Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine podcast, where we do deep dives into topics of mind, body and spirit. Through these conversations, you’ll hear practical advice and effective strategies to improve your health and ultimately add healthspan to your lifespan. I’m Ed Paget, I’m an osteopath and exercise physiologist with a special interest in longevity.
Now, do you know the difference between having a mold problem and having mold in your house? Did you know that having mold in your environment could be the cause of chronic health conditions and even the culprit holding you back from losing weight? Today’s guest is Jason Earle.
He’s founder of GotMold? in the Mycolab USA and an outspoken air quality crusader. Now, when he was young, Jason was allergic to nearly everything in his environment.
Jason’s asthma was so severe that he was initially diagnosed as having cystic fibrosis. Unfortunately, absenteeism due to battling the symptoms of Lyme disease and the asthma and his mother’s suicide led him to drop out of high school at 16 and go and find work in a local gas station. Now, this could have been the end of his story, but through a fortunate turn of events, Jason found himself becoming a stockbroker on Wall Street, which led him to become the youngest licensed broker in history and earning a Guinness World Record at the age of just 17.
So how did this Wall Street whiz kid end up becoming a mold expert? And what does this have to do with his early childhood growing up in a moldy farmhouse? Now, he’ll explain all of this and more in today’s episode.
Jason has spent the last 20 years performing countless sick building investigations, solving many medical mysteries along the way and helping thousands of families recover their health and peace of mind by discovering and treating mold problems. He’s been featured on The Good Morning America Show, Extreme Makeover, Home Editions, The Dr. Oz Show, Entrepreneur Wilde, and he is featured in at least two college textbooks. Now, mold is a really important topic and it’s not well understood in the health world.
And I learned a lot from talking to Jason. I’m sure you will too. But before we dive into that, I want to remind you that if you want my direct help with lifestyle coaching, maybe you’re too tired, you’re in pain, maybe you’re lacking drive and the doctor said, you just need to change your lifestyle, but you don’t know where to start.
Send me an email, ed at edpaget.com or visit my website edpaget.com. While you’re there, you can also sign up for my weekly newsletter, packed full of great advice about using lifestyle medicine to add healthspan to your lifespan. Time to get on with the show, Jason, welcome to the show.
So good to be here.
All right, so we’re going to have a great conversation today. We’re going to look at the topic of mold, how you got into mold from being a Wall Street Whiz kid to mold, how mold can affect people’s health in ways they don’t often realize and how to detect it and what to do about it. Is there anything else you want to add into that before we get going?
No, I think that’s a great start.
All right. So tell us, what is mold and why should we be worried about it?
Well, mold is part of kingdom fungi, which is by Paul Stammet’s description, the Earth’s immune system and communications network. So there’s potentially a benevolent slant to this, although mold does evoke fear in the hearts of many. Mold is known as microfungi, up there with yeasts as opposed to mushrooms, which are the macro fungi.
And mold is often referred to as nature’s great recycler. Its job is to turn dead plant matter back into dirt. And so it’s doing its job if it’s doing that in your yard, not so much if it’s doing it in your living room.
Yeah, mold. We actually had a lecture on mold in osteopathic training, but it wasn’t anything to do with mold breaking stuff down. It was really interesting.
It was to do with when you expose mold to an anesthetic, it freezes. I don’t know if you’ve heard this. It’s called slime mold does this.
And when the anesthetic wears off, the mold pulses again, or it moves in a pulsation. And the rhythm of the pulsation is the same as our craniosacral rhythm. And the time it takes for the mold to wear off is the same time it takes for, sorry, the analgesic to wear off is the same time it takes for it to wear off in humans.
So there’s this kind of weird connection between the rhythm of slime mold, the eight most ancient thing on the planet, and our cerebral spinal fluid mechanisms in the body.
Wow, that’s fascinating. That is a first for me. I’m always amazed at our relationship with mold because we’re fungi in general, because in fact, we are genetically more closely related to fungi than we are bacteria, which is part of the reason why antibiotics work well on us and why antifungal medications can actually be very harmful for us.
So it does not surprise me that you’d see similar rhythms. Let’s put it that way.
All right, so that’s what mold is, and why is that detrimental to be in our households?
Well, mold is really a tool of decay. It’s a function of decay, and so whenever, if you think about us on an evolutionary basis, most people recoil viscerally from the smell or the presence of feces, vomit, or dead animals, rotting animals, right? There’s a visceral repulsion to that, and mold is the precursor to real decay and rot.
And so if you dial it all the way back, it’s no surprise that we have a visceral and immune response to the metabolic activities of fungi growing indoors. And so the other thing is that mold, as it’s growing, the spores, so there’s really three fundamentally important components to mold. This is a hyper simplification for conversation purposes, but essentially you have spores, which are the hardy reproductive capsules that are seed-like, that break free, become airborne, and go forth and prosper.
Their job is to go find a place where it’s going to get wet and damp, and then they’re going to proliferate. Then you also have the mycotoxins, which get a lot of the headlines, but disproportionately so, because only about 100 or so of the 100,000 species actually produce these chemical toxins that are actually to inhibit growth of other microorganisms, but also because, like I said before, we’re closely related to fungi, they can also have an adverse impact on our health. And then thirdly, there’s the microbial gases, and they’re called MVOCs, that’s microbial volatile organic compounds.
