Episode 116: Is Mold Silently Wrecking Your Health? How to Detox from Mold with Dave Asprey

Foreign.

Dr. Rob Whitfield, the board certified plastic surgeon specializing in explant surgery Breast implant illness.

Is a topic that is not often.

Talked enough about, especially in medical community.

But is something that affects many women.

In this podcast I will be discussing the latest research, treatment options and personal stories of women who have undergone explant surgery in an effort to heal breast implant illness. In this podcast we'll explore the symptoms.

Of breast implant illness and delve into.

The latest surgical techniques for explantation and the recovery process. Whether you are currently experiencing breast implant illness or are considering explant surgery, this podcast is a valuable resource for anyone looking to take control of their health and wellness. So let's dive in.

Welcome to the show. Today we have a special guest, Dave Asprey. Known around the world as the father of Biohacking. Dave is an acclaimed health science entrepreneur, four time New Times New York Times best selling author and host of the award winning top world 100 podcast, the Human Upgrade. Dave's mission is to empower and enable people to lead happier, more conscious lives by using biohacking techniques and technology to improve the functioning and destiny of the.

Body and the mind.

Dave has created billion dollar industries to support his breakthrough protocols including MCT oil, collagen, protein and functional coffees. He's the founder and CEO of Upgrade Labs, the first biohacking gym and the creator and the host of Biohacking Conference, longest running biohacking conference in the world which celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2024. Most recently he launched the 5 Day Instant program 40 Years of Zen, the world's most exclusive 5 Day Mastery program retreat for upgrading the brain. Welcome to the show Dave everybody. My special guest today is Dave Asprey's friend and client of mine, but also the father of biohacking and somebody who like I, shares a big problem with Bold in his past and he's going to share and drop some knowledge. We've been talking offline about this, but welcome to the show Dave.

Rob, it's good to see you again my friend.

Thanks for coming, I really appreciate it. I know you're very busy. We're going to dig in deep today about mold and can you just share briefly for those listening who don't know of your experience, like what happened and what kind of got you on the trail of mold toxicity.

I grew up in a basement that had been flooded that had toxic mold and I didn't know it. No one knew about that in the 70s and 80s and I had childhood asthma, arthritis diagnosed when I was 14 odd oppositional defiant disorder and OCD. Asperger's syndrome. Rashes. 15 years of antibiotics because of chronic strep throat, which is a symptom of toxic mold. Weird nightmares and dreams, all kinds of behavioral things, brain things, immune things, autoimmune stuff. By the time I was 23, I hit 300 pounds. When I was 26, I was diagnosed as having lower testosterone than my mother, which is not a great goal. And, I mean, you've seen how much extra skin I have. Rob, you helped me with the no cut facelift, and we took a bunch off my low back without any scars, which is cool. So I just had this whole spectrum of crazy neurological and immune things, and mold is a major part of that. Reason I was so fat and had those giant man boobs was marlena, which is 10,000 times more estrogenic than human estrogen, and they give it to cows to make them fat on 30% less calories. So, you know, it was very biologically disruptive, and it took me a long time to figure out what's going on. And as we're recording this, I'm about 6% body fat. My brain is freaking epic, and my immune system works pretty darn well. And I've learned how to manage whatever I need. And I went from 10 years ago or 20 years ago. I walk into a moldy building, and this might sound crazy, but, you know, I would take a few breaths, and my blood pressure would drop. I'd get really tired. I get brain fog sometimes for six weeks. Like. Like a lot. Like, just disabling and just need to sleep and take binders and all this crap. And it. It was disabling. And where I am now, I am highly resilient to mold. I've gotten over it, and it's taken years. I recorded a documentary, professionally shot one. It's called Moldy movie.

It's free.

Moldymovie.com if you're listening to this, and either you think you have mold and you're not sure, or even worse, you're pretty sure you have mold. And your husband or your wife, your doctor doesn't believe you, go to moldymovie.com, again. I want your money. Just watch the movie. A dozen top experts, including Daniel Amen, leaders in environmental medicine, and a dozen people like you and me, who got mold with crazy symptoms all over the place. And this is why it's so pernicious. It affects hormone systems, and most mycotoxins affect the mitochondria in the body. And it's kind of obvious because penicillin is a mold toxin. Right. You know, we discovered on cantaloupe, and that's where antibiotics came from. Well, your mitochondria are ancient bacteria, so there's a multi billion year old war between bacteria and fungus. So if you're breathing antibiotics, which is what mold makes, well, no wonder it's messing with you. And in my case, you know, my mitochondria were running very, very low. I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, pre diabetes, massive cognitive issues before I was 30, and I had to dig my way out of that. And this is how important it can be. And if we just knew what it was, the fact I had strep throat all the time, my doctors, if they'd have known this back then, they should have said, you know, you need to get a mold test in your bedroom because normal healthy kids don't get strep throat every month. Strep throat's a response to mold in the environment. It's the bacteria in the nose going, well, if I'm getting constant antibiotics, I better arm myself and get, get stronger form a biofilm. So if people are having hormone issues that are unexplained, weird autoimmune issues, unexplained weight gain, crazy dreams in the night and frequent bruising, balance disturbances, behavioral disorders, a sudden rage, I know all those things. And those are all symptoms of mold.

