Mold And Mycotoxins: The Hidden Nutrient Deficiency Link

Introduction and Dr. Tessieru2019s Mold Expertise 0:00

Welcome back to the conversation. And today I have Dr. Tessier. Hi. Welcome. Hi, I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited for this talk because we're going to get all into mold today. And let me introduce you to our audience. You're a practicing naturopathic physician. You specialize in mold related illness, really, when it's complicated by comorbid conditions like Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, chronic infections like Lyme, EBV, CMV and so many more. You also specialize in treating the overlooked forms of mold illness.

So that includes allergy infection, colonization and micro toxic doses. And you're the former president of the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness, and you're currently serving for your second term as the vice president. So to say, you know, something about mold, toxins and environmental toxins is an understatement. So thank you so much for coming here to share your wisdom. And I want to jump right in. And my burning question is, because I'm seeing it in my own practice. The first thing I want our audience to hear about is why is mold and Mycotoxin illness on the rise?

What the heck is happening? Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, I know that there's a growing awareness. So usually with a growing awareness comes, you know, more and more people talking about it, more and more people seeking care for it, which is wonderful.

Why Mold Illness Is Rising 1:35

I'm all I'm all for that. So I would say the growing awareness is, I think also what leads to some of the increase in diagnoses. But we also have to be myself mindful of building practices. Right. So is this really cool study that was done another 2017 or 18 where they took a piece of drywall cut in a little circle popped in a petri dish poured sterile water on it and threw it in an incubator and it grew. Chaetomium mycotoxin producer. It grew Stachybotrys another, you know, this the scary black mold, even though there's many black mold and it produced it with sterile water.

And so, you know, drywall does have that paper backing that, you know, paper needs water production, right? You need water and paper production. So at the drywall factory, we're doing wet paper to to dry onto drywall. And then it just comes pre inoculate. It's literally just add water. So that's one building practice. You know, we're also going into this whole other world, I would say, of building practices where we're building things tight again the way we did in the seventies. Well, I hate to tell people, but, you know, the split level ranches that are well known for also having a finished basement and being tight as all get out.

During the last oil crisis in the seventies, we built things so tight that they couldn't breathe. And when they can't breathe, they trap humidity and we grow mold. We're doing it again. We're doing it again with our business building practices right now. The third construction thing that we do is everything has antifungals on it, everything. And these are copper axles. Well, the antifungals that we use, a class of them, we have a few, not many, but a few. The class of antifungals that we use in medicine are triazole, All right.

are fluconazole, ketoconazole, our itraconazole, you know, goes on and on. But we use copper axles as the backbone for a lot of our pressure treated lumber, which you need to have in your your studs, your foundation, anything that comes in contact with concrete. And so we're creating resistance patterns by having these antifungals in the environment. And we're doing the same, too, with our agricultural practices. We put thousands of tons of antifungal on our crops every year. And medical research has shown that folks who work in the fields who, you know, pick farmers, you know, all of them who are exposed to these crop antifungals when they get fungal infections and they go seek help from a doctor, they are already resistant, even though they are naive, as what we call it, to the medications that the doctors are using.

And it's because of what's being exposed in our agricultural industry. So people think, oh, you know, like antibiotics and me and all that kind of stuff, like, sure, but hello anti-flu goes in our food system. So I would have to say, you know, we have this growing, growing issues with building practices, growing issues with antifungal resistance. You know, we have our our wonderful change in weather patterns. You know, that's raining one day and 90 degrees the next day. And always in a state of flux.

That's that's a big thing. You know, a lot of the houses that get built are built for a specific climate that we've been following for the past, you know, 100 years or something or so. And with these shifts and changes also come these buildings inability to adapt because their old building standards from from back when. So you know I think that those are some of the core things of why mold illness is on the rise. And I would have to say the the last one is that it's it's the the the treatment du jour, the diseases does your of years past are failing.

And so people are looking for like, what's the thing? So, you know, in the nineties it was Epstein-Barr virus. I remember watching Seinfeld and hearing them crack and EBV joke. Wait a minute. And so, you know, the nineties it was it was Epstein-Barr and then it became mold. And we are having I'm sorry, it became Lyme. And so you have all these people who are sick. And while I have this chronic fatigue. Oh, it's EBV. Okay, well, that treatment didn't work. Oh, it's it's Lyme. That treatment didn't work.

And so I think people are kind of stumbling into mold after, you know, all of these cool, interesting health issues aren't their answer after MTHFR isn't their answer after maybe Mast cell isn't their answer. So yeah, I would say, you know, awareness building changes, weather patterns and again that whole like evolution of disease Du jour. I have one more question. Yeah what about EMFS? I mean, what about them? I mean, is this part of the reason we're seeing more mold illness? I mean, people's bodies are growing. I'm I'm curious, does it facilitate mold growth or does mold colonization use EMFs for communication?