And most of us are familiar with VOCs, specifically the man-made ones, which are unfortunately abundant in modern buildings, paints, finishes, personal care products, cleaners, many of them emit VOCs or comprise of VOCs. And so the microbes make them too. In fact, microbes make VOCs that are very similar to industrial solvents, almost identical to the man-made ones in many cases.
And so when the seeds or the spores land on a surface and the right conditions are present, by the way, which are the same conditions that we enjoy as humans. So mold just likes to hang out with us. The spores are waiting for the stars to be in alignment, like a combination lock where you’ve got the right temperature, you’ve got a food source, a nutrition source, which is basically what we build our buildings out of, which we can dig into more a little bit later.
We essentially build buildings out of mold food. And then you’ve got to have the right temperature, you’ve got to have oxygen. These are aerobic organisms, contrary to popular opinion, people who think that they’re going to growing in their gut and stuff.
This is a false narrative. And then of course, you have to have the right amount of moisture. And of all of those things, the only thing that really is variable that we can control is moisture.
And so when the right amount of moisture comes into play, which is just outside of where we like to maintain in our buildings, then you start to see condensation form, and then you see this really elegant biological process start to unfold. And so when the spores start to germinate, they release hyphae, which are like these roots that go into the material that it’s going to grow on, and then they start to release enzymes. And so they digest what they’re eating outside of themselves.
They don’t have a stomach like we do. They digest outside. And when it’s extracting the nutrition that it’s seeking, it’s also digesting and releasing digestive gases.
And without being crude, essentially, these microbial gases are like mold farts. They are releasing their digestive… And by the way, we, the microbial, our gases, are also microbial gases.
We don’t really digest our food so much as we have an ancient partnership with these critters who do most of the digestion for us. I would argue that we’re more like ambulatory composters than we are digestive organisms. And so these gases that are produced are emerging as a primary source of mold related illness in current research.
And they are known to cause initial symptoms like headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, anxiety and depression, potentially mitochondrial damage is showing up in animal studies. This is the musty smell, to just bring it to the simplest term. The musty smell, which has long been considered an aesthetic nuisance, is actually a health hazard and can cause, in chronic exposures, can even lead to things like chemical sensitivities and chronic inflammation.
So when you think about the way this can cause adverse health effects, I like to say that if you’re sucking on the tailpipe of any organism long enough, you’re probably not going to feel well. And so that’s really what we’re dealing with here, is you’re dealing with the exhaust of an organism that’s doing its best to eat your house. And the biggest problem that we have now in our society, and this has been a slow process, it began with World War II, around World War II with the baby boomers, the demand for cheap and fast construction materials to build the houses that were necessary.
We began building buildings out of papier-mache, when drywall was first rolled out, and then we began tightening up the houses in the 70s due to the fuel crisis, and so we began having less and less air exchange to save energy, and then we started painting our walls with toxic chemicals and floor finishes. But while we’re doing this tightening up, and reducing air exchange, when the buildings get wet now, the mold growth and those byproducts, the digestive byproducts, the mycotoxins and the MVSTs and the spores accumulate indoors. And it’s always fun to kind of look back at and say, well, you know, well, why is that really a problem?
Well, in recent past, we’ve also stopped going out of our buildings. We spend 90% of our time indoors. It used to be that we spent 90% of our time indoors, and we’d go from building to building.
We’d go from our house to the car and the car, you know, indoor air in your car is still indoors. And then the workplace. Now we don’t even leave the building.
We stay in the same place. And we breathe 13 to 15 times a minute. If you do the math, that’s 20,000 times a day.
It’s extraordinary. And if you think about the volume of air in total, I’ve done the math on this and done the actual experiments, you breathe about 30 pounds of air a day. 30 pounds of air.
And that’s remarkable because if you drink 8, 8 ounces of glasses of water, that’s half a gallon, that’s 4 pounds. If you eat 3 meals, and many of your listeners probably intermittent fast, but if you eat 3 big meals, you might eat 4 pounds of food. So you’re talking about air being your largest environmental exposure by sevenfold.
It’s remarkable. Yet, this is a blind spot. And people often ask me, why do you think that is?
Well, I think somebody once said, whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish. And so we have a problem with this. We can’t see past the tip of our noses, hiding in plain sight.
And this constant rebreathing of these same chemicals, and I mean that by the VOCs and the microbial chemicals, that constant rebreathing has gotten us to a place where we’ve got outrageous autoimmune issues, we’ve got outrageous cancer issues, everyone’s looking at food and water as a primary cause. And I’m here to suggest that we need to look more closely at what our largest environmental exposures are and start dealing with these things proactively through a combination of source control, ventilation and filtration.
Wow, that’s quite the introduction and that’s the bombshell because you’re right, even in the world of functional medicine or lifestyle medicine as well, we look at nutrition and we look at food. We may look at water if we’re into the more of the liquid aspect of things, but we’re certainly not looking at air. And to have that in pounds, like 30 pounds, that’s a huge amount of air we’re breathing in every day.
And I think from a government point of view, they’re aware of pollution being a problem in the main cities, but we’re not aware of pollution in our homes coming from organic sources. And when you did that sort of introduction there, I’ve actually had people talk to me on this podcast before about mold and we didn’t really get into the MVOCs. We more talked about the spores being a problem, and I wasn’t even aware these MVOCs were a problem.
How does the gas interact with our nervous system? How does the gas cause these problems in the body?
Well, sure. And I’ll actually rewind a bit on this because this was a series of awakenings for me about this. When I was a kid and I moved out of the moldy house and my symptoms went away, it was chalked up to adolescent remission, so I just went on with my life.
