The Silent Killer In Your Home: How Mold Impacts Your Heart

Introduction and Mold Journey 0:00

Well, Doctor Peter, thanks so much, man. I really appreciate you being here with us. Thanks for having me. It's it's always a pleasure to get together with you, trying to help change the world and save lives. And that's what we're going to do. And that's what you have been doing. And I alluded to it when I just read your bio a minute ago, but, you know, you've done really great work as the gluten free warrior and you've spread awareness about, the inflammatory connections with grains and pain, autoimmunity.

And you've devoted Near-Decade plus to this and, and this, this shift, and that's shift in brand, but shift in focus to mold. It wasn't it wasn't on your five year vision plan. I'll bet. No, as a matter of fact, I was I was praying to God. This was several years ago. I said, God, please, please quit sending people with chronic mold problems to my practice. Wow. Because I'm one of the few online that still practice. I have a brick and mortar and you know, I still see people three days a week and, mold is tough, man.

It's a tough conversation because you know what? You what you really are trying to do is help somebody understand that where diet and lifestyle have totally failed them, right? Medicine has totally failed. And they're frustrated. They don't they don't know what else to do. They don't they don't know what other questions to ask. And then as a as their doctor, you're putting together the pieces that you know, you're in mold. And so now you're telling these people who spent thousands of dollars and you know, sick for years that the very one place they thought was their safe haven is killing them.

Yeah. Your house is killing you. And and so to do that and to have that conversation, there's one there's tremendous skepticism on the part of many people where a lot of that skepticism can come from is, let's say, a woman who stays home doesn't go to work, but she's in the home every day, all day, is the most exposed right from a time dose, exposure to mold, mold, toxins in her health deteriorates faster than everyone else's. Right. Because maybe the kids go off to school for 8 or 12 hours a day.

The husband's off at work for, you know, 40 plus hours a week. And so they're less affected because there's a smaller dose exposure. Because it is it dose exposure matters, right? Time of exposure. So the woman is usually the person that notices health declines first. And so you have this okay. This doubt because husband's like, well I don't feel tremendously bad. So you know, it can't be mold can't be my house because I live there too. Right. So you have to overcome those types of objections. Not not the not that those are hard to overcome.

It's just a it's like a legal case. You have to build so much objective evidence, both forensically within the biochemistry of the patient, but also forensically within the milieu of the house. Right. So you, you know, taking on mold cases, you know, you kind of have to be an Hvac expert, construction expert, an airflow expert. Right? These are all things that are very important to help as a doctor, help you help your patient navigate a true understanding. And so it takes tremendous time and resources to do that.

And then you're still met with skepticism. And and so that's why I was praying it was just these are these are things I go home with them and I love I love helping people get healthy and find their health. But, you know, every patient I see, I don't I don't I'm not a high volume practice. And I take on 350, 400 cases a year max. And, I take everybody home with me, like they sit on the back of my shoulders and I'm thinking about them. I'm praying for them, and they're on my minds. How do we help get them better?

And when you have, you know, 30, 40% of those people are in mold. You know, it gets heavy, it gets super heavy. And, you since Covid, really, I've noticed a tremendous uptick. And and I think part of the reason why is everybody stayed home. So again, time in the house, if the house has a has an issue, there's a greater amount of time in the home, which is a greater amount of exposure, and there's a greater deterioration in health. But but anyway, as I was as I was praying to God, I said, God, please, please quit sending chronic mold patients to my where my answer came very shortly after.

With my wife and her health started to deteriorate with what happened in my family. With that way, our family was the first thing was my dog. Our family dog, a little 8 pound Yorkie was getting sick and her organs were failing and she was vomiting and she was having diarrhea and she was lethargic. So we, you know, we took her to vets multiple, multiple times. Nobody knew what was wrong with her. She just her health was just failing. She went blind and her organs failed. And at the end of the day, it was mold.

It killed her. That was my first clue. Was my dog, and I didn't. I didn't hear that clue, you know, because. God, God doesn't answer your prayers in the in the. You know, as you know, he doesn't just say here, Peter, this is exactly what I need for you. He gives you clues, he gives you inside. So as I prayed, don't send me any more. The first message he sent me was the death of my dog. He wanted me to pay attention. And then the second message that he sent me was my son and my wife both got very sick.

And then the third message that he sent me was, I had, you know, we had for 20 years, we had a nanny for my youngest son.

How Mold Exposure Harms Health 5:55

We had she lived with us and, and she was our nanny. She took care of us. She she helped, help with the house. Well, she comes to me and she says she's crying, and she says, I can't, I can't work for you anymore. And, you know, at the time, it was like, why? Because she she had her own business where she would clean other people's homes. And that was her. That was her. She didn't quit cleaning home. She just quit cleaning mine. Okay. And I and I, you know, fast for a little while, a little bit more.

My wife and I, we we're gone on a vacation, and we come home and, she's scrambling. Once we get home, she's scrambling to clean the house because her aunt's coming to visit the following week, and, and there's this haze on the cabinets. And at the time, you didn't really think much of it. So she's wiping this haze off the cabinets and it's mold. What it is, is actually aspergillus penicillium mold. And so she's crystallizing all this and breathing it in. And so the day that she did that, she was in bed for 18 days after with a fever, 100 102 fever, we thought she had just got Covid because it was around the same time.

And so it's like, okay, so now there's another excuse. I didn't hear that message. Right. And then and then her health really takes a tumble after that. I mean, to the point, Eric, where she can't she can't complete sentences. She's on the couch all day. This is a woman who's, you know, in great shape, CrossFit, you know, just a phenomenal person of phenomenally energetically. Right. But just all that goes away in a very short period of time. And, but then she starts smelling this must or this odor.