Yeah, we talk about this a lot. And your experience is now you're so resilient. I remember when I first went to your house when you moved into Austin, and it had mold in the, one of the rooms and it had 42 water leaks.

And I lived there for four months without getting sick. Like, that's how resilient I am. Most people who have mold right now are like, that can't be real. It can be real.

It is, because I went to Dave's house and I saw it and I was like, what is going on here? And I, for everybody listening, I've talked about it before, but I had a strong issue with a mold toxicity at a home that we were in, in Austin. And then we, you know, basically, I think when we look at our patients who have problems with chronic inflammation and obviously taking care of patients with chronic inflammation all the time with breast implants who have trouble, I look at their toxicity burden tests to help highlight not just, you know, heavy metals that could be there from, you know, possible leaching of chemicals out of the shell or glyphosates or other Environmental toxins. But I'm always looking for mycotoxins because I don't want to miss those. I want them to understand those. Because most of this is happening at your home or your work or when you travel. And it's, you know, Austin's got a ton of mold in the air. Even I know Dave knows this now. But, like, you constantly have Jasper air filters and IQ air filters from Switzerland running in my office. He's been in my office and he knows I'm a little bit of air freak when it comes to that. For good reason.

I think we should all be air freaks. I've got an air filter in just about every room, especially the bedroom. And mold toxins are extremely small molecules, and that means that they float around. A lot of times they're actually in dust. So the dust in your house, the more mold you have, the more you need to dust and vacuum and have air filters. And if you ever get a good quality air filter, you'll open that thing up and look at what's accumulated on the filter that's going into your lungs. And that's where a lot of the mycotoxins sit. So you got to be aware of that. And people like, oh, I have a water filter. I only drink filtered water. And you breathe unfiltered air. Your body takes 30 pounds of air plus food and combines them to make energy every day. So I clean the air. Because you also don't need cedar and, you know, rubber dust and microplastics and all that. So indoor air quality is a massive, massive issue. And it's not that hard to get some air filters. Yeah.

You know, when people ask me, you know, right away, you know, how can they start feeling better or lowering inflammation? I. The number one thing that I go to is food quality. Food quality and sleep. Like, you gotta start with those basic things. And when you, when you do that, then if we get your report back and let's. For instance, I told Dave we were gonna do this. We're gonna look at one of my patients reports as an example. This is not an infrequent problem that I face. I'll get somebody who has on a toxicity burden test, aflatoxin or gliotoxin or ochratoxin in the 95th percentile. And this is not the time that you wanna be in the 95th percentile. You don't to want, want this on your, your test result because this means your body is dealing with a significant burden of mycotoxin. And like you said, this is coming from the fungus itself. And it's typically floating around, it's in the dust, and it's simply going to be at your home or at your place of work or maybe someplace you travel.

So also, don't forget cars. So many people's cars have mold. And especially in an environment like Austin, you have days where it's really moist and you're running really cold air condition. So you get hot, moist air condenses on your cold air conditioner, and then you turn off the car, and then you turn the car back on. And of course mold's gonna grow there, especially if it's been a week because you were gone. So what is a really good practice? I don't always do this by a long shot. Turn the heat on for 30 seconds before you turn off the AC, and that'll dry out the condensers. And if your car starts to develop that funk, you can actually clean that system out, either with ozone or there's a bacterial spray called Homebiot that's a probiotic that eats toxic mold. Now, because I started that company 10 years ago, is my smallest company, I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm just mentioning this is what I do. It's like anytime I smell a little bit of, like, I just get a hint of mold, or if I'm traveling, I missed the room where I am because I know that the stuff will go in. And it's the natural balance to go against mold. It likes to eat mold as its food source.

I have a great, great patient story about that patient. A bunch of coffee with cream and everything out of the passenger seat, onto the floorboard and under the mat, it grew a ton of mold. So every time she got in the car to go travel, because she worked at another community, she had a two to three hour commute most of the time.

She must have been so sick she.

Would get sick in her car. And then she looked at her husband who was at the appointment with her and said she didn't think it was a problem. He thought I was crazy.

But she was.

Basically, they had to sell the car because the car eventually got looked at for an air conditioning problem, and they found all mold. And she was like, I'm never getting in that car again. Which is the right answer. Like that is you just got to get away from that from an environment standpoint. Well, let's talk about a couple of these toxins that I find routinely that we know are both whether they're neurotoxic or whether they're Going to cause, you know, arthritic type symptoms or fatigue or all the things. Let's start with something that is literally put in wine and we find it in coffee and we find it in grains, and that's ochratoxin.

