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Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC, has served thousands of patients as a Nurse Practitioner over the last 22 years. Her work in the health industry marries both traditional and functional medicine. Laura’s wellness programs help her high-performing clients boost energy, renew mental focus, feel great in their bodies, and be productive again.... Read More
Lauren Tessier, ND, is a practicing Naturopathic Physician licensed by the state of Vermont. Her practice Life After Mold in Waterbury, Vermont is the East Coast’s only formerly certified, CIRS-literate Naturopathic practice. Life After Mold services patients suffering from multi-symptom, multi system illness, complicated by co-morbid conditions such as MCS,... Read More
- Discover why mold and mycotoxin diseases are on the rise and how they affect your body
- Understand how mold and mycotoxins trigger silent inflammation and contribute to chronic diseases
- Gain insights into how mold and mycotoxins can lead to nutrient deficiencies
- This video is part of the Silent Killers Summit: Reversing The Root Cause Of Chronic Inflammatory Disease
Related Topics
Antifungal Resistance, Building Practices, Calcium Influx, Chronic Disease, Chronic Infections, Emfs, Environmental Toxins, Health, Inflammation, Lyme, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, Mitochondria, Mold, Mycotoxins, Nutrient Deficiencies, Nutrient Deficiency, Nutritional Immunity, Stress, Toxins, Traumas, Weather Patterns, Wi-fiLaura Frontiero, FNP-BC
Welcome back to the conversation and today I have Dr. Tessier. Hi, welcome.
Lauren Tessier, ND
I am so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
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 mycotoxicosis. 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 are mold and mycotoxin illnesses on the rise. What the heck is happening?
Lauren Tessier, ND
Yeah. So I think, I know that there’s a growing awareness. So usually with a growing awareness comes more and more people talking about it, more and more people seeking care for it, which is wonderful. I’m all for that. So I would say the growing awareness I think also what leads to some of the increase in diagnoses. But we also have to be mindful of building practices. So it’s this really cool study that was done another 2017 or 18 where they took a piece of drywall cut in a little circle popped it 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, the scary black mold, even though there are many black molds and it produced it with sterile water. And so, you know, drywall does have that paper backing that paper needs water production, right? You need water in paper production. So at the drywall factory, we’re doing wet paper to dry onto drywall and then it just comes pre-inoculate. It’s literally just add one 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 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 building practices right now.
The third construction thing that we do is everything has antifungals on it 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, are fluconazole, are 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 studs, your foundation, and anything that comes in contact with concrete. 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 like pick farmers, 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 like antibiotics and me and all that kind of stuff, like, sure, but hello antifungals in our food system. So I would have to say we have these growing issues with building practices, growing issues with antifungal resistance. You know, we have 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 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 100 years or something or so. With these shifts and changes also come these buildings’ inability to adapt because of their old building standards 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 last one is that it’s the treatment du jour, the diseases du jour of years past are failing. And so people are looking for like, what’s the thing? So, you know, in the nineties it was the Epstein-Barr virus. I remember watching Seinfeld and hearing them crack an EBV joke.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
Wait a minute. What?
Lauren Tessier, ND
And so, you know, the nineties 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 Lyme. That treatment didn’t work. And so I think people are kind of stumbling into the mold after all of these cool, interesting health issues aren’t their answer after MTHFR isn’t their answer. After 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.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
I have one more question. Yeah, what about EMFs?
Lauren Tessier, ND
I mean, what about them?
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
I mean is this part of the reason we’re seeing more mold illness? I mean, people’s bodies are, 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, is there anything out there on this topic?
Lauren Tessier, ND
You know, Dietrich Klinghardt. Dr. Klinghardt, a few years ago would 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 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 that everything is connected in the body and we know that folks who are 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, we turn off our Wi-Fi 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?
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
Absolutely, we teach that to our clients and in our courses to just shut off that router at night. Shut off, not even that. Shut off the breaker to your bedroom. I mean, we could go down there. 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 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?
Lauren Tessier, ND
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 an added disservice to ourselves because we’re shoving that stuff into life as a lysosome, 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 body’s defense, we do see that there are very key ways that mold and mycotoxins interfere with our nutrients.
For instance, we’ve seen that mycotoxins, ochratoxin, and citrinin actually, goes and sequester iron and it’s plus three charges if anyone’s nerdy enough to want to know about that which actually will prevent a host absorption of iron. And you know, iron’s a 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 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.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
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?
