Mycotoxins & Health: Unraveling The Impact

Ann Shippy, MD

Welcome to another episode of Mold, Mycotoxins, and Chronic Illness. I’m your host, Dr. Ann Shippy. Today we get to talk with Doug Kaufmann, who has such a wealth of knowledge. He’s been at this for quite a while. He’s the host of Know the Cause, which is globally televised. He started it in 1999, and now it’s in over 200 countries. Way to go, Doug! He’s the author of The Fungus Link, which is a series of 13 books that’s still popular after 20 years because it’s still very relevant. He published an article that’s important in 2014 in Oncology News on the role of mold, mycotoxins, and fungi in cancer. I want to cover that today as well. Let’s get started with your story and how you became such an expert in fungus. I know it hit you early in your twenties.

Doug Kaufmann

You know, Dr. Shippy, a lot of us have this story that has been blown up because we have it. I mean, I was in Vietnam. I was trained as a hospital corpsman in Vietnam. LVN training by the Navy and then off to Vietnam, you go. When I got back, nothing seemed to be right. The personality of Doug Kaufmann went through the back problems, the skin problems, and the stomach problems. I got to wondering if I wasn’t a victim of Agent Orange, and all of us Vietnam veterans think Agent Orange, yet we tend to forget that we were soaking wet during monsoon weather. We didn’t have a little cabin with a key. We could go in. We’re lying outside, sleeping in the rain, and so forth. We were constantly wet. I began to wonder if I did have a mold problem. I worked with Dr. Everett Hughes on a collaborative research paper at USC Medical School when I got back in 1971, and he suggested I couldn’t take the elevator up. Dr. Shippy, I had all these problems. If I were with other people, my heart would beat out of its chamber. Strange symptoms—definitely neurologic, physiologic, and so forth.

One day the doctor said to me, one of the doctors at the university, “It sounds like you have a parasite. Did you eat raw meat?” I said, “Yes, It’s called nuoc mam.” Some of the women over in Vietnam, in the operating rooms there, gave us some nuoc mam and we ate it. He said, Pick up a book on parasitology and study it. One of the chapters I opened in a 1953 book on parasitology dealt with fungi that parasitized man and certain of these fungi like Penicillium can off-gas secondary byproducts, which are very dangerous. In the case of one of the Aspergillus molds or two of them now, we know that they’re mycotoxins. They’re called these poisons. Their off-gas causes human cancer and I know we’ll delve into them a little bit, but it’s because I have it. Most of us in this field, it’s because we were exposed to it. We tried to fix it ourselves very often and knew that little information existed 53 years ago when I got into this.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes, I think even now, a lot of times physicians only think about the life-threatening massive infections and don’t think about the chronic low-grade infections that are driving a lot of the physiology. What did you do that helped to write your books and start your TV show? What did you do to get better?

Doug Kaufmann

It was amazing how my life was just laid out for me. I became a pretty good clinical nutritionist with all of these doctors I worked with because I understood from my background that I may have a mold problem. I worked in an ear, nose, and throat office in Los Angeles for many years. Howard Gottschalk was his name; he was a medical doctor. What an open-minded guy! It was so fascinating. One of her patients one day was waiting for an allergy shot, and he came in and had a little bowl in his hand, and he said, Doug, you notice I haven’t been here. He’s an engineer for one of the airlines. He said I haven’t been here in a couple of months for my little allergy shot. I said, I know I miss seeing you. He said, Well, do you know what this is? He took the cover off. I said, No, I don’t think it looks like cottage cheese. He said, This is aged milk. My mother gave me a bowl of this. If I take a tablespoon of this in the morning and a tablespoon in the evening, my allergies don’t bother me. Of course, you and I immediately went on probiotics. We didn’t know what that was 50 years ago. They’re yogurt. We didn’t even know what it was.

I said, “Well, that’s good. I’m sorry to see you go, but keep it up.” It’s ironic how many patients taught us, the healthcare providers, about these types of things. One day Dr. Gottschalk did a sinus surgery on a patient, and they found mold growing in their sinuses. He instructed Bob downstairs, a friend of mine who was a pharmacist, to grind up nystatin, put it in a little saline squirter, and squirt it in the patient’s nose. We saw that patient week after week, then month after month, with zero problems, total breathing, and opening up the sinuses. Then, of course, in 1999, there was this Mayo Clinic study showing that virtually 96.8% of all chronic sinusitis isn’t bacterial at all. Even though we give antibiotics to these patients, it’s fungal. This study came up here just six months ago for the main universities. It was a collaborative study on cancer. They found mold in 35 different types of cancer. I mean, I am in the right field at the right time.

Ann Shippy, MD

Say that again, because after people listen to this, we won’t think about cancer the same way again. If diagnosed with cancer, we’re going to think, “Oh, we better look for mold.” So say the statistics again.