Let's talk about this stuff. So ochratoxin is a common environmental mold. Actually, it's a mold toxin, not just a mold. It's made by different species. And ochratoxin is particularly bad for your bladder and your kidneys. And recent studies showed as a direct mitochondrial toxin. I quit drinking coffee for five years because I would drink coffee and then an hour or two later I would get like the jitter, cranky thing like that. And I'm really famous for starting a company called Bulletproof, which I don't run anymore. My new mold free coffee company is called Danger Coffee. And I actually have binders that are in the coffee as well. And it's called Danger because who knows what you might do. So I'm bringing this up because ochratoxin A is such a common poison in coffee, and it happens during the fermentation of the coffee beans long before they're roasted. Got 36 studies on my website that show that it is present in green coffee, that it survives temperatures of roasting, and it's in coffee when you brew it. Problem is that in the US There is no government standard for this mold toxin. What that means is it'll be in your coffee because when it's illegal to sell coffee in Japan or China or Europe, they will send the dirty coffee here. So different cups of coffee can make you feel very different, especially if you're mold sensitive. And for me, I discovered this because after five years of no coffee, I had a cup of coffee and I felt so good. And then the next day, I had a different cup of pine coffee and I felt like crap. I'm like, I couldn't have got allergic to coffee in one day. So something else. And when I unpacked all this, I'm like, oh, my God, it's in wine, it's in beer, it's in grain. And because it's not controlled in coffee, it's a big issue. And it's in the air and it affects your mitochondria, which is that jittery, tired, I need sugar feeling that we're so used to. And because my lab data showed I was exposed by breathing it and I know that it's in coffee, I still to this day feel a difference from street coffee. I don't drink it. I brew My own coffee when I travel because of this difference. So understanding that this toxin is there, and here's how you can tell, aside from the I drank coffee and I felt jittery and cranky sometimes right away, if you have a mast cell response, sometimes an hour later, if it's a mycotoxin response. If you drink a cup of coffee and soon after you have to go pee and your bladder's not full, you very likely got mold toxin in your coffee. Because it is so toxic to the kidney and bladder, the body will dehydrate you. It'll pull water out of the blood to dilute the toxin, and it'll give you an urgent signal to pee. And then you go to pee and there's just a half a cup comes out. That's weird. When I really have to pee, I should be having, you know, two or three cups of urine. So why did you get that signal? It's your body protecting you. And it's a clear sign that something was toxic or irritating. And it's gonna be either oxal or it's going to be mycotoxin and oxalate, which is razor sharp crystals of calcium that form in the body. Those come from certain foods, like spinach, kale, raspberries, sweet potatoes, almonds, beets, things like that. Or they come from mold metabolism. So if you're in a house with mold, you have toxic mold. Metabolically, your body will make razor sharp calcium crystals that are associated with interstitial cystitis, joint pain, brain fog, calcifications in the brain, and these microscopic crystals caused by toxic mold in your metabolism or caused by eating more of it and nuts and things like that. They are shown in studies to directly poison mitochondria because they actually, they cut the mitochondrial membrane. They're like tiny pieces of glass throughout the body, and they accumulate as you age. In my case, in my desperate desire to lose weight, before I figured it out and wrote books about it and all that, I tried being a raw vegan for a while, where I was eating an incredibly toxic dose of these plant toxins on top of what the mold was doing to my metabolism. And one of the other conditions that comes out from this, I bet you've seen this in some of your breast implant illness people, is vulvodynia. And vulvodynia is when oxalate forms in your vulva. And these are incredibly painful, like tiny little needles. You can't even wear underwear if you have this. No one's going to be touching your vulva. If you have vulvodynia and it's a combination of either eating too much of these toxins or more likely, metabolically creating the toxins because of mold in your body or in your environment, plus the nutritional burden. So if you're having chronic UTIs or interstitial cystitis or any of those things, you gotta look at oxalate and you gotta look at toxic mold.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the chronic interstitial cystitis, because that has been that and recalcitrants, urinary tract infections or irritation that, you know, it's been treated over and over and over again. When people tell me that, I mean, like, oh, we need to look at your toxicity test, because that's not normal. And when people have, you know, in Dave's experience and my experience, when they have chronic inflammation, the immune system is activated to a point where it has difficulty responding, and then tolerance is lost, and that protects you. You start to have more problems with immune dysfunction, mitochondrial dysfunction, and your protective mechanisms will obviously take over like Dave is describing. And I've experienced this every once in a while, but now I've done what Dave has described, and I take my own coffee with me, and I take my own French press with me when I travel for meetings and I'm going to speak. And it makes a huge difference because the coffee hotels is trash, is terrible.

You kind of have to do that. When you travel. A lot of hotel coffee makers, you open them up, there's mold in them, and there's microplastics in all of them, and the water's not good. Rob, I don't even travel with a French press anymore. I take the Danger Coffee, which again, is lab tested, mold free. Some brands I've worked with before do not say mold free on the label anymore. And with Danger Coffee, I know it is. And there's a therapeutic dose of trace minerals and electrolytes that are specifically there. One of the things they can do is bind to toxins. And so I will take that. I grind it really fine, like espresso grind. And I just bring two stainless steel coffee flasks. I get boiling water. Whether I go to Starbucks, by the way, Starbucks has great water filters. You get hot water at Starbucks, that's fine. Or I have a little thing that boils water. Like you stick it in the water and plug it in the wall, and I boil water in one. I put some coffee in there, slosh it around, let it sit for a few minutes, and all the coffee will drop. To the bottom. Then you just pour it into the other mug. And I've brewed my coffee in the room. No French press required.

