Toxins Exposed: The Ultimate Expert Mashup

24:07So if someone had asthma, they were having asthma attacks for sure. Yeah. If they, so if they already had like respiratory stuff, it was going to be way worse. If they had autoimmune stuff, it would be very flared up. kind of like what i like to explain is most of the things that are bad about eating bad food or drinking bad water are very similar to breathing bad air it's just this another toxin source that you introduce to your body that kind of triggers everything so yeah respiratory stuff was the most heightened and then anyone elderly that was like on cpap machines was really struggling babies were really struggling so like the the most vulnerable populations were put over the edge yeah and then people who were generally healthy were just like unwell.

24:50So if it's a wildfire smoke, like your lungs can burn a little bit, skin stuff, itchy eyes, rashes, autoimmune flare up. So it's really like across the board. With mold, I have heard and I've experienced my own mold issues, but doesn't mold stay in your system for a really long time? It's kind of like heavy metals and stuff. Like if you don't have a detox protocol, then it can stay in there and be a problem. And mold's not usually one of those things that is acute. It's more of like a chronic long-term thing. So if you sleep in a moldy hotel room one night, it's definitely going to mess you up for the night.

25:24You know, you'll have a bad sleep. You might get headaches, brain fog, a little bit of rash, but you'll be okay. A couple of days later, it'll clear out. But when you're living in a moldy environment, then it's just really gets inside you. I've almost never seen someone who's done a mycotoxin or a mold test from like a urine or blood analysis that didn't have some amount of mold. It's just like it's omnipresent. But yeah, it definitely stays in you for quite some time. Did you have high levels of mold from your work being exposed to toxic environments? Yeah, I didn't realize it at the time. Because my I mean, when I'd go to these like disaster zones, we were working like 18 hours a day and living a pretty unhealthy lifestyle for a few months at a time.

26:06Yeah. And yeah, mold. But also for us, heavy metals were really bad too. Because it wasn't just the 5 ,000 homes that burnt down or it wasn't just a million acres of trees that burnt or the 5 ,000 homes but everything in every house was gone so when you would drive down a street after a wildfire zone all you see is chimney stacks piles of ash and chimney stacks so where's the wd-40 where's the paint cans where's all the cleaning chemicals like literally the cars the fuel everything in everyone's homes the factories kind of got into the smoke and makes it like a toxic plume of smoke I still have a little bit of it.

26:45It gets triggered now by gluten. I have a bit of psoriasis. And that got triggered after this wildfire in 2016 and living in that environment. Did you go on a detox protocol after that? I have. And I probably am due for another one now. What are some major things, like for people sitting at home who have maybe never had an air purifier, have never noticed or thought about air quality, why do they need an air purifier? What are some of the things that they could be noticing that they're missing? So an air purifier is one of the tools, but there's actually a lot of stuff that people can do like for free at home immediately.

27:18And I think the main thing is just starting from air awareness. So like broadly, there's outdoor air pollution and there's indoor air pollution. So outdoor air pollution is your mold, your pollen, your allergens, the rubber from the tires, the chemicals, the factories, just like general pollution. Then indoor air pollution is all the off-gassing from the furniture, the carpets, the flooring, the paints. Pretty much anything manufactured has an off-gassing period. Pets, cooking, cleaning products, the list really, really goes on. And if you think about homes, since the 70s in particular, we started building our homes, optimizing them for energy efficiency.

28:00So the problem is we're trying to keep the cool in in the summer and the warm air in in the winter. But the problem is we keep everything in. So we have all the outdoor air comes in, the pollen, the allergens, the mold, the pollution. Then we all have the indoor pollutants. And our homes are basically like Tupperware bags. They're like little plastic bags or Tupperware boxes. So everything gets trapped inside. Here in Austin, when we do allergy testing in the spring, if we test someone's carpet or even like a couch material, there's typically more pollen inside than outside, even on a bad allergy day.

