My Moldy Journey

Introduction and Dave's Mold Recovery Story 0:00

Welcome, everyone. I'm thrilled and honored to interview my dear friend and colleague, Dave Astbury, and we're going to be taking a journey in his own journey. On how he really recovered from mycotoxins and mold illness. So welcome, Dave. I'm really excited to interview you today. And I'm happy to be here for you. Thank you. Thank you. So this is something that you really are not only passionate about, but I am so grateful that you've spent a lot of your career educating people about the dangers of mold and mycotoxins.

You created the documentary. You know, your bulletproof coffee. Really, you know, popularized the idea of that. We could be ingesting mycotoxins and how to navigate that. And so the people who are listening to this summit are not only potential people who this is a new topic, or patients who are still in the throes of their journey. And recovering from mold illness. And then physicians, always, you know, we're always looking for new tools and how to treat patients and get better and better at our, at recovering more quickly when patients come to see us.

And so I would love us, if you don't mind, just to take a moment. And, how did your journey into biohacking really start with uncover ING that mold and mycotoxins were really making you sick? I grew up in a basement that had been flooded, and we didn't know anything about mold back in the 70s, and 80s, and all I knew was I had tons of symptoms and no one could figure it out and went to allergist after allergist and I had, strep throat over and over and asthma and allergies and behavioral disorders, all this stuff that we know now is, is tied with it.

I had these nosebleeds ten times a day. It was just a chronic thing and easy bruising. Which is another very common sign of environmental toxic mold exposure. And eventually the allergist said, we think you're allergic to cockroaches and kapok, which is a filling for life vests in the 70s. And everything else is fine. So it just didn't make any sense. And we moved. But I was always somehow around mold and I'd get sometimes a little better, sometimes a bit worse. But chronic pain and inflammation is just how things were.

Mold also makes you angry. It makes it harder to, harder to control your emotions. So you tend to get a mold rage. So not a really good set up. And I finally said, I'm going to get on top of this. I'm just in pain all the time. I'm in my mid 20s and I'm noticing the chronic fatigue syndrome. I've been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and all the risks, all the diseases that bring on risk as you age. I already have them. I'm not even 30. Arthritis is. I'm high risk of stroke and heart attack. Prediabetes.

You know, the list just goes on and on. And I went to my normal doctor and he basically said, maybe he's trying to lose some weight. I'm like, I worked out an hour and a half a day, six days a week for a year and a half. I don't lose any weight. And I was on a low fat, low calorie diet. He's looked at me like, gal liar. You know you're eating Snickers bars the whole time. I'm like, okay, then I said, vitamin C makes me feel better. He said, stop, it'll kill you. And I said, what about Linus Pauling?

And so Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes, took 90g of vitamin C a day. And the doctor looks at me, he goes, Linus who? And I said, you're fired. And I walked out of his office. I didn't pay him, and it was on my credit report for seven years, but it was worth it. And, for four years I studied everything. And I said, I have one of these seven things going on, including I had yeast, but not toxic mold on my list of things. And I went into a functional medicine doctor before we really use that name, is someone called an ortho molecular doctor, but an anti-aging doctor.

And he said, I was a Johns Hopkins ENT surgeon. My patients didn't get better, so I learned all the weird stuff I do some homeopathy, I do a lot of nutritional interventions. I do intravenous vitamin C and other things. My patients get better. No one sees me more than three times. They've been here ten times. I think I want to order an HIV test for you. I don't think you have HIV, but you're not getting better the way everyone else does. And it's driving me nuts because, you know, I am a master of my craft and, it turns out this is the guy who actually was the first person to make liposomal glutathione on a commercially.

So this is someone who really known who was doing his name was Tim Gilford. And, well, one thing led to another. And finally he said, well, you don't have HIV, but I'm going to test you for allergies to mold. And what do you know? It came back and it said you're allergic to eight of the top ten most toxic species. So I'm like, Now I have proof of exposure and proof that my immune system is reacting this way. Right. And it's such a common problem in homes, especially in Northern California, where I was at the time, that that was the smoking gun that led me to really start to understand molds.

And now I filmed a documentary on it, and I've written a lot about it and helped to raise awareness of how important it is. And that story is unfortunately all too common that a lot of my patients have gone through it as well. And I think, again, we're doing a lot of education. But I'd love to hear your story about how, you know, we look at when we talk about mold and mycotoxins and how they affect us physically. You mentioned this allergic phenomenon. So looking at allergy, the mold. So that's one way to look at immune reactivity.

But there's also other ways to understand how mold is affecting us physically. And creating this cascade of one and all of these symptoms. And so, I would love for you to, let us know. Did you have any other tests once you saw that this your body was having this allergic reaction where the other tests that, gave you more and more of a deeper understanding of that. This was, in fact, a lot of your symptoms were due to mold.

Testing, Exposure Clues, and Treatment Basics 5:47

Well, it's mystifying, because mold can have different symptoms for different people, right? So and one day it says the other day it's that, if you're living in a moldy house, though, you're always exposed to it. And the biggest thing there is, you go on vacation, everything's better. You come home, it gets worse. So that is probably the single biggest thing someone who's not sure can do that's relatively free. You can also get something called an early test, an environmental relative mold index test.

And what this will do is it will measure the mold inside your house versus the mold outside your house and tell you, in my case, one of the times when a relapse of symptoms from a leaky dishwasher, we had it replaced. There was water that had been leaking for a long time, released a bunch of mold, and my dogs stopped eating. And, you know, my brain just instantly foggy, my gut lining shed. But I didn't know what was going on. I just felt like a zombie. Like I was hung over all the time. And when you get mold, especially something like that, everything feels like it's just too much work.

