Podcast Transcript
FDN Health Detective Podcast
Mon, Nov 27, 2023 9:19AM 57:39
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
mold, people, house, years, indoor air quality, sample, mold exposure, VOCs, moldy, exposure, air, musty smell, asthma, symptoms, building, live, created, testing, mycotoxin, remediation
SPEAKERS
Jason Earle
Evan Transou
Jason Earle 00:00
You know, the general sort of idea around mold, especially with the uninformed people that have no experience is that they think it’s typically like upper respiratory allergic sinusitis and asthma and all that stuff. And that’s a big deal. I mean, mold is according to EPA, Berkeley Labs responsible for 25% of asthma cases and 4.6 million in the United States on a causal basis, by the way, so, you know, this is a big deal.
It’s a really big deal on the upper respiratory right. However, what’s not What does not get attention is the way that mold impacts people on a psychiatric basis on an emotional base.
Evan Transou
Hello, and welcome to the health tech podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. We bring you interviews from people who have conquered the trickiest of health challenges using the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition philosophy and similar healing modalities. You’re going to hear from experts who have been through the wringer with their health issues and yet managed to come out on the other side. If you’re interested in natural healing and or functional medicine.
Congrats, you’re in the right place. You can always visit us at Functional Diagnostic nutrition.com. But for now, Here is today’s episode.
All right, hello, my friends and welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transou, aka Detective F, and I will be your host for today’s show episode number 288 of the Health Detective podcast. Super exciting as we creep up on number 300. I do not know what cool thing to do for number 300. But I’m starting to think about it. We have a very timely conversation today.
And I’m not sure that our guest even knows that yet.
So he will see how timely This is in just a moment. But I’ll read his bio and then we’ll jump into our topic today. Jason Earle is a man on a mission an adoring father of two boys, an incredible entrepreneur, and an indoor air quality Crusader. He is the founder and CEO of GOT MOLD? and the creator of the GOT MOLD? Test Kit. The realization that his moldy childhood home was the underlying cause of his extreme allergies and asthma led him into the healthy home business in 2002, leaving behind a successful career on Wall Street.
Over the last two decades, Jason Jason has personally performed countless sick-building investigations, solving many medical mysteries along the way and helping 1000s of families recover their health and peace of mind. He has been featured or appeared on Good Morning America Extreme Makeover Home Edition. That’s a very appropriate entrepreneur, wired, and more.
Jason, welcome to the show, my friend. Thanks for having me. Okay, so I said it was timely. The reason it is timely is because people are gonna hate me for this in the functional space. It’s not that I did not believe mold was a thing. I knew that it was a thing that affected people. I understood the testing for it great. What I did not realize and did not believe necessarily is in our groups. I mean it’s post 50% of people are posting Oh, I have this or I have that or something with this. Like is this really that prevalent? Well, I moved into an apartment last year with my fiance and I started feeling a little weird like I started getting some like odd injuries in the beginning like just doing weightlifting in jujitsu.
I never correlated that with anything other than just weightlifting and jujitsu can cause injuries, but it was abnormal for me. So then fast forward a little bit and we get to the last three months, I was waking up some nights gasping because my sinuses and my nose were so clogged. It wasn’t like a sleep apnea. gasp it was I can’t breathe out of my nose. So my body just woke me up. Because it was so bad. I am fatigued. And thankfully we got out of there. But admittedly, it’s not perfect yet. So I’m super excited for this today. You said that you had this. It seems like a much later realization that your childhood home had this. So how the heck did you even come to the realization that this is what was going on?
Jason Earle 03:57
Well, you know, it’s one of those things that in retrospect, was very obvious, but only because of the awareness that’s now sort of in the zeitgeist right now, granted, I did start in this industry 21 years ago before it was in the zeitgeist. But, it was just one of those things where, you know, I happen to be wondering at the time, so I’ll kind of rewind when I was four years old. I lost a lot of weight in a three-week period. And my parents were very concerned, of course, so I was having difficulty breathing. And they brought me to the pediatrician who said, you should take them to Children’s Hospital. This looks serious.
And so based upon the symptoms I was presenting with and my family history, the initial diagnosis with cystic fibrosis, which is, you know, was a death sentence back then, but devastating, in particular to my father because he lost four of his cousins to CF before the age of 14. So this is their worst nightmare coming true. And so they say they spent the next six weeks crying while they waited for a second opinion. And thankfully, the second opinion contradicted I did not have CF, evidenced by the fact that I stand here 47 years old, but also, what I did have was asthma compounded by pneumonia. And I tested positive for every single thing that they tested me for in terms of allergies.
So it was grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats, and even cotton. So my clothing was itchy, all my childhood. And intuitively, you know, it’s funny, I actually spent a lot of time outside and I seemed to do better outside even amidst all these allergens, I grew up on a small non-working farm kind of a hobby farm more of an adoptive animal adoption facility. And so I was literally, you know, just there I was, I was in sort of an allergen stew.
But I did a lot better outside. So I spent most of my childhood sort of running around in the woods. And when I was 12 years old, my folks split up, which was good for everyone involved. And so I moved out of the house, and suddenly all my symptoms disappeared. I hadn’t used an inhaler since I moved out. And I, I’m no longer allergic to anything, which is kind of remarkable. But the doctors who refer patients to me, over the years have sort of found it entertaining to test me for allergies, knowing my history. Because you know, absent that chronic exposure, you know, I’m remarkably healthy.
And so the awareness didn’t come until much later though, because my father and my grandfather had grown out of his asthma, something called spontaneous adolescent remission. So basically, we have no idea what happened. That’s the that’s the diagnosis. And, so fast forward, what’s relevant to the story here is that two years later, and that same home, my mom did not move out, my mom stayed in the house, I moved out with my father, and my mom committed suicide in that home.