We don't see any mold or it's not obvious. We don't see like, oh, there's mold in your bathroom corner, there's mold here. There's no we don't see. There's nothing that visibly we could see. But her nose is good. We call them all the inspector out. They, Initially they find positive mold in the air, 9200 spore count per cubic meter, which is extremely high for an air test. Those of you who may not know much about mold, but if you even find mold on an air test, you're extremely lucky because air tests are extremely inaccurate.

They don't. They don't make mold up if you do find it, but you can miss mold very easily with an air test because and there's just a lot of nuance there. Even the Who, the World Health Organization, on there with their standards of air testing, say that you need at least 27 samples to get an accurate assessment of an indoor space, you know, so he took one sample and he found 9200 spore count. And that was our that was our beginning of our first clue. Right. And I thought, oh, it's it can't be a big deal. Maybe we just missed something.

Maybe there's a leak. Just a small leak somewhere. So we had, you know, we had to build because the home was new. We had the builder come out, and they're doing as much as they can to try to, to to try to figure out where it's growing. But they're not qualified. They just the mold inspector they hired was an idiot to be frank, wasn't qualified. And ultimately what they ended up doing, their solution, which I knew was wrong because I've been dealing with people with chronic mold for years. In my practice, their solution was to scrub our air and to vacuum the walls in our bathroom.

Like that was the solution. And so that's what they did. And then immediately they ran an air test immediately after turning off the air scrubber. And oh, problem solved. And that was when I knew we had a problem because, my wife is funny. She asked the guy, why? Why would you think an air sample would be accurate after immediately turning off the air scrubber? That that seems a little suspect. And he's like, oh no, this is what we do. This is how it's done all the time. And then she calls me and tells me that because I wasn't home to, to experience that.

But they're like, okay, we need to find somebody who's forensic. And so from that point, we found a gentleman and he came out and he's like, get out of the house now! Wow. I mean, within five minutes, Eric, he had photographic evidence of mold growing on the back of our sheetrock. He showed me that. It's funny because before mold turns into this big, thick carpet of obvious mold, it grows in fractal patterns, it grows in geometric patterns, and it looks a lot like debris on the back of sheetrock.

A lot of times they try to call it sheetrock dust, but dust doesn't settle vertically. You see what I'm saying? Like the air. Like there's no electrostatic, charge behind your wall. There shouldn't be. And that dust shouldn't just adhere to the back of your wall. But if you look at it under the right lighting at an angle, you can see geometric, geometric growth patterns. And that's what he was showing us. And, and so from there, it was just a matter of getting extremely forensic. I hired engineers and architects and Hvac experts and, people to come out and assess our house and what we ended up finding out once, once all the testing was done.

Was they just cut corners in the building, and this is nothing. This is very common, by the way. Like this isn't unique to my house. It's it's I think mold is the next great epidemic of of what drives illness, especially in the US, because the rapidity at which they're building homes with unskilled labor, and the mistakes that they're making in the corners that they're cutting on purpose to save money, it's a catastrophe. They're building mold boxes. I mean, just in my area along just in the greater Houston area, there are a couple of neighborhoods now.

One of them is an 8000 home neighborhood. A good chunk of those homes have mold in them already. It's a brand new neighborhood. Another one? One of my one of my, one of my workers, one of my employees in my office. Her sister is in a neighborhood where several hundred homes and, like half of them, have visible mold growing on them in their brand new homes because they're cutting corners. So, anywhere to say all all of that is to simply say, my experience was I didn't want to deal with this anymore.

I wanted to put my head in the sand and move forward and keep talking about gluten and keep talking about immune disease and died and lifestyle change. But God dropped in my life such a problem that I couldn't ignore it. And what I found along that journey was it was so frustrating trying to get real answers. You know, I've had plenty of patients where it's like, yeah, go hire this guy, go hire your experts. But I don't, you know, I just I just assumed that the experts were experts. You know what I mean?

I, I assume him all the mold inspectors knew what they were doing. I assume that, you know, the building biology experts knew what they were doing. I assume that the builders knew what they were doing. And so that was my own mistake. And I'm probably I probably missed it a lot in a lot of my patients historically. Thinking back, especially on some of the people that, you know, struggled to really find their answer with diet and lifestyle change. But what I realize is the industry is corrupt. It's full of ineptitude and people that don't know what they're doing.

It's it's it's it's got a total lack of empathy and a total misunderstanding of the devastation. And the health impacts that mold and mold toxins can have on humans, even in small amounts. And and so that's where I found myself. And so as part of that, as I like to, as I like to do when I, when I have to go that deep into something, when it's that disruptive of life because we moved out of our house, we lived it in a, in an extended stay hotel for two months, just trying to recover. And, you know, we have a farm.

And so, you know, you're driving from a hotel back to your farm to feed your animals because, you know, animals, there's no break you don't get. You know, it's not every morning, every night you have to take care of your critters. And if you're doing it right. And so it was, you know, it was a very huge displacement. And, so now I, I turn my sights on why is this a problem? What's the scope and the nature of why this has become such a big problem? And so that's, that's where we're at now. We're in the middle of, you know, filming a documentary, on this process of what we've gone through, but also to arm people with the right knowledge so that they don't stay in their homes.

I mean, if I didn't know what I knew, my wife would be dead. You know, my dog died. My wife would be dead. My son would probably be dead or severely named. My health wasn't wasn't all that great. I put on 25 pounds in the mold. And I'm a CrossFit or. I love, you know, I love staying fit. I just enjoy exercise. And, you know, I just couldn't do it anymore because I was so, I was so disrepair. I try to do a pull up in my shoulder. Would go out for a month. You know, I try to do a squat, my knees would ache, and I wouldn't recover from a workout.

