My Moldy Journey

Dave Asprey

Christine, I’m happy to be here for you.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

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 a documentary, and your “Bulletproof Coffee” really 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, we’re always looking for new tools on how to treat patients and get better and better 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 uncovering that mold and mycotoxins were really making you sick?

Dave Asprey

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 is I had tons of symptoms and no one could figure it out. I went to allergist after allergist and I had a strep throat over and over, and asthma and allergies and behavioral disorders, all the stuff that we know now is tied with it. I had these nosebleeds 10 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 little bit worse, but chronic pain and inflammation is just how things were. Mold also makes you angry. It makes it harder to control your emotions, so you tend to get a mold rage. So not a really good setup. And I finally said, I’m gonna get on top of this. I’m just in pain all the time. I’m in my mid-twenties 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, I’m high risk of stroke and heart attack, pre-diabetes, the list just goes on and on. And I went to my normal doctor and he basically said, maybe you should try 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 and I didn’t lose any weight, and I was on a low fat, low calorie diet. 

He looks at me like, yeah, liar. You know, you’re eating Snickers bars all the time. I’m like, okay. Then I said, “Vitamin C makes me feel better”. And he said, “Stop, it’ll kill you.” And I said, “What about Linus Pauling?” And so Linus Pauling won two Nobel prizes, took 90 grams 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 in to a functional medicine doctor before we really used that name. It was someone called an orthomolecular doctor, but an anti-aging doctor. And he said, “Hm, 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, Dave, you’ve been here 10 times. I think I wanna 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 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, commercially. So this is someone who really knew what he was doing, his name was Tim Guilford. 

Well, one thing led to another and finally he said, “Well, you don’t have HIV, but I’m gonna 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 10 most toxic species. So I’m like, aha! Now I have proof of exposure and proof that my immune system is reacting this way. And it’s such a common problem in homes, especially in Northern California where I was at the time. That was the smoking gun that led me to really start to understand mold. 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.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

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 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 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 your body was having this allergic reaction, were there 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?

Dave Asprey

Well, it’s mystifying because mold can have different symptoms for different people. So in one day it’s this, 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 ERMI test, an Environmental Relative Mold Index test. And what this will do is this will measure the mold inside your house versus the mold outside your house and tell you, hm, in my case, one of the times when I had 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 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 suddenly like that, everything feels like it’s just too much work. It’s like walking through mud all the time and just doing basics stuff, making a decision to go to another place. It’s like, “Oh, it’s just too much, I’ll just lay here.” So it kinda turns you into a bump on a log. When you get out of an environment like that, it’s a big deal. The other thing that works though. Oh, sorry, at that time, 88 times more Penicillium indoors than 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 Stachybotrys in another house where I lived, 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. Like in every way that matters. And metabolically and cognitively and mentally, it’s entirely possible. What they mean is, given what I’ve been taught, I don’t know how to do it. 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 cholestyramine. And if you take that and you feel much better in a day or two, you’re probably binding up some toxins. 

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’m, oh, get an air test, there’s 400 bucks, get a lab test, there’s 500 bucks and you gotta pay a doctor to go see all this stuff, a really good doctor like you, you still have to make a living. 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 gonna go spend a couple thousand dollars to know what’s going on. Yeah, and is your insurance company gonna pay for it? Probably not. I spent $300,000 getting better. I’m lucky I was in a position to do that. It would’ve cost me 50,000, had I known most of what I know now. And it would cost me 5,000, 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 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 of months to start feeling way better than you have in a long time.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Yeah, no, great info and I’m gonna pick your brain ’cause 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 plan, for some people to get better and so you mentioned, again, we reiterate this a lot in the Summit Radio. 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 cholestyramine, you kind of already alluded to liposomal glutathione, but what are some of your other, when you think about your recovery, what were some of the most meaningful things that you did?

Dave Asprey

One of the things that made the biggest difference for me was ozone therapy. What mold does, if you think about it, your body is a collection of cells and there’s a lot of ’em 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, 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, the emergent behavior is that you’re more you. 

So do I feel stressed or do I not feel stressed? Am I energized, am I not energized. And the ancient enemy of bacteria is mold. And 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 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 to do 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. 

