The Hidden Link Between Gut Health, Mold, and Your Brain | Podcast #414

The video discusses the connection between mold exposure, gut health, and brain function. Mold exposure can lead to chronic mood and focus issues, as well as gut problems. Mold can colonize in the gut and produce toxins that affect the brain and immune system. Mold exposure can also contribute to recurring gut infections. Treating mold involves addressing both the gut and the environment.

Highlights

Mold exposure can lead to chronic mood and focus issues.
Mold can colonize in the gut and produce toxins that affect the brain and immune system.
Mold exposure can contribute to recurring gut infections.
Treating mold involves addressing both the gut and the environment.
Mold exposure can have collateral effects on other systems, such as the thyroid and joints.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it's Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Welcome to the Beyond Wellness Radio podcast. Feel free and head over to justinhealth. com. We have all of our podcast transcriptions there, as well as video series on different health topics ranging from thyroid to hormones, ketogenic diets, and gluten. While you're there, you can also schedule a consult with myself, Dr.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: J, and or our colleagues and staff to help dive into any pressing health issues you really want to get to the root cause on. Again, if you enjoy the podcast, feel free and share the information with friends or family. Hey guys, Dr. Justin Marchegiani here with Evan Brand. Evan, happy new year, my friend. How you doing?

Evan Brand: Hey man, happy new year. I'm getting like sunbathing through the window right now. So I'm pretty happy that the blue sky is starting off the new year here. And you know, there's a lot of people this time of year that, They might feel resentment or frustration or depression or anxiety, you know, just clinically talking with people.

Evan Brand: I know the holidays bring up a lot of weird emotions for people. Maybe there's like family connections that are screwed up or maybe there's a financial issue or some other relationship issue or a job stress that's happening and people kind of come into the new year feeling. Not fully prepared. And so I'm hoping that the information we could provide people today can give them a path forward and how they could potentially investigate their health to start the new year by investigating some of these root causes.

Evan Brand: We can improve double, triple, quadruple your productivity, which. is going to set you up for a good year.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I totally agree. Well, we chatted before here, we're going to talk about the mold gut brain connection. This is a powerful, powerful connection because we see people with mold issues, have chronic mood focus issues.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You may also see a lot of gut issues as well, where your gut almost becomes a mold factory as well. Talk a little bit more about how your gut can colonize mold and become a mold factory. Yeah. So, I mean,

Evan Brand: there's kind of two different stories that can happen. So, someone could have an exposure from a dorm in college 20 years ago, and maybe you just genetically don't detox these mycotoxins very well.

Evan Brand: And so, you've stored those in your body. This can accumulate in the brain, in the organs, in the fat tissue, which can affect your kidneys. You could be up in the middle of the night to go pee. You could have chronic anxiety, depression. You could have issues with exercise intolerance. Now, if you've had a weakened immune system or the exposure was large enough or long enough, then you can actually start to grow it.

Evan Brand: So, you can be a storage facility or you can be a factory or you can be both. And just using an at home urine sample on the organic acids, we can measure this colonization. And this is a very common problem. I've seen it in kids that are three years old. I've got some case studies where we've seen the oat markers, page one, all these yeast and fungal markers completely off the chart in a child that was living in a home where the tree roots had busted through the foundation.

Evan Brand: And every time it rained, the basement leaked. And this is not a rare problem. So I know sometimes when you and I talk about these things, many people may blow things off and just. move on with her life. But what I'm telling you is decades ago, exposure that you've had could still be affecting you today.

Evan Brand: Dr.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Justin Marchegiani Yeah. And on an O test, right, we have a couple of markers that are yeast based markers, like the arabinose marker, the tricarbolic marker, or the carboxy citric marker. These are going to be more kind of candida yeast markers. And again, we have yeast and then we have candida as a subsection of yeast under that umbrella, but so is mold.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Okay. And so, mold kind of could be still in that yeast category. The big ones, when we look at colonized mold, if you're looking at one of the oat tests, like the one by Mosaic, we're looking at the, the ones that have the aspergillus or fusarium in, in parentheses, those are gonna be the big ones. The, the 5 hydroxy, methyl 2 ferroic, the ferrin 2, 5 dicarboxylic, the ferrin carb, carbonylglycine, the tartaric acid, and the tricarbolic, you know, these are your, your big longevity words.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But, But these are going to be your colonized mold markers. So what's happening here, Evan, is you have exposure to mold in the environment, dorm room, old house. You could now clean that environment up, either move or remediate, and essentially you could still have mold being produced by your gut. Is that correct?