So I just ended up having to stop doing it altogether. And, you know, with that came a bunch of weight faded. It was it was it was just life altering, you know? And here I am, I, you know, pride myself on, you know, trying to know health and wellness. And it's also very humbling to have that stolen away from you and, and struggle to figure out why it's happening. Thank you for just being so vulnerable, so real. I, I, I can think of no better person that I would want to entrust with this task than you.

And maybe that's why God put this on your lap. Because he knew you were going to be faithful with it. You know, it's the condolences, our condolences for your puppy, for the loss and the suffering. Yet it's through oftentimes. How often do we experience that passion was birthed from the pain and then from that was birthed this purpose. And so what could take you away? Because you're a very driven man, very entrepreneurial. You're very successful, focused. I'm sure you have your goals and you meet them and then maybe God's been knocking on your door for a few years.

And, hey, Peter, I want you to be the mold guy. And you're like, no, I'm focused on this. And and so I just want to thank you, man. No joke. I mean, very, very sincerely, I haven't heard the depths of this. We talked recently, and you gave me a little snippet of what's going on. I'm like, wow, I had no idea. We haven't talked in a year or so. So I just want to thank you for taking the charge, because very few people would do what you've done. And I want to unpack this a little bit. And folks, first off, we're talking about the context of, black mold, toxic mold exposure and directly increasing your risk for heart attack, stroke, heart disease, and virtually every chronic illness.

I mean, period, exclamation point. And not only that, but more even more importantly, is the recovery of those diseases. Because if you are in a situation where your home is toxic and you don't know it, you might find never healing, never truly recovering from heart attack, stroke, cancer, diabetes, or whatever it might be. So, where do we start? And my, my, I'm taking notes. My first thought is testing. I mean, can you give people some practical advice? Like, I think there may be a problem. What's the first thing someone does?

I'd say that mold is not a do it yourself at home project. Don't try to clean your own mold without understanding the nature of why it grew.

Testing the Body and the Home 17:10

You know, if you find it like that's even if you. Let's just say you suspect mold. Okay. First steps. Yeah, I suspect mold. Maybe, maybe my diet is dialed in. I've seen a functional style doctor. He's guided me along this path of improving a lot of things, but I just am not. Not getting better. And mold is on your radar. Step one. Is perform, but you have to change your diet. You have to have kind of the right diet to do this, but it's to perform something called a urinary mycotoxins analysis. And if you're going to do that, there's some foods that you have to cut out of your diet before you can do a test like this.

Because sometimes foods can be contaminated with mold toxins. So it's a whole nother chapter of this story. But for example, dried fruit can be contaminated. Peanut butter, coffee, all grains. And when I wrote No grain, No Pain, I wrote about mycotoxins as being predominantly one of the biggest problems beyond gluten in grains. Because grains oftentimes have mold growing on them. And then they harvest that for food, and then those mycotoxins are not subjected to deterioration or destruction by heat or by some of the processes.

When we when we basically break these things down into foods and so they live, they stay in their, so you have to be off of those types of foods and things if you're going to do a urine mycotoxins test. So if you're working with a mold literate doctor, they should know that, like you shouldn't, you should just give you a urine test and say, don't worry about changing your diet. Don't worry about anything. Because if they do, you're going to get a false positive potentially. We don't look, we don't want to blame mold if mold is not to blame, but we want to be really accurate about how we go about it.

So if your diet's not not dialed in, you can get contamination of mycotoxins through your diet. And that can lead to a false positive. And now you're investigating your home and spending a bunch of money investing in your home. And really, you don't have a problem. Does that make sense? So, so part one is, is change your diet before you do a micro toxin test, at least for two weeks. Most mold toxins have a very short half life, so they're in and out of the body pretty quickly. If you're if your livers and your kidney is if your liver and kidneys are working effectively. So but but again, that's step one.

That would be like the first level of suspicion evidence. You we would we wouldn't build a whole case just on a, on a micro toxin test. But it is a good first step if it comes back positive. Now you you think okay, well where do I spend my time? My house, my car, maybe work. So you can't just go straight to the house and say, oh, it's just the house, right? It could. I mean, you could work in a moldy building. I've seen it a lot. I had a at a patient just several months ago who was a sales rep and worked out of her car and spent like 12 hours a day in her car, and her car was full of mold and it was making her super sick.

And you know why? She got rid of her car recovery, right? So it's not always the house. So I say that because, you know, this is why you have to stay forensic with it. So mycotoxins, there are blood tests that it can also allude and help. So one of some of the blood tests that can help us understand whether or not a person is being exposed is IGA and IgG antibody testing two different mold species. So you can, you know, not so much IgG. A lot of people want to run IgG tests. IgG tests don't tell you that you're being exposed and that that exposure is hurting you.

Exams telling you that you've had exposure and that your body's produced antibodies to protect you. But IGA and IG, antibodies tell you that you're being harmed and that your body's actively trying to fight the exposure. So it's important that those tests can be can be insights for mold reactions because there's mold reactions that people have. And then there's there's micro toxin reactions. So think of mold as the microorganism that's alive okay. That grows and replicates and think of the mold toxins as these little tiny poisons that they push out into the environment.