And it’s relevant, strangely relevant to this. And then I was diagnosed with Lyme disease a year later, which tends to disproportionately affect those of mold sensitivities. And then, through a series of sort of extraordinary events, I ended up getting recruited out of the gas station, where I was working to become the youngest licensed stockbroker in history actually, was just a total fairytale, did that for nine years and was very dissatisfied it towards the end and decided I wanted to do something meaningful with my life, and went traveling, went backpacking. While I was away, I was in Hawaii, and I was reading stories about this huge mold problem that had been discovered in Hilton Kalia Tower, which is Hilton’s flagship property on Oahu and Waikiki Beach.
In fact, if you’ve ever seen pictures of Waikiki Beach, you’ll see there’s a hotel with a rainbow on it. That’s the building. And it had been shut down for mold for about six months when I was there. And there are a lot of stories in the local papers about people who’ve been affected by it. One particular story jumped out at me and it was a 40-year-old man who had been an employee there for a long time. And he developed adult-onset asthma and all these allergies that he had never had before. And it was like a deja vu moment for me bringing me right back to my childhood.
And I thought, Geez, I wonder if our house had mold, you know because I had no idea. I knew nothing about mold. And so I called my dad from a payphone which probably isn’t there anymore, and asked him if he thought we had mold. And he just laughed at me, you know, typical ’70s parents, of course, we had mold mushrooms in the basement. Why do you ask? And that was all I needed to hear, you know, at that it was literally a lightbulb moment. For me, I was fascinated by the concept, that the buildings, especially our homes can make you sick, that was a new idea for me. And it’s something that propelled me with a level of curiosity that has never abated.
And so I took that energy and enthusiasm back to New Jersey and took a job working in the mold remediation business on the sales side of things to see you know, to learn a little while earn a little I learned while I learned and quickly saw that there were essentially a bunch of thugs, you know, using a lot of chemicals instead of cleaning. And intuitively even though there were no guidance documents, or standard operating procedures at the time, or industry standards at the time, I just intuitively knew that adding chemicals to an environment is not going to get you healthier, right?
Just like it’s pretty, pretty self-evident. And so, so I ended up starting an inspection company at night, I was doing free inspections for people to help them avoid the contractor issues at night, and slowly that morphed into a business where we became a pure play Mold Inspection Company. That was called lab results because we used specialized Labrador Retrievers that were sniffing out and had mold and buildings and laboratory testing. So lab results and then that became 100 got mold, which kind of brings us here today.
Evan Transou
Wow. Okay, what’s so interesting about you right off the bat and my lovely co-workers will get this you kind of have this background where you were you chose the Wall Street thing you chose this financial route, but then you have this situation which it’s not that there’s anything wrong with that job, right? But you got led to a life filled with purpose and passion, not just chasing money, right? We know a guy like that here.
He might host the podcast. And so it’s very interesting to get to talk to you like that because, quite frankly, if this never happened to me, I’d be in real estate, a lawyer or I always joke Wall Street or something. But I’m thankful that these things happen because it’s much better. Those are why we need those jobs, but it is better to live a life for me When I had passion or wish, I didn’t have passion for any of those things I just thought they paid the most.
And so I would go do that. So it’s amazing. Sometimes to have these bad things happen and have these experiences. I, if we can, I’d love to dive more
into the story. And I hope it’s okay because you brought it up. But I talked about the passing of your mom. And I know that you’ve probably told the story a million times. So you kind of flew right through it. I mean, that’s a pretty serious thing. And you had connected that to the mold
thing. So when you said that you don’t believe that those things are disconnected? What is your belief that occurred there? Yeah,
Jason Earle 10:29
well, thanks for digging in a lot of times, people sort of tiptoe around that one. But I really, think it’s a very important part of the story. Because, you know, the general sort of idea around mold, especially with the uninformed people who have no experience is that they think it’s typically like upper respiratory, allergic, you know, sinusitis, and asthma and all that stuff. And that’s a big deal. I mean, mold is, according to EPA, Berkeley Labs responsible for 25% of asthma cases, 4.6 million in the United States, on a causal basis, by the way, so you know, this is a big deal. It’s a really big deal on the upper respiratory, right?
However, what’s not What does not get attention is the way that mold impacts people on a psychiatric basis on an emotional base on, you know, the DIS rhythms that come from chronic mold exposure impact you in almost every single way. And so, you know, my mother was also an alcoholic and, so mental health is a very complex thing. And there’s no way to sort of pin the tail on the donkey and say,
What did what, but what was interesting was that around 2008, my mom died in 1991. And, so, in 2008, fast forward, right, so processing this stuff for a while, 2008 after I’d already been in the business for seven years, Brown University released a study, and it was a large study with 6000 participants, and they found a direct correlation between mold exposure and mold and dampness indoors and are strong a strong correlation between mold exposure and dampness indoors and depression.
And now they were not able to say that it caused it right. That was not the purpose of the study. But what they did was they interviewed these people, and they asked them what was going on in their home in terms of mold and moisture issues. And, and then they also gave them a quote, give them a quality of life survey. So how are you feeling? And the numbers were very clear, right, people who reported that they had a mold or moisture problem that was unresolved, were experiencing emotional troubles. And so that that caught my attention.
Because, you know, the question is, is it was it a disempowerment issue? People don’t know they have mold because they haven’t fixed it, maybe there are other issues, financial issues, and you know, maybe they’re not in charge of being able to do this. And so maybe their landlords not responding, or their husband or wife is saying, This is ridiculous, you know, that’s depressing. In this, you know, if you’re if you’re not able to take control of your environment that’s very disempowering, or was it a chemical interaction? Was there an actual biological function there or a dysfunction?
More accurately, maybe. And, and so that that got my wheels turning? Well, so remember, I mentioned that we use mold-sniffing dogs. I had a wonderful black lab named Oreo. And we had a lot of national press, because she was one of the first in the world, and she was very, very effective. And so one day, I got a call from Dr. Joan Bennett at Rutgers University. She had read one of the pieces that had been released about us, and she said, I study mold, and I’d like to meet your dog. It’s okay if you come to So, so we drove up.
I lived in New Jersey at the time, and she was at Rutgers. And so we just went right up, route one and had a wonderful meeting. And she shared with me her research. She actually had suffered from mold exposure. Because she had a house down in New Orleans. It had been flooded during Katrina, and she, being a great researcher, decided, well, she’s gonna go down there and check out her house and check out the mold and her building and so she went down there to sample the building.
