ALS: To The Moon and Back — Episode 18

This week’s episode is a big one. We’re joined by Heather Plude for a deep dive into mould, mycotoxins, chronic illness, stress, nervous system responses and the absolutely wild rabbit holes people end up travelling when they’re trying to work out why they’re sick. 

Heather shares the extraordinary story of her son becoming critically ill as a child, the discovery of toxic mould in their home, and how that experience completely changed the direction of her life. We talk about the practical side of mould testing, why some people seem more affected than others, the difference between mould and mycotoxins, and why “just spray some bleach on it” may not be the brilliant plan we once thought it was. 

There’s also plenty of classic Portia moments, including discHussions about shouting on trains, grey Sydney weather, mouldy apartments, silk doonas apparently made from “the bottoms of caterpillars,” and the ongoing reality that if you live on the east coast of Australia right now… honestly… you probably have mould somewhere. 

As always, this podcast is about curiosity, conversation and exploring ideas around health, healing and recovery. We’re not pretending to have all the answers — but we are asking a lot of questions. And occasionally laughing while doing it, because otherwise you’d cry into your dehumidifier.

Resources:

HERTSMI

Heather's A Good Health Advocate

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Welcome to ALS to the Men and Back. I'm Lisa Wright, and my dear friend Portia Turbo joins me each week, and we're trying to do one each week. We'll see how we go. We try and be honest, very ridiculous on a regular basis, and it's a conversation about living with ALS. But we also end up talking about travel, art, perfume. We also talk about ALS again, the treatments, the timelines, the science, the humour that keeps us sane. We talk about what's hard, what helps, and how to keep living fully in the middle of it all. So if you're joining it, please subscribe, share, and leave us a review. If you really hate it, that's okay. Just pretend you never heard of us. Thank you. Here we go.

SPEAKER_03 1:02

Hello.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Hello, how are you?

SPEAKER_03 1:05

I am a visual and humanity humanitarian delight. So hey, we have an extra today, Lisa. I'm so excited about this. And I'm going to introduce her. Her name is Heather Plude. Yes? Did I say that right?

SPEAKER_00 1:23

You absolutely did, Portia. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_03 1:26

Great. Now, Heather, can you please introduce yourself and tell us why you are here joining us today?

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Absolutely. So my name's Heather Plude. And about 17 years ago, my son got very sick. Um, he wound up having seizures, uh, losing a third of his body weight, not being able to walk. He was 10 years old, and they told me he had MS and that he would continue to get worse, and I should just settle in for that. And I decided instead I would start going to the library and reading everything I could on health. And um, I was an auto mechanic, but now I have turned into somewhat of an expert on health. He is well, he uh now he's 27 years old, just got married, they're having a baby in September. Uh, and you know, he graduated engineering and he he walks, he runs, he does everything uh normally. So uh I kind of as I was praying through that situation that lasted a couple of years, I told God, if you help me get him well, I'll spend the rest of my life helping other people get well. So we found many things that have helped that situation, and then over the next 15 years, I've just helped other people with it. So it's been fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 2:46

Wow, yeah, wow, that is extraordinary. So then you need to tell us what it was that caused this problem, please.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Okay, yeah. So um, at first we found out he had Lyme disease. We tried to treat that, he got so much worse with that treatment. Um, now the treatment that we went for, there's many different ways to treat Lyme. Uh, we went with uh they call it Iliad, I think is the name of the Lyme disease group, and they treat with antibiotics. And when he only got worse on the oral antibiotics, they did a pick lime to his heart and they were giving him IV and antibiotics.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

So at that point, he got so much worse that I said that that's it, we're done, we're gonna go all natural, no more pharmaceuticals. No, and we tested him for heavy metals, he was very high in heavy metals. Um, we tested for parasites that came back negative, but it I don't know if you know, but like every parasite test, at least in the United States, are horrible. So um, and then we we found uh toxic mold in our house. That was the next I the thing that made me keep looking at the environment. Now I tested the water and our we did get a whole house water filter. Um but the dog started having the same symptoms my son was having, started having seizures and wasn't able to walk. And I said, There's something in the environment, it has to be the air. So we tested for radon, and then the next thing we did was test for mold. And we came back when the the lab told us it was the highest test they'd ever seen. Um we left the house.