Yeah, I mean, that's. And I've actually seen Dave do this. I know he's not making it up. He carries around his flask of coffee. I've seen him do it. I've gotten little. I guess I'm. I don't want to say I'm too bougie, but my wife got one of those tiny French presses that you can travel with. So I just pack that up and nice roll around with our coffee. And we have danger at home. And it's very good coffee. And I like the fact you actually put minerals back in. And I think that's. People are learning more and more about macronutrients, but they really miss the boat on micronutrients, and they miss the boat on minerals. You know, that's a common problem. Let's transition away from ochra toxin, because in our country, there's.

As you.

I know you know this, but there's no rules about how much ochratoxin gets put into anything, including the wine, unlike the European Union, where there are limits on it. But let's go to glio toxin. This is more of what you experience, probably from your initial dose of toxin, because it's water damage, and that's a very, very specific thing that you experience. And whether it's a water leak or a flood, I. I mean, we're in Texas. I mean, Houston floods all the time. And that everybody who comes from Houston, I just assume that they have a ton of toxic burden from all of the different problems with flooding. Let's unpack gliotoxin.

Gliotoxin is particularly nasty neurologically. Right. And it's also one of the harder ones to get rid of. And it's even associated with Parkinson's. Like, you see higher levels of gliotoxin in these neurodegenerative diseases, and I believe Alzheimer's from memory. So this is one that is not likely to be found in food, from my recollection, but you will find gliotoxin in environmental mold. And certain toxins are only if you eat them or breathe them, and others can absorb through the skin. This is why controlling dust is so important. So from memory, gliotoxin can affect you transdermally as well. So, like, don't be rolling around in moldy stuff or in dusty stuff.

And this is one of the main things we talk about with our patients, where they. They come from an environment I don't know if this has been your experience, but everybody gets super personal. We talked about this. When you say anything about their home, like where they live, whether it's from the financial investment or the personal memories of the home. But if you say, you know, you got to be very careful with and evaluate your environment at home, there's a lot of pushback all the time and you can't. If you're having health issues, you spend the most time at home asleep in your bedroom. So you know this Dave. There's water leaks all the time in Masters, there's roof problems, there's window leaks. I mean, you just kind of just roll through the, the list. So you better have an air filter in your bedroom like Dave was talking about. And it better have a dense enough filter to help get some of these things out of the air. So at night when you're, you're breathing in and out, you can actually, as much as we can be protected. I would say that way.

In fact, if you were to just do one thing, get a high quality air filter in your bedroom. If your bathroom is attached to your bedroom, you probably have mold in your bathroom because you take showers in there. So you're going to have to do something like a home biotic or what I do, I just leave the exhaust fan in the bathroom on 247 because it helps to dry out the bathroom after showers and then it creates an negative pressure in there. And just the other night I must have turned the fan off or, or maybe my girlfriend did. And I came in in the morning and it smelled wet and my bathroom shouldn't be smelling wet unless I got out of the shower.

Right.