She went in there with an n95 respirator, which protects you from particles and also the mycotoxins, which are on the particles mycotoxins do not become airborne independently, according to the, to the to the research out there. So they have to have a carrier particle. So she knew from being a mycotoxin expert and a mold researcher that that was going to protect her well, as she was walking through the house. The way she described. It was a fungal utopia. The musty smell was coming through. She had to stop several times to get a breath of fresh air and come back in and she became very ill.
And she couldn’t help but think that there was something else going on here because the musty smell has long been marginalized is sort of an aesthetic nuisance, right? It’s just a musty smell. It’s just the basement, right? Because just the way the basement smelled. She came out of it saying there’s something to this. Something is going on here. It’s not just mycotoxins, which is what gets all the headlines. So she went back to her lab and started figuring out what was in this musty smell. Which is, by the way, what the dogs are trained to sniff out and detect the source of. So this is a direct connection here, right?
And so she, she began testing, one compound that was found in the muscle, a very common compound called one often three, all it’s a mushroom alcohol. And it’s actually sold as a food additive strangely. But it’s it she began testing. Fruit flies that fluoresce that actually glow when they produce dopamine, and also against some plants. And she found that it caused the plants to grow in strange ways. She also found that the fruit fly stopped producing dopamine, and they stopped reproducing sounds a lot like depression, right? They stopped flying to the light, which is their instinctive nature. Instead, they started flying down, they developed local motor disorder, local motor disorders, as well as subsequent studies, mitochondrial damage, and premature death.
And so, she found that these compounds are actually neurotoxic. And, so in essence, what she deduced is that all mold growth has the potential to create toxicity. Now this is that’s, that’s a big deal. And this is not something that’s in the headlines. This is not something that’s in the zeitgeist yet, which is something we endeavor to fix with talks like this. And so now you connect the dots on this stuff, right? My personal history, the Brown University study, and the beautiful work elegant work that Dr. John Bennett is doing at Rutgers University. And you can see that this all makes a lot more sense, right? And so So thankfully, people are now talking about this now. And we’re starting to see that musty smell is now being recognized as an actual health hazard.
We know vos musty smell is a microbial VOC. Vocs or volatile organic compounds. VOCs are commonly manmade, right? So we know about benzene, gasoline is loaded with VOCs, right? We know that these things can cause headaches, nausea, dizziness, fatigue, and difficulty concentrating cancer is chronic exposure. This is nasty stuff. Microbes. Microbes make the same kind of compounds. In fact, many of them microbial VOCs look identical to industrial solvents. And they’re producing them. Every time there’s active growth.
They’re essentially mold burps, if you will, right, it’s the byproduct of digestion, the same way we produce gases when we’re digesting, by the way, and we’re not producing our own gases, those are microbial VOCs we’re not really digesting, we’re kind of like ambulatory composters, right, and we’re partnering this ancient partnership. And so, the microbial VOCs are unsung or beneath the surface in this conversation. And it’s a really big deal. It’s a very important thing for people to be when I say, be aware of BB Air, right? And that’s kind of where I want to go with this conversation, right, because this stuff is hiding in plain sight, right under the tip of your nose. For
Evan Transou
thank you for diving more into that. I’m actually in the mental health space. It’s something that I dealt with, not because of mold that I that I know of, but I, I’ll never beat around that bush. It’s just something that needs to be talked about. And the many reasons need to be talked about. Because in my personal story, it’s more if I had known I was sensitive to certain foods if I had known what was going on in my gut, I could have, you know, saved myself from depression a lot earlier.
And not to get you know, too dramatic or dark on the podcast, it really was only ever one bad day away from acting on the thoughts I was having. And I’ve always wondered how many people are passing away via suicide, because of stuff like this, or because of stuff like myself, I feel great now, well, minus this whole recent mold thing outside of that I’ve been feeling great for the last eight, nine years. And so it’s just crazy to me that people lose their lives over this stuff. And so I’m excited to dive into the hiding in plain sight thing, because we’re this is It was humbling on one sense because remember, I said I didn’t necessarily believe it was as big of a problem, as many of my fellow practitioners say it is. And then I went to an apartment that was totally nice, perfect place.
The owners are all nice, everyone’s cool. And yet, it was an event. So we couldn’t see this the entire time. But it turns out, it’s actually in the H vac system. And I wouldn’t even have ever thought about the word mold. If it wasn’t for my fellow practitioners always talking about this stuff. Like I would have never seen it I would have never checked I would have just thought, oh, something’s wrong with me. Or even worse. What happened is, I moved more into work with SDN over the last several months, like a lot more. It used to be, you know, maybe 1020 hours a week now. It’s like, it’s a lot more than that. I’ll put it that way. And I was working at home all the time and sitting.
And so I figured, oh, it’s because I’m sitting on a computer all day. That’s why I’m starting to feel worse and worse. I’m sure that doesn’t help. But also what am I doing? I’m living in the exposure all day versus I was traveling before going out all the time. I had to leave the house every day. I’m like, wow, this is this is a lot here. So of course, if someone sees a black mold growing under Africans think? Yes, common sense should tell you we need to do something about that, hopefully. But you’re talking about the stuff that might be invisible. So how do we how do we address this for people who might suspect that this is going on if they’re hearing some of these symptoms, but there’s no obvious culprit yet, just visually at least? Yeah.
Jason Earle 20:15
Well, I mean, I think one of the ways to sort of get into what to do is kind of to start with how we got here, actually, because I think that this is an evolutionary thing that’s happened to us. And in order to fix this, people need to understand that this is not the way we are supposed to live. Where you know, we live in these hermetically sealed chemical boxes that are made of paper mache. Okay, sheetrock is one step away from paper mache, and it gets moldy very quickly when it gets wet. And then because it’s hermetically sealed, the error exchange is minimal. And we reread that same error 20,000 times a day, I mean, you breathe 13 to 15 times a minute and 20,000 times a day, right? So think about that is 20,000 doses, okay?