SPEAKER_03 4:29

We left the house two uh two days later and took how does that mold come into a house, Hitler?

SPEAKER_00 4:36

So in our house, um, they had replaced an outside window um and put a tub in, and they had made it look like siding on the outside, but instead of regular siding, they used press board, which is a type of I don't know if you it would be called the same thing, but it's not plywood, it's like pressed wood all together glued together. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they used that on the outside of the house, so it just acted like a sponge and brought the water into the wall and uh over you know, probably it was like that for 12 years. So our walls were just completely full of gross mold. Wow. We ripped ripped that house down to studs and took every bit of porous material out because we were told that was the only way to do it. Spent over $40,000 on remediation. So that's about $65 here. Push up. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

And that was with my husband doing all the work himself. That was just materials because we took out all the insulation, all the sheetrock, um, took it down to the studs, then cleaned everything, then did an encapsulation of the basement, threw everything we owned out, which was three dumpsters full of stuff. We were told that was the only way to do it. And as sick as my son was, we weren't going back without doing everything exactly right. So we didn't move back into the house that way, and then two years later, we uh he got sick again, wound up uh he passed out, and uh we so we did another test for mold and it was high again. Nothing happened, you know. So now we use um an air purifier called the high tech, been using that for the last 15 years, and it's really been incredible.

SPEAKER_03 6:28

How does uh how does an air purifier help?

SPEAKER_00 6:34

So air filters just filter mold and then they blow mold around. We tried probably a dozen different air filters before I really started talking to labs, and I'm like, why is it that I can get the like the best HEPA filter out there? And I'm I'm I still feel sick. I actually feel worse when it's on. And they told they're the ones that told me that catching mic trying to catch mycotoxins with a filter is like trying to catch a baseball with a basketball hoop, they just go right through, so it'll catch the mold because the mold is big, but the toxins that really make us sick get blown around and um they don't it doesn't do anything for that. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 7:21

So the not a good news story.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Well, the high tech yeah, yeah. The high tech is the air purifier we use, and it just breaks the mold down at the molecular level. Wow. So you never you you don't have mold, you don't have mycotype, it breaks down bacteria, viruses, anything, it just breaks it down into an innoculous, harmless atoms. Is that part of the blue light within the unit that does that? So it's the UV, there's a UVC bulb in there, but there's uh something on the reactor pads that it reacts with. So the process is kind of like how the sun cleans the air outside, but he's recreated that so we can do it inside. Amazing.

SPEAKER_03 8:08

Wow, so it's like soap for virus.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, except and it's yeah, it's it, I guess that's a good way to put it soap for viruses. Yeah, virus bacteria mold.

SPEAKER_02 8:21

It's interesting too, because you know, for years, I like when you walk into this house, it doesn't smell moldy at all. And I'd go to the optometrist and I would say to her, My eyes are always really red. And she said, Um, in the Southern Highlands, I have a theory um that the pine trees, we have a lot of big wind breaks that are pines, and she was saying it was pollen, but it wasn't. I think it was mold, and um and I went and saw a respiratory specialist, the back of my nose, he said, was about 80% occluded, and he said I had non-allergic rhinitis and just wanted me to use nasal sprays. So I've had inflammation in the back of my nose, and nobody could tell me what it was, but he never tested for molds.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Did you know that in 1999, so 27 years ago, the Mayo Clinic, which is you know famous here in the United States, they did a study, and 96% of the people they studied, and I don't remember the number of people in that study, but it was quite a few, they were studying sinus infections, and they said that 96% were mold related. Wow. And doctors still give antibiotics for sinus infections. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I mean, what the and what the antibiotic because some people will feel better with antibiotics. So what you have in your nose might be bacteria and mold, but it shrinks the bacteria, and then the mold is still there and it grows back even more. I think the reason we have problem more problems now than we used to is because we have so much EMF in the air, and EMF makes mold grow faster. What's EMF? Electromagnetic frequencies, so like our cell phones and our Wi-Fi and all of that.