Doug Kaufmann

This is fascinating. The cancer analysis reveals cancer types, specific fungal ecology, and fungus. They took the paraffin off. They have all these biopsies to prepare for it. I began studying 35, 17, and 401. Samples they found in 35 different types of cancer, like you and I know, Dr. Shippy, breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, brain cancer, etc. They found mold. There are several different types of mold. This is interesting. It came out of UCSD, San Diego, California. I think it was Harvard, Cornell, and then the Institute of Science in Israel. An epic study showed 35 different types of cancer.

Ann Shippy, MD

For listeners, those are very reputable places for research. This is right. Just a little side gig. This is revolutionary.

Doug Kaufmann

The Weitzman Institute of Science in Israel, the Weizmann Institute of Science, is a major school. Biopsy didn’t exist because these doctors had no idea that cancer was growing. We found bacteria in the microbiome of some cancers. But here, they found fungi in 35 different types of cancer. They went on to say, I highlighted this just for you, Dr. Shippy. Although our data do not establish causal relationships behind these clusters, they suggest that fungal spores are immunologically potent. I mean, this is amazing. Are these fungi off-gassing in breast lumps a poison that is then enabling metastasis to occur? You know and I know that in 2016, the drug Itraconazole, or sporanox, was approved. It was repurposed from a toenail fungus drug to a cancer drug. Not coincidentally, I think we’re going to find more and more of these antifungal drugs. Antifungal supplements work to heal beyond what we thought they would 30 years ago.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. The cancer rates are increasing, and we could probably correlate that with indoor environments getting more and more likely to have mold in them.

Doug Kaufmann

I lectured a few years ago at Ty and Charlene Bollinger’s The Truth about Cancer. That was about tens of thousands of people watching this thing if not hundreds of thousands. Here’s one of my graphics. The similarities between cancer and fungi each thrives in a SAC formation. We now know that polyps have a fungal etiology. Often, we know that cancer can grow in a lump. They metabolize nutrients in the absence of oxygen. Well, we know that cancer tumors grow without oxygen in a little sac. Fungi generate a caustic poison called lactic acid. Each depends on its host for sustenance, proliferation, and reproduction. Each thrives in the presence of sugar and dye and the absence of sugar. Both emit volatile organic compounds that dogs can detect. Both respond to antifungal medicines, and that list is just growing.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s beautiful, Doug. That creates quite a picture of the analogy. It makes total sense.

Doug Kaufmann

At the very least. Shouldn’t a physician rule it out? There are now mycology labs; take the breast biopsy, send half off to the oncology lab, and separate and send one to a mycology lab. Do you see the Aspergillus mole? Do you see mycotoxins? Do you see Candida in that lump? Could this somehow be linked to yeast or mold?

Ann Shippy, MD

This is interesting because usually, the cancer treatment is to suppress the immune system even more rather than helping the immune system fight things up. It’s kind of an interesting dilemma.

Doug Kaufmann

In my humble opinion, one needs to have a couple of doctors. One needs to have a doctor they trust and love, and one needs to have an oncologist. Someone just wrote me a letter the other day. I’m sitting here giving chemotherapy, and I thought, What? It’s a friend of a friend of mine, but it’s okay because I’ve got donuts and diet sodas sitting here taking chemotherapy in the chemotherapy chair. It’s okay to drink diet soda and eat donuts. Cancer doctors are good people. I know several of them.

Ann Shippy, MD

I think it’s one of the hardest jobs.

Doug Kaufmann

Oh, can you imagine?

Ann Shippy, MD

Like a heart standpoint and wanting to help people.

Doug Kaufmann

Oh, they do. Unfortunately, their statistics aren’t great when it comes to oncology. But these doctors believe that the person’s going to die of malnutrition, which often cancer patients do. Fungi can do that. They give them anything. Eat anything; eat bread, pasta, or anything you want. Just to keep weight on ice cream and so forth. I understand that mentality, but it’s turning out They’re now studying the carnivore diet, the keto diet, and so forth. With cancer patients fasting too, Isn’t it fascinating where this is going? I mean, I know you do a lot of this. Thank God for doctors like you who see the big picture instead of the prostate instead of the brain. The big picture It’s the whole patient that has fungus or cancer, not just a prostate.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, this is a perfect segue because I think for anybody who’s recovering from mold and mycotoxin illness, whether they have cancer or not, the diet is foundational. You’ve been teaching about this for a long, long time. I’d love for you to share your wisdom on that foundational diet that you’ve been advocating for, which is instrumental in helping people heal.

Doug Kaufmann

We call it the Kaufmann One and Kaufmann Two Diet, formerly the Phase One and Phase Two Diet, which clinically I got to see work over and over again. My background is that I wrote a book on food hypersensitivity versus food allergy in the, I don’t know, mid-eighties.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes, you must have been one of the first people writing about that too.

