Mold: How to identify your health’s limiting factor & Immune Triggering Event

Mold: The Hidden Health Saboteur You Might Be Overlooking
Think mold is harmless because “it’s everywhere”? Think again.
In this episode, I break down the surprising—and often devastating—ways mold toxicity can show up in your health, even when others in your home “don’t seem to have a problem.” From homes and schools to favorite hobbies and everyday foods, mold exposure is far more common than most people realize—and in sensitive individuals, it can be the missing piece in a stubborn health puzzle.

We’ll cover:

• What mold toxicity actually is and how it’s similar to other biotoxins like Lyme or heavy metals
• How common environments—from energy-efficient homes to your kitchen pantry—can set the stage for illness
• The surprising symptoms mold can trigger in adults and children, from fatigue and reflux to anxiety, sensory issues, and autoimmune-like flares
• Why mold impacts the gut, mitochondria, and even brain chemistry
• The connection between histamine, behavioral changes, and “mystery” food reactions
• Why identifying and avoiding your health’s “triggering event” is key to recovery

If you’ve been searching for answers to complex, lingering symptoms—and nothing seems to stick—mold may be the root cause you’ve been missing.

Instagram: @heyheyelizabethmae
Website: www.heyheymae.com

Transcript

Hey friends, welcome back to Hey, You're Gonna Be Okay. I'm Elizabeth and today we're going to have a really important and honestly.

I opening conversation about mold toxicity, how it can be the thing standing in the way of your healing. And it's also what I call an immune triggering event. So let's start here. Have you heard people say mold is everywhere? So obviously it can't affect your health like that. It's not affecting my health. It couldn't also be affecting your health. We see this a lot in partners, people who share homes together where one partner is not affected and one partner's health, typically the woman because of hormone interplay is greatly affected or the kiddos are having

issues but the adults are fine. It can be very confusing if you will or some are reactive and some are not. We're going to talk about that. Or worse, sometimes we see people say, you know, I don't seem to have a problem with mold. Your problems are in your head. Mold can be tricky too because mold is going to hide behind walls. And then mold itself is one issue and then mycotoxins are another issue. So if that sounds familiar, please know that you're definitely not alone. I hear this all the time in my practice, but here's what we know for sure. Mold in closed environments like your home

can make you sick and mold-enclosed environments like your children's schools can make them sick. In fact, I'll tell you right now, mold is often the driving factor behind most of my sensitive clients and when it's not, it's Lyme. So mold is one of the big four triggering immune events that we talk about a lot here at Hey Hey. The other three are streptococcus infections, so strep throat, strep infections, Epstein-Barr virus and Lyme disease. So those three are pathogens, whereas mold is more of an environmental toxin.

Now we're going to learn more and more about mold every year as time goes on because it's starting to be seen as more of a health issue. There's been more, you know, funding, etc. put into figuring the mold sickness equation in there. But there are many different approaches to treatment. The one thing that is agreed upon, despite all the innovations and research, is avoid it, avoid it, avoid it, avoid it. So what is mold toxicity? Let's break it down. A toxin is just a fancy word for a poison, right? In our bodies, microbes, things like infectious

Agents, bacteria, fungus, viruses, they all release their own load of toxins. Did you know that? if a virus is in your body, that is a problem. And then what the virus produces, that is the problem and that is toxicity. This buildup over time from pathogens we call biotoxicity. Mold works in a very similar way. When the pathogens are killed by our immune system, they can actually dump more toxins into their system before they're gone. And with mold, you have the mold spore. So what you think of as the dotty spotty that you'll see in

water damaged areas and then you have mycotoxins which basically I tell my kids they're like mold farts. It's with the mold excretes that's a gas that can also make you sick. So other toxins we think about are familiar with maybe things like heavy metals, synthetic chemicals and then of course these mold toxins. So where can you be exposed to mold? If mold is everywhere where is it that it becomes a problem? So many places unfortunately. So at home especially and even in newer homes newer building materials like gypsum board

fiberboard, then really like energy efficient, very sealed homes that don't breathe very well create the perfect storm of conditions. You've got moisture, you have condensation, and you have no way for the house to breathe. Schools, I touched on that a tiny bit, especially in buildings with water damage with old HVAC systems. Think about HVAC systems.

