Dhru Purohit Show - Is Mold the Surprising Toxin That's Impacting Your Child's Health? With Dr. Pejman Katiraei

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and WHOOP.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. Pejman Katiraei to talk about the link between mold toxicity and unexplained health challenges in children. Dr. Katiraei has helped parents find radical relief for their children’s gut, immune, and behavioral problems after identifying and removing the sources of mold in their lives.  Dr. Pejman Katiraei is a board-certified pediatrician who is also boarded and fellowship trained in integrative medicine. He completed his undergraduate at UCLA and obtained his osteopathic medical degree at Western University of Health Sciences. He completed a pediatric residency at Loma Linda University, where he stayed on as a teaching faculty member for over four years.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Katiraei dive into: -Dr. Katiraei’s discovery of the role mold toxicity plays in children's illnesses (0:00) -Case examples of mold toxicity in children (5:05) -What mold exposure does to the body (13:07) -Mold toxicity as a cause of PANDAS, behavioral, and gut imbalances (28:21) -Symptoms of mold toxicity in parents (51:39) -The challenges of mold in the home, inspection, and testing (1:14:10) -Dr. Katiraei’s online community and database, Wholistic Minds (1:44:18) -Nutrition and supplemental support for mold detoxification (1:51:30) For more on Dr. Katiraei’s online community and database, Wholistic Minds, follow them on Instagram @wholisticminds, and Facebook @Wholistic Minds, or through his website, https://www.wholistickids.com Also mentioned in this episode: -Deaths related to mold exposure at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital  -The International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness (ISEA) -ERMI Mold Test by EnviroBiomics, Inc.  -@moldfinders Instagram -History of how hand-washing became a part of medical care ButcherBox has a variety of different boxes, and you can choose your box and frequency. For a limited time, you can sign up today and get two pounds of ground beef free for a whole year PLUS $20 off by going to https://www.butcherbox.com/dhru. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health coaching platform that monitors your physiology 24/7 and provides personalized recommendations based on what your body needs. To get yours, go to https://www.join.whoop.com and get 15% off your membership with code DHRU15. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Early exposure to these toxins has been demonstrated to actually disrupt neuroplasticity and alter how the brain cells start connecting with one another. And there are some people looking at how that may be one component to what we see with autism. Hi everyone, Drew Prode here. If you're curious about the topic of mold and why so many physicians are increasingly talking about the dangers of high exposure or chronic exposure to mold, especially when it comes to the development of kids' brains. today's episode is for you. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings

of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Pedgeman Kataray. Dr. Pedgeman is a board-certified pediatrician who is also boarded and fellowship trained in integrative medicine. He completed his undergraduate at UCLA

and then obtained his osteopathic medical degree at the Western University of Health Sciences. He then went on a graduate student He then went on to complete a pediatric residency at Loma Linda University, where he stayed on as teaching faculty for over four years. Through his training as an integrative pediatrician and his experience is seeing thousands and thousands of kids over the years, Dr. Pedgeman has become increasingly concerned about the role that mold and the mycotoxins they produce has been playing in the development of children's brains, immune systems, and overall health. It's for that reason that we've invited Dr. Pedgeman back onto the podcast to talk about his growing concern. Who should be paying attention to this topic and why it's so important for physicians like himself to raise awareness

and for individuals that are listening that are concerned for themselves and their families like you to spread the word about this increasing mold toxicity problem that society is dealing with today. Now, a little bit more about Dr. Pedgeman. He's completed two fellowships in integrative medicine and he has a private practice in Santa Monica where he focuses on helping children with severe behavioral challenges. He's also working with an amazing team to build a project out called Holistic Minds, which is an online portal that helps parents understand the root cause of their child's behavioral issues and what steps they can take to help resolve it.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation on the topic of mold and how it can impact our children's health. Stay tuned. Dr. Pedgeman, welcome back to the podcast. I want to jump right in in the preparation of today's episode where we're talking about kids, mold and the true impact that you've seen as a pediatrician. Now, for many, many years, the true impact that mold has on the development on the function, on the energy of kids, you shared a statement with me that I want to start off with.

And you shared that in my 14 years of experience as an integrative pediatrician, nothing has caused a greater concern for children as mold. That's a super bold statement, and I want to give you an opportunity to expand on that. Sure. Talk about that. Pleasure to be here. So I started an integrative medicine in 2008, and I ran down a lot of rabbit holes, you know, the rabbit hole of vaccines and heavy metals and the gastrointestinal track.

I even got obsessed enough with the gastrointestinal track to the point where I published the paper on it. And I've gone down a lot of different rabbit holes. And over the years, I found these rabbit holes to come to kind of an end at a certain point. And about four to half years ago, I started becoming aware of mold. And that was primarily actually because of one of the moms. I had this sweet little guy who's now 12. And at the time, intense pans and pandas, inflammation, aggression, got kicked out of two schools, highly, highly intelligent could not function for the life of him.

Like when we're talking, not being able to function, like grabbing a knife, chasing after his mom with a knife because he was going, I mean, I hate to use this word to describe a kid, he was going psychotic. Like, his entire nervous system was completely falling apart. We did gluten-free, dairy-free, ultra-low inflammatory diet, treated his gut, you know, found whatever we can find the stool test, treated that. like anything and everything I can think of to help him completely failed. And we were talking about medications. And then she started doing her own research. And she's like, what about mold? I'm like, I don't know, sure. And long story short, it turns out that they had mold or it turns out they had such bad mold that the second they found out about it, she had to like get the heck out of there. And then, you know, what came to me is like, well, okay, let me find some expert to then, you know,

send my mold kids to because I don't want to get into. into another world. And then I started looking around and realized, like, there's essentially very few pediatricians. This is four years ago that actually know a whole lot about mold. And sadly, to this day, there aren't that many of us. So I took it upon myself to start researching. And over the last two and a half, three years, I mean, at some point, like, I pretty much got my hands on every single publication I can find on mold.

And the more I learned, the more troubled I became. and the more horrified, really, I became about what this exposure is doing to these kids. And the part that really, really scares me is one, we're not talking about it. We have very little awareness around it, an early, early exposure. So in utero exposure and exposure in the first two to three years of life, where the child's microbiome is forming, the child's gastrointestinal tract is forming, their immune system at the gastrointestinal tract, level at the systemic level is priming itself. It's becoming oriented in terms of what it reacts to or not. You have neuroplasticity, you have neuronal pruning. You've got all of these core systems that are starting to develop in orient and prime all in the first few years. And when mold

exposure is present, and this is all based on published studies, any and all of these systems can actually be disrupted. And when that happens, there are a cascade of events that then lead to unusual manifestations of disease. I'll give you an example. I've taken care of several kids with inflammatory bowel disease early, early on. So adults get inflammatory bowel disease. They get colitis Crohn's, right? And we say, okay, well, you've got it. You're blah, blah, blah. It's really weird for two or three-year-olds, four-year-olds to get inflammatory bowel disease. In the three kids that I've taken care of, it's not an end of 100 or 1,000. And those three kids, every single one of those kids had mold exposure. And that's just an anecdotal example. But my concern is that X percentage of

autism and they're published studies of experts that are just looking at that saying that some percentage of autism, we don't know what the heck it is, could be that early exposure. Learning disabilities are published studies that show that early exposure to mold for more than in several years can cause a 10 point IQ decrease. This is a published study. There are so many things like this that once you start getting into the literature, and you see that there's so much data in science out there, it just has not somehow trickled into our conversation of medicine, and sadly not into the conversation of holistic or integrated medicine either.

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You mentioned early on in your career and getting started in integrative medicine. Can you tell us a little about where you were and maybe some of the first kids that you were seeing that later on, even if you didn't figure out then, that maybe that might have been a situation that was related to mold, like, What were those kids suffering from? You're talking like early, early on or just recently? When you started your going, when you started officially calling yourself an integrative pediatrician? Got it. I wish I could remember everything back then.

So, you know, when I started, I had just finished my chief residency at Loma Linda University and my program director is like, hey, what do you think about this holistic medicine stuff? I'm like, it sounds cool. So I went to a conference, loved it, started getting into it, and that university was generous or crazy enough to say, hey, fledgling, go ahead and start this holistic medicine center for us. So I became the holistic expert at Loma Linda. And it was probably one of the most wonderful experiences in my professional career. Like, I love that institution to this day.

And I started, you know, as a new pediatric doctor seeing just about every case you can imagine, 40-year-olds with lupus, 35-year-olds with horrendous inflammatory bowel disease that were failing medications, and then children with autism, ADHD, just about anything and everything that walked through the door. And I was taking insurance. And at that time, I think we were even taking Medi-Cal. So, like, any and all patients in the institution that wanted holistic medicine came to my door, how many of those had mold? I honestly have no idea, because it was so far out of my scope of consciousness at that time that I wouldn't even be able to tell you. I can tell you in looking back over the last four to five years of my more recent patients, so many of them

that I've looked back on, I have all of a sudden said, oh my God, that person probably had them all too. And gosh, this one had mold two. You mentioned this mother that came to you four years ago and was advocating for you to investigate that maybe her child was dealing with issues of mold and mycotoxins, right? What are the common diseases, diagnoses, symptoms of kids that are struggling with mold? You mentioned a few there, pandas, other stuff. Just talk through and kind of run through the gamut of some of the common ones that are there that you've seen in your clinical practice. Sure. So the first thing is the immune system starts acting in a really weird fashion. And it's almost like the immune system starts going upside down. So on one hand, you've got this weird

immune suppression where these kids, I can only speak about the kids, they get sick often. And when they do get sick, they stay sick for a period of time. And that's the secondary part. So you've got an immune system that's partially suppressed, and it's actually specifically with the neutrophils. If you look at some of the kids, they have very low neutrophils, which have to do with fighting viruses. But then they also have a weird inflammatory response. So they can't really effectively treat the infections that are there, but then the inflammatory response, the congestion, the allergy reactions, histamine reactions, are all off the charts. And a lot of these kids, in addition to just being stuffed up and congested and mouth breathing and sort of

forth all the time or for long periods of time. They also have large reactions to foods. So a lot of the kids that have 15 different food reactions or they're allergic to a whole bunch of different things, a lot of those have early mold exposure or ongoing mold exposure. So that's one. A lot of the kids that I see who have perpetual gut issues. So there are kids that have a little bit of, you know, whatever, diarrhea, abdominal pain, eczema, and you get rid of gluten, you get rid of dairy, you give them a probiotic, you give them a few things, and voila, they're perfect. And then there are other kids that you do everything under the sun. You basically put them on this uber restrictive, you know, elimination diet, you know, super, super anti-inflammatory diet. They're on 15,000 supplements,

and it's barely working. A lot of those kids have mold. You've got kids with weird mitochondrial issues. So the kids that are just tired all the time, they're just exhausted. They don't want to run. The kids that just sit in the corner and play on puzzles, they don't really want to be active. A lot of those kids have some kind of toxin. In my world, mold toxins are at the top of the list. So just the fatigue, the weakness, kids who don't grow. So animal studies have shown that at least in animals that are exposed to early or are exposed to micro toxins and large amounts, those animals don't grow. in my experience, the severe cases of failure to thrive, like the six-year-old that looks like a three-year-old kind of severe thrive, like first percentile, fifth percentile of height weight. A lot of those kids have it because not only do you get a hit in the gastrointestinal track with all of the malabsorption and things that happen, you also get disruption in growth, a growth hormone and a cascade of other hormones that are ultimately needed to drive growth. Kids who are super, super picky eaters.

And when I'm not talking about like the kids that are being a pain in the butt, you know, we're talking about the kids that will only like mac and cheese and chicken nuggets plus or minus pizza. Because of the intense sensory issues that these kids have and that kind of gets into the next segments, that is another manifestation of mold where you've got appetite suppression. So the kids barely want to eat and the foods that they do eat are very, very limited just because the experience of the food. So appetite is low, but the experience of the food is just grotesque. And some of the older kids have told me, like, food just feels weird in my mouth.