My mother, two years later, committed suicide. Never thought about that in the context of how our buildings may be related to this. But then fast forward, I got into the mold business and the healthy home business, and in 2008, Brown University did a remarkable study.
It was rather large, involved 6,000 participants. And they were curious about the potential connection between mold and dampness and doors and depression. They were actually trying to debunk a study that was done at Oxford University, and what they ended up doing was confirming the findings.
And so what they did was they asked these participants whether or not they had a mold problem, unresolved, and then they also inquired about their general well-being through a quality of life questionnaire. And they found a very strong correlation between mold and dampness and doors and depression. Now, they stopped short of pinning the tail on the donkey and saying mold causes depression because that was not the purpose of the study.
In fact, what they did was ended up asking a lot of questions afterwards. For example, was this due to a disempowerment, right? People who know they have a mold problem and haven’t fixed it, there might be a lot going on there, financial issues.
They might not be in control of the building because their husband or wife or boss or landlord, whatever the case may be. And then they also asked, is there actually a chemical or a biological connection? And so they stopped short of being able to answer that.
But what that did was get the wheels in motion and began to get researchers looking at what this relationship might be. And just a few years later, now my mold inspection business, the first name of the company was LabResults because we use Labrador Retrievers trained to sniff out hidden mold in buildings and laboratory testing, and we thought that was cute. And we got a lot of national press as a result of our nifty use of rescued, highly trained Labrador Retrievers.
And so one day I got a phone call from Dr. Joan Bennett, who’s a fungal geneticist and mold researcher at Rutgers University. And she said, I read a story about you and your dog. I’d like to meet your dog.
It’s okay if you come too. And so I lived in Princeton at the time, and she was just up in New Brunswick, just a couple of exits up Route 1. So we drove up and did a little demonstration for her.
And then she began to show me her research. And what she had done, this is in response to her actually having a mold exposure down in New Orleans. She had a house down in New Orleans.
She was a teacher, a professor at Tulane. Hurricane Katrina came through. They were evacuated.
She went back to investigate the house and see what was, what had happened to the house, being just a curious researcher. She went with a backpack full of sampling equipment and an N95 respirator. She walked in knowing that the N95 respirator will stop spores and stop mycotoxins, because mycotoxins actually have to have a carrier particle.
They’re not airborne by themselves. They’re not volatile. So they’re sort of sticky substances.
And so they become airborne on the spores. And so an N95 respirator, which we’re all familiar with from COVID, will arrest those particles. But as she’s going through her house, she notices a very strong smell coming through.
And she recognized it clearly as the musty smell, that very dank but very dense odor. And she had to take a few breaks before she was able to finish her inspection. And ultimately, she fell ill.
She was sick for a spell afterwards. And this really got her thinking, because she had testified as an expert witness in defense of insurance companies who had been sued for mold-related illness. And she thought, maybe I got this wrong, because she had said, you can’t inhale enough mycotoxins.
That was her thesis. This mycotoxin through air exposure doesn’t seem to hold up. And so now she started to think, well, geez, maybe it was this musty smell.
So she went back to the lab and began isolating chemicals and figuring out what she could actually procure and being a basic scientist, she found one octan, three all, mushroom alcohol. And she began testing fruit flies that fluoresce when they produce dopamine, pretty nifty little critters, and also on plants. And she found the plants had real problems in exposure to this compound.
But the fruit flies were fascinating because they first of all stopped producing dopamine. They also stopped reproducing. They also stopped flying to the light, which is their instinctive nature, and instead started flying down, developed locomotor disorder, the way she characterized it, and Parkinsonian-like symptoms.
She can, at later subsequent studies, found that mitochondrial damage and premature death to be also very common. And so she essentially decided that these should not be called volatile organic, microbial volatile organic compounds, but volatoxins. She identified that these are neurotoxic.
And so this opened up a completely different thought process around the idea that mold, the toxic mold is relegated to the few toxin-producing species, toxin-producing species. And this actually shows that all mold growth indoors of significance can lead to toxicity. This is a remarkable finding.
And it also explains why you can have mold-related illness in buildings where those toxic species do not exist. This is a very common thing that I’ve seen over the last 21 years doing thousands of assessments. And so this also connected the dots for me between my mother’s early demise, the Brown University study in this very strong correlation, and these animal studies.
And so now we have yet to get this out into the zeitgeist, right? Which is part of the reason why these conversations are so important. But make no mistake, the microbial VOCs are neurotoxic.
And they are regashes, which means that they become airborne and stay airborne. And they disperse in the air much more evenly than spores and other particles do. And they can come through the walls where spores can’t and microtoxins can’t.
So that explains why hidden mold growth or sequestered in a space can actually have severe health implications.
That’s fascinating. And just a quicker side, you would have thought that a fruit fly, which seeks out rotting fruit, would have some sort of natural immunity to the microtoxins and microtoxins produced by the rotting fruit, assuming it’s the same stuff. I don’t know.
One would think.
A little aside. So she’s done this research. She asked you to come up with your dog or ask your dog to come up with you.
What was the outcome of that? Why was she interested in you?
Well, the dogs are trained to sniff out the source of that musty smell. That’s what they’re trained to do. The way they’re trained is to find the source of that odor.
That odor is the musty smell. So for her, it brought it all the way around. Because what was happening for us when we were doing all these inspections, was we were going into homes that were primarily, the inspections were primarily driven by health concern.
