Podcast Transcript
[00:00] Andrea: Welcome to the Abundant Wellness Podcast. I’m Andrea, registered nurse, functional health practitioner, author and mom navigating the very real trenches of parenting kids with sensitive, complex nervous systems. This podcast is for parents who are tired of being told to just try harder, who feel the grief of realizing you can’t fix your child, but still refuse to believe that this is the end of your story. Here, we talk about what actually helps.
[00:25] Andrea: Nervous system-informed parenting, functional health, the gut-brain connection, emotional resilience, and faith in the middle of the mess. See, you’re raising a child who’s not broken, but deeply wired. My hope is that every episode helps you to feel less alone, more anchored, and better equipped to support both yourself and your child. If you’re ready for compassionate science, honest conversations, and hope that doesn’t bypass reality, you’re in the right place. Let’s get started.
[00:57] Andrea: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Abundant Wellness Podcast. I am so excited for today’s guest, Jason Earle, the founder of Got Mold and several other companies that all serve the public in terms of really navigating mold. And so I’m excited to pick your brain. I had several practitioners and followers on Instagram send some questions for you today. So I’m excited to dive into all of that. But Jason, I know that you have your own personal story with mold.
[01:30] Andrea: It’s on your website. But I would love to hear you share a little bit about that and what prompted you to do what you’re doing now.
[01:38] Jason: Well, first of all, thanks very much for having me. I’m excited to be here too. It’s an honor to serve this particular part of the market and your audience, because I think there’s just so much confusion around mold, around the air quality. So every chance that I have to sort of maybe clarify or iron out some of the wrinkles, it’s a privilege to do so. And the reality of this industry is that there are very few people that got into this space on an academic track.
[02:06] Jason: I mean, with the exception of people in the labs, or the engineers, maybe the environmental consultants that have gotten into this. But there’s really not an academic track for environmental consultant for indoor environments. It’s a multidisciplinary space if there ever was one because it’s buildings and bodies and how they intersect. And this is really an emerging space. Many of the things that we thought we knew about this, we don’t. And by the way, it’s also a brand new reality.
[02:34] Jason: We’ve only been doing this living in chemical boxes that get moldy really quickly when they get wet thing for about 80 years. And so that really since World War II, when the demand from the baby boomers created the need for faster and cheaper building materials. And so we began making buildings out of paper mache and then energy efficiency, caused us to reduce air exchange in the 60s. And then next thing you know, we’ve got all these conditions, a hundred new autoimmune diseases, skyrocketing cancer, all those things.
[03:02] Jason: So this is really a new space. And so I got into it the way many of my esteemed colleagues did, which is through my own personal experience. So it goes all the way back for me. So when I was about four years old, I lost a lot of weight in the 30 period. And my parents took me to the pediatrician who said, you should really take him to Children’s Hospital. And my mom was a nurse.
[03:22] Jason: This is, so she obviously got the clue. And my dad had a number of relatives suffer from cystic fibrosis. In fact, four of his cousins died of cystic fibrosis before the age of 14. So that was their worry. And guess what? That was the initial diagnosis. So their four-year-old boy was was diagnosed with CF. And they cried for six weeks while they waited for a second opinion, which thankfully contradicted that first one, evidenced by the fact that I sit here at 50 years old.
[03:48] Jason: That sentence back then. So actually what I had was asthma compounded by pneumonia and allergies to nearly everything in my environment. I grew up on a little hobby farm with lots of rescue animals surrounded by fields full of all the things I was allergic to. And so I lived on inhalers and spent a lot of time outside. For some reason, I intuitively knew outdoors, even with all the outdoor allergens, still I felt much better and never thought about that again until much later.
[04:19] Jason: But when I was 12 years old, my folks split up and moved out of that musty old farmhouse, and all my symptoms went away. And I have not had to use an inhaler since, nor am I allergic to anything anymore. And it was chalked up to spontaneous adolescent remission, which is a fancy term for we have no idea what the hell happened there.
[04:37] Andrea: By the way, that doesn’t really happen also. Mostly.
[04:41] Jason: Yeah. My grandfather grew ahead of his asthma, but the transition was pretty remarkable. But again, the knowledge and awareness around mold, indoor air quality, environmental sensitivities was zero, zero. So my parents, for as much as they loved and cared for me, and my mom was very aware of many things being in health care, this was a blind spot. And to this day, still remains a blind spot in the health care system.
[05:07] Jason: And so, which is a major problem. But anyway, I ended up just a couple of years later. My mom died suddenly a couple of years after that to suicide, which is actually relevant for the conversation if we want to unpack some of the psychiatric aspects of this. And then also a year after that, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Still not sure I actually had it, but I do know I got the antibiotics.
[05:27] Jason: And that sent me on another health journey related to healing my gut, which actually has a lot to do with getting better from mold, by the way, which we can unpack, right? Because it’s really about the path to healing from environmental sickness is air, food, and attitude. The food part is really important. So I inadvertently ended up learning a lot about that through my experience, really driven by the Lyme diagnosis and treatment.
[05:48] Jason: And then I was forced to miss a lot of school, which led me to drop out of high school, and I ended up became a full-time gas attendant. And that’s where I met a guy who recruited me to come work on Wall Street, believe it or not. And so it was just a fairy tale kind of thing. And I ended up becoming a very young stockbroker, did that for nine years. And then one day I woke up and wanted to do something meaningful with my life and went backpacking.
[06:08] Jason: And while I was away, I came across a story about a guy who had gotten sick from the hotel where he worked in Hawaii. And he blamed the mold in the building, which is a historic mold problem. At the time, I was there, actually. I was in the shadow of the building, which was closed down for mold. There were guys coming in and out in moon suits. I thought asbestos. I read in the article of mold, knew nothing about it.