Evan Brand: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Heck, yeah. And if your mother had it, she could have given it to you through breast milk if you were breastfed. We know mycotoxins easily and readily cross the placenta as well. Evan Brand Right. Dr. Justin Marchegiani we've seen one year old babies that are off the chart for mold toxicity.

Evan Brand: These are the kids that have allergies, they have food sensitivities, they go to the pediatrician. Evan Brand Right. Dr. Justin Marchegiani They have no suggestions but to put the kid on maybe some steroid cream for the skin issue, the skin eruption.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Evan Brand And we deal with mold, so. We have molds like Aspergillus or Fusarium.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And don't get me wrong, mold could be a antagonist of your immune system and create immune stress. But most of the time, it's going to be the off gassing or the flatulence of the mold called mycotoxins. Is that correct? Evan

Evan Brand: Brand

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah.

Evan Brand: Mycotoxins are tiny. They're 50 times smaller than a mold spore. So, for example, if you had Let's say you had some trim around your windows that wasn't very good, and you had storms blowing rain in.

Evan Brand: You've got water running down your window trim, and then boom, behind your drywall, you've got an issue there. That alone, those mycotoxins are so tiny, they can readily penetrate out into your breathable air. You're having insomnia at night, you don't know why, it's from these mycotoxins.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, when I look at mycotoxins, the first thing I, I try to look at is one, we'll run an O test and we'll see, is there colonized mold there?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's number one. Number two is we'll kind of look at the house. Is there an issue with mold being in the house? Is there an active mold exposure? Yes or no. I find active mold exposures are obviously going to cause more problems. Usually once you're away from that environment, you're not getting exposed daily.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Usually problems tend to get better. So if you go away for a week or two, you come back and you notice symptoms. flipping on or off like a light switch, that can be a big concern. So we'll always do some kind of a mold test in the house. I know we talked about it. I'm doing a lot of the mold plate type of test, the petri dish type of agar plate test.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Are you still doing that test yourself? Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Brand: I love them. They're cheap. They're easy. They're a good, good way to prove a skeptic that something is going on.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And you can even do it without sending it to the lab. If you kind of know, you know, how many polka dots there are, if you want to keep it under five and, and you want to just, you know, put it out for an hour or two, close it, wait four days later.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if you see that And it's a pretty good sign that you're in good shape. You start to see it, you know, four or five or up and that's something where you want to send it to the lab. Re do it. It's in the lab, right?

Evan Brand: And then mycotoxins, you know, they tear apart the blood brain barrier, they tear apart the gut barrier.

Evan Brand: So, the connection, you know, you and I have talked about. gut health for a decade plus now. And we've seen so many cases of parasites and bacterial overgrowth and candida. And we've really been, in my opinion, just based on the numbers we've done, we've been some of the best functional medicine providers for gut health out there, especially producing online content.

Evan Brand: And so, And now when I look at those cases, I find all these people that have these recurring gut infections over and over and over a lot of those people had mold underlying and maybe I didn't recognize it or I didn't see it initially and now I look back or I dig deeper into their case and we find it so I really think gut issues can they exist on their own?

Evan Brand: Yes, but this whole chicken or egg scenario, I think that people probably had an immune hit such as this mold exposure that reduce the immune system enough to allow these opportunistic infections like H. pylori, Clostridia, Klebsiella, Pseudomonas to then move in. So, if you just go to the SIBO guy, you might not fully fix your issues.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. Also, I find too, You have to look at, all right, is there an active issue now in the environment? Yes or no, you have to cross that off. The number two, you have to look at, you know, how do your mold levels look from a, a toxic load level. So we want to look at toxic levels in the urine.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We want to be able to challenge that. And then we also want to look at the organic acid test to see, do we have any colonized mold too. So we want to look at it one, two, three levels deep. Now, when you go to treat. Are you just treating the gut and treating the infections and then hoping as we clear out the gut, clear out the candida, clear out maybe potentially C diff because it's a big association with a lot of these penicillium aspergillus molds and C diff, when we clear those out, is the goal for you that we're gonna knock that colonized mold down?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh, yeah. As long as the environment's good.

