s the EFT, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, meditation, amino acids, GABA, passion, flour, valerian, whatever you need to do from an adaptogenic herb or herbal perspective, I’m all about, I love herbs, I’m so into it, but those were bandits for me, and they helped me to stabilize my condition while I worked on getting the mold out the back door. And so the limbic system can eventually reset. The limbic system can calm down and you can’t get a grip on yourself, but if you’re feeling like you’re going to the psychiatrist and they’re putting you on lorazepam, and Xanax, and other benzodiazepines, which to me have a lot of downsides, you gotta think deeper. So that’s it on that.

Greg Eckel, ND, LAc

Yes. Thank you for answering the topic of the day. Thank you so much, Evan. And again, I look forward to getting this out. Thanks.