If you take 20,000 doses of anything, it’s cumulative, right? And there’s no such thing as neutral air. It’s either it’s either healthy or unhealthy. It’s either life-giving, or it’s toxifying. There’s no neutral. And so the way this all happened was, you know, back in the day, we all went outside to work. And we, you know, we did, we had a lot of air change in our buildings, too, because they weren’t close, they weren’t close up really tight. And they were hard to heat and cool. Okay. And so we had some downsides to that. But when the wind blew, the houses would whistle because there was literally nothing in the walls. And so these kinds of modern ailments, autoimmune asthma, and all these things didn’t exist back then. Or they are if they did, they were in such a, so minimal and certainly not recognized.
But what happened was around 19, World War Two, the baby boomers created an incredible demand for fast and cheap building materials to have new houses. And so sheetrock or drywall was one of the first big innovations. And then and so but the thing about sheetrock is that it is it the perfect mold medium, it absorbs water, and then it’s got paper on both sides. Mold loves to eat things that were made from one time alive, but plant material in particular. So paper is an ideal growth medium. And then in the 70s, we had the fuel crisis. And so we began closing up our buildings really tight and insulating them with fluffing insulation.
So now when water gets in the walls stays in the walls, it doesn’t have any drying potential. And so that leads to chronic dampness when water gets in because houses do leak quality construction went down, right, we lost the artisan, right? We used to build houses out of stone, brick, concrete, old-growth timber, and they were built to last now we built for speed and profit. And so then we started really experimenting with a lot of petroleum products. And so we made our carpets out of oil, and we paint our walls with petroleum products, and we finish our floors with petrol and rock.
So it’s not just mold, it’s also VOCs. It’s also the fact that our building material companies, our chemical companies make no mistake, much like our food companies are. And much like our pharmaceutical companies are their chemical companies that happen to make pharmaceuticals, food, and building materials. And so so the reason that I that I bring all this up is because essentially, now the biggest, the big thing that’s happened recently is because of COVID. And, and because of this, this whole remote work thing, now we’re living in this in these buildings, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, many of us don’t leave the house at all.
And you know, on average, we spend 90% of our time indoors, re-breathing the same air over and over and over again. And then we wonder why we have all the fatigue, anxiety, depression, respiratory illness, and autoimmune disease, it’s a big deal. And so and then we’re also on top of it all, and this is the sort of the coup de gras is it now was over sanitizing our house. And so we’re now using antimicrobial everything and we’re using ionizers and ozone machines, zappers and overusing HEPA filters, and overusing HEPA vacuums. And so what we’ve done is we’ve destroyed the microbiome in our building, which actually teaches our our body what’s normal in the environment, right?
So you know, just to take it one step further, the word human comes from humus which is soil. We are so disconnected from our true heritage. Right? We Rob Rob Dawn, who wrote a beautiful book called never home alone, which I highly recommend to anybody who’s curious about the subject says that we should rename our species instead of Homo sapiens, homo endurance. And I don’t disagree with him because we have literally separated ourselves from nature. And as a result, Nietzsche now reacts to us differently. Every breath we take is a learning experience.
These spores in normal amounts because they’re spores are everywhere and are hormetic stressors, they teach your body what’s normal in the environment. If you stop ripping that from the home, by over-sanitizing and over-cleaning, the body doesn’t know what’s normal, then you go out and have a normal exposure to what’s what’s what’s supposed to be a healthy background, which is, you know, we live on planet fungi, you know it, no doubt about it.
So you need to be able to know that. So I always say clean your house and run the HEPA filters and stuff and then open your windows, letting nature back in, spend some time outside, you know, and so it’s been like the the proverbial boiling of the frog, you know, you know, it started slowly, and then the heat kept getting turned up. And as the heat has gotten turned up, we’ve gone from moldy buildings to chemically filled buildings to over-sanitized buildings, and their stack these things have stacked up on top of each other. And that’s where we are today. Wow.
25:44 Evan Transou
So far, okay, I’m curious, I’m gonna use my personal story not to get free advice here. But I think this actually relates to a lot of people, for someone like me who moved into the new apartment. And yes, I might have noticed some things from early on. But again, those are injuries that genuinely could have been from something else. I think I felt fine the rest of the time. And that really hit in those last several months that we were at the apartment.
Then when we looked at the H vac system, I’m not an expert in this by any means. But this does not look like it just got there overnight. I mean, it looks like it’s been growing for quite some time. So with that said, what is actually happening to people when they’re exposed? Of course, someone can have an instant reaction, maybe like an allergy-type thing. But it’s then as it’s accumulating that when symptoms can occur.
Like, I guess what I’m basically trying to say like in my case, because I’m sure it’s relatable to someone, do you think all of a sudden these symptoms started just because I randomly developed an allergy or because it was literally building up in my body over time, or just more exposure? Since I’m working indoors now versus I was kind of on the road before. Like, why did that happen? Even though I lived there for you? Well,
Jason Earle 26:45
I think you kind of nailed it, right, you spend more and more time indoors. And again, you know, you go from being able to purge, you know, we are by changing environments, just like having a very diet, right? By changing environments, your body gets a chance to find equilibrium. And, so what’s also really fascinating is that air is is is this thing where it’s hiding in plain sight, right of the of the four basic human needs air, water, food and shelter, shelter, you can live it out for a while food and go three weeks or so, water, you can go three days, air three minutes, and yet have those four things air is the thing we think about last, and it’s a blind spot, that’s almost like, you know, you can’t smell your own breath. You know, unless it’s really bad.
Well, you can’t, you can’t, you don’t know that you got an air problem until it’s really bad. And, so the thing that’s fascinating about that is if you eat three meals a day, which many of our listeners don’t, right, a lot of intermittent fasting, you’re gonna get about four pounds of food maximum. And if you, if you drink eight, eight-ounce glasses of water, that’s about a half a pound, it’s about a half a gallon. It’s about it’s about four pounds, rather. And, but if you take those 20,000 breaths, and I have done this, I’ve weighed my breath, it comes out to roughly 30 pounds of air, your mind around that, right? So that’s seven times any other environmental exposure, your primary environmental exposures, air, water, and food. And yet, it’s the thing that we think about the least.
