How Mold Toxins Destroy Your Sex Life & Relationships

Introduction to Mold and Sexual Health 0:00

Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane here. Welcome to another amazing interview on the sexual health summit. I'm really excited to bring on our next guest mold expert. We're going to talk about mold and energy and how all of this ties into sexual function. Evan Brand, welcome to the summit. Thanks so much for having me. This is a huge problem that nobody wants to talk about. So I'm glad that you're doing this because in clinic I've seen over 2000 clients in the last decade. One of the questions on my intake form is, is your libido adequate?

And 99 out of 100 of these adults that take that say no. Occasionally you'll get a man that's like, Yep, no problem. But in terms of females, I mean, it's at least 90 out of 100 say their libido is not where it needs to be. And then, of course, that creates a lot of marriage tension. I actually gave a talk recently for Mosaic. They just got bought out by Great Plains. I run more organic acid testing than almost anyone, and so they wanted me to do a talk for them. And I titled the talk Mold and how Mold Leads to Marriage Dysfunction or How Mold Leads to Divorce.

And I kind of painted this picture, which I want to talk about with you today, to how we can impact the issue of a health issue, then affecting, of course, your sex life. And then that, of course, affecting your marriage, your relationships, how you treat your kids, you treat your spouse. I mean, if you are having sexual dysfunction, I see it affect your daily life, too. How confident you are at your job. So I think it could directly impact your income, your career, like everything. Yeah. I mean, there's so much you said there that will spin off of in this, you know, in our time together today around, you know, exactly what you said around.

It's not just about sexual function, right? It's about how that impacts relationships, confidence, wellbeing, how you deal with stress on and on and on. So great intro. We're going to unpack all of that, but before we do, can you just tell everybody a little bit about who you are and how you got into this, you know, world of mold, how you started making the connections in the clinical practice with the thousands of people you've treated, how you started really making the connections between mold and sexual dysfunction.

I know you mentioned your intake form, but just talk to us a little bit about who you are, kind of why you're passionate about this and really beyond your intake form, what else helped you kind of make those connections of mold, toxicity and sexual dysfunction? Sure. Well, I think like most of us, we're all wounded warriors. We didn't do this because we wanted to necessarily. We do it because we had to. So through my whole twenties, throughout business school, in college,

Evan Brandu2019s Personal Health Journey 2:50

I was suffering. I was diagnosed with IBS. And then I also had anxiety issues, depression. I had terrible skin. My sleep was a wreck. I just felt awful. And I bounced around from doctor to doctor. I got a few prescriptions written. I never filled them for acid blocking medications and anti spasmodic from my gut issues, and not once was nutrition brought up. And so this was, you know, 2007, eight, nine. And then I came across Paleo, got rid of grains, got rid of gluten, got rid of dairy, way better, not feeling better.

Then I met more friends in the natural health space. I started a podcast in 2012, which is a long time ago in the Health Podcast world, and then I started interviewing people and every time I interviewed someone, I'm like, I'm learning, I'm getting these golden nuggets from these interviews. Like, it's incredible. And so then I got into functional medicine testing. I ran a stool test. I found out I had parasite infections. So then I treated those, got rid of them using herbs. And then I had H pylori.

A very common bacteria, damages the parietal cells, reduces stomach acid, creates a lot of malabsorption, a lot of nutrient deficiencies, neurotransmitter problems. It can affect your sexual health as well because now you're getting robbed of your nutrients. So I had to fix that infection. Then my wife and I started having kids. We built a brand new house. We had mold in the crawl space, didn't know about it, started waking up dizzy every day, had blood pressure problems. Good buddy of mine, Dr. Jack Wolfson, he's a cardiologist.

I texted him about my issues. I'm like, Jack, I'm dizzy. My blood pressure's going crazy. And he text back one word in all caps. Mold. I thought, There's no way it's brand new house. He's like, Find it. So we found it, we fixed it, remediated it, moved out. Ever since then, clinically, I'd kind of transform from being the gut guy because I was primarily helping people with SIBO and Candida and parasites and other digestive issues to now I had this whole new can of worms, which was mold, toxicity.