The job of a mold toxin for mold is to basically suppress the immune system of everything in the area, so that the mold can start growing on it and start eating it and feeding off of it. I mean, mold is God's great equalizer, right? Ashes to ashes mold is what makes that a possibility. So mold is not necessarily evil, but when it's growing in your house uncontrollably producing mycotoxins, you can be reactive to mold. Anywhere from 5 to 20% of the population is allergic to mold. But then we also have micro toxic causes, which is mold poisoning, might mold toxin poisoning, and no one is, no one is resistant to that when the dose is high enough for long enough so the mycotoxins can affect you, the mold can affect you.

So the mycotoxins testing is important. The mold IgG A IgG testing can be important. IgG less important than IGA and IgG. IGF. And so those are insights that can give you clues. There's also antibody testing to mycotoxins. So you can measure mycotoxins directly coming out of a person. That would indicate environmental exposures. You can also measure the antibody response to those mold toxins. Right. So there's there's two different types of things that can be measured there that can give you insight into into testing a person a human.

And then there's other blood tests like TGF beta one and and C4 a and and then p nine. These are inflammatory markers that are commonly present in high in people that have had mold exposure, although they're not definitive for mold exposure. They're inside, right? They're inside. They're clues to inflammation. That mold can can drive. So those are examples. We can literally we could talk for 6 or 7 hours on testing. But so that's testing the human in in kind of a, a short capsule of of overview.

And then there's testing the home. And this is where it can get really complex because like I said earlier, air testing can be very misleading. And so you really you can do our testing. But a lot of times the way airflow works in a house, when you're putting a tripod, it's measuring air in the middle of a room. You know, you may have mold over here in that airflow, but not in the middle of the room. Right. And so you could miss it. It's very easy to miss it. This is why you need about 27 air samples, 27 or 30 air samples to be able to isolate and assess a space accurately.

Otherwise, it's easy to miss. But then there's also the fact that many of the toxic molds are very heavy. And so when you're doing an air test with that tripod sits up here around the five foot mark, which is where human mouths are, right? A lot of those mold spores drop to the floor. And you can't pick them up on an air test. The other thing your tests don't measure is they don't measure mycotoxins. They measure mold spores. You can have mold spores growing on the floor that are emitting mycotoxins.

Mycotoxins are about point one to point three microns in size. There's as small as a virus. You don't see them, but if you're not measuring them in your air, you're not getting a true assessment of whether or not you're being poisoned by mycotoxins. And so that's that's something now the technology has evolved. We're now that has become a possibility in the last couple of years where you can now not just do an ear test for mold spores, but you can also do an air test for mycotoxins, which in my opinion, those things should be done.

But there are a lot of flaws in the way mold inspectors do air testing. And many of the experts, the biology building experts in the mold experts believe that it's unethical to do an air test in a home without replicating living conditions. And what I mean by that is there's airflow naturally in an airflow. You're walking through a house, you're opening closing doors, opening, closing windows. And so there's movement, right? There's all this movement of air. A lot of times what mold inspectors do is they have the the homeowner leave the house.

They let the home sit for several hours with no airflow. They tiptoe in and then they run their test. And so there's no actual movement of air. So, you know, if that if those spores are floating down below or are on the floor on surface areas of things, you're not picking those up, which is really I mean, ethically, it's important that a disturbance air test is done. And then sometimes you don't you don't attack the mold in in the air of the central living, places. But you can detect it behind the wall.

So there's what's called cavity wall samples, where you can literally take an air sample from the wall cavity and measure it for. And a lot of times you'll find, like in my home, we did find 9200, spores in our, in our air when they first tested it. But when they, when they scrubbed it, you know, they and they said, oh, it's mitigated. But then I had another inspector come out and they, they tapped into the wall cavity and in some of my wall cavities, I mean, we're talking hundreds of thousands of spore counts per cubic meter of air of black mold.

Can't tell me, Aspergillus Penicillium. So, not present in the air but present in the wall cavity. And you have to understand the wall cavity pushes air into the living space because all houses breathe like there's a breathing, motion that occurs with air, with airflow. And so this is this is part of the forensics, like, how do you know that that's happening in your house? Well, you can do it. What's called a smoke test, where you run smoke machines and it'll you actually can watch watch air flowing out of your outlets.

Right. So when you put when you put air or when you put rather smoke next to your wall outlets and you see that smoke drive away from the wall outlet, that means there's airflow coming out of your wall, right? Pushing into your living space. And so if your wall cavities for those mold spores, you know, that's that's pushing poison into your, into your living space. So, so that's, that's kind of some of the air testing that can be done and some of the odds and ends to it. But then there's also, what's called, MSC qPCR testing, which is just a way of measuring for mold spores and dust samples.

Because, remember, a lot of the toxic mold will settle on surfaces. They don't float in the air. So measuring those areas where it's really dusty, the top of refrigerators, the top of doorframes, that kind of thing. And you can do dust samples that can detect with very great degrees of accuracy, different types of mold spores. You can also do what are called taped live samples, and those can measure mold. And they can also measure the for the presence of mycotoxins, you know, beyond the mold. And so it's just a matter of having the right forensic type of mold inspector who knows these things to come out and do a thorough job for you and not just come out and run an airtight one air test in the middle of your room, of your house and say, oh no, you don't have any problems.

And I can't see anything. And this is, you know, the vast majority of the industry. You know, when I said earlier, I said it was corrupt, but I also said it, they were inept. I'm not saying that mold inspectors are trying to, to trick you. You're just lazy. And, it's super efficient to come into a house and spend 30 minutes running an air test, charging somebody $500, and then move on to the next house. It's like a high volume. How many houses can I hit today but not do a thorough job on any of them?