[06:29] Jason: But the story of his illness was so, it was just like my life in reverse. He had developed adult onset asthma and all these allergies that he never had before. At 40 years old. And I thought, jeez. And he blamed the mold, of course. And so I thought, I wonder if we had mold. And I called my dad from the payphone shortly thereafter and asked him. And he said, he said, yeah, of course, we have mold.
[06:50] Jason: We have mushrooms in the basement. Why do you ask? You know, it’s a 70s parenting, right? But I immediately in that moment had this sort of white light experience where I was like, wow, buildings can make you sick. That was such a big idea. Mold, yes, fascinating. Really, truly amazing. But the broader thing here is the idea that the buildings that we build to protect ourselves, instead of being a passive supporter of wellness, which is really their highest and best use, right?
[07:18] Jason: Instead, become a source of disease. That idea propelled me, well, to this day, I now have a different perspective, which is not only that buildings can make you sick, but also buildings can heal you. Buildings that are built properly, maintained lovingly, are actually, we have a symbiotic relationship with buildings. They’re an extension of your immune system. When a building is sick, you get sick. When a building heals, so too can you.
[07:38] Jason: Really, that’s the larger thing that 25 years later has really crystallized for me. But the path from there to here really was, I came back armed with some curiosity, took a job working for a company that was doing mold treatments because remediation didn’t really exist back then. This is, I’ve been in this a long time. And I saw quickly that people were being harmed actually through that process. Often buildings being torn apart willy-nilly without actual any sort of surgical or precision approach.
[08:07] Jason: So, you know, just gross demo, which great for the contractor, not so good for the homeowner. Also lots of chemicals being used instead of cleaning. And mold remediation does not include chemicals unless there’s concern about sewage, like, you know, so unless there’s a nutrient-rich source of moisture. Generally speaking, chemicals only add to the problem and are another typical approach of adding things to fix something. And that’s actually not the way we fix things.
[08:31] Jason: Most of the time we do it via negativa, removal, improvement through subtraction. And so when it comes to mold, it’s about, it’s the other way. And so anyway, I saw this and realized that I needed to really understand more. And I was taking lots and lots of courses at night, building science courses, and also at around that time, I heard about a guy who trained a dog to sniff mold and to detect mold in buildings.
[08:50] Jason: And I thought that was just crazy enough to be brilliant and went down to Florida, met him. And it was much to my surprise and everyone else in my sphere came home with that thought. And so next thing you know, we’ve got a mold-sniffing dog first in North America. Her name is Oreo. And so we ended up having a lot of local press descend upon us. They were initially trying to debunk us and we found them very quickly.
[09:11] Jason: And instead, we got supported by them. So we ended up with this groundswell of demand for mostly from physicians who were having problems with patients that weren’t responding to traditional treatments. And so we ended up really doing house calls. And so we became sort of the investigative arm, if you will, of a whole bunch of pediatricians, pediatrician pulmonologists, GPs even started sending people to us, a lot of ENTs. And so our business really became doing the work that doing that last mile of care, really, to include the built environment as part of the work up.
[09:41] Jason: And we’ve been educating doctors and the mold effect consumer about the importance of including your building as part of a health work up ever since, because it works. And when we get in there and find a mold problem, suddenly all these other things go away. Suddenly the autoimmune goes away. Suddenly, you know, kids no longer have to use inhalers. You know, I live this. And so, you know, the transformation is not usually through additive values.
[10:02] Jason: It’s usually through removing the thing that’s the effect. And built environment is not just mold. It’s VOCs and chemicals. And there’s lots, it’s a potpourri of exposures. Mold tends to be the calling card, or if you will, the gateway drug for indoor air quality, because it smells bad, it ruins your stuff. It’s kind of event driven, and it’s got all the headlines. But really, when you look at this more broadly, you know, we have to really take this in the whole environment, specifically when it comes to airborne chemicals, as well as the biological stuff comes when buildings get damp.
[10:31] Jason: And so I spent 18 years in the field doing assessments, countless thousands of sick building investigations with dogs and all the other tools. So we’re really comprehensive. But over the years, I became frustrated by the fact that most people who needed us, especially the ones who needed us, most couldn’t afford us. So I began working on tools that would help to reduce abuse at the lower end of the market, giving people a soft and easy place to, you know, a friendly place to come get answers, which is what Gotmold and gotmold.com is really all about.
[11:00] Jason: And then through that, launching our at-home test kit, the Gotmold test kit, which lets you test your air using professional devices without having to deal with the conflicts of interests and a lot of the concerns that are common. And then beyond that, we’ve worked on developing some additional tools that will help clarify some of the confusion in the testing industry, because there just hasn’t been any innovation in like the last 25 years.
[11:20] Jason: And so our job really here at Mycolab is to bring current science to the forefront so that the industry can advance. Because right now, we’re kind of stuck with a lot of junk science tests and a lot of feedback loops that are not actually helping the consumer.
[11:35] Andrea: Yeah. Parenting a child with ADHD, autism, PDA, anxiety or ODD, and you are exhausted trying to figure out what’s actually going on, I want you to hear this. Many of the kids I work with also struggle with symptoms like constipation, diarrhea, bloating, skin issues or brain fog. And while it can feel like the behavioral and digestive pieces are separate, they’re not, they are deeply connected. And that’s why the Happy Tummies Happy Kids program helps to resolve this problem.
[12:05] Andrea: It is a four month root cause approach program that looks at your child’s whole system through a functional lens, not to change who they are, but to improve their function and reduce suffering regardless of the diagnosis. If you’re wondering whether this kind of support is right for your child, the next step is to book a strong start discovery call. It’s a conversation with me to understand your child’s unique needs and see if this program is a good fit for them.