Or is it just that our immune system is overwhelmed and so it can't handle the mold? I mean, what is there anything out there on this topic? You know, Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt Dr. Klinghardt has a few years ago where dialog about how mold who are exposed to EMF would produce more mycotoxins. Having necessarily seen that in the literature, however, you know, it does make sense to me when we place molds under stresses

EMFs, Immune Stress, and Mold 7:31

who are already mycotoxins producers. It's their defense. So of course they're going to increase their defense to any environmental stress. However, what you know, we should call out everything is connected in the body and we know that folks who or cells that are damaged from EMF, the way it occurs is through a shift in the membrane calcium and mold and mycotoxins have a profound impact on the cell membranes of our body. And, you know, there's some data out there that shows that when Mycotoxins damage our mitochondria and ourselves, we also have issues with calcium influx.

So could they theoretically be kind of, you know, stacking an issue on top of one another with that first? I would say potentially, yeah. You know, I'm so when we turn up our wife every night, you know, if we're not going to use it, then why even bother being exposed for the 8 hours we're in bed? So absolutely we can only teach that to our clients and on our courses to just shut off that router at night. Shut out. Not even that. Shut off the breaker to your bedroom. I mean, we could go down there, but now I always teach in my courses that when we think about the underlying cause of inflammation, chronic disease, all the symptoms that are plaguing us and irritating us, we've got buckets of problems.

So we've got, you know, chronic infections, which we can touch on as it relates to mold. We've got all the toxins that are out there, environmental toxins, we've got nutrient deficiencies and we've got traumas and stress. Now, the nutrient deficiency bucket I want to talk about that for a moment because because we know that many nutrient deficiencies are actually a result of those first two buckets, toxins and infections. So from a mold perspective, because that's one of the toxins we're dealing with, how does that contribute to nutrient deficiencies?

And, you know, before we got before we hit play on this, we were chatting about how, you know, we got to clean, help people clean up some of these toxins in their body before we can even fix the nutrient deficiency problem, because it's just creating a higher need for nutrients. So what would you share with our audience about that? You know, I'm so happy that you've mentioned that because there's a super cool concept of nutritional immunity, which is exactly what you're getting at, where the body itself will work to sequester nutrients away from the infection so that the infection doesn't have anything to work with, to grow and to replicate.

But we're also doing added disservice to ourselves because we're shoving that stuff into life as a lysosomes, into storage, vacuoles in our cells where we can't really touch it and the bugs can't touch it. And we're kind of sitting dragon on top of our gold, hoping that the intruders will go away, you know, in time before, you know, the cell gets damaged from not having these nutrients. So, you know, that's very much one way and that's just a natural defense that our body has in these situations.

But, you know, aside from our bodies defense, we do see that there are

How Mold Causes Nutrient Deficiencies 10:53

very key ways that mold and mycotoxins interfere with our nutrients. For instance, we've seen that mycotoxins, okra, toxin and citron and actually goes and sequesters iron and it's it's plus three charge if anyone's nerdy enough to want to know about that which actually will prevent a host absorption of iron and you know ions and mixed bag. We need it but we don't want too much of it and you know that the whole entire process of inflammation and the, the ferrous cycle and all of that. So all of that to say we see that those mycotoxins will actually bind it.

However, again, this goes back to kind of the nutritional immunity thing. We also see that fungal infections will go and pull iron out of our red blood cells by latching on to heme. It will extract heme from our red blood cells, which then of course causes hemoglobin disruption, you know, so we're. One and people wonder, why is my energy low? Why am I brain foggy? Why am I why can't I get better? Well, if you don't have normal levels of heme, you're not going to be oxygenated and oxygen is required for mitochondrial function and every organ in the body.

I mean, it is. You can always point back to it. Right? Right. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so that's like iron. But then, you know, everyone here I mentioned earlier, right. And AFR and everyone's outside but there's like thousands of snips that are important to you. It's not just empty bar, but everyone knows about empty too far, so why not talk about folate? So we do know that there are certain mycotoxins that actually interfere with the creation of the folate receptors. And when we increase or when we mess with the transcription or, you know, the coding from our, our genetic information into the protein that creates the receptor, when we mess with that, we're not going to have that little hand on the outside of the cell reaching out for the folate, come in and sit on it.

So Mycotoxins have the ability to interfere with that directive. Suppression of folate along with folate, B12 right. So B12 is absorbed in the ilium of the small intestine. That's really where the bulk of it happens. And when we damage our local gut mucosa gut tissue, we're going to interfere with nutrient absorption there. And we have seen that aflatoxin a few Magnuson dioxane about all a K of on the toxin very much damages the ilium of the small intestines and. Any any nutrients that are absorbed through the ilium which is many are going to be compromised.

