Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The DNA Talks Podcast, where we take on the mission of unlocking the code of your genetics. This season is all about you. Upgrading your health, not just on the surface, but down to the root cause.
Join us as your clinicians at The DNA Company investigate your DNA and beyond. The intention of this podcast is to enhance your lifestyle by changing what is in your control. This does not substitute the medical advice given by a personal doctor, therapist, and other health care professionals.
Welcome to The DNA Talks Podcast, where we take on the mission of unlocking the code of your genetics. Hello, my name is Dr. Lara Varden. I’m a licensed clinical practitioner with The DNA Company and Dean of The DNA University.
As a PhD, I have expertise in cellular biology, molecular genetics, biochemistry, neuroscience, and functional nutrition. And today I have the immense honor of having a guest who has graced us before. He is a man on a mission, Jason Earle, an adoring father of two boys, almost just out of diapers.
He’s also an incurable entrepreneur, an indoor air quality crusader. He’s the founder and CEO of GOT MOLD, as well as the creator of GOT MOLD Test Kit. The realization that his moldy childhood home was the underlying cause of his extreme allergies and asthma led him into the healthy home business in 2002, leaving behind a successful career on Wall Street.
We had, like I said before, the delightful opportunity of having Jason on previously, one of our co-founders, Kashif Khan, actually got to interview him last year, a little over a year ago, back in July, actually the end of July, we had an episode called GOT MOLD? Clearing the Air on Mold and Mycotoxins with Jason Earle. So I really encourage everyone to go back and listen to that episode.
There’s some fantastic information. We will be touching on a few of those things because they are just so important. They need reiteration.
Also, we did a webinar with him at the end of June. So that was also very informative and had some real-time questions from the audience. So again, I do encourage you to go back and listen to those.
I would like to welcome you, Jason. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
So we had a lot of questions and interest about mold, and specifically how it affects the gut biome as well as the brain. So we’re going to jump in to that topic a little bit more today, and how mold affects these aspects of our life and our health. And I wanted to ask you, are there specific types of mold that are known to affect the gut and brain?
First of all, it is a pleasure, a great pleasure to be back here again, chatting with you and serving your listeners. I love the work you guys are doing at DNA Company, so it’s always a pleasure to help support. When it comes to the specific mold types, the answer is yes and no.
So there’s a lot of misinformation and I would say misappropriated attention on specific species. And that tends to be kind of a fool’s errand because this is something you can’t control. And so you began the podcast by saying that we’re going to focus on things we can’t control, which is actually one of the best parts about the indoor air quality issue itself.
Because unlike most other environmental hazards, unlike especially the outdoor environment, we have a disproportionate amount of control within our indoor space if we choose to accept it. I should say a disproportionate potential for control if we choose to accept it. And so what we try to do is focus on the variables that allow us to capitalize on that.
So for example, worrying about the species is an impossible microscopic game. But worrying about the conditions that cause the mold growth in the first place is within our control. So that’s sort of the long answer.
The short answer is there are some species that produce very potent toxins that are actually intended to thwart the success of other competing microbes. So think about it as chemical weapons on a microscopic scale, and we can get caught in the crosshairs. And because we’re genetically very close to, we split off from fungi about 1.5 billion years ago.
So we’ve got a lot of similarity to fungi, and so these things can affect us. Anyway, the mycotoxin-producing fungi are about 100 species out of 100,000. So it’s a very small number relative to the ocean of fungi that we may get exposed to in a lifetime.
And so if we’re going to take a look at the species that we should worry about or look at molds in general, I think we should probably talk about how we get exposed, because there’s really two routes of exposure. And when we unpack that, then you can start getting into the types that cause the problems and the types that don’t. So in our built environment, in our home environment, which we would call environmental exposures, the species really doesn’t matter.
What matters is the underlying moisture problem, because there’s a changing of the guard. Quite frankly, if you’ve got a moisture problem in your building over the course of, say, two, three, four weeks, if you were to sample every single day, you’d actually find different species dominating over that period of time. So it’s not a static thing.
You got this one mold that happened to have moved in, and now it’s kind of set up camp. It’s not like that. There’s a rotation, kind of like the way you see the degradation in a forest.
You know, when the tree falls, some organisms will initially colonize on it, and then over time, as it begins to break down, additional organisms will find their niche, right? Which is, you know, which the root word of niche is actually nest. So it will find their, or those organisms will find their home.
Same thing happens in our building as fungi begins to try to break it down. And so that’s why I say it’s a fool’s errand, because it’s a constantly moving target. But the underlying issue, the moisture problem, that’s imperative.
And then the compounds that molds produce when they’re growing, you got the mycotoxins, but you also have the microbial VOCs. The toxins are not airborne easily. They’re not gases, but the VOCs are.
And we’ll dig in to why those impact you in different ways. Switching gears over to food, there are those same mycotoxin producing fungi are actually very, very potent in food, because there’s so much nutrition. So in grains, actually even in the fields where grains are being grown and propagated, a lot of the mold contamination actually happens while the plants are still alive.
And then during processing and then storage and of course, transportation. And so we have a tremendous problem with imported grains having mycotoxin contamination. It’s actually our primary source of exposure to mycotoxins and fungal toxins.
It’s actually in our food supply. And oftentimes what we end up with, and the reason why this is such a fascinating conversation, is because what we have when we have environmental mold exposures, oftentimes actually an overlap, where we have an environmental exposure and a food-based exposure. And we’re not evolutionarily designed to deal with that at the same time on a constant basis.
And so it’s not a surprise to me that in the modernization, where we see these things happening now, we also happen to have suddenly 100 autoimmune diseases and skyrocketing rates of cancer and, you know, autism and allergies and epidemic asthma, etc., etc. So, you know, if you were to track these and chart these, you’d see that the ascendence of both of these phenomenon actually are in parallel.
