Citrinin Q&A with Dr. Crista

All right. Hello. We are back with the mycotoxin lunch and learn. We've covered ochratoxin, gliotoxin, zearolenone, and today we're going to be talking about citrinin. Citronin is commonly seen in association with ochratoxin. A lot of times, if there's going to be a water damage, building that is hosting the types of molds that we get ochratoxin from, we will also find citronin in that same location typically. So think of him as kind of like Bonnie and Clyde. You know, they like to kind of come together, each one of them dangerous, but together even more so, that kind of thing. So citrinen is from the molds Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus A wentl, Aspergillus ostianus, fumigatus, niveus awamori, and Aspergillus parasiticus. And also from penicillium species. So penicillin, this is primarily why it got its name, Penicillium citrinum expansum, and then the species of mold called Menascus. So that's why if you're finding it on your mycotoxin test, some of the labs are reporting, you know, this is from multiple mold species. That's because it's from that many. So Aspergillus and Penicillium are the most commonly found types of molds in indoor buildings. Just because they're common doesn't mean they're healthy. And so they can spit out this particular mycotoxin. And as you noticed, you're hearing some of the same things when we talked about ochratoxin, some of the same species. So some of these molds can spit out multiple different times time, types of mycotoxins and chemicals. That makes everything so yucky, doesn't it? So let's talk about what it can do to the body. It is in a lot of the things that you'll read, they'll say, oh, this is from food, this is from poorly stored grains. It can be, but if you're supposed to a damp or musty or water damaged building, it's from the building. These species are species that exist in water damaged buildings. Just like ochratoxin. Citronin is really hard on the kidneys. So when you have a citronin and ochratoxin combination, kidney support has to be like your number one thing that you are focusing on. And what I use number one for both of these. The things that have been shown in animal studies that really help protect the kidneys is melatonin. Melatonin can be a tricky one because some of you guys have such a low membrane cell membrane phospholipids that melatonin can. It's. It's a great antioxidant in the brain. And when you get it into your body, and all of a sudden your brain is like, oh, I have channels that are open. Finally, I want to think about a bunch of things, and I want us to get up. Oh, hey, Lisa. So let's get up instead of get sleepy. So if you get either direction with melatonin, either excessively sleepy or you get wired instead of tired, that's often a sign that my patients need some phospholipid membrane resuscitation. This is a term from Dr. Ray. So phosphatidylserine choline. And then we try to get the melatonin on board, because both citronin, if you're seeing citronin and ochratoxin, you've got a double whammy. Kidney problem. Kidney assault, we might say. So the color of molds that this one comes from, I just listed, you know, the asperdillus, the penicillium, the menascus is typically going to be, like, a lemony yellow color. But any mold can be any color, depending on what food it is eating. So you cannot diagnose a type of mold just by looking at it with your eyes. It has to be tested so that you know its favorite building material. These molds. The favorite building material is wallpaper, wood, drywall, linoleum, and the insulation, paper on insulation. So anything papery, drywall, because it likes the paper, some of the symptoms that it's causing. So if we look at the big picture of what citronin can do, it can be toxic to the cells, the genes, the liver, the kidneys. It can cause birth defects and changes. So that's called being teratogenic. It can be toxic to embryos. So it's not gonna be any surprise that this can cause infertility, miscarriages, and early birth, premature birth. And it's also carcinogenic. Scary stuff, but it's all treatable. Remember, this number one step is get out of mold. All right? So symptoms that I'm seeing in my patients. What I did is I took, you know, my. My patients, and then I looked at the science of what the. These kinds of mycotoxins are doing to the cells or to animals, and then correlated that to my patients and created kind of like a. A symptom list for Each mycotoxin and that can be found on the fact sheet. I'm basically reading from my fact sheet right now. That's a fact sheet. Every mycotoxin that we can test for, I have a fact sheet for. We don't have them all up yet, but we'll get there. But right now the citronin one is. So you just go to drcrista.com d r c r I s t a.com citronin and there will be the fact sheet there that has all of this information. The common symptoms that I'm seeing, the most common that I'm seeing with citronin alone. And again, citronin and ochratoxin, commonly you'll have tested together and then it tells you what I'm using with my patients. So the symptoms I'm seeing with patients who have citronin is fatigue. Commonly this is going to be fatigue with muscle pain. Citronin in particular is one of those that can cause a lot of muscle pain. And a little tip is that green tea has a citronin protective, specifically