But but make more money because I'm hitting more homes. And that's part of the problem. You really got to have somebody who spends a half a day at your house and understands, you know, how to find clues, because there's also other clues they look for. They use moisture meters, they use infrared cameras, they use fiber optic cameras. They can put behind your wall cavity to measure, to look. They use, other tools like, like smoke testing, as another forensic type of investigation. So you really want somebody who understands those things is doing a thorough job, but also you want somebody who can do a visual inspection.

Let's let's look for areas where there might be signs of water damage, like peeling paint or wallpaper that's peeling back. Let's look for, let's look for areas where humidity is a little bit higher and maybe it shouldn't be. Right. The walls, it shouldn't really have 50% humidity when you, when you put a humidity reader on them, like the air itself in a home should be below 55% relative humidity and maybe it's 60 or 70%, which is conducive for muscle growth without leaking water because you don't need a busted piper or leaky roof for mold to grow.

That's that's another myth. You don't need running water. You just need water vapor mold growth. The number one ingredient for for mold to grow and replicate in your house is for your house. Humidity levels not to be well controlled. And so a good mold inspector understands those things and will measure those things. Don't go to a Home Depot and buy a mold petri dish kit. I mean, you can, but don't rely on that as evidence to make all your decisions. Like if you want to rely on it as a as a piece of evidence in a chain of evidence.

Right. And I said earlier, it's like building a legal case, because you're, you're getting ready to make a decision as to whether or not your house is killing you or whether it isn't. And so you need to be right. You need to be accurate. Because if you're not and you know, some people gaslight themselves, it's like, I don't want to find it. Why is it hard for me as a doctor. Luke's not hard for me. I can go home. I don't have to if I'm not living in it. It's not hard. It's not weighing on me to not live in somebody's mold.

What's hard is to watch somebody die, which hard is to watch somebody's health completely deteriorate into cancer, or have a major health issue that just doesn't get better because they don't want to hear the truth. It's a tough truth. It's probably the toughest truth that I've ever had to deal with in private practice. Because because like I said earlier, the mentality of the home is the home is the heart. The home is the heart is where we go to where we go to heal. It's where we go to sleep. It's where we go to have fun.

It's where we go to congregate and be at peace. It's not where we go to be maimed and murdered by a hidden in, you know, a hidden mycotoxins that that we're not even aware of. And, and so you have to you have to have that level of investigation if you're trying to rule it in or out, if you're going to be able to make great decisions

Recovery Strategies and Detox Support 31:25

about your next step. Because many people in mold, when you talk about some of the symptoms, one of the biggest symptoms is brain fog, an inability to cope or adapt to stress. And so when you're not coping with stress well, and then hearing the news that your home might be killing you like that's a crusher, I was there, brain fog to the to the level that you can't think clearly. What am I supposed to do? I don't want to make the decision. It's. It's hard to make this decision. It's stressful to make the decision. I'm already overwhelmed.

I'm already overstressed. I can't handle one more thing. And that's why when we had our forensic investigation done, the guy looked at me dead in the eye, and he said, get the hell out of here. This house is killing your family. And I laughed. We left that night that I mean, we didn't. We left with the clothes on our back. And one of the first things we did is we went to the store and bought new clothes. Because those clothes we left with were contaminated with mold and mycotoxins. So, anyway, it's a hard thing to do, right?

Because, you know, when you're walking away from, you know, we have an odd attachment to the physical world, even those of us that are spiritual, right? We still we still do. We still have this attachment to the physical world, but it's the world we live in. It's the world we navigate it. It's hard. It's hard to leave something that you've worked your whole life to build. It's hard to walk away from all the Christmas ornaments from your kids. It's hard to walk away from all the special pictures and the special moments that you've kind of culminated as your home, right?

To make your home a home like you. You leave those things behind because a lot of them, they're just they've just become poisoned. Right. And and if you take them with you, you're just going to bring the poison with you. So it's hard to get somebody to do that. So I know this sounds daunting, right? This whole conversation so far sounds a little daunting. I, I, I want you all to know there's plenty of hope on the other side of this as as I've experienced both personally and and with people I've worked with.

But, but it's that's why you have to go to the level of investigation to get your answers. Because if you dismiss the proper investigation, as I said earlier, the heaviness of this is when people die in their mold. I had a gentleman, you know, he had he had, severe respiratory issues, could barely breathe on an oxygen tank. You know, we give back his tests. I'm like, man, your mold. We sent out a mold, Inspector. Multispectral. I get the hell out of here. He says, no, I don't want to. I'll die in my house. And he did.

He died. Died about a year later. The didn't last. His wife ultimately ended up watching him die before she was convinced to get the hell out. It's a tough thing. And, you know, when you when you have people that don't want to see that truth, you have to stack the evidence for them in their favor because it's hard for them. They're sick to brain fog. They're having a hard time dealing with stress, coping with stress they can't handle anymore. And as a doctor, if you don't line your ducks up in a row so that they have the best information to make, the best decision to move forward, then you fail them and potentially you've killed them.

And that's heavy. So full circle. That's why I was praying. It's that heaviness. And I hate to say it, but it's a rich man's game sometimes where I've spoken to people and they're like, I can't afford to leave. Like I can't even afford the hotel night. I'm hand-to-mouth. I could barely afford rent or my mortgage, and to say I have to buy new clothes, to say I have to move. What do I do with this place? I'm in it. That's another big it's a financial piece and and that's tough. I mean, thankfully at this point, we have things like crowd sourcing and go Fund Me and things like that, which, by the way, if anyone feels and they go through these processes and they feel they're in the situation and but know that during the situation that Doctor Peters talking about for sure don't do this alone.