And so I went and I look back at all these cases where I had suffered, or maybe we had good success, and then the people relapsed. So let's say we fix their gut on a three month gut protocol, and then three months later they're like, Hey, I'm back in trouble again. Well, we would just rotate herbs. Let's try this probiotic instead. Let's do this gut healing support. You need more adrenals, let's throw in some more liver up your thyroid Zoloft. Let's work on antibiotics. But then we were missing this big smoking gun, which is the mold.

So now I really kind of zoom in on that. I still fix the gut issues, the mood issues and all of that work with a ton of children as well. But now I've had to have like pretty controversial conversations with people because there's this issue where the wife is sick, the husband doesn't believe the wife thinks she's crazy, so now she's pissed off. She's not going to want to have sex. She's mad at this dude. He doesn't believe her. She's been suffering for ten years and he doesn't believe her. So I'm now almost like a therapist in a way, because I'll get this stubborn, skeptic husband on these phone calls and I'll point out the lab testing that we ran.

I'll say, Look, here's the petri dishes that we've tested in your home. Your master bedroom has 20 colonies of Aspergillus. Also your wife, her levels of ochratoxin, which is a mold toxin that comes from Aspergillus okra toxins very damaging to the cerebellum. It definitely affects the endocrine system most. Mold, toxin would be classified as an endocrine disruptor. Most of them are highly estrogenic. So there's a big link between excess mycotoxins and breast cancer. Colon cancers. I mean, these are very toxic substances that people breathe in in a water damage building.

So I take this skeptic husband. I go look at your wife's levels. This is why she's anxious. We pull up her organic acid, we look at her brain chemistry. This is why she's depressed. This is why she has no sex drive. This is why she's exhausted all the time. It's not because she's getting older. It's not just because of the kids. It's because of this. And so luckily, I've saved many, many marriages by using the labs, too. Then illustrate what's actually happening under the hood. Most people, when they think sexual health, they think only emotional problems.

Well, it's an issue with me and her. She gained weight after babies. She doesn't feel as sexy or he's got a beer belly or he's got erectile dysfunction like we think of these surface level things. But to be able to paint a picture of mold exposure in your basement driving the erectile dysfunction or the lack of pleasure and intimacy, like that's an important thing that nobody's figuring out. Yeah, it's a it's a really important issue. There are so many things you just said that I really want to just kind of tap into and make sure that we're emphasizing.

So, one, this thing that you're bringing up around new homes and I see this with so many of the clients I treat to around new homes don't mean they're safe, right? Just because it's need does not mean anything as far as mold or no mold like we don't it's kind of like the body, right? We don't know what's there until we actually look under the hood as you're saying. So that's one point that you made that I really think is important to overemphasize, because I just see that so commonly, you know, that people just can't wrap their brain around it and, you know, another point is really in getting to these, you know, roots from a standpoint of what you're saying around mold and marriages, that is really beyond some of the basics.

So let's go a little bit deeper there around. If somebody has mold and they have erectile dysfunction, let's let's kind of tease that apart a little bit more in detail. So what's happening here? So people understand what's happening more mechanistically, where mold is actually leading to that erectile dysfunction. Can you go deeper into that? Sure. Yeah, there's several mechanisms. So the first will start is easy. It's the neurochemistry piece of it. So if you just look in PubMed, you type in okra, toxin, dopamine, all the literature is there, which is saying that mold toxin.

So just to be clear of what we're describing here, so you're in a water damage building. Okay. So this may have had a plumbing leak.

How Mold Affects Libido and Relationships 8:40

The kitchen faucet, the toilet overflowed the bathtub. The shower pane was leaky. There was a roof problem or the wages, excess humidity, you know, over time, even just access humidity can build up in the home and create problems because our houses are built tight. We have good windows, good doors. We don't have many drafts. So there's no dilution to the pollution that's building up in the home. So even just moisture can create this issue. And as these molds grow, they want to stake out their territory.