And you just don't want that. And anyone with mold knows what I'm talking about. You have like a sixth sense. You walk into a molded place like, oh, this place isn't right. And it's actually your nervous system trying to warn you. Problem is that quite often people get a full on PTSD response from mold. And I did have that at one point because you're so tired of just feeling like crap. And so you, you go there and your body doesn't really detect mycotoxins. Well, they're such small molecules, they're like the size of cholesterol. Like they're very similar to cholesterol, a lot of them. So it's like, I know something is poisoning me, I don't know what it is. So it's like, oh, maybe it's. And so you start developing chemical sensitivities in Fact, people with mcs, quite often it's just mycotoxins triggered it. And a lot of times they think, oh, I have lung Lyme disease. I thought I had lyme too. 90 plus percent of people with Lyme disease get rid of mold and Lyme magically goes away because your immune system does its job. So I had to go through and actually teach my nervous system to chill out whenever I smelled mold that was part of healing from mold. There are people who get rid of the toxin problem, but they still have a neurological, very well defined defensive mechanism just towards anywhere that's moldy. And then a lot of us, we tie our identity to where we live. You know, home is where the heart is and all that kind of stuff. So this is a place you put tons of money, tons of time. It's, you know, where your kids might have grown up. And it's a place where you want to feel safe. And then you get, you know, some incredibly well certified hippie doctor who the hell does he know what he's saying? Or some jerk biohacker. And we're like, your house may not be safe. And you're like, what do you mean my house isn't safe? It's my, it's my castle. And it's a really common and disabling and very well meaning neurological response has nothing to do with your conscious brain. It's just like if someone were to say, you know, you're in LA and a fire burned your house or I once the house I lived in, my parents house was destroyed in a flood and it is a big drama. So of course it's not going to feel good. And understand it's not that your home is good or bad or safe or unsafe even. And life, it's very extreme. There's cases where your house just needs to be torn down. The odds are you have a mold problem in your house and you might be able to fix it and it's going to cost more than you want. So for example, I lived in a place in Palo Alto a while ago and the dishwasher had a slow drip behind it. I had no idea. So when it stopped working, repairman came in, put in a new dishwasher. And that day my dog stopped eating. I wasn't nearly as healed as I am now. The lining of my gut shed off. I had like just world ending gas, which isn't normal. It wasn't that normal for me anyway. And this is full on immune system reaction to the stuff. Massive brain fog. Coffee wouldn't work none of the things that keep me focused, like, man, I'm just a zombie here. What is going on? And it took about four weeks to figure out that that's what it was. And didn't own the home. Got the landlord to fix it. Eventually they had to rip out the whole kitchen for about 8ft in every direction. It was wet and moldy underneath the floor, and was only when they pulled the dishwasher that it released all those spores. So was the house unsafe? Well, it just needed repair, right? So we had to wet, dust everything, put in special things. I mean, it was disruptive. But during that time, I slept 12 hours a day. I woke up feeling hungover. Every when you have mold because you can't make energy, like your mitochondria poisoned, every single thing in your life feels like it's walking uphill. It's such a big burden. Like, like going to the post office is Mount Everest. And this is one of the things. If you stay in that environment, you will not be able to take care of yourself. And it's not because you're weak or anything. It's because your fight or flight is constantly on and you have zero energy, right? So you get out of there and you start doing things to get your energy back. And a lot of people do this backwards. And I did the first time I got mold poisoning that I was aware of. You're like, well, I got to deal with the mold. And you do a bunch of things that actually make you more tired. No, you deal with your energy in your brain and you do whatever it takes to get your brain working so you can clean it up. And I approach this as, oh, oh, your brain isn't working. All right, let's solve that. We'll get you on nootropics, get you on modafinil. We'll get you on low dose cortisol to get your blood pressure high enough, because most people with mold have low blood pressure, which just trashes your brain. And I'm just going to say it. You're going to have a couple cups of coffee in the morning when cortisol should be higher up. And coffee is not bad at normal doses. Even if your adrenals are tired, if you do it in the morning, in fact, it can help set your cortisol curve. So you do that and like, oh, maybe have some ketones, you know, MCT oil, you know, put butter in your coffee. Mold people have been doing this since I introduced the idea. So if you do that, like, oh, my God, I can think, I got Two hours of clarity. Maybe do some ozone therapy, Rob, at your office, which, which can help. You're doing ozone for people, right?

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They are.

And then Dave is obviously mentioning things like nootropics and things that are next steps for sure. And depending on what the toxin is like, he's, you know, specifically trying to get your cognitive decline is a big issue obviously with mold toxicity and being hungover and tired from mitochondrial dysfunction and or being unable to cope with oxidative stress at a cellular level, which makes that burden that much harder. I want to transition to something before we get off of the mycotoxins because this one is a common one and I, I think you'll appreciate this one. But toxin and nuts, rice or you know, it can be in meat and dairy as well. And I think this one I had a food scientist on one time and he said, he went and did the ultraviolet light on the, the nut section at a store and it all lit up like a Christmas tree because of the aflatoxins inside of the actual, you know, food. And this is something that I think is, I don't want to say it's minimized. It's not even talked about.

Yeah, it's a big thing. I think I wrote about this in one of probably the bulletproof diet. There's field toxins, these grow in the field and then there's storage toxins. And these grow when usually grains are stored. And here's something that farmers will do. Well, I'm going to say industrial farmers will do. They know that if they give mycotoxin contaminated corn or soy or wheat or any kind of grain to animals, it reduces fertility in the animals dramatically and the animals start to die. So they will save the expensive mold free grain for animals that are going to Reproduce. And then as they get near the end of when they're going to harvest them, they feed them the moldiest grain. And the grain toxins bioaccumulate, but who cares? The animal is going to die anyway. And like, it's brutal. And another problem is they use something called silage, which is when they take grass and hay that they cut and they put it in these big buildings and they let it ferment. Right now this is a traditional way of, of preserving food for cows in winter. It's not a bad thing. Except the silage, they're not controlling it well. So it's full of mold toxin. So you eat this food and thank God cows have kidneys and livers. I'd rather eat a cow that ate moldy grain than me eat the moldy grain because the cow acts as a filter. And cows also will minimize the amount of toxin they through put into their milk. But you'll still find aflatoxin in milk because it's a very small molecule, it makes its way through. So what should you do? Grass fed whenever you can. Organic is probably better, but you can have organic moldy stuff, it doesn't change things. So higher quality food is important for this kind of stuff. And then the bulk bins in a lot of stores, you know, you have to clean them once a week or mold can form in them or it forms during storage. So I find that minimizing grain and nuts is a really good idea. In fact, if you want to get, get better, it turns out there's a lot of oxalate and lectins and other things you don't necessarily want when you're eating most types of nuts and most types of grain. The safest by far is white rice, because the brown part of the rice that has the toxins and would have the mold and has the arsenic, well, they grind that off and what's left inside is just starch. But some people with toxic mold need to go on a starch free diet for some period of time. And the other thing that's really important is you may have to go on a keto diet for a little while, in which case you cycle in and out of ketosis. Most people, in my experience, to really fully heal to the extent I have, after you bind all the toxins, you probably got a mold infection somewhere inside your body. So you take an antifungal called sporonox or itraconazole, sometimes for six or eight months. And that is what was the final piece of the puzzle for me that created the resilience. I got rid of the mold that was making the toxins in my body. Company that offers the testing that can determine that is called my mica lab. And that's been powerful. And then the final step is learning to chill. In fact, my new book is called Heavily Meditated. And I'm going through this, and one of the things I had to do was sit down and use the process in the book. It's called the reset process. That is how you go in and you reset a trigger that's in your body. And if you've had mold, when you walk into a moldy environment, your nervous system will be triggered because it's going to have this deep sense of unsafety. And then the panic response that's entirely outside your conscious awareness, it's going to be disabling. And when you realize it's possible to teach the body to be calm and peaceful even in the presence of toxin, there's a process for that. So ignoring the mind body connection with mold is a big mistake. So, sure, get the mold out of your environment, then get the mold out of your food, get the mold out of your body, and then get the reactivity to the mold out. And if you read Heavily Meditated, the process is laid out step by step, and it's a meditation process. You could also try and do something like emdr, and there's a whole bunch of different technologies and techniques for getting into your nervous system. Bottom line is you want to be able to look mold right in the eye, to take a breath of a room that has mold in it and have a deep nervous system response says, I'm safe, I've got this. And it's not an easy thing to do, but it's absolutely the final step of healing.