And we were doing lots of testing, of course, and a very detailed physical inspection. And the dogs would find hidden mold where we would drill into walls, pull out air samples, and we would often find huge infestations that were not showing up in standard air sampling. But the people were experiencing major health issues.
And then when they got remediated, the spore counts and everything else seemed to be about the same in the ambient air, but the musty smell had gone away and so did the symptoms. And so as I began sharing these things with her, we started having sort of a meeting of the minds and recognizing that the information, the knowledge, the wisdom has not, this needs to get out. Because again, there’s a hyperfocus on spores and also a hyperfocus on mycotoxins.
And this leaves out probably the most important aspect of mold growth indoors.
I’m going to ask this because I’m sure some of my listeners will be thinking, what about the dog? Does the dog not get sick?
That’s a really good question. So dogs have, first of all, if you watch a dog, the first thing it does is it goes out and it puts its nose in the soil. And dogs don’t actually inhale through their nose the way you think they do.
They actually do this sampling. And then they purge. And that’s how they cleanse their olfactory, but they’re also cleansing it of accumulation of particles and things like that.
Dogs are designed, they’re basically air samplers, four-legged air samplers, right? And so no, dogs don’t actually… Now, I should also mention that if we go into a building where there’s visible mold, we wouldn’t use a dog because you don’t need a dog, right?
You don’t need a dog for the visible mold. And we would never bring her into a space where there was any sort of hazard, construction site or if there were distractions that were insurmountable, you know, parakeets or litter boxes or bowls of dog. You know, these things were very, we would control the environment before we brought them in.
And also Oreo was so efficient that we would do large homes and be done in 15 minutes. Her part was done. And then I had to go back in and interpret her data and make sense of it all.
And so she would actually enjoy the air conditioning and I would leave classical music on for her too. So she actually had the cushiest of all the jobs. She got paid, she got a lot of attention.
And so she lived quite a beautiful life. And by the way, I also lived as a Labrador receiver. She lived to 14 years old, which is a good long life.
And she helped thousands of people live healthier lives along the way. So our dogs were very well taken care of. And all we did was use their innate biology in order to just sort of refocus their attention on this thing, which they were compensated with love and food for.
So no, the dogs were not at risk, and they were certainly never harmed.
No, I’m sure they weren’t. Okay, so you’ve gone through this process with the dogs, and then from there you developed some different testing with the labs as well. Is that correct?
That’s correct.
Did that replace the dogs?
Well, so unfortunately, we’ll never be able to replace the dogs. And we are working on some devices and some technology around the microbial gases. The main thing that we did in terms of innovating around the testing space was, right now, if you want to have your house tested for mold and you call a professional, they’re going to come over with a whole bunch of equipment, tools, devices, and after they do their inspection, they will usually bring out an air sampling kit or an air sampling device.
It’s a vacuum pump and it pulls air through a spore trap. So a spore trap is a precision engineered cassette that looks just like this for the people who are watching us. And the air gets pulled through that cassette, almost like a filter, and captures the airborne particles.
At the lab, they’re analyzed for mold spores, pollen, whatever target particle is being analyzed for. We like to look broadly because air quality is multifaceted. It’s not just about mold.
But those tests are very expensive, done by a professional, such that the cost of an inspection is out of reach for most people. It’s a mortgage payment, just a simple mold inspection, a detailed mold inspection by qualified, independent, professional. Not one of these free inspections, which are not actually inspections.
That’s a sales call. But an actual mold inspection by a qualified professional can cost you $1,500 or more. And so it always bothered me that the people who needed that kind of testing were the ones who couldn’t afford it.
And by the way, the poor are disproportionately affected by this, because of course they’re living in areas that are often low-lying. The buildings are not well maintained. They also have lifestyle issues, often too many people living in the building, and they’re dry and closed, and there’s just lots of reasons why people that are on the lower socioeconomic, lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum experience a lot more mold exposure and the unfortunate results.
So what we decided to do was figure out how we could get rid of the issues related to that testing, which is first of all, get the conflict of interest out of the way, get the mold inspector out of the way. And then how do we make an air sampling pump that actually is reusable, that we wouldn’t have to take back? And so what we did was we developed one that looks like this.
Some people call it the egg. And so this is an air sampling pump that duplicates a $1,000 device exactly. It pulls exactly the same air flow rate.
I mean, it’s identical, such that we actually have the chief inspector at HUD now buys these pumps. He won’t use the professional pumps anymore. He only uses ours.
And he supervises 278 inspectors, and he just buys these from us in bulk. And so the interfaces with the pump, the cassettes interface with the pump, it runs for five minutes the same way a professional pump would. And then when you’re done, you put it in a prepaid mailer, and it goes to our lab partner where it’s analyzed.
This looks for airborne spores. And this is important because, again, mycotoxins travel on spores and spore fragments and dust. So if you’ve got a high spore count, you have the potential of being exposed to mycotoxins.
But also it’s clearly indicative if you’ve got high spore counts relative to the outside that there’s mold growth going on in the building. On the other side, there’s microbial, there’s VOC testing. We don’t offer that.
There is a company called Enthalpy Labs that does MVOC testing, and we partner with them. And our test kit and their test kit go together like peanut butter and jelly.
Well, that’s interesting that you mentioned peanut butter. Because as I understand it, you’re doing a mold summit soon, or next year. And in there, you’re going to be talking about some of the common myths with mold exposure.