In the warmer months, they're going to get cold, right? Because they're pumping out air conditioning. But when that cold hits hot air, you get some condensation sometimes in the system. Depending on where a system is run, a lot of times in the South, we'll see HVA duct work run through attic. So the attic is hot and then you have this really cold duct work coming through and you're to have regular condensation there. Dorms are very notorious for having mold. You can just Google college of and mold exposure and you are going to find plenty of dormitories that have mold exposure in them.

So a lot of people are like, you know what? I did great. I went to college. I was so sick I guess it's because I drank too much. Well, maybe

and maybe also the mold. So group housing is another place that we can see a lot of molds and you got buildings that aren't maintained very well. Hobbies is another one. So maybe you have a great, wonderfully mold-free home and work environment, but you are a brewer or a baker or a cheese lover or a collector of antiques or rare books. Maybe you grow mushrooms or you use cannabis. All of these things can be mold exposure points. Interesting, huh? The last exposure site and probably the place that there's been the most research around,

because initially we were researching a lot around mold in food sources for animals is also in our food. So dried fruits. I always say anything that's oldie can get moldy. So aged cheese, wine, it took a while to make the wine, right? Beer, vinegar, processed meats, these things take a while to make. And then you have foods that are just inherently moldy like mushrooms, they are a fungus, and then you have things like corn. Because of how grains are stored too, often in high humidity they can become contaminated.

which then gets passed on to the animals they will eat. These mycohoxins can pass through the placenta in humans. So if I'm exposed to mold, I pass that through the placenta to my baby. They concentrate in breast milk, so we always want to be very careful with mold exposure in babies and moms and nursing. And then they impact babies developing immune systems. Because mold is an immune system trigger, it is an immune limiting factor, a child who is growing up in a moldy environment is going to have an immune system that's very

I often say that when babies are in utero and born into a moldy environment, and I don't mean literally, but yes, a home birth into a moldy environment is a whole nother issue. Those babies can really struggle immune wise because their body has never really learned that mold is not part of them. The immune system is there to protect. It's there to create a boundary between self, the baby's body, and non-self, the world. Mold toxins, pathogens. But if the pathogens have been part

of the baby's body since they were conceived then you're gonna have an immune system that's very dysregulated so a lot of kids that we see with really bad eczema or eczema at all or immune issues that won't resolve often were in mold still in mold and babies they also love crawling through the house where mold spores love to hide is in dust so baby crawls through dust they're exposed to a lot more mold than you and I are gonna be exposed to in our homes so what are we gonna see when we see some

show up with mold toxicity. This is where it gets tricky because mold is kind of a masquerader. It can look just like Lyme disease so part of what we do here at Heihei is really determining the difference between the two. Sometimes it's easy as I got sick after I had a tick bite and we can say well let's back down on the mold but other times it's not quite as easy and a lot of times it's both because you can have mold as an immune limiting factor but already have an infectious load that the body was maintaining pretty well until the mold

came in and took the immune system down. So classic mold symptoms include

Electric shock sensations, pulsing, vibrating, sometimes up the spine, sometimes just in the body in general. A lot of times you'll have ice pick like pains. Chronic sinus infections are a big one. So if someone comes to us and they're talking about mold or is it Lyme? Sometimes I feel like in the winter it's worse. Well, Lyme can get worse in the winter too because our immune systems can be limited in that season. But a lot of times when you're in mold because we breathe in mold spores and we breathe in those mycotoxins, you're going to see chronic sinus infections.

