124: The Top 10 Most Common Mold Myths

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're One of the 130 million people that are dealing with SIRS Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Number 10, ozone kills mold. So, three things that you need to know about ozone, okay? The first thing is that ozone doesn't break down every single mold of mycotoxin the same way. In fact, there's been studies in food mycotoxins that show that ozone has different effects on different type of mycotoxins and how effectively it can break it down. So the use of ozone is not like a guarantee that you're going to break down every mycotoxin at the same rate or even completely all the way. That's the first thing. The second thing is that ozone is an equal opportunity destroyer, okay? It's not just focusing on mold or biotoxins or biological things is literally anything that ozone touches, it's highly reactive. It will start to break it down. So think, for example, like the seals around your windows. If it starts breaking the seals around your windows, that can lead pathways for water to come in, could also leave pathways for air to come in, which. Which can create condensation on your windows and result in an additional problem. And the third thing is that ozone is super unhealthy for you to breathe, you to be super, super careful about doing it, and it's just a band aid. Without finding the source of the mold in the first place, it's all just going to come back.

Number nine, if I fix my mold problem, I'll never be exposed again. All right? I took this video when I walked into a drugstore, and it's not about the drugstore. Obviously, there's a lot of problems here. It's about what the drugstore represents in our overall exposure and what we should be expecting. Here's the thing. Any drugstore, grocery store, gas station, anywhere, you walk into your friend's house, there's going to be more problems in places. The idea that we are going to fix something and never, ever be exposed again. It's so unrealistic. And what it does is it leads to unhealthy expectations, increased anxiety, perpetual time spent in the sympathetic response state, just all of these things. Here's the thing, you spend 90% of your time in your home. The goal is to get your home reduction as low as we can. Not so you'll never be exposed again, but so you give your body enough breathing room to start recovery so you can be a normal person and live a normal life. Number eight, there should be zero mold in the home. So this doctor tells her, just, just move into a house of no mold. Like you could just do that. Just like that. So that was number one and then number two. Yeah. Well, how do I do that? Oh, just find a house that's less than 10 years old and you'll be fine. Are you kidding? I, I, I was like blown away when this person told me that. I was like, I cannot believe that this doctor said that to you. Like, this person should know better. They should know better. They're, they're the people that understand this. They work with so many people. Like, you should know that you can't just get up and move to a house that has no mold. God, if it was that easy, wouldn't we all just freaking get up and do that? Like it's not that easy. You know, you can't just go find a house that doesn't have mold. If we could do that, if you knew how to do that, you wouldn't be doing any of this stuff because you would have just like gotten up and went to a house that didn't have mold. A big part of why I do this show is to open your guys eyes to the challenges that we have. Can you just move into a house with no mold? No. I was telling my client yesterday that I was working with. So we're talking about that.

Actually it was the same one. I was that of that. I was just putting the story on the same one who had this doctor and I was like, I can, I've been doing this for a long time, like nearly a decade. I've been doing this. I've been in thousands of homes. I can literally count on one hand. This is not an exaggeration. I have five fingers on a hand. I could count on one hand the number of times that I walked into a house and found absolutely nothing. That's it. One hand. And I actually think it's three. I don't even think it's a full hand. I think it's a half a hand. That's it. So am I going to just get up and go find a house that doesn't have mold? You're absolutely not going to get up and go find a house that doesn't have mold. This is why you need to take control of this. Situation. This is why you need to learn about stuff yourself and not rely on other people to tell you how to do it. Right? Like, and. And. And that's what I'm trying to do, is to share that with you guys, right? Number seven, you can just buy mold resistant cleaning products. Hey, guys, fun fact. The main ingredient in every single cleaning bottle that you have is water. It's not the other cleaning ingredients. It's water is the base. And then they put in, like, the active ingredients, like a little bit here, a little bit here, and then bam, it's a cleaning product, but the bulk of it is water. And the reason I'm telling you this is because if you're looking in your cabinets and you're under your sink and your bathrooms and you see product stains have that trigger as a water stain, not a product stain. Okay? And I'll give you a quick example. In the last place that I lived in, I had a product bottle under my sink. It exploded under my kitchen sink. I didn't know it exploded. It exploded. At some point in time, I go in there to grab something. I see this bottle exploded. I'm like, oh, awesome. I go start pulling stuff out. There's mold all over my cabinet. All right, so mold had grown after this product bottle exploded. Guess what the product bottle was? It was a product spray that was meant to clean mold off of stuff. It was a mold cleaning product that had mold grow because the number one ingredient is water.

Number six, mildew is different than mold.