So they essentially farmed out these mycotoxins. So Mycotoxins think of them as a mold fart and you breathe these in as the innocent bystander and they get stored in your body, they hang out in the bile. There's other places in the body where mold hangs out mycotoxins specifically, but that okra toxin is probably the most common one and it directly damages the part of the brain that helps make dopamine. So now on organic assets testing, you'll see the low dopamine. So you're going to see symptomatically lack of drive, lack of energy, lack of focus and concentration.

They may get bored easily. They may have addictions. Like they're just flipping through every social media app, you know, seeking that hit or they're addicted to coffee or stimulants, sugar, who knows? Gluten free cookies, you know, alcohol. It could be something to try and self-medicate the brain chemistry issue. The other mechanism would be nitric oxide. So mold directly affects blood flow and it can create what we call hyper Kogi ability to where there's literally lack of blood flow to the extremities.

So a lot of these people will report cold hands, cold feet, cold nose, also weak or nonexistent erections, if you think of that as a blood flow problem. This is why Viagra and some of these other drugs work with the vasodilation effect. So if we have that problem with mold, I'm not going to put you on Viagra because I don't prescribe. But what I may say is, well, let's do a blend of some amino acids, let's throw in some citrulline or some arginine or some other things to act as a natural vasodilator to get the blood flow back to your hands, to your feet, to your privates so you can have a sex life.

Yeah. Thank you. There's so much to be said there. And one thing I really want to emphasize is one of the things I see so commonly. I imagine you do too in your client population. So I think we share a lot of similar types of people from the old world is this whole misunderstanding of like okra, toxins, aspergillus, like these types of toxins only being found in food because there is so much literature out there, right? That is like, oh, these are food derived toxins. You can see studies on this, right?

And so there is, I think, this misunderstanding that you're really helping to, you know, to show people that's so important around like this is in our environment. This is not just a few dry things and it's not the food deprivation that's really making people sick. It's when they're breathing people, you know, breathing the mycotoxins. And so I think that really helps to show that. And one of the things and there's a few different things I'm going to spin off on what you said, because I think it's really important.

But one of the things I want to take a step back because I know when people listen to these summits, as I know you've done, you know, hundreds of these talks, we have our practitioners, we have our summit junkies, you know, tend to listen that I've listened to a bazillion of these. And then we have other people that are probably hearing this for only the first or second time. So can you you've talked about the organic acid test in relationship to this problem a couple of times now. Can you talk a little bit more about what is the organic acid test?

Just a little bit more around like the utility of that and in particular in this world of sexual health that we're talking about here? Yeah, let's actually look at one because the picture is a thousand words, right? Sure. We'll look at this is a fun case study. This was a little boy who was three years old when he came to me and he was one of five children. The mother had a tree roots that had busted through her foundation in her basement. And so when it rained, they had water in their basement and the whole family was sick.

But this little boy was on the verge of getting kicked out of school. So he was the top priority because the teachers are sending notes home. The mom works full time for the government. She's like, I cannot quit this job. I need my kids in school. Fix him. So we ran some labs and then one of those who ran the organic acids, which is a fasted urine sample, you wake up in the cup, get this back to the lab, and with that we get about 75 pieces of data from it. Now, page one, this is my favorite page because it shows the biggest smoking guns of all.

In this case, you're looking at these little triangles. So folks that are watching along, you'll see the little triangles. Hopefully they're going to be somewhere in the midline. Too low is sometimes an issue, but too high is really the problematic situation, meaning these acids in the urine are too high and we link those to certain molds. So in this case here, this poor boy, this number two right here, a long word, five hydroxy methyl to farrokh acid. This indicates this poor guy. He's had so much aspergillus exposure, he's now colonized.

Now this kid needs antifungals up his nose. He needs antifungals in his gut. And we can use herbs. And I'll show you the result of how we fixed it down here. Albinos. This is a gas that is produced by Candida. So we know this poor boy's got a massive Candida overgrowth. And in this whole section down here, more long works, hydroxy benzoate, hydroxy empiric. These are bacterial overgrowth markers. So we know this kid has a bacterial overgrowth problem, too, down here for crystals high. So we assume he may have even had Clostridium difficile, which is a problem.