And then that takes us into the next domain, which is part of the sensory pathways of the body. So ultimately, sight, sound, touch, skin, balance, these are all sensory pathways, right? It's what allows us to orient ourselves to the world. What happens is. is when you have mold exposure, ultimately that distorts histamine levels and other biochemical pathways, if you want to say, in hormones. And that actually starts changing the sensory perception and processing of the brain, which then causes the kids that can't tolerate sound, the kids that get overwhelmed, kids that can't tolerate clothing on their bodies. I have this sweet little, she's about five now, five-year-old little girl. At one point, her

sensory issues were so intense that this little girl did not even want a wait or underwear. Forget about clothing, underwear. Asthma, in my clinical practice at least, every single one of the kids who have had severe asthma, I'm not talking a little like you take albedoil once every while. The kids that end up in the hospital end up in their emergency room, despite being on inhaled steroids, those kids have had mold exposure. And I'm not saying that this is the case for every single one, right? There could be absolutely other reasons.

But these are all ways that it can show up. Severe cases of eczema. I have this beautiful little, she's four and a half now, four and a half, five little girl, five-year-old little girl. Her eczema was so bad that she, every night, she would sit there clawing herself to the point of bleeding and literally could not sleep because it was constant itch, itch. And a lot of the severe cases,

of eczema that I've seen also could be mold. So these are just some of the things that are kind of coming up at the top of my mind. On a molecular level, what is mold actually doing to the body? And is it the mold? Is it the mycotoxins? Talk about a little bit of that interaction. Like, you know, when most people think about moldy blueberries, they think about moldy strawberries. They think about moldy strawberries. They think about a little bit of mold on their bread. So first, what is the mold that you're talking about? What kind of exposure? And then what is that actually doing in the body that's leading to all these symptoms, conditions, and expression of disease that you just shared? Right question. So I think to answer that, it's helpful to first stand

back and ask, what does mold do? It breaks things down, right? It decomposes. Right? That's the purpose of mold, it decomposes matter. It becomes a problem when you are the matter that it starts decomposing. And this is the part that really got me to freak out as a physician. Because when I started looking at it, I started realizing like, holy Jesus, like, that's what molds do. In mycotoxins, one of their... And can you explain what they are? Just because there's some people that are listening that are not familiar with what they are. So molds are, well, so mold... Micotoxins or... Yeah. So we've got There's probably hundreds of species of mold. And the hardcore researchers point out that we still don't even know all of the different types of molds that are out there.

And they're nature's decomposers, nature's trash bins. Anytime anything in nature dies, breaks down, other stuff, this is the recycling. The recycling process. Yeah, it recycles matter. And there are molds that really don't cause harm to us. And then there are some molds like penicillium, aspergillus, cladosporium, and then the classic black mold stachabotris that happen to be very toxic to us. And especially the, so molds themselves can cause allergy reactions, they can cause sinus infections, they can cause other things. But it turns out that the toxins that they produce actually happen to be even more problematic to us.

And when molds get stressed, they actually produce more toxins in an attempt to protect themselves. And it turns out that those toxins are highly, highly, highly, highly toxic to us, especially when present in any large amounts. Now, most people would think like, well, no, it can't be that bad, right? It can't be that serious. It can't be that real. And, you know, an analogy that I've learned to give people is we've all learned that, you know, pesticides and glyphosates are not good for us, right?

And generally speaking, eating organic foods is in our best interest, right? Now, imagine right now our focus is to avoid pesticide-laden foods because those pesticides are bad for us. Now, imagine if you lived in an area where literally across the street from you was a non-organic farm and every day they were spraying pesticides on those crops and those pesticides were wafting into your room and you were inhaling them. When you have mold contamination in your house, you have the equivalent of potentially that level of contamination being inhaled and ingested into the body.

So you can kind of get an idea of the levels of exposure. And you can't see it oftentimes. It's not like your ceiling is about to cave in. It's not like your wall that's turning black. Oftentimes it's completely invisible, which is the part that's really disturbing. Now, what did these toxins do? Why did I get so freaked out, right? And when you say these toxins, are you talking about mycotoxins or is it more than just micotoxins?

Right now, just microtoxins. The toxins that these molds produce. So this is when I really started freaking out. And also then as I started looking out further and further, I started seeing these other areas of, you know, child-related disease being tied to it. And then it started finding articles to support that. So let's first start with the brain. the nervous system as a whole is probably one of the more fragile systems in our body, right? And you've got this blood-brain barrier that tries to protect it.

Well, first, it turns out that mycotoxins can not only disrupt the gut barrier, which can affect the brain, it can actually directly disrupt the blood-brain barrier. So you've got this compromised, open kind of porous now protection of the brain. Once the microtoxins get into the nervous system, they can actually cause activation of the neuronal immune system, the microglia and other immune pathways within the nervous system. And when that happens, when the microglia get activated, you get very unusual things. People are tying microglial activation to autism. It's been tied to pans and pandas, a host of other things. The microtoxins themselves are directly toxic to the nerve. neurons. So you can get neuronal death. So the neurons themselves can actually start degenerating. They can actually start falling apart. Because the mycotoxins disrupt the mitochondria. And when you think of how do neurons function, right? They take these little signals in one part of the body and then they

shoot it down the axon and then dump out of chemical, right? They do all of these fancy things. How does that happen? It's all mitochondria dependent. So when you get a disruption in the energy, not only are the neurons being damaged and harmed and potentially dying, what also happens is the neuronal activity itself actually starts changing and becoming disrupted. And there are studies looking at this thing called synaptic fatigue, where the signaling, the cell-to-cell signaling of the brain cells actually starts becoming fatigued because of this energy disruption. Early exposure to the brain has been demonstrated. to disrupt neuroplasticity. So the way the brain starts wiring itself in the first few years,

you know, the appropriate pruning, we get rid of the cells we don't want, we develop the pathways we do want to ultimately allow us to be healthy, you know, functioning individuals. Early exposure to these toxins has been demonstrated to actually disrupt this neuroplasticity and alter ultimately how the brain cells start connecting with one another. And there are some people looking at how that may be one component to what we see with autism. So that's just within the nervous system. There are medications that they use for heart transplant, for organ transplant, like cyclosporin. Cyclosporin happens to be a mold-derived compound. And it has been demonstrated that mycotoxins can directly suppress the immune system. And one-tale side that I see when there's mold exposure is about 10 to 20 percent of the

kids that I see actually have low white blood cells. And before understanding this, I would see it here and there. And I could never understand why it is that some of these kids had low white blood cells and they had low neutrophils, which are a type of white blood cells. Turns out mold toxins can do that. You get activation of the pro-inflammatory pathways. So TNF alpha, interleukin-6, mast cells. So a lot of the parts of the immune system start becoming overactivity. And thenfing overactivated, and the T regulatory cells, I'm sure you've talked about this with a lot of the smart people that you've had on this podcast. It turns out the mycotoxins can downregulate or disrupt the T regulatory cells in their ability to actually control and manage the immune

cells. So you get this very weird distortion systemically at the immune response. And then when you go into the gastrointestinal track, and we all know the gastrointestinal track influences the systemic immune response, right? First and foremost, where do we get antibiotics from? Molds, right? Penicillin came from penicillium. It's a mold. Most of our antibiotics are derived from molds in the toxins they produce. When you have prolonged exposure to mold toxins, you get a disruption in the microbiome. So all of these beneficial lactobacillinibifidobactors, you know, all the things that we take in our probiotics, it turns out that those suckers actually get hit.

And all of those communities start getting suppressed because these mycotoxins are actually killing off these bacteria. And, you know, early on, I would look at these stool studies that I would do. And I'm like, why in God's good earth are these kids' guts so messed up? because they hadn't gotten 15,000 antibiotics. You know, their diets were pristine. They were eating lots of vegetable matters. So all the right things that the parents were doing to support the gut were completely failing

because these kids were getting essentially a daily dose of antibiotics. In addition to the microbiome being disrupted, and studies have demonstrated this, you also get disruption of the microbiome, which is actually the fungal makeup of the microbiome. And the fungal component also gets distorted. So all of a sudden, candida starts going wild because it turns out that candida and the immune cells and the molds all communicate. There's this funny little term called quorum sensing where it's almost like they're having a little party and they're all chitch chatting and, you know, they're having a drink with one

another and they're like. And in the process of that, what happens is these microorganisms within the gut actually start sensing that things are changing, and it's actually quite genius when you look at it, like these microbes that we think are dumb are actually really intelligent. They actually start changing their behavior. And for instance, Candida becomes invasive. A lot of other microorganisms start becoming invasive, and like salmonella, chigella, E. coli actually start translocating, which means they go from the protected inner kind of parts of the bowel, and they actually start trying to poke through the layer and actually start getting into our bloodstream to ultimately

kill us because they're sensing that the entire thing has been disrupted. So bacterial translocation takes place, these microbiome colonies start changing. And the gastrointestinal tract as a whole starts getting compromised. So you get leaky gut, you get massive intestinal permeability because the zonulin proteins that are like the glue of the gastrointestinal tract, so they keep the intestinal cells glued together, that glue actually starts becoming undone, and the zonulin proteins and other tight junction proteins actually start getting compromised. You get gut inflammation. So the immune system at the gut level starts becoming overactive.

The musin layer, which is kind of the mucous layer that's there to protect the gut, actually starts becoming compromised. The secretory IGA that's there to also protect it, create kind of an immune protective layer also gets compromised. So multiple different parts of the gastrointestinal tract start getting hit and they get hit potentially really hard to the point where you can get the manifestation of full-blown inflammatory bowel disease. But it could also be just the gut itself is not whole. Hence, the food allergies and, you know, the, the people who have 15,000 food sensitivities and they can eat like five foods, chances are at least 50% of them have mold exposure.

So I want to zoom out for a second just to place some context around the conversation. So you are based out here in Los Angeles and you are a go-to pediatrician for a lot of individuals. In fact, that pretty sure your practice is like almost like completely booked up, if not booked up. and you often tend to families and their kids who have very complicated situations that they've already seen multiple doctors usually before they've come to you and many of these families you know are often people that have means so they've been doing their own investigation they've tried stuff and they generally when we talk about the larger landscape of the population in america they're generally on the healthier side of families, right?

They're already doing a lot of things right. They're probably eating a lot of whole foods and organic and other things like that and probably taking some supplements and other things like that. And yet still, their kids were having these unexplained group of different things across the board in some cases, you know, ADHD, not saying that every instance of that is connected to mold could be inflammatory bowel disease, as you mentioned. it could be mitochondrial dysfunction, a whole host of things,

pandas. And what you saw through pulling on that thread over the years, more and more is that often mold is either deeply connected or one of the root issues that cause that situation, that dysfunction in the first place. And then by helping the family understand that the, and we'll tease this part out, but just connecting it for the audience,

And that the primary source of that mold exposure was the buildings, meaning the homes that people were living in. We already know right now through the World Health Organization that in North America alone, and this is probably grossly understated, one fourth of all buildings, including commercial properties, have a serious mold issue. And that includes homes as well. and that ongoing exposure of being in a home that was not either remediated or in some cases where a family couldn't move was exposing kids to antibiotic levels of ongoing mycotoxins that continued to have the process get worse and worse and worse. Once you treated it, and we'll get into the treatment part in a little bit, you saw those areas that children and sometimes their families were dealing with get significant. or in some cases completely reverse. Is that a good overview?

You nailed it. You nailed it. Okay. All right. So a few questions that I have here. And I want to stress test a little bit of this early on just for people who are listening and they feel like kind of a statement that you said earlier. Like, okay, are you really saying that mold is that significant of an issue that it's so

connected to all these different conditions that you listed. Okay. So the first one that I want to stress test. on is human beings have been have evolved with mold for a long time. What is going on now that it's so much more worse of an issue and how can you know that it's mold wouldn't their parents often have the same exact condition because since we've had modern buildings, we've had issues with mold. So what the hell is going on now that you think this issue of mold?

mold is that deeply connected to what the kids are dealing with that you see in your clinical practice? Great question. I want to actually point one thing out. What I want to highlight is I'm not saying that every single one of these things is always tied to mold. And the examples that I gave, it's not to say that every single type of severe asthma or severe eczema or inflammatory bowel disease or autism or whatever is tied to mold.

What I am seeing is it is. really disturbing how little we understand about this and how little we understand what percentage of these cases could be tied to mold or not. The conventional medical community, the research community, the holistic pediatric community, right now there's essentially zero awareness around this connection. And that's why it's a delight to be here to share this with you. because I hope that the more we talk about this, the more we can start researching, you know, what percentage of severe asthma is mold? We don't know.

