193: Mold, Minerals, and Mountain Living — A Holistic Health Wake-Up Call with Lexie Haren

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.

Hey, everyone.

Welcome to Today. Whatever Today is for you. I did that joke last time, so it's not going to land as well this time. I guess it depends how long these go before they come out. Anyways, we're back for another episode. So today is a pretty cool one because we're talking to a medical professional, and we're also talking to a we inspect client at the same time. And that's really cool because now we can really connect dots to stuff that a lot of times you're not able to do when you're talking from one person to the other. And so I think it'd be really awesome to have a pretty unique conversation that doesn't happen all the time. I have Lexi Herron on today from Heron Holistics, correct?

Yep. Out of Idaho. Right.

Cool. Well, thank you for joining us.

Yeah, me too. Me too. All right, so here was what I was thinking. I was thinking we start with a little bit of picking your brain and being a little selfish on that front. And then after that, maybe talking through, like, how the process was what drove you into looking down the mole path, kind of what that journey looked like for you and what it's looking like kind of after the fact. How's that sound?

That sounds wonderful.

Cool. All right, well, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about yourself and your background and all that fun stuff first.

Yeah, of course. Well, I am Lexi Heron. I have my master's in high altitude exercise physiology, actually. So I am a human physiologist, and I just really love geeking out about the human body and how we can, you know, support ourselves to have optimum energy and optimum metabolic function and all of this. So this has definitely been a passion of mine ever since I was really in high school. And I just knew I wanted a job where I didn't have to sit at a desk under fluorescent lights all day. And this certainly allows me to be out and about and helping people and moving, and that's amazing. So as I was working through cardiac and pulmonary rehab with clients, that was one of my first clinical experiences. I was just realizing a lot of people needed help with more than just exercise and movement. They needed a lot of guidance as far as how were their foundations with their health, you know, like what was actually triggering their metabolism to shut down and not work off optimally. And so I went down the rabbit hole of functional lab testing actually and found myself deep into the mineral realm of things and how minerals are literally the spark plugs of life. They help create our cellular energy, all of that. And then this sort of led me into, yeah, just taking more courses and continuing education and starting to add that into my practice and helping people in a more holistic way. 4. So that's how hair and holistics was born. Functional labs focus with on the hair tissue mineral analysis and slowly but surely over the last couple of years I've been starting to add more homeopathy into my practice as I've learned to navigate my old own journey and help others in other ways.

Very cool. So this is a. It's a different angle, I feel like than a lot of the medical professionals that sort of talk about mold and stuff because a lot of times it's either symptom based or it's talking about specific testing. It's like mycotoxin urine testing or oak testing or igg ige testing or inflammatory marker testing or all the things. Right. And so the mineral piece I think is really interesting here. I guess for those who aren't familiar, maybe just start like why are minerals so critical to health in general and like what happens when they become imbalanced?

Yeah, most definitely. So yeah, like I said, I like to think of the minerals as like the spark plugs of life. So if we think of the four main electrolytes like sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium, we need these in relatively large amounts in our body coming in through our food. We don't. Our body doesn't produce minerals on its own. So we need to make sure we're getting that from whether it be external sources, food lotions or bath soaks, things like that. And in order for our cells to actually and our neurons to fire within our body and create energy ATP, they actually need these main electrolytes to help regulate fluid balance to create these charges and electrical charges within our body that really contributes to everything involving life itself and regeneration of cells and detox pathways, all of that. And so I'd say what, what I see the most in my practice is a lot of people's minerals are becoming ultra depleted just because of stressors. Stressors. Whether it's environmental, physical, emotional, really any of those and when minerals become depleted, it can lead to this cascade effect of suboptimal energy production in the cells. Maybe the gut starts, stops working optimally, maybe digestive processes really slow down, detox function suffers. And it just leads to a long laundry list of symptoms for a lot of people. So that's why I like to go into minerals first because it's sort of the root, the foundation of all of this energy production and in our bodies.

Very cool. When you started listing the minerals and I knew this, but like I didn't know it until you started listening them. And then I just started thinking of like elements and like these other versions of those things where it's like here's all the, you know, here's your sodium, your potassium and your stuff, like so. And it's like a lot, like those packs are like a lot. Is that really like what's needed?