So you could probably list a laundry list of nutrient deficiencies associated with mold toxicity, is that right? I would say so. I tend to when I end up dialoging about these things, I really work to pull from, you know, the what has been studied in the literature and every you know, I think a lot of folks have ups and downs with the literature because only certain things get published, right? That's the best way to put. And so, you know, when I'm talking kind of globally like that, I would say, yes, like six degrees of separation logic follows for sure.

And what I'm citing now is more the stuff that I've actually seen in the data. So that's so we have something to fall back on if people ever ask. Yes, for sure. So iron vitamins, can you throw out a couple others that you have that data on? Yeah, zinc is another huge one. So important for our immune system at some. Point and mitochondria too, right? Yeah. So zinc to another micro toxin directly reduces zinc absorption in the body too. As a tri coat. The seen I believe this one was studied by the like the U.S.

Army as a chemical warfare bio and then like you know these things aren't aren't aren't lightweight by any means. Zinc has also been impacted by aflatoxin, although it's more of a correlation. What we see when people have higher levels of aflatoxin, which again can come from the environment or can come from food, they'll tend to have a higher correlation of zinc deficiencies. And then the other one that's in the literature that people can dig around in and find is that okra toxin again, food or environment can reduce the intercellular concentrations of zinc.

And, you know, that's inside the cell. And that's where we need zinc. We need zinc for, you know, the mitochondria, the zinc fingers, all this crazy stuff that zinc does. And of course, you know, zinc is so important to the cell on so many levels from transcribing genes to the energy, the mitochondria. So yeah, it's it's definitely it's definitely a concern to see these things get limited. But it's a very fine dance because you want to make sure that you're not just front loading someone with nutrients before you clear out any of these issues because you're potentially going to have an uphill battle like you said, you know, if someone has a raging fungal infection, you know, I don't want to give them iron, you know, even if they're functionally iron deficient in their they're they're ferritin is low.

You know, it's the existential question. Chicken or the egg is their is their ferritin low because their body is trying to like protect all that iron storage from that bug or, you know, is that bug, they're consuming it all and is that why they're deficient? So we need to make sure that before any nutrients are aggressively given from a therapeutic standpoint, you know, like two, three, four times that physiologic trickle dose, that natural dose that we need to find in food. We need to make sure that we are fighting an uphill battle with any type of fungal infections.

What I just heard you say is that a therapeutic dose of a suspected nutrient deficiency could be adding fuel to the fire of your symptoms. And what you're trying to solve. And this is precisely what we do in Western medicine. I worked in that arena for 21 years and we would run a CBC and we would look and on a ferritin level and iron levels and we would determine there's an iron deficiency anemia here. And the and then we'd go looking for a GI cause of bleeding. And when we didn't find it, the solution was iron and we were not searching for mold toxins, we were not searching for parasites, we were not searching for anything else that could be consuming that iron and or or just the thought that your body might be down regulating something on purpose to starve out an infection or a bug or a toxin in your body that you're trying to get rid of.

I mean, this is what's missing in Western medicine, and this is why I shifted teams, because there's so much more to this now. But it's not just Western medicine or like it's nutritional immunity is not something that's taught in even natural Pathak Medical School. It's not it's not Tai as like a core component of these things, you know. So there is a there's just a lot of stuff that ends up getting lost. So I the reason why I hop in there so aggressively is say that is like people can't can't blame themselves for the information that they

From Nutrient Replacement to Root Cause Care 18:38

they don't know or they weren't taught like now, you know, to go out and find that info and to expand into it. But, you know, you don't you don't know what you don't know until you realize that you don't you don't know, you know, so totally. And on that point, I would say there are many, many well intending natural practitioners, functional natural medicine who don't understand this concept either. And when somebody comes to their office for the first time, the first thing they're doing is a nutrient panel and replacing nutrients but not seeking out the cause of the nutrient deficiency.

So in that sense, they're just trading one prescription pad for another. Instead of prescribing a drug, they're prescribing a supplement based on an inadequate evaluation of what is going on in someone's body. So my invitation to everyone listening right now is to find the people here who resonate with you, because this is a very carefully curated group of practitioners who understand these concepts that Dr. Tessier is unpacking for you right now. So this is this this this discussion is fascinating.

And we're going to keep going. But first, what I'm going to do is I'm going to thank you so much for joining us today for this talk, Dr. Tessier. And to our audience, I hope that you're finding this conversation insightful and helpful if you're a summit purchaser. Stay right here, because we're about to dove even deeper into this discussion. We're going to talk about solutions. We're going to talk about how muscle toxins influence inflammation on the body. And we're going to see how far we can go with this talk today.