It kills many people from diarrhea and hospitals battle antibiotic resistant strains of C diff. So it's it's something not to mess around with. Luckily herbs, we don't have that problem so I don't get freaked out by it when I see it. But, but this was a mess. And this opened up a whole new potential for this kid to heal because he was doing

Organic Acid Testing and Case Study 14:20

speech therapy, behavioral therapy and all these other types of therapies. And guess what? None of that was a root cause. And he could have done that for 20 years and never fixed a mold problem. So that's why I love the OA because you get a real deep look into what's happening underlying now in the case of someone that has sexual dysfunction, a lot of times these women primarily we're talking to humans somewhat, but know I think we're somehow a little more protected. Maybe the extra testosterone helps protect us against this toxicity.

And so, you know, the women typically have lower testosterone, and I believe they succumb to the toxicity more so. But in these females, we're often going to see mitochondrial issues, too. So you get a good window into that here. And if these markers are really high, that indicates some level of toxicity to the mitochondria, which could be from things like vaccines that have heavy metals or if it were some sort of chemical exposure living next to a farm like agricultural issues, not eating organic, these pesticides can damage the mitochondria.

And then a woman who's tired and has no sex drive. We're going to look at this and we're going to factor that in brain chemistry here, too, so we can take a look at dopamine, we can look at serotonin. These are a beautiful windows into what's happening and it's not a perfect match. Like sometimes people are low in serotonin and you ask them about their symptoms and it doesn't match you. You're like, okay, fine, we'll leave it alone. But a lot of times, as is spot on and they report those deficiency symptoms and that could be irritability, poor libido, poor motivation, poor drive, you get nutrients on a note test.

So we love looking at that. Like typically people with mold are going to be pretty low in vitamin C, B, vitamins. You're going to burn up like jet fuel. So we often see these quite low glue to thiamin. You'll often see deficiencies there. He's on his way towards that. The higher this number goes, the more deficient you are. So I love and oh, and so after a year, we put a protocol together. After a year, we've retested this kid. You could see he was age four now and we fixed everything except for just a tiny bit of bacterial overgrowth.

But in terms of the colonization, the Candida, it was completely resolved. And you know, you could just be excited about the paper. In the paper confirms we did a great job. It really it's more about the mom saying, hey, look, teachers now sending notes home. What did you do? We have other kids that need help like him. How did you fix him? And that's really the true reward for me. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's really cool to see clinical results, but when you actually see the symptoms change and lives change, that's the magic and what we do.

And just for all you listeners about sexual health, to kind of tie this all together, like, wow, this to this example of the test was on a three year old kid just think about this. The same sort of principles, right? Being tied into what Evan's already shared with us around, oh, the impact of mold on neurotransmitters, on the circulation and these sorts of things. And know I wanted to come back to. So thank you for showing that. I think that was a really helpful example for people to understand the utility of that test.

And I want to come back to kind of bring in, you know, more of the ladies, too, from the nitric oxide standpoint and the blood flow of just, you know, talking about how when we're saying circulation and blood flow to the genitals, to the extremities, to all these areas that can get impacted by mold and by that lack of circulation, that women also have erectile tissue. Right. And so one, everybody that's listening, if you're when we're thinking about erectile dysfunction and the guys to remember that we also as women we need that blood flow to the erectile tissues of the female genitals just like men do.

So there is erectile tissue that is absolutely dependent upon blood flow. So just to make sure everybody is truly understanding how that all ties together from, you know, the whole picture. So where I think we should go next because I know where people are probably thinking with what you're, you know, showing in with that, you know, test example is okay you said like you fixed it awesome. So I'm sure everybody is thinking about, well, how, how did even do that? So can you talk to us a little bit more about like treatment and how you approach this from a root cause issue?