SPEAKER_02 10:22

And you the weirdest thing is that we were turning everything on to flight mode, but when we did the building biology report, we have an air filter, we have a dehumidifier in the room, uh, and she came in and she said they're all sending out Wi-Fi. All these appliances now have Wi-Fi built in, so you can operate them through your phone. And our room was like the the numbers in our bedroom were huge.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Just yeah, it just all bounces around, right? It just bounces around. Yeah, I have a friend that just came got a brain tumor. Um, and we were talking to someone said, sorry, how do you think people get brain tumors? I'm like, the phone up to the head all the time. I mean, he was a New York businessman, I'm sure he had that phone up to his head.

SPEAKER_03 11:18

Look, I will tell you though, I prefer brain cancer than to be sitting on a train doing this and shouting at the top of my voice and having it come through loud like they do, because that makes me want to stab people. So I have a question. Why are some people more affected by this than others? Because we all live in the same world, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:47

Yeah, that's a great question. So there's a genetic test called uh the H L A D R test. Um, and it it shows that 24% of people are susceptible to mold. So the other 76% won't get sick. So you can be in a house with four people and you're the only one sick, and everybody's gonna say it's not the house. Yeah, right. Because I'm not sick. Yeah. Well, that's not the way it works.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

He he thought I was being a bit neurotic because I would come well historically. Thank you, Fashion. Um, I I came home from babysitting my granddaughter. I'd walk in, get into bed in the bedroom we have moved out of, and I would say, This room's making me sick.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

And I thought it was the wood fireplace. I'm still not convinced it wasn't. Like we're very careful about running that, but um, then we wipe down the inside of the windows and it was black. Yeah, but it's aspergillus um molds in this house, and interestingly enough, they're not molds that are very well represented outside. The ambient air around Sydney is 550 mold spores. We have 1100 just in the ambient air up here, always the overachiever.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

I know the aspergellous molds they produce neurological toxins, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

Ah, okay. Um I see Carrie Fagard at UNutrition, like Kirsty, you know, their their company, and she said, I made the comment that melatonin, and I've said this in other episodes, but melatonin was giving me a huge headache. And she said that gave her some ideas about where the energy cycle, like in the Krebs cycle, things might be falling down. And she said, Why don't you get an organic acids test? Because it could help them, you know, have a look. And anyway, there was a box where I could tick the mycotoxin panel, and I just thought, oh well, may as well. I have no idea. Right. We we'd clean this room out because we are um doing the 47 steps. We had we've got whole house filtration, we've got a remineralizing um water filter that's absolutely amazing. We um have been trying to limit EMFs, and we had cleaned the room for what we thought was cleaning it for mold. And yeah, blowing up you're doing a lot of great stuff there. Yeah, thank you. And and thank you. I've watched your mold um webinar twice. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:54

So so Lisa has talked about you long before saying that you were coming on.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Yeah, yeah, well, great.

SPEAKER_03 15:03

Aspirational amounts of work that you're doing. So yeah, as a volunteer.

unknown 15:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:10

Why do some people become no, that's not the question I'm asking. Uh how much stress, how much does stress and overall health affect a human's response to this mold?

SPEAKER_00 15:28

Huge. Oh, it's huge. Stress on health is 100% the biggest thing. I think it's more than any toxin out there. Stress and our mind are the biggest things for more. And I'm gonna give an example of people. So I was terrified to go on a boat and I just went on a cruise. But my whole life I had said, I can't go on a cruise because I'll get stuck on the boat. I won't come off. That was how I felt about it. And I just figured I'm gonna suck it up and I'm gonna go. So I went on this cruise and I got off, and the next day I was still feeling like I was on the cruise, and people told me that's normal. Like, because I but so I felt like I was still rocking that away for two weeks. So I had like, and it was getting worse. It was vertigo bad. I would be walking the dogs and looking forward, and I had to look at the ground because I was getting sick to my stomach, like motion sickness, just walking. Wow. I tried all kinds of things, and I'm I'm very into holistic health. I don't even I don't take anything pharmaceutical. So I tried ear candling and frequencies and acupuncture, and I finally said, I think I need to go get a hypnotist. So I found a hypnotist, and I don't have vertigo. Not only that, but some pain that I had on this side of my face that's been following me around for 30 years is so much better. So we just went into like some past experiences and cleared a bunch of those, and then she asked my higher self what we could do about some of the things, and at the end, I mean it was a five-hour session, but at the end of it, boy, am I feeling better.