Guys, I gotta tell you, marketing companies are so smart. The big ones, they really, really get it. If they have a product they're trying to sell, they create a narrative around the product, and they push that to make you think that you need need it. And to think that the problem it's solving is something different when really it's not. The big thing I'm thinking of here when I'm talking about this is mold versus mildew. Guys, newsflash, Mildew is mold. Mold is mildew. They are not different things, okay? But these big box corporations have created mildew. They literally created this word, mildew, so they could sell you products that are geared around removing mildew while at the same time devaluing the. The impact that mildew can have on someone, right? So, like, oh, it's mildew. It's not a big deal. Just spray it with this stuff as opposed to, hey, that's mold. It could be releasing thousands of spores, hundreds of thousands of fragments. It could be creating toxins, all that stuff. A spray doesn't fix that, but a spray can fix a little bit of moldoo.

Number five, all mold is toxic. What is toxic mold? And this phrase of toxic mold that gets thrown around a lot. It gets misconstrued and it misleads a lot of people of us think that when you hear the phrase toxic mold, you're actually talking about this toxic chemical. And that's not what we're actually talking about. When people say that, they might actually mean the toxic chemical or the mold that has the ability to produce a toxin. Is the mold itself toxic? No. Is the chemical it creates toxic? Yes. The creator of the toxin is a living thing. The toxin is a non living chemical byproduct product. They are different things. That's why testing for mycotoxins is really important. That's why we don't just do a mold species test and think that we know everything. On the flip side, that's why you don't just do a mycotoxin test and think that it tells you everything. On the mold species side, again, toxic mold should only mean a mold with the ability to produce toxins.

Number four, air samples will tell you if there's a mole problem for sure.

70% of the time when there was an actual source problem in the wall, the air sample said there was nothing. We know that the signs of water damage are kind of the red flag clues that there might be a mold source hidden somewhere. I wouldn't just look at that. So, okay, there's bubbling paint in this window. I'm gonna step four feet over here, put an air sample in the middle of the room, and think it's going to tell me what's going on. That's where that 70% fail rate comes from that I mentioned. Because I did this for a year, and every house I went into, I wanted to prove this. In that example, I walked four feet away, put an air sample up. But the other thing I did, which is the real way to do it, called a wall cavity test in the wall. Put a little hole in the wall about the size of a Sharpie pen, put a tube through the hole, and then attach that to an air sampling pump and collect air from behind the wall directly where the bubbling was on the front side. That's the difference in how we go through and inspect a space. It's all about where is the source. It's no different than medicine. Root cause. It's the exact same thing. What is the root cause of the exposure problem? The root cause is wherever the mold sources are hidden, the exposure Problem is the dust piece. You do have to address both of them, but you have to know why it started in the first place. Otherwise it's going to keep happening.

Number three, you need an active water issue to have a mole problem.

The biggest misconception that people have is I need to have a water problem right now for there to be a mold problem. It's completely the opposite from that. It's because the problem happened before, and it's dried at this point. There doesn't need to be water right now. Think of it this way. Imagine you had this big, beautiful yard, and then you stop watering. Does the grass just pick up and walk away and go somewhere else? No, it dries out. It becomes brittle. And that's exactly what happens with mold colonies. The secret to going in and finding mold in a house is to not actually look for mold in the house. Very rarely is it able to be seen. The secret to doing this is to look for signs of water damage, not stuff that's wet right now.

Number two, fogging kills mold.

The purpose of the fog, guys, is actually not to kill anything. It's not to get rid of anything. That's not what the purpose of the fogging is, really. The fogging is a mechanism that we use to get all the microscopic stuff that's floating around up here to attach to them, make them heavier, and then have gravity bring them down. So it's to get all that stuff that's floating down to surfaces so then you can wipe. So that's why we fog.

Number one, mold is always visible.

A lot of times, the challenge with this industry is that we're talking about this invisible thing that you can't see. But that's not always how people think about it. They think about it like, if I don't have a whole bunch of black stuff all over this wall, then I don't have a mold problem. Because all the commercials that I've seen from Clorox and Tide and all the people that make their mold cleaning products, they put massive things of mold on walls. Why do they do that? Because you have to sell a product, and you can't visualize what you're selling on ultimately. What's an invisible, inhalable thing that most people are impacted by? So you have all of these big companies that create this illusion that there's only a mold problem if it's, like, big and everywhere, and then our spray can fix it. Right? So we've kind of, like, been trained. This is what a mole problem looks like. That's not what a real mole problem looks like, what a normal mole problem looks like. What it looks like is my baseboard's pulling off the wall a little bit for no reason. There's a little bubbling in the paint over here. Why does that look like that? Why is my cabinet under my sink warping a little bit? None of those things have visible mold on them, but that's what a mold problem looks like.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.

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