He took me in after hours and said, here’s how 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 used it. And I felt like myself for five minutes that first day, I’m like, wow, that was great! And the next day I did it and I felt like 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 I went on the Bulletproof Diet, even though it didn’t have a name then, where you eat a lot of saturated fats. And I didn’t, at the time, know about intermittent fasting, but if I had known I would have done that as well. But that’s kinda how I did it.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Yeah, those are all great tools. and a lot of the therapies myself and Dr. Gordon and Nafisa both use as well. We have ozone in the office, we just got actually a 10-pass, I’ve been using UVBI and Major Auto-Heme for a while. But yeah, ozone is one of those really wonderful treatments that does so much for the body. So yeah, incorporating that in your recovery, binders, glutathione, 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. And so then you can have yeast overgrowth or dysbiosis in other ways or other infections can thrive when you have immunosuppression. 

And so, no, I think those are all great pearls. And Dave, 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 tend to be like chemically sensitive, they tend to be the canaries in the coal mine. They can walk into a building and smell either the fragrance or the mold right away. And it can be really harmful to their body, it can be highly neurotoxic and take ’em 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 threat that has been so harmful to it in the past?

Dave Asprey

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 gonna find something that’s probably it and I’m gonna latch onto that. And I’m gonna 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, funny, you get rid of mold in the environment, put them on 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, your immune system has its own consciousness and intelligence that is teachable. And there’s a whole field called psychoneuroimmunology. that proves what I’m saying is real. Like it’s an actual field of science, so there’s no airy fairy stuff in there. And that system says, okay, there’s a threat and I’m going to trigger an appropriate threat response. 

Unfortunately, it’s mismatched. What you can do with breathing exercises, somatic therapy, and 40 Years of Zen is my neurofeedback company where I’ve done most of my own work and I bring senior executives through. And there’s a reset process you go through where you are reactive, whether it’s you’re reactive because I smelled something that I didn’t wanna smell, a perfume or some kind of chemical sensitivity, or my boss yelled at me. There’s people who the boss yells, your heart rate goes up and you get all it’s the same process. And so what you do is you just teach the body, teach the nervous system, and all of this is unconscious, it’s not you deciding to do any of this. 

You teach it, hey, there’s no need to react to that, it’s not protecting you anymore. In the meantime though, until you realize mold’s 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 gonna kill you in here, get out! And that’s actually really good. It’s the same thing, you touch a hot stove, you don’t 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 trying to help you. So you end up forgiving the inflammatory response, you end up forgiving the mold, you ended up letting this go, but forgiving isn’t like a cognitive, I forgive you, let’s sing kumbaya. It’s a neurological thing you do to tell the body, don’t hold that as a threat, ’cause I’m not gonna do that to you anymore.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Yeah, no, I think that’s a great point. And I often, a lot of my patients say, oh, my genetics are bad or I’m not a good detoxer and I’m so sensitive. I’m like, honestly, I think your body is actually doing the right thing. It’s sending the alarm signal when you’re sitting around something that’s highly neurotoxic that we really haven’t been equipped to deal with. And so, I think that my patients are, again, how I mentioned the canaries in the coal mine, who, they’re having appropriate responses in a really toxic world, you know? So yeah, I think that’s a great point. And when I think about sensitivity, with mold 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 that’s making these mast cells so hypervigilant and hyperexcitable 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?

Dave Asprey

I think most people who are exposed to mold and working on recovering do better on a mast cell protocol that desensitizes their mast cells. So you can look at these things called toll-like receptors or TLRs. 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.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

They have a message for you.

Dave Asprey

Yeah, hopefully they just killed some mold, that’s what I’m gonna say. Wow, that was pretty impressive, you don’t see that that often. All right, so these toll-like receptors, they trigger a mast cell. So they’re looking for, like they’re sort of the little firewall thing, they’re 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, mast cells, they release histamine when they degranulate, inflammatory response and all that, but they make a whole bunch of bad inflammatory compounds. So if you can say, I’m gonna turn down the sensitivity of the mast cells. So the toll-like receptors might get triggered, but the mast cells just don’t activate as much, you’ll 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. And especially with Pepcid, you’re gonna have a wrecked gut if you have a mold and Pepcid makes your gut worse, unless you take the right digestive supplements when you eat, in which case you can actually take Pepcid 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 gonna feel like crap. 

You’re gonna have a Herxheimer reaction and that’s just how it is. And no! Most people who have mold also have families or wanna 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 someone, this guy puts butter in his coffee, there 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, 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 am asking you to help me on this. And if you try some prescriptions or non-prescription stuff and nothing works, look, you may just need a lot of rest. 

But quite often it can come down to 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 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 the Bulletproof Coffee and I’m not trying to sell it at all here. Bulletproof’s 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 drank 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 and 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 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 centers in China. We don’t have in the U.S. 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 developed lab testing standards and coffee production standards that minimize mold fermentation during the green coffee process. And these toxins, unfortunately, survive roasting and brewing. 