Lauren Tessier, ND
Right. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so that’s like iron. But then, everyone here, I mentioned earlier MTHFR and Methylenetetrahydrofolate, but there are thousands of snips that are important to you. It’s not just MTHFR but everyone knows about MTHFR 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 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 to come in and sit on it. So mycotoxins have the ability to interfere with that direct absorption 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 and gut tissue, we’re going to interfere with nutrient absorption there. And we have seen that aflatoxin, fumonisin, deoxynivalenol, and nivalenol toxin very much damage the ileum of the small intestines.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
Any nutrients that are absorbed through the ileum 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?
Lauren Tessier, ND
I would say so. I tend to when I end up dialoguing about these things. I really work to pull from, you know, 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 it. 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 have something to fall back on if people ever ask.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
Yes, for sure. So iron, B12 vitamins, can you throw out a couple of others that you have that data on?
Lauren Tessier, ND
Yeah, Zinc is another huge one.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
So important for our immune system.
Lauren Tessier, ND
At mitochondria too, right? So, Zinc, T-2 another mycotoxin directly reduces Zinc absorption in the body. T-2 is a trichothecene, I believe this one was studied by the like U.S. Army as a chemical warfare, bio, like you know these things 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 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 ochratoxin 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 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 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 ferritin is low. It’s the existential question. Chicken or the egg. Is their ferritin low because their body is trying to 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 physiological 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 infection.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
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 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 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.
Lauren Tessier, ND
But it’s not just Western medicine, Laura. Nutritional immunity is not something that’s taught in even Naturopathic Medical School. It’s not Tai as like a core component of these things, you know. So there’s just a lot of stuff that ends up getting lost. So, the reason why I hop in there so aggressively is to say that is like people can’t blame themselves for the information that 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.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
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. 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 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 dive even deeper into this discussion. We’re going to talk about solutions. We’re going to talk about how mold 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 dive right back in. So, Dr. Tessier, I love now to have you link up. Why mold and mycotoxins 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?
Lauren Tessier, ND
Right. Right. So before we hop 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 MYCO as in fungi. myco rather than micro MICRO, people kind of, and I just like getting clear. I’m not trying to be snotty.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
This is important. I’ve also heard people say miko or mito toxins.
Lauren Tessier, ND
Yeah. I’m sure there are mitochondrial toxins. I’m sure there’s a whole entire classification in. 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 defense from whatever else is in their environment. So mycotoxins when it comes to, you know, how, why they’re doing this whole silent on unsuspecting inflammation, it really comes down to their mechanism of action. A mechanism action is 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 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. 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 membranes. And guess what? Our mitochondria have even more lipids in their membrane, a double lipid 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. 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 having 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 hormone 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, and 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 your TH2, helper cells, and your Tregs 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 grew up in the nineties, I always think of Warren G. They’re the regulators.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
That’s right. Regulate, go look up the song, everyone, if you don’t know.
Lauren Tessier, ND
Go get an education on that. And so immune system confusion so they decrease the body’s immune system’s ability to regulate itself in all those checks and balances and what they further do is they increase coding 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 as 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, two subsets of our T helper cells our Th17 and our Th1. 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 silent inflammation. 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 butt everywhere, our skin, those polysaccharides can cause a histamine response that can cause that kind of mast cell activation. As 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, when it comes to mold and mycotoxins, I think personally that they are the backbone of just the silent illness that is happening to everyone right now.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
You know, it was a really fascinating science lesson. And I know people are going to want to go back and remind.
Lauren Tessier, ND
Sorry, everybody.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
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 interesting way and in relation to parasites. So, you know, we have talks on this summit about parasites and 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, take 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’s 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?
Lauren Tessier, ND
It’s very poetic. Very poetic. Also, I can’t help but think of the recent show 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 Halloween-ish time and I’m in the spirit but in one of the scenes they had folks 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 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,
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
I’ve been thinking about that.
Lauren Tessier, ND
So, if you’re 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 out of moving and going out and seeing people. It’s isolating, being sedentary, like it’s keeping you away through your symptomology of all these things that you really should be doing for optimal health. So it’s almost like the backward concept of the 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.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
Yeah, it is. So I’m sorry. I know we are 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 lay some symptoms while we talk about that, like how do you know you have it and what’s the solution? 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, in 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.