Evan Brand: Yeah, for sure. And on the OAT test, you'll see it, too. I mean, you'll see the markers disappear. Now, I always recommend doing the sinus stuff, too. I know you've done some great videos on sinus rinsing and sinus flushing, so that's a great piece of the puzzle, too.

Evan Brand: Now, the OAT test doesn't say, yeah, you're colonized in the sinuses. It could

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: be up there. I always assume it. I always, if there's any breathing issues. Right? You can go watch my video on it, but we're gonna do a high quality saline RO distilled water. We're gonna do the ExClear Rescue, which has some biofilm busters.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We're gonna put a drop or two of iodine or, you know, a milliliter of silver, cause those are also gonna bust up biofilms, and we're gonna flush that cavity out, you know, once or twice, maybe three times a day, if it's more acute, if it's more of a sinus infection, every hour or two. So yeah, I I think that's a big thing, cause talk about marcons or methicillin resistant staph in the nose, yeah, I mean, that's definitely a thing that's associated with mold issues as well.

Evan Brand: Now the cool thing is, so the gut protocols that you and I create, a lot of times these herbs have synergistic properties to where, yeah, we may be targeting a specific bacteria or a parasite because you have bloating, you have constipation, gas, maybe you have stomach cramping, and Yeah. It's cool because you can try to target those specific bugs and then you knock out some of the colonization as, as a side effect.

Evan Brand: So, I haven't had to shift the protocols too much because a lot of the blends that you and I have formulated, we have a multitude of antimicrobial, antifungal, antivirals kind of all in the same blend. And so, it's really exciting when you do a retest of the oat, you can see, hey, look, we cleared the bacteria on the stool, we cleared the parasite, we reduced inflammation, and The fungal colonization and the candida goes away.

Evan Brand: So there's really not this magic mold protocol, so to speak. It's fixing the other issues as well. And I'm finding that mold is becoming a more trendy topic. I see so many videos now, and I think the problem with that is because you're going to become so zoomed in on this, that now you're going to miss the other stuff that's screwing up your gut, that's screwing up your mood, your energy.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And also it's a double edged sword where people come after mold and they treat it like it's its own entity. The problem is the longer you have mold exposure and mold colonization, that's going to increase the chance that your gut is permeable. So now you have leaky gut. So now that increases the chance of food allergens and gut inflammation due to healthy foods coming in.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Now that because of the gut inflammation, you're lowering your enzymes, you're lowering your acids, you're lowering your bile salt, so now it's hard for you to digest food. So now you're having more digestive issues, maybe you have gastroparesis, maybe you have SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or CFO, small intestinal fungal overgrowth as well.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So these issues kind of compound. And so now, you go see the mold doctor, you can go address the mold, in your environment. You can do a fancy detox protocol from mold, but now other issues have to be addressed together. And that's where it gets really dicey because you can see the fancy line person, but now other systems are broken around it and you have to prioritize a plan to fix everything else at the same time.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Well, it's hard. It's hard for us because, you know, we have to. Keyword and we SEO certain content. And so people may get labeled as a certain expert, but what we want you to know Dr. J and I, we have the broad spectrum functional medicine knowledge that you really need. It's just, it's a sexier thing for people to sell you on their niche, right?

Evan Brand: They're like the mold girl, the thyroid girl, like it's really easy and sexy. And you kind of have to do that to really like find your audience, so to speak. But you're right. There is a collateral damage that's happened now where maybe now you've Developed Hashimoto's as well because your gut has been so screwed up.

Evan Brand: You've had this bacterial autoimmune attack now on the thyroid or even on the brain or on the joints. So now you have RA, just detoxing this stuff will not fix your joints. Now we have to implement other strategies. So that's it. What we're saying is this is an important piece. We have to try and connect the dots, but we also have to make sure that we're not just using a super, super fine magnifying glass.