If you're not a summit purchaser, click on the button on this page to get access to a continuation of this conversation and many others, and get the tools you need to reclaim your health. If you're watching this continuation of my talk with Dr. Tessier, thank you for being a valuable member of our community, and we're going to dove right back in. So, Dr. Tessier, I love now to have you link up. Why mold Michael and Michael toxins lead to silent unsuspected inflammation and ultimately chronic disease because it's this huge cascade.

So what is it that it's doing in the body that's making us so sick? Right. Right. So before we jump into that. Right, I just want to be clear with people. So molds or fungi or yeast where we're going to use them interchangeably in this discussion, it's not perfect nomenclature. Both molds and yeasts are a type of fungi. If we want it to be super specific, we would say fungi, but we're probably just going to run through and say molds during this conversation and mycotoxins it's myc0 as in fungi micro rather than micro.

I rco people kind of. And I just like getting clear. I'm not trying to be snotty or important. I've also said it is. People say miko r mike mitotic toxins. I've heard. People say, yeah, i'm sure there are mitochondrial toxins. I'm sure there's a whole entire classification in.

How Mycotoxins Drive Inflammation and Disease 21:38

Right. Thank you for pointing that out. So with Mycotoxins, mycotoxins are produced by the fungi by the organism. They are their defense. And so when they start to feel threatened when something's encroaching on their niche or they're trying to get a foothold into the host, they will secrete these which helps them kind of battle off any any defense from, you know, whatever else is in their environment. So mycotoxins when it comes to, you know, how, why they're doing this whole silent on unsuspecting information, it really comes down to their mechanism of action are mechanism actions like how the job gets done and so specifically with Mycotoxins not molds yet with the production of Mycotoxins we're looking at, I mean, it interacts with the body in so many different ways.

But I would say the the four main ways, the number one major way is through oxidation. And so these things are really good going in and knocking off electrons on any of the things that are found in the body, but very specifically they are attracted to any of our lipids and this results in lipid peroxidation. Well, turns out lipids are everywhere. You know, we think about them being really high, high fat content, the brain high fat content in the liver, high fat content in the envelope around the kidneys.

Sure. Those are going to be some of your bigger targets. But all of our cells have lipids in our membrane. And guess what? Our mitochondria have even more lipids in their membrane, a double little membrane compared to the cell. So to the cell membrane. So the mitochondria tend to be a huge target inside every single cell in the body in addition to all of your kind of fatty organs. And so that oxidation is really problematic because when you trigger oxidation, then you, you trigger damage and the immune system alerts itself to the damage.

And that's when you get that inflammation cascade to happening. The other issue with Mycotoxins is that they interfere with their own detoxification and they do this by interfering with phase one, phase two detox pathways. And they are so well known for depleting glutathione, which is our master antioxidant. If we don't have good iron in there going up and cleaning up that space, then that oxidative damage is going to blow out of control and we're just going to keep have inflammation over and over and over in the body.

So that's number one, I would say oxidation slash lipid peroxidation, right? So the other two ways I threw in there, the detox, one, two, so one or two. But the other two ways out of the four, I would say are the the hormone an imbalance issues that they cause and also some of that immune system confusion that they cause. The hormone imbalance, you know, hormones are huge for our inflammation signaling. You know, we see that women who are going through menopause have depleted immune system processes because of the loss of those important female sex hormones.

Mycotoxins can sit on hormone receptors. They can compete with your hormones, they can decrease your body's clearance of hormones, they can increase your body's clearance that they mess around with hormones. They cause a lot of hormonal chaos. And so when you cause hormonal chaos, that's a backdoor into inflammation in the body. And then the final one is the immune system confusion and mycotoxins are amazing for suppressing the immune system and specifically for suppressing the immune system that is responsible for cleaning up infections and things like that in the body.

So what we end up seeing is the your t h to help our cells and your t regulatory cells. When they're exposed to mycotoxins, they will drop down and your T regulatory cells are the ones that go in and kind of tell everyone how to do their job. Really. Simply put, they are the regulators. If anyone is grew up in the nineties, I always think of Warren G and I said. Oh. They're the regulators of the. U.S., right? Regulate you look up the song every one of you don't. Go go get an education that and so immune system confusion so they they decrease the body's the immune system's ability to regulate itself in all those checks and balances and what they further do is they increase coding for for a lot of these inflammatory chemicals.

So they will actually get the body to produce more. And then as a follow up to that, they will even suppress all of our cleanup crew, like I said, are our macrophages, our neutrophils, the front line of our defense. They end up suppressing our immunoglobulins, the things that go in and coat these pathogens to signal to them to get cleared up. And then they also cause a shift in a subset to subsets of our t help. Our cells are th7 teens and our t h ones. And when you start to do that, you shift more autoimmune.