Doug Kaufmann

I was.  We were the first laboratory in Los Angeles to offer food allergy testing and blood food allergy testing. I set that up with four PhDs, but I digress. That was many decades ago. It was so fascinating to me to understand that the reason food allergies exist is because gut permeability exists. I chew up my broccoli and I eat my pizza, and all of a sudden I’m allergic to broccoli and pizza. What those tests measure or anti-antibodies specific to foods, but it was so fascinating. Back in those early years, I wrote about how common food allergies were. I didn’t know much about cancer. I was working. I went to the Washington University School of Medicine for a short time, and I worked with the woman who helped develop the Pap smear, Dr. Miriam T.K. Bryant. She said, If you take exfoliated cells, spin them down slowly, expose them to food antigens, and under a microscope, we can watch the food impaired, the white blood cells implode or explode in the presence of these antigens. Wow. I do have a diverse and fascinating background.

Ann Shippy, MD

I like to.

Doug Kaufmann

But I came all that way. But the books that I have written about fungus all happened because of all these patients,  maybe thousands of doctors that I worked with. Doctors lose patients when they can’t fix a patient, their patients stop referring to them, etc. A nice physician from Dallas called me one day. He read my book, The Food Sensitivity Diet, and he said, I think you’re full of baloney food. I wrote a chapter in there saying that I thought skin problems were just inside, problems coming out of the skin.

Ann Shippy, MD

It makes sense because God is contiguous with the skin. It’s all really on the outside.

Doug Kaufmann

It made perfect sense to me. But he was angry. His name is David Weakly, a nice man. He was out of Johns Hopkins. He had a big practice here in Dallas. He flew back to California, met with me, and his wife, and calmed down. He said, “Well, prove it to me that psoriasis.” I introduced him to some patients. He offered me a five-year gig if I would leave Los Angeles with my two little boys at the time and my wife and move to Dallas. We rented our home, and we flew to Dallas. About the third month, He called me into his office, and he was mad, and he said, Linda called today with the lymphoma, and I said, “Oh, yes, I heard that.” He said, “Look at this.” He throws her chart in front of me. “Her lymphoma is gone. What are you doing? “I said, “Well, you authorize Sporanox and Nystatin.” “You’re not telling me that you think lymphoma is a fungus.” I said, “No, no, I’m not. Here are the references back from the seventies and eighties that say very often these tumors have a fungal mycotoxins medialogy.” He was blown away.

He was so excited. He hired a family practice doctor to come into the practice, and we grew the heck out of that thing because we could now see everything, not just skin problems, but I got into this with ear, nose, and throat problems that responded favorably to Nystatin that we had back in the seventies and then expounded on that with skin problems. Anything from eczema to granuloma annulare to psoriasis, we were helping people left and right, and some of those are how I got into the cancer field. Some of those people said to Dr. Weakly that he would examine them with me after I put them on my diet and Nystatin. And he would say to them, “How are you doing? “They’d say, “This is incredible.” He started authorizing Kleenex boxes in every exam room because many of them were remote. I’ve had these migraines for 23 years. I go on this diet and these antifungals, and it’s gone. Several of the people had tumors. Several of them brought Dr. Weakly their oncology reports, their tumor markers—we’re all getting better, the lumps were dissipating, and he sat me down. He and two other doctors sat me down one night and said, “Tell us again, do fungi grow in lumps? “I mean, polyps have a fungal etiology sometimes. Sometimes there are bacteria they isolate in there.

Ann Shippy, MD

Especially the nasal polyps.

Doug Kaufmann

Like that’s been Documented.

Ann Shippy, MD

How it’s you have to think you have tumor fungal exposure.

Doug Kaufmann

Thank you. Then that begs the question: are nasal polyps different from colon polyps or polycystic ovaries? I had so many women I worked with, and I put them on various oils, essential oils, not essential oils, but omega-3 fatty acids, EPA, and DHEA. Their ovarian lumps began to dissipate. They would bring me reports from their doctors saying this was 50% better. What are you doing? All they’re doing is antifungal therapy. More and more friends would refer your friends to Dr. Weakly. When I was there, my half-day, three-day-a-week job grew into Monday through Saturday, seeing all of these patients, and it was exciting just to put these people on an experimental antifungal program. Sure, their psoriasis got better in most instances, but it was so exciting to see depression. It was so exciting to see other symptoms clear up.

Ann Shippy, MD

I’m curious how long the patients were treated. Like, how long did they end up needing to be on the diet and antifungals? I want to emphasize the diet. Come back to that a little bit more because one without the other, if you start feeding this fungus, but how long for the antifungals did you usually find was optimal?

Doug Kaufmann

I had to develop this back with Dr. Gottschalk in California, and then I carried it over here to Dallas. We moved here in 1986. You see the patient initially, and if the doctor allows, you put them on a systemic antifungal, guessing that their psoriasis might be deeper than the skin. You put them in a local antifungal because I did a little questionnaire back in California. Yes, you have chronic nosebleeds, or yes, you have chronic sinusitis, but you also have bloating, belching gas, and constipation. A lot of these patients say yes. We put them on nystatin, which is a gut antifungal, and either diet flucon, or back then it was Amphotericin B, Niacin, or all the older-generation antifungal drugs. Then we’d see them in two weeks, and it was a two-week meeting that I lived for. I mean, I got out of bed to see these people in two weeks. The vast majority of them were so excited. One time I helped a woman with her skin problem here at Dr. Weakly’s office. She came back with her friend. I went out to the waiting room and said hello. They came in. Her friend turned out to be her husband, a guy named Jim. He was the head of Osteo-Bone. He headed up the pain clinic at the Garland Hospital out here in Texas. He said, “My wife has had these symptoms. We’ve done everything you put her on a diet and give her antifungal drugs. What does this mean? “I ended up working with Jim at the hospital for six months, helping patients with retractable pain get better with the antifungal program. This is how it works.