You know, I think it really depends on a personal level, like where someone's minerals are at, what kind of stressors they're exposed to every single day and how their body is handling that stress. I do think a lot of the common electrolyte packs and pre made things out there, I do think they have a little too much sodium. Just in my opinion, from looking at people's labs with minerals on the daily, I have found that a lot of people are really lacking in potassium. And sodium and potassium really balance each other out. We want them to be in a good ratio to each other for functions to happen well within the body. And if that ratio gets really off or there's too much sodium or there's too much potassium, it's like we really wanna balance that out as much as we can. And I'm finding more and more in the labs that I'm doing that more people are needing more potassium typically than sodium. So it really depends where someone's at. But I recommend the testing if someone doesn't know.

Yeah, I remember when I was taking those and then I just got lazy and stopped ordering them. But it was like 2,000 milligrams sodium and like 50 or 60 of potassium or something like that. So it was like a very big. It was a very big difference. That's really interesting to hear.

Yeah. And I think one of the rough rules I go off of is like you typically want to have four times the amount of potassium in your diet daily. Then you do sodium and if you actually start tracking that, it's actually pretty difficult to do if you're not really focusing on getting that potassium in. Yeah.

Something else to look at with the diet, it's hard. I can't even. Like, my wife is really good at, like, macro tracking and stuff, and she's. She, like, got really into it, and I tried to do it for, like, two days. Like, I cannot track all this stuff all the time.

Yeah, it's a lot. It's got to be sustainable for sure.

So you talked about depletion of minerals, and you mentioned environmental triggers or factors being one of those things. So obviously, like, the air you breathe, mold is a part of that. Can you just, like. Can we talk, like, kind of high level, like, what does a mold exposure. It's not like, you know, your everyday thing. Like, you know, you have an issue that's going on in your place. Right. And we'll fast forward to where. Where we were with you and a little bit towards the end. But, like, how does having a consistent, you know, mold exposure issue in the house specifically tied to, like, what's happening with your mineral loads?

Yeah. So if I were looking at a hair tissue mineral analysis lab that maybe someone had been exposed to mold or didn't know, a few things I might see on there right off the bat, if I was kind of zooming out, my lens is I would typically see a significant loss in magnesium. So magnesium is one of the very first minerals that's depleted when our body is under stress. Um, and when our magnesium stores become ultra depleted, then our body starts tapping into other stores, like sodium and potassium and things like that to try to get, like, as much energy as it can. Um, and the beautiful thing about magnesium is that you can really take a lot of magnesium and your body will just get rid of excess through the urine. You can't necessarily overdose on magnesium unless it's a certain supplement form that your body doesn't tolerate well and it irritates your gut or something like that. But if you were thinking of Epsom, salt soaks things like that, like great sources of magnesium to replenish that. So I see that magnesium depleted with stress. If I'm looking at a gut function, because the gut is a thing that before my mold journey, I had no idea that mold could impact the gut like it does. I experienced every single gut issue you could think of, and this actually showed up on my htma, and I was like, wow, it's clear that I have gut issues here. Is this related to the mold? And I. I didn't know that beforehand, but it's been something I've been learning and been seeing these trends with. So we'll see things like phosphorus thrown off. Phosphorus is really essential for helping break down proteins and get energy from the food we're consuming. Uh, we'll see different levels in sulfur, which is essential in the detox pathway function. Usually if we're overloaded with a toxin that's environmental, our detox pathways will be likely be overloaded. And that's going to show to some extent on the htma. So I'll see that sulfur and then the molybdenum is an essential mineral for helping in that detox and that sulfation pathway as well. So those are the main ones. Sometimes I will also see a, an accumulation of heavy metals in the hair tissue. So sometimes this is from someone's tap water source or something environmental if they're working with a lot of construction materials. But it can also indicate that the body's not really detoxing things. Well, if I'm seeing a heavy accumulation of heavy metals, and that may just through kind of linking one thing to the next, it can show me, okay, the detox pathways are overburdened here. We need to focus on this. Maybe there's some sort of other environmental stressor going on.