And one of the myths is that the focus is on what’s in our house, exactly what we’ve been talking about, right? And testing the house and so on and so on. But as I understand, there’s another area that is commonly missed.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Indeed. And thank you for bringing that up. We get calls, emails, social media, DMs every day, sometimes dozens a day, with people saying, I have a mold, I have a mycotoxin urine test that says that I have mold in my body.
And so I’m looking to find out if your test can find the one that makes ocher toxin A or vomitoxin or any of these toxins. And I have to let them down slowly sometimes, but these are not toxins that are produced by molds that grow in buildings in most cases.
They’re trying to ask you, where is the source of that mold and can your test find it in their house?
That’s right.
Okay, so where is the source?
Well, so the vast majority, according to the research, the vast majority of mycotoxin exposure is actually coming from food. Now, where is that coming from? Well, we import tremendous amounts of food, right?
I mean, go look at the blueberries and whole foods. They’re coming from Peru. And we all learned during the beginning of the Russian invasion that Ukraine was the world’s breadbasket.
And so we import grains and spices and all sorts of things, nuts. And so we, and by the way, a lot of the practices overseas are not exactly as robust as the ones that we employ here. And then they put those foods that may or may not have been cured or dried properly on a shipping container for 30 days.
And then they land here. And so a group of food scientists actually took a look at some statistics that had been thrown around since 1985. The UN used to say that 25% of food stuffs were contaminated with mycotoxins, which is a big number.
But this group of food scientists couldn’t find the actual backup data. So they said, well, let’s do our own study. And they concluded, in fact, that the food at the port being exported, in most cases, had less than that, probably closer to like 10%.
But by the time it got to the port of destination, between 60% and 80% were contaminated. And often below the legal threshold to actually stop the shipment, although we have the United States as the highest threshold, we will take food that has been turned away at European ports. So it’s remarkable.
But what’s scary about that is that these things are cumulative, they’re lipophilic, they get stuck in our fat cells, and they’re also hydrophobic, so they don’t excrete well. And so we end up with… it’s a real problem.
And they also amplify each other, these toxins, they can have a cascading effect. And so you might have a food that doesn’t fail at testing, but if you have five of those foods on the same plate in aggregate, you’ve exceeded your sort of allowance, if you will, even though there’s no such thing as really a regulated allowance for these things. And so what we’re seeing is that…
and of course, Dave Asprey built an entire built business around the mold, you know, mycotoxin-free coffee. Yeah. And so this is not exactly news, but there’s an entire industry that has emerged around functional care practitioners who are using these mycotoxin tests, and I’m not sure how many of them are aware of this or not, but then turn around and recommend them to inspectors who then turn around and use ERMI, which is a kind of dust test developed by the EPA, which is wildly prone to false positives, to do an inspection.
And this whole thing keeps going, but they’re all missing the point, and it’s a gravy train, unfortunately, and a lot of people ended up doing a lot of unnecessary work, really disrupting their lives, all because of data points that are assembled in a way that actually don’t tell the truth. They tell a story, but it’s not the truth.
So they’re pointing them to a mold problem in their home when it’s really a mold problem in their food, which is not just specific to that person, it’s specific to all the citizens of the United States.
That’s right. I would argue that there are numbers thrown around. Dave Asprey likes to say 100 million Americans are affected by mold.
And between property damage and health effects, I’d say that number might be low. But if you add in food, I think we’re all affected by it.
To some extent. And I’m sure that we have a certain amount of detoxification systems in our body that can deal with a low dose of mold, being that once upon a time, we didn’t have refrigeration and we would have eaten potentially moldy food or we slept in places that were damp and moldy during certain times of the year. But I guess there’s, like you say, if we’re staying in the same house and it has a mold problem and we’re eating the same foods, which we do now, we habitually eat the same foods year round, then we’re building a problem for ourselves.
Yes, and also there are two big things that happen in our food supply that are unique to modern life. Number one is hyper-processing. We can’t see if our grains are moldy.
Only the people processing them know that. And even they probably don’t want to know. And they’re not obligated to do this testing.
There’s very minimal testing done on this stuff. So we’re not built for that. Our metabolism isn’t built for hyper-processing, for turning everything into sugar, essentially, highly assimilated.
And it causes problems that all of your colleagues probably speak about every day. But the other one that’s really unique is that we now feed our farm animals foods that they don’t eat in nature, and specifically grains. We feed cows corn and pigs, all sorts of stuff, and chickens as well.
And these are often not human-grade. And what makes them not human-grade? Well, lots of different things.
But one of them is that they could be potentially moldy. And so you end up with carryover effect, which is where animals eat moldy grains. It goes into their, like I said, their lipophilic.
They go into fat. So lipo meaning fat and philic meaning love. So they love the fat, and so they get stuck in the fat cells.
And so you see this with conventional dairy is a big problem. Conventional meats in general are a big problem. And so it’s not just the grains, sugars and grains and processed foods.
It’s not just the peanut butter, which you very artfully segue us into this conversation with. But it’s much broader than that, and it’s hiding in things that you would never think, like that delicious steak with Bordelais sauce, right? Potentially be in both the steak and the sauce.
And so we ingest these things, and how does that affect us? And does this make us fat as well?
It has all sorts of potential ramifications, right? I’m not a doctor. I’ve never even played one on TV.