So, and I didn’t make that up, 34 studies back up what I just said. And if that’s one thing, what about 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 thing that I made that goes along with my diet recommendations, guys, eating foods that are high-risk of mold like Brazil nuts, it’s probably not good for anyone. In fact, I can show you studies for that, but for people who have 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 meal even though 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 somebody called Alternaria brassicae. 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, and the next morning, even that night, you’re just like, ah, my guts off and my joints hurt. And I’m kind of seeing colors a little bit, Alternaria is cause it alters your perception. It’s especially where 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 ’em in the winter. So we do have mold in our food way more than we know about and it’s more of a trigger for people who have been exposed in their environments.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Yeah, I think that still gets under-recognized and overlooked when we’re putting together mold protocols. We do see these patients have the high degree of sensitivity and a lot of food reactions, but looking at it from this layer and even some of the mycotoxin testing that we can do through the urine and looking at exposure and how people, their mycotoxin burden, some of it has gotten pooh-poohed because of not being able to differentiate foods versus environment, but hey, it’s all, they’re all routes of exposure to mycotoxins. So we have to look at environment and foods more often. Did you do urine mycotoxin testing in your journey or was that available at the time?

Dave Asprey

I’ve done urine for sure and you can look at blood. I’m a fan of MyMycoLab. 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.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

I agree, yeah, that’s a good point. And I think also, when we think about mold and how it affects the body, especially if people have been in a highly toxic environment, how it can colonize the sinuses. I see a lot of chronic sinusitis and chronic sinus issues. And so, not only, getting out of the mold, step one, but also making sure that the sinuses are irrigated as well. What were some of your sinus hacks? Did you have anything?

Dave Asprey

Yeah, I had MRCoNS multiple antibiotic-resistant coagulase negative bacteria. And if you think about it, 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 gonna 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 antibiotics in a nasal spray and then sometimes EDTA to break it down. I’ve also used amphoteracin B nasal spray and nystatin 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 at daveasprey.com, it’s on my page. 

What you do is you take warm water with sea salt 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. 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 very important you don’t breathe ozone gas, it’s terrible for you but if you really wanna fix your sinuses, there’s nothing like ozone gas in the sinuses. So what you do, is 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!

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Thank you for that public service announcement. It’s important. Yeah, no, it is important and we use nasal ozone as well, and 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, but no, I haven’t tried the iodine rinse. We use different salt solutions or xylitol, even our different probiotic washes. But iodine, we do the nebulizer a lot with iodine for different things, but no, I’ll have to try that. I’ll have to share that recipe and I’ll let you know how that goes.

Dave Asprey

It works and you can also, you can do a hydrogen peroxide. You can nebulize 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 strap. 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 gonna 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, hmm, 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.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Yeah, no, that’s a great point. And we see a lot of patients too who might have what we would call a tonsil interference field, or even have tonsil scars that, history of strep in their life and that tissue becomes inflamed or infected. And that can be a huge obstacle to lymphatic drainage or also if it’s top of the GALT or the Gut Associated Lymphatic Tissue. So it’s like the gut-brain kinda connection there, so just keeping that tissue really healthy or flowing is really important. Do you have a strep probiotic strain, like a product that you like?

Dave Asprey

Yeah, BLIS, B-L-I-S probiotics, their, I think it’s called MK, it’s either MK12 or MK8. They have actually two different ones, one’s for gingivitis and one is for strep. And the guy who did it, studied strep throat for 30 years because he had really bad strep throat and found hmm, there was a healthy strep throat that fights the bad Streptococcus. And if you dig deep, we also have something called Clostridium difficile, which isn’t a problem for most mold people unless 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.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

I know, right? It’s like the chicken or the egg when you’re in this journey. It’s like you either are misdiagnosed and then also all the immunosuppression. So you have all this bacterial overgrowth and dysbiosis, but it always comes back as we learn more and more about the microbiome, it’s like, let the bugs hash it out, right? Get the right bugs and the right conditions to really allow our microbiome to thrive because it has so much to do with our regulation of our immune system. So yeah, I like that idea and that’s really aligned with naturopathic philosophy and biological medicine, looking at the microbiomes in the body. 

No, a lot of, I’m learning some tips, so thank you. I’m gonna be filling my test kit with some new products after today to check ’em out. So Dave, you touched on the sinuses and then you 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 to the hypothalamus and the pituitary, in your journey, did this affect sleep, hormones? How did all this go hand in hand for you?