And I doubt that there’s a coincidence there. So it’s a complicated, it’s a short question, a very long answer. But I think that that’s why we’re here sort of to unpack all of that.
Oh, absolutely. And I’ll tell you that allostatic load, you know, for the audience, this is the accumulation of the stresses throughout your life and mold exposure, it is just more that we are piling on to that load. And, you know, it’s, it just gets to be too much when you don’t have relief from all the toxic exposures that we are exposed to, especially, you know, in our environment today, you know, between soil, air, food, water, beauty products, all of the things that we put on ourselves that are impacting our immune system, that are impacting our liver’s ability to clear.
And then when we throw our genes into it, and if we have particular areas of weakness in our detoxification pathways, like our glutathione conjugation pathway, or our methylation pathway, you know, again, it’s like having your hand tied behind your back, trying to climb a mountain with a hundred-pound sack on your back. So we need to start unloading, unloading that pack, stop adding on more rocks, stop adding on more weight, you know, to that. And that gets into the exposure, which I know something that you have been such a proponent about, and saying, you know, what do we do?
Well, the first thing we do is find where these exposures are coming in and mitigate them. Start lowering your exposure. And, you know, when it comes to food, we know our food, our gut, gut biome, if we are eating moldy food, we are affecting our gut biome.
And then when we throw our genes into it, and if we have particular areas of weakness in our detoxification pathways, like our glutathione conjugation pathway, or our methylation pathway, you know, again, it’s like having your hand tied behind your back, trying to climb a mountain with a hundred-pound sack on your back. So we need to start unloading, unloading that pack, stop adding on more rocks, stop adding on more weight, you know, to that. And that gets into the exposure, which I know something that you have been such a proponent about, and saying, you know, what do we do?
Well, the first thing we do is find where these exposures are coming in and mitigate them. Start lowering your exposure. And, you know, when it comes to food, we know our food, our gut, gut biome, if we are eating moldy food, we are affecting our gut biome.
So, but, you know, like you were saying, it’s hard to say, oh, it’s just one because we are exposed to so many. So it’s not like it really matters so much of what species it happens to be or, you know, what type. It’s just you’re exposed.
So let’s stop that exposure. Let’s heal the gut so we can heal the brain together.
Absolutely.
So I was wondering, when we’re talking about mental health disorders and mold exposure, you know, gut, you had specific issues. And not that you have to go into the whole story about, you know, what had happened to you because you beautifully explained that in the previous, you know, episode that we had with you and in the webinar. But if you want to just mention for our audience, especially if they’re new, some of the gut and brain issues that you dealt with, and hence, you know, immune issues with your exposure to mold.
Sure. A really important aspect of my awareness around mold that came about somewhat recently, actually. And it had to do with my mother, actually, who committed suicide when I was 14 years old.
And that’s relevant, strangely, because I had moved out of that moldy house when I was 12. All my symptoms went away. She stayed.
Now, she was also an alcoholic and mental health is a complex issue. So there’s no way to really unpack and say, what was the causal thing? But it certainly could not have helped.
And the question I have is, what was she self-medicating against? I know there are circumstantial things, and no one gets to this stage in our lives with having some stuff, right? But the pieces of the puzzle started coming together for me in 2008, when Brown University released a study that showed that they surveyed 6,000 people, asked them essentially, how are you feeling?
Quality of life survey. Then they inquired about their home conditions, specifically around mold and dampness, whether they had issues that were unresolved. What they found was a very, very strong correlation between mold and dampness and dorsal depression.
They were unable to pin the tail on the donkey because that wasn’t the purpose of the study. The purpose was to see if there was a relationship, and they found in fact there was. It actually yielded more questions.
Was this a chemical response or was this a circumstantial thing? In other words, people that are unable to fix a mold problem, they’re pretty disempowered, and therefore, that’s a depressing thing if you’re stuck in an environment which you can’t control. Kind of circling back to the beginning of the conversation.
That was very fascinating to me because I had seen so many people in, while I was already in the industry, suffering from emotional dysregulation, depression, malaise. Of course, all of the cognitive impairment that’s the hallmark of mold exposure, and the ability and inability to maintain a job. These are all very depressing realities.
And so, but then in 2015, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Joan Benn. I actually met her earlier than that, but she published her paper called Silver Linings, and it was about her exploration into the space. She being a mycotoxin expert, she thought she knew a lot, and then she had her own experience with a home that got flooded during Hurricane Katrina.
And she walked in to do some sampling, wearing an N95 respirator, thinking that would protect her from the spores and mycotoxins. But the smell kept coming through, and she kept having to take a minute to get some relief. She’d keep walking out.
But she ended up having to cut her whole sort of like reconnaissance. She went into her own home that was mold infested to actually sample it, believe it or not, because she’s a mold nerd. And she was so interested by this that she said, I’m going to make the most out of it.
And anyway, she had to cut her experiment short because she was so sickened by it, and she was sick for two weeks later. And so she said, this was not in the literature. This is not what I was, you know, if there’s something here that we need to dig into.
And so she began researching the musty smell, which is an area of great fascination for me. And what she found was that there’s incredibly potent toxins in there that are not classified as microtoxins. They are toxic VOCs.
In fact, one of them, one octon three all, is 40 times more toxic than toluene in animal studies. Toluene is very…
Can you explain to the audience, you know, for those who don’t know what VOCs are?
Yes. So, and thank you for slowing me down on that. So when we think about mold, people just think mold, mold, mold, just this thing, or microtoxins.
And actually that’s a, they’re almost there. Mold spores are the seeds, like seed-like capsules that go forth and prosper, right? These are the things that are designed to go out there and find a new spot to set up camp and expand their domain.