[12:30] Andrea: You can schedule a strong start discovery call using the link in the show notes. You don’t have to figure this out alone, and I look forward to hearing from you soon. That’s really good and really comprehensive. You covered a lot of different points within that, that I’m going to try and kind of extract out as we keep talking. But you made a perfect segue into my number one question that I get from my own clients.
[12:55] Andrea: When we hit that wall where we’re like, everything that should be working for you is not working. We need to assess like those external factor. I mean, usually we’re assessing for that early on as well, but it becomes much more obvious the deeper you go, why somebody’s not healing. We need to really investigate the environment, right? In which somebody’s in. So walk us through, what is the gold standard in your opinion of evaluating if mold is in your environment?
[13:24] Andrea: What kind of tests should we use? You have a lot of resources on your website, so I’m going to make sure to link that as well. And I know it’s in your ebook, but if you can briefly walk us through, what’s your first step when you get a call from somebody and you’re starting to do the evaluation on their home? What are you looking for?
[13:43] Jason: Yeah, so this is incredibly important. I’m going to spill my candy in the lobby and I’m going to rewind a little bit. So it’s a clinical diagnosis. So now we sell tests, right? We’re in the lab business for all intents and purposes. And yet, I will tell you that the best test is you. And the way to do a proper workup for a human includes their terrain, to use Natia, Winters, Lexicon.
[14:09] Jason: And so the terrain includes the home. And so you will take a history from every patient during the intake process. You’re going to find out about all of their health histories as much as possible as relevant. And you’re going to ask them questions about their symptoms. And you’re going to go through that. Same thing applies to a building. So we ask, there’s basically the Fast Four questions. It’s probably best to call it the Fast Five, actually.
[14:31] Jason: So it would be, first of all, history. Is there a history of water damage, dampness, leaks, floods, things like that? If you know of any of that stuff, that’s super important. We need to look at that. Do you see anything in the building that is indicative of dampness? That’s blistering paint, stains, trim pulling away from the walls, water bugs, spiderwebs, all these things are occlus, rusting things, right? Pull the carpet up in the corner, in the basement, and see if those nail, those tack strips are rusty, right?
[14:57] Jason: This is, these things, if you see any signs of dampness, of course, visible mold, right? So condensation on windows, right? These are all, so you’re tuning in to the visual aspects of what dampness looks like. And also is there, do you smell anything? Is there any odor that is indicative of growth? Biological, musty, earthy, sour, these kinds of smells are not just a clue. They’re also individually health hazards. They’re on their own.
[15:27] Jason: Those VOCs, those volatile organic compounds, many people think about VOCs as being manmade. And yes, they are, but microbes make them too. And they’re very, very potent industrial solvents. And I mean, they’re used for biofuels, you know, these are combustible gases. So breathing these things is generally ill-advised. And so that musty smell is not just a clue, but it’s something you really need to take seriously. And so in that case, that’s the sign of actual active growth, right?
[15:52] Jason: So that is the immediate digestive byproduct of mold and microbes doing their thing in your house. So we’ve covered history. Do you see something? Do you smell something? Do you feel something? And this is also really important. Do you have symptoms that seem to get better when you leave the building? Are there areas in the building that seem to get much, much worse? And this is oftentimes requires people to take a little time away, usually a couple of few days.
[16:14] Jason: Sometimes it’s almost instant, which by the way underscores some of the fallacy around diagnosing mold toxicity squarely because toxicity doesn’t behave that way. It’s not a rapid onset of symptoms and a rapid offset. That’s just not the way toxicity works. Talk to any toxicologist. That’s a neurosensory irritation. It’s not explained by allergy. It’s not explained by inflammation. It’s not explained by any of the other pathways, but it is explained through a neurosensory pathway specifically via the trigeminal nerve in the face.
[16:41] Jason: And so this is something that is not spoken about enough, but it’s powerful because it’s also very empowering. It doesn’t require detox protocols and all these kinds of things. While they may help in some way for some people for certain reasons, what I’m talking about here is in addition to that, and I would say in many cases, supplants that. Most mold-related illness is not mycotoxin induced in my professional opinion. And if it is, it’s primarily through the food exposures.
[17:06] Jason: So that’s another rabbit hole for us to go down. So now we said building history, fast forward, building history. Do you see something, smell something, or feel something? And then the other fifth one that you could add in, which I think is important these days, is have you had a recent renovation or new construction? That’s important for a lot of reasons. Chemicals, if you don’t specifically ask or tell your contractor not to use materials that have VOCs in them, or whether it be even the adhesives, the caulk, the finishing, the final touch, it will.
[17:38] Jason: They will have VOCs and they will off gas and you’ll smell that new house smell. And that new house smell is not good for you. When I smell that, I used to think, oh, yay, new house. Now I smell autoimmune disease and cancer because that’s what that is. And so I have a very different framing on that, that Pavlovian response that initially, when I first moved into my first apartment, they had freshly painted, I thought I had arrived.
[17:58] Jason: I realize now that probably was not good for my nervous system or anything else. So really the fast four or the fast five questions should be in the intake of every single functional doc, every single doc in general. And so what you’re talking about there is the beginning of a clinical diagnosis, right? We’re talking about, we’re getting context. And then driven by the answers, if any of those questions are answered affirmatively, then you need an assessment.
[18:21] Jason: And the question is, is it a DIY assessment or is it a pro assessment? And so that’s driven by whether or not you’ve got the budget and access. And so in other words, do you have anybody local? Because if you have to fly somebody in, it’s gonna be five grand, you know, to start, right? And by the way, there’s a really unscrupulous set of guys out there that are doing really expensive inspections, and they’re really, really talented at selling, and they are using all sorts of unscrupulous methods.