It's it's like walking through mud all the time and just doing the basics of making a decision to go to another place is like, oh, it's just too much. I'll just lay here. So it kind of turns you into a bump on a log. When you get out of an environment like that, it it's a big deal. The other thing that works, though, and so at that time, 88 times more Penicillium indoors and outdoors. So we knew we had that plus a bunch of other, probably worse ones. But that was the dominant one. I've also had Starkey Buttress in another house where I live, which really causes long term neurological harm until you recover.

Anyone who tells you that anything going on with you is permanent or irreversible is just an idiot. Just to be really clear, I am younger now at 48 than I was at 28. And like in every way that matters and metabolically and cognitively and mentally I get it's it's entirely possible what they mean is given what I've been taught, I don't know how to do it. And and that's the only thing so impossible or impermanent medically. No way your body can do all sorts of stuff that you wouldn't even imagine.

So in my case, I would say one of the other big tests is you can take activated charcoal and maybe a pharmaceutical called College Diamine. And if you take that and you feel much better in a day or two, you're probably binding up some toxins. Right. But ideally you could get a test that says what's going on. And there's a variety of lab tests you can get. But again, it's increasing money. So I'll get an air test. You know, there's 400 bucks, get a lab test, there's 500 bucks, and you got to pay a doctor to go see all this stuff.

At a really good doctor like you. You still have to make a living, right? So all of a sudden, you're saying I feel like crap all the time? It's probably affecting my income. It's affecting my career. It's affecting my family. Oh, and I'm going to spend a couple thousand dollars to know what's going on. Yeah, and is your insurance going to come in to pay for it? Probably not. I spent $300,000 getting better. I'm lucky I was in a position to do that. It would have cost me 50,000 had I known. Most of what I know now, I know it cost me 5000.

Had I known exactly what to do with what you can do today, literally, if you get a lab test that says you have mold toxins in your body and you're having a response to them, then you bind the toxins and you go through the treatment protocols that we now understand. It is within reason to get better quickly. And I've helped. I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of people go through that, just with the knowledge and some conversations here and there. So it's it's not meant to be a lifelong problem.

It might take you a year to get all the way better, but it should take you a couple months to start feeling way better than you have in a long time. Yeah. No. Great info and I'm going to pick your brain because probably many people, are listening and maybe spend $300,000 or more, unfortunately on trying to get to the root of their illness. And so $5,000 sounds like a great plane, you know, for, you know, some people that, get better. And so you mentioned, you know, again, you know, we reiterate this a lot in the summit, right?

If you have a known mold exposure and you're sick, you have to get out of the mold. Obviously you I think, agree to that. And then once you're out of the mold, how do you really, get the mold out of your system and undo the inflammatory cascade that it creates in the body? So you mentioned binders like charcoal and Calistoga. I mean, you kind of already alluded to like the sample glutathione and but what are some of your other like when you think about your recovery, what were some of the most meaningful things that you did?

One of the things that made the biggest difference for me was, ozone therapy. And what mold does, if you think about it, your body is a collection of cells and there's a lot of them in there. And inside the cells, there's ancient bacteria called mitochondria, and there's way more of them than there are cells in your body. And we call them the power plants of your cells, but they're actually environmental sensors that also make hormones and make electricity. Right. And they make other proteins and signaling molecules.

So they're basically factories looking at the world around you going, should I make energy? Should I make something else? Should I make an inflammatory compound? What do I do? And when enough of them make enough decisions, we emergent behaviors that you're more you right. So do I feel stressed or not feel stress I mean I energize them and I energize. And the ancient enemy of bacteria is mold. If you don't believe me, what is penicillin? It is a mold toxin. Purified. So for 2 billion years, molds and bacteria have been at war.

And your body is, feeling attacked and your mitochondria are damaged by mold toxins. What ozone therapy does is ozone therapy, gives a signal to the mitochondria that says you get you better wake up. It actually donates electrons to them so they can start doing more. And it also tells them you need to turn on your antioxidant defenses, even if they've been disabled by the mold. And suddenly your mitochondria become stronger. And I remember very well the first time I learned ozone therapy about 20 years ago, I learned from an 88 year old dentist who had been using it in his medical practice for a long time.

It took me an after hours and said, here's all the gear works. You can buy your own and, you can do it at home rectally or vaginally. And when you go to an office, you do it intravenously, usually. But any of them is good, and IV is sort of the gold standard. What I did is I went home, I bought the machine, and I use it, and I felt like myself for five minutes that first day, like, wow. That was great. And the next day I did it and I talked myself for eight minutes and it just kept going up. And I did it every night for about 18 months, and it restored my biology and I was binding toxins.

And I went on a course of antifungal therapy, and I got rid of all the mold in my environment, and I stopped eating omega six fats, and they went on the bulletproof diet. Even though didn't have a name. Then you eat a lot of saturated fats, and I didn't at the time know about intermittent fasting, but if I'd known, I would have done that as well. But that's kind of how I did it. Yeah, those are all great tools and a lot of the therapies myself and Doctor Gordon and the FSA both, use as well. We have some in the office.

We just got actually a ten pass. I've been using UVB and major auto heme for a while, but, yeah, ozone is one of those really wonderful treatments that there's so much for the body. So, yeah, incorporating that in your recovery. Binders solidify on antifungals sometimes, get missed, I feel like. So sometimes I feel like people don't, really understand how mold can colonize in the body and the sinuses and the GI tract also, it's immunosuppressive as well.