Ann Shippy, MD

It makes sense to say that some people can mount a huge inflammation response when they’re fighting off infection and that inflammation can settle into the muscles and joints and wherever you’ve had some wear and tear and caused a lot of discomfort and pain. It fits in with the story too.

Doug Kaufmann

What we taught at that time was C-reactive protein. Folks, it’s a blood test. Your doctor can determine inflammation inside your body. The C-reactive protein determines inflammation inside the body, but it doesn’t determine what causes it. I always used to teach the doctors that I worked with. What makes bread rise? Could that same yeast induce tissue inflammation, and outside the pipe, in the circulatory stream, we have nerves, and as the pipe blows up, or as the tissue blows up on the pipe, nerves are compressed? “Ow, that hurts horribly.” I just wish in pain management and pain control we would begin to understand. You have known for many years that a good antifungal program could even help with pain. That, Dr. Shippy, is what those patients taught me. Every time one of them would say, “Would this have anything to do with my chronic back pain? Because, Doug, for two weeks I’ve been out of pain and I’d like a puppy dog.” Go to one of the doctor’s offices, and knock on the door. “Hey, Jim, can you come in and listen to what this patient’s saying? “You give a doctor a fish, and he eats for a day. If you teach a doctor to fish, as your office does, you can help so many of these patients. And that’s what I learned.

Ann Shippy, MD

What I love about this, Doug, is how you were able to figure this out without data. Now we have so many tools. I know I can tell which one of my patients has fungi because our testing has advanced so much that we can do a nasal swab, do PCR testing, and find the fungus in the digestive tract. We’ve got microbial markers that we can test in urine. See when they’re out of balance. That detective work is so much easier now than what we were doing, where we didn’t have these windows into the body and be able to see reality, so that’s so impressive. Working blind. You could know that’s what’s going on with the patient.

Doug Kaufmann

That’s what the doctors used to tell me. Do you have data? All I know is that when I eat bread or get into a beer or something like that, I feel horrible. I’m the rare guy who has had a yeast infection. I used to play baseball, and one day I had to miss this. When I got back from Vietnam, a softball league, one day I had to miss, and I came back into the dugout. Doug, Maury told me, You have a yeast infection. They all just roll their eyes. I’m the first guy with the yeast infection, and we should expound on that. Men have yeast infections, too. I tell them. I know. I tell men, do not drink alcohol. Do not be on antibiotics before you go in and see a prostate. Doctor, I tell women, before you get a pap smear or even a mammogram, stay away from alcohol for some time. These are inflammatory enhancers. I think they can drive up the PSA number. It’s just experience. The data is now there. 53 years ago, I was a lone wolf. Today, this was an exciting 2018 or so. In 2016, I spoke to alternative oncologists. You and I love this. It was in San Diego. I’m not a physician. To get CME units for me, every graphic has to be turned over to their board, and they approve them all. I gave a lecture. You could have heard a pin drop in there. Oh, it was amazing. They were from Japan. They were from all over. I’m telling you, my knees were knocking. Here is a group of oncologists. I’m going to tell them you don’t know the cause of cancer, but I do.

When I put the graphic up, this is a book, Breast Cancer Hope at Last, that these three doctors with the World Health Organization wrote. One of them became my friend. I read this book and listened to it. Are penicillin and other antibiotics carcinogenic in humans? Certainly, physicians would not believe such a risk exists for penicillin, an antibiotic given to billions of humans. However, it is by definition a mycotoxin, and mycotoxins do cause cancer. We now know that the risk of many cancers: breast, colon, lung, etc. goes up the more antibiotics we take, and alcohol and other mycotoxins are intimately linked with seven or ten kinds of cancer. These are things we have to understand. That’s when I dove into the diet and began to see that I was the first guy, I think, with the antifungal. Well, it’s not true, caveman. When he beats on the head, I’m dragged back to his cave, pulled up from the ground, or plucked off a tree and eaten. I was kind of the caveman guy at the Kaufmann Diet. We know that fungi are fueled by carbs. We know that you should limit your carbs. Most people think, Oh, I don’t eat candy, but you chew bread and you eat pasta, and this converts to glucose, the sugar, when you swallow it. This enables the fungi to thrive, party, and have a great time while you’re feeding them. Don’t get me started on alcohol. That’s just it.

