Toxic Mold, Genetics, and Testing

WELCOME TO EPISODE 121

The SHORT report on MOLD in the home! Today we are fielding an audience question regarding black mold and mold toxicity. “Should one leave their home upon the discovery of toxic mold?” The reality is, that every year people spend an incredible amount of time, money, and energy to recover from mold toxicity. Freddie shares his personal experience which included a 40,000$ remediation and long-term health implications. In this episode, Freddie discusses the components of mold that make it toxic for the body, regardless if it is inside or outside. We cover where mold likes to hide in areas like behind refrigerators, water connections, between washers, dryers, dishwashers, and wet drywall. Join us for an episode that could save your life or someone near and dear to your heart from mold!

Episode Highlights

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Freddie Kimmel (00:00.942)
Welcome to the Beautifully Broken podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel, and on the show we explore the survivor's journey, practitioners making a difference, and the therapeutic treatments and transformational technology that allow the body to heal itself. Witness the inspiration we gain by navigating the human experience with grace, humility, and a healthy dose of mistakes. Because part of being human is being beautifully broken.

Freddie Kimmel (00:36.591)
broken podcast. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel. This is the short report on mold. This is a solo sew that I've done. I've been working on this for weeks and the really challenging thing for me, people have asked, can I get a digestible format on just mold? No, it literally, I need two hours to talk about mold. So I'm just going to take one question that someone posed through social media.

And the question was, I've identified toxic mold. Do I need to leave my home? Do I have to get out of my home? Do I have to abandon everything I own, all my materials, yada, yada, yada? This is the big question, right? And it's very common. I often see people have a mold exposure and the narrative is they can't get better. So on the social post, one woman said, it cost me over $150,000 to remediate from mold and heal from mold, mycotoxins and lime. Lime and mold are often paired together.

We will not talk about why in this podcast. Another person said mold ruined my life. I lost my partner, my job and my home. my God. I wish I had a list of people that have given me the story. It's so many. It's so common. And we're going to get into why one partner is affected and one may not be. Another person said, I found mold. I remediated and I'm not better. And it's seven years since I had that initial exposure. So the symptoms continue. The fatigue continues.

And oftentimes the level of mycotoxins in the urine and blood samples don't change, even when doing all the pharmaceutical interventions. And that was my experience. So first, let's just break down in case you're not familiar, a mycotoxin. Mycotoxins are unique toxins that are naturally produced by mold and other types of fungi. Human beings can be exposed to mycotoxins through the air and mold affected buildings or their homes or all different types of foods.

So the mold you see, people say, I have mold and they'll tell me they'll send a picture of the corner of their shower with some, little brown spots. That's not really the mold we're talking about. We're talking about hidden mold and I'll offer an often reference behind your refrigerator, the connections for water between a washer and dryer, a dishwasher. And the belief system is that because it's a new home that it's not going to have mold.

Freddie Kimmel (03:05.509)
we're also going to debunk that myth. So, I just want to talk about the idea that it's a toxin we're exposed to. And the thing about mold is, we can't just neutralize it. We got to get it out of the body. Because mold that's been killed by some type of a pharmaceutical or a frequency system, if that's your belief, it's just as dangerous in the body, dead or alive. Right? So you can have these spores that are producing more mold, and if you kill them and they're floating around in your tissues,

They can be the agitant to the immune system that causes you just as much pain and suffering. So when I had my mold exposure, I bought a home and I lived in it for eight months, nine months before I really pulled apart some walls and saw what was going on. So I had a good amount of time in this home with lots of mold. Right away, I was put on what's known as a binder and I connected with a mold doc in New York City and I found a protocol for pulling mold out of the system.

which was based on using a couple different, they're actually called bile acid sequesterins. I used Wellcol and colesteramine. Now, both of these are actually used to lower cholesterol in the blood, but they have an affinity for binding to mold. And colesteramine is a bile acid sequesterin. It's a non-digestible resin. You can think about a really good resin that binds to its...

and taro hepatic bile acids in the intestine and it forms an insoluble complex that can be excreted in when you poop. So the idea is that it's always like pulling mold and mycotoxins and environmental toxins out of the bile from your liver gallbladder channels. The other thing I did was ampotericin, which is an antifungal.

And I did this in a nasal rinse to try to clear my nasal passages, which were just so inflamed. I could barely breathe out of my nose at the time. And this was amplified by me having an existing deviated septum. So the best thing I can tell you is Ampotericin for six months was like all I did was it made my nose so raw I had nosebleeds. So I basically had to quit everything that I was doing. After eight months, none of the levels have changed in my body.