SPEAKER_02 17:16

That's what you did on Friday because I went five hours of hypnotherapy. That's epic. Yeah, yeah, huge.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Yeah, well, so two hours of it was the interview process before we started, and then there were three hours of three, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

So I was in a huge car accident in 2011, and it disrupted my equilibrium in my right ear, and then two years later, I was running an animal welfare charity in Sydney and working really hard, long hours, and then I had this day where I went to get up and I just went straight back into vertigo, and it was happening more and more frequently. It got to the point I wasn't even prepared to walk down to the corner shop because I thought if I fall over, I won't be able to get home. And I was really lucky. I found Philip Kremer at the MARA, he's an equilibrium specialist, and he said, I think you have psychogenic dizziness disorder. So when your body goes through that stress response again, it goes, Oh, I know what this is, it's vertigo coming back, and it was recreating it. And in those months that I'd had vertigo, I'd set up a neural pathway, which is kind of like what you're describing, Heather. And he said, the way to deal with this is to disrupt it, and he just got me picking a word every time it happened, recreate what I was doing and spell it backwards. And it sounds so ridiculously simple, but three weeks and I was fine, but it came back when I went on a cruise, it really did because I think that subtle rocking, your brain's like, okay, here we go, here we go. Yeah, wow, amazing.

SPEAKER_03 19:09

So diverging, what are the biggest mistakes people make when they're trying to clean mold?

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Uh, first air testing is pretty um, it's like a snapshot in time. So I've had people do air testing and tell me I don't have any mold, and then they end it right there. But if you get a negative air test, I would go on to do a dust test or some kind of uh uh some kind of other test besides the air testing. I um I read a book about um just after Katrina, um, the hurricane we had here that hit New Orleans really bad. Someone down there got sick, and uh, trying to remember the name of her books. The the author is her last name is Billings, but um, she wrote a book about their experience down in New Orleans, they got very sick from mold, yeah, and they had found a house you could see the black mold on the walls and the ceiling, and they did an air test in there and it came back negative.

SPEAKER_03 20:09

Oh, goodness gracious!

SPEAKER_00 20:11

It is it is easy to get a negative air test. So that's one of the biggest mistakes I see out there. Now, when it comes to cleaning it, bleach that's the biggest mistake because it feeds it. People don't know it, they think, oh, it disappeared. Well, bleach makes things white, but it feeds the roots and it comes back stronger. Not only shut up, but when you put bleach on mold, it makes the mycotoxins a different kind of mycotoxin that goes into the brain, it crosses the blood-brain barrier, and it really causes problems. So, those are probably the two biggest mistakes.

SPEAKER_03 20:50

So, what should we use?

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Um when it comes to cleaning mold, I just like to use a plant-based cleaner that there's one called um Benefact. I don't know if it's available in Australia, but it it's Benefact Decon30. And I buy it by the gallon and then just put it in spray bottle bottles. It's plant-based, it's non-toxic, and um it's it'll it is effective on mold. I wouldn't say without the high tech, I don't know how effective it would be, you know, but for cleaning, that's all I use now.

SPEAKER_03 21:30

So after we finish today, could you please send Lisa a list of your uh purifier, your air purifier?

SPEAKER_02 21:40

This I've got one, Pasha. I've just bought one.

SPEAKER_03 21:43

Fantastic, but but Heather has the top of the line, and I think that we should be No, she bought it for me.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

I know of the works.

SPEAKER_03 21:56

Fantastic, so great. Lisa, you've got that, and and this. Cleaner. Um so my question because I have uh a property that does have mold on the roof because it has water, um it's a problem, and I've been getting them to spray it with white vinegar, then vacuum it off, and then spray it with clove water.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

Okay. Vinegar, I used to use vinegar before I found Benefact Decon 30. I used to use vinegar. It's a very good plant-based cleaner, and it is pretty effective. Um are you fixing the leak? Are you fixing the roof?

