Excerpt from a Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast episode (guest Ian Clark) in which Ian describes severe illness linked to fungal infections and heavy metal exposure. Ian recounts profound fatigue, mental/emotional collapse, pain, headaches, reduced basal body temperature, personality changes, and severe outcomes (e.g., fistulas). Ben compares his milder experience with tinea versicolor and describes using oil of oregano, infrared sauna, and metal chelation. The speakers assert (anecdotally) that mold exposure in buildings can lead to colonization and that the combination of heavy metals plus fungal infection worsens enzymatic dysfunction.
Chapters
Like, when you get there, anybody that ever gets there, they just want to lay down and die. You're so sick. You're so messed up. You're in so much pain. You're. You got pounding headaches. When you try to change anything, you just want to die. Literally. I mean, I. I've been. I was in that mental emotional state and thinking, cool. Really good, Ian. Awesome job. You know, here you are. You got seven children, you got an amazing family, and you've totally let your. I wasn't a drinker or a smoker. I mean, I wouldn't refrain from having a beer or something, but I was not into that kind of stuff. I didn't do drugs. I stopped all that when I was about 21. Yeah.
It was your food and your environment.
Yeah, exactly. And the stress levels and just the. And also the mental attitude. Horrific mental attitude. Like, oh, I don't care. Yeah, whatever. You know, that person. Real arrogant and know it all. And you couldn't tell me anything. If you mentioned the word organic to me, I'd say, what are you talking about? Everything grows out of the ground, idiot.
Right.
You know, that type of a person. And I'm sorry that I was, you know, that there was no excuse for it, and it had a lot to do. When you put fungus in a person's body with heavy metals, you do turn into a rather weird person.
Is it. Is it a combination? Like. Like you. You say that as though fungus by itself or heavy metals by themselves are not as big of an issue as fungus combined with heavy metals. Is there something about that 12 combo?
Oh, yeah. I think if you have heavy metals, you will have a fungal infection and your whole enzymatic system goes down. Because when you have those two combinations, your body temperature drops below normal.
Yeah.
And every 0.1 degree of body temperature, your basal temperature dropping, is a sliding scale upwards of enzymatic dysfunction.
Interesting. You know, this is something. And obviously you were way, way farther down this rabbit hole than I was. But, you know, I started to notice a couple of years ago, things like, you know, me getting more cold than I should in the afternoon and my. My energy levels dropping. And I actually got this thing. The doctor told me it was. It was tinea versicolor, where I was tanning irregularly on. On my skin, which I later learned was. It was an actual fungus that grows in your skin that when you're. When the sun hits your skin, it makes your skin kind of splotchy when you tan. I started doing oil of oregano topically and internally. I started doing infrared sauna to work on getting rid of the heavy metals. I was doing like metal chelation, spray, stuff like that. I think I probably had something similar to what you were experiencing, but a much more micro level. But yeah, I mean, I would tend to agree that it seemed that the two went hand in hand. This whole idea that I had a bunch of metal exposure and I had some kind of fungus taking over my body and it. I mean, I think there's probably more people and probably a lot of people listening in right now walking around with some of these issues. You know, maybe it hasn't gotten into full blown, you know, freaking like fistula like you had, but. But yeah, that's interesting that that heavy metal fungus combo seems to kind of go hand in hand, right?
Oh, yeah, It's a big play. And you know, I was also exposed to many environments where I lived in as a young guy working in the oil field, which were way less than optimal. A lot of mold inside the houses I lived in. So if you walk into a building right now, it's already now proven. I have a friend in Austin, Texas that was given a million dollars to do a research for the DoD on mold alone. Yeah. You walk into a building that has X amount of mold per cubic meter of air and you breathe that air, you will be colonized. It's inevitable. Doesn't matter.
