Matt Kelly answers a viewer question about whether mold can cause food sensitivities, intolerances, and allergies. He explains that mold exposure and mycotoxins often damage the gut first—irritating the intestinal lining, increasing permeability ("leaky gut"), and triggering immune dysregulation (food sensitivities, allergies, mast cell flares, and potentially autoimmune conditions). He recommends testing for mycotoxins and tick-borne illnesses together when symptoms overlap, and offers consultations for home/body mold assessment.
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Leslie asked a great question here about mold and food intolerance and sensitivities and allergies. And I love that question because we have so many people and kids that have increasing, growing food sensitivities and allergies, but have no idea that mold could be the root cause. They end up just avoiding foods and getting sicker and taking anti histamines and different things to try to compensate when they need to find the root cause. So Leslie's question was, how do you know if it's mold making you sick when you have so many food sensitivities and allergies? Well, one of the first targets or systems that go down with mold exposure and toxicity is the gut. I see this a lot in kid clients, but adults too. But you'll see that the gut gets wrecked. And mycotoxins are extremely irritating to the intestinal lining. Okay. So you get that inflammation that's there. Like our son Isaac ended up having mast cell flares in his small intestine triggered by mold. So if he had bad enough exposure or ate high histamine foods, he would just have like a knife was stabbing in his abdomen and he'd be buckled over in tears and he had extreme pain there because of the inflammation that was caused by mold by mycotoxins, and it would just inflame him like crazy. But the guts, the gut is one of the first things to go down. And in kids you see food sensitivities and then food allergies and then autoimmune conditions can start and then you end up with pans and pants. Kids can end up with pans of pandas, all stemming from the dysregulated immune system, which is further increased by the gut permeability. So what happens is you get this added inflammation in the intestines and then you end up with that intestinal lining inflammation and then those, those tight joints pull apart that lets proteins through that cause the body to freak out and say, hey, these food proteins shouldn't be in the blood. So then it starts creating reactions. And so you have food sensitivities, allergies, and like I mentioned, in the end you end up with more autoimmune conditions because of that leaky gut. So yes, it can absolutely be associated with mold. It could be other toxins, it could be metal toxicity, it could be like Lyme and CO infections also cause great distress in the gut. But the two big things to check are tick borne illnesses and mycotoxins. And that's why with kids or people that aren't sure what's going on. I have the tick borne and mycotoxin combo, and I have that combo because the lab offers it as a combo because those two are tested so frequently together because their symptoms overlap so, so much. All right, so if you're not sure which it is, I would definitely go with that combo. But mold can 100% cause what you're asking about there. I hope that helps. Leslie, do you have questions about mold in your home or body? Book a consultation with Matt, AKA the Mold man, to guide your home and body to the next level of healing.