SPEAKER_03 22:37

Okay, so it's an apartment, and uh it the water is actually coming, not actually coming from our apartment, it's next door's apartment. The roof of that apartment is a uh so the roof of that apartment is uh alumni. Yep, and it has flawed waterproofing that we have fixed and paid, like the whole place has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to have this fixed again and again and again, and it is never fixed properly.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

But we're on the body corporate pusher has paid to fix it.

SPEAKER_03 23:23

Yeah, yeah. The body corporate. We've we've had like huge amounts of work done. Uh, we're only holding on to this property because it's about to be re-uh zoned. I know you don't care about this, it's about to be rezoned, so we're gonna sell the whole property and it's gonna be all knocked down and they're gonna build a high rise there.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

But um yeah, is someone living there?

SPEAKER_03 23:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're healthy. Yeah, we have students in there, and we say every time you see a little bit of mold, this is what you need to do, which they do, which is what they do. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

I would put a high tech in there.

SPEAKER_03 23:58

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

So yeah, it'll I mean it'll help your property, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:04

That's really important.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

Yeah, um, I I was talking to friends on Friday, Anthea and Raina, Mark, were here. Um, push and you're not Mark. And anyway, um, they've got mold at their place. If you live on the east coast of Australia at this time, you have mold.

SPEAKER_03 24:25

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 24:26

Like you just you just can't avoid it. And we went out to Uluru, and while we're out there, I said to Mark, I said, I actually feel a bit better because the humidity is like 25% is the desert, and we got home and I was like, oh, and the the funny thing was at that point I didn't have the Mycotox panel back. And I to be honest, I thought this is probably throwing my money away, we've cleaned the room, but my awareness has increased a lot. Like we've bought um like dust mic covers and for our pillows and for the bed, yeah. Yeah, yeah, we're getting rid of it. We've got a silk duna. Apparently, a silk duna is um less likely to suck up mold, and um truly, apparently so.

SPEAKER_03 25:20

Yeah, from the bottoms of caterpillars, yay!

SPEAKER_02 25:23

Yeah, exactly. Um but we have timber beams in this house, like exposed beams, they had really, really high counts. And she said, other than like there's a product she's recommended because it actually encapsulates the spore as well. And she said, so it sort of kills it off. But she said, the only thing you could do is sand it. And I'm going, I don't want to sand that and have it go out into the air and have like we're living in I live in this room with a paired-down wardrobe because I've got jumpers I've had for 30 years, and they've all gone to you know, the go they've gone to the skip in really because I wouldn't have anybody put them on. My next door neighbor and I had a conversation. I have a next door neighbor that does tapping heather, and I catch up with him a fair bit, and I went into his house and I said, Have you ever thought about mold? And he said, The minute he moved here, he was getting a snuffly nose, and he's an asthmatic. So I just think when you live in this environment, you've got to have a strategy for mold. And yeah, and age of house doesn't matter. Like, you know, we we live you can have a brand new house with mold. That's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

I think people think, oh, it's a new house, it'll be fine. Or you can live in like I I've had people say, Oh, I live in the desert, there's no way I have mold. I'm like, you should test because I found plenty of people in the desert with mold. Wow, so it does not matter. You just I mean, if you have a leak in a in a I'll give you an example. Um, someone that had a leak in her bathroom, um, and it she was living in a condo, so the it wasn't her bathroom that was leaking, it was the condo above her, and it was leaking into her bathroom. Couldn't see anything in her bathroom at all, but she did a mold test and it came back high. And then she got a um an infrared camera and started looking for where it could be and saw that the the ceiling above her shower was coming back as a as a different as a cooler color, uh, which means it was wet and and that yeah, it was just different than everything else. So they they cut out one piece of sheetrock above the shower and it was black on the other side, just black. Yeah. So I'm assuming that could be the shower base directly above the shell below. Right. They had to have the the condo association had to get in touch with the people above her, and they had to fix their shower, which had a leak. So she and then she could fix hers. But the best thing to do in that situation, and I coached her through this, is leave that piece of ceiling open so that the high tech can get the air can get in there and start cleaning that, and then anywhere that you see mold, cut it, cut it out and two feet beyond that because it could have grown that far.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