So just to clarify that, because I'm hearing kind of two things, and you tell me if I'm getting this right. One, we're not talking about mold really at all, and especially when it comes to pediatrics, like on a national level, it's not in the zeitgeist, and you're advocating it for it to be in the zeitgeist. But one of the reasons that you're advocating it for it is not that you're, every instance of ADHD or pandas or IBD or gastrointestal issues or mitochond, not that everyone is directly primarily caused or connected to mold, but in your clinical experience, which there are

some studies that are out there, but largely most of what gives you this resolve to be an advocate for this topic and the families that you're talking about is really your clinical experience, right, and working with families. So it's not that every instance is connected to mold, but what you're saying is that way more than what most people would expect. And in your practice here in Los Angeles, a high percentage of the cases are connected or deeply related to mold. Is that accurate? Yes. Okay.

And the more I look for it and the more I learn how to look for it, the more I find it. And part of that is to highlight how beyond the lack of awareness and, you know, the zeitgeist not being aware of this and so forth is also the technology that we have to assess mold exposure and mold-related disease frankly sucks. The tests that we have are faulty. They give false negatives all the time. And, you know, I've had multiple cases where they and their doctor thought, enough to check for mold. They did a test that was supposed to pick it up. It looked completely

normal. So they moved on to X, Y, or Z other things, but it turns out that the test was faulty. So the technology, the testing modalities we have are far from perfect. And you almost have to be a little paranoid to be looking for it. But once you have that degree of awareness, all of a sudden you see it popping up in so many different examples and so many different cases. And that's really kind of the point here. And to connect the dots a little bit, more, the reason that you have such strong resolve that I'm hearing from you and, you know, getting a chance to know you over these years is that once you understood that mold was a significant part of it, there was, uh, you know, to simplify a sort of a two-pronged approach, reducing or

completely removing exposure. Sometimes that meant an extreme situation, you know, this gets into the whole complications of treating this and sometimes families having to, you know, move. or expensive mediation, and sometimes it's not that bad, and it's not as expensive. So removing the child, and sometimes their family, obviously the child's going to move from it,

the family's going to move too, but sometimes the parents have issues as well. We'll talk about that. But removing the child from that exposure and then treating the underlying systems in the body, and when you've done that, and this is what's giving you the resolve, is partly I'm asking and I'm stating,

is that you've seen kids improve. So based on your clinical, standard sort of classical scientific method, even though we don't have the research, even though the testing is faulty, even though most, you know, academies of pediatric care and all the institutions that are out there, mold is not on their radar. What you're doing is you're practicing the scientific method and saying, here's what I think is going on. Let me treat for this.

Let me handle it. Okay, I'm not 100% sure how much mold is exactly tied to their issue, but there's no denying that the child has gotten better once I treated for all the things that are related to mold. Is that accurate? Yes. And I will say one thing. It's not that we don't have the data. We have a lot of data.

Like when you go into the animal study, it turns out the agricultural community, because it turns out the mold and mold toxins harm animals. The agricultural community has published several hundred, if not thousands of paper, on what mold and mold toxins do to mammals. Now, they happen to be pigs in. chickens and cows and, you know, other animals. But when you see what those animal studies, first of all, show, it's terrifying. Two, the basic sciences, so when you get into the worlds of immunology, the mitochondria, metabolomics, you know, worlds of neuroscience, and you look at

what the basic sciences have shown. It's also with no doubt at all, mycotoxins are horrendously harmful. So we have the basic sciences, we have the agricultural data. What's missing is the human science because we have not yet, for some reason, translated that into, gosh, this really harms humans. It's not to say there isn't any data. The data is still rather sparse and we need to do a lot more research. I wonder if at all, that's partially because we know, even major hospitals know that mold can make patients know in the intensive care unit. The problem is that it doesn't end up getting treated. Nobody looks into it. People have no idea how to remediate it. But there was a very prominent article that came out about like two years ago where it was a hospital in Seattle,

I'll link to it inside of the show notes, found that the untimely death of a few patients that were in their ICU unit that like nobody could explain was directly connected to a major mold infestation that was in that part of the hospital. Now, I don't know what the follow-up was. I don't know if they ever fixed it. You know, there was a whole sort of, it was in, you know, it kind of was in the papers. It was on CNN and all these different writings and things like that. So there is some awareness. But I wonder if one of the reasons that this hasn't been studied is, number one, there's just not enough awareness, right? There's maybe not enough clinicians speaking up from what they're seeing, which is part of the reason why we wanted you to come on the podcast.

But number two, we know for a fact that mycotoxin exposure to human health is negative. Like, there's nobody that would advocate that mycotoxin exposure is neutral. Like, it's known to be, you know, negative for human health. So could you knowingly expose people to it, even when we know that it's negative for health? like it probably would bring up a lot of different things in a review board that's trying to put together a clinical trial that we know this is harmful, but in a way we don't know how harmful it is because we're not treating for it in clinical care. Yeah, yeah.

We're not treating. We're not looking for it. We're not testing. So it has not yet entered the consciousness of the larger medical communities. And this includes the holistic medical communities. Like I look at a lot of the functional medicine providers, the integrated. pediatricians that I, you know, know, and the vast majority of them are not yet at a place where they're thinking about it or testing for it or looking for it. And I think as we start shifting this,

and as more and more researchers and providers start asking the questions of, can this be tied, and how do we assess for it? That's when answers will start coming up. And, you know, part of why I'm so happy to be here is there are like unimaginable levels of disease and suffering and cost that are probably taking place right now as a result of all of this exposure, that we are spending gobs and gobs and money on treating this disease and treating that disease and hospitalizing all these people and people ending up in the ICU. And I've had one of my mole patients who had severe enough asthma, Like they ended up in the hospital, not just the ER, in the hospital for several days, almost ended up in the ICU because the asthma was so out of control.

So we spent so much money on treatment. We spend the quarter of a trillion dollars caring for individuals with autism in this country. That's a huge amount of money. And we have not even yet started asking, well, could mold exposure early on be one contributor, not the contributor, one major contributor out of, let's say, 10 that's causing that. And even if it's 10% of autism and we can get to a place where we start preventing it, my God, how much suffering, how much disability and ultimately how much cost can we save by having this awareness. And that's really part of my purpose to not only bring this information out there and have people start asking questions and gain that awareness.

It's, you know, hopefully we get to a place where we can start actually preventing it and preventing it. in preventing the exposure, mitigating, because, yes, remediation sucks and it's expensive. But when you look at all of the complications and costs that comes from continuous exposure that's not being addressed, ultimately as a society, ultimately the amount of insurance that insurance companies pay out, which means we pay out into the insurance, government pays out, we're spending way more money on caring for all of these people that are exposed and it would take to actually address it. So I want to go back to that question that I asked, which is part of a couple questions

that I have where I want to, in a healthy way, push back on some of the things that are there for the sake of getting more understanding for myself, as well as for the audience. So only see it in that spirit. So the first question was, mold has been an issue that we've dealt with as our modern human species since the since as long as homo sapiens have been there and probably even you know before that right i'm saying homo sapiens because of written history in fact one of my friends dr ann shippey who also is uh you know somebody deeply in the mold space and has been on this podcast before reminded me that you know mold was even talked about in the bible and how problematic it is and how important it is to

address it in what capacity i have no idea but i'll take her word for it right um so if mold has been an issue that humans have been dealing with for quite some time. And let's fast forward that to our modern industrial age where most humans are living, most people in the Western world, let's say that, are living in structures and buildings that could develop mold inside of them through, you know, water exposure, you know, modern plumbing is a big issue, leaky pipes, right? Those are the main sort of things like water exposure, leaky pipes from my understanding, unremediated or unattended to, you know, drywall or other things that are there. Why does it seem that it's more of an issue for this generation that's growing up? And you may not have an answer,

but I'm asking you to maybe to like think about it a little bit and not the generation before them, who also kind of grew up in homes and buildings and closed structures where you would think they would have just as much exposure to mold as the generation that's going to. growing up now. Any thoughts on that? I do. I do. Great question. So there's multiple pieces to it. First and foremost, when you look at how molds affect the system, and then you add to that glyphosates, and you add to that PCBs, and you add to that BPA, and you add to that other environmental toxicans. For instance, glyphosates and mold toxins, when you look at their physiological impacts, are actually very, very, very similar.

They actually cause harm, they harm the microbiome. They hit the gastrointestinal tract. They hit the liver and the detox pathways. They affect the nervous system. So my mentor, Dr. Neil Nathan, actually talks about this in his book, Toxic, that we believe that one of the things that have happened is we have the existing toxic load. And we know, sadly, all human beings, newborns coming into the world, I'm sure you know of the EWG study, you know, everyone has exposure.

We can't escape it. Living in the world today, we are exposed. Even if you're eating organic foods, you still have some degree of glyphosate exposure. All of these environmental toxicans create a certain stress onto the human body. They create a certain vulnerability. Now, my observation is that all of these toxicans create that load, but that load is is not yet enough to break the system. Now, when you add the 500-pound gorilla on top of that load,

all of a sudden the systems that were still functioning, you know, they had some vulnerability. The microbiome wasn't perfect, but it wasn't falling apart. The gastrointestinal track was maybe a little off, but nothing bad. The mycotoxins, when the exposure is high enough, long enough, especially early enough, that's like the 500-pound gorilla that comes and sits on that load

and then suddenly breaks it. So you've got the total toxic load with the mycotoxins pushing that toxic load way beyond what our physiological buffering capacity or tolerance capacity is. Then you get into building science. So think about 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago, we didn't have this kind of energy efficiency, right?

Buildings... Buildings were way more leaky. They leaked. Yeah. And not water. We're talking about air. Like air would come in. they were heating and HVAC systems and cooling, like they weren't as tight.

Not at all. As they are today. In fact, you know, getting lead certified often means that you have a building that's like totally unbreatheable. So is that by what you mean by leaking? Exactly. Yes. Okay. Got it.

Yes. So you're saying building standards and the fact that we're trying to make our buildings more green by making them energy efficient in a way has created more of a protection layer for the mold that ends up growing inside. Well, it's a protection layer. And there was this really amazing publication that actually talked about how through this energy efficiency, we have created buildings that have the potential to become more toxic. Not that they are inherently more toxic, but now because you've got this completely closed

system that does not breathe at all, if there's some kind of contamination, whether it's, you know, you put down carpet and it's, or whatever, something is off gas. or paint or in this case of mold, all of those toxins recirculate continuously in the home. So let's say you've got a tiny little leak, you don't even see it. And prior, you know, 40 years ago, because the building was constantly breathing, these mold toxins wouldn't concentrate into the environment the same way they do now. They would get diluted by some fresh air being leaked in and then the moldy air being leaked out. Is that what you're saying?

Yes. And some of the environmental experts that have been teaching me, like one of the things they say is if you're worried about having mold contamination in your home, open your windows as much as you can to get fresh air in because that actually dilutes the concentrations of these mold toxins and allows them to kind of be moved out of the home. So we've got that. We also have drywall. So it turns out that up until the 1950s, U.S. homes and most homes in North America were billed with plaster. Plaster is basically concrete, which actually happens to be resilient to mold. So if plaster gets wet, it doesn't get moldy as quickly. Not to say there weren't mold issues in the old homes.

There were still mold issues for sure. It turns out that drywall, because drywall is basically paper, paper and calcium carbonate, I think, is sandwiched together. Paper that's in drywall comes from tree bark. It turns out that tree bark actually has mold spores in the bark. And it turns out that drywall has some amount of mold spores actually just built into it. So when you add water to drywall, you can quickly get mold contamination because as soon as that drywall gets wet, presuming you don't have the fancy moisture mold resistant.

in green drywalls or whatever they are. But most common drywall, once that sucker gets wet, it can develop mold contamination quite easily within a few days. And this is the environmental experts that I've talked to teaching me that. And there's studies that look at that. So our building methodology has also changed over the last several decades. And combination of these things, the closed systems, the drywall, you know, sadly nowadays, construction, techniques are not as good as they used to be because a lot of builders are just trying to throw up homes as fast as they can, right? So sometimes they'll cut corners here and there just to cut down costs. All of this combined with the total toxic load is part of the issue.