respiratory issues including asthma, coughs, clearing of the throat and a lot of histamine type symptoms. So a person may have a lot of foods they can't eat, they may have a lot of allergies, they may just feel like they're somebody who just really struggles with seasonal allergies and they are going to when they are mold exposed. Now in kids mold exposure can look a little bit wider and a little bit more specific so those conflict but pan's pandas a lot of times my kids who have pediatric acute neuropsychiatric disorder

associated with streptococcus or that pediatric autoimmune encephalitis issue, they're also living in mold. So my most severe kids, every single time we intake a severe child whose pan-span is there as mold involved. Severe eczema is a big one, failure to thrive. Tonsil and adenoid issues are huge with mold toxicity and exposure because if you think you're breathing in right past those tonsils and adenoids, and they are immune organs in some capacity, and so they're going to try to do their job to deal with and

filter and help to combat that immune challenge. Sensory processing struggles are big in children and adults. Joint pain can come along from that intense inflammation. You're gonna see a lot of chronic gut issues and gut inflammation. We also see autism spectrum symptoms. So if I have a kiddo I'm seeing and they have an onset of autism spectrum symptoms, I'm always gonna...

pull back and try to see what infectious issues, what are the big four, are there, is there mold present? And then of course frequent illnesses and colds, emphasis on the colds because you're gonna see a lot of respiratory issue there. So anytime we're seeing recurrent respiratory, even if it's something that's like diagnosable. When I lived in mold many years ago, I had whooping cough multiple times in the same year despite being vaccinated against it as a child and later as an adult when I had some international travel.

So it's something that can really limit that respiratory system and we'll often see that recurrent respiratory cough, etc. Clearing of the throat, any of those kind of things. Now, you'll also see fungal overgrowth typically in someone who has mold exposure because remember mold has antibiotic properties like penicillin, right? Penicillin is derived from mold. If you are living in mold, that is essentially creating an antimicrobial environment in the body. So it's like you're breathing in antibiotic all day long every day. Now that throws off

the gut microbiome and can create a lot of odd GI symptoms. And fungus loves family, I always love to say. So if you have mold in your home, or you're exposed, fungus loves family. Inside of our gut, we have good fungus. Saccharomyces boulardii is one of the most common that we talk about that is a yeast that comes in and helps with fungal issues. You've got Candida in the body. You have lots of different strains. And when they are appropriate, they're fine. We need yeast.

help break down things in the body. When we have mold in the environment that fungus loves family and you enable the internal fungus to overgrow. Other signs we might see are muscle weakness, dizziness is pretty common, anxiety, depression, brain fog, the brain will be pretty inflamed from breathing in and exposed to that all the time so you'll see a lot of psych issues. They're just kind of chronic hanging, they don't get better. Sometimes they get better if you go on vacation though. Headaches are common, GI issues and chest tightness.

feeling like you can't breathe, the bronchials will respond to being exposed to mold ongoing. So you'll have a lot of issue there. Numbness and tingling is another big flag for me. Numbness especially, tingling sometimes we see with Lyme and Bugborne infections, but numbness we tend to see more with mold exposure. Sensitivity to light is big. We can see that across a host of issues though and infections. A metallic taste in the mouth is another one. Metallic taste in the mouth is one that I tend to see more when we just have toxicity and

So a person may be, I've had a farmer who farms and sprays glyphosate and is exposed to a lot of chemical load, have the metallic taste, not necessarily have the fungal exposure. I've had people who have lime before who have the metallic taste or they'll eat I think about when I had lime. And I was eating some cherries and first five cherries were great. I enjoyed them so much. Cherry number six tastes like mold, tastes like metal, tastes like so disgusting I had to spit it out. Of course I'm gonna look at it see like is

there's something wrong here with the cherry, noop. There's something wrong here with the sensory of the body and sometimes we can get taste sensations that are really weird. Other symptoms from mold exposure, excessive thirst, night sweats, frequent urination or big flags, especially in our kiddos, which is hard, right? Because a lot of times kids will wet the bed for a long time and we excuse that because they're gonna grow out of it, or dad always did, but a lot of times that's not normal. Appetite swings, weight gain, temperature,