The, while it’s growing, when mold lands on a surface, a spore lands on a surface, if the conditions are right, it begins to digest that surface. It releases enzymes, and so it digests outside of it, unlike us, where we digest inside. And in that digestive process, just like we produce gas, when we digest, molds do too.
And in fact, most of our gasses are not actually ours. They’re actually microbial gasses too, FYI. You know, we’re ambulatory composters more so than actual, we’re not really doing much of the digestion ourselves.
Anyway, the point is that those gasses are produced outside of the cell, and so it releases the metabolic byproducts in the form of what you characterize as a musty smell. And that musty smell is a potpourri of chemical compounds some of which are known carcinogens, many of which are known to be very toxic, and some of which are relatively benign, and just kind of the wood, the smell that you might smell when you walk through the woods on a damp day, right? That beautiful sort of earthy smell.
So there’s a whole range of these compounds, none of which we should be breathing in great quantities anyway, right? These are, historically speaking, we’re exposed to them in nature in a transient way, they kind of come and go. So we’ve got spores, we’ve got the microbial VOCs, or volatile organic compounds.
And so the VOC that you might be familiar with is formaldehyde, or alcohol, or even sodium hypochlorite, which is the smell of bleach, or even the chemicals that make gasoline. These are the VOCs that we’re all kind of exposed to on a regular basis, but we’re also being exposed to them from a microbial source when mold grows in buildings. And then the third thing, and I leave that for the third, is the mycotoxins.
And I leave that as the last piece because it is in fact a rounding error in the overall fungal kingdom in terms of the number of species that produce these compounds. Yet they get the disproportionate amount of attention because it’s a scary word. And by the way, they are potent, and you don’t want to be around these guys very much, right?
And so this is why you have to really be careful about food. But the microbial VOCs, circling back, are produced by all molds during active growth. And this is important.
That’s the important part. Because you don’t need to worry about the species. You need to worry about the moisture problem and the fact that there are conditions in your building that are conducive to growth.
And the only thing we can really control in that regard is the moisture problem. And so circling back to finish up the mental health piece, in 2015 when Joan Bennett began researching this, she found this one compound, one octanthreol, which is the mushroom alcohol, and it smells very mushroomy. And really fun fact, nerdy fact, okay?
Molecules, some of them, actually have a right hand and a left hand version. And they actually smell different, even though they are chemically identical. But so this is the same with limonene, which is the thing that we smell when we smell lime or lemon.
And also this is with one octanthreol. And so, there’s a musty side to it and then there’s a mushroomy side to it, which is just a very interesting thing for me. So, I digress.
But the more you look at this stuff, the more interesting it really is. And so Joan Bennett began looking at the mushroom alcohol and she began exposing fruit flies and certain plants to it and she found that they stop producing dopamine. They fly down instead of the light, they stop reproducing.
They develop mitochondrial disorder or locomotor dysfunction, and what she characterizes is Parkinsonian-like symptoms. And subsequent research has identified that VOC exposure is linked to Parkinsonian-like symptoms, ALS, things like that, where you get neurodegenerative illness. And so there’s a lot there to unpack.
But what you end up with is that there was definitive evidence that mold exposure could actually trigger, through a chemical exposure, essentially depression, right? A modification in your neurotransmitters. And this is not just through that.
This also happens through the gut disruptions, through, you know, so many of our neurotransmitters are produced in our gut, serotonin, et cetera, GABA. And so you end up with dysregulation when you’re eating moldy food. When you’re breathing this stuff in, oftentimes you’ll be swallowing these things.
You get a lot of incidental ingestion. A lot of stuff lands on your tongue and you swallow it. And so these things can, like I said, with an overlap, like a Venn diagram, air and food, really have a double whammy on you.
And so it’s a big deal. The mental health side of this, it is probably the most overlooked, but it’s the most common way that mold presents. In other words, mold sickness generally presents in cognitive impairment first and emotional dysregulation.
Most people are so impaired and emotionally dysregulated that they can’t even think their way towards identifying the source. And so if you’re listening to this and you’re struggling with something that happened to sort of kick off around the time where there was a water event, a leak, a flood, you know, you started noticing dampness or a musty odor, this is your call to action, right? Because this is where you start to say, well, let me zoom out a little bit and start to see, hey, did this start happening?
Right around then, this is what we ask people to do, is start tuning in to your senses, zoom out a little bit and take a look and see, because these things don’t happen accidentally. If you have a mold exposure, there is a dampness issue there on some level. And that’s what I want to always bring people back to.
You’ve either got food exposure, which means you’ve got to clean up your diet, or you’ve got building exposure, which means you’ve got to get fixed on a moisture problem, or if you’re like many people, you have both.
Yeah, and I want to say to people, they may be thinking, well, what are the symptoms of mold exposure? And it’s like, this can be a little difficult because it can be very broad. I mean, the body can only show so many different symptoms.
But I mean, I unfortunately grew up in a moldy house. I lived in another moldy house. I mean, I grew up in northern New York.
So very damp, you know, colder, wet times during the year. But some of the symptoms that you may find as far as, okay, respiratory symptoms like coughing, sneezing, wheezing, shortness of breath, any kind of nasal sinus congestion, you know, for your eyes, itchy, watery eyes, skin rashes. Jason, like you’re saying, those neurological and cognitive symptoms, you know, having a headache, that fatigue, difficulty concentrating, you know, you could even have sore throat, aches and pains, nausea.
You know, there’s, it could even be a little more severe where you’re actually getting into asthma attacks, chronic lung infections. My sister, oh gosh, she, you know, was having to use albuterol and, you know, doing nasal, you know, treatments. And I mean, it had gotten so bad.
She was living off of antibiotics and, you know, constantly being out of work because the work that she did took her into this office area of files that were moldy. I mean, she could smell every time she went in. And I’ll tell you, if she hadn’t moved to Arizona in the Phoenix area, much more dry in a place, she probably would have died because the infections were just constant, you know.