And then you replace and you know, to top all this off, we repainted the tile roof here, and one of the workers cracked a tile, and we didn't realize, but like we can get we can get 200 mils of rain here in a day, and so what's that? 33, that's like 60. Anyway, I can't work it out in inches, but it's a lot, and um and 10 inches, nearly 10 inches, is yeah, massive, massive amount of rain, and so we we had water literally running down the inside of the wall here, no, and we fixed it and then it came back. I thought we'd fixed it. This went on and off for two years before I got sick. Oh, wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 29:23

Yeah, so I have a question now. Why is mold so difficult to diagnose in humans? So, what is the difficulty?

SPEAKER_00 29:34

A lot of times doctors will take a blood test, and those are useless, right? You do a blood test for mold, it can show an allergy, but allergies don't matter when it comes to mold. The mold isn't the mold can cause allergies, and you can get the snipples, that's you know, that's for sure. But it's the mycotoxins that get into the body and cause neurological problems and cause, I mean, the mycotoxins from stocky batris mold are used in yellow rain and or agent orange, so those are two bioweapons, and it's written about in the United States Department of Defense chapter on bioweapons. They take the the mycotoxins from mold and they use them to kill people, so they're in our homes, they're killing us.

SPEAKER_02 30:26

MLA, yeah, one of the ones that we had was um they use it to suppress people's immune systems when they've had an organ transplant.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

What's it doing to you?

SPEAKER_02 30:39

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:42

So practical first steps. If you suspect you have mold in your home, first steps there's the Hertz Me test.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

It's H-E-R-T-S-M-I, and that is through a lab in New Jersey in the United States. Anyone in the in the whole world can do the lab, you don't have to ask them for a kit, they won't send one out of the United States. You can just go pick up if a Swiffer cloth or a piece of sterile gauze and go around your house and dust eight to ten different places. Put it in a Ziploc bag, print out the chain of custody from the Mycometrics website, and then you're gonna send that to the lab and they will email you the results. So so easy. Yeah, it's you don't have to hire a mold inspector, you just do the test yourself.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

That's my favorite and sixty dollars.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:40

Yeah, that's very reasonable to find out that your house is killing you.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And only tests for the five most toxic molds to humans. Okay, so it you know, you don't have to, it's there's another test that's 36 molds. It's the same type of test. When someone does that test, I pull out the five molds that are toxic to humans. So you're no reason to spend the X, it's uh it that one's I think $285. Why spend the extra $140 if you can just do the hundred and I think it's $150 for them? Um that hurts me.

SPEAKER_02 32:18

Um, Heather, my question is is if you're in the like, are some molds more difficult to eradicate than others? Are some just hanging on for dear life?

SPEAKER_00 32:32

And you know, well, I used to think so before I started using high-tech. Stochybatris was known as the most toxic molds to human, and you just can't, there's no way to get rid of it. Those were the stories I heard with the high tech. I've seen stochibatris go down so quickly. Aspergillus also goes down, but sometimes a little bit more slowly. Yeah, now with high tech, if it's on the other side of the wall, sometimes you'll keep getting tests back that are high. So you have to if there's hidden mold, you still have to remove and replace things that have this one.

SPEAKER_02 33:14

We've we've taken the wardrobe doors off in the bedroom, and on the outer wall is probably the most shady wet spot, and we've had the conversation. We replaced a couple of fiber boards there a few years ago, and I like a visual check, it looked okay, that just given how damp it is up here. Like it's beautiful, it's it's green and lush all the time, but uh but yeah, just where exactly are you in Australia? So I'm about 115 kilometers south of Sydney. Have you been here before?

