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Click here to download the mp3 of Bulletproof Radio Short Report – Moldy – #221
Todays episode was shot during PaleoF(x), one of the largest Paleo conferences in the country, where I had the privilege to give a keynote address. Today’s short report is about my upcoming Moldy documentary, mold toxins in our coffee, and how mold exposure makes you weak, sick, and fat.
What You Will Hear
- 0:38 – Cool Fact of the Day!
- 2:00 – Mold
- 6:29 – Moldy documentary
- 8:25 – Mold exposure
Featured
91.7 percent of green coffee is moldy
Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
Silicon Valley Health Institue (SVHI)
Bulletproof
James Baber: The Hidden Dangers of Toxic Mold – #198
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Transcripts
Click here to download PDF of this transcript
Dave Asprey: Hey, I’m Dave Asprey and you’re listening to the Bulletproof Radio short report. A highly condensed show to bring you the most important ways to upgrade yourself. This isn’t a full episode. There’s no interview, but we’re going to talk about some cool stuff. This is the second one I’ve recorded here at PaleoFX, where I’m a keynote speaker. I’ve been on a couple panels about bio-hacking and just having a good time. Meeting a lot of cool people and a lot of people whose lives have been changed by fat in the morning without protein and carbs. We call that bulletproof coffee around here.
Today’s cool fact of the day is that good coffee is magic, but you all ready knew that. You’re bulletproof. The reason that I’m going to talk about this is mycotoxins. These damaging compounds that you’ve probably heard me talk about, in coffee. At PaleoFX today, I’m handing out a report with 34 studies about the problem of mold in coffee, and how roasting doesn’t fix it. There’s been some confusion out there by people selling coffee that isn’t tested, that says, “It doesn’t make a difference.” I would beg to differ and so there’s a little bit of science behind that.
Mycotoxins are present in almost all coffee, including bulletproof coffee, because one part per quintillion is still present. You can push the levels down much, much lower than any government regulates. That’s an interesting thing. One of the studies showed 91.7% of this green coffee had this mold in it. Another study showed 52% of green coffee did and 50% of brewed coffees are moldy. This is a problem, but it’s not always a problem. You may have really clean coffee that is just that way by luck. It must be that way because you followed the advice on my blog to reduce your risk, even if you’re not getting my coffee.
One of my goals is to change the regulations in the US, so that we have mold centers for coffee that are on par with Europe, Japan, and most of South America, because I think you deserve it. I like being able to go to a corner coffee shop and get coffee that always makes me kick ass. This is not meant to be a plug for coffee. It’s just a cool fact that, really there is mold in this stuff.
The reason I’m talking about mold is not because I’m a broken record. It’s because mold is one of those naturally occurring neurotoxins that affects our performance, but it’s hard to see. In fact, it’s so hard to see, that I made a documentary about it. Not so much about coffee, mold, and mold in food, but mold in the environment, which is really a problem. Mold in the environment is affecting 100 million people in the US, because about 28% have genes where molds from water damage, from condensation, from a broken pipe, from a leaky roof, mold happens. It happens in your house. Suddenly you get sick. You don’t feel well, but you’re not all the way sick, and your brain goes down. In fact, Doctor Amen in the movie, Daniel Amen, who wrote Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. A very well-known and respected brain scientist, he’s in the movie saying that you can lose 15 IQ points if you’re exposed to a water damaged building. This is profound stuff. This is why I made a movie called Moldy.
What I’m going to do in this short report is just talk about mold a little bit. Also, this is a little bit of a plug for Moldy, the movie, because I think you’re going to want to check this out. I mentioned 100 million people, as 28% is genetically susceptible. The rest of the population is also susceptible, but we don’t get chronic inflammation in that population. What we get is cancer. We get heart disease. We get other direct affects. Autoimmunity is a major trigger. People don’t know this, but Hashimoto’s can be triggered by environmental. You breathe the stuff in. It can also trigger all of the forms of autoimmunity, including pituitary autoimmunity, where your immune system starts to attack your pituitary gland. It can attack your joints, rheumatoid arthritis.