[18:48] Jason: They drive traffic to their uncle who owns a very expensive remediation company and charges $100,000 for remediation. These are the people that you don’t want coming to your house. And because they will gladly take $200,000 and leave you with a shell of a home and a shell of a pocketbook and a shell of you will lose hope in humanity. And that’s really, I think, the thing that’s being stolen from people right now by these unscrupulous characters is hope.
[19:11] Jason: And I can’t think of anything worse than stealing hope because guess what? Here’s the good news is that this is actually really treatable. And usually it doesn’t cost $150,000 because if you have to do that, there are lots of things you can do with that money to create a sanctuary without chasing stachybotryspores and mycotoxins that are showing up off of a urine panel. You can’t diagnose, this is a really important bold-faced underscore neon-like comment, okay?
[19:38] Jason: You cannot diagnose a person from a test in a building, and you cannot diagnose a building from a test from a person. You diagnose them separately. You explore them separately. Where they overlap, there’s opportunity for work to be done. But you cannot conflate that presence of microbes in a building equals disease in a human. There are so many leaps that you have to make in order to do it, especially given the current state of testing.
[20:05] Jason: Testing both for the building and for the body are wildly problematic right now, regardless of which test. So if you want, it doesn’t matter if you want to go down the mycotoxin urine panels, the IgG blood tests by Mycolab. These are a problem at oats tests. People are talking about colonization in their gut of environmental mold. These are obligate aerobes, which means that they cannot grow in the gut. And so colonization in the gut is not real.
[20:30] Jason: Well, people, yeasts? Yes, but not. So my point is that these things all are problematic. And so what we need to do is really start saying, well, first of all, do we understand the tests and what they’re looking for? Do we really understand the sources? If we do, then maybe we can make use of these tests better. But the conflation that’s happening in all, and also we tend to string these things together.
[20:48] Jason: If you get a high mycotoxin urine panel, and then there’s high Ernie, well then that’s like, we’ve got a problem. We got to leave with the shirts on our back. People are taking action based on labs only, but you would never ever do that with your body. If you suddenly got, if you did a lipid panel and an inflammation panel, and you’ve got high CRP and high lipids, you wouldn’t immediately call the surgeon and have a stent installed, right?
[21:13] Jason: Or immediately have some sort of cardiac intervention. You would go get some more context. You would say, okay, what’s your history? What’s your diet? What’s your genetic? You’d start to get that stuff that’s not contained in a lab report. And so what I’m saying here is that people are over-emphasizing labs, and in many cases, completely ignoring actual context. But then they’re hiring people that come in and rip their lives apart without actually doing the really basic stuff.
[21:39] Jason: Like, hey, is there a history of water damage? Do you see something? Do you smell something? Do you feel something? Do you feel better when you leave the building? Those questions are fundamental across the entire spectrum, and they should be continually re-asked throughout your entire experience of living in buildings and breathing air.
[21:54] Andrea: Right, absolutely. I think you encapsulated that really well, and you hit on many of the issues that I see when I’m working with somebody. I’m like, okay, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here, but there are some really valid concerns here that we have about the presentation, right? And we need to not ignore this, but then let’s say they check off three out of four of those boxes, or even like two out of four of the four things that you mentioned.
[22:22] Andrea: You talked about how the Ermi has flaws, and obviously blood testing and the Oat Test also, they are pieces to a puzzle that we’re still, like from a scientific perspective, trying to create a gold standard that does not exist yet. And I think that people need to understand that, that most of us from a practitioner and you being the, I don’t want to say diagnostician, but the person that’s providing the tools to assess these things in the environment, we’re still trying to create a gold standard that doesn’t exist yet.
[22:58] Andrea: So let’s say they check off two of those boxes. We know that there’s been water damage in the home and we know that there’s a health history that raises some red flags. What would be their next step in terms of evaluating the environment? You’d mentioned that the ERMI has its flaws and yet that’s one of the things that’s the most heavily promoted.
[23:17] Jason: Yeah, and also by the way, they recommend taking action based on that alone. And that is so fundamentally in opposition to best practices when it comes to environmental assessments, that on its face, anyone who’s giving you that advice, really you should question any other advice they give you, seriously, because you cannot, there is no single test for the building or for the body that is actionable by itself. There isn’t, you need context.
[23:47] Jason: And that context needs to be, by the way, you gotta be also very careful about where you’re getting data from, a lot of times you’re getting free inspections from people who do remediation or treatments. This is a bad idea. Never ask a barber if you need a haircut, you know? So, there’s a reason why you’re not supposed to do remediation and do assessments on the same project, and why you shouldn’t have financial relationships with between those, and they often do.
[24:12] Jason: And if they’re family, by the way, and you should ask, that’s an immediate conflict of interest, people. And this is probably the most often used group in the space, is exactly that. So, words to the wise, okay? So, when it comes to what you do next, first of all, if you detect moisture in the building, okay? A mold assessment is a moisture assessment. So, when we’re doing a mold inspection, we’re not really looking for mold.
[24:38] Jason: Yes, we are in a way, because that’s obviously the thing that that’s the smoking gun, but what we’re really looking for is moisture problems. We begin with the outside of the building, we look for defects that could lead to intrusion, maintenance issues, things that need attendance, and then we go in the inside and we see where those things might manifest, because moisture either comes from the outside, from the rain, groundwater, or in the inside, we get in and then we start looking at things like manifestations of dampness that might be formed from condensation, source moisture, moisture source from inside.