Ozone Therapy, Binders, and Core Recovery Tools 13:10

And so then you can have yeast overgrowth or dysbiosis in other ways, or other, other infections can thrive when you have immunosuppression. And so no, I think those are all great pearls. And one of the things that I see a lot in the mold, community, in the mold illness community is this, sensitivity that develops. And so it's a lot of different reasons why this develops, but mold, sensitive patients also tempted to be, like, chemically sensitive. They tend to be the canary in the coal mine that they can walk into a building and, you know, smell either the, you know, the fragrance or the, the mold right away.

And it can be really, you know, really harmful to their body. It can be highly neurotoxic and take them down. And so I know that you do a lot of work educating people on neurofeedback and neuroplasticity. And so did that have also a component in your healing, looking at how you have to rewire your brain to the three, that has been so harmful to it, in the past? Yeah. Here's the thing. Your body is not equipped to recognize these mold toxins. They're very small molecular weight. And in fact, some of the more common ones look a lot like cholesterol.

And your body likes cholesterol. So what happens is that your immune system's looking around for something going, I know something's messing with me, but I can't see it, so I'm going to find something that's probably it, and I'm going to latch on to that. And I'm going to tell myself that that's what's causing it, so I can have something to react to. So most people who have chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia or Lyme disease, in my experience, which is pretty deep, they have mold exposure. And maybe 10% of people who think they have Lyme have Lyme.

Everyone who has chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. It's funny, you get rid of mold in the environment, put them on an anti mold therapy. They don't have chronic fatigue syndrome anymore. It's like, who would have thought. So this is something that I would like to see more out there. But part of this too is that you become, Well, let's put it this way. It's not even you. It's the the your immune system has its own consciousness and intelligence that is teachable. And there's a whole field called psycho neuro immunology that proves what I'm saying is real, like, it's an actual field of science.

So there's no, you know, airy fairy stuff in there. And that system says, okay, there's a threat, and I'm going to trigger, an appropriate response. Unfortunately, it's mismatch what you can do with breathing exercises, somatic therapy and 40 Years of Zen is my neurofeedback company, where I've done this my own work and I bring your senior executives through, and there's a reset process you go through where you are reactive, whether it's your reactive, because I smelled something that I didn't want to smell, perfume or some kind of chemical sensitivity, or my boss yelled at me, there's people who sales are you heart rate goes up and you get all, it's the same process.

And so what you do is you just teach the body to teach the nervous system, and all of this is unconscious. It's not you deciding do any of this, you teach it. Hey, there's no need to react to that. It's not. It's not protecting you anymore. In the meantime, though, until you realize mold is a problem, until you remove it from your environment, it actually is serving you. It's telling you, I don't know what it is, but there's probably something that's going to kill you in here. Get out. Right. And that's actually really good. So same thing.

You touch a hot stove, you have to think, oh, is it hot? Maybe I should move my hand. No, your hand moves and then you take credit for it. It's the same system. It's it's trying to help you. So you end up for giving the inflammatory response unit, for giving them all. Do you end up letting this government for giving isn't like a cognitive I forgive you, you know, it seems to me, it's a neurological thing you do to tell the body, don't hold that as a threat, because I'm not going to do that to you anymore.

Yeah. No I think that's a great point. And I often a lot on my patients and say oh my genetics are bad or I'm not a good detox or, and I'm so sensitive I'm like honestly I think your body is actually, you know, doing the right thing. It's sending the alarm signal when you're sending around something that's highly neurotoxic, that we really haven't been equipped to deal with. And so, you know, I think the, you know, my patients are, you know, you know, I mentioned the canary in the coal mine who they they're having inappropriate responses.

And I'm really toxic world, you know. So yeah. So yeah I think that's a great point. And you know, when I think about sensitivity, you know, with more patients as well, I think about the relationship with mold and mast cells. And so again, mast cells have, become more mainstream, this kind of mast cell connection with the sensitivity. And I always think, okay, what's the underlying cause? It's making these mast cells so hyper vigilant and hyper excitable, to readily release histamine. And so mold in our community is a big driver to that.

And so what has your experience been with looking at the connection with mold, mycotoxins, mast cells, in your healing process? I think most people who are exposed to mold and working on recovering do better on a mast cell, protocol that desensitize eases their mast cells. So you can look at these things called, toll like receptors, or, tcrs. And they're the things that control whether mast cells get turned on or get turned off. I'm getting distracted because there's two giant buzzards, like six foot wingspan, six feet from my window.

All right. They flew away, I think. Got they have a message for you. Yeah. Hopefully. Hopefully they, hopefully they just killed some, some mold. That's what I'm going to say. Well, that was pretty impressive. That you don't see that that often. All right. So these toe like receptors, they trigger mast cells. So they're looking for, like they're sort of the, the little firewall thing they're looking for. Looking for something they can alert on. Oh, look, that looks like a threat. And if so, turn on mast cells and people think, oh, my cells.

They release histamine when they do granulated, you know, inflammatory response and all that, but they make a whole bunch of bad inflammatory compounds. So if you can say, I'm going to turn down the sensitivity of the mast cells so the cell like receptors might get triggered. But the mast cells just don't activate as much. You have a lot less symptoms. So it's amazing. Really heavy duty drugs like Claritin Pepcid oftentimes help with mold sensitivity. Which is pretty cool, right. And, you know, especially with Pepcid, you're going to have a Rex gut if you have mold and Pepcid, make sure got worse unless you take the right digestive supplements when you eat, in which case you can actually take Pepcid

Sensitivity, Mast Cells, and Food Triggers 19:48

relatively safely. And there's natural compounds like low dose vitamin C. Like quercetin that work reasonably well. And a lot of people who heal from mold do it without controlling their mast cells. But I think that there's something to be said for that as an addition to more modern protocols, just so you can feel good. A lot of people also historically said, oh, you're going to feel like crap. You're going to have a hard time or reaction. And that's just how it is. And know most people who have mold also have families or want to have families or have jobs and have lives.