But what we see consistently is that these microtoxins, I mean, there’s a wide variety of them. Some of them make you fat. Some of them make you skinny, right?
Some people can’t sleep. Some people can’t get out of bed. You know, a lot of emotional dysregulation.
You know, some of these are carcinogenic, mutagenic. And so some of them are hemorrhagic, and it caused blood vessels to burst. These are specifically with the trichomyces are hemorrhagic.
And so, you know, that can lead to all sorts of issues in our digestive system and our bloodstream. You know, you think about things like aneurysms and strokes and all these kinds of really scary things. Who knows how much these toxins might be involved in that?
And so we’re already overloaded. Our livers are, generally speaking, very overloaded because of the VOC exposure in buildings, right? We all know that drinking alcohol taxes your liver.
Alcohol is a VOC. Well, when you’re breathing this stuff, it’s also being processed in your liver. And so we overload our liver, and then the mycotoxins we’re taking in with these hyper-processed foods and these unnatural conventional meats, especially, you know, we’re just piling on.
And so the symptoms are wide-ranging. But I would argue that most autoimmune disease is a byproduct of this overload, this allostatic load. But it’s cumulative, and there’s no way to say that it’s mycotoxins, MVOCs, VOCs, right?
This is like a snowball at the bottom of a hill. You can’t really figure out what came from where, but it’s a mess. And so what I try to suggest is that people become air aware, but also food aware, and just try to make better decisions most of the time, because you’re not going to truly be able to avoid any of this stuff.
It’s so embedded in our buildings and our food supply, but you can make better decisions most of the time. And what I find is that people who do that tend to get better.
Okay, so now you scared the pants off most of us. Let’s think about what we can do about this. So there’s food things that we can do, and I don’t think that’s within the scope of this particular episode to talk about it, but you mentioned a few things.
But let’s bring this bit back to a person’s house. So how would a person be alert to the fact that they may have mold? Can you tell us like right from the visible to the invisible, how do they know to get a test?
Sure. Well, I boil it down to if you see something, smell something or feel something, do something. And so to sort of unpack those a little bit, if you see something, we’re always looking for moisture, signs of moisture.
So that’s blistering paint, stains, discoloration, trim pulling away from the wall, water bugs, rust, right? Any indication of excess dampness in the building or any signs of moisture. And so, and that also means looking outside the house too.
Do you have puddling and ponding in the yard, right? Is your landscaping soggy? Are you overwatering, which a lot of people do?
And then, so you just, the vigilance here revolves around maintaining a normal moisture level in and around your home. And that’s also maintenance, right? If you see your siding is an issue or if the grout around your tub or shower is missing, that’s clearly a red flag that moisture can and probably will get through there.
And I’ve seen amazing amounts of mold behind the tiles that look pretty good, but there’s a missing piece of grout. I’ve seen tubs, tubs and showers rotting out inside and everything looks beautiful, but there’s a missing piece of grout or caulk. So that’s see something.
If you smell something, of course, by the way, visible mold, right?
It’s quite common in bathrooms, where I grew up in the UK anyway, where it’s pretty damp. You go into the bathroom, even the caulking has black spots in it and the ceiling will have these little black spots in it. That’s mold?
Yes, it is. Well, you could argue that is mold, technically, often referred to as mildew, which is sort of a diminutive term and sort of a scientific misspeak. But that’s more of a hygiene issue.
Now, if you see the mold on the ceiling and you see a lot of it around the ground, what that means is you probably are not ventilating your bathroom at all or insufficiently. And so managing that moisture, people using squeegees, and getting the moisture down the drain is a really good idea. And then running bathroom exhaust vents that go outside, not into a ceiling, not up into the attic.
The moisture has to go outside. So we get a lot of calls for that. But again, I’m more concerned about missing grout and caulk than I am about mold on grout and caulk because that’s more of a hygiene issue.
And by the way, mold is growing not on the kraut or the caulk. It’s actually growing on the soap residue. It’s actually eating the soap residue.
It doesn’t have much interest in caulk or grout because these are inorganic substances that don’t support growth. So again, it goes back to a hygiene issue. If you get that clean, and by the way, you don’t need chemicals to clean mold.
That’s a really important point. Mold doesn’t require to be killed to be cleaned. You can just, good old-fashioned elbow grease, get rid of the…
Now, if you want to clean it so that it’s not visible using bleach on things like kraut and caulk, that’s a different story. Do that judiciously though, because those chemicals, bleach in particular, is also an unhealthy thing to be breathing. But the smell of something, so we see something, and then we smell something.
And we talked about the musty smell at length here. If you smell that musty smell, which is so distinct, right? I mean, everybody knows what that musty smell is.
And so if you get a whiff of it, it doesn’t have to be a very strong… Find out where it’s coming from. You don’t have to be a mold dog, but you can follow…
Like people say, follow the money, follow the moisture. And so you want to go look around the house and say, well, if I smell it over here, but not over there, there might be something brewing over here. And if that’s beyond your scope and abilities to diagnose the source of the moisture, that’s often where people find value in bringing in a mold inspector who has experience in diagnosing these things.
So the smell is a big, big, big, big clue. It’s the primary clue in most cases. It’s not always, by the way, it’s not always detectable, and this is important.
You can have a major mold problem not have a smell because of the way air moves through wall cavities and through buildings, and so that’s not always, it’s not a silver bullet, but it’s indicative in many, many cases. The third thing is if you feel something, and usually that means that there’s initially a symptom that tends to get better when you leave. And if you notice that you’re having sleep issues, again, weight gain, weight loss, respiratory issues, sinus problems, you know, mold rage is actually a real thing, so emotional dysregulation across the spectrum is a big deal.