Glad you brought that up, because some of the most difficult cases I've dealt with are, you know, we're trying to take care of the patient, but the patient, from a nervous system standpoint, like you said, is in fight or flight all the time. And from cognitive standpoint, they really have trouble with, I think, integrating and synthesizing, synthesizing information they're being told. And then obviously with retention, because of the cognitive issues, very, very hard for them. And then, you know, getting them, you know, to turn the corner. Obviously, there's a combination of things we talked about. First and foremost, Dave and I are not telling you to go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars. You're trying to just improve air quality, fluid quality, and food quality, and your quality and quantity of Sleep first and foremost. Those are like four things that are actionable that you can do, you know, starting today. After you listen to this, one more.

Rob, sorry to interrupt you there. If you're going to eat suspect food, like you're going to eat some grains, you're going to go to a restaurant, like, you know, it's a higher risk thing. Take some activated charcoal with it, which is a broad spectrum binder. Take some zeolite maybe. And anyone who's had mold needs to understand activated charcoal is your friend. It can be constipating if you take too much. Don't take it in your drugs or something like that. But if you're going to eat stuff that might be risky, take it with the food. If you know you were in an environment with mold, take activated charcoal so that the mold will be attracted electrically to the charge on the charcoal and then you can poop the mold out instead of letting it soak into your tissues.

Well, we didn't touch about intrahepatic circulation, but the liver is the big filter. And then a lot of problems with mycotoxins in general. They're bound to bile salts and your enteral hepatic circulation. Then it wants to keep the bile salt so it doesn't let the toxin get out. So you have to be aggressive. And Dave and I have talked about this and there are a number of detoxification protocols. But like he's mentioning, you have to be very. All we're asking you basically to do is just pay closer attention to what you're breathing and drinking and eating so that you have more resilience, you become more resilient. And then, you know, with sleep, you're really. That's the, you know, the, the one thing I prioritize the most in terms of recovery is sleep for my patients. And then in Dave's book, I'm glad he brought up this, but, you know, we talk about, you know, calming the nervous system, getting therapy, doing self work, whether that's reading Dave's book or other works he's done or other authors works, you have to do something to work on yourself altogether the time to calm yourself and get a better sense of, of, I mean, self, basically. So you always got to be working on that. So tell us some more about this book.