citronin protective effect on the muscles. So if you have that, you know, muscle fatigue, skeletal muscle fatigue as part of your fatigue. So it's usually like a fatigue. Muscle fatigue, yeah. Fatigue, muscle fatigue and muscle pain combination. Green tea is one of the things that can help to detoxify this Mycotoxin. Also reactive blood sugar. So not necessarily hypoglycemic or not necessarily high blood sugar, but both. And you bounce and you can. You know, those glucose monitors, continuous glucose monitors are a fantastic way to know that a lot of biohackers are into that right now. It can cause frequency of the urination, pain with urination, it can create edema. So we can see a lot of. It's typically going to be lower leg, just like with zearalenone. But it can be anywhere if you just have more lymphatic stagnation and then there's a. It's diabetes insipidus, but it's not. It's not the one that you might be thinking. It's a nephrogenic type because of the damage on the kidney. This can actually cause an inability of the kidneys to hold water. And so you might have a low ADH from the mycotoxins affecting your pituitary secretion of that. And ADH is antidiuretic hormone that keeps blood in our blood vessels so that we have enough blood volume. So when we see a low ability to a low adh, you're going to see more of like a POTS picture. People who have difficulty with, with standing up, they get little stars in their, in their eyes or their blood pressure or their blood rate go, flood rate, heart rate goes up. That's pots. This is a little different. Citronin causes a kidney based inability to hold on to it. So you have kind of a double whammy if you have mixed mycotoxins because a lot of mycotoxins reduce adhesive and then the kidneys can't hold onto it. It can cause reflux or gastroesophageal reflux disease, ulcers. Even some people having like coughing up blood that's coming from the stomach, from the peptic ulcers. Food sensitivities, increased chemical sensitivity. So if you're somebody that's like, okay, I get a headache now when I go into Target, you know, our big box store. I get spacey, I can't remember what I'm doing or I get itchy or I mean headache is the typical one. Or I suddenly get diarrhea every time I try and go to the grocery store. Those are kind of these chemical sensitivities. People start taking out candles from their life, taking out fragrances from their life, getting sick feeling when you're pumping gas at the gas station. These are all this kind of chemical sensitivities you can see creeping up with citron and exposure. Heart palpitations, shortness of breath, chest pain or angina, menstrual changes. And this has to do not necessarily just with it. Not like zearalenone that has an estrogen like effect, but because of what it's doing to the ability of our body to process hormones also can cause miscarriage and infertility. Citronin. Okay, so we're gonna talk about like what to do about it. It is highly like the other ones. You know, they all create this mitochondrial function reduction. So dysfunction, which is where the fatigue is coming from. But when the mitochondria aren't working, that means all your body systems aren't working. And it's harder to detoxify and get it out. So we'll talk about solutions. Let me make sure I get some questions. Oh, it's so nice to see some. Hello. People that I love. I've been doing the liposomal quicksilver and sleeping like heavenly. I'm assuming that's melatonin. That's great. I love their melatonin. I think there's something to those liposomes. For some people it works better if they hold it under the tongue for like a minute before you swallow it and you get the effect up into the brain and then you don't, you don't lose a lot of it to the, the gut action. Should sibo or high methane sibo be treated before or with mold? If constipation is not responding to bitters and fiber. I've heard some say wait and work on the gut until mold is gone. For me, mold is so commonly the reason for my patients who have sibo. I think that mold is priority because these toxins are neurotoxic, so they're impacting your motility and that's creating a perpetual sibo situation. And, and that's if you know the, the primary reason for sibo is someone has. Gets food poisoning and throws up and things go get retrograde. But mold is a very common reason to get sibo that for people who've never had food poisoning and thrown up and had that retrograde flow. And you can do both at the same time. There's no reason you couldn't do both. You know, there, there are the plants that we use for mold you can use for. They're. They're the same. So you don't necessarily have to wait. I would say do both. Someone loves my website. Thank you. I work really hard to make sure it's resourceful. If you're looking for, you know, if you're finding these helpful and you're like, oh, I want more of whatever this is that she's doing. I have a lot on my Instagram, but I even have even more on my website called purchase. So if you go down to the footer, the word pearls or the link pearls is its little short blogs and short video blogs and like there's years and years and years and years of information there. Is it safe to take the liposomal melatonin long term? For my patients, yes. For most patients, the only ones I worry about is children. Melatonin can affect puberty