The other part of the issue is the food supply. So corn, grains, a lot of these different foods are now stored in silos, they've been stored in silos forever, right? As we've had climate change and humidity levels, heat levels have changed, all of these grains that are sitting in these silos sometimes for months actually can become moldy. And those grains are then fed to the animals, and we consume the milk, we consume the meat of these animals, which means we get exposed to this. Now, people say, well, the FDA regulates that, and we don't have, we can't have, we can't have mold contamination in the food and it can't cause a problem. That's until you actually look at the FDA regulations and the guidelines. And it turns out that certain mold toxins like okrotoxin,

I think gliotoxin and one of the other mold toxins are actually not regulated at all, at all. Like we don't, if it's there, it's not being controlled, which also means that these toxins are getting into the food supply. So you've got the food supply having mold and with environmental change, studies have started hinting at the possibility that these grains are becoming more moldy, animals are getting the mold, passing it onto us. So we've got that load. We've got the toxic load from glyphosate, pesticides, whatever, coming up. You've got the building science, the drywall. And then when you add all of that together, all of a sudden you're like, oh, that's why it's becoming a problem. So you believe, to summarize it here, that we are living in

a toxic soup that's increasingly gotten more concentrated, which is one of the reasons that we're seeing in the case of pediatrics and the type of kids that you get a chance to work with, with these allergies, issues that maybe adults would be having, but they're having these gastrointestinal issues, severe mitochondrial dysfunction. It's the concentration and how early those kids, even in some cases being in utero, right, on their way to being born, they're growing up in a much more concentrated toxic soup, which is why some of the kids that are out there in your belief are right from the get, sometimes right away coming into this world, dealing with such, I don't know any other better way to say it, but crazy symptoms and diseases.

Yeah, yeah. And the most significant contributor to that toxic soup being the mold toxins. A way to look at this is, I used to have an old Prius, so I can bash on Priuses. My Prius at a certain point, you know, was not running in top form. You know, it would take it a while to get going. And, you know, there were little issues with it. So imagine a car that's, you know, not the highest performing car to begin with. And the engine is a little off. And, you know, the transmission is a little bit. little off. So it's already a little off. And now a 500-pound gorilla comes and sits in the backseat. And all of a sudden, within a few months, that car that was still running okay, all of a sudden starts breaking down. The engine breaks down, the transmission breaks down. That's the level of additional toxic

load that this exposure can bring. So we do live in a toxic soup and we should do everything possible to mitigate that toxic soup. What I see, especially in our, you know, more more aware, holistic community, right? Those those that are aware of eating organic and are aware of living cleanly and aware of, you know, not spraying your home with X, Y, or Z, cleaners, etc., to mitigate that exposure. That is all great, but we're focusing so much on this and we're missing the 500 pound gorilla. I have many families that do everything perfectly right. They eat 100% organic. Every single cleaner they use is all organic, all clean, everything is clean, everything is clean. Even then, if the mold exposure is there, that's enough to cause the system to develop problems.

And that's how significant this is. So for all of the viewers out there, are doing all of these things right, and they're wondering why in God's good earth is my health, my kids' health being off, this could be one reason, not the only reason, this could be one reason. And you primarily, you know, you're a pediatrician, so you see kids. But one of the things that you wanted to make sure that even I understood is that, like, a lot of families whose kids are dealing with this, it's quite often that you see that the parents themselves sometimes have unexplained symptoms. So we're primarily talking about this from the angle of kids because this generation that's growing up right now and, you know, pretty much since the modern building items that you've added, more energy efficient buildings, drywall, etc., other stuff. We're seeing more of these complicated situations that you're treating, but there are also parents that deal with this. Do you want to say anything about that? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the

things that really has me become paranoid is probably the right word about mold, if nothing else, very concerned, is let's say a child has X, Y, or Z thing, right? And we kind of touched on that. one of the things that I asked to parents is do either of you have, and it could be brain fog or memory issues, and it's not dementia horrendous memory loss, but if parents think back to, let's say, five years ago, and their memory is not as sharp as it used to be, they're more forgetful, they're having a hard time remembering things. That's one telltale sign. And this reflects, you know, part of the genetics because they're human beings, they're more resilient to mold toxicity. So it doesn't affect them as badly. And then especially with adults, because our systems are more mature and resilient,

we can handle more than little kids. But a lot of parents are like, yeah, you know, my memory is just not as good as it used to be. I've just become more forgetful. And every single parent says the same thing. I just chalked it up to being a busy, busy parent, you know, just chasing after the kids or just having too much stress every time there's a reason why they've justified their memory issues. The other thing is fatigue. So because of the significant mitochondrial disruption that mycotoxins do, they can actually cause essentially damage to the entire chain of events that these little organelles create energy, right? They make ATP for us. They give us life. They give us energy, so forth. It turns out that that entire conveyor belt of processes that take place from

food broken down to the key pieces that ultimately go into this generator which spits out electricity, which gives us life, that entire conveyor belt, literally every single part of that process, the electron transport chain can be hit. So a lot of adults will also say like, yeah, you know, I'm just tired all the time. And I have to drink five cups of coffee and I sleep eight hours, but I still wake up tired. And again, it's like, well, I just chalked it up to just being a really, busy parent. So the fatigability, the memory issues are two very common things. Then there are some of the sinus issues. So allergies, you know, some parents just have these weird allergies that

are there almost all the time, waking up congested in the mornings, waking up having to clear your throat, coughing a whole bunch. And then one of the things that's interesting, a lot of the parents say, yeah, yeah. You know, when I go on vacation, my allergies go away. And then as soon as I come back home, my allergies come back. Mold exposure. Fibromyalgia, weird aches and pains. So joint pains, muscle pains, neck pains. And it's not because of anything. It's just it's there and you can't explain it. That is another telltale sign. And then there are the food sensitivities. So, you know, the families where one or multiple people, you know, are reacting to 15 foods. And it's, It's not just a little gluten or dairy.

It's like they're reacting to a whole bunch of things. That could be another sign. So I want to stress test, you know, what you just shared from the audience's perspective. Go for it. Right. When a lot of people who are world class in their field come on this podcast and talk about, you know, their unique sort of area that they're known for treating. In this case, you're working with kids and mold, right? And you have really developed a deep expertise there clinically and have a good understanding.

understanding of like the literature and what's there. And then somebody else next week comes on and talks about something else. Let's say like mouth breathing. A lot of times the audience hears that this one area, heavy metals, in this case, mold, in another case, sugar. In another case, this is the reason that they're having parent or child these unexplained issues. You go online and you can kind of find that sort of narrative with a lot of things.

People will say that about vaccines. People will say it about this, that. And I think from an audience's perspective, they're listening and they're like, okay, I'm paying attention. How do I contextualize this with all the other things that people are talking about that are supposedly the root reason that I or my child is suffering from this inexplicable thing? So it's not to say that what you're saying is not true because there's a lot of there's a lot of truth inside of that. But it's more in the sense of how do we balance out that you're saying that mold is deeply connected to a lot of these things, allergies, sinuses, other stuff, in comparison to all the other insults that the body is going to be going through and the experts who are advocating for that

particular area. I love it. Good point. I think a lot of times we take things out of context. and, you know, part of why I started off with I've run down a lot of rabbit holes is because I have. You know, at one point, I was obsessed with, you know, 100% gluten-free, dairy-free, get rid of sugar. And I'm not saying that those things are good. So people should avoid sugar and they should reduce gluten and dairy because they do cause problems.

At one point, I was obsessed with MTHFR and methylation to the point where I was injecting myself with B-12 injections, eating, like, taking, I think, at one point, like 10,000 micrograms or 10 milligrams of folate because I thought that would fix me. And I would do that to my patients too. And like, people would go along with me. None of those things ever added up in that kind of a way. For the patients that you were seeing. For the patients, clinically. Like, every now and then, it would work. But it wasn't a slam dunk. And it certainly wouldn't explain all of the weirdness that I was seeing. And I'll give you examples. Like, I, I, I was, I still focus a lot on the gut.

Don't get me wrong. I still do the probiotics, you know, the immunoglobulins, all this fancy stuff to fix the gut. In all my kiddos with eczema allergies, gastrointestinal issues, growth problems, I would do all of these things for them, let's say, 10 years ago. 20 or 30% of the time it would work well. 67% of the time, it was marginal at best or didn't produce much results. When you look at certain things, like for instance, let's say glyphosates and pesticides, it's not to say that these things are good, and it's not to say that they don't cause problems. They do cause problems. They're very problematic.

Now, you have to understand the degree of exposure to understand how much harm these things can cause. in ordinary everyday life, so those of us that live in suburban, you know, city environments, outside of our food supply, our exposure levels are pretty low. Now, if you lived in an agriculture area. Specifically, you're talking about pesticides and glyphosites. Right. Okay. Now, you may be spraying some around your house.

You may live near a golf course. Now, in that kind of a setting, let's say your house is here, golf course is. golf courses here every day they're coming along spraying pesticides. Or I have one deer family where I believe they live in Idaho. And it turns out literally across the street from them, there is a farm. And, you know, we kept looking and I was like, is this mole toxins? Because this poor guy had all kinds of awful things happening. Gastrointestinal issues, immune reactivity, gut falling apart, mitochondrial markers all over the place. And we kept searching. Their house was actually pretty clean until the mom's like, could it be the farm? I'm like, so we checked his glyphosate

levels and they were like off the charts, like higher than what I had ever seen in any of my other patients. There are families that drink well water and their well water is contaminated with all kinds of things, including potentially heavy metals. So it's not to say that these things aren't problems. It's to say that in context, most ordinary people don't have enough exposure to these things to the point where they become the primary causative factor. Unless potentially they're eating a diet of primarily ultra-processed foods where you have significant concentration. But again, what you're talking about mostly is like healthy-ish families that are already

off ultra-processed foods. They're not dealing with like deep socioeconomic stuff that is like preventing the basic core function of them being able to, you know, show up as a healthy, person in a dated basis. So again, we're talking about like healthier families and that's the statement that you're related to. Exactly. And these are the families that I care for. Right. And I mean, sadly, these are also families that, you know, from across the country are reaching out in high number saying we've done everything. We've done everything. We've cut out sugar. We've cut out gluten. We've got out this. We're doing probiotics. We're eating organic. We've done

this. Nothing is working. What the heck is going on? So it's in that context is that, really the statement, yes. Yeah. So going back to it, and this is where I feel like we can contextualize and personalize this topic, is that, you know, your original statement in my 14 years of experience as an integrative pediatrician, nothing has caused a greater concern as mold. Again, if we zoom out, we see, again, for the population as a whole, for most kids, the biggest issues are going to be obesity. Not that mold can't play a role in that type, you know, two diabetes, you know, aka what was used to be called, you know, juvenile diabetes, etc. So those things are still there.

But again, we're talking about healthier families whose kids have tried and the families have tried and the parents have tried a lot of different things. It's still not working for them. And this is where you're like, you know, you're a clinician that's kind of like waving their hands and a doctor is waving their hands and saying, guys, listen, I don't know how. bad this issue of mold is, but I can tell you it's a lot worse than what we thought it was. We need to pay attention to this a lot more than what we're doing currently in our treatment protocols. 100%. I think this problem is bigger than what most people can imagine. I think it's probably

bigger than what I can even imagine. And I think as we start as a community to really dial into this, we will be surprised at the very least in terms of what we find. It was probably a year ago that I reached out to my mentor, Dr. Nathan, because I was at a point where I was going not crazy, but I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. And I reached out to him. I'm like, Neil, I'm finding it everywhere. I'm finding it caused so many different things. Like, am I just losing it? Like, am I becoming delusional? He's like, no, no, welcome to my world. And And Neil Nathan, you know, God bless him. He's the reason why I gained this awareness. He's been at this for 10 to 15 years. Specifically the topic of mold and kids? Specifically the topic. Well, he's an adult practitioner, but he also treats, you know, some children who have been affected. But he is one of the grandfathers of, you know, the mold community. He, Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker, there's a handful of guys that started this entire movement 10 to 15 years ago. And, you know, I reached out to him.

at a certain point because the more I learned, the more I look, the more I found. And I reached out to him saying, like, am I just losing it? Is it that I've become distorted or is this actually real? And am I finally seeing what's there? And he's like, no, this is what's there. So I want to talk about homes, you know, testing for mold. And we're going to continue to go down this thread and everything of that. first I'd love for you to maybe think about and kind of putting you on the spot but a case study

of a patient you know a young kid that you worked with whose families had tried a lot of different things ultimately you came to the understanding that mold was a central part of what was going on with them and then after treating it you know what did their life look like you know sort of give us a little bit of a before and after case study if one comes to my mind of a patient. Several come to mind. Yeah. So that little girl that I was, that I brought up every night clawing herself.