Go out started, go fund me. People will get behind it, especially if you have a story, especially if you say, look, I've been going to doctors. I've spent this much money on medical bills. Nothing's helping me. Found the solution? Please help. This will help me, whatever it is. But that that it always, not always, but oftentimes come back to financial peace. A couple things to unpack there. This is brilliant. And like I actually don't want to stop. I'm learning so much, want to unpack and kind of summarize a couple things, folks.

It is beyond a shadow of a doubt in the literature. Why cardiology and why your GP's are not saying this. Maybe they are, but most don't is beyond me. But the literature is clear. Chronic mold exposure directly related to irregular heartbeats, heart inflammation, internal bleeding, blood clots that can and will lead to a variety of different stroke. I think that's one thing to really, really remember. And this is in the literature I like, I'm looking at a study here from 2014, mold infections and the central nervous system.

I mean, it's right there in the literature and it talks about hemorrhagic strokes, sub arachnoid hemorrhage, epidemia it just the different things that it could do to your cerebral gray and white matter. It it damages your brain, your central nervous system. Your the third largest nervous system in your body. And people don't realize it. The heart is and is a neurological tissue. It's a neuro, muscular tissue. It is not, you know, in a vacuum. And, you know, like, the third largest nervous system runs through the center of your heart.

And mycotoxins are neurotoxins. That's that's part of their claim to to. We'll just say infamy. Right? It's it's, it's not good. And you almost all mold toxins, for the most part create free radical damage like they're reactive oxygen species. And, you know, anytime you have free radicals running amok, you get oxidative stress, right? And that can damage the endothelial lining of your blood vessels, creating vasoconstriction and increased clotting. Yeah, arrhythmias definitely are on that list of things.

And that's, that's neurological, right. Because you're getting that neurological damage. So your heart, neurologically is not being prompted properly to, to beat and relax appropriately. So you can get you can get running heart rates, galloping heart rates, you can get arrhythmic heart rates, etc.. But it even it even goes deeper than that. Like, like mycotoxins. There's research now showing that they disrupt the gut's ability to produce mucin, which is what coats and lines your GI tract to prevent it from leaking.

Right. So when we talk about leaky gut, leaky gut is a precursor to auto immunity. And a lot of heart disease is autoimmunity. Yeah. If you look at the core underlying mechanisms of chronic inflammation, it's an autoimmune process. And that happens with leaky gut. But we also know that it can cause vitamin and mineral deficiency. There's some research showing that muscle toxins induce vitamin B12 deficiency. And, you know, B12 deficiency as it relates to the heart, cardiovascular disease. Right.

So elevations of homocysteine, how do we lower homocysteine, vitamin B12. Homocysteine is a vascular toxin, right? It's it's a it's an independent risk factor for stroke, heart attacks and other cardiovascular health issues. So you know, we also know that, some of the mold this this is this is actually from research in Japan. Some of the mold grows a type of Penicillium. Let me back that up. Some of the rice has a type of Penicillium mold that grows in it. This is why again when I wrote no grain, No pain, I talked about mold toxins on grain.

But there's a yellow type of mold it can grow on rice. And some researchers believe, you know, we go back to berry berry, which was, you know, with polished white rice. It was causing vitamin B1 deficiencies. And that's why when you look at a bag of rice, it's fortified with vitamin B1 berry berries, a deficiency of vitamin B1. It berry berry is a cardiovascular disease. Berry berry is basically congestive heart failure. And and we know that that these Penicillium molds that grow on grain produce a toxin that can trigger berry, berry like reactions.

So what does the doctor do when you have these things? Typically they put you on a blood pressure pill. They lower your cholesterol. Generally they, they want to regulate your blood sugar. Right. And all those things. Yeah. The classic triad of metabolic syndrome, right, was regulate your blood pressure, regulate your cholesterol, regulate your blood sugar, and we'll call it even. And, and you can go home and sleep at night. But the reality is, a lot of high cholesterol is induced by mold. What causes high cholesterol?

Well, we have we can have a long. I know you and I. Serious. We could have a long conversation about whether or not even high. What is high cholesterol? Because I think there's some question marks there. But but truly high cholesterol. Right. You know, 300 plus. What's driving that? Well, one of the one of the reasons cholesterol goes up is, is for the immune system. It's helping the immune system. It fights infection like mold, infection because you can get mold infection, too. Once you're living in mold. Mold suppresses your immune system.

And now you got mold growing on you and in you. It's just the third. That's the triad of mold, right? You get you can be allergic to mold. You can you can be poisoned by mold toxins, but you can also have a mold infection. Like, those are the three big ways that mold affects humans. And, and when you when you have that, that mold infection aspect, it'll drive up your cholesterol when you have cardiovascular damage. I mean, it's it's the cart before the horse. It's not like cholesterol causes damage in plaques.

It's that the damage causes your body to make more cholesterol. Because cholesterol is a tool to help you kind of lay down a protective layer to stifle the inflammation. Cholesterol is any inflammatory. So, you know, we don't want to lower it when we're, we're we're in a situation our body's making more on purpose. And that purpose is to help you, not to. Maybe the body's not wrong. That's another mistake. I see a lot of doctors try to fight human chemistry, saying that your body is wrong for doing what it's doing, instead of asking, why is your body doing what it's doing?

They say, your body's wrong. Let's let's fix that with this pill. In reality, you're fighting the body's natural ability to protect itself. That's why drugs are the third leading, cause of death. They don't they don't solve the problem. But anyway, we did come on here to talk about about pharmaceutical induced deaths. We came on here to talk about mold. And so it's important for the viewers to understand it. Mold is an equal opportunity tissue destroyer. And there are hundreds of different probably more.

