This podcast episode (hosts Wendie Trubow and Ed Levitan with guest Dr. Margaret Christensen) discusses how environmental toxicants—particularly mold and mycotoxins—can drive a wide range of health problems. Dr. Christensen links mold exposure and water-damaged buildings to immune dysregulation that can worsen hormonal issues, autoimmunity, metabolic disturbance (weight gain/diabetes), chronic infections, and neuropsychiatric conditions, and she recommends careful history-taking and testing (refers listeners to the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness, iseai.org).
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If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great and feel freaking amazing, you're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.
And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.
Where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social and spiritual lives.
Hold on to your hats.
A lot of people don't recognize that when their landscaper comes and makes their lawn nice and green and sprays, they're spraying glyphosate and round. That's roundup. So that's glyphosate plus 2.4D and other things. So. So just know if you have a nice green lawn, it's because your landscaper spraying stuff and don't let them do that because your kids are walking on.
It and you're walking and your pets and your pets and they track it.
Into your house and then you know. Okay, so how do you fix it? How do you, how do. Where do you start untangling ball of wax?
Well, I think before we fix it.
How do we identify it?
That's a great identifying. So again, if you're coming in with a lot of hormonal symptoms, whether it be fertility, heavy periods, PCOS or polycystic ovarian syndrome, erectile dysfunction, hypertension, anxiety, depression, bipolar symptoms, add, adhd, I mean those are all things. Chronic infections of any kind, chronic sinus infections, chronic ear infections, get a good history and the whole family, starting with the kids and how many antibiotics you've been on in your life. So those are all things that we can start asking to figure out. Okay, yeah, maybe there's a hormonal component here. I think every person needs to be asked, have you ever lived or worked in a water damaged building? It's so common. Again, mold, mycotoxins and toxic mold exposure is so incredibly common and so completely undiagnosed. And I know you guys are a big Lyme people. Where there is Lyme, there is mold first usually. And so one of the things that toxic mold does is it suppresses our innate immune system. The part of the immune system that goes after things like Lyme and bacteria and viruses and it over activates the adaptive immune system. That's the part that produces cytokines and antibodies. So I think everybody knows what a cytokine is now that we've had Covid. And so toxic mold throws this off like this. And that's why we've seen also people, a lot of people who got really sick with COVID their lungs were just, were already full of moldy crap and they were already, they were already imbalanced like this and then their cytokines went crazy. So I think that's, it's important A, to get a good history and then B, just, you know, whenever you are having a hormonal disruption of any sort and, or neurotransmitter disruption, getting a good history of what are your toxic exposures. And I'll start with food. Right.
Well, but there's also like kids going to school.
Yeah, yeah.
Colleges, colleges.
50 of houses and 60 of commercial buildings have had water damage issues. If you have a pier and beam house or you know, basements, those are more likely some of these super old houses really. It's wet sheetrock of any kind. And you know, people say, well, I've got a new house. Well, what, what when it was built, being built, was the sheetrock up when it was pouring rain? And then they just tyvect over it, you know. So anyway, that's a, that's a good question.
You know, we built our house and just the, just the hum. We had the winter of 2015, which was called Snowmageddon up in, up in the northeast.
We had two years ago.
Yeah. So but we had, we had a leak. And I'm thinking to myself, we've had the house tested. But now I'm like, what if. But we've tested.
We've definitely tested. Well, you know, and again, you have to test with people who know what they're looking for, know what they're doing. I highly, highly, highly recommend the International Society for environmentally acquired illness. Iseai.org they have great courses, they've got great information online and they're particularly focused on toxic, you know, environmental toxicants, but particularly kind of toxic mold and then some of the vector borne infections like Lyme as well.
And you didn't mention weight resistant.
Oh wait, wait. Oh my gosh. Diabetes. Diabetes and weight gain. Yeah. I mean, because again, just depending on your genetics, some, some people will, will just create more fat to store their fat soluble toxins and they're actually trying to protect their body. And then, and actually in those cases, you also have to be careful when people have rapid weight loss. They're mobilizing a lot of toxins and you have to have, and you have to have support for your liver and your gut and your kidneys to be able to get this all, everything out of you before if you're losing weight and then feel crappy. Okay.
So I want to just back up a second because what you said, essentially anything that you are suffering with, even though it is common, it is not normal and there is a high probability that you were exposed to a mycotoxin or other toxin that's causing your problem. Do not blow it off.
A, Right. Yes.
B, rapid weight loss is not safe for you. Right. C, hormones should be balanced and if they're not? C, C1, which means that something's going on.
Well, don't forget autoimmunity too.
Yeah.
And then the auto, and then, and then the autoimmune. So it's, you know, it's all tied together. And we have, you know, seen particularly in the last 30 years, logarithmic increases in among in autoimmunity in cancers and neuropsychiatric syndromes. Everything from again, autism and add in children to schizophrenia and bipolar and anxiety, depression a little bit later in life to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS towards the end of life. These are all connected. There's a huge environmental component for all of those and autoimmunity has just been as skyrocketing.