Because of eczema. Because of eczema. Severe, severe, whole body, head to toe, like scaly, itchy, intense eczema, bleeding. She was on multiple different medications to try to control it. And every night, literally the mom was like, yeah, she would wake up. three to five times a night just because of her itching. And we would have to literally be there to restrain her because she would itch so badly to the point where she would actually cause herself to bleed. The mom is actually a health care provider. So she had already done every imaginable

gut healing protocol, food elimination. They're working with this amazing immunologist in Long Beach, Dr. Rendawa, who is the country's top. allergy desensitization expert, and he was trying to guide them. So they were doing, I mean, they were literally doing everything humanly possible to try to address this. The only thing they had not done was use a biologic agent. So using the hardcore immune suppressants to shut down her immune system. And the mom, you know, appropriately was like, I don't know if I wouldn't put my six-year-old

on a biologic agent to shut down her immune system. It turns out that in their wonderful home with this beautiful, built-in fridge. It turns out that the way that fridge was installed, there was some kind of issue with humidity being trapped in the back of that fridge. And that fridge happened to have literally, that mom showed me a picture, happened to have black mold on the entire backside of the fridge. And every time the fans were running, it was pumping mold toxins into the entire environment. They also had a few other small but significant leaks. Fast forward, they got the heck out of there. mediated, replaced the fridge, got everything fixed. Within two to three weeks of leaving that

environment, that little girl that was clawing herself with multiple different medications to try to control the allergy reactions, the itching stopped for the most part, like by 90%. The mom is like, we were waking up three to five times a night because of this itching. Now maybe two or three times a week, she'll wake up once to scratch herself. Fast forward, another, I think it was another three or four months. We started the detox, did a few things. Her eczema that was perpetually inflaming her entire body was improved by 50, 60 percent to the point where she now had normal patches of skin, and she's continuing to heal since then. Wow. Another example that just recently happened, there was another poor guy, probably seven, eight years of age.

intense brain inflammation. So aggression, destructive, high anxiety, like just literally losing it to the point where the parents were like starting to really struggle. He was getting kicked out of school, like social life, a mess, like the severe pans pandas. We did some testing. Sure enough, he had, in him we did a blood test. He had very intense immune reactions against the mold. I told him, You guys probably have mold, get it tested. Inspector came. It turns out that in their older style home that they were renting, the air conditioning somehow was set up to suck air in from the subfloor. So, you know, the house sits on this platform.

So it was sucking air in from beneath the home. And the way the drainage was set up, like water constantly was draving into that subfloor. So that subfloor was actually heavily mold contaminated. It was like a greenhouse with just mold constantly growing. And every time they were running their furnace, moldy air was getting sucked in, being blown into the house, on top of also a few other leaks. They left the house. And I think it was within three or four weeks with a few anti-inflammatories,

60, 70 percent of the aggression, anxiety, losing it, started calming down. I've had kiddos with severe asthma. every time the kid would get a cold would end up in the ER despite being on inhaled steroids. Like, as holistic as I want to be, in those cases, I'm like, you've got to put him on steroids because everything else. And we did the gluten-free, dairy-free, gut protocol, et cetera. We did all of that. With the steroids, every time he would get sick, he would still end up in the ER because his

breathing would get so bad. Turns out that they had mold. They fixed the mold, got rid of it, eliminated. Within two or three months, all of a sudden, the kid that was ending up in the air, the ER with every cold, now suddenly was having a mild asthma reaction, a little albuterol, didn't even need steroids, and asthma was improved. And we've had cases of ADHD. We've had cases of, you know, growth problems I'm still working on. Those are harder not to crack, but a lot of other kids with weird issues have started improving. I'll give you another example that just came to my

mind. A beautiful little at the time when I started working with her five-year-old. exhausted all the time, like literally would would struggle to move. And the parents would like get her to take her for walks, complaining all the time. Big mood issues, anxiety, reactions, not socializing well in school, constantly overwhelmed, constantly having meltdowns. It turns out in their home, they brought on two inspectors, two mold inspectors. Both mold inspectors said, you guys don't have any mold. Your house is clean. Everything is fine. We don't know what the heck you're talking about. And I kept pestering them to the point where the dad is like, we're about to fire you. Like, you're totally offline, but fine, I'll bring in the inspector that you want. Inspector that I suggested came. Turns out that the window in the little girl's room, the rest of the house was fine. The window in the little girl's room, the inspector found just a little water staining in one of the corners, opens up the wall.

The entire wall in her room contaminated with mold and her bed was literally butting up against that moldy wall. They fixed it. Fast forward a year and a half. Detox did a bunch of things. Now without supplements, the same little girl that was exhausted all the time didn't want to really do much is now athletic, actually playing competitive soccer and kicking butt. Her resiliency, her vitality. her vitality is just off the charts.

So the point where it's like, the mom is like, I don't recognize the former version of my daughter because my daughter is so different. The anxiety, the social issues where she was constantly getting overwhelmed in school, would constantly want to go play by herself away from the other kids, gone. The irritability, the agitation that the family would see gone, literally just transformed. And if I didn't see this in these kids, if we did not see this kind of transfer, I wouldn't be here. I mean, I probably would have given up because it would have just been so depressing. The most beautiful part of this conversation is if we actually take the time to look for the exposure and we find it and address it and treat it, the transformations, at least in the kids, I can't speak about the adults that I see in the kids are, I mean, breathtaking. They're in the most beautiful things that I've ever seen. And it is the whole reason why I'm here having this discussion. Wow. It's a powerful sharing of stories of people whose lives have completely turned around. And I can understand how that gives you not only as a doctor, but as a parent yourself, this feeling of like, if I don't speak up and do something about this, not saying I have all the answers, right? Because it's very clear that you're very, you're very clear. Like, look, I have a part of the equation and I need help. Like I need more and more people, parents, doctors, researchers. We need to look in this. I can.

completely see how this is a topic that you have decided that you want to be an advocate for. So thank you for that. Thank you. Okay, a couple things that I want to pull apart that you shared there that, you know, pull the threat on a little bit, not pull apart, pull the threat on. One of the biggest challenges, and we've had people on the podcast talk about this previously, but I'd love to bring it up again in this context. One of the biggest challenges when people move into a home or even an apartment or a condo that they're renting, is most municipalities around the U.S. and in North America, there are real estate inspectors that are brought in to look and make sure a building is up to code and that the buyer who takes

it over or the renter who's about to go in is often gets a signed letter stating that there's no known mold as one aspect. Some places also have some things around asbestos and lead and other things in California especially. Talk about the process. with the way that the real estate world and especially inspectors are often incentivized not to go looking for mold that could be an issue in in the home, right? Like, because it goes back to like the FDA thing. You know, people say, well, the FDA should be looking out for mold and they have all these regulations about making sure that mold doesn't end up in food.

Well, we have that in real estate, but tell us why it might be broken. So I don't know. I mean, I think in some cases it is incentivized. And there are probably landlords and other people that intentionally don't want to find it. So they've probably found an inspector that intentionally just doesn't look for it. I've heard that actually that's way more the norm, that if your business is an inspector and you start to develop a reputation as finding the little bit of mold that actually could be a lot of an issue, people stop using you because your name is. out there, especially if the person who hires you is usually the buyer or the real estate agent themselves. It's not like the families are often hiring you unless that the family goes and finds somebody independently. Well, I've actually, so that's the area that I know best. So I can't really speak to that.

Push back and share what it is. I mean, I mostly work with the families. And I can tell you that the vast majority of the mold inspectors that they hire. are generally unaware of how to even really find the mold. So at least in my naive perspective, and I could be totally naive about this and missing part of the picture. I won't deny that.

From my naive perspective, what I see is that a lot of mold inspectors don't even have the training or awareness to really go looking for it. Agreed. Because they'll come in, and I mean, I have some families that have, you know, $5 million,

dollar beautiful homes in the nicest area you can possibly imagine. And inspectors have come in, they're like, your house is perfect. I don't know what you're talking about. Because there's nothing visible. There's nothing visible. And it turns out that one, in one case, one of the eight air conditioning units in the home happened to have been plumbed incorrectly and happened to be accumulating a lot of moisture on those condenser coils. And that air conditioning unit, I was collecting that moisture, which then meant the entire unit became moldy, was pumping out mold into the bedroom of the kids, one of whom was having all kinds of weird allergy issues and the other kids were having like their liver enzymes were being elevated. So that's one example where the house looked perfect. It turns out the one air conditioning unit that was impacting these kids, which the other inspectors did not look for, was contaminated.

And in defense of inspectors and people who are brought in to look for this, also because the families themselves and the realtors are not educated about it, if an inspector all of a sudden gives you a bill that's like two times or three times what the norm is because they really went out of their way to look for it. Who's all going to pay for it unless they're educated that like, hey, listen, I want you to do a super freaking thorough job and I'm willing to pay for it. Yeah, yeah. And like that piece of it, so there's the unawareness, right? There's the lack of understanding that these exposures can cause such a big problem. So there's really lack of incentive for a lot of inspectors to be really hardcore. And a lot of the inspectors that I've talked to because one or two of them, I finally got on the phone. I'm like, dude, why are you not being more aggressive?

And the guy said that, well, we're trained to look based on OSHA standards for mold. And what are the OSHA standards? The OSHA standards is basically if your ceiling is about to collapse because there's so much water damage or you check a wall and the wall has so much moisture there that the moisture meter is off, then you can say, well, there's probably leak over there. Let's open it up and check. So they're looking for really high, scary levels of water contamination and secondarily mold. And that is the standard, the government standard that's been set.

things need to be so bad before they flag. Yes. What they're not looking for are health-related levels of mold. And part of that is up until 15, 20 years ago, we didn't even know to look for lower levels of mold, right? So this entire conversation is so new, just like how most integrative doctors don't have the awareness to look for it, right? So it's not even on their radar.

They're not even looking and picking apart their tests to be like, cut, you know, those white blood cells on this test that I did, that's weird. I don't know why it is. Maybe I should look at it further. It's not even, as you said, in the zeitgeist, so it's not in the zeitgeist of the mold inspectors. It's not in the consciousness of the medical community and the holistic community. And because of that, the bar is, if you want to say, set so low in terms of worrying or looking about it that we're missing it all the time. And then there's Whereas the other piece of it, which is finding mold is sometimes an epic pain in the rear end. Because it's not always obvious.

Most of the times it isn't obvious. It's not. 80, 90% of the time it's not obvious at all. It's not like you can look and see something. It's actually hidden in the wall in a way where there's literally one little clue. And unless you were obsessively looking for that one clue, you would miss it. It's a pipe that's in the wall. it's leaking at one joint that it's mended on.

And that just has been leaking for three, four years. And there's a whole mold spore underneath. It's a HVAC unit or it's an air conditioner that in the front looks good, but in the back is leaking, but you can't see it. You know, it's a refrigerator like the example that you gave. It's so many different situations that it could be. And it really takes somebody train. Yeah.

So when you go and you're trying to advocate for these families and in some cases getting on their nerves in a good way to try to make sure you help them get on the root of this issue, how have you gone about finding inspectors that actually know what they're doing? So there are good inspectors out there. I mean, there are highly trained sensitive inspectors out there. And like one organization, ISEAI, if I got it correctly, International Society for environmentally acquired illness is one database where there's actually inspectors that are highly borderline paranoid about mold. And if you find someone in their database, they're going

to find it. Because it's really hard to find some of those people, my general approach is for families to use these funny little DNA tests. They're called ERME's ERMIs. And there's several companies that have them out there. And basically what these ermies do is you take a little swifter pad, you go and just dust your home, and then you send that dust to the laboratory. And the laboratory actually runs a DNA probe on that dust, and they look to see if there's any high levels of certain molds. And then they'll report back to you that X amount of these molds are present in the dust sample. And it turns out that for 250 bucks, that's actually a fairly accurate way to look. And within, and if you want, I'm happy to give you in the notes or families can, I was taught basically to look for specific types of mold.

So like stack of botrys, ketonium, globue, something or other, some of these molds are highly specific to indoor contamination because you can, if you leave your door or window open, you can get mold to come from the outside. And it turns out that in these Ermi tests, the total number that they give is useless. And if you look at it, you're like, oh, my God, my house is so contaminated. No, it's because dust from your garden came in. But there are specific molds that don't grow outside because they're very finicky. They like, you know, air condition, climate controlled environments. They like to be comfortable. And these molds happen to only grow inside the house.