It's entirely possible to be exposed to mold and be highly functional while you're healing. It might take work, and it's okay if you have some days that aren't good, but I guarantee you that with things like glutathione with binders, things like ozone, things like, I don't know, this weird thing like some this guy puts butter in his coffee. They're in bulletproof coffee. There are lots of things you can use that are performance enhancers, including things like modafinil, which is a narcolepsy drug which can work wonderfully.

Look, you have a right to feel good while you recover, right? You don't have to suffer. You probably will some, but you can suffer way less than you think. And if your doctor won't help you feel functional while you're recovering, it's okay to say no. I'm asking you to help me on this. And you know, if you try some some prescription, some numbers from seven, nothing works. But you need a lot of rest. But quite often it it can come down to I'm not eating the wrong stuff and eating the right stuff.

And one of the things that happens, people get sensitized through their skin, through their their tear ducts, through their sinuses. They oftentimes will be more sensitive in food as well. I think this is a much bigger problem than people realize. One of the reasons I made Bulletproof Coffee, and I'm not trying to sell it at all here, but just a big company. I don't even run bulletproof anymore. I'm just the founder. And, I was the first person to bring mold free coffee to the market. Because I realized when I drink coffee, it made me about an hour later, anxious and jittery and cranky, and it would give me food cravings.

So I quit coffee for five years that I didn't like. And, I went and I traveled around. I came back to the U.S and I had a cup of coffee and I felt fine. I'm like, I'm fixed, I'm not allergic to coffee. And the next day I had another cup of coffee from a different company and I had all the symptoms. Again, I'm like, wait, I didn't get a coffee allergy overnight. It was different coffee. And I did all the research. It turns out that in most of the world, there are legal limits for the, for the amount of mold allowed in coffee.

In fact, there are for many foods in the U.S. and Canada. There are no standards at all. So when coffee's illegal to sell in China, yes, there are mold standards in China we don't have in the US or in Japan or in Europe or in most of South America. They take all that coffee and they send it to coffee companies here, and then we drink it and then we get cranky. So for me, that coffee was just like disabling. I don't feel good to this day. I don't feel great if I drink coffee. Most coffee and so I develop lab testing standards and coffee production standards that minimize mold fermentation during the green coffee process.

And these toxins. Unfortunately survive roasting so and brewing so. And I didn't make up 34 studies. Back up what I just said. And if that's one thing with a peanut butter, peanut butter is a known source of mold. In fact, it's a common source of aflatoxin. There's some people reacting to mold that's in coffee or mold that's in their food. And when you look at something like the Bulletproof Diet roadmap, which is the the thing that I, I made that goes along with my diet recommendations. My guy's eating foods that are high risk of mold, like Brazil nuts.

It's probably not good for anyone. In fact, I could show you studies for that. But for people who've been exposed in their homes, it can be disabling or profoundly make you worse. So then you realize, wait, you mean there's a difference between this meal and that? And they both say the same thing? Another example here, Christine, a lot of people don't know about this, even in the mold community, but they know a lot about it. In Russia, there's something called Alton area brassica. And this is a mold that grows on cabbage and broccoli and related things whenever they're wet and cool.

So Russia wet and cool, they know more about it. If you get a lot of organic California cauliflower and broccoli in mid-winter and you eat it in the next morning, and even that night, you're like, oh, I have my guts off and my joints hurt, and I'm kind of seeing colors of it all turn areas because it alters your perception. Right? It's especially I live in the Pacific Northwest. Winter veggies are a problem. That's why we used to make sauerkraut all winter. You couldn't grow them in the winter, right?

So we do have mold in our food way more than we know about. And it's more of a trigger for people who've been exposed in their environments. Yeah. I think that still gets under recognized and overlooked when we're putting together more protocols. We do see these patients have like the high degree of sensitivity and a lot of, food reactions. But you know, looking at it from this layer and even, you know, some of the mycotoxins testing, that we can do through the urine and looking at, exposure and how people, you know, their mycotoxins burden, some of it, has gotten poo poohed because of not been able to differentiate, you know, foods versus environment.

But hey, it's all, you know, they're all roots of exposure to mycotoxins. So we have to look at environment and, you know, foods more often. Did you do your own mycotoxins testing in your journey or was that available at the time? I've done urine, for sure. And you can look at blood. I'm a fan of of my, my co lab. I like their approach because they're looking at, an immune response to toxins as well as to the mold itself. So you can have, someone who's not being currently exposed but has an onboard infection and things like that.

So there's a toxicology angle to it that's different than biology. And then there's, the Great Plains, the urinary things. The question about urinary is it'll measure whether you're excreting it, but are you excreting it from stores in the body or from environmental exposure? But I find that if you were to pair, any of the biological screens with what's in your environment and you have a correlation, you know, there's an issue, I agree, you know, that's a good point. And, you know, I think also, you know, when we think about mold and how it affects, the body, especially if people had been, in a highly toxic environment, how it can, colonize the sinuses.