And you know, again, listeners, yes, we're talking about more, but remember, this is a root cause, one of the many root causes of sexual dysfunction. So if you can talk to us about treatment and one of the things I think it's really important emphasize is what you said earlier is like you're not prescribing this is like natural stuff. And I think there's this misunderstanding that the natural stuff is not as strong when sometimes I think it's even more effective than the pharmaceutical, you know.

ROOT Yeah, for sure. And actually, I talked with Dr. Neil Nathan. He's one of the popular MDs who wrote a book called Toxic about this. And we kind of talked about it on my podcast. And, you know, he's conventional medical doctor, so his ideology on it was that you really need to use a antifungals like fluke nasal itraconazole, nice statin to beat this problem. And I've proven it wrong hundreds of times. We've done it successfully using herbs. So I'm not saying that there's not a place for pharmaceuticals.

I'm just biased against them because I haven't needed them. The side effect profile of herbs and natural medicine is virtually nonexistent. There's literally zero known negative interactions between these herbs. In fact, they actually provide synergistic benefit. So one herb plus another equals three, and you get this more bang for your buck when you combine these herbs. So typically, just to be clear on what happens is most of these women, they often have gut issues as well that we don't necessarily see the full picture of in the test.

And so that's where we may come in and do a stool test. So often we'll do a GI mat panel as well, which is a DNA stool sample at home where you can measure all sorts of infections like in this case here we had E coli, we didn't have H. Pylori, surprisingly, but we had some PREVOTELLA which can create joint tissues. We have some Proteus, any of these autoimmune triggering bacteria or a problem. So we're always looking at females for these because we know, for example, Klebsiella this bacteria can create Hashimoto's.

So a lot of these women with Hashimoto ost, they also have low sex drive because they're hypothyroid, because they have antibodies attacking their thyroid, because they have a gut infection. So it's really important to fix these issues here. And then also we can measure parasites. So we'll see a lot of parasites and sexual dysfunction. I had Giardia years ago and Krypto. Luckily I got rid of them because I love to be out in lakes and rivers and creeks and streams and if you like to be out in the water like that, a lot of surface water of the U.S.

is contaminated with parasites. So if you swallow some, get it up your nose, it's not rare to go camping for a week at the lake and come home with parasites. It wouldn't be a rare situation if your plane is dirty, as I like to get, so we'll also measure gut inflammation, which we see a lot of issues there will measure fat digestion, pancreatic enzyme function. So these are just another, you know, another set of diagnostic tools. And then protocol wise, usually it looks something like this. We'll put together a blend of some antimicrobials.

This is a liquid tincture. We'll put together some sort of Saccharomyces Bacardi multi strain probiotic blend. If there's colonization issues, you've got to make sure you do the sinuses as well. So it's not on this sheet, but we'll often do an herbal antifungal spray, you know, in the sinuses that can be helpful. And then binders, you got to have binders on board. So this kid got better. You know, we tested his mycotoxins and I know this is about a kid, but honestly, if I told you it was a 47 year old woman, you wouldn't know the difference because on paper, these issues look the same.

So you could see here this kid at first extremely high levels of oak were toxic. Leo toxin. And then we retested him a year later. It takes at least a year, probably two or three, though, to fully fix this. You see, we got the numbers way down. Still some oak or toxin on the map, though. Eventually the mom gets tapped out financially because she's paying for five kids. Right. So, you know, you always try to balance like budget and cost and sanity. But yeah, in the females, often in that protocol, we're going to go ahead

Treatment Approaches for Mold and Sexual Dysfunction 22:00

and put in some libido promoting herbs anyway. So there's, there's several different blends that we've used. Douglas Labs makes a good one. A friend of mine from Bio Ray, her name is Dr. Stephanie Wray. She's got a good tincture that we use and there's several other blends. A lot of them are going to have horny goat weed, they're going to have mocha domina, maybe some a Lou Thoreau Siberian ginseng rhodiola is a good one, which I love, because these women are too tired to have sex. So if you get some rhodiola in their system, usually a little perk up a little bit.