But but that we've recognized and that we've measured and studied different mycotoxins that we know are not only cardio toxic, cardiovascular toxic, but they're neurotoxic. They're toxic to the GI tract. They can they're toxic to the liver. They can cause damage to the kidneys. They cause cancer. And there are decades of research that have been done in this area. This is not new science. This is just an area of science that just like nutrition is ignored in medical school. Yeah. So too is environmental medicine.

Environmental medicine, one of the largest aspects of environmental medicine is sick building syndrome. And it's most of sick building syndrome is mold oriented. It's, you know, the vast majority of it. Wow wow wow wow. This has been unbelievable, by the way. And this is one of those must listen to repeats. I'm gonna start, you know, when you're on the airplane, you got the the pilot says, hey, we're going to start our descent. We're going to be landing in 20 minutes. Like, this is kind of like the landing announcement, but on a start by just a little walk through of some things.

So you might be seeing something on your you should be seeing something doc, on your screen right now. If you're able to see this, great. If not I'm going to walk you through. I just did a basic Google search and thank God for I that is, summarizing the data. I just typed up mycotoxins, response and mycotoxins. A couple things here, Michael. Toxins can remain in the body for years. And some people, especially those with inefficient detoxification symptoms and this is something don't respond yet.

But I'm going to give you a this is where we're going to land. There are almost no treatments for mycotoxins exposure except for supportive therapy such as diet and hydration. And this is what the literature is suggesting. This is what conventional medicine says. Except for supportive therapy, diet and hydration, there are almost no treatments from Michael. That's where I got it and I want to show you how I works. You click the button. It takes us to this journal from 2003. So if you're searching, this is what I'm saying.

If you're searching this online and you're like, okay, let's work this up, you're going to find out there's virtually no help, there's virtually no hope. And we're going to flip that script. But I want to paint the picture here because I mentioned food. I want to highlight what Doctor Peter said. Great list here. Grains, nuts, peanuts, dried fruit, coffee, cocoa, tea, wine, beer, herbs and spices completely go abstinent on those things for like Doctor Peter said at least two weeks before you get your test, but also do some testing.

See yourself because you mentioned something that was pretty powerful this time, dose exposure. And it also seems to be like there is a accumulation dose. So if you have a diet high in those foods and if you have mold exposure at your home, if you eat more of those foods and maybe your spouse, maybe that's another reason why you're affected differently is because you have more mold in your system because of the foods you're intaking. So that's something, my summary of what Doctor Peter's saying, and this is where I want you to go, because the treatment is there is no treatment.

Well, people go please, everyone go check out mold jack, Dicom, mold jack head. And I'm just want to read this from the trailer and let you roll. I love how you bring this together. The book of Leviticus. If the mildew reappears in the house says God, it must be torn down. It's stones, it's timbers, all of the plaster and taken out of town. Please let's land this plane. Talk to us about therapy. Talk to us about things that people can do right now, even if they are suspect. In addition to some of the food changes, walk us through some things that people can start doing.

Next to demolishing their home and rebuilding a new one. What what can people start doing today? I mean, first things first. You can change your diet, and there are a lot of people that do find tremendous benefit in diet change just by reducing the bucket exposure, right? Reducing the toxic load, the burden. But beyond beyond that you have to get out of mold to recover. That is number one. Number one, because I see it too often, people not getting out of it if it's bad enough. Now, if you've got some small amount where you're getting some exposure and it's simple remediation, like it's just a matter of cleaning, you know, a small area and fixing a small defect.

Okay, great. That doesn't mean tear down your home. Like in a lot of cases, it's not the home that needs to be torn down. It's some remediation that needs to be performed properly by people who understand what to do. So that that's a step, you know, you don't have to necessarily lose your house. I think God gave me that message and sent me on that journey because he needed me to understand all of it. He needed me to go through the journey so that I could, do what he gifted me with, which is I can make complex topics sound more simple so that people can manage, you know, navigating complex areas.

That's my gift. And so so step one is you got to get out of it. Step two change your diet. Step three, if you're out of it and your diet's been changed, there's certainly are therapeutics that can be done. Remember, your body always detoxes. There's a wisdom in your body. Detox is always on. And what we do. I always talk about the concept of I gotta do a detox. Your body is already detox detoxing right now. That's what sweat it. That's what urine is. That's what poop is. That's what your breath is.

It's your body expelling things through those orifices and channels

Hope, Practical Advice, and Closing Thoughts 47:45

to keep homeostasis going internally and to keep you going and feeling good. So you're already detoxing. You can detox mycotoxins. There's some people that are out there saying the only way you can do it is to take large amounts of quaternary ammonia, a prescription drug called holy star. I mean, I don't agree with that. Now, having said mold toxins can get trapped between your liver and your in your gut, but there are great binders, charcoal, zeolite, pectin, just to name a few that you can use that will help push that stuff out of you.

There's lots of things in fibrous foods, so I know a lot of people are. The trend today is kind of people going more carnivore and kind of being, you know, more scared of, of, of plant based diets and a lot of people who are in mold do better on a carnivore diet. I will say that, for many reasons, which we don't, we don't have time to get into the depth of all those today. But but, binders work really, really well. Glutathione is how your body mobilizes muscle toxins out of your tissues so that you can pick out and poop them out.

So good at iron is is a low hanging fruit supplement. NAC and Acetylcysteine can be very, very helpful as a as a nutritional supplement. Vitamin C, you know, my my favorite detox supplement is vitamin C. It's like human duct tape. It does everything. And then you also have some other things that you should probably get, get looked at, your nutrition status, sometimes recovering from mold when you're out of it and you're trying to recover it. Can't remember I said earlier, muscle toxins can cause malnutrition.