Evan Brand: We've got to be able to zoom

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: out a little.

Evan Brand: Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. I mean, it's been observed that people with certain fungal species or mold species have a decrease in beneficial probiotic bacteria in the gut. And so this plays a big role. So now you people are being more open to dysbiosis. and Clostridium C.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: diff. Now the chance of digestive issues, bloating, gas, diarrhea, especially, it now goes up. I think this is part of the reason why you'll see some studies showing that probiotics, taking probiotics can help your body deal with or neutralize some of the negative consequences of, of mold exposure. I think part of that is, is because the mold is impacting the gut so negatively that adding in some of the probiotics I think is maybe holding some of the.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Negative effects of mold on your gut at bay? A little bit,

Evan Brand: yeah. I think it's that it's pro, it's helping glucuronidation, which is important to help get mold out. Yeah, it's, I, I saw a couple papers saying that the probiotics immune system too, I saw a couple papers saying the probiotics are actually helping convert the mold into something less toxic, so it may actually kind of de granulate, if you will, or kind.

Evan Brand: Transfer the mold into a different toxin that's less toxic. And then also, you know, the histamine component is huge too. So for folks listening that have histamine intolerance, that could not just be food sensitivities. That could be reactions to chemicals. I mean, my chemical sensitivity, it wrecked me.

Evan Brand: I'm better now, but it's, it's been hell to go through that level of sensitivity ramped up after exposure and tick bites at the same time. So, and once again, it gets tricky, you know, case by case, but. It is true that when you have that shift in the gut because of the exposure, now you're, you're likely dealing with more histamine producing bacteria, and then when you're losing your good guys, some of those good guys help you to regulate histamine in the gut, so the problem is people will go on like strict carnivore diet, but that's not necessarily fixing what's happening in the gut bacteria, and there's a lot of people out there now that I've seen, they've followed the carnivore gurus, and they're still suffering, and we look at their gut, and it's a mess, and you cannot eat your way out of it.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and also the problem with carnivore, it's still, it can be a good diet. I mean, most of these diets are gonna be for a season for a reason, so there's a periodization plan with it. Some people, you see it a lot in the vegan community, they do really great in a vegan diet, and then they stay there. And then now, nutritional deficiencies compound.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: They're getting 400 to 500 grams of carbohydrate a day to get their, you know, half a gram per pound of body weight of protein. And that's, that can be an issue for some. So, especially in regards to carnivore diet, you know, if you're getting most of your calories from fat and protein, well, if you have any deficiencies in hydrochloric acid enzymes or bile salts, you're gonna have big problems.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: You're gonna have a lot of issues. Plus, sometimes the electrolytes can get thrown off. Again, you can combine that with some, you know, electrolyte formulas or bone broth, and you can. Mitigate some of that, but a lot of times it's not. I wanted to highlight one thing. So with mold testing, I think a big issue too is people do a lot of mold testing, especially with urine and they're, they're not challenging the mold coming out of their system.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the problem with a lot of people that have mold issues is they can't eliminate. And part of elimination is via their urine. So some of the testing say, don't use glutathione, don't use detoxification support. Well, we don't want to do binders because binders will pull it out in the stool. And if you're collecting urine, you won't see the mycotoxins or the fungal toxins.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Do you still agree that you're using some kind of a purge or detoxification support when you're collecting a urine mycotoxin test to see the full mycotoxin levels in there?

Evan Brand: Evan Brand Yeah, I mean, we stopped with the glutathione. We were really pushing that hard for a while. And then I believe it It changes something with the mitochondrial markers.

Evan Brand: So I think we decided, no, maybe not. But I try to push a hot bath, a sauna, exercise, something.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: NAC, right? NAC?

Evan Brand: Any, any kind of provoking agent like NAC or maybe even like chlorella to move things. I don't know. But the problem is, if someone has brought a test to us, sometimes they're, they're like offended if I want to go there.