You know what's really interesting about that is there's, there's a lot of doctors out there now that they don't even really like running the mycotoxin urine test for actually the exact reason that you just said, except it doesn't show you that. And so when you start talking about this, it's interesting. So it's if, if you're somebody whose toxic load is very high and you just don't detox very well and your pathways are shut, you can't move it, you can take it. You could do a urine mycotoxin test and nothing shows up on it. But you can still be very, very high toxic burden to mycotoxins. And, and it can be misleading, but like, what you just described is like almost the opposite of that. And it just makes me wonder, like, does it make more sense to look at something like this first, possibly, and be like, okay, I'm detoxing relatively well now. Maybe I do a mycotoxin test after that.

Yeah, yeah, see, that one makes sense to me. And that's kind of what I did in my, in my own situation too. I was like, okay, here's my hair tissue mineral analysis. This is what it's showing me about my mineral levels right now, how I'm handling stress. There's obviously some gut function things on there, some, some thyroid function things showing up too. And then I was like, okay, I think I'm going to run a mycotoxin panel, too. And I'm just going to compare. See what I'm getting from both of these and then compare that to my home test results, too. So it's really fun to just look into all the different aspects and see what we can gather from each piece and then bring it together all in one, one big picture. What was.

Did you have a clinical myco. Do you have mycotoxins in your body when you were in that?

Yes, I was very high in ochratoxin A, which. Our house report came back high in ochratoxin A as well. So I was. And. And there was one other one. I can't remember a specific mulch species right now, but got it.

All right, so we're connecting the dots a little bit. Okay.

I'm gonna save this last piece for the end because it's completely not related. I'm just really interested in it.

Which is.

Which is living at high altit, how exercise, like, impacts your body and stuff. I'm just kind of really into that. But let's continue down this path and then we'll, like, circle back to that.

Let's talk about your. You mentioned your mole journey here a minute ago. So you ran these tests. You probably didn't run these tests for no reason. People don't usually test themselves for no reason. So, like, what was going on that made you want to start looking at, you know, at what's happening in your body and then, like, kind of. How did that progress?

Yeah, so we had just moved into a home new to us, but a very old home in North Idaho. And that was about a year and a half ago now. And the first thing was we found out it had been smoked in for 50 years. And so that was fun. So I started just kind of remediating that all on my own. Luckily, it's a tiny home, so it's not huge. And then as I was starting to do a lot of this smoke remediation myself, I started to feel extremely sick. Like, I felt like my lymph nodes were getting really swollen and they just weren't going down. I also felt like my thyroid was swollen. I just generally had a lot of swollenness in my neck region. And slowly but surely after this, I started experiencing all of these really odd gut issues. And if you would have asked me a few months before this, I would have said my gut is in the best place it's been in years. I have no food allergies I have no intolerances. Like, I've worked really hard on this, and I have a really solid foundation. And that just, like, all went out the window. It was like, okay, every gut issue, like, from constipation to, like, blood in my stool to not tolerating literally any foods or any foods with histamine. It was so wild. And it happened just in a matter of months. And we really knew something was off when my husband, he had a chronic cough and we left for a weekend, and his cough went away, and my lymph nodes went down a bit, and I felt like I had better energy, and I didn't have this chronic fatigue just from being away from our environment for a few days. So that was when we were like, okay, there's some red flags here that something in our environment, in that house is really trying to kill us right now. And lo and behold, we. We went back and did some digging. We found. We knew some of the windows weren't sealed properly. And I pulled away some of the window sills and. And found mold growing in there. And I just knew, like, mold was growing on the porch and on anything outside, like, almost instantaneously. So I just knew there was something going on.

Yeah, that's such a. I was. I was literally just talking about this minutes ago. The leaving your house and feeling better and then coming back and not. Is such a huge, huge thing. And a lot of times people will attribute that to, oh, I'm, like, on vacation. I'm not stressed. I'm sitting by the pool. I'm, like, enjoying my life. Of course I feel better. And then I go back home and I got work, and, like. Like, try. Try to think past the past that a little bit. And. And I think a lot of times you don't really realize until you come home. It's not like, when you're gone. Like, when you're gone, you're, like, rationalizing it with all this stuff, right? Then you come, like, hits you like, a ton of bricks. And, like, that's the point. Like, oh, there's something here. That's, like, work didn't just happen when I walked in the door. Right?