Freddie Kimmel (05:25.573)
The mold was just as high as ever. And that can also be because we're removing it from the tissues. But I had to look to another route. So I frame all this just to let you know that I speak from a place of experience. I spent all the money on the specialists and the interventions and the binders and the technology to try to get mold out of my system. And what I never really understood was when I initially found mold in my apartment,

I had this really fancy company come in and test the air quality. And they set up, the best I can say, it's an upright vacuum with a long pole and a cartridge on the end, which is going to pull air from the inside of my apartment. And then they set that up for an amount of time. And then they did that in a hallway outside my apartment. And then they did it outside my building. And really what you want to do is you want to compare the ratios. And what we're looking for is colony forming units or CFUs. And so what they found in my home,

was a spore count of roughly 120,000. So that's 120,000 spores in the air. Now, as a human being, I take in about 20,000 breaths a day. So I've got to think about it. I'm breathing in these 120,000 colony forming units in every single breath. I was in the home for eight months. So we got to take it one step further. We got to talk about particle size.

The EPA is generally, if you Google the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, what they're really looking for is like 10 micrometers. That's like the size that they're really worried about. Those are particle sizes that can get into the lung, can get into the blood. can be things like asbestos. We can cause lung cancer. Mold is 2.5 micrometers wide. Most molds. To give you a range, a red blood cell in your body, one red blood cell is five micrometers wide. Mold is

hydrophilic, it can cross the blood-brain barrier, and it can get into even the small joints in the body. Again, for reference, mold being 2.5 micrometers, a small capillary in your hand is 5 micrometers wide. So they can go all the way down in your body. So I just say these numbers to frame, to give you a frame of reference, why it takes time to get better from mold, especially if you choose to stay in the moldy home.

Freddie Kimmel (07:47.484)
I don't care if you think that's your superpower, if you think your symptoms aren't worse or better, you are still accumulating mold with all those breaths. I mentioned a word I said, lipophilic. Mold toxins are lipophilic, meaning their molecular structure consists of a fatty acid molecule. And for this reason, mold toxins migrate and deposit to what fatty organ? The brain, which is roughly 60 % fat. This is often why mold is associated with it.

cognitive decline. So when we think about mold and we've identified particle size, we might have an understanding now of why timeline is elongated. I want to go back to another timeline. I'm actually going to go back to the Bible and I'm going to read a Bible quote. And please know that I support all religions. I support everybody's being spiritual AF. Have your spiritual connection. And I am not dogmatic about which religion you

And I think it's fascinating that in Leviticus 14, in which the Lord says to Moses and Aaron, here's the quote, If mildew appears in the house after the stones have been torn out and the house is scraped and plastered, the priest is to go and examine it. And if mildew has spread in the house, it is a destructive mildew. The house is unclean. It must be torn down. It's stones. It's timbers.

and all the plaster, not only torn down, but taken down out of town to an unclean place. So I find it fascinating that in one of the good books, a holy book, right? This is like before the time of Christ, they knew how toxic mold was and how a human being was susceptible to this fungus, the fungus among us. I just like to do that to give it scope.

It's not some weird thing that some small subset of the population is weak to, or you hear randomly about it. You're going to hear more and more about this mold toxicity and it's driving chronic illness because people have been in their homes for a long time now. Two and a half years, right? Been told to stay home. Another co-factor that will exacerbate your ability to heal is the HLA gene. The HLA gene affects roughly 25 % of us. So think 25 %

Freddie Kimmel (10:12.182)
percent of America is like, you know, 80 million people in the U.S. So carriers of the HLA-DR gene, that's the human leukocyte antigen gene, are prone to develop chronic health issues involving systemic inflammation, whether the cause is mold or Lyme or tick-borne illness or gluten or countless other catalysts, because the HLA-DR gene makes a person helpless against biotoxin illness. It makes detoxification very, very difficult. So the 25 %...

of people who have that HLA-DR-BQ gene is related to mold toxicity do not make antibodies to deactivate and remove mold toxins. I'm going say that one more time. We do not make antibodies needed to deactivate and remove mold toxins. I say we because that's me. I have the HLA-DR gene. Their bodies cannot recognize mold toxicity as bad guys to be eliminated. So let's go back to the 120,000 particle size.

120,000 colony forming units that were in Freddie's apartment, 20,000 breasts a day. And I'm just choosing by living there. And I knew there was mold a long time before, but I didn't get right out. I was choosing to try to remediate, repair floors, repair leaky walls while I was living there. So I have to take, here's the net is I've got to take radical ownership of how long it took me to recover. That's it.