Evan Brand: It's like, well, so and so tested me three years ago, nothing showed up. It's like, yeah, but you were sick as hell back then. My first initial mycotoxin profile, my ocratoxin was a 12, which was high, but not off the chart. And then when I retested six months later, after trying really hard to get better, my levels went from a 12 to a 196.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, I can go higher. And also, too, if you're just doing glutathione, newsflash, glutathione does not cross the blood brain barrier, right? So that may help with levels in the body. But if there's stuff in the brain, that could be a problem. And you're gonna need things that help cross the blood brain barrier as well.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And like, you know, Sona is a good option too. I like Sona because it is more gentle and you could push it out via your skin too. Evan

Evan Brand: Brand There was one paper you're mentioning before we hit record. It was saying that the tricothocene group of mycotoxins was accumulating in the prefrontal cortex. Dr.

Evan Brand: Justin

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Marchegiani Yes.

Evan Brand: So that's pretty nuts because you think about the decision making, you know, and I find most people today, especially people over age 40, they have a lot of issues with making decisions, whether that's relationship decisions, financial decisions, what to do with their house, what to do with their aging parents.

Evan Brand: You know, I find a lot of people are in analysis paralysis and it would make sense that not only the. Trichothecene family that you're talking about, but also Ocratoxin, we know directly affects dopamine, which you need for drive, focus, concentration, motivation, so I find that we're in a pretty apathetic society that's having trouble making decisions, and we could directly correlate that to the brain chemistry that's affected because of the gut and because of the toxicity.

Evan Brand: Dr.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Justin Marchegiani Yeah, the black mold, the, the, the stachybotrys black mold produces mycotoxins like the tricotosines, which accumulate, like you mentioned, prefrontal cortex, that, that's the reward center, that's the dopamine center. And then also the effects of mold, people exposed to ocrotoxin.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ocrotoxin A can come from penicillin or aspergillus. And these can create other nervous system issues. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Whether it's Alzheimer's or different neurological degeneration. And so it's a big deal. People want to keep their brains healthy. It's to really, and then all of us, this is going to also cause inflammation in the brain.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And this is going to impact GABA, which is the neurotransmitter that hits the break. It helps you relax, helps you chill. Dopamine. That's the I love you neurotransmitter. It's the focus neurotransmitter. Same with serotonin. They're connected. Epinephrine. Right. And then obviously you can increase glutamate which can go up when there's a lot of inflammation can overstimulate the brain and these are people that get seizures or anxiety or insomnia, right?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Their brain's overstimulated. And so, yeah, it's really important that when you look at a patient coming in, I never want to just say, Oh, you're just a mold person. It's like, no, no, no. Mold may be you. Like if we assign here's a hundred percent of what's going on, maybe moles 25 or 30 percent, but then there's some gut issues.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's another 30 percent. Maybe there's some nutrients. That's 10 or 20. Maybe there's some adrenal hormone stuff. That's 10 or 20. So you have to look at the whole pie and don't go all in on one thing being it. It may be the majority, but you have to fix everything else along with it in a periodized manner.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: To get optimal results.

Evan Brand: That's right. That's right. I mean, we didn't even hit the mitochondrial piece. So the people that are struggling with chronic fatigue, they can't exercise. Those people likely have mitochondrial issues. We'll find that on the oat test. So your new year's resolution, in my opinion, if you want me to tell you what to do, get an organic acids test.

Evan Brand: There's so much data from that. If I was on a desert island, I could only pick one test. I'd probably choose the oat.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We'll put the links down below for the oat test. If you guys want to. Find a place to support that. There'll be right down below in the description. So feel free and see that also too. I mean, it's a big deal.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: People get very overwhelmed. Like, okay, I have mold in my house. What do I do? They call them over mediator. It's like tens of thousands of dollars. They get overwhelmed. Should I move? What should I do? I mean, this isn't going to be the podcast for that, but just to kind of be very simple, you've had issues.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I've had issues. We've been able to remediate in a very conservative way. testing in a conservative way, not too expensive. Try to get to the root cause of what's happening to the best of our ability. Any just brief kind of overview on that?

Evan Brand: Yeah. Well, there's things you can do on your own at home. I mean, there's candles that we have that you can burn.