So I like to blend adaptogenic herbs in with libido promoting slash hormones, supporting herbs like the mocha, maybe even like elk antler or some of these kind of natural pro androgen type blends for females. And they'll perk back up like I had a woman in Brazil, supposedly she hadn't had sex with her husband in ten years. I don't know if that's true. That sounds crazy long. And so we got her on a protocol to fix her parasites, put her on some hormone boosting herbs like that, and six weeks later, she's like, Hey, I'm back to having sex.

And guess what? My vagina can get swollen. Now I have blood flow down there. I'm like, Cool. So these issues are fixable. I've heard there's a pharmaceutical coming on the market for women. If it's not already there, like a low, like sex drive formula for women, I can look it up for you, but I looked into the mechanism of it and it's basically an SSRI rebranded as a sex drive drug. Yeah, there's there's a lot to be said there. And you said something that I feel like is an important direction we want to go, which is the topic of energy.

And I feel like so many women and men really I mean, I think so many people, they lose their libido, they lose their desire in part because of overwork and overwhelm. Right. So I don't know if you've seen the book by Dr. Libby Weaver, The Rushing Woman Syndrome, which that book is obviously by title, focused a lot more on women. But it's really looking at this full complexity, what's happening in our society around go, go, go, sympathetic overdrive, multitasking all the time. You know, really hard to be focused on the present and thereby focused on things like pleasure and love and touch and connection. So let's go into this whole thing.

And even like I know, you know, we can talk about moles and mitochondria and energy so we can talk a little bit about more mitochondria energy and how that's all tied into this libido picture. That would be amazing. Yeah, let's do it. Well, women are more emotional, and you all need time to warm up. And men are typically insensitive to that. You know, we're like a fire hydrant. You can just kind of turn us on in two or 3 minutes and we're ready to go. Whereas women, it might take 20 to 30. And in the modern world, especially if you have kids, I've got three kids of my own to even have time and find the time to give you that 20 minutes of foreplay.

It's like you got to work that into the schedule. So, you know, let's get granular in terms of like the actual day to day stuff because we could get geeky and functional medicine and that still doesn't fix your scheduling issue. So truthfully, if you have the ability, you know, let's say if you guys work from home or if the husband can come home for lunch schedule in the middle of the day, if you're waiting until eight or 9 p.m. after your kids or your teenagers have wore you out, and now at 9:00, he's going to try to come after you, what do you think's going to happen? You're going to shut him down.

You'd rather just veg out on your phone on the couch. So the reality is you've got to try to think about your circadian rhythm and your cortisol levels are not elevated or they shouldn't be at 9 p.m., so your tank is already pretty much empty by then. From a cortisol perspective, if you think of cortisol as like your smartphone battery, you're already at like 9% and here he is coming after you. You're not going to want it. You got to recharge first. So then tomorrow comes and then you put it off again and then you end up in one of these sexless marriages.

There's a whole thread on the Internet now on Reddit called Dead Bedrooms, and it's growing exponentially. And it's this huge epidemic of couples that have, quote, dead bedrooms now and everyone's trying to seek help from each other. So this is not a rare situation. Just to kind of reiterate, like since the invention of the iPhone, I think this has had this has compounded the problem. They actually did a study on women, the vast majority. It was more than half. I forget the exact number, but more than half of women said they would rather play on their smartphone at night than have sex.

So now you're hijacked because of these software developers and engineers. They've created so much of a pleasure hit for you. You know, watching your favorite Instagram story and linking to her favorite necklace in flip flops. You saw her wear in her beach photo that that is a bigger hit of pleasure than your own spouse. So in a way, you almost have to go on a fast from the social media. So I've deleted all the social media apps off my phone and I'll still be able to access them on the browser because I still am a content producer.

I produce YouTube videos, I produce podcasts. I still have to kind of be there, but I'm not wanting to engage anymore on my own personal phone. I think it's just a it's a terrible it's a terrible, addicting thing. A friend of mine, Paul Saladino, he called it like a device of despair or something like that. So so schedule your sex. Try to do it earlier in the day. Don't wait till 9 p.m.. Like if you drop the kids off at school and it's just you and your spouse go home, get it in, then get it done.