Like, right, exactly.

But I started breathing when I walked in the door, so maybe. Maybe that.

I know I was like, I did all these things to make my life less stressful at home. Like, why am I getting more sick? This doesn't line up with what I'm doing.

All right, so you. You now have a reasonable suspicion of. Of things going on. You pulled a couple things you saw some stuff. So what's your next step on this path? Are you going to Yelp and looking for five star local inspector? Are you past that or like, like, where are you going and what's your path before you get to us?

Yeah. So we had already decided we wanted to do like a full remodel with our house. After all this smoke remediation stuff, we decided to change the layout and stuff, and that involved taking down a lot of the internal walls. So my naive, inexperienced self back then was like, oh, the home remodel will take care of this all and we'll be great. We'll have new windows, most of the walls will be pulled through, and we're going to be good. We'll have new Sheetrock. Like, we don't need to do official remediation. And then as everything's going on this whole year, we ended up living in our travel trailer most of the year. Last year, no running water on our property, nothing. And we were pretty much camping as our house was gutted and redone. And then we started getting really sick living in our travel trailer, and we found a ton of mold growing in our travel trailer. So it was like this kind of cascade effect, but flashback to the house. We. It was just about to get finished when we started getting really sick in the travel trailer. So we moved back into the house even though it's still getting completed a little bit. And I still start feeling more sick than before. And I'm like, okay, I don't think this remodel really did anything. And I had this. I had followed y' all on Instagram for a while, and I had you in the back of my mind probably for six months or so. Should have called that first day. If you're learning from my story, call that first day. Don't remodel your entire house and then wait till it's almost done to get the mold inspection. But called and got that mold inspection, and then I just had to have peace of mind with it all. I knew there was still mold in there, and I was like, I need to know exactly where it is and what I need to do to remediate it. Well, and if I have to burn down the house even after our remodel, that's going to be what it is.

Well, I, you know, I would love to, like, just touch on that piece a little bit because so many people think they have to burn their house down. I know you're joking, but it's like, you know, you go on these Facebook groups and stuff, and it's like, there's no hope. Had to burn your house down. Mold is everywhere. You can't get rid of it. If you're sensitive, you're doomed. Like, all this stuff happens. And, you know, I'm looking through, you know, your results and stuff right now while we're talking, and you know, we. We provide a priority list of areas where it's like, significant versus, you know, like, do this now, maybe do this later, maybe things you don't really need to worry about. And I mean, 30% of the things were maybe do this now. And then everything just, like, tear down. And I think it's really important for people to hear that it's not always every single thing. And it means you've got your entire house and rip it to the suds every single time. But it's more about, like, where are the worst things? And let's just get really laser focused on those worst things. So how did, like how when you saw everything and you saw the results and you saw the things that we, you know, the, the things that we were uncovering, I guess. Two questions. One, what was maybe like the biggest surprise that, that you're like, oh, there's something here that maybe you didn't know about. And then looking at like the priority plan and like, how. How that helped or didn't help or whatever.

Well, I was actually really encouraging when I got the report back because I was like, oh my gosh, we're going to have to redo this whole house again. And when I was reading the report, like you said, it's just a few key walls under, and those were the areas I knew were the problem areas already. So it really just gave me clarity. And, okay, we're going to get this addressed and that's going to be super helpful, and then we'll be great. So I'm not tearing out my entire remodel. It's just a couple walls, and it's not going to be terrible. But yes, one thing that surprised me, I think, is I knew the crawl space was neglected. I knew there was moisture in the crawl space, but I didn't know that was a huge source of mold. And when we had done a lot of the interior part of our house and redone it, I. I didn't even think about the crawl space, like, impacting us. But we actually just had a guy, the guy that's doing our remediation right now, he just redid our entire crawl space, like two weeks ago. He sent us pictures from down there, and it was insane. Like, I had no idea there was so much black mold down there. And he scrubbed it all, did all the HEPA scrubbing, and it looked like everything was new wood. After he completed it, he buttoned up the whole vapor barrier, put fans and dehumidifiers down there. And he was saying he's worked in mold remediation for a while. He's like, I haven't seen a crawl space this bad in a long time. And it's likely that just a lot of this from under your house is just seeping through the wall cavities and making you guys really sick. So that was a big surprise to me because I was like, oh, if we take care of the immediate walls, we're probably good. But just thinking about all that air under our home, considering those mold spores and everything, that was probably the biggest thing.