Boy, I stopped that so long ago when I did my studies. There are foods, and people ask me, “Doug, why do you allow green apples on your diet? “One day I got a haircut in 1973, and while I was waiting for the barber, he had an old Woman’s Day magazine. On the cover, it says that there’s less sugar in green apples than in red apples. I was a lone wolf. I had a library card we didn’t have. Hey, Siri, back then I had a lot. I had to get a library card, go to a couple of libraries, and do my research. We now know that fungi are fueled by carbs, so we stop eating carbs. I’ll go back to an earlier statement I made with the ketogenic diet or the very carbohydrate-sparing diet, the carnivore diet, which is a zero-carb keto diet with five to seven 8% carbs. My diet offers a little more carbs because I was worried 50 years ago that I was not. People would die without carbs, and now we know differently. But I’ll never forget eating with Dr. Hughes at USC Medical School. We had an avocado tree out back, so I cut up a couple of avocados. I had no money, so I took them, and some nice registered nurses and dietitians sat across from Dr. Hughes and me, and this one woman said, I notice you eat avocado every day. I said, Yes, I’m a little broke, and I have an avocado tree. She said, Be careful, young man. That leads to heart disease. Now, that’s the break. That’s where we were many years ago with misinformation. Misinformation and disinformation But at any rate, mine has been 50 years of anecdotal data compiled from wonderful patients who had to sign a release. Yes, I know this is experimental for my psoriasis. Is it fungal? I don’t think so. But I’m going to allow you to give me a couple of antifungal drugs, and I’ll follow Doug’s diet for a few weeks. The rest was history. Cancer? You’re looking at a long program. When we used to bring the patients back to Dr. Weakly, it would be two weeks, then two weeks. At that point, we try to separate them from drugs that may have had no toxicity to the liver. Some of them wanted to see how nystatin, which is only a gut antifungal, doesn’t induce hepatotoxicity. I learned about things like folic acid, omega-3 fatty acids, and lauric acid. All the things you thank God for doctors like you have in your practice that seem to do the same job without the side effects.

Ann Shippy, MD

So what are your favorites over the years of natural antifungals?

Doug Kaufmann

Dr. Weakly allowed me to begin seeing patients who were listening to an old radio show I did on weekends, but to come in for free. We dedicated time to these people, and some of them had lung conditions, some with multiple symptoms. I went down and bought a case of apple cider vinegar and malic acid. I would hand out a little bottle of apple cider vinegar, and every one of these patients was poor. They didn’t have money. They couldn’t afford to come see us. But I’ll thank him forever for what he did. I’d say, “Take a teaspoon of this, stir it, and six, eight ounces of water; drink it a couple of times a day, but don’t eat these foods.” Then we’d see them again in two weeks. It was nothing short of amazing. I started liking very inexpensive apple cider vinegar. Today, my favorite, I really think, is caprylic acid. These and lauric acid are the fatty acids from coconut, and they get the job done. I’m enamored with Neem, which is an Indian antifungal. I love curcumin for its antifungal and anti-inflammatory properties, which I’ve studied. I ended up going to a school, an herbology course, with two doctors I was working with at the time, and we, on our drive home, went to this amazing medical school. I learned more in that herbology session than I did in medical school.

My hat is off to physicians who were traditionally trained. allopathically trained and in a meeting with patients in the zip this and open these and learned the patients would tell me, Doug, every time I drink beer, my skin gets worse. You didn’t need to spend $200 to stop drinking beer. What else? Well, bread seems to do the same thing. You learn from all these patients, and you finally put a little program together. That’s what my diet was. It’s devoid of bread. It’s void of grains because grains can harbor these fungal metabolites in them. Peanuts are another very common source of these fungal metabolites. The pistachio nuts are also. Through the years, as you can imagine, Dr. Shippy’s, my 50-year-old diet had to change a little bit. Purists say no to carrots; there’s too much sugar in a carrot that’s high on the glycemic index. Falcarinol is a phytonutrient in carrots that’s a powerful antifungal. God did it right. Man messes it up, but God did it right. It just makes for a happy patient when they can eat lots of food and take a few supplements. I always recommend parasites. I don’t know where you are. Yes, I do. I always recommend that people get into antiques. Who am I talking with? Dr. Shippy. An anti-parasite program. And I know you.

Ann Shippy, MD

It’s so important that they when they’re present, wreak havoc.

Doug Kaufmann

Yes, they do.

Ann Shippy, MD

It causes a lot of inflammation, so it’s harder to get people detoxified and recovered if they’re some of those critters on board that are also adding to the inflammation.

Doug Kaufmann

Sure. And things like Mabendezole and some of these drugs. We’ve discovered that antiparasitic drugs can help cancer patients over time. How can that be? A doctor is not going to prescribe that. But anything that would kill a parasite, obviously fungi, parasitized us humans. We need an antiparasitic program, which is the antifungal program. Here’s one of the graphics I put together for this group of oncologists: Here are mycotoxin deactivators and supplements that inhibit mycotoxin proliferation. Psyllium binds mycotoxins, activated charcoal, bentonite clay, N-acetyl cysteine, a precursor to glutathione, alpha-lipoic acid, curcumin, trans-resveratrol, chlorophyll, which is chemoprotective, zinc, and garlic. I have all these books that talk about deactivating mycotoxins, and they’re so technical, but they’re being used in the agricultural industry to keep cows.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s been one of the huge ways that we’ve gotten to have actual data on mycotoxins. It’s such a huge issue with raising animals because of the grains. I think that’s part of why so many of these animals are fed grains, and they’re just loaded with mycotoxins. They have to learn how to mitigate it or not have the mycotoxins in the grains. But that’s a tough task they’re doing.