[25:05] Jason: And so, in all the cases, when we’re doing a mold assessment, we’re looking for moisture. And so, if any of those questions yield that there’s a dampness problem, the first thing to do is figure out where the source of that moisture is. If that exceeds your ability and experience, that’s when you call a professional. And that professional needs to be independent. They need to be experienced. And they don’t necessarily have to have all the certifications and things like that.
[25:32] Jason: Somebody who actually just does environmental, indoor environmental assessments, does not do remediation. I like building biologists a lot, more so than like the certified mold inspector guys, because they tend to be more well-rounded, although they can be a little bit too much on EMF and stuff. They a little bit weak, honestly, on mold and VOCs, but they tend to be more well-rounded when it comes to understanding how buildings impact health. And so really dialing in that moisture inspection is the first step.
[25:57] Jason: Now, if you can do that on your own, please do so and do so immediately, because the longer a moisture problem persists in your building, A, the more you’re exposed, B, the bigger it gets, mold grows. And the bigger it gets, guess what? The more expensive it’s going to be. And so really, truly, while you’re sleeping, mold is doing push-ups, you know? And so you want to run towards this stuff. And so that’s really the most important thing, is it’s a moisture inspection.
[26:24] Jason: Find the moisture. Now, if you can’t do that yourself, then you bring someone in. That’s the assessment. Now, the way we help people with that is through at gotmold.com. In fact, we’ve created a landing page for this particular show at gotmold.com/abundantwellness. And I’ll suggest people go there, because you’ll find a copy of our ebook there, which is 46 pages of inspection checklists and FAQs and guidance around how to hire a mold inspector and what to avoid and all that kind of stuff.
[26:50] Jason: I mean, really, if you read that and actually do an assessment of your home, you’ll learn more about your building than you can imagine. And I encourage people to really get familiar with the building. So I said I was gonna back up and then rewind, but I just kind of went right into it. Now I’m gonna explain what needs to really be looked at. Buildings are not just shelter. If you really look at the way animals have evolved over the millennia, many of them have learned to adapt their environment to suit their needs.
[27:19] Jason: Beavers build dams, right? That’s thermal regulation. There’s lots of different reasons why they do that. But there’s something called an extended phenotype, which is really where the animal really and its habitat are actually really one unit. And this is kind of a philosophical lens, if you will. But think about a turtle with a shell, bird with a nest, right? Obviously, beaver with a dam and humans with their homes. You know, we are, or a hermit crab with its shell, which is probably a little bit more like us, right?
[27:46] Jason: Because we can move in and out of other people’s shells. But the idea is that buildings don’t do well without people, people don’t do well without buildings. So we have a really symbiotic relationship with these boxes. But see, more than boxes, these are an extension of your immune system. They really are an exoskeleton or an exoskeleton. And we’re a very strange species because we used to build out of stuff that was natural to our surroundings, that was actually native and local to our surroundings.
[28:11] Jason: And now we build out of garbage. We build out of toxic stuff. And then if an evolutionary biologist were to do an objective assessment of this species based upon how it’s changed its behaviors over the last 80 years, it would say, we’re probably not long for this world. And what it’s done to our reproduction and all this other stuff. I mean, just really, if you really look at it objectively, you take diet out, we’ve got problems.
[28:34] Jason: Our habitats are no longer supporting health, they’re actively leading to disease. And so I further sort of illustrate this idea because it makes it more real for people. When you look at the building, think about the idea that maybe, you know, what is an organism by definition? It’s a system of life-sustaining systems. It’s actually a system of organs. And so you can look at the building and say, wow, okay, there’s an HVAC system that’s kind of respiratory.
[28:56] Jason: And then you got circulatory system, that’s the plumbing. And then you got the electrical system is in the nervous system, and you got the bones in the structural elements, and you’ve got the fat in the walls as insulation. And dermis, if you look at the cross-section of a wall assembly, the layers of siding look a lot like dermis, you know? And so here you have this building that really looks a lot like an organism.
[29:16] Jason: And what’s interesting is that there’s this missing element here, which is the immune system. And guess what? That’s you. We are the building’s immune system. And so it’s our job to maintain it, because guess what? We’re taking care of ourselves. Maintenance is a form of love. It’s actually a form of self-love, because it does come back down to you. So if you take care of the building, it takes care of you, vice versa.
[29:37] Jason: You neglect it, and you will experience what… You could even go further down and use cell as a metaphor. The building is a cell with a mitochondria. And you know what happens to mitochondria when pollutants are introduced, and the cell wall has not been closed down. Next thing you know, you end up with cell danger response, and you end up with all sorts of downstream effects from that. So really, the metaphor plays all the way through.
[29:58] Jason: And so really, when you’re talking about diagnosing a building, we have to look at this building as a system of systems, and we have to do a workup on the history of it, and we have to do the same thing you would with a human. Buildings manifest moisture problems in very different ways. And you can actually think about the moisture problem as an injury or as an ache in pain, and then the mold is inflammation.
[30:17] Jason: That’s a signal that you get.
[30:19] Andrea: Really good metaphor for that.
[30:22] Jason: And then that chronic inflammation left by itself is its own disease. That often in humans leads to cancer and other things like that. And guess what happens if you leave that going? It will rot the wall out. Moisture problems kill buildings. And so think about a moisture problem potentially as the root cause, and think about the rot in the wall as cancer or inflammation. And so this is a really beautiful metaphor, and it plays all the way through.
[30:45] Jason: The inspector, right? The inspector is not just gonna, your doctor doesn’t just take tests, your doctor does a physical, and will look at you very different ways. They’ll do imaging, and they’ll do bloods, and they’ll do all these different multifactorial assessment methods in order for them to get closer to what’s really going on. Not to prove the diagnosis, which is what everyone’s trying to do now with confirmation bias. Everyone’s trying to prove you’ve got mold.