And if you know to look for those molds, then the accuracy of this test actually goes up quite a bit. So that's my general rule in terms of guiding families. And they do that. Oh, no, no. I was going to say, yeah. So what I'm hearing from you in my experience was all to talk about in a second is that not all molds are problematic, right? There's plenty of molds that are not an issue that are just going to be part of just

living in, you know, the world. But there are known strains that are the most problematic. And that's the ones that we have to be most paying attention to. And then there's probably ones in the middle that correspond with a child or a family members symptoms that somebody can help them unpack to see, is it something that's impacting them? Yeah. Are there any tests that you feel comfortable to mention or for us to include in the link of the show notes, companies that you've used before?

In terms of the early tests that are there? Like, are there ones that are there that you regularly use? Is there a brand or anything like that? Yeah, absolutely. And I have no affiliation with any of these guys. So envirobiomics is one company that actually does a good test, and they're probably the least expensive, $250 for the test. There's another one called Micometrics that has a good test. And then Real Time Labs has an Ermi test, and I think for another $150, you can actually add the checking for mold toxins. So they can actually check not just for the presence of molds, but for the presence of certain

toxins in the environment. So if you want to get really fancy, that's available. Those are the three. And there's, I think, a few others out there. Those are the three that I generally recommend to families. I've hired inspectors that come in and kind of do an Ermi test, right? Collect dust from different rooms. And I found that to be quite an expensive process. And I didn't know about these at-home tests. And then there's a guy that I follow on Instagram.

I think it goes by Brian the Mold guy. I'll link to his show notes below. I think he created one. And I know affiliation, you know, just talk to him a couple times on Instagram, see his content. He created one called the Dust Test. I think I sent it to you just like, hey, what do you think of this test is good? And I recently ran that test in my condo here in Los Angeles to see because one of the things that I'm just proactively doing from having friends like you in my life is that as my wife and I gear up to want to have a baby sometime this year or next year, I want to make sure that the environment that we're in is best suited for that. And, you know, tests is a couple hundred bucks, which I realize is a big spend for a lot of people.

so I'm not saying at all that this is an affordable thing that everybody can get a chance to do. But we got back the results from that. And we came in about what would be, I have a question for you on this, which we'll come to later on. We came in about average, right? No crazy levels of mycotoxins inside of the home. But there are some issues of some potentially problematic mold that you have to kind of backtrack, maybe work with your practitioner to see, like, is anybody having these types of symptoms? and some light level remediation to go and investigate like where is this coming from and kind of address it.

Right. So all in all, a better case scenario because mold is so problematic and is in so many buildings that are there, it gave us the feeling at least that, okay, at least in this context and the test are not perfect, as you've mentioned before, it feels like great, a place that we can stay at for the next few years and at least, you know, feel comfortable to raise a child in when it comes to the top. topic of mold specifically. Yeah. And I think what you touched on is the most important piece.

We don't want perfection. You shouldn't expect to have a mold-free home. That doesn't exist. And every home has some amount of mold. The thing that we need to be mindful of is if there's scary levels of contamination that are causing physiological harm. And, you know, family send me, like, there are armies and they're like, oh my God, this is so bad.

And I look at him, I'm like, no, you guys are fine. We don't, as we come to that understanding where we can say, okay, like, yeah, this isn't bad. This is normal. That's not where the problems are coming from. Every single one of the cases that I have seen, it wasn't just a little bit. It was actually when you really came to understand in that one given environment, in one, that one room or whatever else, there was actually very, very high levels of mold that were then causing the issue. And as far as the cost goes, so I want to push back on that a little bit. Please, please do.

Because 250 bucks is a good bit of money. How much money do we spend on coffee? Like the average person in a month, how much money would they spend, presuming you're a coffee drinker? How much money would an average person spend on coffee? 100 bucks, 150 bucks? If they have coffee outside the home? If they have coffee outside the home.

it's not to downplay the fact that 200 bucks is still, you know, a good bit of money. But when we look at what the potential implications are if we don't do that investigation and we don't look for these things, that's where I start saying like, gosh, you know, that investment is worth a lot because I love actually where you're going with, you know, being, preparing for, you know, God willing, your little one to join you, because if we did that for everyone and, you know, we found the homes that are like, holy Jesus, this house is fully, fully contaminated. Let's clean it up. Let's detox the parents. I don't know if we can even begin to comprehend the amount of disease that we could potentially prevent. And the savings from not having

to treat that. Yes. And in our case, my wife and I are renting the condo building that we're in now because a big part of it's we're trying to decide where we just we just got married last year so that's number one so we wanted a place for you know we both moved out of our old places wanted a place for us and we're trying to figure out where do we want to live in l.A. right like where do we want to live that is the right mixture of all the things that we have and being close to friends etc other stuff so the other thing about it is that um is we're also you know trying to become more aware of this world because when we're ready to buy a home I want to make sure that we have all the testing that we need before we're moving that home because remediation,

if you end up buying a home and you really are married to staying there, if it has really bad mold, you're talking about, especially in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, you know, Chicago, San Francisco, all those things like that. If you don't look for mold in the right way ahead of time, you could be hundreds of thousands of dollars in if there's a major mold issue. Yeah. Which is a lot of money when you compare that to like spending a couple hundred bucks for an army test.

Yeah. It can be very expensive. And sadly, we've had families that have had to spend that. I mean, I'll give you an example of one of our dear close family members within our extended family. The daughter was having weird hormonal issues, cyclone, problems, anxiety, a bunch of things. Initially, I didn't even make the connection, but then one of her tests was a little off. So then I started kind of probing the other family members.

The two boys both have attention learning problems. One of them, you know, diagnosed as full ADHD, the other one kind of borderline. And then the mom's liver enzymes were elevated, even though she's healthy, but when you looked at her labs, they were fully elevated. And then the dad, who is this robust, strong man who in his early 60s three years ago had way more energy than I did, to the point where I'm like, dude, I don't know how you have this much energy, but you're ridiculous. Over the last two to three years, I saw him decline to the point where I could see that he was exhausted all the time. And finally, when I started to piecing things together, I started hunting them, like, you guys need to check, you guys need to check,

you guys need to check. Sure enough, like multiple areas of their home were contaminated to the point where it turned into a hundred plus thousand dollar remediation, air conditioning you need to be replaced. This part of the wall needed to be replaced, so forth and so on. And it was, I mean, it was not an easy conversation to have with them because of the cost and the burden. But ultimately, when they looked at it and they saw how much all of their lives were being impacted. And, you know, the part that makes this conversation sad for me is it's not just about the immediate health consequences, especially in the kids, and using this guy as an example, if a child has exposure early on and that child loses the ability to regulate their emotions,

which I see all the time. And these kids just explode and they're impulsive and they can't, they're distracted and they're just off. And whether we label them as pans and pandas and these kids that have brain inflammation and aggression and reactivity, or it's more of just a classic ADHD but like hyper distractible can't focus. And a lot of times these kids also have brain fog. So weird areas of like working memory are affected. And working memories like kind of are our brains ram, right? It takes information in, we process it and does something with. And it turns out the math is one subject that happens to be highly dependent on that. So like a lot of

times these kids hate math because of that. When these kids have this impact and they start them thinking of themselves as well, I'm just, I'm just dumb. And I've had kids that have told me, like, do you think I'm dumb? I feel dumb. I am dumb. And then, that stays with them long enough to the point where now that becomes their identity. I am a dumb person. I am a kid who can't learn. Or I am the bad kid who can't manage his emotions. What's really sad, what's really, really, really sad is these kids actually start giving up. They don't want to go to college. Statistically, this has all been shown, where two to three, ADHD, more severe cases of ADHD, two to 300 fold higher risk of not going to college.

Kids who have these oppositional behaviors, two to 300 fold increase of incarceration because these kids can't manage themselves. And ultimately their self-esteem goes to hell. Ultimately, their image of self goes to hell. And the impact that this has in their life and like why I do everything I do is because is when I look at this, and I look at just not just the immediate suffering, but ultimately the trajectory that these children are put on. In the case of my family, one of the kids, smart as hell.

Like, the things that he figures out on his own is insane. But he ultimately gave up wanting to go to college because he could not sit still and learn worth a damn. And basically, he's like, college isn't for me. I'm not the learning type. Like, I'm going to go do other stuff. And that is what unfolds in a lot of these kids' lives where they just, they give up. They're like, I can't manage myself.

So I'm just a bad kid. And then a little thing happens in their family and all of a sudden that kid goes and does something really stupid ends up in prison. Or these kids give up on college, give up on learning and drop out of school. And ultimately their entire future is put on a path. because of this exposure. And I worry about this and all the kids that I take care of because I can see what they're experiencing and the older kids articulate to me. Do you think I'm bad?

Do you think I'm mean? Do you think I'm whatever or dumb or stupid or can't learn? And for kids to use these descriptors of themselves, like, it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. And that's why we need to have these discussions and why we need to have this awareness. No, I appreciate you bringing that up because it's like the, how do you put a price on the untapped potential and also the current human suffering of children who just want to be loved and show up in this world and, you know, be a positive contributor, a good citizen,

want to self-actualize just like anybody else, but they genuinely, not only do they feel like they can't. Maybe they feel like they're not meant to be because they fundamentally feel like they're broken. Yeah, they do feel they're broken. I want to come back to this pathway of treatment and you working with families and kids. A huge part of that is what we just talked about, which is the component of exploring environmental toxins, specifically mold and seeing what the exposure is inside of the home. And a big part of that is finding an inspector or using it at a home test to get a sense of how bad is a situation. It's not about being perfect. It's not about living a mold free home. In fact, there's a lot of molds that are not an issue. Probably some molds that are

beneficial to us that are out there that we just don't know about. But it's the particular strains that thrive in an indoor environment that we know are the most harmful. And then you match set up with the unexplained symptoms that especially kids are going with, right? And then hopefully people can find a practitioner or somebody, well, in that first pillar, hopefully they can find somebody that they trust and a lot of it is asking around, getting references, talking to the people, finding an inspector and maybe even somebody to help you remediate and knock on wood that it's light level remediation. Yeah.

Right. There's another aspect, which is once that's been figured out and the source. source has been addressed because no matter what you throw at a child especially all the good things you give them if they're not addressing with the source they'll continue to pour dirty water into the clean bathtub yeah and yet the water will never get clean again so the source has been addressed and now we can start addressing the root now you mentioned a lot of different conditions we've talked about ADHD we've talked about pandas we talked about irritable bowel syndrome we talked about mitochondrial histories, brain inflammation, whole host of things. But generally, can you talk

about how you start to think about the treatment side of things for a child once the source has been identified? How do you think about it? How do you approach it in terms of what do I need to bring in to help their body restore balance? So it's complicated, but it's not that complicated. You know, my general approach is during the time of the detox to first decrease the inflammatory load. So to whatever extent, you know, cut out pro-inflammatory foods, increase the healthy foods. As an example, I think like the diet Terry Walsh promotes the Walsh Protocol. Like her diet is actually brilliant because essentially what she has done is through diets and lifestyle start modulating, you know, detox pathways. inflammatory pathways, support the microbiome.

And these are all things that we want to do to whatever extent. Now, with certain kids that have these challenges, there's no way you can change their diet because they're so extremely picky that they will only eat a certain. It's a catch-22. The mold makes them more, mold exposes them to more micro toxins. That's another layer of burden on the body. Their sensory systems get thrown off and they just feel like there's certain things

they cannot eat. Yeah, exactly. So to what, why I say the diet first is if it's possible to change things, in some cases, you know the kids, like the kids with asthma and eczema that don't have sensory issues, they're pretty flexible and parents can do that. So with that said, the first thing is if there are behavioral issues, aggression, anxiety, sensory issues that you touched on, first thing you want to do is just calm things down. No affiliation with these companies.

two products that I have found to be helpful, and we can't obviously talk about medicine, but people should go talk to their doctor. There's a compound called Mirica or a product called Mirica. It's PEA, which is a egg fat-derived compound that's an anti-inflammatory. And it also has luteolin, which is this kind of polyphenol compound that happens to be really good at calming down mass cell activity and also calming down the microglia, which is where some of that behavioral inflammation comes from. So this is a supplement. This is supplement.