Yeah, it's. I, I kind of call these areas shadow sources. It's like what I've. I've created a name for them. I don't know if it'll stick at some point, but I call them. Yeah, thanks. I, I call them shadow sources. And the things that I throw in that category is your crawl space, your attic, and your H vac system. And there are things that you can't see because you never go look at them or you never go there, but they can have such a big impact on your space because of one if it's H vac, it's forced air moving air all over the place. Your crawl space is natural. Building pressure moves air up from the crawl constantly. You literally have to re engineer the building's performance and airflow patterns in your house to make that not happen. Right. So that's the natural way that happens. And attics get pulled down into the house all the time. Right. So these areas that we don't really think about and it. And it's so important to like uncover those things because if you're just, hey, we'll handle the couple walls. And then you do a couple walls and this is, this is going back to, you know, toxic mold Facebook group 101. It's like, oh, I remediated these walls and I'm still sick. There's no hope. Burn the house down. When it's really like the entire underground of your house is pushing this thing up to you. And maybe your walls, while they maybe were a problem, were not like the biggest problem. Right. And understanding that. Yeah. So. Well, I'm glad to hear. So. So you guys went through, you did some work. Right.

So how's everything going now it's going great so far. We still have our attic space to get done and we're actually going to go out of town for a few weeks while they do that, so we can get all our stuff out and, and they can just open up those couple walls and do the attic and then, then we'll be done in the next three weeks. So. But I am generally feeling better. I'm also just learning how to support my body better through all the experiences and have learned what my body needs to help detox better through all of this.

So what are a couple of those things? What, what are you doing now to support that?

Yeah, for me, what I found to be really valuable specifically for the ochratoxin a like detoxing that has been zeolite. That's been a huge thing that's been valuable. I tried a bunch of binders, charcoal, clays, things like that. And there's different ones that work better for different species of mold and mycotoxins. But I really found the zeolite to be super helpful in moving things out, high dosing that. And then I've also been doing some very specific homeopathic detox protocols. So very specific mold detox remedy, some organ support and bowel support. As I'm doing that just to support my detox organs.

And then just trying to get my body to sweat as much as possible. I found that I wasn't sweating very much this last year because that detox function was just so impaired and I really needed to support my body to do that. It took me going on a ski hut trip in the mountains. Actually they had a little sauna year out there and we got that thing cooking. I wish I had a thermometer. It had to have been like 210 degrees in that sauna and we had like 10 of us in there. And I have not sweat more in my life than I did in that ski yurt sauna a few weeks ago. And ever since then my body's been sweating well. So I'm like, okay, just gotta prioritize those really intense releases of all the toxins through sweat.

Oh, that's really interesting. And it's almost like it unclogged you a little bit in a way.

It totally did. Yeah. My, my infrared sauna at home wasn't even touching it. I wouldn't break a sweat in there. But this one, for some reason it just got hot enough that it helped me open those pathways again, which was really cool.

Wow. You know, the sweating thing is really interesting is it's there's always these little clues that you, like, if you know what to look for. Like, you can. You can try to understand little things. Like, if you're someone who doesn't sweat, like, sweating is normal. So if you don't sweat, then there's a blockage somewhere. Right. It's a detox, you know, detox pathway, you know, issue. Right. And so it's like one of these little things where you're like, oh, yeah, I work out all the time. I don't sweat.

Right. Yeah. Really important. I used to be a really good sweater, too. So I. When that started happening, I was like, what is going on? I need to dig into this.

Awesome. Well, let's wrap up this piece of it. You've been through it, or you're kind of finishing up, I guess at the end, you've kind of gone through the process, that sort of thing. So what advice do you have for people.

Who are going through it? What advice do you have for the process? Any. Anything like that that you want to share now that we've kind of been.