So this is where pay attention to your environment, but it can be so difficult to know exactly like you were saying, you know, because you’re just doing enough to have the energy to think and live, much less try to solve this problem. And especially if it’s not visually apparent, you know, like under leaky sinks, and then you can actually see the mold growing or down in musty basements where, I mean, it’s just like kind of hits you like a brick wall. That’s, you know, what happened in the place where I previously lived.
But if there was a water leak in the window and it’s in between the walls, you won’t see it. How would you know except that use your senses like Jason, like you’re saying, use your senses, people. You’re smelling it, you get, you know, a headache.
You know, we had flooding in a basement of a house we were renting and files and papers, you know, actually that were important because they were medical papers, got molded and packed them up and which honestly, I don’t recommend you carry them from place to place because you’re only bringing that mold with you. But I remember opening that container to look at some papers and I could see the mold on the files and I could smell it. And I immediately got this nauseating headache.
I mean, I immediately felt it. And this comes back into the genetics and specifically your glutathione conjugation pathway. So for those of you out there who have had your DNA 360 done, this would be your GST genes.
And so specifically GSTP1, even your GSTM1. Now, the GSTP1 genes, this offers the ability to utilize glutathione for inhalation-based toxins, mold, VOCs, okay? Mine is is dysregulated.
So I am like a super sniffer. I can smell mold in anything. Very sensitive, you know, before many other people.
So in a way, I find it a little bit of a superpower, so I can make sure to avoid that. But unfortunately, it also makes me more susceptible to these issues. And with the GSTM-1, this works with the utilization of glutathione in the biomes of the gut and lungs.
So if you don’t have any copies of your GSTM-1, you’re already a little bit behind the 8-ball when it comes to that for gut health, for the population in order to more readily help with that diversity with your immune system. But throw mold on top of that. Again, it’s adding more stones to your pack when you’re climbing that mountain.
It’s really something you want to make sure to support, and this is supporting your glutathione conjugation pathway, whether you are able to take glutathione as a supplement or eating foods rich in cysteine, which is one of the molecules that actually helps support and create glutathione. But that’s definitely a genetic area that you want to look at. And also to see if you are more strongly susceptible to these exposures.
That’s always something important. But I wanted to circle back a little bit to the inflammation that mold causes, getting back to the gut health, the brain health. Because with these VOCs, with the microtoxins, with these other mold exposures, again, these are foreign.
So your body is reacting. Your immune system is going, oh, wait a minute, this is not good. So it is giving off these pro-inflammatory cytokines, things like TNF-alpha, IL-6, interleukin-6, interleukin-1-beta.
These can exacerbate inflammation and inflammatory conditions in the gut. And if you’ve got inflammation in the gut, you’re going to have inflammation in the brain. And that neuroinflammation, that actually affects Michael Gleal activation.
And that can lead to those issues that you had mentioned, like for your mom, those getting into the brain fog. Because what happens is that oxidative stress is increased when you have this neuroinflammation. The responses to the stress, like NERF 2 and HO1, these can be downregulated by mold toxicity or VOCs.
So again, super important for whatever you can do or to have a family member who lives outside that can help you, please reach out for help. Have them assist you in doing that because your health really is top priority.
Yeah. And I will unpack that inflammation piece a little bit. Absolutely.
Because I think it’s pretty fascinating. First of all, a lot of the people that I’m talking to now on the psychiatric side are now recognizing depression as an inflammatory disease. And that’s fascinating.
And it’s worth examination. I often say that the immune system is like a juggler. And he or she can keep thousands of processes going with absolute elegance and ease.
And mold is like a guy across the room throwing baseballs at that juggler. He’s going to have to make a decision. Am I going to defend myself from the mold, from the baseballs?
Or am I going to keep juggling? And so the immune system will inevitably drop the balls in order to protect itself from the mold. And so the process can be rather abrupt.
And the healing can be rather slow. Because it takes a while for the juggler to get the confidence back and to begin juggling the processes. They’re all inextricably connected.
And so it takes a while after you get a big exposure or a chronic exposure to get back to the point where, without assistance, to get back to the point where you’re sort of back up to speed. There’s another theory, though, which is really interesting, about the reason why mold has such a huge impact on us. And it revolves around the idea of molecular mimicry, which is the idea that the immune system mistakes self-antigens for foreign antigens.
And essentially, due to structural similarities, because again, we’ve got this ancestral relationship with fungi. And fungi has this really fascinating way of doing, of getting into partners. In other words, if you look at the tree, if you look at the mycorrhizal, the way fungi works in the woods with trees, we now know, and this is a very recent discovery, that only about 8% of plant species don’t have a fungal partner living inside of them.
This is fascinating, not just in the roots, sharing information. And the way that they do that is through slipping into the cells at the root of them. And they kind of suppress the immune system.
So the tree doesn’t even notice, the plant doesn’t even notice, and then establishes this partnership, which is actually a mutually beneficial thing. Sometimes it’s infection, sometimes it’s mutually beneficial. And the same thing goes with us.
And so the molds and fungi have this amazing ability to sort of slip in and do what they want to do. And their agenda may not necessarily be the same as ours. And so this is all stuff that’s being explored, that there’s not really a definitive answer on.
But what we do know, despite all the theories, is that minimizing exposure to endo mold growth is really good for your health. And taking action on it quickly will help you avoid having a series of complications. Because as you said earlier, it’s the allostatic load.
You know, mold does cause lots of illness. But one of the most common problems is that it exacerbates existing conditions. And also it brings to the surface these latent symptom profiles that would otherwise not even be detected.
Autoimmune disease is the best example. We see all the time people suddenly develop fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, ME, you name it, whatever it is. And also, of course, there’s this kissing cousin, which is Lyme disease, which is, by the way, cytokine central.