And that's really where a lot of the chaos comes in because you know as well as I know, Laura, as soon as you hit that autoimmune signal, nothing makes sense in the immune system anymore. Like it's off the rails. So the mycotoxins themselves are a handful when you get into the mold because again, we're talking about how the mycotoxins work when they cause that silent inflammation and how the molds work when they cause inside information. Yes, molds or fungi in the body can make the mycotoxins so they double down on that front.

But the polysaccharides, the carbohydrates that we see on these fungi that are hanging out in our biofilms, in our mouth, our nose, our gut, our but everywhere, our skin, those polysaccharides can cause a histamine response that can cause that kind of mass. So activation out. And soon as you do that, you're just turning up the background noise on the immune system and causing more, more chaos and reactivity. And then, you know, when you do have a direct colonization, maybe bordering on an infection, that's also going to cause tons of oxidative damage to the tissues, that's going to cause tons of inflammation.

So, you know, when it comes to mold and mycotoxins, they've I think personally that they are the backbone of just the the silent illness that is happening to everyone right now. You know, it was a really fascinating science lesson. And I know people are going to want to go back and remind. Everybody that this is. Great for the practitioners and for the people who like super want to understand. And, you know, our audience tends to want to understand. I want to get into in just a moment, I want to get into how to protect ourselves, solutions, you know, symptoms, that type of stuff.

And I want to share something. One of my mentors at one point described mold to me in such an and in such an interesting way and in relation to parasites. So, you know, we have talks on this summit about parasites, infections, and when you think about parasites and infections, their main goal is not to kill the host because they're living off the host. And so you'll live with these infections and they'll cause all kinds of symptoms and problems and and, you know,

Mold Exposure, Symptoms, and Bodywide Impact 29:38

takes your immune system and every system in your body. But you'll carry on. Like you're probably not going to die from a parasite unless it's, you know, some crazy scenario. Mold is very different, though, and I would argue that it may be the singular most important thing you need to get out of your body. And this is what my mentor said. Mold sole objective is to kill you. And the example that he gave is if you were to walk in the forest and see a dead animal on the forest floor, it's gone through a whole cycle of decomposition.

Right. So the bugs have come in. Everything's come in. And the last thing that happens is mold. And it returns the organic matter to the forest floor. It completely decomposes. It's the last thing that comes in. So the difference between the dead animal and us is we have an immune system and we're alive. So we're fighting this, but it is trying to return you to the earth. Its job is to decompose your body, which is very different than a parasite. Do you have any comment on that? It's it's very poetic.

Very poetic. And also, I can't help but think of what was the recent show that The Last of US and then the TV show Hannibal. I don't know if people are watching that one. One of the scenes was someone who had and I apologize, everyone. It's it's Halloween ish time and I'm in the spirit but one of the scenes they they had folks who who were exposed who were who had been deceased and they were growing fungi off of them. And it was you know, it was interesting. Anyway, my apologies. So, you know, I do I do agree with that.

I absolutely agree with that. I think it's a super interesting take. And, you know, kind of even before that whole they want to take you down. When you think about mold, it's it's not just them taking you down. It's they bring you into a space where they can grow even better, you know? So if. You're any more. About that, yeah, I would love to show if you're a mold exposed a lot of people have light sensitivity right. And so they feel really crummy. They stay inside where there's decreased ventilation and if their home is moldy, then there's also more mold in there.

And it just has this like a self existential self preserving mechanism where it's I feel sick, I feel ill, I want to stay out of the sun. I want to stay like out of moving and going out and seeing people. It's isolating, being sedentary, like it's keeping you away through your symptomology of of all these things that you really should be doing for optimal health. So it's almost like the backwards concept of doctrine of signatures, you know. So yeah, I would have to say I agree with that. It's a really interesting take on that for sure.

Yeah, it is. So I'm sorry. I know we side barred but yeah. Mold is a passion, right? If we don't get mold out of people and the passion of mine and yours, and if we don't get help people with this, it's very hard to solve all the other issues. So let's give people hope here. I'd love to spend the remaining time we have really talking about solutions and protecting ourselves. And you can license symptoms while we talk about that, like how do you know you have it and what's the solutions? I'm sure you can talk about them all together, but let's get into like you have mold.

We know you've got it. Now, how do we get it out of the body and also, how important is it to get out of the environment if it's a current exposure? Oh, and also I have to say that when we run mold testing on people, we can't tell exactly when the exposure was. It could have been when you were a child, an adolescent, your twenties, thirties, 40. That could be a current exposure. So if you want to lace that in as we speak about it as well. So I'll just let you riff from here. Go. So this is something that's, that's eating away at me, no pun intended, giving our conversation is that not all fungi are going to kill you.