It's coming out in mid April. You can order it right now. It's heavily meditated. And the brain fog and the neurologic, the neurological stress response from mold, it's such a big thing. And it's something that you can you can handle. So heavily meditated is how do you deal with the unconscious things that the body does before you can think. And this is what causes the stress response if you are exposed to mold. And this is why if mold has suppressed your energy production, you're, you're going to get mold rage, right? You know, your partner, your spouse can say something that wouldn't really be that big of a deal, but because you can't self regulate, you're gonna yell at them or just do things that you regret and you're gonna think it's because you're a bad person or you're weak or. No, like you had a hardware problem. It's like, is your car a bad car because it had the wrong gas in it? No, it wasn't running right. And this is what's going on with you. So heavily meditated teaches every technology that enhances meditation, makes it work faster or even in some cases replaces meditation. And the more mold you've had, the more you need to relearn how to self regulate yourself so that you can handle anything that life brings your way. And the number one feeling people will describe if they've been exposed to mold is it's overwhelmed. Like, I can't handle anything in my life. I can't even do laundry. Like making dinner is just too much. And I got yelling kids. And that feeling is something that you can change. And in the book, I go through my own path of this and all of the different things. So it's not about food. There's a small amount about food in there that helps with meditation. But hey, maybe doing some breath work with your meditation will be profoundly resetting of your vagal response. Another thing that mold people at a certain stage in healing really, like it's a brand new concept in the world. So mold is going to suppress dopamine. And dopamine gives you motivation to do things that matter, like to pursue them. So if, let's say you really wanted a car, your dopamine is going to make you do work so that you can get the car once. And if you buy the car, you won't get any pleasure from buying it. It's just the pursuit of it made you happy and made you motivated. Since dopamine's low, you're unmotivated. Everything feels hard. So here's a new concept in the world. It's called bicep. And this is from heavily meditated. And it's not this bicep, by the way, that's caffeine on my bicep. BICEP stands for brief intentional conscious exposure to pain. And you're like, what? Well, it turns out monks used to whip themselves in the morning, not because they were sinners, but for a very specific reason. And yogis lay on a bed of nails, Texans eat jalapenos for breakfast, and biohackers and old people oftentimes do a short, intense, cold plunge. And what's going on here is if under your conscious control, you do one thing that is actually painful but not damaging for a brief period of time, not to overwhelm the nervous system just enough to. To say, whoa, that was intense. I got this. That. That resets your dopamine sensitivity by up to 250%. It takes less dopamine to feel motivated. So even though it sucked to take a cold shower on your face in the morning for one minute, well, the rest of the day you had less brain fog from the mold because you had more dopamine. It's a really potent thing. It's called bicep, and it's in heavily meditated.

I'm glad you brought it up, because I cannot stand cold plunging. But I'll take a cold shower or put my face in, you know, cold water. We've talked about this before. I'm not a cold plunge person.

But, Rob, you got a man up, man. One minute in the cold. The fact you hate it will make you stronger.

Yeah, I can do the cold shower. I'm good with that. Tell us about forgive as the fifth F in your book.

Yeah, your mitochondria will run through before you can think. This whole way of processing reality. Number one, is it scary? If so, trigger the fight. Or flight. Or freeze. Or fawn. Run away from killer. Hide. That's fear. Number two, it's food. Eat everything your body's like, is it scary? Is it going to eat me? Can I eat it? The third F word is fertility. Well, do I have to kill it? Can I eat it? And can I hump it? Is what your. Your body's processing reality before you think, sorry. The good news is all life forms, including humans, after that, friend, I gotta have a community. How do I support my community?

Right?

And so these are all either sources of nourishment or depletion at each of those levels. But okay, after we've done all those things, the fifth F word is forgive. And this is how humans evolve. And all life on Earth likes to evolve. And for us, forgiveness is closing the loop and coming back to the beginning and becoming less resentful, less fearful, less Reactive. So it's a beautiful loop. The body does all those things automatically. And if you can learn how to turn off your fear. So you walk into a moldy building. Oh, there's mold here. It's not a good idea for me to be here, but if I needed to be here for five minutes, I got this. And you walk out and you deal with it. It's a very different energy than, oh my God, this is moldy. Okay. I'm feeling, you know, my vision is coming. Oh, this has happened to me. My vision's coming into a pinhole and my heart's racing and my blood pressure's dropping and I'm like, ah, okay. All of this is happening before you can think. And the F word, forgiveness is how do I turn off my reactivity to something that my body experienced that I didn't like, that made me feel unsafe at some time in life. And the reset process in heavily meditated is very much about how do I do a structured form of forgiveness that has nothing to do with the brain. It's an altered state in the body. And if you learn how to do that and then you do it, you can actually forgive mold for trashing your brain and your biology. And it's not that you're saying it was okay, you're just saying I'm not going to be reactive to it anymore. And this is the thing to become non reactive to childhood trauma, to the bully in fifth grade, to the fact that one of your parents was mean to you, the fact that, you know you got fired unfairly and all the things that suck up all your energy every day, you can just go through in a structured process and like, check the box, check the box. And now I know this is true because 40 years of Zen is a high end neuroscience program that I started 10 years ago. People come and spend five days working with me and my team and you go through and you reset all of the things you can find that are triggers. So someone cuts you off in traffic, you don't care, someone yells at you. That's probably their problem. And the amount of extra energy is good. That makes you free. So this is kind of my highest and best. This is a $16,000 program that entrepreneurs go through. And the core of it is the reset process. And I'm giving it away and heavily meditated because it's easier with electrodes glued to your brain where we're showing you. Exactly. But you can do this at home. You do before you go to bed. And it is the most important thing for Evolving as a human being is forgiveness.

And I have. Dave doesn't know this, but I have a client here from Europe today on this program and exposes how great 40 years of Zen is. And she's probably going to do it, if she hasn't already done it. Every time she comes in the country, she goes up to Washington and does it. She's like. The next point, I think, is a very important point because all of my patients at one point or another knew intuitively that something was wrong with them. And there's a lot to overcome to figure out and make the decision to come to Austin. Whether you're from, you know, Asia or Europe or the US you have to put, you know, ego aside. And, you know, that's a challenge because many times that overrides what we want to do. But talk a little bit about your. Your. Your portion of the book, Intuition Over Ego.