I see a lot of, you know, chronic sinusitis and chronic sinus issues. And so not only, you know, getting out of the mold, you know, step one, but also making sure that the sinuses are irrigated, as well. What were some of your sinus hacks? Did you have anything? Yeah. Yeah, I, I had Mark Johns, the multiple antibiotic resistant, coagulated negative bacteria. And if you think about it makes sense. So the bacteria in your body like we're getting attacked by this mold which is an antibiotic in the environment.

So we're going to make a biofilm to protect ourselves which then secretes bacterial toxins. Right next to the brain. So what works really well for that, is, colloidal silver, and sometimes antibiotic. There's nothing wrong with the antibiotics in a nasal spray you want. And then, sometimes EDTA to break it down. I've also used amphotericin B nasal spray, and I statine nasal spray. These are antifungal drugs if there's actual fungus up there. But one of the most, actually, two of the most powerful things are first, I call it the bulletproof sinus rinse.

And you can Google that Dave aspect comments on my page. What you do is you take warm water. With sea salt

Sinus, Oral, and Gut Support 27:18

and a few drops of iodine in it, which is really important. And instead of doing like the neti pot, which doesn't work as well, you bend forward at the waist like a dippy bird, so your nose is pointed at the floor, and then you sniff through the nose and you won't choke on it. You're just drinking it through your nose like a straw, and it'll come up in the back of your mouth without making you gag, and it'll fill your mouth with it. And it's that suction and the flow that really works. And then you basically pull your head out of the bowl and spit it in the sink.

And you do that a few times. That works incredibly well. And then you follow it up with whatever medication you have. That's one. The other one is with the right, ozone equipment. It's it's very important you don't breathe ozone gas. It's terrible for you. But if you really want to fix your sinuses, there's nothing like ozone gas in the sinuses. So I use you, hold your breath and usually work with a doctor. You take a syringe and you squirt low strength ozone gas in one nostril, and it'll percolate all up inside your sinuses.

You feel it get all warm and all this, and then you breathe out through the nose, and then you breathe in clean air through the mouth. So that way you never inhale the ozone. But you've now used ozone gas to get way deep in the sinuses where you can really not get liquid. And that is a wonderful way to make yourself feel better. It's ridiculous. Just don't breathe ozone gas. It is not okay to breathe it. You can put it in any other hole, but not the lungs. Thank you for that public service announcement.

It's important. Yeah. Now it is important that we use, sinus, you know, nasal ozone as well. And. Yeah, that's something we just try to hit home because again, you'll know very quickly that it's not good for your lungs if you ever inhale it. So. Yeah. But no, I haven't tried the, the iodine rinse. You know, we use different salt solutions or, xylitol, even our different probiotic washes. But, you know, iodine that, we do the nebulizer a lot with iodine for different things, but, now I'll have to try that.

I'll have to share that recipe, and I'll let you know how that goes. It works. And you can also, you can do hydrogen peroxide. You can nebulizer that, and that appears to be really good for your lungs as well. The other thing I would say, if people are dealing with strep throat, there are now probiotics that are positive strep that eat bad strep. They're healthy forms of strep throat that actually live in the mouth. And what we're learning is that everything happening in your gut is a reflection of what's happening in your mouth.

So if you have gingivitis, you're going to have gut problems. And strangely enough, people with toxic mold very commonly, whether it's an infection or more likely in their environment, they commonly have bleeding gums and gingivitis. It's a sign of systemic inflammation. And you can look for that. What did I do that caused me to get swollen and bleeding gums? And when your oral health is better, your gut health is better. And when you have bad mold, you get sinus problems with bacteria, you get oral problems with bacteria, you get gut problems that don't work.

And it's a systemic problem. Yeah. No that's a great point. And we see a lot of patients too who might have what we would call like a tonsil interference field or even have tonsils scars that you know history of strep in their life. And that tissue becomes inflamed or infected and that can be a, a huge obstacle that I've included attic drainage or also it's top of the gall or the gut associated lymphatic tissue. So it's like the gut brain kind of connection there. So just keeping that tissue really healthy, or inflow in is really important.

Do you have a strep probiotic strain that you like a product that you like or. Yeah. Bliss. Bliss probiotics. There I think it's called m k c the m k 12 room Kate. They have actually two different ones for gingivitis and one is for strep. And the guy who did it studies strep throat for 30 years because he had really bad strep throat and found him. There's a healthy strep throat that fights the bad streptococcus. And if you dig deep, we also have something called Clostridium difficile, which isn't the problem for most mold people in this.

They're near death anyway, but it's a common hospital GI thing. Well, there's a healthy strain of probiotic clostridium that'll push out the toxic stuff. So you find that you can manage these things, but starting in the mouth is a good idea. So if you have chronic strep throat or chronic sinusitis, you probably have mold as a trigger for that. And I would say look at using a probiotic orally and then do all the mold stuff to get rid of the mold. And magically, you shouldn't have to live through 15 years of antibiotic therapy like I did.

I know right. It's like the chicken or the egg. When you're in this journey you know it's like you either are misdiagnosed and then also all the immune suppression. So you have all this bacterial overgrowth and dysbiosis. But you know it always comes back. You know as we learn more and more about the microbiome, it's like let the let the bugs hash it out. Right. Get the, you know, the right bugs in the right conditions to really allow our microbiome, to thrive because it has so much to do with our regulation of our immune system.

Right. So, so yeah, I like that idea. And that's really, you know, aligned with naturopathy philosophy and biological medicine, you know, looking at the microbiomes in the body. You know, a lot of I'm learning some tips. So thank you. I'm going to be filling my test kit with some new products after, today to check them out. So, Dave, you touched on the sinus and the new, you know, related that obviously the proximity to the brain and there's many mechanisms that mold can inflame the brain. But when we think about the sinuses and the, proximity, proximity to the hypothalamus and the pituitary in your journey, did this affect, sleep hormones?