Doug Kaufmann

The task they’re doing. I mean, they’re looking at mixing zinc and other things with ruminant feed and so forth. I talked to a doctor who said a horse got in moldy hay, spontaneously aborted, and vomited, so deoxynivalenol, one of these mycotoxins, is also called vomitoxin, and it makes the horse vomit. It’s fascinating to talk. Every farmer knows today what I wish every doctor knew today. Is there an infertility link? You can bet on it. Is there a zearalenone that is now in our meat supply, corn, and so forth? Is there a breast cancer link? Yes, there is. Yet we are the only ones. That’s not true. Australia does, too. Canada does, too. We allow zearalenone. We have a synthetic zearalenone; this is mycotoxins from Fusarium mold. We take baby cows and drip it into their bodies so they’ll grow within three weeks, six weeks very quickly. Antibiotics and this zearalenone, yet this zearalenone is, in my humble opinion, not safe. If you eat meat, eat grass-fed, grass-finished meat. I have always said there are two kinds of meat, and you need to be careful out there if you’re concerned about disease.

Ann Shippy, MD

That’s such a great reminder here, and it leads to so many different questions. I think it is interesting. We think our government is pretty strict about things, but it’s not. Most countries are much stricter on the mycotoxin regulations for all food, and they wouldn’t allow adding a mycotoxin to an animal because they understand that when you feed that animal and give it a mycotoxin, it’s going to be in the animal’s flesh.

Doug Kaufmann

Thank you. Then what do we do? Especially cows. We drink their milk, we eat their yogurt, and we eat meat. It just blows me away. You brought up a really good point. When I presented this data on cancer, there are currently six possible probable or known mycotoxins; therefore, fungi are known to cause cancer or possible or probable cancer causes, and yet only one is tested by the FDA. I spoke with one of the testers, and it’s amazing how little testing is done. But if you’re eating peanuts, I’d encourage you to look at pecans instead. If you’re eating greens, this might be a good time to stop the breakfast cereal. This morning. I had a grapefruit, a whole grapefruit. Normally, I’ll eat a green apple, a bowl of yogurt, or something like that, but I make sure it’s not from antibiotic- or zearalenone-infused cattle. This means you’re staring right down the plate at a pretty paranoid guy when I go out to dinner. Excuse me, is the state grass-fed or grass-finished? I don’t know if it’s grass-finished. What does that mean? In the United States, a farmer is allowed to use the last month of the cow’s life to load them up on grains. Well, that’s where the mycotoxins are. Then sacrifice them for our meat supply. Grass-finished means you don’t get that last month to load them up on corn and so forth. Their decisions are all we need. I think meat is quite dangerous. The American Medical Association says meat is linked to so many problems, and it is, but it isn’t the meat. It’s what’s added to the meat, in my opinion, that causes all these problems and increases women’s risk of breast cancer and other cancers.

Ann Shippy, MD

I agree. Then there’s the piece of how you cook it after you’ve browned it and burned it.

Doug Kaufmann

That’s a barbecue.

Ann Shippy, MD

Also the carcinogen. What’s been added to it and how is it prepared? Do you want to cook the meat? The grass-fed, grass-finished at a low temperature.

Doug Kaufmann

It’d be a great show for my show. No, because you and I are walking into a restaurant.

Ann Shippy, MD

Oh, let’s do it.

Doug Kaufmann

Then have the waiter say, “Hi. Can I start you with a drink? Here’s a glass of water.” “Well, okay. Is this purified water?” “Yes, it is.” “I know it has ice in it. Was that pure?” You were there. You and I could do it. We would be a hit on TV. Just you and I walking in and asking the right questions.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, and that’s the key. Knowing the right questions to ask with all of this One of the smallest sources of food is coffee. Because again, it’s not regulated, they can be a huge source of mycotoxins, and it’s left up to individual companies to test them. Before you buy your coffee, make sure that it’s from a company that’s mindful of mycotoxin levels. What I understand from those companies is that it’s getting harder and harder to source low-quality mycotoxin coffee.

Doug Kaufmann

Do you know Dave Asprey?

Ann Shippy, MD

I do.

Doug Kaufmann

Do you remember Dave? Oh, my gosh! Remember when he came out? He was hit 40 different ways by the medical war. Like coffee’s going to hurt us. Yet he isolated some mycotoxins that I had studied. Indeed, they’re good companies. Pure coffee has good mycotoxins. But there are more and more companies out there, and they’re quite expensive because of the assays. They have to run on the coffee before it goes into the packaged coffee. It’s funny that the studies link coffee ingestion to longevity, which is why some of these people are finding mycotoxins-free coffee out there.