[31:04] Jason: Well, you’ve got this, and you’ve got this, of course you do. Well, no, that’s like mythology, looking up at the stars and saying, oh, look, that’s the Delta Orion. That’s the story that sticks to you. That’s not diagnosed, it’s a hypothesis. And then we test that hypothesis. In fact, we try to break that hypothesis. And so what we need to do is really start backing away from the stories of mold and these, you got the HLA, and you got the VCS, and you got the Myermi, and you got the, well, you’ve got mold, not necessarily.
[31:29] Jason: Plus, we’re also using a lot of junk science tests to paint that picture. And so it’s really easy to do that when you know the outcomes of those tests 90 percent of the time. And so this is really causing more problems than I can possibly tell you. So we need to start looking at buildings more objectively. And also, like I said, as, as organisms, understanding that there is no silver bullet for testing it, and that the building is in and of itself needs to heal, it needs to get better, for the people to get better.
[31:58] Andrea: Absolutely. One of the biggest and most easily fixed issues that I see in parents raising neurodivergent children or parents of children with a complex medical diagnosis is actually mineral deficiencies and low electrolytes. When we are under chronic stress as raising these children is chronically stressful, we run through our electrolytes and our minerals very, very quickly, which then puts a lot of stress on pretty much every organ system in the body. So one of the things that I teach a lot of the parents that I work with is a very quick action step, which is to just grab a scoop of electrolytes and add it to your water one to two times a day.
[32:37] Andrea: It’s one of the easiest ways that you can nourish your body so that you don’t end up in a state of depletion. When we are mineral balanced, when our electrolytes are balanced, we sleep better, we respond to stress better, we bounce back a lot quicker from events that are really stressful. So one of the electrolytes that I use is Paleo Valley. They’re super duper clean, no food coloring, no yucky ingredients, super affordable.
[33:02] Andrea: I have a 15 percent off link for you in the show notes. One thing that you can do to care for yourself today is to grab some electrolytes, add it to your water, and remind yourself that you’re worth nourishing too. Yeah, that’s really good. And I think helping people to understand that because there’s so much panic that happens when you are told that, you know, hey, we need to, you know, I try to broach that conversation in various different ways with my clients, but in a comprehensive way of like, we need to think about this as being a possibility because of X, Y, and Z.
[33:38] Andrea: We’re not going to move into panic land. We’re not going to move into anxiety. That’s not going to help your nervous system. But we do need to think about like a strategic assessment over this because, to my understanding, mold plates are not, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but those are not diagnostic, correct?
[33:59] Jason: That’s right. These are junk science. Settling plates or petri dishes really are probably the ultimate junk science right now, because I define that as a scientific principle or tool used in a non-scientific way, and often used as a, you almost always follow the money. If there is another more expensive, comprehensive procedure that follows after the result of that test, then that will commonly be junk science. These are lead generators more so than diagnostics.
[34:31] Jason: Petri dishes in particular are really interesting because now we know with genetic sequencing, and we’re working on a really fascinating tool, a new DNA-based dust test that will make hermy go away finally. But what we know from environmental microbiology, molecular biology now is that settling plates lose at least 80 percent of the species that are present in the environment. And more importantly, for the people who are really concerned, they’re absolutely sure that these are great tests, these immunolidics and these other guys.
[34:59] Jason: The reality is that they don’t actually have the agar in them. The media itself, the sticky stuff, is very specific to the type of organism, or I should say the organism, these organisms like certain kinds of food. They like a certain amount of moisture, they like the right temperature, it’s like a combination lock. And so each species or each taxa actually has a different sort of combination. The combination for the molds that everyone’s worried about, which I also think needs to be reeled in a little bit, stacubitris, catomium, these molds grow, they’re cellulosic, so that means they like to eat the cellulose, the little fibery bits that’s in paper, for example, on your drywall, the grass and twigs and stuff out in the yard.
[35:38] Jason: They do not grow on malt extract agar, which is what’s on these dishes. So that’s where you grow weeds, all the fast growing stuff grows. And so what you have there is confirmation bias. So if mold grows, that means something, doesn’t mean anything. You could do that with a piece of damp white bread, take it, throw it on your counter, boom, it’ll get moldy. It means literally nothing. And by the way, anyone who’s concerned about mold in their home, I would say that probably the last thing that you should be encouraged to do is grow more.
[36:06] Jason: Right? And that’s what these things are asking. So I think just on its face, there’s something kind of strangely contradictory about that.
[36:14] Andrea: A little bit, right in front of our noses and we didn’t even see it, right?
[36:18] Jason: That’s right. And so basically, what those prove is that mold spores are ubiquitous. They are, by the way, they’re the most abundant biological particulate on the planet. Kingdom fungi every year produces 50 megatons of spores. Just to put a point on that, that’s the equivalent of 500,000 blue whales.
[36:36] Andrea: Wow.
[36:36] Jason: Annually, spores going into the environment, most of them settle in the oceans and the mountaintops and what have you. But we find 13.7 miles above the Earth’s surface and weather balloons. They’re literally everywhere. So spores landing on a plate growing, congratulations. That’s a sixth grade science fair experiment. That’s not a diagnostic.
[36:54] Andrea: Okay. I like how you, again, very well-rounded explanation because it truly could grow anything, anywhere, right? And it’s not diagnostic. So a couple of questions I want to get to from people that sent in questions for your podcast today. And you kind of already touched on them. So I don’t think we need to necessarily spend too much time on them. But in your experience, how much of healing comes from healing the physical body?