Dave Asprey

Everyone with toxic mold is gonna have sleep problems. University, you’re gonna wake up and feel like you didn’t sleep. A very common sign of a new exposure, so you move into a 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, accused me of doing random things that I could not have possibly done, like flipping lights on and off and screaming, 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 her 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 thing. 

I didn’t know it ’cause our eyes were open and she was talking to me and she was asleep the whole time and that’s what mold does. And it turns out the wall in her bedroom had Stachybotrys And so that’s an extreme example, but you know, people twitching, kicking, restless leg syndrome, weird dreams, it’s a big deal. So sleep is a major thing. And then hormone disruption, they make xenoestrogens these molds, not all species do, it depends what you have. But my very favorite, one of the hormone disruptors is called zearalenone. And the reason it’s my favorite, is it’s the thing that proves that calories in calories out doesn’t work because industrial drug companies collect zearalenone, which is a thousand times more estrogenic than human estrogen. Then they make pellets of it and they put the pellets in cow’s ears, industrially. And as the mycotoxin melts into the tympanic membrane, it enters circulation, becomes a part of the cow’s fat. And then the cow gets fat on 30% less calories.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Wow, I didn’t know that.

Dave Asprey

Yeah. 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, 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 gonna feel, ’cause you’re already stressed and now you’re stressed ’cause you’re not getting enough energy. Your body is not gonna let go of the fat because of the hormone signal from the mold. So zearalenone 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 gotta 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 WHR researcher who spent 17 years putting together the research and the story behind this. His name was A.V. 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 paper after paper, not paper after paper, but compendiums of papers, linking all these things together. And A.V. Constantine is one of the, obviously called the preeminent modern scholar who realized that these are links 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 felt so vindicated, in his books, it’s like there’s four major causes of Alzheimer’s and toxic mold’s one of them, I’m 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. It doesn’t mean it’s the only cause, it just means it’s a major cause.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Yeah, right, the type three is inhaled Alzheimer’s I think he calls it. So that’s obviously a big connection, I had a, my mother just went through this 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 mold exposure, their symptoms accelerate because of being in the, they were locked down, we’ve been locked up. And so yeah, she went through her journey and we found one of my friends did a CPRA and then that was elevated. And then we did an ERMI, she had mold, oh yeah, I had a water leak in my closet and blah, blah, blah. So she came out, lived with us, we’ve remediated her home. And she’s new to my, she knows what I do, but not really and I’m fine if she listens to this, but she’s actually saying, “You know, Christine, I really think it was the toxic mold. I had mold toxicity, didn’t I?” ‘Cause 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. But she got her brain back and the mold got out of her body and out of her home. So, but yeah, Dr. Bredesen has done a lot for looking at Alzheimer’s from an environmental perspective.

Dave Asprey

Well, when we look at general cognitive dysfunction in, so the documentary I did on mold is called “Moldy Movie”. It’s a gift for people it’s moldymovie.com. One of the, one of the guys in there is Dr. Daniel Amen. 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? Like 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 of stuff my hippocampus has gone through, it should be a lot smaller, it grows back. You just have to give it the right, the presence of the right stuff, and you’ve got to remove the stuff that makes you weak.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Yeah and I think you’ve mentioned, it’s like not only this cognitive piece, but I just feel like especially with the really epidemic of all these mental health conditions that we see right, and 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, I think we’re getting there, we’re shifting the paradigm to looking at these conditions as neuro inflammation and looking at environmental causes like mold that were really, I think are still, so many people are suffering that haven’t put this connection together. So just made me wanna plug that as well. ‘Cause you said even like you had rage and anxiety and things like that. And yeah.

Dave Asprey

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 “Moldy 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 ’cause 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 were both practicing doctors, full on MDs. And he’s saying, I never felt a thing. I know the symptoms are real ’cause 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 who are 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 and it’s perfectly fine, and they say 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. You might be getting a heart attack, but you feel fine, but maybe it’s hitting her emotionally or maybe it’s vice versa. 

No, you need to get the stuff out of your environment it is not safe for humans. And you send your kids to a 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 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 Homebiotic, H-O-M-E 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 outta 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.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

I’m glad you landed on that. ‘Cause I wanted to ask any of your hacks ’cause again, mold is something that, we don’t live in a sterile world and unfortunately we come in contact more than we like. And I guess to that point too, Dave, I mean, is there a threshold that you feel like when you’ve been mold exposed that, the ERMI people say like you can’t be in a house above two or the HERTSMI me has to be less than 10. Is there a threshold piece that you feel like that ability in our work environment needs to be? And then we can do things like Homebiotic and air purifiers or so forth, but just navigating like, okay, you figured out this problem, now how to like live in the world for people?