I mentioned how the. The body processes reality, and it goes through those F words. There's about a third of a second where your body does that, and then your ears or your eyes get the information about it. So there's a censorship window in there. And intuition is your body's natural connection and intelligence to the world and the universe. We only sense a tiny amount of what's really happening in the world around us so that our brains wouldn't get overwhelmed. Like, we don't sense gravity waves. We don't sense, usually most magnetism. We don't think about sphincters and, like, there's all kinds of stuff out there. X rays. It's just. It's outside our awareness, but it's real. It's. So we're not really seeing the world. We're just seeing a picture of the world. And then when you think about all the. All the different experiences that actually. You had an angle on this one that you wanted me to hit, and I feel like I just missed it. What was it?

Oh, just intuition.

Being intuitive around intuition. Got it.

Yeah.

So once all of that stuff percolates through, there is a brief and first signal that is your intuitive knowingness. And through the process of meditating, I've traveled all over the world and studied with gurus and monasteries and fasted in caves and all that to be able to develop the 40 years of Zen process and to understand intuition. So most of the time, though, we've been taught since we were little kids to suppress and ignore the intuition. And right after the intuition is a much bigger signal, which is emotion. Right. And then there's a thought that comes after that, which is to justify the emotion. So what will happen is like, something will pop into your head and immediately there'll be like a resistance. And then the brain will say, oh, let's not do that. There's a reason I should do this. And this is the idea of getting out of your head. And when you learn how to become peaceful by doing the reset process and heavily meditated, what happens is the intuition pops in. And instead of immediately suppressing and forgetting, you stop the habit of suppressing and forgetting and you start the habit of being curious and, oh, I wonder why I just thought of that person. So then you pick up the phone and you call them and like, oh my God, thank goodness you called me. I really needed to talk to you. Like, what happened there? Well, you listen to your intuition instead of suppressing your intuition, saying, I shouldn't call, I'm busy. Right? So first and small signal, almost instantaneous, that is intuition. That is inner knowingness. You don't even have to think for that. And once you start thinking, unless you're thinking about the intuition, you're much more likely to think about the emotion. And that reset process is what lets you turn down emotions that don't serve you. Suddenly. If you feel joy, it's not going to suppress an intuition. But if you feel fear, anger, resentment, sadness, grudge being triggered, you're not going to have the intuition that's. I believe in all human beings. And it's really been. It's changed my life and the power of this. When I wrote my first big book, the Bulletproof Diet, I said, very specifically, C8MCT oil is the one that works better for your brain. Now, there is no scientific studies for this, but I could intuit the difference. I could feel the difference. I tested the difference, and five years later, study comes out of UC San Diego. It says, oh, look, that's the only form of MCT oil that raises ketones that high. So a lot of times, all the great breakthroughs, they're intuitive. You know, Watson and Crick had a dream like my grandfather co invented the process for making plutonium, for purifying it. And it came to him in a dream like, this is how we do it. It's our intuitive thing. Oh, I just thought it like it just comes in. And we have learned through a careful process to never pay attention to that. And when you practice forgiveness, when you practice neurological calmness, your intuition's there. And when you start getting mold illness, especially if you're a mom, women have more intuitive sensors than men. Because of mitochondrial density and that I know something's wrong. Dude, there's something wrong, right? And if it's a knowingness that something's wrong, listen. And if it's a fear that something is wrong, go to therapy, do the reset process. And there's a difference.

You said that. Because I. My patients tell me that all the time and they have this very specific thing that I tell my team. I was like. I say, if you listen long enough, they'll tell you exactly, you know, what is wrong. Because they, they know. They may not always be able to verbalize it directly to you, but if you listen carefully enough, you'll learn for them. And I have learned a ton from Dave. I look forward to seeing him soon and reading his new book when it comes out. Thanks for being on the show, Dave. I really appreciate having you.

You are so welcome, Rob. I really appreciate the work you're doing because you practice intuition. I know you listen to your patients in a way that a lot of physicians haven't learned how to do. You listen to women with breast implant illness and then you get the data and you're validating it. You're talking to people with mold, and it's so critically important. And just as a final thought, if you start getting exposed to mold and you have all these crazy dreams that something's trying to get you. Dude, your body's trying to tell you there's something trying to get me. I can't sense it because it's too small molecularly. But something isn't right. That's happening. You gotta look in your world, you're not crazy. You're actually plugged in and it's okay. So, Rob, thanks for being plugged in, man.

Thank you so much, brother.

Thanks for joining me today. I hope you found the information and stories shared on this podcast helpful and informative. Remember, taking control of your health and wellness is key to recovery from breast implant illness. If you're looking for additional resources and support, be sure to visit our online store, Dr. Rob's Solutions at drrobsolutions.myshopify.com you'll find a wide range of wellness products and supplements to support your journey to recovery. From specially formulated detox supplements to personalized skincare products, we have everything you need. To answer aid your recovery, visit Dr. Rob's Solutions today at drrobssolutions.myshopify.com thank you for listening and we'll be back with another episode soon. Remember, you're not alone in this journey, and together we can overcome breast implant illness.

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