So Lyme, cytokines, mold, cytokines, and you’ve got two tractor trailers going down a one-lane road. And that’s too much. And so that’s why people really go off the rails when they have mold and Lyme at the same time is one of the reasons.
So there’s a lot there on the inflammation side of things that people need to be aware of. And by the way, I might mention, we live in an inflammatory world. We are exposed to all sorts of stuff that’s regulating us.
This becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It can do a doozy on you by itself, but there’s nobody living in a bubble here, nobody’s living in a vacuum. There is nothing, there’s not one thing that is happening by itself in our world today.
Our exposures are layered and constant and chronic. And so going back to what is the one thing, what are the things that you can do? What are the things that you must do?
And it is be vigilant around moisture control. And when you do, when you see something, smell something or feel something, do something and do it quickly.
You know, it’s funny. That’s what I find very dichotic about science is, as a scientist, when we set up experiments, you want to limit your variables. And so that way, you don’t have confounding factors affecting your results, you know, and figuring out, okay, well, what’s going on?
But it truly does not mimic real life because there are so many things going on. You know, that’s why we do things in a lab so we can control it. And, you know, this gets back to what you were just talking about.
It’s usually never just one thing. There’s so many other factors involved. You know, but in science, it’s like, we do the best we can.
And when you’re talking about biological systems, they really are the most difficult because there are just so many variables to keep in mind.
Indeed. Almost impossible to actually really, if you really look at it, let me just give you a fun example. Let me twist up some people who think that science has got it all figured out.
Because if you look at all the animal studies, all the animal studies that have been done, there are a few things. First of all, there has never been a, well, recently, there was an interesting study that looks at mice. And they found out that mice that are fed by a woman, yes, you get different results than mice that are fed by a man.
And this has never been written up in the research reports. Here’s who, that’s a variable. That’s a meaningful variable apparently.
I didn’t know that. How about this one? All of those studies have been done under blue fluorescent lights.
What? Yes. I mean, that changes everything, everything.
So when we start talking about isolating variables or limiting variables, what about the variables that we’re not even seeing, that they’re so close to us, that we can’t even detect them? And those two examples are just two examples, right? And so we really need to, again, tune in to your senses.
You need to trust your body. This whole idea of turning over our health to the health care system has been proven to be a pretty lousy strategy. And so, well, what can we do?
And my suggestion around this stuff is always a story of self-empowerment. Because we all live in buildings, we all breathe air, we all live on planet fungi, which also happens to be a water planet. And so, if you look at all those things, I feel like learning how to live in buildings and breathe air should be our birthright.
But in fact, this is something that we need to learn how to do, because this is not what we live in is not a natural phenomenon, right? These buildings, if you look at our history, 99.9% of our history on the planet as a species was outside. Only a tiny infinitesimal fragment of our existence as a species has been done in chemical boxes, made of paper mache, they get moldy very quickly when they get wet.
Then we all spend 95% plus of our time, it used to be said 90%, but I would say even closer 99% for many of us, in those same buildings, breathing the same air 20,000 times a day. How is that going to change our outcomes in ways that we’re now learning? That’s how.
Yeah. And you know, it can seem so overwhelming. It really can.
But there are things that can be done. So how do we fight off mold inside our bodies? You know, go ahead.
First is you avoid them.
Exactly.
First things first is you want to… So it’s air, food and attitude. If you really want to get down to what you do to get better and what you do.
But air, you have to deal with both mold and dampness, which is to say the same thing twice. And VOCs, meaning man-made VOCs. So you got microbial VOCs and man-made VOCs.
Both of them are harmful in any significant amounts. So air, food, that means essentially a no sugar, no grains diet. I know no one wants to hear that but guess what?
That’s the path to heal with this stuff. No sugar, no grains. And a local seasonal or a local pastured ideally or grass-fed meats and dairy.
I bring that up because the conventional farming, conventional meat and dairy, those animals are fed grains that they’re not eating in nature, that are also notoriously loaded with mycotoxins. And we know that to be true because farmers and the agricultural world is actually where all the mycotoxin research comes from. We don’t know much about mycotoxins in humans because we’re not allowed to study that.
But we do study on animals, we do it all the time. And that’s actually where all these binders and all these mycotoxin urine panels and all that stuff. And by the way, if you’re going to get your health assessed for mycotoxins, do not use a mycotoxin urine panel.
They are junk science. They’ll tell you what you’ve been eating. They’re not going to tell you what you’ve been breathing.
And so this is a very common source of misdiagnosis. And people end up going down a rabbit hole, a wild goose chase, looking for mold in their house when it’s in their pantry. They’re looking in their basement, and they should be looking in there.
But you had said air, so we need to improve the air quality. What specifically can people do to improve their air quality?
Well, first of all, you should be monitoring your humidity. And so I’ve got these gauges all over my house, digital humidity gauges. And so you want to keep your humidity between 40 and 60 percent.
That’s what they call the Goldilocks zone. Above 60 percent, you start to get condensation, dampness. It’s not just mold, it’s also dust mites and other things like that.
Below 40 percent, it gets too dry. People tend to get mucous membrane, their mucous membranes dry at crack. And actually, that’s how you get sick in the winter.
It’s not because it’s cold, it’s because it’s dry. And you end up with a direct wrap from whatever microbes you’re exposed to directly in your bloodstream. So you end up with the moderate humidity.
You want to also obviously keep your nose peeled and your eyes peeled for any signs of dampness, any signs of moisture. You want to do a regular inspection, by the way, of your home. I know it sounds weird, but people don’t check out their body even.
They find out, you know, the next thing you know, you’ve got a melanoma, right? You need to take responsibility for our shells. And our building is an extension of our immune system.