Like, I really want to pay homage at the at the altar of fungi to say, you know, we have wonderful food sources. We we use them in our food, we use them in our drug development. And, you know, we can that but leaving that whole concept alone, but we use it in our drug develop, we can even add fungi into our soil to remediate oil spills. You know, I even have I know of folks not directed by me, but I know of folks who have used fungi in their healing journey from a the existential spiritual perspective.

You know, we know that garlic dimensions can be a really, really nice binder as we know that Saccharomyces can help with balancing the gut. Flora And so I just want to throw it out there that, you know, you don't have to walk around just being perpetually afraid of fungi, like, oh, we not need it. Yeah, we need to think about them. Like superheroes and supervillains like they are. They have magical powers, and some of them are really bad for you and some of them are really helpful to you. So, yes, I said that with my with my forest for you.

All right. As I go off on a Hannibal Lecter journey. So anyway, you know, you and me both. So, you know, when when folks come into me, when I typically see them, the biggest complaint is typically fatigue, brain fog, cognitive issues. And for a little ones, because little ones tend to express themselves differently, have a different grasp of their body, we tend to see more digestive stuff and maybe some of like the added behavior are all stuff that might flow as a result of of neuroinflammation.

And so if we kind of step back and we think about how these are impacting the body systems, you know, once Mycotoxins get into the body, they're going to hit systemic circulation. And I always say like, it's game on. It's like the the Wayne's World when they're bringing out the hockey night, game on, game off, game on. That's as soon as it goes into systemic circulation, it's going to hit everywhere in the body. That doesn't stop and then includes crossing the blood brain barrier. We know that mycotoxins go local to that circulation.

They cause micro glial activation, they inflame the astrocytes, they get everything all pissed off, and they can cause localized inflammation, swelling in the brain, and that can kind of cause that downstream neuro cognition effects. The other thing about micro, aside from just inhalation into systemic circulation, eating into systemic circulation, you also have your olfactory bulb, your little piece of nerve that sticks down like a little a little pendulum, you know, through through your your nasal plate, right through your brain.

And so our olfactory bulb has this way of wicking. Any toxins from the nasal chamber up into the brain. And this isn't this is backed by science. We have seen mycotoxins have delivered into the nose, caused necrotic damage in animals in in the brain. You know, this is why our sense of smell is so closely related to our memories and our emotions. It's because it's it's wired that way, you know. And so we also see this with like increase in like smog, certain like parts per million of smog under a certain micron size can also get dissolved into that fatty membrane and go right up into the brain.

So you have a couple of different highways. You have your systemic circulation, and then you have your your oil slick highway that is your nervous system. And if we wanted to take that step further when we got colonized in our gut, which can happen from eating or maybe post nasal drip from our sinuses going down into our gut, the the fungi and mycotoxins in our gut can cause local inflammation, can cause some of that leaky gut dysbiosis issue.

Getting Mold Out of the Environment and Body 38:08

And then, lo and behold, you have 2 to 3 nerve connections depending on the pathway between your nervous system and your gut and up to your brain, you know, and can dissolve really easily into that fatty membrane around our nerves that we've seen with our nose. So we have like this, they just have a way of delivering themselves all around the body. And, you know, it inflames every organ. It has the ability to inflame every organ, you know, so I don't do too much dialog about the correlation of mycotoxins to cancer.

But in the literature, the aflatoxin okra toxin in developing nations where they have a lot in their food system, they develop liver cancer, gastric cancer, colon cancer, you know, colitis, all of these different things from the local inflammation of these things throughout the body. So, you know, it's it's everywhere. Once it gets in, it's everywhere. But there's so many things that you can do about it. You know? So let's talk about what we can do about it. Like strategies. I'd love our audience to walk away with some strategies on getting Mycotoxins out of the body and knowing what they need to be asking their practitioners for.

What are they looking for in terms of you know, protocols? And also, you know, this isn't a DIY thing, you guys. This is something that you should be hiring a practitioner to help you with. I cannot stress that enough. The majority of people I work with have been to you've been through years of trying to DIY their health and they've come up, you know, hitting a wall, hitting a wall, hitting a wall because there is an order of operations to do. And you can't you got to work with somebody who knows how to handle this and who has seen it over and over and over again and knows when you have your when you hit a wall in your progress, what to do to get you past that.

So let's, let's unpack some of the strategies here. Yeah. So the first strategy is avoiding exposure no matter what. And that means if the exposure of the mold, fungi, whatever and mycotoxins are in your sinuses, in your gut or out here in your environment, if it's out here, in your environment, you need to address that. So that way they can't come back in and reseed your sinuses eyes and your gut. So you need to make sure that the home is safe. And this is a lot of people go, Oh yeah, but I can't afford this.