Lauren Tessier, ND
So this is something that’s eating away at me, no pun intended, given our conversation is that not all fungi are going to kill you. Like, I really want to pay homage at the altar of fungi to say, you know, we have wonderful food sources. We use them in our food, we use them in our drug development. And, you know, we can but, leaving that whole concept alone, but we use it in our drug development, 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 an existential spiritual perspective. You know, we know that galactomyces can be a really, really nice binder as we know that, saccharomyces can help with balancing the gut floor. 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.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
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 should have said that with my forest floor.
Lauren Tessier, ND
All right. As I go off on a Hannibal Lecter journey. So anyway, you know, you and me both. So, you know, when folks come into me when I typically see them, the biggest complaint is typically fatigue, brain fog, cognitive issues. And for little ones, because little ones tend to express themselves differently, and have a different grasp of their body, we tend to see more digestive stuff and maybe some of the ADDD behavioral stuff that might flow as a result of neuroinflammation. And so if we kind of step back and we think about how these are impacting the body systems. 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 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 microglial activation, they inflame the astrocytes, they get everything all pissed off, and they can cause localized inflammation, and swelling in the brain, and that can kind of cause that downstream neurocognition effects. The other thing about mycotoxins aside from just inhalation into the systemic circulation, eating into the systemic circulation, you also have your olfactory bulb, your little piece of nerve that sticks down like a little pendulum through 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 is backed by science. We have seen mycotoxins have delivered into the nose causing necrotic damage in animals 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 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 oil-slick highway that is your nervous system. And if we wanted to take that step further when we get colonized in our gut, which can happen from eating or maybe post nasal drip from our sinuses going down into our gut, the fungi, and mycotoxins in our gut can cause local inflammation, can cause some of that leaky gut dysbiosis issue. And then, lo and behold, you have two to three 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. So I don’t do too much dialog about the correlation of mycotoxins to cancer. But in the literature, the aflatoxin, ochratoxin 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 everywhere. Once it gets in, it’s everywhere. But there are so many things that you can do about it.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
So let’s talk about what we can do about it. Like strategies. I’d love our audience to walk away with some strategies for 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.
Lauren Tessier, ND
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 are so many people that as soon as they address their home appropriately, all their stuff from 10, 20 years improves. And I always tell people to 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.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
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.
Lauren Tessier, ND
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 spray an enzyme and. Oh, well, guess what? That brings down the spores 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, but you then need to repair the intrusion. Whatever caused that dampness, whether it was a direct leak, whether it was a sweating toilet tank 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 is 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 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, Lazy 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 remediation, say, do I need 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 a 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.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
Nope. 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 expert. Other things that need to happen. So reducing exposure, reducing exposure, environment. Now how do you get out of your body?
Lauren Tessier, ND
How you get out of your body. Right. We don’t always know if your colonization is causing the illness because you naturally have there are plenty of healthy people out there who naturally have different types of Aspergillus and Cladosporium in their biofilms, in their mouth, and 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 what tips the scales. But in those instances, I would take two or three months of doing detox work after you properly remediated 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. Cause 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, repleting 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 of 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 to do like aggressive repletes until you clear out any of your colonization infections, biofilm lingers.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
And you’re doing this with herbs prescriptions. What is a combination? What are you rectum? Is it, you know, orals, injectables, I.V.?
Lauren Tessier, ND
You know, I do oral. I do oral in my practice. I’m in rural Vermont. You know, I don’t have 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 mitts 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 transdermal or you know, suppositories or things like that. 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 are 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 severely overlooked I have just found personally that people tend to have more herx reactions, more at die-off reactions, more mass cell triggering reactions from these herb combos that have so much going on rather than specific directed pharmaceutical intervention. And your mileage may vary in different strokes for different folks. People are going to have, you know, different things that resonate well with their bodies. But I have found that in 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, that’s the other thing.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
Yeah, that’s the thing with supplements, too. I mean, you’re going to herx 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. Mm hmm.
Lauren Tessier, ND
I agree. 110%. Same. Yeah.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
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, and how to work with you. I’m sure there are people here that are waiting like when I found her, I found her. This is the one. How do they get you?
Lauren Tessier, ND
So message of hope. Oh, my gosh. I mean, this is so important. And I mentioned it earlier about 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’re going to get stuck in that. You’re going to hold your immune system. And I don’t even say 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 but if we have a history of trauma or I mean, the illness itself is 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. 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 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 fight your way out of 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. 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 that. 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.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
How do we find you?
Lauren Tessier, ND
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 (@lifeaftermold). YouTube also. And if you had to over to my website(lifeaftermold.com), I have a great little opt-in there called My Mold Prevention 1 to 1 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 tuning in.
Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC
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.
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