and so I don't use high dose. You know, I don't go over 3 milligrams of kids at all. Even though in my book for adults break the mold, I'm saying to use the, the doses we're using for cancer therapy, which is in the 20 milligram range. If you can, your body can tolerate that and you don't get real groggy. But yeah, for kids, I don't. I'm very careful about dosing and how long we're using it, so we might have to pulse it or do it in a second, slightly different way so we don't affect puberty. Lisa, is decaf green tea effective and either way, how many cups a day? So yes, decaf is effective. It's the, it's the polyphenols of the green tea. And green tea, because it's steamed and then dried right away, they, we don't lose all those polyphenols which you could you lose with anything that's fermented like a oolong or a black tea. That's why green tea is so commonly talked about. So green tea, I would go for two to four cups of green tea per day. If you can get that in some people with all the frequency of urination, that's a little tough to get in. I believe I've dealt with this. Yep. A lot of people make those connections of like, oh my gosh, I think that was the mold thing. Now what is the best thing to do to support kidneys with mold? Melatonin is number one. CoQ10 is also on the list. There are quite a few plants that are beautiful for it that also help with detoxification, such as globe artichoke and parietaria. Some other dietary things that you can do. A lot of people feel better when they have citronin toxicity. Going on a grain free diet temporarily because grains can be the place where citronin can grow these molds that can make citronin. So temporary grain free diet. Some people when they go paleo or something like that, they're like, oh, I feel so much better. And I'm like, I would have loved to have seen your mycotoxin test before you did that because I'll bet you you had citronin. A key food for detoxification, detoxing citronin is radishes. Radishes have this. Oh gosh, what's the name of it? Pelargonidin pelosi, something like that. It is a specific bioflavonoid that helps detoxify citronin. So if you find yourself suddenly craving radishes, there might be a reason for that. Also butyrate rich foods to protect the gut effects. Remember, it's causing reflux and ulceration and blood in the stool and those kinds of things. Butyrate rich foods such as butter, we want to use organic only from grass fed pastured animals. Cabbage, radicchio, the white part of the spring onion, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, those are all rich sources of butyrate and that can help protect the lining of the cell the cells called enterocytes really get hit hard with citronin and also mpa, mycophenolic acid. I have my patients use insoluble fiber as a binder if they can tolerate it. Some of you Sibo people, that's a little tougher to do. Psyllium husk and flax seed and chia seed, that's on the. No, no biphasic diet. So you can use sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, and pumpkin seeds. Grind them up like 2 to 4 tablespoons. Grind them up in a coffee grinder so you get them chewed up, and you get a lot of surface area for binding, and then just sprinkle that over your food. It makes doing binding so much easier. All right, do I know if dysautonomia is for mold or because of stress, the nervous system from chronic health symptoms? Dysautonomia is definitely. Mold can definitely cause dysautonomia. The mycotoxins, every single one of the mycotoxins that we've talked about and the ones that you find in indoor buildings are neurotoxic. And many of them cross the blood brain barrier, which is how we get the autonomic nervous system, the brain stem. That's how it gets involved in this. And then it doesn't function as quickly, and it gets a little hiccup in it. And that's where we can get these dysautonomia symptoms. Pupils opening, you know, dilating and constricting, dilating and constricting, not accommodating to the light. And then you. It doesn't constrict enough or it can't hold the constriction. And that's where people get light sensitive. Some of the. The blood pressure issues, gut issues with dysautonomia. So, yes, it's definitely correlated. I have. It's. I have a lot of multic patients who have dysautonomia. Can you tell? I can't multitask very well. I'm like, all right, let me fix. Every time I get a new question, if I don't have my thumb on this, it bumps me to the very end, which is very annoying. Is there a nasal spray that helps? Absolutely. My patients. When I'm treating my mold patients, I treat with antifungals and both systemic or whole body and the nose and intranasally. If you go to my website, I think on Instagram, I also have one nasal options. But if you go to my website, you'll see the nasal sprays that I like to use. And if you email my clinic, it's supportoctorchrista.com I have a handout called Nasal Options for Mold. I have several molds. How do I know which one to treat first? All of them. Anything that you're doing. All the tools that I talk about in my book, you are addressing all of the mold mold colonization. And then with the mycotoxins, you can look at the fact sheets and find the things that are mentioned on each one and just pick those two or three things that are on every sheet that applies to the mycotoxins you have. It can be very