28:32So you see like a bad allergy day, they're like, stay inside, stay inside. you're like, you have just as much. If you weren't filtering your air and cleaning your surfaces well, you have just as much allergens, if not more indoors than outside. And outside, we have the sun, UV light, we have the wind, the rain and the trees. Those four things make up nature's air purifier, which is the real air purifier, which is also why our logo is a tree. Because we should not need air purifiers. If we built our homes better, and we polluted less, and we didn't cut down so many trees, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

29:03So should we be keeping our windows and doors open as much as possible? Yeah. And I think the same way people check the temperature, like people think about weather has the temperature, sun or cloud, and will it rain? And I always look at air quality. And you could Google wherever you like now Tesla, Google, Apple, everyone's starting to report on air quality. Is that accurate though? It's pretty good. Really? Yeah, it's pretty good. Okay. Quite good. I don't know why I never believe it. You can. If it's a cloudy, cool day, but the air quality is super good, then it kind of makes me happier because I'm like it's cloudy and it's cool and it's rainy but the air is super fresh I'm waterproof let's go outside yeah but if it's like sunny but the air is horrible maybe we'll go for a walk but maybe not run today okay so just kind of increasing that little bit of air awareness yeah and yeah indoor air particularly is very poor so the things that people need to think about is there's fresh air which you can only get by ventilation so to answer your question about windows and doors and stuff.

30:00If it's obviously in Austin in summertime, we're not opening our windows. It's too hot. So if it's not too hot, not too cold, and the outdoor air is relatively clean, then yes, open your windows, like get fresh air, and especially when you're cooking. And on that note, people should test their range hoods. More than half of people's range hoods don't actually work. So if you take it, just take a tissue, do a tissue test, turn your range hood on, hold it up to the vent, and make sure it's actually pulling the tissue up. And then make sure it's venting outside. Because often that thing is venting into the crawl space.

30:35It's venting behind your wall. It's like a little microwave one that's like venting in the cabinet above or in your attic. It's not actually venting outside. It's just putting it in another room. And if you can, when you're cooking, especially if you're boiling stuff, use the back burner because the rain shed does collect much more from the back burner. the shower when you're using your bathroom fan run it for like two hours after your shower because all that humidity and make sure that vents outside too those often vent into attics because you shower think about how much water a towel can soak up so when you're done showering there's like a gallon plus of water just like on your towel in the shower floor and then if it's not exhausting outside that just goes inside and that contributes to your mold growth why is cooking creating toxins in the air?

31:23So a few reasons. Definitely like a nonstick pan is worse. Not clean food is worse. But even if you're using your grass fed, grass finished steak with organic oils and everything, no seed oils and you're doing all the things right, high heat and protein creates a lot of byproducts. So there's chemical compounds that are created like PAH, which is polycylic aromatic hydrocarbons, a bunch more stuff, same stuff that we'd be testing for after wildfire smoke. So there's a lot of like chemical compounds that aren't the food and aren't the oil that get created from the proteins and the heat. And then that gets embedded in your carpets and your furniture.

31:59Anything in your home that can get wet and absorb water also absorb air. And then the other thing to consider is just because you can eat something, it doesn't mean you can breathe it. Because when you eat something, you get your digestive system to break it down, pull out the nutrients, filter out the rest. When you breathe it, it's really harsh. Our respiratory system is not as robust as our digestive system. So like, just cause you can put something in your mouth doesn't mean you can put it in your nose. Yeah. Um, which is why when someone's cooking, if they can, yeah, doors and windows open for sure.

32:30Or, you know, if you don't have that, that's, that's when purifying your air becomes much more mandatory, but there's still no substitute for fresh air and ventilation. So I should put a Jasper in the kitchen because we make a ton of red meat. Living room, it will be the craziest.

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36:07You mentioned pets. Why are pets creating toxins in the air? Pets have allergens. So just right off the bat, the pet dander, their fur is problematic. And a lot of people actually who think they're allergic to cats end up being allergic to cat litter, not cats. So I thought I was allergic to cats. I wasn't. I was allergic to cat litter. Why? Well, go look at the chemical sheet of like a dust-based clumping litter. It's literally like the worst chemicals ever. Wait, I didn't even think about that. And then kitty goes, there's like a plume of kitty litter smoke. And then you smell it throughout your whole house.