Through the majority of it, I think one thing that I. Is really valuable right off the bat is just knowing you're not alone. I felt so isolated through a lot of the process, and I. I knew other people were experiencing things like this, but I actually started to meet people in my own community that were dealing with very similar things and very similar symptoms. And just knowing I wasn't crazy, that I wasn't gonna die, that there were tools and resources for me was, like, the very first thing. Like, I just needed to know that I wasn't alone in that and that there was some hope at the end of the tunnel because it was pretty dark for a while. So if you can. If you're going through it, I would recommend finding someone you can connect with that maybe has a similar story or has been through it, or a practitioner that specializes in. In mold and mycotoxins.

My other thing would be, I wish that I did the full mold inspection right off the bat. I wish that we just did that first thing and we got clarity on what we needed to clear out, what we needed to do. I think I was scared, in retrospect, to know, like, what it would come back as, and I didn't know what kind of investment that would look like. But my husband always reminds me. He's like, there's nothing more important than your health. And if you don't have your health, you. You just don't have life. And so that's. We'll do whatever we can to take care of that. So I think that's the, the huge thing is just get clarity on your process moving forward, what you're going to do for your health, what you're going to do for your home and be confident in that, that it's going to work.

Yeah, I love that you said that. I feel like this has been something I've been saying a lot too. The fear of the unknown is a really dangerous thing. It's actually a lot of times more dangerous than the thing you're afraid of because it stops you from doing things you need to do and it can be a really big problem. And then fear just begets more fear just because more fear. And that isn't healthy either. And a lot of times people will not do something. So just like you said, like, well, what if it costs X amount or whatever to do all these things and then just like, oh, I'm not going to do it yet. Whatever's happening is causing an issue. And a lot of times which actually happened here pretty much it was that fear that you created that you future paced for yourself way in the future never actually happened. When you went full and did it right. It was a few areas. It wasn't ripping your whole thing down. Right. And I think it's so normal human nature to do this, to just think the worst possible thing that could possibly happen. And you're creating this fear based framework on how you're looking at life and nothing good comes out of life if you have, if you look through a lens of fear. Right. Looking through a lens of possibility and potential and you know, and hope and those sorts of things allows your, allows your mind to take actions that maybe it wouldn't. And then you can make real decisions based off of real information that makes sense instead of making no decisions off of fake information that aren't real.

Totally agree. I think that's so empowering too. It's like, okay, like I now have this information and I can make my choices and my plan and I can be confident in that and, and know I'm doing the right thing. I think that's really awesome.

Cool. Well, thank you for sharing all of that. So I hope that, I hope that people hear this and if they're looking through the fear goggles, maybe they take them off and think of it that way. Okay, so I talk about one more thing because I saw this when I was, when I was looking, looking you up and checking out your stuff. So the last thing that I wanted to chat about today I just thought was super interesting. And it has nothing to do with Mulder or any of that stuff. So if that's all you're into in life, then you can turn it off. But if you're like into cool stuff, you might want to listen. So you live in very high altitude, and there is a whole understanding of how your body adapts to exercise. When you live at high altitude and then when you come down to like sea level, I always imagine you feeling like a superhero at that point. I'm just like, so interested in like the benefits that it has on the body and if there's a way to mimic high altitude, like exercise. If you don't live at high altitude, if it's helpful for you, like, I just like it, like, yeah, a five minute geek out on this would be awesome.

Oh yeah, I love this. So my master's was in high altitude exercise physiology, so that's why I'm qualified to talk on this subject first off. But I think my favorite thing about going through my graduate studies program was we literally used ourselves as guinea pigs. We were in Gunnison, Colorado, which is an altitude of 7,700ft in elevation. And then when you go up to the mountains, like Crested Butte and even higher, you get up into the tens easily, just at the base, and then up to 14,000ft of elevation with some of the surrounding mountains. So we were able to use ourselves as guinea pigs and see like, okay, what can we do at altitude? How can we enhance our performance? All of this. We know that the oxygen saturation in the air is less at high altitude, so there's less pressure of oxygen as you go up. So in the body, there's a few physiological things that happen when you first go to altitudes. So you've probably experienced this yourself if you've ever traveled to high altitude. But you start to get a little shorter breath easier, your heart rate might start pounding a little bit, start racing. This is just all your body's natural adaptation mechanisms to create. Start creating more red blood cells. So with less oxygen in the air, the body has to create more red blood cells, cells for better oxygen carrying capacity to get that less amount of oxygen to all those extremities, all the muscles, all the organs, things like that. So there's a few major benefits to living at altitude and traveling to altitude and exercising up there. One is you can ultimately increase your cardiac output, your cardiac capac, cardio capacity, all of that, because your heart essentially gets stronger working up there. Now, if someone already has heart disease or something like that it might be too much of a stress on their heart to go up to altitude for long periods of time. So there's always two sides to the coin here. But from a performance perspective, it's great. You can get more of these red blood cells created new blood vessel formation within the body, and then if you travel down to sea level after that, you will ideally have this increased capacity for performance. You can probably hit those higher intensity levels than you would be able to at altitude. You can maybe go for a run on the beach and feel like you're just flying almost. So that's kind of the first thing that comes to mind is like, you have these major benefits like that.