Dysregulation the body will store toxicity that it can't process and handle in our fat tissue So anytime someone says to me I've gained a lot of weight really quickly. That's a flag for me Mold also attacks your mitochondria Those are your little energy powerhouses inside your cells and mold tries to decompose the host It's nature's decomposer, right? Like what happens when you cut a tree down all these little mushrooms pop up around that areas They decompose with the stump in the root area. That's normal, but that does mean that we're

exposed to mold, we're gonna have a shutting down of energy, detox processes, immune function, anything that helps your body thrive is not gonna be going well. So, let's talk about feeding and maybe behavioral challenges kind of indicators. Mold and mycotoxins, so mold and the gas that it emits, the mycotoxins, they disrupt the immune system. my bad. They disrupt the nervous system, including your vagus nerve, which is gonna run down.

this out your neck from your spinal cord. And it goes to lots of organs. You've got organs above your diaphragm, organs below your diaphragm, but it handles a lot of those processes that we have nothing to do with, right? I don't do anything to make my heartbeat. I don't do anything to make my lungs contract. I do nothing to make my GI tract move. When the vagus nerve is impacted by mold and mycotoxins, it can slow stomach emptying. So you're going to see nausea, reflux, vomiting. You can see just a lot of GI issues, bloat, SIBO that's recurrent that we can't get rid of.

A lot of times mold is part of the issue there. Mold can also activate mast cells in the gut. So dumping histamine, you've got this major hypersensitivity. You can have kids, often sometimes adults, who are going to be gagging or vomiting. Especially like if there's an acute major mold exposure, you're going to see like a gag, a cough, a vomit, a lot of upper GI heartburn type situation. Behavior. These mast cells that can be triggered

by the mold exposure. When they dump, they're basically like cells, they're gonna let confetti out histamine into the body. Histamine can make someone look like they're super high. Like, wow, like I just had five shots of espresso, but I didn't. You'll have trouble sleeping. You're gonna be in sympathetic overdrive or just always in fight, flight, freeze? Just go, go, go. We see it so much in kids that it's always a flag for me. Like, why is this kid forever, ever, ever in sympathetic dominance? Well,

Exposure is creating the mast cell proliferation, which then dump histamine and you have this great stimulation in the brain. They can't calm down. Kids may also refuse food. They may feel really, really hungry in cycles where you're like, wow, they're eating so much. And then days and days of not eating so much and feeling really yucky, feeling really yucky in the morning in our belly is another sign. You might also see sensory issues. Sound sensitivity is huge. Balance challenges are huge. Balance challenges are actually one way that we challenge the detoxification system.

Sometimes I'll meet with somebody and early on we do a lot of biofeedback stuff and I will have them stand up on a call and stand on one foot and close their eyes and then do the other and you can see balance really be challenged and be poor when you have toxicity issues. Clumsiness is regular, pure as well when it comes to the sensory issues. Now, you'll also see trouble with motor planning, touch sensitivity, visual tracking. So a lot of times all of those sensory areas

are dealing with inflammation and then you're gonna deal with symptoms of the inflammation from the mold.

You're also gonna see somebody who usually startles a lot of fear around ordinary noises. And it's worse too, we can have psych symptoms where it's not just depression and anxiety, but there's like a real ho-hum concern about death and dying and I need to my will together. I see this a lot in Lyme too, but it really is like anytime the body is at such a toxic place, inherently we can kind of dwell on those end of life things. It's bizarre, but we see it over and over again.

Another issue we see when there's mold present is a lot of tactile issues. This is something we see in our Pans Pandas kids. But remember, we see a lot of mold crossover with our Pans Pandas kids and their infection load. Because mold has weakened the immune system and is an immune trigger or lower and then it makes the immune system very weak at policing the normal pathogen load that the body's exposed to. So in this, you see tactile issues like very picky about clothing, very picky about textures, textures of what I'm wearing.