It’s not just food. It’s not just gluten. It’s actually stuff you breathe. Just like inhaled drugs, like your asthma inhaler, they hit you much faster and more aggressively than things that you swallow. This is why mold in our houses is bad. At least that’s half the reason.
The other reason it’s bad is we did it to ourselves. We did it to ourselves, because about 35 years ago, we sprayed an anti-fungal agent all over the place. This anti-fungal agent killed 98% of soil fungus. Halleluia, right. Now our food doesn’t spoil. Except the 2% that we didn’t kill, had plasmid level genetic mutation turned on. Normally when you get single gene mutation, it takes a long time for something to turn viral and become violent. In this case, plamids are whole groups of genes, and unfortunately, microbes can change plasmids like baseball cards. Think X-Men the movie. You have Wolverine with claws. You have Mystique who can turn blue, change shape, and all that stuff. Those are kind of interesting, but if your mold is doing that, it’s not that interesting. What we’ve found is that mold has become much more aggressive and it makes much more mycotoxin than it did before. Not microtoxin, but mycotoxin, which is myco, like mushroom, and then toxin.
These molds, when they grow in your home, or in your office, or in your car, they grow without competition, and they grow in a stressed environment. They’re stressed, in part, because they were basically bred that way over the past 30 years, because we’ve been spreading these fungicides around, but also the paint in your home, almost certainly, contains something that triggers aggressiveness in these molds. The more stressed an environmental mold is, the more toxin it makes, and the more it’s going to make you sick. The mold itself, the spore, can and will make you sick. It’ll cause immune issues. The poison made by the mold, which is equal to an antibiotic, will also make you sick.
It’s a problem of toxins, which can be in coffee, or food, or wine, beer, chocolate, wheat, peanuts, stuff like this. These are high mold foods. Corn is another one. That’s one thing and you can get those in your house. Some of them even right through your skin, like [trachosothine 00:05:50] can make you quite ill. You might say, Dave why are you ranting about this. I don’t have a problem. Newsflash, it triggers cancer. It triggers all sorts of other degenerative diseases. It’s just hard to see. Parts per billion affect people, so if the person in the building is getting sick at the time, and they’re telling you no it’s an air quality issue, there’s stained ceiling tiles are around and you’re not getting sick. It doesn’t mean than you’re in an environment that’s optimal for performance. It means that you have a canary next to you, but if you hang around in there for a long time, you might not like the cancer that emerges years later. Unfortunately, I’m not making this up. There’s 1200 studies about just one of these toxins on the Bulletproof website. That’s also the toxin most common in coffee.
Why did I make a documentary called Moldy? It’s affecting so many people. One of the things that I used to deal with is called mold rage. What happens is when you’re exposed to this, especially if you’re in that 28% of genetic people like me, it makes you unable to regulate your emotions. In fact, I have a SPEC scan from Daniel Amen, 12 years ago, pointing out this exact problem in my own brain, when I was mold exposed. It’s really interesting in that I’m calm, peaceful, loving, and generally kind to my family. I wasn’t always that way because I didn’t have emotional regulation.
If there’s something in your environment that makes you act like a jerk, and there’s something in your environment that triggers cancer, and triggers all sorts of other health problems in people, something that there’s supposed to be safe levels of, even though individual response curves are quite different, it’s worth knowing about. I interviewed some of the top experts in the world on environmental mold, how to remove it, and more importantly, what it does to you. We have Dr. Mark Hyman, Daniel Amen, guys I’ve become friends with, Pedram Shojai from well.org, talking about the spiritual affects of this weight on your head. Of course, I interviewed a dozen or so people who were affected by mold, to hear what it did for them. Why it caused unexplained weight gain.