36:48I don't have cats, but I'm also not allergic to anything. so I don't think about this kind of thing. This is good. This is good. So yeah, cat litter messes up a lot of people, myself included. Then purifying the air helped. You can also switch to a grass pellet-based litter. I was going to say, are there organic ones? There are. Then the downside is it tracks all over your house, but now they make these little mats that are like, they almost look like foam. They're textured. So by the time the cat walks away from the litter box, most of it's fallen off. Okay. And then dogs, on the other hand, they go outside.

37:24So take this picture for a sec. Would you ever take a blanket, go outside with your blanket, rub it on the grass, soak up some nice glyphosate, find some dogs, rub it on their butt a little, rub it on some trees, rub it on some roads, and then shake it out in your bed at night. You know what I'm picturing right now? My little dog Arnold eating roadkill, because that's like his favorite thing. He'll like run up to a dead squirrel and just, yeah. That's probably why I have H. pylori. Yeah, that sounds like a likely cause. No, you're so right about that. I didn't even think in that way. I mean, my question was more so, is the Jasper also benefiting my dogs?

38:00Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, dogs get allergies too. Yeah. So yeah, the dog is like this sponge that you put out into the world, soak up all the beautiful glyphosate and then wring it out in your bed at night. And most people sleep with their dogs. Yeah. So on our air quality quiz, It's like, do you have any pets? If it says yes, dog, cat, or both. And then if they say dog or cat, we're like, do you sleep with your pet? We know you do. And then if they say yes, we'll email them about that. Because, yeah, that's like a huge source of introducing allergens into your bedroom. So keeping your dog groomed is going to be super helpful.

38:38But I always tell people you can either keep the dog out of the room, and if the dog is in the room, that's like a mandatory situation to filter the air. Because it's not like you're eating the stuff. Same with mold. We can go back to that after. Like you're not eating the mold. You're not drinking it. You're not rubbing it on your skin. The dog, you might be kind of rubbing it and maybe making out with your dog after it eats roadkill. So maybe that is the culprit here. You're like, you need to figure that out. But like my question is with the grooming, I feel like they use all these crazy chemicals on the dog.

39:09Like the dog comes back smelling like a coconut. Eek. You know what I'm saying? I never had a dog. That doesn't surprise me at all. I don't like the fragrances of it. I'm sure we're in Austin. There's definitely like a holistic wellness dog groomer. I'm sure. At least brush it, maybe HEPA vacuum a little. Yeah, you're right. More of like a, I don't think you need a chemical potion up the dog, but I feel like just like a mechanical clean would be beneficial. Yeah, I should probably implement that. At least the groom. Yeah. I'm not a big germophobe. And I think sometimes that's to my detriment. I kind of like, oh, whatever.

39:41There's dirt here, dirt there. But like the air purifying, I think, makes such a big difference, especially if you're someone who struggles with acne or you have other symptoms could bad air quality symptoms show up differently in different people oh yeah okay same way mold shows up differently in different people yeah when i did mold consulting and testing and restoration for a decade i could go to a house two people let's say a family of five two of them could be like deathly ill chronic migraines fatigue like beside themselves quality of life destroyed brain fog one or two of them might have like a rash and one of them might be like i'm fine it's kind of an allergen same way like you said different things impact people differently yeah so it impacts people so differently some people it's like debilitating also it depends on you know how well you um you naturally detox yeah certain people have certain genes or don't have certain genes that change their ability to like methylate and detox properly.

40:42And then, you know, maybe someone's drinking more water than the other. And then but yeah, it definitely varies depending on the person dramatically. And if they've had a big exposure event, and then you know, it kind of isn't everywhere problem. If you live coastal, there's a lot of humidity. Yeah. Here, there's a lot of mold in Austin, there's still humidity and high heat. In Arizona, there's also a ton of mold, people think there's not i see some of the worst mold toxicity in arizona of anywhere because they are so dry they don't have a natural like they're not used to it so then if you get a leak in your house it ravages you but also all that desert sand used to be underwater so if you sampled the desert sand there's ancient molds that have been there for who knows thousands or millions of years so often when people have big mold toxic exposure events in arizona they it's like after a wind storm or haboob, they have this big exposure.