It's really cool. I've, I've been interested in this. I was looking. Well, I guess you could tell me. My assumption was that ewat, like exercise with oxygen therapy, where you're limiting the amount of oxygen that you have over a period of time, is like a similar impact on the body where then you're reducing kind of amount of, you know, amount of oxygen that you're breathing in. It kind of mimics the same thing. Is that true or is that not true? Am I understanding that right?

Yeah, you know, from the experience I had in looking into studies like that, it, it, it can be valuable down there. I think there are some more external factors that go into play when you actually do ascend in altitude physically. But if you are just limiting that oxygen intake as you're exercising at a lower altitude, in my mind, from a physiological perspective, it makes sense. Your body's going to increase your ventilation just like at altitude, your heart rate's going to increase, and then therefore you're going to have that increase in red blood cells and the angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels to help the metabolism come up to that to, to meet that lowered oxygen intake.

Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the studies I was reading as I was nerding out on this stuff, was essentially showing like, after, like an EWA session, I forget what the period of time was, but there's like a period of time afterwards that the oxygenation percentage like in your blood and in your body, like really skyrockets at that point in time, and then it starts to kind of work itself down. But then having higher levels of oxygen in the body are beneficial for preventative, for disease and things like this. And so connecting the dots to neurodegenerative issues and cognitive things and stuff like that, because that's kind of how I was looking at it, it's like, oh, this is super interesting. And it's because I have a genetic adaptation myself. It gives me a 25% chance for Alzheimer's. So one of the things that I'm always trying to do, I'm in the sauna all the time. Because that's really helpful for that. I like, do things, like, to prevent as much as I can that happening in the future. So that's like a road that I. That I nerd out down often.

Yeah, well, because I always studied, like, the hypobaric chambers when I was in college because we were trying to simulate that high altitude environment. And then it was actually my first experience this last year doing hyperbaric therapy as I was dealing with mold stuff, I was like, okay, well, my body could probably use some more oxygen to help me heal and go to my organs. And so that was kind of fun to look on the opposite side of the spectrum and. And see the value of oxygen there. But if we can just increase our body's ability to carry oxygen better and more efficiently, then I think that's a win win.

That's awesome. Well, Lexi, thanks for hanging. I appreciate it.

Of course. This was super fun. I loved it.

Yeah, this is very cool. Thank you for sharing your story. Thanks for talking through.

Your experience as you went through it. Because I actually think, like, this experience is a very hopeful type of experience. And just for everyone listening, it's not always doom and gloom. There's plenty of times where you go into a place and there's a few things. It's not like everything in the world that's happening. Right. So it's just a matter of finding them and being able to pinpoint which of the things are the worst things and going through that process. And so you are a great, a great example of how that actually came out into reality. So people actually believe me instead of thinking, I just say things all the time.

That's great. Thanks.

I never know half the time, like, when people are listening, they're like, he just says stuff like, I don't know if they think that or not. I don't, I don't. But I, you know, who knows?

When I talk by myself in my room, I just feel like I'm talking to nobody. And so.

Anyway, just throwing it out there into the abyss.

Yeah. See what happens. So, hey, anyone listening? If you want to, like, leave a review and just let me know that you're listening and I'm not talking to myself in my room, that would be awesome.

Anyway, I'm like, going nuts right now. All right, Lexi, I'm gonna. I'm gonna make. Not make you suffer anymore. Thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you. I. I appreciate being able to come on and share my story.

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