It’s like a third scan, if you will, because we’ve got this R scan, we’ve got the clothing we’re wearing, then we’ve got this external, this exo-scan, exoskeleton. And our relationship with our building has a direct proportion to our health. Sick buildings create sick people.
When a building heals and gets well-maintained, it helps create a healing environment. So there’s a real symbiotic relationship there. And so you want to moderate humidity, you want to really do regular assessments of your home, just get tuned in to your building.
Get tuned in the same way I suggest people get tuned in to their own senses. And then you also want to use filters, not just HEPA filters, but also filters that have carbon in them, because carbon is what takes out the VOCs. HEPA filters are good at particles, but that’s only a very small percentage of our indoor pollution these days.
Most of the indoor pollution in a modern building is actually from VOCs, and it’s from personal care products, cleaning products, the finishes, the furnishings, the, you know, you name it, carpets, building materials. You know, that stuff is all either off-gassing or shedding in little particles. And so all that stuff needs to be removed with appropriate air filtration.
And also HEPA filtered vacuum cleaners, because if they’re not HEPA filtered, they’re distributing particles through your house. They are not removing them from your house. And they’re distributing them in a very micro-fine part, very micro-fine manner, such that they’re even more deeply respirable on the back end when they come out than they were on the front end when they went in, because they get broken up, they get kind of broken down into bits.
And then lastly, as if that wasn’t enough, open your windows. You know, I think most of what we’re experiencing now, all of the stuff that I’ve just talked about, is rooted in one thing, which is disconnection from nature. And if we, if I can remind us that the word human comes from humus, which is soil, and we are so disconnected between the hermetically sealed buildings that we live in and the rubber on the bottom of our shoes and our food wrapped in plastic and this whole disconnection, I think that that is the fundamental problem that’s allowing all these other things to really manifest.
So get your house clean, right? Watch out for moisture issues. And open up the windows.
Walk outside barefoot, you know, breathe in outdoor air that has lots of spores in it, because it does, because that’s a hermetic stressor. That will actually help your body be prepared when you do get exposed indoors. But if we’re living in these bubbles, and we’re only exposed to, you know, the HEPA-filtered air, then we have mold exposure.
Guess what? We’re not ready, right? We have not trained our immune system to respond appropriately.
And I think that’s the key, right? Is the immune system is on, is ready. But if you’re not training it, then it’s going to panic when it gets exposed to something that it knows it shouldn’t be.
So I’ve got a question. Have you heard of high-tech air reactor? It uses the photocatalytic oxidation technology.
What are your thoughts about that?
Well, I know that they sued one of my friends for speaking honestly about that. Sincerely. So there’s a real hair trigger response, let’s say.
So what I will say is I’ll speak more broadly. I’ve interviewed a number of people from my GOT MOLD Summit, which is coming up very shortly, around this subject matter, specifically around technologies that circumvent the filter-based approach. So you’ve got two ways to deal with your air, really.
Oh, look at that.
You made balloons.
It’s a celebration, who knew? Wow, congratulations. For those of us not watching this, I just have put up a gesture and it triggered a cascade of balloons.
So anyway, you basically got filters which remove air, which remove particles and again, pollutants from air when you push air through it, right? And that’s a typical HEPA filter which are noisy, and you have to spend money on replacement filters and all that stuff. And that’s the main reason why people go towards other technologies.
And then you got these electronic devices, which I call zappers. And so you could talk about ozone, ionizers, PCOS, hydroxyl generators, kind of all in the same breath. They’re all very different, but they all have the same kind of attention, focus around a few things.
First of all, no filters, which sounds great. But ultimately, the filter is what captures the pollutants. You can get rid of it.
And that’s important because these other things don’t actually capture them and they claim to destroy them, but only in a lab. In reality, they don’t actually do a very good job of doing that. They partially damage them and they actually can cause more particles than removing particles, strangely.
They can create other compounds, too, because the chemistry inside the photocatalytic oxidization, for example, will actually partially break down compounds, and then they’ll reform into other Frankenstein-like compounds and easy ones, like formaldehyde, is a very common byproduct of impartial, or I should say, an incomplete oxidization. Also, you’ve got these kill claims, which is troubling for me. Any kill claim, any time you see a kill claim that kills, it destroys, it eradicates.
That means it’s doing a lot of chemistry in your air, and we don’t need to add chemistry to our air. We want to remove chemistry from our air. We want to simplify things.
We don’t need to kill mold, because actually mold being alive doesn’t hurt you any more so than dead mold. Dead mold is still allergenic and potentially toxigenic, so it’s literally irrelevant whether or not you’ve killed it. It still has the potential for the same immune response or immune effect.
And so therefore, what we have here is basically a solution looking for a problem, and very well marketed because they’re extremely high profit margin. So we’re talking about molecule, we’re talking about the old ionic breeze, right? And then you got the brand that you mentioned.
These are often, and I also will mention this, many of them produce ozone. Ozone is great outside when it’s a thunderstorm, when it’s under storming, and it serves a function in nature, has no place indoors. It is actually truly harmful to human tissue.
It is, it’s extremely aggressive. It not only impacts living cells, it also changes the chemistry that VOCs in your home. I am very strongly opposed to any electronic filtration, any electronic air cleaners.
And it’s a shame because, you know, they do offer some perceived benefits, but the downsides and the unknowns, as well as the knowns, are so significant that I would stay very clear.
Now, when we’re talking about moisture, and I’ve heard you, you know, in other interviews say that you really want to take care of the moisture damage within the first like 24 hours, you know, 48 hours, because after that, then the mold starts coming in, and then oftentimes, insurance doesn’t cover anymore. But unfortunately, the challenge of someone, first of all, being aware or, oh, they’re aware, but it takes a little bit to do any kind of remediation. And it’s usually not within that 24, 48 hours.
What do they do? What can be done?