Evan Brand: There's misting and fogging solutions that can help. There's hydrogen peroxide that can help. There's removing the damaged materials that can help. So I used to be Overwhelmed with this subject because it did seem very daunting, but the more I deal with this and the more I coach people through this, I'm really not intimidated by it anymore.

Evan Brand: Like we had, we had an issue in, in the attic. I mean, we had a brand new air conditioning system up there and there was an issue with some sort of airflow to where there was humidity building up in the system and it dripped down through the ceiling. And I was like, Oh my God, here's a puddle on the floor.

Evan Brand: Here we go again with mold. You know, this stuff is haunting me. And. And so I talked to JW and he's like, well, just swab it before you go cut and stuff. Just dry it out as quick as you can and swab it. I'm like, okay, so we swab it. We send it off to the lab, nothing. So we caught it and dried it so quick that it stained the ceiling, but luckily there was no mold growth.

Evan Brand: And so now we just paint over it and we get to move on. But in a lot of cases, You, you get so paralyzed by the fear of all this that you do nothing. And so I've, I've worked through that and I help people work through that because as you said, people get overwhelmed and then they, they freak out. It's like, I don't have 20 grand.

Evan Brand: It's like, well, you don't need 20 grand. It literally cost me the cost of a Q tip and whatever it was, 20, 30 bucks to sample that Q tip and a fan to dry out what happened. I just caught it quick. Now, if it's a long term issue, it's harder and more expensive.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. I think, you know, you have your, your acute issues, which are going to happen from a pipe bursting.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: a foundation being leaky and letting a lot of water in or a leaky roof. So I think it's good to have get your roof looked at once a year. Get your HVACs looked at once a year. Make sure everything is draining well. Take a look, make sure your foundation is doing good, right? Make sure those kind of things.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So those are going to let more water come in. The faster water comes in, the greater likelihood of mold and the mycotoxins. Now, most people, it's going to be more of a Environmental issue where they just have chronically high humidity in their house and mold needs three things to grow. It needs air.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's mostly a given unless it's in some kind of a container that's closed off. It needs carbohydrate. Carbohydrates and to come from either wood, drywall or dust and it needs oxygen. And so filter out the air as well. So if you can mitigate, The moisture that's decreasing the water. And if you can decrease the carbohydrate in a chronic setting, that's going to be dust particles.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And that's going to help most of your issues. And that may involve a high quality HEPA filter with a VOC filter that may involve having good HVAC. Make sure your HVAC is working well and draining as well as a, either a dehumidifier attached to your HVAC or an additional dehumidifier in the space to keep that chronically below 50%.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Ideally put it in the mid forties. That's going to be a good place to keep your humidity low. So Any moisture that comes in the environment is goes in the air and is not staying on surfaces and not going to interact with the dust as much.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Just easy stuff. Like have your vent fan on when you're taking a hot steamy shower.

Evan Brand: I mean, if you're, if your shower mirror is steamed up by the time you get out of the shower, You probably either had it on too long, too hot, or you did not have enough ventilation. So, like, I could take a hot shower. It's not super hot because that aggravates histamine for some people. For me, if it's like a boiling shower, that's gonna aggravate the mast cells.

Evan Brand: So, you know, I don't recommend, like, boiling showers. I know my wife gets it hotter than me. I'm like, honey, that's frickin hot. I try to go in after, it's like, good lord, you're crazy. So, so, so there's the temperature piece, but then, if we have adequate ventilation, If I get out of the shower, there's no steam on the mirror.