And so a lot of times people are devoid, are super deficient in B vitamins, they're deficient in key minerals. And so they're not responding as quickly or as well because their body lacks a key nutrient to perform detoxification. And so having those nutrient levels checked very, in my opinion, very important part of it, because then you can customize and we always talk about generic protocols. Right. Like what can I do generically to get more toxins out of my body? Okay. Easy. Glutathione NAC vitamin C great places to start.

But what about my own unique needs? What happened to me in that mold? What kind of damage was done? Where's my nutritional status currently, and what do I need to know about that? So that if I do, I can prompt a customized, supplementation type of protocol to really give my body what it what it actually is. And instead of giving it things that I speculate might be helpful. And I think in my practice experience, it's been the number one game changer for people is, is when they have detailed information about their own biochemistry that they can apply versus just kind of a one size fits all type of a generic program.

But but those things are key. But in recovery is very possible. And if you've been out and you think you're out of mold and you're you're and it's two years later, you haven't found the problem, you haven't fixed the problem. It doesn't take two years typically. For most people. Now, if you've been in mold 20 years, yeah, it may take every bit of, of two years, but, there should be signs of improvement along the way. I sometimes run into people where they're like, yeah, I've been working with my doctor for 3 or 4 years and I've seen no change.

I'm like, well, you're missing, you're missing. You're missing big bits. You're missing key points. You might not be out of the mold. If again, as a doctor, I was guilty of this. I relied on the mold inspection industry to to be honest and to do their job. And, you know, looking looking back, sometimes I think, man, I, I probably could have helped that person more had I known more about it. And there are some people, I've actually picked the phone up and called them, you know, now that I have a whole nother threshold of knowledge like, hey, how are you?

You know, here's what we know. And, you know, like, anyway, that's story for another day. But but get out of the mold. Supplements can be very, very helpful. Customizing it to your own biochemistry is even more helpful. Changing your diet is a necessity. And then there are what I would call beyond diet change. There are five other what I would call non-negotiable fundamentals of recovery if you want to recover. So diet is one set of six. So diet is one. So there's five more right. So so diet sleep exercise two tolerance.

And that doesn't have to be cross. It could just be movement. It could just be a walk. You could just be something whatever you can tolerate. Sunshine sunshine sunshine sunshine sunshine. The evidence on sunlight as a medicine is overwhelmingly powerful, and people don't take that serious enough. Matter of fact, we have a whole field of dermatology that makes us think that sun is poison, which is total nonsense. You got to get outside in the sun. It's one of the best tools for recovery and for red enhances the efficiency of mitochondrial energy production.

And you need energy to heal. And that is free energy. Your cells are like batteries that soak in infrared light and can drive the process of ATP or energy production to help you heal. So sunshine and then number five is clean water. You're 70% water. If you're drinking contaminated water, poisoned water, you're not going to do as well. And then number six is clean air. And remember that's full circle, right. Because why were you sick in the first place? Your air wasn't clean. You were breathing in mold spores and mycotoxins.

So the air was dirty with those agents. And so you've that's why you have to get out. Like that's a fundamental you have to be out of the mold if you're going to recover. But those six things are aren't negotiable. And so you have to that's the hard truth, right? If you're listening to this and you really strongly disrespecting mold, don't gloss over the hard truth that you have to. You have to commit to doing those things really well, and you can't put any one of them aside. They have to be done together if you want to get better.

So you can't pick two out of the six, you can't pick three out of the six. You've got your body needs. All those are essential behaviors that are required in order for a person to get better. Which is awesome, folks. You got you got to check out mold Jack The.com get on the list and be part of the premiere. If you're watching this after it premieres, watch the replay of it. Just get connected with Doctor Osborn and go to Doctor Peter Osborn. Dot com. Just thank you. I mean, and with all due respect to everyone with different faiths and spirituality, I just thank God Almighty for you and your gift.

It's it's brilliant. We need it. You you were the gluten free warrior. I'm going to be the mold free warrior. You are a fighter to the core against evil. And mold is evil and disease and mold exposure is evil. Disease is evil and you are fighting it, and you're helping so many people. I'm just so blessed to call you a friend and a colleague. My, just, I've learned so much. I have a lot to do. And I hope you all take a time to listen to this again and to really digest and follow Doctor Peters. Worth it.

You, his YouTube channel, his website, so much. Consider going to the clinic in Sugarland, Texas. There's so much to do. Any parting words of hope or advice before we say goodbye? Friend? I just think it's important that you'll understand it is possible to recover. It may seem hopeless, but you know it isn't. And you know, you mentioned one thing. I just will circle quickly back on. That is it's not a rich man's game. It's not. And here's what I mean by that. You have to dedicate yourself to the principles of getting better.

And that's that doesn't require wealth. I've. I've got patients that recovered intense. I've got patients that recovered in campers. I've got patients that, you know, once you get out of it, your brain comes back. And now you can think clearly. And now you've become functional again. Now you go back to work and now you can enrich yourself, you know, with hard work and you can get away. There's a way out, right? It's not just the rich man's game. It can seem daunting and overwhelming, but, I've seen people do it without without treatment as well.

So I'll. I'll just leave them with that. I'm glad you said that, I really am. Well, folks, this was eye opening, and it could very well be the solution to the answers that you've been praying for. And strongly consider it. Just like the actor Peter, with his wife, with his child, with his family, with his patients. This could be that solution. What a talk. While. Well, as always, this doctor Eric Zelensky, my hope and prayers that you and your family truly experienced an abundant life and we will talk to you soon. Bye bye.