177: How Many People Are Affected by Mold? Breaking Down Mold's Impact on the Population

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 Foreign.

How we doing, everybody? Another day, another topic.

All right, so this one again, this is. This came through my email community. I'm starting to take the majority of my topics from there, frankly, guys, because I kind of am running out of things that just come up with myself. And so I feel like if I'm seeing a lot of the similar stuff come in via email, then I can understand that that's the topic people are looking for. And then I will, you know, talk about it, be helpful. So if you want to try to submit ideas or topics that you would like me to talk about, I'm doing this through my email community. In order to get there, it's yes, weinspector.com join. Yes, weinspect.com join super easy. You will join. I will then send an email out and I'll say, hey, give me topics to talk about and you will respond to it possibly. And then I will look at them and I will talk about it. So that's what's happening right now. So I, I was looking at some stuff and, and there were some questions around, like the misunderstanding of how many people might actually be impacted by mold and trying to clarify that, to understand, like who should, should not be concerned about this sort of thing. And so I'm actually going to read this specific question from one person. Then I had some others that were similar. So I'm going to read it now just for context. I said that 40% of the population is impacted by mold on a daily basis. Right. I actually say that in the intro of the podcast. Right. So this said, wow, 40%. I wouldn't be surprised based on the number of friends I have that I suspect may be affected by mold toxicity. I'd love to share this with them since most of them dismiss me when I mention mold to them. Where did you get the 40% number from? Also, I thought mold toxicity could only affect the 25% of the population that has the genetic makeup to not detox properly. Is that true? Thanks. I'd love to share more info. So these are really good questions. So let me start with the 40% number, which I actually know. Is low. Right. So when that number comes from a couple key health diagnoses that we know for sure are impacted by mold exposure. So the first one is sirs. That is 24%. She mentioned 20 or he or she mentioned 25 in this email. And technically it's 24% of the population has a genetic makeup that doesn't allow them to detox properly. So there's 24% of your population right there. Okay. So now the other three areas that we know for sure mold impacts in terms of diagnoses are pans and pandas, which is pediatric neurological issues. So like kids, kids who are having neurological impact from environmental triggers and exposures. That's one autoimmune conditions, big blanket autoimmune issues. And the other one is Lyme disease. So those are the other three that I looked at. So you put those together, you have sirs, which is Chronic inflammatory response syndrome, Lyme disease, autoimmune conditions, and pans, pandas. So what I did is I went and I researched the number of people that have that in the U.S.

And then I looked at the total population in the U.S. this was, you know, two years ago maybe. So there's 130 million people in the U.S. at that time, 40% of them were encompassed in this group of four people of these four diagnoses. Now that's just these four hard diagnoses. Right. There's a whole lot of other things going on that people are dealing with where they're not diagnosed with autoimmune or Lyme, or they're not a child with pans or pandas yet they're still being impacted by mold. Right. People who have chronic fatigue, chronic this, chronic that, chronic fill in the blank that hasn't been diagnosed that are only going to like your mainstream medical doctors and they're all on pills and anti inflammatories and they're on steroids and they're on all this stuff that's not working. All of those people are not included in this because they're not tied into the metric or the statistic of someone who's been diagnosed with one of those things or has had. Yeah, of those things. So this number is actually way more than 40%. Right. What I would say is if you are somebody who is dealing with some sort of ongoing health issue that is not being properly reduced or you're not getting benefit from traditional medical treatment, so it kind of keeps going on and like they can't really figure out what's going on or the treatments aren't working the way they're expecting to, or they maybe work for a short period of time and you get a little better, but then you plateau again, and then maybe you come back down, you start feeling worse again. Those are all telltale signs that there's some sort of environmental issue going on that's not allowing the traditional treatment protocols to work the way they are supposed to. Right? So if you're somebody in that boat, you are probably being impacted by something, an environmental trigger. Right? And mold is really the most prevalent of those. So, you know, it could always be other things. Right. But a lot of times, mold becomes sort of the initial root of that, and then you can start developing like, multiple chemical sensitivity or mast cell activation syndrome or some of these other things where the root of that is actually a mold exposure that's then overworking your body. And then your body starts diverting from other areas that it can to try to handle that. And then you start getting other sensitivities and symptoms as a result of that kind of cascades down. Right? So mold, a lot of times is the kind of origination anchor point for these more complex health issues or ongoing health issues that aren't getting better, Right? I'm gonna say it's for every single thing that exists, but it's for a lot of things. Right? And it might not be the only component, but it's something where you reduce that. That inflammation your body, that trigger, that's triggering your immune response, that's constantly keeping you in your sympathetic response state, which is your fight or flight portion of your autonomic nervous system, and how you respond to things. When you're constantly there, you can't heal. And if you're in a mold situation, you're constantly there, your sleep goes down. I mean, so many things happen to it. So the symptoms and the systems. The symptoms and systems in your body are all being affected or some are being affected constantly, right? So mold exposure, a lot of time is. Is defined as a multi system, multi symptom problem system, meaning digestive system, reproductive system, nervous system, like the, you know, your cardiovascular system. Those are different systems in your body, and symptoms are then how they manifest, right? So you're having skin issues, you're having digestion issues, you're having neurological brain fog. You're, you know, all that. So those are your symptoms, right? So basically a. A one key component that's a really big red flag of a mold issue is you have multiple systems in your body. So let's say, for example, your digestion and Your skin, let's say. So say those are two things and those are two different systems in your body and you're having symptoms in both places that is a, a potential sign of environmental issue. Right? So a lot of times that's how, that's how you can look at it. Like if your traditional medical doctors aren't getting it and they're like, oh, you got all these symptoms, I know, we'll just start treating your symptoms. If they're just treating your symptoms, it's not working. Right. Because treating symptoms doesn't solve the problem. It's.