And so as a result, you know, we talked about every diet, right, you won’t have to have a varied air diet, because you’re consuming this stuff. Okay, this is not just something that’s past, you know, it’s just that you’re actually consuming what’s in the air. And so it’s very important that you vary your air as well as you just as you vary your diet. And then of course, if you can do source control, so there’s only three things you can do with an indoor air quality problem, you can either remove the source, which is ideal, that’s remediation, essentially, you can filter the air, which only buys you time, it doesn’t really solve the problem. Or you can dilute which is basically opening the windows or getting ventilation. Those are the only three things you can do. Notice I didn’t say spray, you know, kill sanitize, you know, like, over
29:03 Evan Transou
paint overs, the craziest thing? Yeah, right, all that stuff,
Jason Earle 29:07
right. It’s just like, it’s like typical sort of like band-aid on a bullet wound, you know, it does not work. And so, really what it comes down to is reducing exposure, creating different different going through different environments. Bringing nature in, is probably the most important thing you can do bringing outside airspace, especially if you live in a place where you have nature, right, this is challenging if you live in a place where you know you’ve got a lot of pollution, you know, in New York City or you know, anywhere where there’s a lot of things, and by the way, that is that is a major issue in and of itself, right? So outdoor air comes into the house, outdoor air always comes in and infiltrates in and the data on this is fascinating too.
You are exposed to outdoor air four times as much in your house. Check this out. You’re because you’re re-breathing it. So whatever’s outside if you’ve got toxins outside and infill traits, you reread that Aaron, you actually have four times the exposure in your home to outdoor air than you would if you were walking around the block. Well, right, so our indoor environment is is, is this encapsulated space? And so it’s really important that we become aware of this. Because it is, it is the, like I said, it’s your single largest environmental exposure. And because it is, it’s something that’s so subtle, it’s the thing that will weaken you.
So it goes back to your story. What we see consistently with chronic exposures is that it weakens the immune system, it weakens, it breaks you down so that you become susceptible to other things. It also generally leads to a lot of inflammation, especially in people who have a genetic predisposition towards that. And so there’s another piece to which is a lot of the mycotoxin reports that people are getting, people are concerned about it being in their building, but actually there’s a major mold problem in our food supply, especially from imported grains and from conventional meats, because the animals are fed moldy grains, and it carries over into the dairy and it carries over and the meat.
So you end up with a Venn diagram with mold exposure, that looks like two circles overlapping one’s air and one’s water. The mycotoxins are mostly coming from food. And the musty smell. The chemicals that come from the mold growth itself come from the air, but they are sensitized and they can amplify each other. And this is the other thing is that you tend to see these hyperreactive hyperemia reactions are these, these hypersensitivities develop, where, where one, one exposure tends to create a disproportionate response to another exposure. And so oftentimes, people feel much better when they leave.
But chronic exposure tends to lead to chronic sent or I should say, long-term exposure tends to lead to long-term symptoms. And short term exposure tends to lead to short-term symptoms. So what I encourage people to do is become very attuned to this. Because if you start to notice, like you, you start to notice I’m having problems here, and then you change environments. Oftentimes, if you do that quickly, you can recover quickly. But if you don’t listen to that quiet voice inside, saying there’s something wrong here, right? And don’t make that change, then these things can stay with you for a very long time. And they can turn into things like chemical sensitivities and autoimmune disease, it tends to bring out latent symptom profiles, things that might be underneath the surface.
So fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, you know, you know, lupus, all these things that tend to be really below the surface, and then suddenly there’s they, they come up, and nobody really knows why they do but we consistently see that chronic exposure to a poor indoor environment, especially a moldy 110 tends to be the commonality amongst those, those profiles.
32:53 Evan Transou
I totally can see this because and listen, I’m good. Like, thankfully, I have so many tools and resources at my disposal again, thank God because of years of doing this, that I don’t want to over-dramatize it. But it is interesting because once we left the whole reason that we left the apartment early was because we went to a wedding and we stayed in a hotel. Jason, I felt so bad that day that this was one of my best friend’s weddings. We ended up leaving at like 830 at night. This was just this was on September 30. And when I went back to the hotel Mike I needed a fresh night’s sleep.
I have to travel soon for work for FDM I cannot be off This is not the time to do it. 2 am, 3 am night I can’t do this. And I don’t do that normally anyway. We slept in the hotel, and I woke up in the morning, am I babe listen to this? And she’s like, What am I my sinuses were all cleared up I’m like, there’s some it’s the apartment. There’s something with the apartment. This I should feel worse than a hotel. This does not make any sense.
Thank God though it was a brand new hotel like the last couple of months when they opened up. So it was kind of the perfect place to go test and you know, not a literal test. But this anecdote that I had now wait until I leave this gets better. And the same thing happened when I traveled in a few days. So it is kind of scary and crazy to see it accumulate because I know that there are things off right now. As I’m doing this podcast not looking for sympathy again. I’m just being honest. I mean, raging neck pain and headache and I’ve taken an Advil for it.
I never take Advil that’s not what I want to do it barely budgets. So I’m working through a lot of this stuff right now, to really get this the hell out of my body. My last selfish question for this is just because it might validate me so just Just say yes, if you don’t mind. Have you ever heard of someone with mold exposure? But you said it can increase inflammation? Would that make any sense for them to have an increased risk of injury and like sports and stuff?
Jason Earle 34:33
Yeah, yeah, I know that. I’ve heard that before. It’s, it makes you weak. You know, it’s like kryptonite. It makes you weak. Now some people are more reactive to it than others, right? We all have this bio-individual reaction or response to environmental exposures. But I think of mold as kryptonite. It will even take Aren’t Superman given enough, given enough time? And so yeah, injuries, because again, inflammation is, you know, it’s an in many ways mold exposure is an injury. You know, it does remarkable things, I often say that mold, or the immune system is like a juggler. It can juggle all these processes 1000s of processes with incredible ease and elegance.