41:34And when they get their mycotoxin and their blood and on all their testing done, the same species of mold in their dust is the same that's in their blood almost unanimously. That's insane. So it's kind of like an everywhere problem. Wow. Yeah. And do you think that the awareness around mold has gone up? Because I feel like, yeah, more people are getting their homes tested. Do you feel the same with air quality awareness? So you think that's still lagging. So mold is kind of like a, it's sort of like the new Lyme. Yeah. It's like a thing that if you're sick and you can't figure it out why it's like a, it's like a common culprit, but because it's everywhere, it's way more prevalent.

42:14You're not like, it wasn't like through a bug bite or something or a mosquito or a tick or something. If you look at the search volume of anything mold related, it looks like a hockey stick. It's like the NVIDIA stock. It is going crazy. So the mold awareness is going up. mold is much scarier than air even though anyone who's having a mold problem it's an air problem it's not usually the mold on your strawberries you can see that stuff yeah like right now we're breathing some amount of mold and that's okay there's a certain amount of reasonable mold in the environment it's inside it's outside it's kind of omnipresent so this like black and white approach to mold is a little bit intense it's like if you drink tap water it has chlorine so do you rip out your pipes or do you filter your water yeah so mold is something that outside it's not nearly that problematic because with the sun the wind the rain and the trees it's when mold is indoors that it's a big problem mold's not any happier inside than we are or our pets are it's pissed off and it wants to get back outside and it will wreak havoc on us to do so so yeah mold awareness is going up a lot which i think is a blessing and a curse it's not a curse in the sense that like people were already impacted from it by for a long period of time it's not like mold it's not like it's more humid or hotter and that's creating more mold growth it's much more mold awareness and i mean humans spend 95 of our time indoors in this part of the world so it's a blessing and a curse it's a curse because you got to get outside more that's too much time inside it's the blessing though because you can you can turn your home into your clean air sanctuary you can have clean water you can make your bedroom a sleep sanctuary it's the one place where you can like dial it in and have it like this wellness sanctuary for not very much money so i think investing in that is is wise air i find air quality was lagging water quality awareness by about 20 years and i think since covid it's shrunk into about 10 years like the gap is closing yeah and this is the way i look at air like you could go three weeks without food three days without water and only three minutes without air.

44:18You eat, let's say, two pounds of food in a day. You drink like two liters of water and you breathe like 17 ,000 liters of air. People don't really realize that it's the thing we consume most of by far. Just like water, we drink it and we pee it out. Air, we breathe it in and we exhale it. It's very similar. So there was a study recently in the UK that showed the average human breathes a credit card worth of microplastics each week. So sometimes to me, it's staggering that people are like, really looking at their food and really looking at the water and you should be. But the amount of stuff that you're getting from the environment and the amount of toxins you're getting from your home and from the air is far more than water and food exponentially more.

45:01So it's not about neglecting those other things. And air is also it's the first thing we do when we're born. It's the last thing we do when we die. It's the only thing that keeps us alive all night long. I call it my sleep fuel, Finland just did a study in these daycares where just by putting a not even good air purifier in the classrooms, 18 % less absenteeism right away. So 18, 20 % basically less sick kids right off the hop. So yeah, when you go from breathing in and the most amazing thing. So remember, I don't tell you this part, but I created Jasper originally just for wildfire smoke. I thought I was going to just, when California would be on fire, we would go there and sell air purifiers and help with that situation because that's the background I was in.

45:43When COVID hit, we were going to launch June 2020. We ended up launching May 2020. And for the first year, we only sold to doctors and dentists. I never in a million years thought I'd be talking about wellness. This is so much better. Yeah. And I didn't think sleep and allergies and mold and asthma would be like the space we were moving into. because I over-engineered the product. I made it for toxic smoke and mold, which makes it, and it had to be beautiful. It's even more effective. It's even more effective. It had to be beautiful and had to be effective and made from steel. That was very important to me.