Like a powder that you would mix with water. They're capsules, but they're tasteless. You can just mix it into food, drink, applesauce, whatever. So in addition to the diet, which, you know, again, you're maybe removing as much as processed food, ultra-process food as you can. Yep. Sugar. For sure.

You're, like, greatly minimizing or having them focus on, like, natural forms of sugar from fruits and whole foods, getting away from concentrated sugars and juices and other things like that, right? where tolerable based on gut issues trying to increase a little bit more fiber especially if the kid isn't eating a lot of fiber what about fat and protein and prioritizing fat and protein on the on on the aspect of how important of those two things they're like healthier sources of fat and protein because a lot of the lot of the kids that I see that are in the space as a whole even if they're not dealing with these severe issues they're they're kind of carbotarians yes right they want to eat a lot of breads pastas other things like that they're not having a lot of of the healthier fats, and they're definitely probably under-eating on healthy sources of protein. Yes. So it's actually really interesting, the carbotarians, because they have weird insulin fluctuations. So a lot of times these kids, between the candida they have and God knows how candida

triggers carb cravings, but it seems to, anecdotally at least, between that and these weird insulin fluctuations that these kids have, that's part of the reason why a lot of these kids are so carb hungry. You know, they're constantly yo-yoing their blood sugar. So when possible bringing in clean healthy proteins, whether fish or even, you know, clean chicken, clean, you know, grass-fed beef, I think all of those things are amazing. Sometimes supplementing with omega fats, supplementing with phosphatil colon, and we'll touch on that in a second.

All of those things will be super, super outful. Got it. So diet was there. And then you brought in this other process. What was the name of it again? Mirica, M-I-R-I-C-A. Merica that you've found to be quite helpful. If there's inflammation.

If there's inflammation. If there's inflammation. Anxiety, irritation, et cetera, that's helpful. One of the things that these molds and mold toxins both do is they trigger mass cell activity. And that mass cell activity can cause some of the hyperactivity reactivity that we see because histamine modulates the nervous system. We'll touch on that if you want. But the other thing that mass cells do is they also drive a lot of other issues within the gut. It turns out that these DAO enzymes, diamine oxidase, something or other, I can't remember the last part of it.

These DAO enzymes actually help bring down histamine levels. And that can reduce congestion. It can improve eczema. it also calms down the behavioral issues. So I've had kids, you know, the parents are like, oh my God, this thing is insane. Like hyperactive kid couldn't sit still for a darn like literally those kids that are constantly touching. I'm sure you've seen them.

Like they literally can't sit still constantly moving. Put them on just this DAO enzyme. And within a week or two, 50, 60, 70 percent improvement in the hyperactivity because it turns out histamine causes weird issues with the vestibular. system, which is our balance control. And because it distorts the balance control systems, that's why these kids are, you know, doing that all the time. As the histamine levels come down and that vestibular effect is also mitigated, that hyperactivity and reactivity also starts calming down. So the first thing is get the kids stable, get the kid into a calm place where they

can regulate. And then we move into the next phase of the detox. Got it. And I want to pause right here because part of what you're doing in your work of advocacy is because it's there's so few practitioners that are educating the space you're building an online community where parents who feel like if you're in this camp and your child has these unexplained symptoms and you feel like you're doing a lot of things right or you might even feel like you're doing everything right you've seen multiple people and you're trying to navigate this whole world of mold and toxin and environmental toxin exposure, but you don't feel like you know where to go. You and your team are building an online community where people join and they can communicate,

be in touch with other people that are there and get a little bit of support on better questions and possible interventions that they can then take back to their practitioners that they're working with. Is that a good way of saying it? It's a little bit more than that. So expand on it and then say the name, if you would. We're still going to talk about a few more things here, but I just thought this would be a good part as people are taking notes and writing it down. I just want to mention the fact that you know, you're building a community like this.

So yeah, tell us what more it is and obviously it's being built out in phases. Right. Right. So what's the name of it and tell us a little bit more about. It's called holistic minds. So W-H-H-H-H-H-H-M-D-S-M-D-S-M-M-S-M-S-M-D-com. So what don't. on me a few years ago as I was seeing these kids that are struggling. And literally, it was the

two kids that looked at me in the same week, the universe lined it up, two kids in the same week in my office. And both of them, you know, looked me dead in the eye. And they're like, do you think I'm bad? You know, in that moment when my heart got ripped apart and I wanted to start crying in front of the family, but I kept myself together, that's when I realized I had to do more. And, you know, I've got a very comfortable practice, so there's no reason for me to expand beyond that. But what I realized is there's way too many families that are really searching for answers and looking for solutions to understand why their children are struggling, whether it's severe ADHD or kids with neuroinflammation or other things.

And I started looking at, you know, how can I best contribute to this community? And it's amazing that there are so many training programs out there. But it turns out that you have to spend a lot of time and energy, you know, upwards of several years to finally get to a place where you can really understand how all of these things come together. And also because it takes so much damn time for practitioners like me to ask the several hundred questions that I do to understand ultimately what's going on, it becomes very costly. So it takes too long for the practitioners to get trained, which means there are too few practitioners ultimately in the domain of helping these families. And when these practitioners are there helping, it takes too much time for them to do their work to ultimately provide the service, which then makes the work expensive.

Because when you're spending an hour and a half per child every time you start a new encounter, you can only help so many people, right? When I stood back and really critically looked at what I do, I asked questions. I asked very, very weirdly specific questions. I then essentially do a pattern recognition on that, you know, data that I've gathered, right? And that's when it dawned on me like, well, Jesus, technology can do all of that. And that's what we're building. So essentially, it's an intelligent health information portal or a health information system.

And if you were to look at the next evolution in health search, that's what we're working to build. And to step back, like, how do you find health information? I mean, podcasts like yours are amazing, right? And that's why you do the work that you do to put good information out there. But if someone said, like, I have, you know, chronic fatigue, right? And you do a Google search. What does Google bring up? Whatever marketing, you know, website and whoever's learned how to game the Google crawlers to

put their website on top, that's what you get. So presuming someone is smart enough to follow you and listen to you and, you know, your curated conversations and others like you, it's really hard to find accurate health information and it's even harder to then understand if that health information is pertinent to you, right? So what we're looking to do is build a system that bridges that gap and helps families understand what's going on by asking very, very, very, very detailed questions. Like right now, our system asks upwards of 300 questions. So everything from the consistency of the child's poop,

have they ever gone swimming in a lake, have they been exposed to lime? So it goes way beyond just the mold. And through this, the system builds a very detailed blueprint about the child, the same way I do in my practice. And then through that, we run a pattern recognition kind of algorithm on to start understanding what are the areas that are out of balance. And then through that, guide people to the right treatments that are specifically tailored to that child to make an impact. Got it. And would you say because most of this podcast has been focused on the mold component,

you know, mold may be related to a lot of the things that these kids are going through, but even if it's not mold, still if a family is having unexplained symptoms and has maybe seen multiple practitioners, even in the holistic space, this is still a tool that could be supportive of that. Absolutely. Absolutely. The engine is being built to have a very robust mold set of suggestions. So essentially, the entire mold detox protocol that I have, anything that could be done,

you know, with supplements. So it doesn't have to be FDA regulated. We're building in. But ultimately, the goal is to empower patients with. with any doctor or health care provider of their choice to then be able to implement all of this stuff. So be able to navigate to the right area. And then once they navigate to the right area, understand which tests to order and understand what those tests mean and then implement the right treatment protocol to address that issue.

So we'll put the link to it in the show notes and people can find it through there and you know, they can look at it, check it out, see if they want to get a chance to sign up for right. Let's go back to treatment. Yes. For a second, right? So the first thing that you said on the second pillar that we're identifying of treatment was calming the immune system down and kind of like getting everything to like calm down a little bit by removing a lot of the inflammatory foods and sort of inputs that are there, sugars, et cetera, processed foods, including in some sometimes targeted supplements to also support that process. of calming the immune system down. You mentioned detox and sometimes having to incorporate that.

Is that the next thing that you want to go into? That is the next thing. And why it's important to calm the immune system down is to stabilize things. Because without that stability, the detox becomes astronomically harder. Whether, you know, the kid has an allergy issue or eczema. Like, I've had kids where the families were a little over-eager to do the detox and suddenly the kid is like in a severe eczema flare or the kids who have behavioral issues, they just all of a sudden go completely off their rockers. So you first need to put the foundation down and just stabilize the heck out of that system. So then you can move into the next phase. The next phase is one, you know, getting some probiotics on board, getting some things to support the gastrointestinal

tracks. So probiotics, sometimes the immunoglobulins, you know, SBI protect, whatever people like. and then you start getting into supporting the liver. So using sulforaphate, using resveratrol, curcumin. All of these support glucoronidation, which actually happens to be one of the primary liver pathways that the mycotoxins detoxify from. So giving a little bit of support to the liver and specifically those pathways to allow the liver to start detoxifying. Because one of the things we didn't talk about is what seems to happen, at least in a lot of the kids that I see, is that at a certain point, they lose the ability to detoxify.

And I've had families where they moved, there was early exposure in the first two to three years of life. The kid is now six, seven years of age. And the parents are like, how the hell did that exposure still cause problems now? And it turns out that certain detox pathways appear to become compromised so the child's ability to push these mycotoxins out of their body actually starts becoming compromised. And we see that because sometimes when we do the urine moultoxin tests, the initial test doesn't look awful at all. Like you can barely see anything in the parents like, are you sure it's a problem?

I'm like, yes, we do the test, we start detoxing. we do another test six to 12 months later, and the levels on that secondary test are like through the roof, even though they moved out of or they're no longer in a moldy environment because the body starts detoxifying once we give it that much. So you're essentially saying that early exposure to these molds and mycotoxins puts such a burden on the body that in some cases the liver is not operating to its fullest capacity. and so even if that exposure has been removed, you're now in a place in position where without some sort of support and resetting of the body's detoxification pathways, it would still be operating at a suboptimal level. Yes.

And it's not just early exposure. This is what makes mycotoxins really spooky. It could just be prolonged exposure. Like I know that a lot of the adult providers that I work with, they see it in their adult patients, that they've lost the ability to detoxify. Because the microbiome is important in clearing micro toxins. Studies have demonstrated that. So when the microbiome becomes distorted, that causes one layer of incapacity to detoxify.

And then the liver itself, God knows what are their among degrees. When these pathways are compromised, so one thing that the mycotoxins do is they compromise NRF2 and certain pathways that are necessary for our ability to produce antioxidants. So our innate detoxification pathways or our innate pathways that produce antioxidants for us, all of those systems start becoming impacted, compromised to whatever extent. And we don't really understand to whatever extent. But what we do know is early exposure or long enough exposure can, in the wrong person, So the person who's genetically vulnerable, which is probably about 25% of the population, in those individuals, certain pathways get shut down.

You get toxicity and that toxicity can stay with the person until there's the intervention to clear this stuff out. Got it. Like you said, there's a lot of personalization, but they're zooming out are common themes amongst all these children that you're working with. So calming the immune system down, getting everything to be at a place where it's ripe for being able to go through detoxification. Is there a next phase after that? Yeah. Then you bring in binders carefully. Which is part of the detoxification process to help the body get rid of these things and help the gut be able to process it and the liver process it and get rid of it all.

Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, of all of the things that I've done to detoxify, I've never seen. such reactivity to binders. So, you know, at one point I was doing heavy metal detoxes. I've done things to myself and others. And I would never, one, see progress as fast as I see in these kids. And two, I would never see such big implosions. I'll give you an example. There's one amazing little girl, the little girl that I told you, she was so hypersensitive to clothing that she wasn't even willing to wear underwear. For that little girl, we put her on a tenth of a capsule of

phosphatil colin, which is about 25 milligrams. She was reacting to 25 milligrams as phosphatil colin. I don't know if you, I'm sure you've taken phosphatil colon. You can take grams of it and if you're healthy, nothing happens to you, right? Maybe a little loose bowel, that's it. 25 milligrams of phosphatil colonel was causing her to completely flip out of her head. we put her on, I think, 10 drops, 10 drops of bentonite clay. And I'll take tablespoons of bentonite clay myself. Nothing happens to me. Ten drops of bentonite clay, if that 10 drops went to 15 drops, started losing her, losing it.