How how did all this go hand in hand for you? Everyone in the toxic mold is going to have sleep problems universally. You're going to wake up and feel like you didn't sleep. A very common sign of a new exposure as you move into new house or there's a water leak in your house is vivid, strange nightmares. I remember when I moved into a condo many years ago, the person I was living with, she started having vivid nightmares, including one to the point where she got up in the middle of the night, accuse me of doing random things that I could not have possibly done, like flipping lights on and off and screaming.

And I don't even know. It didn't make any sense. And I'm just sitting there sort of going, what just happened? And she stormed out of the house with the car keys, and I'm like, what just happened? And she came in two hours later and said, what happened? I woke up in the car. It was a waking nightmare. Things. I didn't know it because our eyes are open. She was talking, but she was asleep the whole time. And that's what mold does. And it turns out the wall in our bedroom on stack mattress.

Sleep, Hormones, and Cognitive Effects 33:48

Right. And so that's an extreme example. But, you know, people twitching, kicking, restless leg syndrome, weird dreams. It's a it's a big deal. So sleep is a major thing. And then hormone disruption they make xeno estrogens. These molds not all species do. It depends what you have. But my very favorite one of the hormone disruptors is called Zarrella known. And the reason that's my favorite is it's the thing that proves that calories in, calories out doesn't work because industrial drug companies collect zero unknown, which is a thousand times more estrogenic than human estrogen.

Then they make pellets of it, and they put the pellets in cows ears industrially. And as the mycotoxins melts into the tympanic membrane, it enters circulation, becomes a part of the cows of fat, and then the cow gets fat on 30% less calories. Wow. I know if a drug can make you fat on 30% less calories, calories in, calories out is fundamentally disproven. We broke that. It doesn't exist. Okay? And this is why if you're like I was and you're you're in mold and you can't lose weight no matter what you do, it's because it's not about the calories.

And the less you eat, the worse you're going to feel because you're already stressed and now you're stressed because not getting enough energy, your body's not gonna let go of the fat because of the hormone signal from the mold. So serotonin causes you to put on fat like no one's business, and it puts it throughout your body. Fat around the organs, fat in the liver. So, yeah, you got to watch out for the hormone problems with guys. Erectile dysfunction. Hair loss, with women, monthly cycle problems, infertility, problems with sperm motility.

All of these are tied. And there are also direct studies to rates of calcification, to cardiovascular disease, to diabetes and to cancer, all tied to environmental molds. And, a shout out to a guy who's no longer with us, a W.H.O. researcher who spent 17 years putting together the research and the story behind this. His name was Avi Constantine. When I first had mold, his books were only available in Germany and had just been translated to English. So I spent $500 to get copies sent from Germany to my house.

And I still have those copies. And, he called them Fungal Bionics and wrote, you know, paper after, not paper repair, but compendiums of papers linking all these things together. And, if you Constantine is one of the obviously called the preeminent modern scholar who realized that these are linked both nutritionally and environmentally to huge numbers of degenerative diseases. Now, in more recent history, I interviewed, Dale Bredesen, who wrote a book, The End of Alzheimer's, on my podcast on Bulletproof Radio.

And I feel so vindicated in his books, like there's four major causes of Alzheimer's and toxic molds. One of them like, Hallelujah, brother, someone finally said it. Yeah, it's a trigger there as well. So most of the degenerative causes of aging are linked to mold. Doesn't mean it's the only cause. It just means it's a major cause. Yeah. Right. The type three is inhaled Alzheimer's I think he calls it. So yeah. Big connection. I had a, my mother just went through this last last fall. And I think a lot of people who are in their homes more than they would have been with Covid if they have a more exposure, their, symptoms accelerate because, beaten in the, you know, they were locked down.

You've been locked up. And so, so yeah, she, you know, she went through her journey and we found, one of my friends, you know, did a C for a and then that was elevated. And then, we did an army. You know, she had molded. Oh, yeah. I had a water leak in my closet, blah, blah, blah. So she came out, lived with us. We remediated her home. And, you know, she's she's new to me and she knows what I do, but not really. I'm fine if she listens to this, but she's she's actually saying, you know, Christine, I really think it was the, you know, the toxic mold.

I had more toxicity than I because she's completely back to normal, and she's doing great. But it is, it really. Her biggest symptom was, insomnia and cognitive decline. And she's a smart woman, so. But she got her brain back, and the mold got out of, you know, her body and out of her home. So. But. Yeah, doctor, but Verizon's done a lot for the, looking at Alzheimer's from an environmental perspective. And when we look at general cognitive dysfunction, and so the documentary I did on mold is called Moldy Movie.

It's a gift for people. That's moldy movie icon. One of the, one of the guys in there is Doctor Daniel Eyman, and he says, yeah, you can lose 15 IQ points when you're around mold, and you get rid of the mold, your IQ goes back up and that is real. So if you're feeling like you're dumber than you were, that happened to me. I'm like, what is wrong? I, I know I'm smart, but I can't think right now. I can't remember stuff. It's mold. And you get rid of the mold. And as long as you're eating enough of the right kinds of fat and you do the work, your brain can come back entirely.