What I'm touching what I want to eat things like that. So remember mold can also alter your brain chemistry leading to food refusal reflux We see ticks a lot of times with mold spasms and we've also seen clients who have seizure like events gone for a whole Workup and they're not necessarily having seizures, but they are having issues. So

What can you do about this? Well, first, if any of this is resonating with you, know that it's, it is overwhelming and it can also be overcome. So you're not imagining it. That is huge. It is weird because you can't always see mold. A lot of times it's behind walls, under floors, in damp areas, but mold is a very real, very challenging health trigger. The key in the process of working through it, which we are going to work through this over the next couple of podcast episodes, is really identifying the exposure.

we have to figure out where it is and it's oftentimes not just one place, right? So maybe we have some in our home, but maybe there's some at church where our kids go to the nursery in the basement. Maybe there is some in our school building. Maybe there's some at work. Maybe our car had a water damage issue and that's a place we need to address. But we want to identify our exposure sites and when you work with us, we really help you work through that. We're going to ask a lot of questions. We're going to help whittle down places and spaces where mold and

or damage can be. And then you want to reduce, right? We want to reduce as much exposure. So can we pull a kid from school? Probably not. Can we equip a school's room environment with an air filtration system? Can we help the child nasal rinse when they get home? Can we give them lots of outdoor time, fresh air, lots of sweating? There are so many things that you can do to identify exposures and then reduce mold exposures whenever possible. And then you do need to seek guidance from someone who understands

both mold and other biotoxins like Lyme because like I said mold is a triggering event to the immune system. When we are dealing with mold we're often dealing with a very dysregulated immune system and there are going to be other infections that come through in that time and are part of the total symptom load. This is why in my opinion sometimes people remediate, have wonderful remediations, testing is clear afterwards, but when they move back in they're still sick and they remain sick. Is it the mold itself

that point, maybe the mold wasn't detoxified well with a practitioner who knows how to do that. Maybe the body wasn't tested after was detoxified well. But more often than not, what we see is mold is an immune trigger. And that means that the immune system is going to struggle to keep other infections dormant that it previously did while you're exposed to mold. I love to use the example of shingles because that is the herpes varicella zostera virus. So when we are little kids, we often get chicken

We right? We have chicken pox. And we have them for a week or so. They go away. We don't ever have chicken pox again. That's ideal and most typical. But then, when we're older and we have a stressful season, maybe we have a loss, we lose our spouse, we have a lot of grief and stress and exhaustion, something like that, or another big sickness, then we have a little shingles episode. And that shingles episode is actually the same herpes vera cell zoster virus that we had as a child, that the immune system that was strong and healthy

kept dormant until the immune system had a triggering event of that grief, exhaustion, a major sickness, a mold exposure. So anytime we see somebody who has recurring issues like recurrent shingles, we're going to check for and work through our process to identify is mold part of a limiting factor here. Anytime somebody has recurrent SIBO, small intestine bacterial overgrowth, we're going to check and see is mold a factor here because fungus loves family, right? It's going to encourage more internal fungal growth.

We don't want that. It's also going to encourage a really dysbiotic or imbalanced gut environment to where the body can't really ever overcome that SIBO in any kind of permanent way because you have mold limiting the whole equation. So know that healing is absolutely possible. You want to identify exposures or reduce it where it's possible. And we're going to go through this in the next couple episodes. And then you want to work with somebody who understands both mold and other biotoxins and infections in the immune system. Know that healing is possible.

that you're going to get to the root cause.

Thank you for spending time with me today. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend who might be struggling. We're gonna go through a lot of mold information. We're gonna talk with a mold inspector soon. There's so much out there about testing and which inspections are good and which ones are bad and how do we remediate and how do we know which testing to do to figure out if we need to invest in an inspection. We're gonna go through all that. I think that mold can be so stressful and it doesn't need to be. You're already experiencing stress.

So my goal is to help us find more resource, whittle it down, make it useful for you to care for and protect and grow health in your family. So as always, you can find more resources at heyheymay.com. But until next time, hey, you're gonna be okay.