Not a fear tactic, just like, give myself grace that it will be time. So I'm going to use outside of the box modalities, right? That's why I'm talking about things to amplify detoxification that are not just colesteramine and well-call. Cause I didn't want to be sick for 10 years. So symptoms associated with people who have the HLA gene and have been exposed to mold are brain fog, extreme fatigue, memory problems.

mood swings, depression, difficulty concentrating, weakness, muscle aches, light sensitivity, a chronic cough, sinus issues, vertigo, metallic taste in your mouth, a static shock. Interesting. Talk a lot about voltage on this podcast, sugar cravings, inability to regulate temperature, digestive issues. It's pretty wild. There is also an incredible list, an incredible list of disease associated with

Freddie Kimmel (12:35.731)
mold. So a lot of these diseases, if you will, Parkinson's, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, Graves' disease, a lot of these can be driven by biotoxin illness, multiple sclerosis. And also the list of things that I just mentioned, we'll often find that there's not a blood test for those disease states, right? It's a symptom set.

There's actually a list that includes Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Sorghum Syndrome, Graves, Hashimoto's, Rheumatoid Arthritis, MS, Autoimmune Diseases. There's like qualifying buckets that give you a list of this disease. Say, I just want to mention that because that's among the mold specialists that I saw. They were really focused on going deeper on this education. Like, why can't I get better? Why is this so hard for me? You know, so we look at all these compounding factors, if you will.

So the other thing I just want to mention why it's hard to get better from mold toxicity is modern day building materials. If you're in a moldy home and you jump to another one, it doesn't mean you're going to get better. Chances are they were all built too quickly and a home used to take roughly 15 months to build. Sometimes they're up in six months today, so corners are cut. The other thing that's problematic is drywall. Gypsum board. It's the perfect food for mold. It only needs to get wet one time.

And this could be a storm, a tear in the roofing, poor flashing around a chimney. There's a great litmus test that I people. Drive around your neighborhood and look at new home construction. You'll often see the studs go up and then maybe some board or particle board. And then they'll put this plastic on. That's known as a vapor barrier. Oftentimes the wood going up and the vapor barrier, there's big time gaps in between that. I'll often drive by and be like, wow, it's been like three weeks.

Why isn't the vapor barrier up? Or they put the vapor barrier right up and they don't put siding on. And it's not hormetically sealed. It's not perfectly sealed. Right? There's tears in that liner. Often wind comes along and you see big rips in it and then we'll just throw up siding. It's like they're making a mold birthday cake. So new construction does not mean that you're safe. The other thing people do is they often deliver lumber to the site. They'll drop it in the front yard.

Freddie Kimmel (15:02.937)
And it sits there and it's rained on, you know, quote unquote, we've got to leave the lumber to let it dry out. I've never understood that because I see a lot of stacks of lumber and sitting in the moldy dirt in the lawn. So construction is problematic. You know, that's a whole nother bucket of worms. could just do building the perfect home that's resistant to mold. That'd be a great podcast. I want to sum it up here. So we've covered a lot. We've covered the idea that mold has been around a long time, the awareness that it makes us sick from the Bible.

Right? We've established that we use when the popular interventions is to use something to pull mold from bile known as a sequestering agent, like coloceramine that may or may not work for you. did not work for me. I could never tolerate binders until I found a company called Cellcore, which uses a bioactive carbon. You'll start to hear in the alternative or complimentary world of medicine about charcoals and betonite clays and zeolites.

I couldn't tolerate any of those, but Cellcore has been pretty magical. And again, we're not going to go into, you know, what products and what ones are, I think, are the best, because that's just my belief system. But those worked really good for me. And so I think it's worth investigating the podcast, the full podcast I did with Dr. J on the Beautifully Broken Podcast about Cellcore and what that product is doing, how it's different, how it works differently as a binder or a bioactive carbon.

We covered the idea that many of the population is possibly struggling with this HLA gene, up to 80 million people that don't have the off-ramp for mold to get out of the body. That's a great fun fact. I mean, imagine the energy you take, all of a sudden it's like you're not viewing your body as this broken container, right? It just has a unique pathway. So mold actually becomes the superpower for me. When I walk into a hotel room, I'm like, wow, I feel a little unique.

My teeth are a little sensitive or numb almost. I've got a little fatigue or brain fog. My words aren't coming to me. Maybe I should evaluate. Maybe I change hotel rooms. Again, finding a clean hotel room. How do you travel to mitigate mold? It's another podcast. So maybe we'll do more short reports on mold. I think it's a big one because it's affecting so many people. I think your action step, if you're wondering whether mold is a problem for you, test. Don't guess.

Freddie Kimmel (17:31.257)
You can physically examine all the connections around your refrigerator, your washer and dryer, and see if those are sound and secure. We can look in the basement to see if there's mold living anywhere, but you got to test. So one of my favorite tests is EnviroBiomics. And that's a test for the home. And they do an ERMI test, which you can do. My favorite thing about the ERMI test from EnviroBiomics, you could order a quick turnaround. You don't have to wait. You could know in like a day.