I can't do this. You need to do it. There's so many people that soon as they address their home appropriately, all their stuff from 1020 years improves. And I always tell people, Address your home first and if you need me, I'm here. But chances are you're not going to need me. And I just saved you more money than not addressing it and then coming to work with me and things aren't getting better. So I want to say something really important here, and it's not just about you had a leak in your roof and the sheetrock got wet.

So you and it and it showed mold. So you had somebody come in and remediate and remove that and replace it. The mold spores are all over your stuff. So it's not just patching the ceiling or removing that sheetrock. It is everywhere. It's in your carpeting, it's in your sofa, it's on your stuff. And you're going to keep being sick unless you clean that environment thoroughly. So I just I have to say that because people think like, oh, you know, I fixed that and I got an air purifier. I'm good. And fixing has such a broad definition, you know, I've seen folks, I call it prey and spray where they come in and they just they they just spray an enzyme and.

Oh, well, guess what? That brings down the sport count for like three weeks until the reservoir that's behind the wall right there kicks out more into the living space. So not only do you need to physically remove the area of growth, you then need to repair the intrusion. Whatever caused that dampness, whether it was a direct leak, whether it was a sweating toilet taint, because the water coming into your toilet is too cold compared to the ambient warm air in the bath. Whatever it is you need to fix why that water humidity happened.

And then you might need you're right. You might need to clean the particulate in the air. That's when it's appropriate to fog. You need to clean up all the sources of everything you know. And I also want to not have people be so freaked out and activated, too, because if you're in that fight or flight stage, you're not going to get better. And so I also want to step back and maybe like tweak a little bit of some of the information you shed. Yes. Cleaning your personal objects are super important.

However, you do not need to throw away all of your personal items and throw out your cat. Or do you know, like there's such a thing as, you know, how close to exposure it is, you know? So if it's in a mudroom and it's a it's a closet and you had a whole mess of coats in there and they had no that's like I don't know how big our house is. Like 50 feet away from the master bedroom. That's up on the second floor where you don't really have a problem. Well, maybe you don't need to throw all your clothes up in your master bedroom, you know?

So I think there are shades of gray, but people do need to be reminded that there are reservoirs that do stay in the home. You're absolutely right. And some of the bigger reservoirs I've seen are anything overstuffed mattresses, pillows, La-Z-Boy recliners, circle T and couches himself, as you know, because what happens is those compressed and then when they open up and expand, after you stand up off of them, they pull air in. And so you sleep on that mattress 8 hours a night. There are so many folks that do a remediation, say, did you do I had a new mattress.

You know, I can't legally tell you to throw these things away. However, that's 8 hours you're spending on it and night like you know so I there are shades of gray to possessions and what I get really scared and worried about our folks who find their way into the Facebook groups and they see the worst case scenario from someone and they say, I had to like burn my house down to just like that's not always the case. But yes, personal exposure. You do need to address the personal items in your home, but that's going to look different for every single one.

So I hope you don't mind. The follow up is terribly important. Any time I say something you want to add to it, just do it. Because that's why I brought you here. You are the so. All right. Other things that need to happen. So reducing exposure, reduce exposure, environment. Now how do you get out of your body? How you get out of your body. Right. So you we don't always know if your colonization is causing the illness because you naturally have there's plenty of healthy people out there who naturally have different types of aspergillus and cloud historian in their biofilms, in their mouth, in their gut.

That's when they kind of get out of control. We don't know that whole get out of control point or tips the scales. But in those instances I would take, you know, two or three months of doing like detox work after you properly are media and a lot of people get a lot better if a lot of people don't get a lot better at that point, that's when antifungals start to become beneficial. That's when you want to work to clear out what is in the body, but you want to make sure you're also doing that with things that are going to help grow and populate all the good bacteria that we want.

As soon as you clear out a niche in the body, that's like the countertop, the kitchen table. As soon as you clear off all the stuff on the kitchen table, that opens up another spot to put more mail down, put to take, you know, so when you start to clean out different niches of the got, you really want to make sure or even the biofilm throughout the body when you clean up niches, you want to make sure that you put the good guys in the blank spots. So, you know, then after you do that clearing out, that's when you can get really aggressive with replenishing those nutrients.

That's when you can get really aggressive with, you know, repeating the iron, the zinc, the B12, the folate. And I do want to remind people that there are a lot of nutrients that are naturally stored in the body. I believe we have upwards of like a year of B12 in our liver hoping our liver is functioning properly, but we have a D, e, k B12 iron and copper. Unfortunately, we don't hold on to our zinc. However, I give that information to folks. So that way when I say you want to wait a little bit to clear out anything in the body before giving these nutrients, I don't want people to panic and say, Oh, my God, I just I don't have enough those nutrients.