[37:22] Andrea: We’re talking about the physical person. So they’re having asthma or allergies or chronic fatigue or any number of symptoms, right? Skin rashes, food sensitivities, you name it, all the stuff that comes with being exposed to an environment that’s not healthy. How much of their recovery comes from removing the unhealthy in the environment? So healing the environment, healing the house, right? Taking care of all of that stuff versus healing the nervous system, or do they heal in tandem?
[37:52] Jason: That’s a great question. First of all, this is based on my experience. This is not a peer-reviewed study, but I have 20 years and thousands and thousands of cases that I’ve worked with. In various different levels, too, because I was in homes and now we have product and working a lot of physicians. So there’s a lot of different perspectives and granular versus 30,000 feet and everything in between. The second part of that is it depends.
[38:18] Jason: And of course, because every building is different and every person is different. And we’re also learning more and more about what these exposures really entail. Because really when we talk about mold, this is, I think, maybe a disservice to the conversation. Really what we’re talking about is dampness. Because from dampness, you get mold, but also some bacterial growth, actinomycetes, which are getting some attention now. And they should, because they’re potent chemical producers, but they’re bacterial.
[38:43] Jason: And also VOCs and chemicals that come from building materials, they end up being released through dampness, something called hydrolysis. That facilitates the release of chemicals that would otherwise be stable. And then you also get the proliferation of dust mites and other allergens. And if you have enough dampness, you’ll get bugs and other sources and vectors of disease, really. So dampness is the tiger, right? And all the things we’re testing for are like the mite on the hair on the tip of the tiger’s tail.
[39:12] Jason: You know, looking at these individual toxins, which is a very reductionist thing. I’m much more of a systems thinking kind of guy. Like what’s the root cause of all this? Dampness. Dampness and chemicals are really what causes all of our built environment related illness. You could also argue EMF and some other things like that, but I would say that’s a distant third. And so dampness and chemicals. And by the way, the dampness releases chemicals and also mold produces chemicals.
[39:38] Jason: So there’s basically biological and non-biological. When you start looking at how people get better, it is via negativa. So removing the offending. So that’s air, food and attitude. And it’s air is removing all fragrances, chemicals, that’s through removing them physically, air filtration, dilution. You know, you can get energy recovery, ventilators, lots you can do to get your air free of chemicals. And also mold, of course, stopping the moisture problem, cleaning up the mold and or relocating, right?
[40:11] Jason: So you either relocate or remediate these things. Once you’ve got air straight, and that means also fragrances, that means no, I mean, literally, like the idea here is that a healthy building doesn’t have odors except for natural materials. Then there’s food. This is really important because people are being diagnosed with mold related illness based upon dietary indicators. Yeah. So these urine panels are not validated. They’ve been actually, many of the people that were involved in the creation of them, and one close to, are suggesting that they should not be sold anymore because they’re leading people down terrible destructive paths.
[40:43] Jason: And so they may be useful to help people understand what’s in their diet. Because by the way, microtoxins in your diet is still mold exposure. And so you’re actually getting a double whammy. If you’re eating the standard American diet, which everyone thinks of as the source of metabolic syndrome, it’s also the source of huge amounts of microtoxins because of all the imported grains, nuts, seeds, spices, conventional meat and dairy is loaded with this stuff because the animals are fed non-human grain food, which is stored out in unconditioned spaces.
[41:11] Jason: And so, and also sprayed with chemicals. So, you know, it’s a whole puppery. So really, when you’re looking at food, food is really important because you’re going to be suffering from some consequences. We have evolved around being able to excrete these things. By the way, another fun fact to consider is that if you’re excreting, your body is actually doing its job and if you’re not, it isn’t. So people get diagnosed with mycotoxicity or with mold toxicity based upon a high panel.
[41:37] Jason: And I’m here to tell you that they’re doing something really remarkable. They’re able to excrete hydrophobic and lipophilic compounds. Wow, that’s actually your body’s doing great work. Because mycotoxins aren’t really easy to excrete. Most of them are hydrophobic, so they don’t stick to water, right? So they don’t come out through your kidneys and they’re lipophilics, they get stuck in your fat cells. So now with GLP, by the way, now a lot of people are excreting them and they’re not recognizing that that’s actually probably from their Cheerios from when they were 11 years old.
[42:05] Jason: So there’s some of that potentially. Very hard to parse that stuff out, but I will tell you that there is no science and the science, they’ve been trying to do this forever. To try to say that this mold in your building creates these mycotoxins and therefore, when it shows up in that panel, that it’s, but that doesn’t actually work because those toxins don’t necessarily produce, are not necessarily produced in modern buildings.
[42:26] Jason: We don’t have the stressors, we don’t have the competition, we don’t also have the nutrients in the building materials. And this has actually been researched. So this is not, I’m not saying it’s, the research on this does not support. And by the way, we don’t find airborne mycotoxins in significant quantities, certainly not enough to be yielding the quantities that are showing up in these panels. Yes, you can have some degree of trace and 20,000 breaths a day.
[42:51] Jason: I could see that having some systemic effects, but yielding in mycotoxin panels is different than, that’s a whole different ball of wax. You have to have a much higher volume, and the math has been done on the surface area, the spores and the quantity, and that work has been done, and it does not support mycotoxin panels as a diagnostic tool, nor does the IgG, by the way, because that can be from any exposure, that can be from food or from air, and that just means you’ve been exposed.
[43:17] Jason: So that again, being exposed to mold on planet Earth is absolutely fundamental. If you’re not being exposed to mold, you’re more likely to have problems too, because a diverse microbial environment is actually good for your immune system, and a sterile environment isn’t. So you’re being exposed all the time. Your body should recognize this stuff, and that’s what IgG is all about. You know?
[43:37] Andrea: Exactly.