I just, my, my, one of my kids, they just, they just like, they hurt themselves yesterday. They cut themselves on something or, or they smashed their finger. That's what it was. And they. No, no, no, no. Well, they've done all of these things. So I'm trying to think of.

So the other day, my oldest, she was running and she, when she runs, sometimes she doesn't lift her feet up all the way off the ground. And so she kind of like scrapes the tops of her toes against the ground as she's running. And we were outside and so the ground wasn't smooth and she cut her, the top of her toe and her toenail kind of broke a little bit right up there and it ripped off and she was bleeding and it turned into this whole thing. Right. So let's talk about system, let's talk about symptom treatment versus root cause treatment. Okay? The symptom treatment which we needed to do was we had to stop it from bleeding, right? We put a band aid on it. Made her feel better, made her feel good. Right? But the root cause of it is that she doesn't lift her feet when she runs. And so I didn't just stop at, hey, we're going to wrap this up. It's like you need, we need to start teaching you to lift your feet higher when you run, otherwise you're going to scrape your foot again. And I didn't say she actually did this twice within like a five minute period. So it allowed her to understand the concept of lifting my feet up or this is going to keep happening. So that's the difference of like treating the root cause of why something is happening as opposed to the symptoms. Right. So if you're seeing somebody and they're just treating the symptoms, you're bleeding toe and they're not teaching you to lift your foot up when you run so you don't keep scraping your toe and bleeding anymore, then they're not actually solving the problem. Right. And a lot of times they're doing it because they don't know what the problem is. And if that's the case and you're kind of going through this like endless cycle, many times exposure, mold exposure, environmental exposure, some other thing is the root behind that that's causing. Right. So that's where the number comes from. The 40% specifically came from Sers Lyme disease, autoimmune diseases, and Panspandas. But like I said, there's this whole other group of people floating around out there that haven't found the doctor smart enough to even diagnose them over here. And so they're floating around over here with all of these undiagnosed things and they're just getting symptom treatment and it's not working and everything that I just said. So I, I personally think, and this is just like gut feel, I think that 40% isn't doubled. I think it's 80% pretty easily. It's just the, the severity and the sig and like how much is someone being impacted? Right. Like, the other thing is the level of impact is different. You, you could be somebody who is relatively healthy and you're exposed for a while and then maybe your sleep starts to suffer a little because it impacts your sleep, for example. So you're still impacted by mold, but you're not walking around feeling sick all the time. You're just tired because now your sleep is being impacted. Right. But poor sleep then results in other things over time and ultimately earlier cause of mortality if you have poor sleep. Right. So you could argue that somebody who's in like this, this very minimal effect is if they don't address it because they're not noticing it might be in a worse place than somebody who's having a more severe effect, who's being proactive in fixing it. Because if they fix it for, then the long term effect of constant exposure goes away at that point because they've addressed it. Whereas if you have somebody who's just like, oh, you know, I'm feeling tired, I'm feeling this, I'm not sick, I'm just, you know, whatever, that has long term effects on longevity and life too. And so, you know, it's almost that idea of like when you cook a. I think it's a lot. Is it a lobster that you cook where like you put them in water and you slowly turn it up and then eventually that's how, that's how they cook and they die in the water? I think that's how is It a frog. I don't know why somebody would do that with a frog. I've heard this concept before anyways. The sl. I'm sure you guys have heard this. The slowly raising temperature of water where you put like a, I'm gonna say a lobster cuz frog sounds weird. And then ultimately the lobster ends up dying in there. And that's how they get cooked, right? As opposed. And they don't know that the temperature's rising. Like by the time they figured out it's too late. As opposed to the pot of bottle, the pot of water is boiling. You stick em in and they freak out right away and they know what's going on, right? So it's like this slow burn that's happening. And for a lot of people the slow burn is what's hitting them right now. Those aren't your most severe acute symptoms, but your long term performance and longevity in life is, is going to be impacted by that as well. So it's really important to understand those two sides of things and just really truly get like why this is so important. We take 20,000 breaths every day. We spend 90% of our time indoors. That means 18,000 of your breaths are happening in a building at some point in time. And we know that the majority of buildings have water damage and or mold issues as a result of that. And so we're breathing in a lot of contamination and toxins all day. Almost every breath that we take. The volume of breath that we breathe in a day is the equivalent of a normal size like 2000 gallon swimming pool in our backyard. Think of it that way. Like so if you're trying to think of how to have a conversation with your friends, here's some analogies for you, right? You have the number of breasts you take in a day. The other is the volume of air that you breathe in is the equal to a normal sized swimming pool at a house in the backyard. Look at the pool in the backyard. Imagine all of that water has mold toxins in it. And every day you're breathing all of that into your lungs and distributing it out to your body. And then the next day your pool fills up again and you go and you breathe it all in again and you do it over and over and over and over again. And, and that's how these conditions start to compound and develop. So maybe that'll be helpful in how you explain or even how you guys understand it. So thanks for the question. It's a good one. I think it's a, it's a good thing to understand just general big picture how this stuff impacts us. And yeah, Remember, go to yes weinspect.com join, get on the email list and then you can submit questions when we make a call for topics. And maybe I'll cover yours.

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.

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