simple and elegant. It can take a long time and symptoms can be scary. But this doesn't have to be hard. Can citrinus cause neurological issues? Yes, very much so. It's neurotoxic. It is not one known to cross the blood brain barrier. The two that are known to do that is cautomium or tetaglobicin and eniatin, which is one of the trichothacines. However, citronin is so hard on the gut, and if you also have mycophenolic acid exposure, the gut gets leaky, the brain gets leaky, and then the mycotoxins can get there. And also the mycotoxins can ride our olfactory bulb. In my new book on pandas and pans, I have a graphic which you should be able to see on my website under the Pandas book. It shows how these mycotoxins, because they are fat soluble, they don't need an escort, they don't need to transfer protein, they don't need anything. They can get on those bare fibers. And that's one of the four places in our brain where we don't have a blood brain barrier. And they will just absorb by a concentration gradient. So the more mycotoxins you're exposed to through the air, the more that you uptake and the farther back they can go into the brain and can get into the basal ganglia and the limbic system. And that's how we get limbic looping. This is how we get people who need, you know, limbic retraining. You need, you know, a lot of it's very beneficial when, when it works. And you gotta get the mycotoxins out of that system. So that takes eating fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, and making and moving more bile. And that's all laid out in my book. Should detoxing mold generally help with pots? Definitely. I definitely see that it helps. Thoughts on treating mold while we while trying to conceive, there are so many risk factors of mycotoxins on baby. These mycotoxins bioaccumulate and get more toxic to baby than mom. Four times more toxic to baby than mom in some cases. So I highly recommend for my patients that you get first out of mold and you get treated and you make sure that your mycotoxin level is down by doing the mycotoxin testing before conceiving. There's a high risk and no one wants to hear this and I know it's very scary. There's a high correlation risk of ochratoxin with creating autism, especially in male babies and just miscarriages, infertility and birth defects. That's why we can't do research studies on these. We can't purposefully expose humans to known birth defect causing cancer causing toxins so that we can figure out what makes them better. Because the whole treatment is don't be exposed is avoidance. So definitely get out of mold. I do not recommend conceiving in a moldy environment. I've seen too many. It's. It's not fair to the kid. I'll put it that way. I'm sorry. Nobody wants to hear that. What would blood in the stool be a sign of that would be the damage or ulceration to the. The cells. The lining of the gut. Should we heal a gut with L glutamine before we detox mold for kids? L glutamine is a little bit tricky. While it is the favorite amino acid next to butyrate. So it's the favorite amino acid. Butyrate is the favorite short chain fatty acid. Glutamine can increase glutamate and make a Panda's pans kid worse. So if you have anybody, if any of those kids are exhibiting neuroinflammation. I do not use glutamine. We go with the other things we can use butyrate. Hard to find a job and be able to move out while living in mold with Lyme. Absolutely. I know. Check out the Change the Air foundation and Malachi's message. Those are two foundations that are working really hard to support people in that very situation. What type of green tea do you recommend for citronin and how much how often? I like green tea from traditional medicinals because I'm lazy and I like it in the bag. And they test for yeast and mold. Mountain Rose Herbs also has a wonderful green tea if you want to use loose leaf tea. All right. Another melatonin fan. 120 milligrams of melatonin in my practice would be too high. I know that people were going high like that for coronavirus protection, but in my practice I would consider that too high. Unless you had an active cancer treatment that we were dealing with. I generally stop at 50 milligrams a day. 20 to 50 is where I'm feeling comfortable. Can green tea affect puberty in kids? Nope. Lots and lots of babies in Japan drinking green tea. Tulsi tea. Tulsi tea is wonderful antifungal. It's a mild antifungal. It really clears up. It has an affinity for the mind and the mood and the lungs. But it's not necessarily going to have a ton of detox like citronin specific detox. But it helps with the antifungal piece and it also helps to lower MMP9 which has been correlated with mast cell activity. So if mast cell is like mood, lungs need a little antifungal. A little scared to start antifungals. Not sure if you're gonna handle it and you have some mast cell issues or histamine issues. That's a nice plant. Interestingly, the green tea is probably helping with the urination thing. It is interesting, isn't it? When you nourish these organs with the nutrients that they need, they can function better. Let's see. I want to make sure and tell you about glutathione. I use glutathione a lot for. Hey, Julia, nice to see you. I use glutathione for. For citronin detoxification. Cause it does utilize that pathway and also for all the mitochondrial damage. So