Ann Shippy, MD

Exactly.

Doug Kaufmann

Longevity is a whole nother fascinating field.

Ann Shippy, MD

Interesting. Yes, so I think a lot of times it’s important to know the details behind it.

Doug Kaufmann

That’s what I mean. You and I walking into a restaurant would be the craziest thing in the world. People would roll their eyes at what we would ask. My wife and I find that we don’t eat out very much at all. We might take the kids out once in a while, but we can go to a real health food store, where they’re changing and getting foods that are organic and pure. We know the sources, and I’m just having such a good time in my old age. I want to continue this as long as I can. My mom had ocular melanoma and died. Dad had prostate disease and died. That sperm and egg became me. Genetics isn’t. I don’t rely very heavily on the hand that I was dealt, and I have studied epigenetics, so Dad never exercised in his life. I go out and push hard. And I ran the White Rock half marathon on my 50th birthday. I just think it’s so important that we detox by dripping.

I call it sweating, especially because it’s harder. I watched what Dad and mommy ate. I don’t eat those because I want to live, as you won’t live a second longer than you’re supposed to. But I want to live that healthy life. I got on the floor the other day with our little 19-month-old granddaughter, and she climbed on my back, I think a 73- or 74-year-old can do that. But I feel so good. That’s all part of this antifungal program. It isn’t specific to preventing cancer, coronary artery disease, or diabetes. But it’s interesting to note here: How do scientists study animals? It’s inhumane to have a new diabetes drug and try it out on patients. You try it out on animals first, usually rats, mice, etc. The way we induce diabetes in study animals is by inoculating them with streptozotocin or declomycin for mycotoxins. You do this for months, and then they all end up with beta cell collapse. With diabetes. How do you treat cancer?

Ann Shippy, MD

Is it just you’re probably using words that people don’t understand?

Doug Kaufmann

Oh my gosh! I never thought I’d use words people didn’t understand.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes.

Doug Kaufmann

These are old antibiotics that are no longer used in medicine. They’re used in research to induce reactions. In the study, animals.

Ann Shippy, MD

But they’re Mycotoxins, They’re antibiotics. Mycotoxins.

Doug Kaufmann

Right. Thank you.

Ann Shippy, MD

Thank you. The bottom line is we know that Mycotoxins can induce diabetes.

Doug Kaufmann

Now just go with me. How do we do it? How do we infuse cancer into these animals? We use different mycotoxins to induce animals. This one animal cancers in all the cancer and all the animals they inject. This one is called aflatoxin. It’s an Aspergillus mold. You inoculate these animals, and soon they’re bleeding or getting lumps and bumps. Now they can study their medication, but it’s a mycotoxin. How do we induce neurological damage? Alzheimer’s type. We use other mycotoxins to induce it, and we can go on with cardiotoxicity, etc. We use fungal mycotoxins that are sometimes in food. We very often eat nuts, grains, and so forth. I have to wonder, Dr. Shippy, when that scientist’s home and all those camps, all those rats now have cancer. He goes in, and he says, “Well, honey, we did it high five. Pour us a drink. How did you do that? “I mean, just because cancer is a huge problem in America. Well, I don’t know. I have these little vials of stuff. What’s it called? Could you look tomorrow? It’s called aflatoxin. What is aflatoxin? I don’t know. All I know is that I inject all these. You would think he’d say, You’re not going to believe this, sweetheart. We figured it out. Aspergillus mold is in a lot of ducting systems in people’s homes. Aspergillus mold grows on corn, wheat, and grain. We don’t get it. It was almost like we pulled up the rug and swept it underneath. But mycotoxins have been inducing disease in animals for as long as we’ve known that they can do that. Why isn’t that then inducing cancer, diabetes, or arthritis? It is. I’m the guy who did the dirty work, empirically figuring all that out. Thank you for bringing that up. There’s now plenty of data and hundreds and hundreds of research papers to confirm this. But that was 53 years ago.

Ann Shippy, MD

If I had my way.

Doug Kaufmann

Yes.

Ann Shippy, MD

We do these labs as a physical every year. We look at people’s cholesterol, blood sugars, kidney function, white blood cell count, their hemoglobin, and maybe check a little something about their thyroid, but not even very comprehensively. People leave with this. Failing that, “Oh, wow, I’m in good health.”

Doug Kaufmann

Yes.

Ann Shippy, MD

But I think we should be starting to include mycotoxin testing and some fungal testing because the body reaches a threshold where it’s been going on for a while before the disease occurs. If I had my way, the screening would be part of the annual physical so people know where they are, and then they can take action to find where it’s coming from in their diet or at home and help their bodies get rid of it.

Doug Kaufmann

It’s a great statement. Few people know that Cyclosporine cyclists are born to prevent tissue rejection. It was fungus. Few people know that statins are antifungal drugs, and yet everybody’s on them, and they seem to work. I mean, it’s so amazing.

Ann Shippy, MD

I think that.