Because if you were going to say, hey tonight, tonight, honey, tonight, I promise, I promise it's not going to happen. Take your pro androgen nerves in the morning. You are both pump your adaptogens get your B vitamins in. I find organ meats to be helpful in boosting libido. So you could buy like a professional organ supplement. Like I sell grass fed organs in capsule form. Or if you're eating meat generally I find vegetarians and vegans. They generally have a lower sex drive. Not always, but generally.

If we can get these people at least on some eggs or some organ capsules or organ meats, we start to see the vitality perk back up. There's a reason in tribal societies, when the women are seeking to be pregnant, the tribes are going to give her the organs. They're going to give the more prized parts of those animals to these women that wish to be fertile and aroused. Also, I would say you'd be surprised at the amount of women that I talk to that say they don't even kiss their spouse because all this kind of ask simple questions, just just to kind of poker around, right?

It's like, okay, sex drives low. How often do you hug and kiss your husband? Oh, we don't do that. Like, what do you mean you don't hug and kiss? Not even once. I'm like, okay, do you ever make out? No, we haven't done that for years. I'm like, Seriously, I said, So do you still have sex? And they'll say, Yeah, just for him. I'm like, That sounds terrible. I'm like, So how does this go down? Like, this is just a wham bam. Thank you, ma'am. That's what my grandma, my great Aunt Paula. Rest in peace, Paul.

That's what she would tell me. She would say, the typical man wants a wham, bam. Thank you, ma'am. And the women don't. So men, you've got to slow down. You've got to dedicate some time. Like if you've been in a relationship for longer than 5 to 10 years, it's going to take some time. This is not this may be a little controversial, but I'll just shoot it out

Energy, Stress, and Libido in Daily Life 29:20

because it's the reality. They've done studies on rats. They take a female rat or a male rat. They've done it both ways. It's the same biochemistry both ways. So they'll take the the female they'll introduce a male rat to her and they'll measure her arousal. Then they'll introduce the same rat. And over time, that arousal from that same male starts to decrease, just natural. So guess what? They introduce a new male to the equation and her arousal skyrockets. Same thing. Vice versa. Male rat, female rats.

Boom boom boom. Same one arousal drops. New female arousal. New female arousal. Am I saying you all have to become swingers? No, I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that in the biochemical way, you do get less of a hit from that person. So you have to do things to stimulate that same hit, which could be more foreplay, more time together. It leaves kissing and hugging. Yeah. Thank you. You. There's so much there. I love everything you're saying. I need to. To bring out a couple key points. One point I think is this concept of foreplay, right?

I think so many people think of foreplay as this thing that you do for like a couple minutes before you do the big act. Right. And foreplay so much more than that. Foreplay for like a lot of sexually like successful couples that I see in long term relationships is really it's like what starts from like the moment that say that true sex act ends, right? It's like the the touching, the kissing, the, you know, the touching each other on the on the arm, on wherever, when you're walking by them in the kitchen, like all these little type of things, the flirty texts, all of that is actually foreplay.

And the reason it's so important, you know, for women is that we, too, like women, have so much of a slower response circulation right wise of getting that blood flow to the genitals. So like men, it's like, oh, what sort of genitals? Oh, a rex. It's rough. It's fairly fast. Think about something sexy. There's a response. And for women, there's just a much slower build time because the circulatory system does not respond in that same sort of way. And the other thing I'm thinking about as you're talking about all of this with this animal, with this rat study is it's making me think of a parallel in her book, Mating in Captivity.

And she has the best. I love how she describes this whole mating in monogamous relationships where it's like, okay, like the rats, you put somebody new in, it's novel, you get a dopamine hit, all of a sudden you're turned on. But what Astor brings up is it doesn't have to be something new. But her whole point is, how do we actually look at our current partner with new eyes? So how do we actually say, You know what, this person I've been with for 20 years, what's the quality of something about them that I just kind of lost?