In fact, there’s a great quote from Richie Shoemaker, who’s pretty much the godfather of mold, talking about, “If you have been exposed to these neurotoxins in your environment, you will not lose weight no matter how little you eat. It is hormonally impossible.” In fact, we talk about some of the things that you’ll also see in the Bulletproof Diet book, about what it does these things like VIP and Melanocyte-stimulating hormone. You don’t have to know about those things. You just have to know, if it smells funky and you’re feeling crappy, there’s probably a correlation. You can do something about it and it matters. Right now, people don’t know about it. They just walk around like zombies getting fat. That sucks. Mold makes you fat and weak. That is true for everyone, more so for some than others.
Let’s see, brain fog, I’m not going to list all the symptoms of mold exposure here, because it’s a very long list. If you’re feeling odd and there’s this long list of symptoms. You go to a normal doctor, who’s not a functional medicine specialist. You list these all. They look at you skeptically. They think you’re a hypochondriac. You might want to be looking at these environmental toxins and see what they’re doing to you, because you have so many symptoms. Doctors are trained to believe that you’re a hypochondriac if you have 20 symptoms. If you don’t believe me, that’s cool, because Janette Hope, who’s also a physician in Santa Barbara, is also in the movie. Janette’s a physician who’s married to a physician.
She had mold in the house. She was affected and her husband wasn’t. They would have just said she was nuts, except that she had a slight temperature, so they knew something was wrong. After biopsying every single organ in her body, which is terribly painful, over two debilitating years of feeling crappy, they figured out it was the mold in the house. They fixed the mold in the house and she got better. Now she specializes in treating mold patients.
This is the kind of stuff that I think is worth knowing about. It’s so worth knowing about that I’ve spent six weeks personally traveling around and interviewing people. Six weeks away from my kids, away from my wife, away from the other Bulletproof things that I do, because this matters, and because it’s critically important that we become aware of this. When buildings are not maintained well, or they’re built wrong, we get sick and we don’t know why. It’s not like you just died, you went to the hospital. Although you may end up there with pneumonia or some other problems over time. What happens is it makes you weak. It makes you weak. It makes you less. It diminishes you. That’s not okay.
This is something that’s happening especially in our schools. Schools don’t have enough budget, so what do schools do? They cut back on building maintenance, so the roof leaks. Then a quarter of the kids have behavioral issues. They feel crappy and they get sick. Some teachers get sick and some don’t. Then there’s eventually lawsuits. Then, gee, how many home insurance or professional insurance things now have a mold exclusion? They know it’s a problem and they don’t want to deal with it.
This matters. It’s in our world. We made this problem by breaking our soil. Guess who’s making it worse? People who spray glyphosate on their soil. Glyphosate is not just a herbicide. It’s an antibiotic. When you spray it on the soil, it is documented to increase the toxicity of mold in our food by up to 500 times. Specifically that’s fumonisin, is the one I’m talking about. It’s one of the species of mold, particularly in corn. Although it can also grow in coffee and some other crops. Interesting that we spray this stuff and then the environment responds. The environment, basically, tries to kick our ass.
This is why Moldy exists. If you want to check this thing out, you can go to Bulletproofexec.com/moldy. If you don’t want to check it out, then you can also just pay intention to your environment. You see water stains. You’re sleeping in a basement or an attic and it smells funky. You just gained a bunch of weight. You just can’t focus. You don’t remember words. Things aren’t as good as they should be, you might want to consider an air test.
In the movie, and especially in the other materials with the movie, I’ll be teaching you how to test your air. It’s remarkable what you can do there. You might also want to consider detox, if you’ve been affected. I have a great video up on the website. One of the first big public talks given about mycotoxins was at the Silicon Valley Health Institute, I think in 2007, 2008. Where I talked about my experience and the detox protocols that are still valid today. Have an awesome day. I hope this was really helpful for you. Check out Bulletproofexec.com/moldy.
This has been an enormous amount of work. I’ve never made a movie before. I did this because I care, because it’s worth your time, and because if you look to your left and you look to your right, one of you are likely genetically susceptible to this. The other two are not strengthened, you’re made weaker, just not as weak. This problem affects us all. You want to be in the same world I want to live in. A world where the environment around us helps us kick ass, not takes away our vitality. See you on the next podcast.
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