the citronin causes mitochondrial dysfunction which is affecting the mitochondria's utilization of glutathione. So I use glutathione to perk up the energy a little bit on a cellular basis. And also vitamin E and resveratrol, those have citronin specific protective effects. The resveratrol is happening. I want to make sure I'm saying this right. When co administered with vitamin E, resveratrol helps with protecting the liver against citronin, specifically in animal studies. So I'm taking this and applying it to these animals. I only see a few fact sheets on the website. Will you be putting out more in the future? Yep, I'm working on it. You betcha. Gotta translate what's in here onto fact sheets and. Yeah, and then get tech people help. Have any of my patients had allergy to modified citrus pectin? Yeah, I mean, people can have an allergy to anything? Anything. Sure. Citrus. There are people who have allergies to citrus and that would be why you'd have an allergy to the pectin. What do I think about carnivore diet for mold? I've had patients do really well on a temporary carnivore diet and I think it's they're also being really careful to be eating, you know like wild game, buffalo, pasture raised meats and things like that. Which I think makes the world of difference. If you're trying to use this to get better from mold. If you're going to go on a carnivore diet and eat things that have been fed mycotoxin laden food, it's not worth it. You know, it's not going to be helping because their meat concentrates what they eat. So we have to start treating animals better. If we treat them better, they're happier and we're healthier. When I tried a nasal spray, it made my heart feel weird. What would you suggest? Yeah, you can start with like the. And this is not personal medical advice what I'm doing my patients, if they have a detox reaction like that, first of all check my book and make sure you're doing all the protect things first. How you have enough good fats, you have enough bioflavonoids, you have all the protection things in place. Because if you don't, when you hit the nose, the mycotoxins or the molds will start spitting out more mycotoxins to defend themselves. And your body has to be ready to receive this. And as you've heard, like many of them are cardiotoxic, many of them are toxic to the heart. So I often will start my patients who are having that reaction and we need to get going on nasal treatment but we don't have all the protect things yet in place. Then I'll use something like Dr. Zach Bush's ion biome using humic acid in the nose and also things like lantosinus. So for a list of all the things I use in the nose you can. So I go probiotics support the terrain and go that way first and wait on the killing part until their body can handle it. I am not a building expert so I can't answer the ERMI questions or anything like that. I would suggest checking out the accounts here that are such as mold finders and the Michael Rubino. I know my lane and I I just have a soapbox about this. If your doctor is managing this, they shouldn't doctors need to know their lane. These people who are doing building inspection, the good ones, spend their life's work learning how to do this. Well, just like I spend my life's work learning about bodies. If your doctor is telling you exactly how to test your building, and they've never been to the building, they don't know anything about stack effect and air currents, and. No, that's not your doctor's job. Please use the experts. And thanks to Covid, a lot of them are doing virtual consultations now. So no matter where you live, you can get that help. Okay, one more question. I want to make sure. Did I get everything about. Oh, something that I'm seeing work really well for the frequency. The effect that citronin has on the bladder, on the kidneys, and the kidneys not listening to the antidiuretic hormone. And so you're just peeing and peeing and peeing. You can't hold water. I created a product, a custom formula called homeopathic vasopressin. This is a prescription, so your doctor will have to recommend it. And then they just contact us, and we'll give you the doctor, the code so you can get it. But. And the. And the instructions of how to use it. But this has been a game changer for my patients, who just literally cannot keep water in their body. And they have to be up every hour at night, and they're not getting their sleep. We need that melatonin to treat from citronin. So that's been a. Just a huge game changer. One more question. If my daughter was born in the house that made me sick and lived there two and a half years, is she worse off than I am? Often, yes. Is more affected by the mycotoxin exposure because they can bioactivate in. In utero. So that would be when I see. You know, when we have that kind of history, there's. You didn't know. There's nothing you could have done about it. But now there are things you can do about it, and they tend to need a lot more immune modulation. And then detoxification. Gentle detoxification. All right, so that's citronin. That went so fast. My goodness. I'm changing course. I had a request, many requests on aflatoxin. So we're doing aflatoxin tomorrow. Then we'll do the trichothecines and chetaglobasin at a future date. Stay tuned. All right, I'll see you tomorrow. We'll talk about aflatoxin. Bye, Sam.