46:15So when all of a sudden, what I didn't think though, with allergies. So people who are struggling from seasonal allergies, often their allergies are gone. Like not just reduced, but like 99 % just gone because if someone has seasonal allergies or whatever it may be that's impacting them allergy-wise, they're getting bombarded 24 hours a day. Human body, very adapt to handling stresses and trauma and bad air. We can handle some stuff. But when it's 24 hours a day, it's like a chronic beatdown. So when you look at the mold and the pollen and the cedar fever and all that, you're breathing it outside, and then you're breathing even more allergens inside.

46:55So when that mold and the pollen and everything is hitting you 24 hours a day, you don't have a time any time to rest and recover so all of a sudden when you turn your bedroom or your home into a clean air sanctuary you really reduce that stress load so now your body which is like a healing machine if you just let it do its thing it can recover but when it's like it can't get parasympathetic and it can't do its own healing process when it's constantly under attack so when you turn your home into a clean air sanctuary or your bedroom into a sleep sanctuary and you're breathing 99 % filtered air all night long, all those toxin and stress loads come down.

47:31And I love the quote, you can't detox your body if you don't detox your home because it's like running on a treadmill in a gas chamber. You know, you're doing all the stuff to detox, but you're in a toxic environment. So you're retoxing as fast as you're detoxing. So it is massive for sleep.

47:53so if you know me and you've been to my house my house is full of jasper air purifiers it's my favorite air purifier it actually isn't just an air purifier it's an air scrubber it has commercial grade power but it's quiet and beautiful i am such a big fan of the founder mike feldstein he's been on the show you have to listen to this episode thousands of listeners who heard him on the podcast already bought jaspers and are loving them it was one of my most popular episodes and I think one of the most bought products from any episode we've done on the show which is really saying a lot I have a code that's going to give you$400 off and I have to tell you investing in clean air is one of the most important ways to invest in your health it gives you better sleep more energy clean fresh air Jasper is the world's best air scrubber for your home and my home is equipped with them I'm about to add another one to my nursery so use code POW POW for$400 off.

48:46It's an exclusive deal. Get$400 off with code POW at checkout. Go to jasper.co slash POW. That's J-A-S-P-R dot co slash POW. That's code POW at jasper.co for$400 off your Jasper air scrubber.

49:07I want to talk about mold toxicity because I've spoken about it a ton on this show. I personally struggled with it for a while. And for me, it came out as acne, which is something I still deal with. But I managed to get rid of the mold. I also had candida, staph, heavy metals. And as someone who's been living a healthy lifestyle for a long time, I was shocked to find that out. So tell us - Were you living a healthy lifestyle? That's the thing that I reflect on. Yeah. Because I was doing HIIT workouts every single day, no rest. Oh, an overtrained woman who would imagine that that might wreck your hormones.

49:45It does it to guys too. It just takes us longer, right? Tell us about your mold experience and how you cleansed from that. I grew up in a basement in Albuquerque, New Mexico that had been flooded. And I had mold exposure from an early age. We didn't know it at the time. You know, it was a nice house with a nice basement. Like, who would have known? So I had nosebleeds like 10 times a day. It's a frequently occurring symptom with toxic mold. I also had rashes. I had asthma and a lot of behavioral disorders. I was diagnosed with ADHD and ODD. You know what that one is? No. Oppositional defiant disorder.

50:28Oh. So think of the Rage Against the Machine song that, fuck you, I won't do what you told me. Like pretty much you have that running all the time in your brain. That may have served you though at some point. It probably did. But it does come with just a lot of anger. When you discovered you had mold from these symptoms, what was your first step? Because I know it can be a really stubborn toxin. Oh, wow. Well, let's talk about what mold does. I did a documentary called Moldy Movie, and it's free. MoldyMovie.com. Just go watch it. If anything I'm saying, like, that can't be real. I've got a dozen top doctors and a dozen people like you and me who were just taken out by this.