Doug Kaufmann

Yes. Okay. Thank you. The same doctors I did. I spoke with one of them yesterday, by the way, who says men are abusing statins. Didn’t hormone replacement therapy come back to snap us in the year 2000 with the Women’s Health Initiative here? We put the pharmaceutical companies to work to put people on drugs. When that fell apart, statin drugs took over. Now we have well-off people with 220 cholesterol, and we can put them on drugs. I won’t get into all that. But it’s fascinating that we’re preventing the onset of coronary artery disease with something that kills fungus called a step drug. It’s just anything, in my humble opinion, food or medicine that seems to work because it stops up fungal debris. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. Serotonin is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Few doctors know that SSRI is about seven years old. Now. We’re documented, too. There are fungicides. They kill fungi. When we realized that elevated serotonin levels in depressed people weren’t the problem, the medical journals that I subscribed to said, Well, then what is the problem where your pills kill fungus? Could fungus induce depression? I don’t know all the answers.

Ann Shippy, MD

Oh, absolutely. There’s plenty of data.

Doug Kaufmann

I know some of the people and the work you’re doing is so good. We just have to keep on keeping on in venues like this where you can interview people who have been there. Yes, I’m a kid who picked myself up by the bootstraps and took off and the doctor said, “Yes, I guess just don’t get me in trouble.” Antifungus. Isn’t that crude that he used to grind up nystatin? It could have been saltwater and we’d start giving it to the allergic patients?” And soon you’d be out of it.

Ann Shippy, MD

We still do some of that today. We do need a compounding pharmacy. I know because that’s so important for this Chronic sinus infection. 

Doug Kaufmann

Yes. 

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. You guys were breaking new ground. I’m very grateful that you got this good information out into the world and with such a big heart.

Doug Kaufmann

Oh, it had to get out. I don’t know why I was chosen, as I was supposed to go to medical school, but the Vietnam War got in the way of that. But I couldn’t have done it anyway, and you guys had twice my IQ. But I was the guy who could kind of figure out what worked for people and then bring that back. The paper I co-authored that went into Oncology News a decade ago now really opened doctors’ eyes. Is there a fungal etiology to cancer? Well, we’ve known for 50 years that you can give a mouse fungus and wham! When you talk about mycotoxins, the easiest way to present this data to people is that penicillium is the mold and the mycotoxins it makes we call penicillin. There are dozens of penicillin-derived antibiotics. These are mycotoxins. Don’t take them. Take them when your doctor says to take them. Do not keep going back to the doctor and saying, I need more antibiotics because indirectly, you’re increasing your risk of not only tummy problems but serious diseases. Be careful. Many fungi are gas poisons, and when we swallow them, that can be detrimental. Did you know, Dr. Shippy, that in the old days, nystatin was cleaved on two antibiotics in the 1950s? And because they knew people were going to have gut problems as antibiotics, he raced the good train of the belly, the good bacteria. They leave nystatin on it. Somewhere, somehow somebody took the nystatin off, and a whole new world of gut diseases was born. Sad.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. Sometimes the best ideas get lost in translation. It could have been such a great idea. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. You’re just such a wealth of information, and you’re so great at explaining complex situations and ideas. I know why your audience loves you. I would love for you to share how people could find you and tap into this passion that you have for educating people and helping with this challenge.

Doug Kaufmann

Thank you. Most recently, maybe five years ago, because I can’t see my audience. It’s very frustrating. Get nice letters. “Gee, you saved my husband’s life.” But I wanted to communicate with the audience. With the advent of social media, I hopped on Facebook and now I have my platform. knowthecause.com. Every Monday and Tuesday from three to four p.m. Central. I do one hour live where people can ask me questions. I will always tell you to listen to your doctor at all times, but I want to help you teach your doctor the role of fungus. Every Monday and Tuesday from three to four p.m. here in Dallas, up on one of the sets here in our studio, I open up the airwaves, talk to you guys about particular things, and then you get to ask me questions. But I started a show 24 years ago called Know the Cause. 

I’ll never forget the president, and vice president of the company, who said, “What are you going to be talking about, Doug?” I said, “I’m going to be talking about fungus.” They said, “Good, What are you going to talk about tomorrow?” I said, “Fungus.”  It was just people can’t get that fungus. Did you know when babies take antibiotics, they gain massive amounts of weight? They’re growth enhancers used in cattle. No wonder. That’s why I talk about fungus, everything from fibromyalgia to depression to tummy problems to cancer, and diabetes. I talk about that on this show called Know the Cause. You can go to my website and learn a lot. knowthecause.com, We employ a doctor who is both a certified industrial hygienist and a medical doctor. His name is Luke Curtis, and we pay Luke every month to update all the data on our website dealing with fungus. There’s a wealth of information on knowthecause.com.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, thanks so much, Doug. I am just so pleased that we got to share so much information so quickly and that people can go even deeper by delving into your massive resources of information.

Doug Kaufmann

It’s great to be with you. Thank you so much for the invite. I appreciate it.

Ann Shippy, MD

It. Let’s do it again soon.

Doug Kaufmann

We’ll do it. Thank you.