I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s amazing, right? And mold is like a guy across the room throwing baseballs at him, or her. And so your immune system is going to have to make a decision here, is it going to keep juggling these processes? Or is it going to protect itself from this evolutionary threat. And so I’m here to tell you that what the immune system does is says, Nope, can’t can’t deal with that we’re gonna we’re gonna work on that stuff. And all the other processes fall to the wayside.
And so a lot of balls get dropped. And so again, the longer that goes, the more difficult that is for those processes to get back up to speed again, and a lot of us have had exposures over the years, that could be considered hormetic that be beneficial, like, you know, for example, I’ve done 1000s and 1000s of mold inspections. And I actually think about them like allergy shots. I’m in a house for an hour or so two hours.
And if I noticed that, that I start to get these hydrogen, my fingers or itchy eyes, I’ll go out and get protection, right, I’ll go out and get some respiratory protection. But that small, those small exposures can actually be beneficial to you. It’s the long exposures that are really a problem. Now, if you’re already hypersensitive, if you’re already really sensitized and you’re experiencing, you know, a disproportionate reaction to lots of other things I wouldn’t tell wouldn’t play that game. You know, I’m in a little bit of a different, different camp there. But, yes, the way that this impacts you is it affects everybody differently. But in almost all cases, what I’ve noticed is that it makes people weak.
37:06 Evan Transou
Okay, that makes that makes a lot of sense. So thank you for again, validating myself. Absolutely. Moving into the the testing side, I think it’s really cool that you’ve been doing this for so long, because, again, there’s nothing wrong with joining the functional medicine space, or joining the mold space, or whatever it might be at any time. But one of the things I always shout out for re Davis, the founder of SDN is he was doing this before it was cool.
You were doing this before it was cool and trendy. And I mean, I guess we still live in a bubble to some degree, because the vast majority of people who are not having these conversations are aware of this stuff. But there are these little bubbles on the internet that are hyper-aware of these issues and trying to actively do something about it. So I see a lot of validity in someone who’s been doing this longer than not.
And so what, what do we have to do in terms of the testing was, if I’m not mistaken, I’m sorry, if I’m, I don’t think I’m mistaking this. I think when you did a presentation for somewhere else in our company, you would actually challenge some of the more mainstream tests on the market. So I’d love to hear about what makes a proper test. What do you guys do, let’s dive into this, please. Yeah,
Jason Earle 38:06
by all means, thank you very much for that, because I think that there there are there’s a real problem with the test. That’s actually not a test. It’s called ErmI, er MI. And ErmI stands for environmental, relative relative environmental relative Moldiness. index. And it was, it’s a research tool developed by the EPA about 20 years ago, based on mold profiles that were found in 30 Something homes in Ohio, not exactly a robust, geographically diverse data set.
And, so then it was used in a study of run 1000 or 1089. Homes, with with with a hud hud study. And then, because there was an absence of and it uses a really cool technology, by the way back then it was really cool, it’s called Ms. qPCR, which is mold specific quantitative polymerase chain reaction. So we all know PCR, which is the last three letters, because that’s what most those COVID knows, right? Everyone knows that now. And so what that does is it targets specific organisms, right? You look at the DNA, and then it amplifies that DNA.
And so you can identify if they’re in a dust sample or, or any kind of sort of specimen sample, you can identify whether that organism is present. It does a very poor job of numerating or counting how much is there. This particular Ms. qPCR has not been updated in 20 years, either, right? And can you think of anything that’s grown more or faster than genomics in the last 20 years? Right?
I mean, this is a caveman-era genomics, the Urmi and so what they suggest you do is gather dust from two rooms, and then compound the sample which by the way, right there is a fail because if you take two tests from two different parts of your body, let’s say you’re doing biopsies, you do a biopsy from your back and a biopsy from your scalp and then put them together one sample and send it in and it says you got cancer well where? Right, so that’s on its face. It’s a fail there.
And then it’s only it only looks for 36 molds and 10 of them are background, outdoor molds, and 26 are considered to be indoor molds. But those molds have not been validated to be of great concern. Specifically, this is from this small, very small study in Ohio. These are not in mycotoxin producers. And again, back to our previous point, all mold growth is potentially toxic, so mycotoxin mycotoxin-producing molds are not the ones to be worried about all mold growth indoors of significance has the potential to create toxicity.
But more importantly, all mold growth indoors has the potential to cause serious health effects. And so regardless of toxicity, so it’s not about just mold toxicity, I want to make that really clear. Urmi also has a notorious habit of being very high. And so in, and people are often told by their doctor, or their practitioner, to use Urmi.
And then and then use that as an actionable data point. And I’m here to tell you that there’s no actionable data point by itself, you need context, you need to know what’s going on in the building. And so it’s important to not take action on one test any test by itself, you need to understand what the actual conditions are in the building and need to, you know, if there’s a history of water damage, if there’s any sort of visible indicator, there are people that there there are, there’s a whole daisy chain or gravy train or like it of practitioners, inspectors, and remediators, that use Urmi, because it guarantees the next visit, a guarantee for inspection guarantees or remediation, the remediators are using this a clearance test because it guarantees are going to have to come back and do more work is there there’s a group of very, very bad players whose names will remain nameless right now who will remain nameless right now that the capitalize on this and they’re doing outrageous $100,000 remediations, without ever having found any actual evidence of mold or moisture problems in these buildings really devastating.
And, so Urmi, or Urmi is a real problem. And then, you know, you also add in these mycotoxin urine tests, which had value, but they’re conflating the ideas between mold and food and mold and air, mycotoxins do not become airborne easily, they have to have a carrier particle. And so you’re going to have high spore counts in those buildings or high dust levels in those buildings. And so that’s why we advocate the use of spore traps for indoor air quality service.
And so we actually created a Mold Test Kit, which we can talk more about later. That allows you to actually figure out what particles are there in the ambient air. We do like DNA based testing. But we like current technologies, not 21 year old genomics. And so we’re working on a test right now that uses next gen or next generation sequencing to identify all known microbes in a dust sample, and only from one room at a time, by the way for the same price as army. And so the idea is that you can you can see that what’s really going on in that dust.