You know, people, again, experience chemical sensitivities as a result of these chronic exposures. So if you’re noticing symptoms that tend to be building-related, tend to abate when you go to a different place, that would be another clue that you need to start looking for a source. And again, we’re always looking for a moisture source because that’s how you find the mold growth.
If you find the moisture, that’s where the mold will begin. Then the job is to figure out what the extent of the growth is. And again, that usually requires some professional guidance because oftentimes this is happening behind wall cavities, you know, in areas that are not necessarily readily accessible.
Let’s say you find the water source, you fix the leak or you fix whatever the problem is. Do you then need to remove the building materials that have mold on or is there a way to kill it on the building materials?
It depends on the building material. And again, you know, there’s a common misunderstanding around mold, that we need to kill it, that we need to sanitize. And actually sanitizing is part of the reason why we have so many autoimmune issues, in my professional opinion.
We are eradicating nature from our buildings. We have a microbiome on us and in us, but we also have one around us. And our building is an extension of our immune system.
And these are like Matryoshka dolls that stack up, those Russian stacking dolls. And so if you mess with one of those, you’re going to mess with all of them to some degree. There’s an upstream and downstream effect.
And the word human comes from humus, which is soil. And we are so far removed from that. And soil, this is our true heritage, right?
We’re from the earth, we’re going to go back to the earth. But we have hermetically sealed ourselves in these boxes with rubber bottoms on our shoes. And the whole thing is hyper sanitizing, especially post COVID.
And so mold remediation is about removal and cleaning. Removal and cleaning. And what I mean removal is you remove building materials that support fungal growth that cannot be cleaned.
So what does that mean? Sheet rock cannot be cleaned any more than you can clean a newspaper, okay, because it’s essentially, that’s what it is. It’s gypsum wrapped in paper.
It’s unbelievable what we build.
Just to interrupt you there, I’m obviously from the UK, but I ended up in Canada. I remember buying my first home in Canada and we had a building inspector, who was British as well. He’s like, yes, a good home.
It will last about 50 years. And I was like, sorry, that’s not a home. He’s like, no, they’re built out of drywall and wood.
It will fall down in 50 years time. And the home I grew up in is 200 years old. And my friends, parents, they all have houses to 500 years old, some of them.
And to hear a house would last 50 years, it just blew my mind that they build houses in North America out of wood and gypsum and sheetrock, like you say.
Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, even the dumbest of the three little pigs didn’t build this house out of paper, but we do at scale. And also, you know, what’s interesting is that sheetrock, according to the Bridget Anderson, who’s a renowned researcher on Copenhagen, she was very curious about why mold and sheetrock are such good friends.
And so she began looking at sheetrock and found that all the major brands come pre-inoculated with mold spores. They’re actually already in the paper. Specifically, Kastakibatris and Cytophomium, which are well known, that’s the black mold that everyone worries about, loves cellulose.
That’s what it eats. That’s its favorite dish. And of course, that’s paper.
And so we basically built self-composting homes, just add water. It’s already there. You don’t even need the sports to come in from outside.
It’s already there. It’s unbelievable what we have done to our food and to our buildings. It’s appalling to me.
So this is why it’s so important to have these conversations, because people need to be aware of this. If you just go on autopilot, you’re in trouble. You have to become aware of these things and make better decisions and to navigate around it, because there’s not a lot you’re going to do.
If you look at the 114 million single-family homes in the United States, almost all of them are light-frame construction, like the ones we’re talking about. So mold removal is remove the building materials that can’t be cleaned. That’s sheetrock, carpet, carpet padding, ceiling tiles, insulation, things like that.
The things that can be cleaned are structural elements. So wood can be cleaned unless it’s lost its structural integrity, unless it’s rotted, right? So wood can be cleaned, glass, metal, plastic, plaster.
And by the way, we used to build buildings like you say, out of plaster and stone and concrete and all. And we even had stone or slate roofs. Now we build out of paper mache and petroleum.
I mean, our building material companies are chemical companies. Make no mistakes. So are our food companies and our pharmaceutical companies.
They are masquerading as purveyors of food and building materials, but they are chemical companies at their core.
And so we have to learn how to overcome that reality through better decision making. So you remove the stuff and then you clean. And that’s mold remediation.
Okay, so if someone’s removed all the mold from their building, well, sorry, if someone’s found the mold in their building and they want to remove it, what are the questions they should ask a potential contractor who’s going to do that for them?
So first of all, ideally, you have an independent inspector that does the initial diagnosis and that develops a work plan. The way this should work, the same way lead paint and asbestos work, is that you’ve got sort of a Chinese wall between the two. And so they do the inspection, the testing, the initial testing, and then develop a remediation plan, and then you go find the contractors.
Now, the contractors need to be certified in the IICRC S520 mold remediation standard. It’s a mouthful. And it’s important because the mold remediation standard clearly states that you don’t need to use chemicals during remediation.
In fact, they’re not advised. And most contractors ignore that, and they use lots of chemicals, which often leaves behind a legacy. This is not good.
Adding chemicals to a home does not make it healthier ever. And even the quote unquote natural ones actually, there’s really strong evidence that if you’re concerned about mold producing toxins in your building, they respond adversely to being sprayed with toxins. They actually fight back with more toxins.