Evan Brand: And I've, I've experimented. I'm like, okay, let me try no ventilation. Let me just not put the exhaust fan on. Boom. You got steam. So that's, that's,

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: or at least get, or at least get a dehumidifier with a trigger, like, you know, set it for 45%. It goes above 45 percent and automatically goes on. I played around with it where if I don't put ventilation on and then put the dehumidifier on, it'll stay on for like an hour.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: It'll pull out like a pint of water. Dr. Justin Marchegiani I know it's nuts. Evan Brand I know. Pine of water. But then everything's gone in an hour because it's, it's really the moisture staying there for days on end. And so as long as you can soak it up in an hour or two, or, you know, after a shower, if you have a good dehumidifier, you should pull it out pretty fast, right?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But as long as you're able to pull it out pretty fast and it's not lingering and it's not chronic, you're going to be in a pretty good place for sure. So get a simple dehumidifier that holds a gallon or two. with a setting where it's automatically triggered. You know, set it for 45 percent or 40 percent that goes above that automatically on, and then it goes off automatically.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: That's a great way to keep, you know, that good. If you have ventilation, I, that's even ideal. You may want to do both. I do both. That's a great way to keep it in check.

Evan Brand: Yep. So, so in summary, if you have gut issues, consider looking into this. If you have sleep issues, frequent urination, blood pressure issues, vision problems, anxiety, depression, irritability, anger, rage, infertility, PMS, menopausal symptoms, hot flashes, shortness of breath, cold hands, cold feet, dizziness, which was my big one, even full blown vertigo.

Evan Brand: You have issues in cars, you have issues on boats, you have car sickness, you have histamine intolerance, food sensitivity, skin rashes, flushing sinus issues. I mean, those are just some off the top of my head. This all could be linked to this constellation of issues, the toxin effect in the gut, the gut effect in the brain.

Evan Brand: Dr. Justin Marchegiani 100%. Oh, the last thing I wanted to Evan Brand In hormones. Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Evan Brand I'm sorry. I'm sorry to interrupt. Dr.

Evan Brand: Justin Marchegiani Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anytime you have chronic stress, chronic inflammation, that's gonna impact progesterone, and that's gonna potentially pull progesterone to go downstream to cortisol, the deal with stress and inflammation.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And if you're a A female, especially cycling, that can cause estrogen dominance. If you're a female, perimetopausal, menopausal, that could potentially throw off the hormones more and increase hot flashes. Especially, mold toxins tend to be estrogenic too, right? Evan Brand Yeah, I mean,

Evan Brand: so, so, so, men, you're having issues with erections.

Evan Brand: Low libido or your wife low libido. This is definitely connected to it also because of the issue with blood flow That's why vasodilators work because when you have toxicity like this, it affects nitric oxide synthase You could just put in google pub med Mycotoxin nitric oxide and you'll read about this But it creates this issue with blood flow And that's also going to be where your brain fog is coming from too because now you have issues With the microcirculation in the brain so we may use specific nutrients to help your brain work better better.

Evan Brand: We may use specific nutrients to fix the gut bacteria, nutrients to support and stabilize hormones, fixing nutrient deficiencies, restoring proper acid and enzyme levels, restoring good microbes in the gut, detoxing and removing the toxins, helping out the kidneys, helping out the liver. And so we orchestrate this beautifully.

Evan Brand: We've done it thousands of times. So It's beautiful. If you need help, you want help through all this stuff. If these symptoms resonate with you, then don't hesitate. Reach out. Let's get some labs run. You're not going to spend a ton of money. It's less than a, an iPhone to get an organic acids test, and it'll provide more information than the last 20 doctors you've

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: seen have given you.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: A hundred percent. That makes a lot of sense. And just one thing to highlight too about the environmental stuff is if you have a finished or unfinished basement, you need some kind of a dehumidifier plugged in. That's working continuously. It may not be on, you may set it for 40 or 45 percent and have it continuously drained once it gets below that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But you need something down there because another big exposure is basements where there's a concrete foundation. and you're around dirt, you're going to pull moisture from the dirt through the concrete slabs into the basement. So, I mean, if you can dry lock and put some kind of a seal on the concrete foundation inside outside, that's, that's best.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: If you can't do that, then just get a dehumidifier going. So, it's always keeping that moisture down in the forties. Again, you know, the best thing about dealing with people like Evan and I, we've been in the trenches. We know how to look at the environmental impact. with your home as well as yourself, your body, and how to periodize that with all the other systems.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So that's really good.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Well said. And you know, a lot of times you're going to have maybe your furnace unit or something in the basement, anywhere where there's already a drain to where you could just have a dehumidifier constantly draining itself. So if you're like arguing, you know, with your spouse, well, it's your turn to dump the water out of the dehumidifier.