And now we’re not just looking at mold, because the evidence, there’s strong evidence that there’s also bacteria specifically called actinomycetes. that are soil bacteria that grow right alongside mold and water damaged buildings. And we also what’s fascinating about them is that everyone knows almost everyone knows that penicillin comes from fungi right? From Penicillium. And so most people think that antibiotics come, from from fungi, and some do. But actually, two-thirds of the antibiotics on the market come from actinomycetes, which are, so they’re potent chemical factories get there. And so and so we know that they were in essence, we know that they’re producing things that we’re not looking at indoor air quality surveys.
And so and then, you know, the there’s also some really interesting voc tests out there and microbial voc tests out there. One in particular, put out by enthalpy Labs, can be very helpful for hidden mold growth, where there’s mold in a wall and the gases can come through but the spores don’t necessarily and so if the spores can’t come through, by the way, neither can the mycotoxins and so it’s so it takes again, it goes back to the idea that there’s no one data point that’s actionable. Oftentimes, you know, it reminds me those pointillism paintings, you know, have you seen, like a.or painting made of dots. You ever seen those?
It’s just a paint, right? So one. is is not a painting, right? One that is, but you start to add the other data points in and you can create a picture. And so oftentimes a proper mold assessment. I shouldn’t say oftentimes, a proper mold assessment involves collecting many data points, visual observations, olfactory does it smell like something right? So I always say if you see something, smell something, or feel something, do something, right.
And that do something might mean doing some DIY testing, because, you know, if you’re on a constrained budget, it may mean finding an independent, qualified mold inspector who has experience in dealing with mold moisture problems that doesn’t have any financial relationships with the remediation contractor that will do the work that will actually, you know, get down on their hands knees and figure out what’s going on in the building. And then also to look beyond mold, because mold, indoor air quality is complex. As I mentioned, it’s mold. It’s VOCs. It’s also it’s also hyper sanitisation. And so, in essence, this all begins with establishing a new level of awareness around the subject.
45:29 Evan Transou
So by the way, you’re getting a lot of positive comments and stuff. So everyone was just saying, well, one has a friend lost a friend to see if someone said that’s incredible, incredible information. This is absolutely awesome. learning a lot. I had no idea but I must go. We actually
have a question from the audience. So if the mold is in the walls, is there any reason to rip out the walls and remediate them? Yes,
Jason Earle 45:50
absolutely. Well, let me back up. The first thing with mold remediation is to reward remediation is the remedy. So the root is the remedy. The Latin root is remediate, err, and if that means to hear, cure, or heal. And so what are we actually remedying? When we deal with mold? Well, we’re first we’re dealing with the moisture problem, because that’s the problem. a mold problem is a moisture problem. Mold is a symptom. So what we need to do is first figure out why is there mold in the wall. Where’s the leak? Where’s the defect?
Is it a leak is it condensation, a lot of humid climates. So, if the wall assembly isn’t built correctly, you’ll get condensation inside of the walls, these things need to be addressed first, then you go in and you remove the, affected materials. And it has to be done by a specialist who understands. And by the way, there’s an industry standard called the I C R c s 520. And it is it is a well-traveled document. It’s it’s the only consensus-accepted industry standard. And, and it is very effective. If contractors would just fill it simply follow it, it does not advocate these chemicals. It advocates the use of environmental controls.
So in other words, you go in and you set up a tent kind of like ET right you set up a tent around the work area, you remove the effective building materials, and you control the dust in that space. That’s the most important part. Then you clean the surfaces using HEPA vacuums and damp wipes no chemicals are unnecessary unless there’s concern about sewage or bacteria. And then make sure it’s completely dry, and that the water problem has been fixed.
You do the necessary testing to make sure the work area and the adjacent work areas are normal, right? That they that they that they’ve been restored to a normal condition, and then you rebuild. So yes, if you’ve got mold in a wall ripping out the walls and remediating is absolutely necessary, but firstly, fix the water problem. And you also have to make sure you deal with the contractor is going to follow the standard.
47:50 Evan Transou
Wow. Okay, so, And by the way, we’re gonna go a few minutes over as long as you’re good. I’m good. This is amazing. So then, for our, we have a bunch of practitioners that listen, we have people that are interested in health that will never become practitioners. So what I want to be 100% Clear on because I think anyone who has listened to even five minutes of this is like, Oh, this is the guy he knows this stuff. This is awesome. So we’ve got mold. What specifically can you offer the audience? How can we use your stuff I have another question about that. But I also want to know this first this would be great. By
Jason Earle 48:19
all means Yeah. So we made a welcome page for your listeners on on our website and it’s got mold.com/health Detective now I saw it and they sent over the link to its health dash detective. They’re going to fix that. So if you go there now, live it’s health dash detective, but it will be health detective one word. So got mole.com/health Detective. And what the reason we did that was because we have an ebook there called How to find mold. We get a lot of great feedback about this essentially and it’s a book filled with inspection checklists and FAQs.
And it’s really great for people who are early in their mold awareness journey. If you follow that book around your house or your or your home, do your own inspection, you will see things that you’ll be surprised. You’ll be amazed at what you learned kind of like giving yourself a physical a lot of people don’t even check out their body, right? Thinking about the building is an extension of your immune system, right? It really is. It’s like an Exo skin or an exoskeleton. We’re a lot like hermit crabs, we don’t do too well with our shells.
So you want to get familiar and intimate with your building. The quality of your relationship with your building is the quality of your health and potentially your longevity. And so it’s very important that you sort of engage in that and so that the ebook is really helpful for that we also have a coupon code there, which is Detective 10 which will give your listeners a 10% discount on any of our test kits. Now we sell the GOT MOLD? Test Kit, which we created mostly because of products like ErmI to be honest with you, because people were getting they were paying too much for some are trap samples which are the most common form of indoor air quality testing.
And, oftentimes the data was being used against them by, you know, unethical inspectors. And so we decided to create a test kit that would allow people to get that data affordably without any concerns about conflicts of interest. And so, so we have a, we sell one, two, and three room air sampling test kits. And then once you buy a kit, this air sampling pump, which we make which duplicates $1,000 air sampling device, so perfect, if you were to get your house tested by a professional, they have an air sampling pump that they come in with, that’s an expensive calibrated device, and interfaces with these cassettes, the sport traps, we created one that costs a lot less.