Including my hippocampal volume is 87th percentile for my age range. Given all the stuff my hippocampus has gone through, it should be a lot smaller. It grows back. You have to give it the right, the presence of the right stuff, and you've got to remove the stuff that makes you weak. Yeah. And I think you've mentioned it's like not only you know this cognitive piece, but I just feel like especially with you know the really epidemic of all these mental health, conditions that we see right now for good reason.

There can be situational things and past trauma, of course, but anxiety, depression, insomnia, even, obsessive compulsive disorder, all of these things, you know, we I think we're getting there. We're shifting the paradigm to looking at these, these conditions as neuro and inflammation and, looking at environmental causes like mold, that were really, I think is, are still, you know, so many people are suffering that haven't put this connection together. So just made me want to plug that as well, because you said even like you had rage and anxiety and, you know, things like that.

And yeah, I, I don't know how many millions of divorces happen because of toxic mold. And one of the big problems is that it hits different people differently. And maybe my favorite interview in in moldy the movie is a husband and wife couple. They're both medical doctors, and she was just disabled by toxic mold. And they're taught in medical school that if you have, more than a few symptoms, it's probably all in your head. And she thought, well, I know I must be a hypochondriac because I have 20 symptoms, but my body temperature is one degree too high, so I know it's real.

She biopsied every organ system in her body, which is really painful. And at the end of all of this, she's sitting there with her husband. They're both practicing doctors. You full on MDS. And he's saying, I never felt a thing. I know the symptoms are real because I saw them in my wife. We did all the medically appropriate stuff and we realized it was the house we're living in. We moved into a different house. The symptoms went away. She's not crazy. I don't feel it. But I know it's real. And anyone who's dealing with a spouse or a patient, someone who's like, it's not real. No.

I have a dozen people, highly functional. Normal people were just taken out like I was who then came back and a dozen doctors going, no, this is real. And people oftentimes have a hard time with that, especially, you know, if you're it seems like it's women a little bit more than men, but it affects different people differently. So if you're going my wife just went crazy. We moved into this new house. It's perfect. Nice. Yeah. There's a few stains on the ceiling. I feel fine, like. Well, yeah, you might get cancer next year or five years from now, or you might be getting a heart attack, but you feel fine.

But maybe it's hitting her emotionally. Or maybe it's vice versa. Now you need to get the stuff out of your environment. It's not safe for humans, and you send your kids to new school and they start going crazy. Maybe it's not teenage hormones. Schools are notoriously moldy because they don't have any maintenance dollars. And so this is a problem. One of the other things I'm going to mention natural natural soil has fungus in it, but it doesn't go toxic like this because there's soil microbes present that fight the fungus.

They create a balance. There is a company that I founded called Home Biotic Home biotic.com. It's a probiotic you spray around a structure and it creates that natural soil bacteria balance that balances mold so they don't get out of control. And I inoculate my home. I live in a very humid part of the world in the Pacific Northwest. I do just fine up here because I've been able to take control of that. So for me, prevention is really important. I'm glad you landed on that because I wanted to ask any of your hacks because again you know, mold is something that, you know, we don't live in a sterile world.

And unfortunately, you know, we come in, contact it more than we like. And, and I guess, to that point to Dave, I mean, is there a threshold that you feel like when you've been more exposed that, you know, the Ami people say, like, you can't be in a house above two or, you know, that hurts me has to be less than, you know, ten is there a threshold piece that you feel like that a building or a work environment needs to be? And then we can do things like home, biotic and air purifiers or so forth?

Resilience, Prevention, and Upgrade Labs 42:58

But just yet navigating, like, okay, you figured out this problem now how to, like, live in the world. You know, for people that this is going to sound a little strange, but you'll never have a mold free anything because one part per trillion, one part per quintillion, in one part per you, so free of at a certain point you say, okay, this number means free of because it's as free as is reasonable. And if you're one of the most sensitive people on the planet, right, it's going to be cheaper to remediate you than it is to create a surface of the planet with no mold.

Because guess what? We'd have no soil and no ecosystem without mold. It's part of the world, right? So what that means is we've got to spend the the time and the dollars on fixing your immune system, fixing a neurological responses, fixing your detox pathways. There is not a consensus on what is a safe limit on a lot of these. All of the safe limits are based on economically convenient, especially in food. They don't care what's safe. They just care what what's easy to do, and they can sell. And this is why when you look at, say, coffee, there's no standards in the US.

But there are standards. But if you look at wine, the standard here for okra toxin A, which is both an environmental toxin and a food toxin, and one that's particularly bad for humans, it's the number one toxin in wine, beer and coffee. So there's no standards in coffee. But our standard for wine is ten parts per billion. In Europe, it's two parts per billion. Who's right? Well, I'm going to argue that Europeans are right. Right. But the Americans be like, I don't know, it was cheaper to make it this way.

Right. And in China, I don't know the standard, but it's probably better than the American standard because our mold centers are particularly bad in the US. But we might have a much better pesticide standard than China would, for instance. So it's one of those things where who's right? Well, the lower you go, the better. But do you need to go to 0.00000001? No, because most of these things have a dose response curve, but it's never set for optimal human performance. It's set for economic convenience.

So your job is to do better than the government, which is a very low standard. I mean, seriously, I have to tell you to do better than the government. Like, come on. So why is that mean? That's a loaded statement, right? So yeah. No. And I, I think my goal when I think about how helping people recover their health is to make them as resilient as possible, right? Because as we said, we're not going to be in a sterile environment. Our bodies, you know, are not sterile. But how do we, no matter what comes our way, that we can quickly recover, adapt, and, you know, lead healthy, meaningful lives.