Evan Brand: Well, I'm not going in the basement. If that thing's full, it's going to probably turn itself off and then you've wasted your time. So you want one that's going to continuously drain. So hopefully you've got a drain down there and that thing can just run into a sink or whatever.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But I'll tell you my challenge this last summer.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I have an April air whole house dehumidifier in my basement. And when it was in the mid nineties and humid, you know, July, August, even September, I couldn't get the humidity levels below 55%. I had a hard time. And so I got an additional dehumidifier. I got the media cube, put the, put the tube in the back.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And what I figured was, Oh, I have storage room in my basement that there's storage, but guess what? There's no ventilation in the storage. So the dehumidifier can't grab that. So I'm going to put a, you know, dehumidifier with a drain tube. So it continuously drains. That's ideal. Almost all basements are going to have some kind of a drain.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So get one that continuously drains, put that in there. And then I was able to knock it down in the mid to low forties. That was it. So you may need a dehumidifier on top of your whole house as well. Just keep that in the back of your mind, too. That's why I get a, get a 10 humidity meter, put it in each floor of the house, and it'll tell you exactly where you're at humidity wise.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Or if you have a Nest thermostat, it'll tell you each thermostat, each ventilation level, where your humidity's at. Evan Brand

Evan Brand: Yeah, you know what's funny is I posted a video on my Instagram about a hygrometer. I'm like, hey, this 10 tool could save your health. And it did like over a hundred thousand views overnight.

Evan Brand: So like you could prep for all these amazing videos on mold and then you do something stupid easy on a hygrometer and you get a hundred thousand views. It's funny what, what clicks with people and what just doesn't.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Oh yeah, also we spilled some water on our floor. A little bit of water on the floor and we like wiped it up, put the fan on it for the day.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I had my handy dandy moisture meter, which everyone should have, put it on there. It was still 20%. And I'm like, wait a minute, it's got to get below 15. So we just put a dehumidifier right in that area and put a fan on it. It needed to be on there for three more days to knock it down. That's crazy. And so, you know, the average person would be like, Oh, it feels good to me.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I think it's okay. But no, in the pores of the wood, it was still not enough. And so you want to keep your woods from rotting out and discoloring you. You know, if a spill happens, you want a topical moisture meter as well as an air humidity meter. It's good to have two of the house.

Evan Brand: Yeah, let, let us know in the comments or reach out to us and let us know if you want to hear more like building environmental stuff, we could do a whole episode on that.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, it's important because most people, if they have a mold issue and they're still living in this crappy environment, what do you do? And then that becomes a whole source of stress and then that's beating up the adrenals because you're like, Oh man, I don't have 30, 000 for a mold remediation. What do I do?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So, it's good. Yeah, we got, we got resources. Dr.

Evan Brand: Justin Marchegiani We could do to stabilize hormones, we could try to support detox pathways, etc. We could try to keep you somewhat stable in that environment, so it's not a make it or break it, but in terms of you making a full recovery while still getting exposed, it's gonna be tough.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, I'll put some of the links down for the products that I personally have, dehumidifier wise, whole house, as well as the internal ones, and Some of the moisture like meters and things like that. I'll put some of that on there. So I know you'll have some links to some of your favorite products.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We'll just look down below, try to do a pin comment for you guys too. And then we'll put some videos maybe in the top left. There's some other mold interviews that we've done to provide additional resources on this topic.

Evan Brand: Awesome. If you want one on one help with this, we're happy to. We work worldwide with people doing functional medicine consultations and lab testing, advanced protocols.

Evan Brand: This is all at Dr. J's website, which is just in health. EvanBrand. com and my site, EvanBrand. com. You can reach us directly and we'll be happy to help. So, don't give up. It could be a little daunting, but we'll help you kind of walk through step one, step two, step three, and walk you back to health.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Justin Marchegiani Absolutely. EvanBrand. com, JustinHealth. com. Look right below. There'll be a link for you guys to reach out and get more support. You guys have an awesome new year. Take care, y'all. Evan Brand Take it easy.