It’s a very good question, because most people have no idea that a leak or a building defect is manifesting. And in those cases, insurance isn’t gonna cover it anyway. So let me first clarify what insurance covers.
Cover sudden and accidental losses. Now, if you have a special rider, in other words, you paid extra for a specific amplifier of your policy, okay? Sometimes mold coverage can be purchased separately, and it’s not cheap.
And it will cover stuff that doesn’t necessarily fall with it under that sudden and accidental category. However, the vast majority, 99.9% probably, will be limited by that. So that means a leaky pipe won’t be covered, but that same pipe, if it bursts suddenly, would be.
Okay? And that’s in the insurance. Insurance is not your friend.
Their goal is to not spend money, not pay you, right? They’ll pay me, pay me, pay me. And then you need something, and they’re like, well, you know, you gotta read your policy.
So when you have a slow issue, when you’ve got like moving the groundwater through a foundation, which is not covered by insurance, when you’ve got a slow leak in a pipe, or you’ve got condensation forming inside of a wall cavity, these kinds of things, and suddenly people find out that they have it, usually because of a health issue, you’ve got three things you can do with an indoor quality problem, just to break it down. Number one, source control. That would mean that you’re gonna jump on this remediation.
Unfortunately, at that stage, it’s a cash pay. You’re not gonna be able to get insurance. And so you wanna get a proper assessment done by a qualified independent assessment professional, not a remediation contractor, because they get paid by the weight, right?
They get paid by the size of the job. You want someone who’s not paid by the size of the project. You want someone who’s paid for their advice and their time.
That’s what a good inspector does.
Where can people find contractors or people like this?
Well, so there’s a few organizations out there that train and certify inspectors and remediators. And there’s been a large change in that profile, in the profile of those associations, because of, well, reasons I won’t go into this whole podcast. But acac.org is a group that certifies, it’s a council-accredited certification body.
And you can find certified indoor environmentalists, CIE. And then there’s a sort of a higher designation, CIEQ, CIEC. And so you would want to look for designations like that.
And you want to question people as to whether or not they actually do remediation and inspections or just one. And you really want to have that be kind of a pass-fail. If they say they just do inspections, they pass.
And if they do both, they fail. You want to be very careful about not inviting the vampire into your home. Especially if they’re doing testing and then they also get paid for cleanup, that can be skewed in their favor.
The other group that’s on the remediation side, if you want to look for certified contractors, iicrc.org is where you’ll find information about the International Institute for Cleaning and Restoration Contractors. And so they train and certify water damage restoration contractors as well as mold remediation contractors. And there are two standards for that, by the way.
The S500, S as in Sam, 500 as in standard, 500, is for water damage and the S520. Those are the operative documents that you want to inquire. Are you certified in that?
Are you certified in water damage? Are you certified in mold? And if they are, then take a bid.
So that source control is the first thing. If you can do it, you can’t always do it. Second thing you can do is filter the air, reduce exposure.
But the key is you have to have air filters that have the carbon in them because the mold is producing VOCs, right? So you can’t just use a HEPA filter. You will not feel better.
The thing that’s making you sick is probably not the spores. It’s probably the VOCs. And then the third thing you can do, if you can’t, in addition to sometimes the filtration and before you’re able to do source control, is dilution, which again goes back to that other suggestion, which is open your windows.
So getting fresh air into the building will help dilute the impacted air so that you’re actually just having a proportionally lower exposure. Of course, you can’t do that if it’s too hot, too cold, or too humid outside. But it is one of those things where if the stars are in alignment, opening the windows can make a huge difference.
And then the last thing you can do, and this is really where a lot of people end up going, is relocate, at least until it’s resolved or until it’s been remediated. So you either remediate or relocate. And if you have to stick around to buy time, then you can either filter or dilute, or you can filter and or dilute.
That’s it. You have very limited options, unfortunately.
And the thing is, is that, you know, obviously, if you’re not the home owner, you’re not going to be pouring in a bunch of your own money to take care of this. And I’ve been there as a renter having water damage and trying to get the landlord to do anything about it is next to impossible. And I’m aware, and I would like you to tell the audience about this.
What can a renter do legally, you know?
It’s one of my favorite subjects. It is a very common thing for us to hear from people saying, I’m renting, I think I’ve got mold, I’m scared to tell my landlord, I don’t know what to do. And what’s interesting is that there is legal doctrine that is known as the Implied Warranty of Habitability, which is in effect in 49 out of the 50 states, okay?
There’s one exception, which is Arkansas, go figure. And that legal doctrine is the sort of foundational underpinning of residential property leases. And so it’s called the Implied Warranty of Habitability because it is not explicit in the sense it is not written in your lease.
It’s implied as a bedrock, as legal doctrine, right? Which basically states, in short, that landlords have an obligation to provide safe and clean housing. That’s it.
Super simple, right? So is mold safe? Not at all, especially for people that have a preexisting condition.
So we used to suggest to people that they get a letter from their doctor saying my patient has a condition that makes mold exposure a hazard to their health. And so this needs to be remediated or they need to be relocated immediately. That used to be necessary.
It doesn’t seem to be as necessary these days. And so basically, the safe and clean part is mold clean. Well, we know mold is not clean, right?
Mold is degradation. Mold is literally decay at the beginning stages of decay. And so properly presented to a landlord where they are informed of their obligations under the implied warranty of habitability.
They are informed of the industry standard, which is the IICRC S520, as well as any of the other local regulations that may exist in the state in which you live. If they’re notified of that, and then they’re told that it has to be remediated within a certain period of time, and they don’t follow that, then oftentimes the tenant can affect what’s called a constructive eviction. They can actually break their lease without any penalties.
In some states, in some municipalities, it is a municipality by a municipality basis the way that some of the stuff is enacted. You can actually pay your rent into an escrow account, which really angers the landlord, but it’s a very good motivator to get them to do what they’re supposed to do. Then you can also dictate how the remediation is, what the clearance criteria are.