51:06what mold does is it grows in houses when there's water damage including condensation and a hundred million homes according to the experts in the documentary homes or businesses or cars and things like that they have toxic mold right now in the u.s alone so it's a massive problem and mold is the cause of lyme disease what yeah i've been diagnosed with active Lyme. When I say I've been diagnosed, I mean, I owned the lab company that did the diagnosis of my Lyme disease. So that doesn't have to come from a tick. You can get bitten by a tick and you can get Lyme disease, but the people who get chronic Lyme, 90 % of them have toxic mold that took their immune system offline and Lyme is a symptom of mold.

51:51You fix the mold and the body gets rid of the Lyme. Now this totally triggered some Lyme people who identify as only Lyme. this information comes not just from what I've seen in 20 years of working in the mold and Lyme and chronic illness space, but on my podcast, I interviewed an expert from UCLA who did a genetic analysis and showed just comprehensively that although the symptoms overlap 90%, 90 % of the time it's mold, not Lyme. So 10 % of the time it could be just Lyme, in which case you go down the Lyme path. By the way, I did take antibiotics for a year to try and cure the Lyme, but you can't get rid of lime if there's mold on board.

52:29Okay. So what does mold make? Mold itself, when you're breathing it or getting it on your skin, it is an immune system irritant. It can cause allergies. Just basically dead mold will do that. Mold also makes mycotoxins. These are toxins separate from the mold itself. And when you're talking about something like coffee, the mold is long dead. It's been roasted and brewed, but the toxin is heat stable. And that's why Danger Coffee says mold right on the label. Some other brands I might've been associated with in the past don't say mold on their label anymore. Mold free meaning? Yeah. In other words, the coffee's lab tested for mold.

53:09Wow. And I think it's really important because along this journey, as I was figuring things out, I gave up coffee for five years. Wow. Because one thing that mold does is it causes your immune system to go into almost like a fight or flight response when you're re-exposed. People who have had mold, they walk into a moldy building and their nervous system gets dysregulated. It's a cell danger response. So I gave up coffee because I noticed after I drank coffee, I would get jittery and anxious and then tired and I'd want more coffee. And I thought I was allergic. Well, I came back from that trip to Tibet and I went to a place in coffee.

53:51And it was like, the lights turned on, the angels are singing. I'm like, oh, God, I love coffee. That's crazy that you had to give it up for five years. Oh, I barely remember them. I mean, is it fair to say that a majority of the coffee are getting at a regular coffee shop as moldy? I love local coffee shops. And so I don't want to pick on anyone in particular. I will say that in the US, there are no laws protecting us from mold toxins in coffee. But in Japan, China, Europe, and most of South America, there are government limits on mold toxins in coffee. And most people who don't think there's mold in coffee heard me on one of the three times I was on the Joe Rogan show.

54:30He decided to say there wasn't mold in coffee after a company he owns started directly competing with Bulletproof. So there was a financial motive for that, and the evidence is very abundant. And here's how you can tell if you're getting mold in your coffee. So some of the studies say 80%, some say 90 % of coffee is moldy. It might be 70%. And the degree and type of mold are also something that matters. So when you drink a cup of coffee and you have to pee right away afterwards, is your bladder full or not full? It's not full. So what system in your body is making you pee? I guess your kidneys, right?

55:09It's your kidneys and bladder and they're doing it to protect you because the toxin that's most common in mold and coffee is called ocrotoxin A, which is a kidney and bladder toxin. That's what I had. There you go. I had it too in my house, right? What that means is if you have most coffee that has OTA in it and you drink it, your body says, oh my God, get it out of here. And then you pee right away and there's like a half a cup of pee. When you drink clean coffee, it actually hydrates you, especially when there's electrolytes and minerals like danger coffee, but it doesn't give you the pee response.