It's like up, ready to go, day later, boom. I got my results if I need like a 48 hour turnaround. And it's just a cloth, which you're going to swipe like eight to 10 surfaces in your home, put it in an envelope and a sealed bag and mail it away to the lab. And they're going to use really high quality measuring devices to know, there these spores that are producing live mold that are going to hurt you in your home? It's fascinating. So the other testing idea, test before we guess.

is to look at what's in the body. Has my body accumulated home that I can correlate with the envirobiomics? Maybe. So I use a lab called Real Time Laboratories, and they're doing excellent mycotoxin panel. And the other thing I love about Real Time Laboratories is they give you a discount on the retest. Many of the tests that I mentioned on the podcast, the mineral test, the omega quant, know, mycotoxins,

You don't want to just do one, a stool diagnostic. You want to test, do an intervention, and then look at it again. I know money is the thing, but we want to know that what we're doing is working for us. That's really how this all works. so allocating funds, it's like, how am I paying for all this? I promise that's another short report. I have so many ideas for a little short 20 minute podcast. We're just creeping on 20, so I got to finish. The other test you can do is Great Plains Laboratory.

It's the GPL Mycotox test, which is another great lab. Also relatively affordable. So that's human testing. The real-time laboratory is great plane. Both of those. Or the home test, the EnviroBiomics. There are other tests. You can even order these little Petri dishes that you can set in your home, and they'll accumulate mold and you send them away. Those are even more affordable. I just haven't really done those. I think the thing I want everybody to take away from this is that...

Freddie Kimmel (19:53.018)
genetically you're probably unique. Many times I hear the idea that or the story that a partner is like relatively fine after they leave the mold and the other one is bedridden. That's just your unique body responding in a unique way. And I promise you, as opposed to being smite upon with a deficiency, it's a superpower. Through that adversity, I would implore you to just feel into how that could be framed as a gift. Otherwise, I think

The other way is valid, but we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. We're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. if it's just look at it never, you know, the idea that when we say things like it never stops, it just keeps coming. Yeah. Life is going to just keep coming. It's going to keep breaking us down and we're still, we're until we're in that flexible state until we can approach these unique health challenges with the inquisitive nature of a child. It's like, wow. Isn't it interesting? My body is responding that way.

How can I lean into that and feel into that and be flexible? Mold's tough because it's going to, in my experience, it does make people tired. It makes you fatigued. It makes your brain not work. So to answer the question, can I live in mold and remediate? I personally would not advise that. And if your health isn't good, if you're doing a lot of biohacks, if you're doing a lot of supplements and you don't feel great, test the air quality in your home. Take a peek. Take a peek.

Take a peek under the rug, explore, approach it with the inquisitive nature of a child, where there's wonderment around it. So I hope this was helpful. There's gonna be more short reports. Can I live in mold? That was the podcast. Namaste, my friends. Bye.

Freddie Kimmel (21:42.226)
My friends, you made it to the end of the podcast. Can you believe this is season four? Wait, don't turn it off yet. Before you go, I have something very important I need to say. There are two ways in which we can build this relationship that we've been working on. The first one is to join me on my membership program at buymeacoffee.com forward slash freddysetgo. You get early access to all the podcasts, bonus episodes, discounted coaching, and free webinars

with thought leaders in the wellness and technology industry. The second way to support this guy right here is to go to freddysetgo.com and download the Beautifully Broken Buyer's Guide. This is my ebook. It's a collection of transformational technology, supplements, and courses that have worked for me, my clients, and my family. These are things that I have found incredibly helpful in my personal healing journey, like the ionic foot bath or amp coil or the red light.

Most offer significant discounts by clicking the link or using the discount code. Now please know they don't cost you anything extra and at the same time they do support the podcast through affiliations. Friends, thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's show, head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. Five stars if you loved it and well, I guess if you're compelled to listen to this entire thing and leave a one-star review, I'm going to take that too.

If you want to connect with me directly, I spend most of my time on the social media platform known as Instagram at freddysetgo. Or you can find me at buymeacoffee.com forward slash freddysetgo or freddysetgo.com. And lastly, from my vast team of legal internet lawyers, which I pay a lot of money to, the information on this podcast is for educational purposes only.

By listening, you agree not to use the information found here as medical advice, to treat any medical condition in yourself or others. Always consult your own physician for any medical issues that you may be having. That's all for today. Our closing? The world is changing. We need you at your very best. So take the steps today to always be upgrading. Remember, while life is pain, putting the fractured pieces back together can be a beautiful process. I love ya. I'm your host, Freddie Kimmel.