And I haven't seen? Like, how do they walk across the room? You know, how do they sit? How do they look at me with this twinkle in their eyes? And to begin to actually look for these novel types of things? And, you know, her whole point is that when we can start to look for the novelty within monogamy, that also, you know, solves that problem that you brought up with that animal study. That's cool. I'm going to add this to my regardless. Yeah, it's a it's a must read in the libido world. It's so yummy.

She does such a good job so and it's, it just pairs so well with that study, right. Because animals, obviously rats, they don't have cognition, at least not that we think in the way that humans do. So they're not going to be able to say, get this new male rat and be like, oh, or I'm sorry, have the same male rat and be like, Oh, this is I'm going to look at this new rat with new eyes. It's not going to happen in the rat world. So. Well, this isn't such a cool, cool lecture. I know we're running out of time here.

So is there anything that we did not cover in the world of mycotoxins and mold and sexual health that you feel like is a really important point to leave people with? And then we'll make sure everybody knows how to get a hold of you. Well, this is a complex puzzle. The stars have to align in a way for both partners to have adequate libido, adequate pleasure, because you have the workload. So maybe he's too tired, which is a sometimes the issue. Right. So he's working full time so she can stay at home with the kids.

But now he's too tired and she's too stressed because she's been with three great crazy kids all day. Right. So this is a complex scenario that you and I can't solve today in just one interview. But what I will say is I would encourage people to sit down with their spouse when they have the time and literally make a priority list of things that they can change or delegate or take off their plate that are draining them and putting them out of the mood. So if the woman realizes, hey, by the time I do all the dishes, all the laundry, all the clean up after dinner, I'm toast.

I don't want anything to do with you. I want to scroll on tock. Well, then he needs to know. Okay, honey, then we're going to move the schedule around when I get home will sneak away, and that's our time together. So I want people to do an inventory of their life and figure out where are these energy zappers coming from? Now, please don't forget about getting a good functional medicine workup on yourself because you need to look at the underlying brain chemistry, the thyroid, the hormones, the mold toxin, the gut infections, because these all are going to basically cap your ability to get to that peak experience.

So even if you and your husband do have time, but you still feel too flat, well, then you need to look deeper. So look on the surface first, identify these lifestyle changes. You can make the scheduling changes, hey, it's going to be 10 a.m. instead of 10 p.m. sex. It's 10 a.m. sex. Now, like those things can help. And then if you milk all that for what you can then look deeper because there's probably something underlying. There's massive amounts of women in their twenties now it's almost becoming, quote cool, which is scary to post about these premature ovarian failure cases.

You see all these women now where they're like, My hair's gray and this is happening and I have menopausal symptoms in my twenties, so we are truly in a big mess. And so I don't want you to think that what we're living in is normal just because something is common.

Practical Relationship and Lifestyle Advice 35:40

So because you and all your other friends all have no sex drive. Like I have a friend who's a doctor, female doctor, and she is single, divorced, and she's in her late forties and she's telling me she can't find a single man in her age group that can get and maintain an erection. So we truly are in a little bit of a mess here. So look deeper, do surface look deeper and then if people want to reach out my site Evanbrand.com it has everything I have functional medicine training courses so I teach doctors and other practitioners and just do it yourself.

Health hackers. I teach those people how to run these labs, how to interpret them, and then how to make protocols to fix yourself. So if you're like, I don't want to hire somebody, I just want to fix myself and learn this stuff. Then my site has the information there and the podcast is free. So I'd like to get you all in there too. Let's keep the conversation going. Yeah, it's amazing. Thank you so much for all of that and for all of you listeners. I know so many of you are going to be like, oh, my gosh, what did we all say?

There's so many different things on here. What labs? Obviously, check out Evan and his site and remember that if you need to hear this again, you can always purchase the summit. If you haven't done that already to listen to what Evan has to say over again, because it was so packed full of information. So thank you, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Evan,for being such a wonderful guest and It's been truly a pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you.