[43:38] Jason: So anyway, so air, food, and attitude. Attitude is the nervous system, and this is really important, because this is where you can grab control of this thing, right? So if you get your environment straight, and then you reduce exposure, so your nervous system is not constantly being assaulted, then you do the nervous system or the somatic work, and you do things like get outside and get fresh air in the morning, get your morning sunlight, take your shoes off and get in the grass.
[43:59] Jason: Do the grounding. There are 22 peer-reviewed studies on grounding. It’s just not profitable, so no one talks about it. But this stuff actually helps. Sauna, drink pure water, love your liver. These things all work, but more importantly, oftentimes what helps people get better, and this is the hard part, so I’ll pause, I’ll give this a little bit of respect, is oftentimes it requires a shifting worldview. Much like an alcoholic who just knows life is falling apart, but I need to make change, and I’m just not ready to because this is part of my identity, it’s my identity, and I know it’s not serving me, but I’m still stuck in it.
[44:31] Jason: There are many people that are stuck in this diagnosis that find some value in that diagnosis for whatever reason, and they get stuck in it, it becomes part of their identity. And those people, generally speaking, have a pretty, unfortunately, pessimistic worldview. The world is attacking them, nature is dangerous, the home is dangerous, microtoxins, everything is, and they’re very tuned up in their nervous system, very tense. I don’t see those people get better very often until they can reduce that chronic anxiety.
[44:59] Jason: Now, this causes anxiety, I want to be clear. The nervous system tweak like this, the trigonal nerve, lots of anxiety. And by the way, Brown University did a great study back in 2008, found a strong correlation between mold, dampness, and doors, and depression. The work that Joan Bennett has done at Rutgers University with fruit flies and dopamine and musty smell, she found that the fruit flies exposed to the musty smell stop producing dopamine and develop Parkinsonian symptoms.
[45:23] Jason: So there’s lots of nervous system downstream stuff from this.
[45:26] Andrea: Absolutely.
[45:27] Jason: But there’s also a certain sense of stepping into this and say, I’m going to take control of this. I’m going to do it by learning how to trust nature, trust the universe, trust that this is a path where healing is possible. And that really has to do with that air, food, and attitude. So it begins with the willingness and then that willingness, stepping into the work like Primal Trust, like the work that Kathleen King is doing is beautiful.
[45:51] Jason: DNRS, Re-Origin. There’s lots of groups doing this stuff. Try to find one that has a community because the people that are a few steps ahead of you will often be the ones that are the most illuminating for you, the ones you can relate to. And try not to go on Facebook and get advice from people that are still suffering because those people are not helping you because guess what?
[46:08] Andrea: It’s a vortex of, yeah.
[46:11] Jason: They’re not going to help you because they don’t have the world view thing that we just mentioned. Those people have already decided that they’re not going to get better. And I’m here to tell you that there’s a point where it all heals, and it’s not an acceptance, it’s actually a gratitude. And there will be a time when if you have that world view and you take the steps towards getting your air and your food straight, and then you take the steps towards taking control of your nervous system.
[46:33] Jason: And then when that happened, I see people get better with incredible, incredible consistency. So it’s not a function of one or the other, or which one you do, it’s better is better, these things don’t need to be done in one fell swoop, better is better, but you gotta do the air and the food thing first. Because in my opinion, you’ve gotta take that nervous system has to be, has to feel safe, really physically, the trigeminal nerve, it doesn’t discriminate.
[47:03] Jason: It’s very sensitive, and so it needs to calm down, everything needs to calm down. And then while that calmness is, or during that piece, then working on the nervous system and reordering things, then makes you resilient so that when you do get exposed again, you’d be amazed, this happens to me all the time, I go moldy hotel rooms these days, I don’t respond anymore at all. And I used to have night terrors, allergies are gone, but I used to get night terrors from the musty smell.
[47:30] Jason: And I’ve gone through the work, I’ve done this neural retraining. And I’m here to tell you that I can go into environments that would have normally set me off, really left me at least puffy and disoriented, and neuraly, a brain fog, and it no longer affects me that way. So this is a very well-traveled path, it works really well. And the good news is, you don’t have to be in the mold avoidance community, you can actually live a regular life after this.
[47:55] Andrea: That’s really good. And I think you landed just exactly where the listeners need to land at the end of this episode today, because I did not want this to be another fear-mongering episode of what to avoid, and what to be anxious about, and the recovery process, and how hard it is. Yes, it’s work, but healing from anything is work, right? And so I just want to say thank you so much, Jason, for the wealth of information that you’ve shared with my audience today.
[48:24] Andrea: I know that you have more resources for us, and I’m going to make sure to link that in the show notes. Please, those of you listening, make sure to go follow Jason. Would you share the best place for them to follow you, whether that’s socials or your website?
[48:38] Jason: Yeah, by all means. So first of all, thank you for having me. It takes a village, so to speak, right? Well, we all have to carry this torch. So gotmold.com/abundantwellness is a really good place to start, and there you’ll find a 10% discount on anything from gotmold.com, as well as her ebook, which I highly encourage people to read. It’s a great resource for you. And the other thing is that we’re pretty active on Instagram, at gotmold, so that would be another place.
[49:04] Jason: And then if you have questions, you can send questions at gotmold.com. So send an email, questions at gotmold.com. I don’t answer them all, but I see them all. And so our team is really good about responding to those things.
[49:14] Andrea: Amazing. Well, I just, I so appreciate the work that you’ve done and you sharing your story and really helping to put those pieces together. And especially as a clinician, we sometimes are equally as confused about this whole process of the environmental aspect. And so I thank you for breaking that down for us. Those of you that are listening, please make sure to go follow Jason. Look in the show notes for the links that he mentioned.
[49:38] Andrea: And thank you so much again for being here.
[49:40] Jason: Thank you.