In other words, you can mandate that a third party, which is what you should do, comes in and does the necessary testing. There are a few lawyers that are really good about this, and I would highly recommend, I’ve interviewed a few of them recently. Eric Lifshitz in San Francisco is an expert in this, and he actually has sort of a DIY toolbox, even though he only serves people in California, but he’s fabulous.
And he can find stuff online that is sort of a form letter that people can use to notify their landlords that there is an issue that needs to be taken care of. But the most important thing is that you’re going to probably end up having to move out anyway. That’s the reality.
So there’s no real point in delaying that, because the reality is that most of the time, even when the problem is corrected, the dynamic shifts your quality of life in such a way that it’s often easier to give birth than to resurrect the dead, when it comes to where you’re living. But the implied warranty of habitability is, and in fact, I have an article that I wrote about this, about what we call the renter’s playbook, and it gives you a step-by-step way to explore that in your local municipalities and protectors.
That would be wonderful, and I’m sure our listeners would be very happy to have access to that information. Before we close up, I wanted to jump in and see if there’s anything, because I remember since you’ve been here last on DNA Talks, would you say there’s been any developments, any technologies, innovations that have happened in the last year that you just want to give a shout out to?
Oh, there’s a few things, actually. And I would say there’s some stuff that’s not necessarily super new, but it’s actually becoming more popular. I want to share with anyone who’s considering potentially doing new construction, and this may be a very small sector of the audience, but there’s a product called AAC, aerated autoclave concrete, and you can build houses out of this.
So you eliminate wall cavities and you eliminate sheetrock for the most part. And the biggest problems with mold and build modern buildings usually manifest on sheetrock in wall cavities. So if you can eliminate those two things from modern structures, you can then reduce the likelihood of mold growth by orders of magnitude.
And so it’s a really important. So AAC, I’m a big fan of it. And there are some factories popping up in the United States.
Historically, you’ve had to get it overseas, Mexico, even Vietnam. They’re shipping it in from. But it’s a really cool product.
I have a half a piece on my desk, right? So this is got, it’s concrete that’s got air bubbles in it.
Oh, neat.
Yeah, so this is one sixth the weight of concrete. And if you can cut it with a handsaw, you can drill into it with a regular drill. But it’s insulative, right?
So it’s insulation and it’s structural. It’s really neat stuff. So I’m a big fan.
I don’t have any stock in the company or any of the companies that make it.
So it doesn’t lose any structural stability with the lighter weight? What about in areas that are susceptible to hurricanes or anything like that? Is there any issues there?
It’s very, very durable. In fact, I am working with another company that’s got a graphene mixture that they’re using to put in stucco, which makes this bulletproof. And I’m not saying that in hyperbole.
It is literally ballistics rated. So really neat stuff. And the other thing, and this is kind of a little bit of a teaser, and I’ll be cautious about this.
My attorneys and advisors will probably tell me to speak in cryptic terms. But we’re working on a few new tests because the mycotoxin urine panels are such junk science. And so is ERMI, the dust test that’s so popular these days, which is a 21-year-old test that uses genomics.
And I don’t think you’d trust anything in genomics as 21 years old to give you any sort of accuracy. It’s ridiculous, right? But people base their entire, these huge decisions on this ancient PCR technique, right?
So we’re working on one that actually uses next-generation sequencing to look at all known microbes. And we’ve got this really novel way of categorizing, of organizing the data to make it user-friendly. And we’re not just looking at mold, we’re also looking at bacteria, so that we can see where there’s evidence of water damage in the building or amplification of it.
And we’re also working on some blood tests to pick up the microbial VOCs, so actual mold exposure. So we’ve got a few different technologies. And this is being afforded by advancements in mass spectrometry and different analytical techniques that we’re really fortunate to have been.
We’re at the forefront with all that stuff with GOT MOLD. And then also, I will also, this is another one of the teasers, are spore traps in our test kit, which people can learn at. In fact, gotmold.com, we have a little landing page for listeners, which is gotmold.com/dnaco.
And there you can find our ebook as well as a discount code for anybody who’s interested in one of our test kits. But it uses something called spore traps, which captures the airborne spores, which is a very strong indicator of mold growth in doors. It’s one indicator, it’s one tool in the toolbox.
And we’re about to start implementing this really top shelf, cutting edge AI technology to analyze the spore. So we’ll have 99.9% accuracy at full scale across all lab locations. So we’re really raising the bar on that.
So the technologies around detection, assessment, testing, all that stuff is 20 years old in most cases. And so we’ve been working really hard to set up, bring it up to date. And so that was not meant to be a commercial for us, but rather a commercial for the technology that’s emerging today.
Fantastic. I’ll tell you, we need you. We need this technology to get updated and to help people.
Thank you so much for your information, for your time. This has been amazing. We could probably talk for another couple hours, but I know that you have a hard stop here.
So I want to definitely thank you for lending your time here with us at The DNA Talks Podcast. We always enjoy having you, your information, and I’m sure our audience is very grateful for all the information and the work that you’ve been doing. I would like as well to thank you, our audience, for tuning in to today’s episodes of The DNA Talks Podcast.
Don’t forget, like, subscribe, leave a comment down below, especially if there’s a certain topic that you’d like us to discuss, or if you have a question on what we’ve discussed here today. You may also listen to this podcast on Spotify and Apple podcasts. If you wish to learn more, add us to your list of liked podcasts, so you’ll be up to date with the next one.
I’ll tell you, thank you so much. Speaking of being up to date, you may also find us on Instagram at DNA Talks Podcast, as well as my own at Dr. Varden Official. That’s DR, Varden Official.
And once again, thank you so much for being here. And we will see you on the next one.