And so when you buy our one of our kits, you get to keep this, and then you can retest again, for less using our refills. And so we sell one, two, and three refills. And then you get the report within three business days of the samples being at the lab. So you collect the samples, kind of like 23andme for mold, you collect the samples using our device, you send it back in a prepaid mailer, all of our prices include lab fees, shipping both ways, there’s nothing else to purchase, you pay for even batteries, it comes with fresh batteries.
And then once it’s at the lab for three days, you get a beautiful report all automated, and you never have to chase down your data, which I know is refreshing for people who are in this testing space, it’s very hard sometimes to get your reports, you don’t have that problem with us. And so you get a nice cover sheet that gives you a green, yellow, orange, or red indication of what was found in each sample, as well as the raw lab data formatted in a way I always wanted my reports formatted. So you know, this is kind of scratching one of my itches.
And so it tells you what the water damage indicator molds are. And then it also color-coded reports and then the last page, the third page, gives you links to find qualified remediators and inspectors in your area, links to the trade associations that we trust the certify and train these guys and gals, as well as some additional resources about some there’s a self-test, there’s a self-evaluation tool there called Hayward score, and a variety of other resources there. So there’s some actionable next steps. For people who are concerned about this.
52:07 Evan Transou
This has been amazing. And for those that especially are listening on audio, because that’s where most of the listeners are, shoot us a DM at F d n training. Let us know if you’d like us to have Jason back on I think you have a lot and that had my friend. So we could probably do this for two or three hours if need be. But this has been excellent. We normally have a signature question on the show that I kind of phrase around a more general health question. But today, I’d like to make it a little bit more specific for you as the final question of today.
What I’m curious about is we have a bunch of people who are going to listen to this, some might not be able to afford testing, remediation, or whatever. Now there’s plenty that well, that’s, that’s wonderful. But there was one thing I’ve always worried about with mold is like, oh, my gosh,
God forbid the test comes back positive. Now we have a whole separate set of issues we have to deal with.
And I’m very aware that mold can affect anyone at any time any house. It’s not a it’s not a class thing. However, using common sense, I would imagine that, you know, older houses that are not as well maintained, are probably going to be what would you call that people that are in poverty might be more likely to live in them and might have even bigger mold problems. So unfortunately, some of the people who are suffering the most might have the least access to actually doing stuff about this. So you had mentioned filters, you were talked about opening the dam Windows and getting outside. My question for you is, if you had no money, but you knew that there was a mold issue, what would you do? And I’m sorry if that’s too tough, but I’m curious, what would you do? Well,
Jason Earle 53:32
your situation was we literally could do a whole nother podcast on my answer. So I’ll keep it really brief. Your eye, the most important thing you can do is, is reduce exposure. And so but but in the process of getting something fixed or repaired, especially people who are impoverished, and this is why we created our test kit also is the people who need us the most are the ones who couldn’t afford my professional mold inspection.
My own parents could not afford to hire my professional Mold Inspection Company, which I created to help families navigate what my family did. And that’s all right. So this is full circle. For me, this is really what this is about being able to close that gap and close that loop. So thank you for bringing it up. But the really interesting thing is that people who are renting are they have a unique tool at their disposal. It’s called the implied warranty of habitability. We literally could do another hour on this. And it’s a legal legal doctrine that underpins all residential leases. And it basically states that landlords have an obligation a legal obligation. It’s not in the lease. That’s what’s called the implied warranty. It’s implied. And it’s in 49 states except for Arkansas, believe it or not.
And don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it is. And so, it says that landlords have a legal obligation to provide safe and clean housing, fit for habitability and so that mean and so what what I mean is a moldy building safe or clean No, neither. It’s neither safe nor clean. This is especially not safe if you’ve got a pre uses any medical condition that either aggravates or causes. And so look up the implied warranty of habitability learn and we have an article actually, and I can put, I can give this to you guys, I’ll send you a link to it. And it’s on our website.
It’s called the renters playbook. It’s you can even Google got mold, renters playbook Jason Earle, and we walk you through it. So what you have to do is you have to notify your landlord that they’ve got the issue, you have to notify them of the proper procedures, which means to use the IICRC s 520. And you have the ability to effect if they don’t respond or or take action within a fixed period of time, you can hold back rent, you can pay into escrow. Yeah. You can also affect if they continue to ignore you or fail to, restore the property to a normal health condition, you can break your lease without having an impact your credit or losing your security deposit, you are in the catbird seat. Most people who have this problem are scared that their landlord is going to be in control and kick them out. Or these people are already feeling oppressed.
And so they don’t have to be the law is on your side. Even if you’ve got bad landlord-tenant laws in your state. If you if you use the implied warranty of habitability, you’d be amazed. But you have to follow the procedures and every single municipality has different rules around that. So you have to get up to speed on that. The good news is we all have access to Google, we all have you know even you know, I see homeless people with their cell phones, right with their with their iPhone. So I know even people who are struggling financially, they can’t afford mold remediation.
They can afford to get online and learn about this. So become educated on this. This is the single like I said, most important environmental exposure you have, and your home is your health. Your home is your health. There’s no two ways about it. Jason,
56:47 Evan Transou
thank you so much for your time, I guess it’s not an if it’s a win. So we will decide once the audience gives the feedback. And you just left a great cliffhanger. You guys tell us which subsequent topic you want within this topic of malt, right? Maybe we want to do a whole thing on that because you just blew my mind. I’m like, holy cow. I wish I knew about you. Five, six months ago when I was dealing with this. My landlords actually, they were really nice people.
But our lease was about to end anyway. So it was kind of I don’t think we could have gotten the most out of this. And I didn’t want to leave my team apartment. Right? A lot of it. Well, that’s a whole separate thing. So I can’t wait to talk to you again. Thank you for what you’re doing and sharing your story and thanks for an excellent podcast.
Jason Earle 57:24
Thank you