These kids, especially that are that toxic or that sensitive. But as far as the detoxification, detoxification, goes, slowly we bring in certain things, bentonite clay being probably the least expensive and most readily available and also broad-acting mycotoxin binder that's out there. So we layer in, or at least I layer in, you know, the bentonite clay, let that settle in, bring in a little bit of charcoal, for instance, let that settle in, then even add a little bit of chlorella, and build a binder profile that seems to be appropriate for that child and then let those binders stay on board for, you know, probably upwards of six months.

And the reason that we're walking through this and feel free to expand or correct the way that I'm saying this is not that we want parents at home to start throwing random things of their kid. We definitely don't want that. Do not do that. Do not give your kids these things. Do not try to put them on a detoxification protocol. This is really something that an experienced practitioner would be, you know, preferably a pediatrician, right?

and, you know, I know there's not a ton of integrative pediatricians that are out there, but, you know, there are some. And then your hope is with the tool that you're building, with the platform that you're building that we have linked to inside of the show notes, that there can be some guidance that you're providing to families and practitioners who, a trained practitioner who knows what to look out for, but may not know the best practices, can get guidance on possible entry points into this process, right? So just anybody who's listening, don't be throwing these things randomly at your kids. You've got to work with a trained practitioner. And the hope is that your tool that you and your team have built can be a supportive process in that. Right. To give people and their provider the kind of template and guidance. Right, with the holistic minds.

Yeah. Yeah. So after the binders, is there a next phase or a next component? There is. So quite a bit of the time we find that ultimately there's fungal, colonization. So the medical community, and I've even started reaching out, I had reached out to a lot of these microbiome specialists like researchers, you know, the consensus, existing consensus is you can't get fungal colonization in the gut because the normal, healthy adult microbiome prevents that. What we don't understand and what we don't have data on is, one, if there's long enough exposure, in the case of some adults that live in his home for a decade, or in the case of the little kids who have not yet formed their microbiome, what happens in that case? From what we best understand,

and we don't yet totally know this, what we best understand is, at least in the case of my little kids and perhaps the adults based on Niels and other people's work, is that at a certain point, people get moldy themselves. So through inhalation and, you know, the molds being in the foods and whatever else, ultimately these molds get into the gastrointestinal track. And there's a point where the microbiome can no longer resist the colonization. So aspergillus in particular, plus or minus the disruption and causes the candida, they start taking hold and they actually start causing a secondary problem. So once we've got the binders on board and these mycotoxins are moving out of the body. What I do for a lot of the kids is herbal or

pharmaceutical antifungals start coming into the picture with the intention to slowly reduce the load of these fungal elements within the gastrointestinal tract and sometimes within the sinuses. So you've got to squirt stuff up in there to get rid of it. Yeah, I've heard from Dr. Dale Bredesen, who does a lot of work in the space of Alzheimer's research, that he was seeing, again, And this is just his clinical experience, although they have done a few studies on this, but not on this particular component. They've done studies in the space of, they have written his last book. It's called the first survivors of Alzheimer's, right?

We all know survivors of cancer. You know, he feels that he's documented some of the first survivors of Alzheimer's. And in his Bredeson protocol, this 13-point system, one of the things that is there for practitioners to look at when they're dealing with a patient that has, you know, early onset dementia or Alzheimer's is to look at mold spores that have been set up as colonies inside of the nasal passage. And he found that a lot of, you know, this is again in his words, a lot of his dementia patients had fungal and mold issues where they had to be treated in the nasal microbiome to address that and deal with it. And the mycotoxins there for these adults was one of

the things that was a contributor to their Alzheimer's or dementia. Isn't that crazy? Crazy. Obviously, it's very, you know, some people hear that aren't like, that sounds like hogwash, that's this, whereas the studies that, a lot of these situations, even your situation here is that part of the reason that you're here on this podcast is, first of all, we never know who's listening, not only families, but there is more research that's need in this space.

There's undoubtedly the connection and the animal models that are there. and understanding how toxic mold as one environmental toxin is on animals and a whole host of issues it causes out there. But sometimes when people say, well, show me the research. The thing they don't understand is if you study medical history, and I'm not going to say that I'm proficient in it or have a master's in it, but I love learning, reading articles and picking up some books. There's even a few books that are on here on this.

wall that I have in my studio that talk about medical history, medical error. One of the things that's classically there is that clinical practice is part of the research experience. As part of evidence-based medicine, sometimes that's a clinical trial, which could mean a randomized clinical control trial, it could be animal studies, this, that, but also clinical experience is part of evidence-based medicine. And it's often the first when it comes to topics that are super problematic, but a little bit fringed because a lot of people have not addressed them yet. Go look up the history of how handwashing became part of medical care. It was from my understanding, and I'll find, see if I can find an article on this and link to it,

there was a group of essentially what we would call now midwives, right, that were part of the process of helping doctors deliver babies that just saw through the scientific method that when they rinse their hands in this sort of alcohol type of solution versus when they just delivered the babies that were there, the mothers had less likely of, less likelihood of infection and other stuff. And I believe this was in Venice, Italy. And we can fact check and I'll link to it and I'll put inside the show notes. And the story is that doctors initially pushed back on that.

Like, okay, this thing that you're telling me there's this bacteria and that's making, they didn't even call it bacteria, then there's something, evil spirits, whatever it might be, is causing a situation where it's making people sick, they pushed back on it. And it was these, I don't know if they called themselves midwives at the time, but it was their first-hand clinical experience being in the situation, being in the trenches, saying something's going on. We may not understand it, but there's fucking something that's going on, right? And time and time again, clinical experience has been the thing that's ultimately led to

more attention in an area, attracts more funding, and then maybe we eventually have the clinical trials that we need to say that, you know, this is something that's out there. Yeah. Yeah. And we're certainly there with mold. And, you know, for people that that'll say, show me the science, if someone is willing to be open enough and, you know, with no bias, and that's how I entered this. Like I had zero bias. I was just like, let me find what the hell is out there.

If you go searching, it is actually mind blowing the amount of science that's there. The clinical sciences, looking at the effects of mycotoxins on the mitochondria. And then once you go into the mitochondria and say, well, how does that affect, you know, and then there's like mitochondrial experts. I don't know if you've gotten into that world a lot, but there are mitochondrial experts that talk about how the mitochondria can affect cognition and dementia and, you know, brain fog and other organ functioning. So the science is all there.

It hasn't yet come together. The dots necessarily haven't all been connected by somebody or some institution, but it's all there. It's all there. You know, the science between mycotoxins and neuroinflammation, the science between mycotoxins and neuronal apoptosis with brain cells dying. I mean, all of these things are there. They've already mapped all of this out. And there's a disturbingly large amount of scientific information, probably in the, you know,

tunes of thousands of papers, if you go looking for it. If someone says, well, there's not enough science, I can't believe it. you know, that's just someone being biased against this and not wanting to look at it. If someone just openly comes in and says, well, gosh, this seems weird. And right now we don't have a whole lot of good explanation for why some of these things happen, right? We don't have a whole lot of good explanation in terms of why, for instance, autism happens, not to say that molotoxins cause all of autism. We don't have a whole lot of good information in terms of why severe cases of asthma happen.

We know how to treat it with steroids, right, which, then causes these kids to not grow. But there's a lot of things when you really stand back, we don't really have any good explanations for why they're happening. The severe cases of ADHD, like there's no good explanation. Whereas once you start piecing the things together between mycotoxins trigger mass cells, which then cause histamine. Histamine disrupts the vestibular pathways. That causes these kids to be all over the place. And all, like, each of these little scientific points have all been mapped out. The papers clearly demonstrate these links. We just haven't gone A, B, C, D, E. Oh, geez, A, and E can be connected. And clinically, that's

what I've seen for sure. Is there anything else before we start to wind down and have some concluding thoughts for you? Is there anything else that you want to mention on the treatment side that are sort of important pillars that you think about, right? You talked about binders, detoxification, calming the immune system down, cleaning up the diet, removing all these inflammatory pathways that are making things worse. Is there anything else on that side that you want to get a chance to touch on? I think those are the key things. And I mean, there are certain fans, like for instance, phosphatilcholine happens to be a very important piece in the detoxification because we don't entirely understand what it does as it relates to molds. But what we do know

is that it can change part of the cell membrane and possibly through that start pushing mycotoxins out. We do know that it improves bile function. And one of the primary mechanisms with through which the body pushes mycotoxins out is actually in the bile. So little things we know about it, but like phosphatilcholine would be one more thing for me to mention if I was to say anything. And you'll use other supportive tools. You know, you have glutathione, sulfurophane, of course, zinc, probiotics, mitococtails. There's a whole list of things.

And again, an experienced practitioner is going to have a lot of different tools in the toolbox about how to put it together to then address that. child unique situation that they're going through. Yeah. And one of the fun things that we're building into the system, we're calling it our treatment engine, is because the system has such a detailed map of the child, so it can differentiate the child that has mold toxicity,

but also has mitochondrial errors, just based on the presentation and if the family has done testing. And through that, actually configure, treatment suggestions that the family with their provider can do because certain kids really do well with the mitochondrial cocktails, the kids that are run down, they're exhausted, so forth. You take the hyperactive, agitated kid and put them on a mitochondrial, they go nuts. So the system is being built to be intelligent enough. So the suggestion that it gives the families can use with their provider is going to be

detailed enough to the point where it's not like just a generic, like, here's the detox protocol for everyone, but the detox protocol actually changes based on each individual child's needs. And that's something that's there right now. It's something you're working on for the future. We're two to three months away from implementing the first version of that system. And I think that that's a great reminder that like when it comes to, I mean, technology can be such an incredible support system besides the fact that there's, first of all, there's not enough integrative pediatricians in the first place. There's so many people that are suffering.

There's a lot of people that don't even live nearby, even if they could see somebody, they don't live nearby somebody that's there. And any kind of tools that can make it easier to go down this rabbit hole for families is going to be super supportive. And because it's a major undertaking, right? You have a big team and everything like that that's working on it. Feedback, right? You're also looking for feedback.

If people go to holistic minds, they sign up, it's something that they want to do. They can give you feedback on how to make the system better as you ongoingly with your team try to make it a more supportive tool for parents to get to the root cause of why their kids are unfortunately suffering. Yeah. And that's part of what's been really cool with our initial beta users. The feedback and just valuable guidance they've given us has been so helpful. But our goal is to change part of the face of,

integrative in holistic functional medicine in the sense that we don't have enough really well-trained providers. There's a lot of people out there, but we need a lot more people to the point where one person said, you know, essentially we're looking to democratize holistic or functional medicine. And in a way, that's really what we're trying to do. To put this kind of information in the hands of so many people where if they've got the local pediatrician that's open-minded enough to say, you know what, shoot, that sounds absolutely crazy,

but I'll support you anyway, sure, because I want to see your kid do well. And there's so many doctors out there that just want to do good, right? They just want to help. They don't have the time. They sure as heck don't have the training, and they don't know how to look for these weird kinds of things. And by putting that kind of information in the hands of patients with their provider in helping, you know, the functional medicine providers that have a little bit of training, but they're like, I don't know how to hell to do this, but I want to help you. Or the person, the doctor, the conventional MD that says, God, your kid is really suffering, we've looked for everything.

We don't know what else to do. Sure, let's go down this rabbit hole. That's how we can make a lot of change. And that's how I see us transforming really the future of access to this kind of health information. and ultimately touching the lives of the millions. This isn't the conversation about a few thousand people. There are millions upon millions of families whose kids are struggling. There are 15 million kids in this country who have mental health disorders.

15 million. There are upwards of several hundred thousand to probably two million kids with severe mental health issues where these kids are falling apart, they're giving up. In order to impact that level of change, to bring that scale of change, we can't do that just through human-human interaction. Technology has to come into the picture, and technology has to augment the way people can access information where any health care provider, anywhere, regardless of how much training they have, as long as they're willing to be open to it, can suddenly become.

that person that supports the family, that's the only way I see us getting out of this. Yeah, that's certainly the hope. It may take a little bit of time to get there, but there's a lot of smart people, including yourself, that are working on this. Dr. Pesman, this has been fantastic. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for advocating for families. Thank you for sharing your clinical experience and talking about this problem that's not

getting enough attention. And just how damaging mold can be on the development, the immune function. the immune function, the growth of young children. There's a lot of families that are suffering, but the hope is that this podcast will ease some of the suffering by at least helping them feel like they're not crazy and that there are some potential answers to what they're going through. So I appreciate you being on here.

Thank you for having me on here. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. And thank you for, creating this space where people can get this information.