So if you really want to get that straightened out, don’t add more toxins. But the contractors need to be, they need to follow the IIC or CS520, and they need to commit to you that they’re not going to use chemicals during the remediation process. It’s very, very important.
And you need to confirm that there’s no financial relationship between the inspectors and the remediators. There’s a lot of room for abuse and that kind of a relationship. And so, but, you know, there’s a really important aspect to this that’s easy to overlook, which is how do we keep this from happening in the first place?
And there’s actually another document, it’s also an IIC or CSU document, it’s called the S500. And if you follow that, you don’t end up having to follow the S520. And that’s called the water damage standard.
And the water damage standard basically states that water damage or water intrusion that occurs needs to be dealt with within 24 to 48 hours. That’s the sort of the safe zone or safer zone. And that means everything needs to be dried.
The materials that are severely affected should also usually be ripped out. But if they can’t be ripped out, that means carpet, carpet padding, sheetrock, insulation, things like that. If they can’t be ripped out, they need to be dried thoroughly.
And I mean really thoroughly. And if they do that well within the first 24 hours, 48 hours, then you’re usually in pretty good shape. And again, your nose will let you know that in most cases.
At the 72 hour mark, now you’re in the mold world. And what’s important to know is that in the S500 world, mold and insurance will cover almost all of that, almost entirely, almost to the replacement cost of the building for water damage. Very important to realize that.
And oftentimes you can do some of that work yourself too, ripping out carpet. As long as there’s not a pretty existing mold problem, because you can spread it all over the place. But if this is a first time, one time event, then you can usually rip that stuff out yourself.
But once you get to the 72 hour mark, insurance doesn’t pay. And now you got to get the guys in moon suits. And the cost just went up tenfold.
So not only do they not pay, but the cost just went up by an order of magnitude. And now, instead of being a weekend warrior kind of a thing, now that you got the guys in the moon suits, this can take a month if everything goes perfectly well, because the inspection takes a day, and then the report takes a week, and then you got to find the contractors, and then you got to do work that takes a week, and then you got to wait for the guy to come back and do a guide out to come back and do testing. And if you do all of that in lockstep, it’s about a month.
So oftentimes people are displaced from their homes. So this is a matter of thinking in hours, not in days or weeks. 72 hours is the hard line.
So I often encourage people to act immediately. Don’t wait for your father or your neighbor or the plumber or anyone else, or even the insurance agent to take action when you have a water damage issue.
Okay, so we’re talking about like a basement flooding, something like that. You got to get down there within 24 hours, like to 48 hours, and just pull everything out.
Pull everything out. Pump that water out. Pull everything out.
Get fans and dehumidifiers. Sometimes people use heat. Again, very important that you…
And if you can contain the space, so in other words, put tape and plastic up on other, you know, cordon off the area, just in case there is a pre-existing mold issue that you’re not aware of. The last thing you want to do is blow that stuff all over your house. So fans can be really problematic in that regard.
But extracting the water is the most important thing you can do in doing it quickly. And dehumidifiers are really useful for that because they don’t tend to disturb as much. They don’t generally create a lot of disturbance.
So getting the moisture under control immediately within 48 hours is really the goal.
All right. Well, I think that’s a great place to bring it to a close. And I think for people in the US, they may have some more questions about this.
How would they find you?
Sure. So we have created a welcome page. Bear with me one second.
My apologies. I came back again. I did not pull this up.
We’re going to have to do that again if you don’t mind.
So for your listeners, we created a welcome page at gotmold.com, which is gotmold.com/lifestyle is your medicine. And when you go there, you’ll see that there’s a link to download an ebook we produce called How to Find Mold, and it’s filled with inspection checklists and FAQs. It’s a guidebook for how to do an inspection in your own home.
People give us lots of really good feedback about this. If you go through your house intentionally, you’ll be amazed at what you see and what you learn about your building, and oftentimes you’ll see parts of your house that you’ve never really looked at very carefully. And that’s often where mold is hiding, behind bookshelves, behind furniture, that you haven’t moved in 10 years.
And so also in there are a number of the FAQs, as I mentioned, where just really useful stuff for people that are early in their mold journey. We also have a coupon code that we produced for you, for your listeners, that gives them a 10% discount on any of our test kits at gotmold.com. So that’s lifestyle10.
And so you’ll find that link there. You’ll find the coupon code there. So also if anyone wants to ask questions, they can go to gotmold.com and go to the bottom of the homepage.
There’s a contact field. I don’t answer all of the questions that come through, but I do see them all. And so that’s a great place.
But if you’d like to ask questions that you’d like other people to benefit from the answer, take it to social media. Go to Gotmold on Facebook, which is at Gotmold, or to Instagram. And specifically in Facebook, if you ask questions there, we love to answer them there so that other people can share in the wealth of knowledge.
Thank you very much, Jason. I’ll put all that in the show notes as well, and people can find that link and find your social media handles to find you and ask questions to you there. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining me in my conversation with Jason Earle. If you’ve enjoyed listening to and learning from this podcast, please leave a comment. And also you can leave a suggestion for a future podcast guest that you would like us to feature.
If you’re on Apple, you can leave us a comment and a five-star review if you’re so inclined. Remember, if you want my direct help, send me an email, ed at edpaget.com, or visit my website, edpaget.com. Now, whilst you’re there, you’ll learn a little bit more about how I can help you make your lifestyle your medicine.