55:42Right. So if you want to monitor how much OTA you're getting or one other toxin from plants, the frequency that you need to pee is a really big variable. You should pee when your bladder's full, not have to pee before it's full, unless you're getting rid of toxins. Is there a difference between, I mean, this might be a dumb question, but like a cold brew, an Americano in terms of the amount of mold? No. Studies show that mold toxins don't survive the brewing process. The mold is long gone, but the poison that's left is there. Think of it like penicillin is there even though you're not eating the mold where penicillin comes from.

56:20So when you do cold brew, it limits your ability to get the, actually a lot of the dissolved good things in coffee. So a heat extraction of any herb is going to get more out of it. And the reason people do cold brew is because it limits some of the bitter compounds, or you could roast the coffee properly and get higher quality coffee. So you get less polyphenols that way, but there's no studies, nothing I've ever seen that says you get less mold that way. You just get less coffee nutrients. If you do an Americano or a French press with a metal filter, then you get coffee oils. And there's two camps around coffee oils.

57:00One of them says they might raise cholesterol, therefore they're bad for you. I don't worry about cholesterol unless it's oxidized because, well, that's what the science supports. There are some other variables like APOB that matter that are not cholesterol, but coffee doesn't affect those. So coffee oils in multiple studies reduce inflammation in the brain. So they're plant essential oils. I drink Americanos when I'm at home almost exclusively. I would say to get the most benefits, look at French press or no paper filter methods or espresso. Okay. But if you're worried about cholesterol, it might be up.

57:38It might be down from that. Just paper filters reduce the soluble fiber you get from coffee. That's a prebiotic. And they take away those oils that I think are good for you. Back to mold cleansing. Did you do supplements, diet? All of the above. I'll tell you the protocol in a minute. Give us the protocol. We still have to understand what mold does. Okay. Okay. So we have the mold itself is a strong immune system activator. And then we have the toxins from mold. They're called mycotoxins. And the toxins from mold are very, very small fat-soluble molecules. They look a lot like cholesterol, and the body can't see molecules that size.

58:16It's below the level of our immune system for most of them. So they directly poison mitochondria and they wreak havoc depending which of the about 200 toxins there are in mold that really affect humans. And you can be suffering from an allergic response to mold or from mycotoxin exposure directly. And what makes it even more complex is your immune system eventually can recognize some mycotoxins and have an immune response to the compound but not the mold. So if you want to get rid of mold, it's helpful to know what you have. In my case, I had exposure to, among many others, something called xeralinone.

58:56Have you heard of that one? No. This is my favorite mycotoxin because anyone who still believes in calories in calories out, including some of my friends in the bodybuilding community who believe that a Kit Kat is the same thing as an orange because calories. Yeah. You can manage your body weight that way until your biology completely breaks. Well, a zorelinone is 10 ,000 times more estrogenic than human estrogen, and it absorbs through the skin. So the dust in your house or that musty blanket, or you could breathe it. So this is one of the things I had, why I was so obese, why my testosterone was so low.

59:37Right? Because estrogen leads to weight gain or weight retention. It does. Okay. Yeah. And it also leads to, you know, basically softness in your muscles. I used to have man boobs and the whole nine yard. Industry is not dumb. Like, what can we do with this? They concentrate that mold toxin into a little waxy pellet, and you put it in an industrial beef cow's ear. It soaks in through the blood vessels there. And the cow gets fat on 30 % less calories. Oh, my God. Wait, are we eating this moldy beef? I don't. I eat grass-fed. Yeah, right. But this is what's happening to the grain-fed. Yeah, it's not that the meat itself is moldy.

1:00:16It's that a very potent estrogen gets added to the cow. Wow. And is it still present in the meat? Well, it's fat soluble and there's extra fat in the meat. Wow. But the important thing for those of us in the fitness area, if anything on the planet exists that makes you fat on 30 % less calories, your story about calories in, calories out is bullshit. It is provably wrong. Now, might they be a variable that's worth tracking? Yes. Does it give you a license to say a Diet Coke and a Snickers bar cancel each other out because calories? No. There are other factors at play. I have to know what your diet's like.