Dave Asprey

This is gonna sound a little strange, but you’ll never have a mold-free anything because one part per trillion, one part per quintillion, one part per, 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, it’s going to be cheaper to remediate you than it is to create a surface of the planet with no mold. Cause guess what? We’d have no soil and no ecosystem without mold, it’s part of the world. So what that means is we’ve gotta spend the time and the dollars on fixing your immune system, fixing your 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 U.S., but there are standards. But if you look at wine, the standard here for ochratoxin 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 10 parts per billion, in Europe it’s two parts per billion. Who’s right? Well, I’m gonna argue the Europeans are right. But the Americans be like, I don’t know, it was cheaper to make it this way. And in China, I don’t know the standard, but it’s probably better than the American standard ’cause our mold centers are particularly bad in the U.S.. 

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 0.000001? 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 has a very low standard. I mean, seriously, do I have to tell you to do better than the government? Like, come on.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

So wise, that’s a loaded statement. So yeah, when I think of my goal, when I think about helping people recover their health, is to make them as resilient as possible. ‘Cause as you said, we’re not gonna be in a sterile environment. Our bodies are not sterile, but how do we, no matter what comes our way that we can quickly recover, adapt, and lead healthy, meaningful lives. 

And so I think that’s a really good point. And just kind of circling back, if people are at this point where they’re still in this traumatized place from having so much suffering from mold, I think that’s where the limbic retraining and the neurofeedback and the trauma work and the, we have DNRS or groups that are, whatever modality you do, like really honing in on that so that you can feel safe in the world.

Dave Asprey

There are amygdala retraining programs. All of my work has been around “The 40 Years of Zen”, where we do something called the reset process. That’s 40yearsofzen.com and it’s an intense five-day 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 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’s coming, well, I’ve lived that, like I have to leave right now. 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 moldiest cities in the world.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Yeah, I have a lot of sick patients in San Diego.

Dave Asprey

Yeah, that and New Orleans are like big problems. So I’m down there and I walk into this thing. Okay, usually cruise ships and boats have mold problems anyway cause they’re always wet. This thing smelled like a wet mop. And I was like, immediately, my nervous system’s like, you should go outside. But it wasn’t a panic response, it was just an awareness. And that’s what you wanna do. You wanna go, oh, there’s mold here. Okay, I’m gonna go, but I’m gonna go in peace, I’m not gonna 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 wanna spend time with, I’m gonna take the hit. So I sat there, I had dinner and by the end of the dinner, I was being a little bit woozy, blood flow in 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, ’cause, I don’t know, I used to have man boobs, I used to weigh 300 pounds. So I have these photos of me with some famous person and I have like size A cups. And my face is all , all balloon man. And then the next day, my gut lining sheds. And I’m like, don’t be in a room with me, this is bad. And this is a normal thing for mold people. And the day after that, the subterranean pimples come. ‘Cause I had deep inflammation at the low level skin, not the little things, it’s the things that take a week to come to the surface and they’re like boils. 

Yeah, that’s all mold. And it was a programmed response. But the panic thing wasn’t there at the beginning. It was an awareness And in retrospect I shouldn’t have taken the hit, I should’ve listened to myself and I could’ve done a better job of binding the toxins, but I didn’t have all this stuff with me ’cause I was traveling on business. If I was at home, I’d have come home, I’d have done ozone and I’ve done a couple other things and 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 till my brain would come back.

And I can be exposed and unless it’s a really, really strong exposure, which might take me two or three days to be fully back, I’m usually back within four hours. And this is from like stuff that really caused a systemic inflammation thing. And like, I’m not gonna 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. And I probably eat more fat than you. 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. It’s hackable, it’s doable, your brain can work better than you thought. It’s a real thing.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

No, I love that statement of hope. And, again, many people who are listening are in the throes of their journey. So no, I think it’s really important to hang on that recovery is possible and again, how to navigate life. 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 Dave, but I think we should end on that. And I would love people to hear just what you’re up to, anything that you wanna share that you’re passionate and excited about in this phase of your career?

Dave Asprey

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’s 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 overexercising, 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 curing those for 10 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, and if you’ve had mold, it matters even more.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

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 boat. 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.

Dave Asprey

It’ll be good. All the mold people will figure out Upgrade Labs makes them feel better, faster.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

Hey, one city at a time, right?

Dave Asprey

Yep.

Christine Schaffner, N.D.

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.

Dave Asprey

Thanks Christine, have a great day.