Right. And so I think that's a really good point. And just kind of circling back and people are, at this point where they're, you know, still this traumatized place from having so much, you know, suffering from mold. I think that's where, like, the limbic retraining and the neurofeedback and the trauma work in the in we have DNR as our group there, you know, whatever modality you do like really honing in on that, so that you can feel safe. In the world, there are amygdala retraining programs. All of my work has been around the 40 years is and we do something called a reset process.

That's 40 years in Centcom. And it's an intense five day, you know, program where we're feeding you mold free, high energy food. And it's a very, carefully created program for a lot of people. EMDR is the most, most affordable eye movement, dissociative response. And this is a way that can sometimes at least take you out of it. But if you walk into a moldy hotel room and you feel abject terror and like the end of the world is coming, well, I've lived that right. You know, like I have to leave right now, all right?

And you get to the point where I can choose to stay, but you might regret it. So I was on, one of those dinner cruise ships in San Diego a few years ago. San Diego is one of the oldest cities in the world. I have a lot of sick patients in San Diego. I've got in New Orleans are like big problems. But, so I'm down there and I walk into this thing, okay? Usually cruise ships in boats have mold problems anyway because I always wet it. This thing smelled like a wet mop and I was like immediately my nervous was like, you should go outside.

But it wasn't a panic response. It was just an awareness. And that's what you do. You right. Oh, there's mold here. Okay, I'm going to go, but I'm going to go in peace. I'm not going to go in terror. And that's the weird stuff. It's hard to put words to it. But instead I'm like, this is such an interesting dinner and I'm meeting people I really don't spend time with. I'm going to take the hit. So I sat there, I had dinner right, and by the end of dinner has been a little bit was the blood flow. My brain's changing, and the next morning I wake up and I'm giving a talk.

But I am super swollen. Like I grow man boobs around mold because, I don't know, I used just have man boobs this way and pounds. So I have these photos of me with some famous person and I have like size eight cups, right? And my face is all red, you know, you know, balloon man. And then, the next day, my gut lining sheds, right? And I'm like, don't be in a room with me. This is bad. And this is a normal thing for most people. Right? And the day after that, the subterranean pimples come because I had deep inflammation at the low levels.

Not the little things, the things that take a week to come to the surface. And they're like boils, right? Yeah. That's all mold. Right. And it was it is a programed response. Right. But the panic thing wasn't there at the beginning. It was an awareness now. And, you know, in retrospect, I shouldn't have taken the hit. I should have listened to my listen to myself. And I could have done a better job of binding the toxins. But I didn't have all the stuff with me because I was traveling on business.

I was at home, I had come home, I'd have done ozone, and I've done a couple other things on it would have not been a problem when I started my mold journey. If I was exposed, I was looking at six weeks of being a zombie, literally six weeks. So my brain would come back and I could be exposed. And unless it's a really, really strong exposure, which might take me 2 or 3 days to be fully back, I'm usually back within four hours. Right. And this is from like stuff that really caused the systemic inflammation thing.

And like I'm not going to try and brag. I'm 48, but like I'm in reasonably good shape for someone who doesn't exercise very much. And yes, I have like bio monitors and whatever else, but I don't. I exercise less than you, I promise. Right? And I probably eat more fat than you, right? And I had mold poisoning for many, many years. So if I can recover to where I am now without a lot of work, without being hungry, without brain fog, and I can be exposed to mold on occasion and not die. I promise you, I was probably sicker than you are, and I it's it's hackable.

It's doable. Your brain can work better than you thought. It's a real thing. No I love that you know statement of hope. And you know again many people are listening are in the throes of their journey. So now I think it's really important to hang on that recovery is possible. And again how to navigate you know, life right. The how do we become more and more and more resilient to whatever stressors come our way? So, I could pick your brain for a little bit longer day, but I will. I think we should end on that.

And I would love people to hear, just what you're up to. Anything that you want to share that you're passionate and excited about in this phase of your. Yeah, your career. So I'm well known for bulletproof. We've disrupted big food. We've brought in mold tested coffee and bulletproof coffee and collagen and MCT oil and ketosis into the mainstream. What I'm working on now is called Upgrade Labs, and it's tied with what we know about mold. It said. Recovery is the hardest part. It's easy to go to the gym and beat yourself up.

But it's hard then to put muscle on afterwards. So most people who do exercise are over exercising, and a lot of people are so stressed they don't really need exercise, they need movement. But they need recovery. There's a set of technologies that have been used by NASA, by special forces, by pro athletes, and by people who know things that you've never heard of. I've been cultivating and carrying those for ten years. We've been doing it at the Beverly Hilton and in Santa Monica underneath Arnold Schwarzenegger's office, for six years.

And I'm franchising that. It's called Upgrade Labs, and there's going to be one in your town in the next year or two where you can come in. And even if you've had mold exposure, we have the technologies that give you your energy back and help you detox and recover faster than you've ever expected. So that's a big thing for people. Even if you don't have mold, it matters. If you've had mold, it matters even more. Awesome. And we will have information on that in the notes alongside. And that's really exciting.

A big part of, what keeps me passionate is how to create more access to more and more of these tools for more people who are in this mode. Right. So, it will be really exciting to have your work in upgrade labs in more and more cities so people can recover more quickly. So I'm really excited to see where this goes for you. It'll be getting all the mold. People will figure out. Upgrade labs makes them feel better, faster. Hey, one one city at a time, right? Yep. Awesome. Well, thank you, Dave, so much for your time and all the awesome anecdotes and the story of Hope.

And again, we'll have all the information, in the show notes as well. So thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Christine. Have a great day to. You.