1:00:53Do you follow a carnivore diet or do you kind of like tinker it based on what's going on? My first big book was called The Bulletproof Diet. And people have lost a couple million pounds on it. I think it's sold about 600 ,000 copies now. and you see it echoed in a lot of newer nutrition books. They're on the same path. Chapter one of the book, avoid these plant toxins, including lectins, phytic acid, oxalates, histamine, and omega-6 fats. So if you're going to do keto, this is all from the Bulletproof Diet, do keto for short periods of time, come out of it, and when you're doing keto, protein quality and fat quality matter, right?

1:01:36So the whole clean keto thing, first book on that. And that's still what I do. You're keto all the time? No. Use keto as a scalpel. And I'm 6 % body fat. What the hell business do I have being keto? I don't want to get any leaner. I'll go in ketosis if I want to deal with a certain issue or I want to lose a little bit of weight, which isn't an issue. On a typical day when I'm not fasting, I will eat 200 grams of animal protein. And I do that because, funny enough, I weigh 200 pounds. And that equation works. In my longevity book, I went through all the research saying you might want 0.6 grams of protein per pound of body weight.

1:02:20And they say, but as you get old, you should go up to 0.8 because you start losing muscle. But when I go to 0.6, I start losing muscle and I don't feel good. So maybe some people do all right on that. But I think between 0.8 and one gram of protein per pound of body weight is good. Except even saying that is nonsense. Because have you ever heard of sarin nerve gas? No. So back in some of the very early terrorist attacks in populated cities, in Japan, some terrorists made sarin nerve gas and put it on a subway. Sarin comes from beans. It's a plant-based protein. Uh-oh. So when plant-based people tell you don't eat animal protein because this one animal protein is bad for you, we could say but, but, sarin, nerve gas.

1:03:15You could also say snake venom is a protein. You probably don't want to eat rattlesnake venom because it has this weird spike-like protein in it. So maybe the quality and type of protein is an important variable. And if you say 200 grams of protein per day, that would give you license to make me eat crickets, okay? And to make me eat soybeans, which might be worse than crickets. I don't really know. I'm not eating either one of them. So that's why I always say animal protein. Because animal protein, whatever source it is, whether it's dairy, if you're not allergic, beef, which is the best, or lamb, or not as good, but still okay, chicken or eggs, right?

1:03:58Those are the things that actually have the amino acids that your body needs and a lot of other cofactors. If you do 200 grams of those kinds of proteins, you get results. If you do 200 grams of industrial processed plant protein, you don't get the results. So the idea that calories matter lets you sell junk food. The idea that protein matters lets you sell junk protein. The reality is that it's the quality and type of protein and the availability in the body that says what works. You can eat the way I'm talking about, which is a low-toxin, quality protein, quality fat. you can eat surprisingly affordably, especially if you tolerate eggs.

1:04:33Like white rice and eggs cooked in butter is cheaper than McMuffins. And it's so much better for you. And if you can't afford the grass-fed ground beef, then what you would do is you would get the non-grass-fed ground beef, which isn't as good, but it's still way better than anything else. And you can get that stuff for 99 cents a pound if you buy it in bulk and you look around for specials. You can also go to restaurant supply stores and they will sell you ridiculously cheap things. Like my lamb chops, the good ones, not the shoulder chops, but the rib chops, they're$6.79 a pound. I love that you're pointing this out because it's a comment I see over and over again, you know, about the exclusivity of health.

1:05:14So I think it's important that we're transparent on that.

1:05:25Thank you for joining us on the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. To support this show, please rate and review and share with your loved ones. If you want to be reminded of new episodes, click the subscribe button on your preferred podcast or video player. You can sign up for my newsletter to receive my favorites at marilowellon.com. It will be linked in the show notes. This podcast is a Pursuit Network production, brought to you by Michaela Phillips, Joel Contartese, Daviel Waldner, and Mackenzie Mizell. You can also watch the full video of each episode on our YouTube channel at Pursuit of Wellness Podcast.

1:05:59Love you, Power Girls and Power Boys. I will see you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider-patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor or health team.

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