And, you know, like what's going to happen to me? It's like you probably have enough in storage or if you're really nervous that you could do minor supplementation. But I want it do like aggressive repeats until you clear out any of your your colonization infection. You know biofilm lingers. And your and you're doing this with herbs prescriptions. What is a combination? What are you rectum? Is it, you know, orals, injectables, I.V.? You know, I, I do oral. I do oral in my practice. I, I'm in rural Vermont.

You know, I don't I don't have a giant a giant clinic and all that kind of stuff. And I get good traction and I tend to get the fallout of folks and there's not tons of them, but I tend to get the follow to folks who have gone and done the IVs and it was too much for their body. So I tend to have I call it the oven met people, you know, I go around with my oven mitts on and support them little by little and small doses and work our way up. So yeah, it's mostly oral supplementation that I'm doing for people or we get creative, you know, transdermal or you know, suppositories or things like that.

Hope, Recovery, and How to Find Dr. Tessier 48:18

But when it comes to the bad naturopath, when it comes to antifungals and these things, I do the pharmaceutical, I do the pharmaceutical. There's always there's a time and a place, you know, and I think a lot of people think just because you're a natural path, you're going to be doing all these herbs. And there's so many times where I have found that doing the pharmaceutical has been so helpful. For instance, Antiparasitic regimens, since I'm so glad you have people on here talking about parasites, one of my favorite topics and is a severely overlooked I have just found personally that people tend to have more herx reactions, more at die off reactions, more mast cell triggering reactions from these herb combos that have so much going on rather than specific directed pharmaceutical intervention.

And your mileage may vary different strokes for different folks. People are going to have, you know, different things that resonate well with their body. But I have found that in the the beautiful population, you see the pharmaceuticals of that like a fine tipped pen, very specific, just really seemed to do really well, especially if you prep people for sets. The other thing, you know, you just. Yeah, that's the thing with supplements, too. I mean, you're going to Hertz if you aren't prepping people and we won't even touch Point Anti-Parasitic until they've done a month of prep, a month of prepping their drainage pathways and being able to excrete and open up their liver, their kidneys, their bowels everything.

Don't even touch Antiparasitic until you can do that. I agree. 110%. Same. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so we're wrapping up here. I would love to just open the floor to any final comments you have on how to how a message of hope would be wonderful. Oh, yeah. Also, I'd love for our audience to know how to reach you, how to find you, how to work with you. I'm sure there's people here that are waiting like when I found her, I found her. This is the one. How do they get you? So message of hope. Oh, my gosh. I mean, this is so important.

And I mentioned it earlier about, you know, your limbic system reaction and that fight or flight response. When you are in that fight or flight response and you have a really poor vagal tone, you you're going to get stuck in that. You're going to hold your immune system. And I don't even see you like there's no blaming language there. Like your situation is going to hold your immune system hostage and it's going to be very difficult to recover appropriately. Some people can do it, you know, but if we have a history of trauma or I mean, the illness itself is a physical trauma, you know, the loss of your personal possessions, the fact that the place that is now supposed to be safe is no longer safe, your home, the fact that maybe partners, friends, family don't understand your illness, it's that this process is traumatizing and we need to put a name to it and then we need to help people move through that, you know, so if you can find two or three people who stand by you and believe you and who are willing to laugh with you, cook with you, dance with you, like cuddle anything that's going to give you those those happy goosebumps and that's going to like give you that dopamine rush that is going to get you so far in these processes.

And it does take a lot of work. It takes so much work to to fight your way out of that that mold, isolation, darkness, whole process that we see. And so laugh. Like if I just laugh, laugh and laugh and hug it out and that's going to get you so far. It's going to get you so far. And so, you know, the message of hope is being hopeful. A message of hope is being hopeful. And it's possible. You know, I've gone through oh, my gosh, I've gone through, I think, upwards of five navigating processes of mold.

You know, I've done it four times in my home and one time in my office, which I just lost back in July as a result of. So, you know, I get it. I firsthand look at it. And so when I share that with you, I just, you know, keep your head up, keep moving, stay positive. It's you're going to get through the other side. There's going to be bumps along the way. You know. How do we find you? Yes, sorry about that. So how folks can find me? I have the handle of Life After Mold everywhere. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook.

So that's Life After Mold. YouTube also. And if you had to over to my website, I have a great little opt in there called my Mold Prevention 101 e-book, which is for free when you sign up for my newsletter and it gives you, you know, a really nice walkthrough of your entire home, of all the hot spots that could be causing mold issues. So definitely go check it out. And thank you guys for for tuning in. Oh, this has been wonderful. I want to thank you for your dedication to the patients that you work with and and just your willingness to come here and share your knowledge and really have a candid, honest, open discussion about mold.

It's been a pleasure. And until next time, everyone take good care. Bye now.