SPEAKER_00 33:52

No, okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

So we have Sydney and then you go Wollongong down the coast. We have an escarpment here, so we're about just on 800 meters above sea level, right on the coast. So the weather comes in off the ocean and just condensates. Robertson, like everybody jokes, it's always foggy, it's quite damp. My GP who retired a few years ago, he would say that the biggest prescription he would make was vitamin D. Because we we just in Australia. In Australia, because it's so foggy, like you can see behind me, like the there's mist on the windows because the shower was on, but I've got the dehumidifier going. But it's gray skies here today. Is it sunny in Sydney Push?

SPEAKER_03 34:44

It is not, it it's actually been delightfully gray for the last few days.

SPEAKER_02 34:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

Why is that delightful?

SPEAKER_02 34:52

Because we don't get winter like you do, we don't. We don't know.

SPEAKER_03 34:57

It's it's just beautiful to walk the dogs through uh a cloudy day, uh, it's a little bit cooler, um, everything is green, everything looks so clean. I quite like a gray day.

SPEAKER_02 35:10

Our summers here go for like five months.

SPEAKER_03 35:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:14

Yeah. So by the end of it, you're excited about a gray day. But but but here, like the weather around Sydney too is that you'll have a couple of days where it's really hot, then you'll get a thunderstorm.

SPEAKER_03 35:30

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

It gets really humid.

unknown 35:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:32

Heaven.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Yeah, mold heaven, mold heaven.

SPEAKER_03 35:35

Well, sure, mold heaven. So I know that we're probably adding to this, but how do people avoid becoming overwhelmed by the fear of mold online?

SPEAKER_00 35:48

I feel that one. Yeah. Okay, so I used to live there in fear of mold because I tried to do it the there's a whole group, they call it mold avoidance. There's no way to avoid mold because it's everywhere. And I tried it for two years, and it is the hardest thing to do. I used to use an ozone blaster and then clean and then vacuum and then do it all over again, and I would be doing that to a different room every week or every few days, and uh, it was very difficult. Uh, and everything that you bring in, if you bring anything in from the post office, you know, mail, it they say in the United States, 50% of um commercial buildings are probably moldy. So, what do you think 50% of your mail is? It's probably coming from that moldy building, and you're bringing that mold in the house. So I would actually put all of my mail in a Ziploc bag, and I would look at it only on the porch. I wouldn't bring my mail in the house. That's how careful I was, and I had small children. I used to make them leave their book bags out on the porch. And it it it was really hard. And then we still got moldy two years later. This is before we found the high tech. So that with as careful as I was, um we we still got it again. So how to avoid that fear is yeah, uh, get a high tech because it is it has made my life so easy, you know. I I just don't worry about it anymore. And my son is buying a house, he's super sensitive to mold. That genetic test I was talking about earlier, he is the worst of the worst genes. They told me there's no way he will ever get well because he's the worst of the worst. Anyone can get well from this. Okay, it's just a matter of um you know getting rid of it, you're not breathing it in every day. So get the high tech and make sure you don't have any leaks, and then take care of your sinuses, take care of your gut. Um, you know, eat clean. If you eat clean for nine weeks, clean out the sinuses and clean out the gut, you're gonna not have a mold problem in your body anymore. So, but if you cheat once, that adds a week. So if you cheat once a week, you'll never finish.

SPEAKER_03 38:11

So eat clean doesn't explain it to me. What is it clean?

SPEAKER_00 38:18

So clean is no white starches because they're one step away from sugar, no sugars, uh, no fruits because they contain sugar. So you want to avoid anything that will ferment. Vinegar also ferments, so you want to avoid your mustards and your uh salad dressings. Um anything, any gut. Yeah, yeah, just for that nine-week period. If you can be very strict with it, you don't have to do it for the rest of your life, it's just uh you know, a cleanse.

SPEAKER_03 38:55

So, as a kid, I had to do a candida diet, which sounds like that.

SPEAKER_00 39:00

That is what it is now. Candida is just a mold that grows in the gut. Oh, and when you breathe in mold, it it becomes candida in the gut. Everywhere else, it's mycotoxins. There's there's also mold in the sinuses, but in the gut, it's called candida.

SPEAKER_02 39:18

Yeah, interesting. I went on that diet as a child as well.

SPEAKER_03 39:23

Did you? Did you? Well, yeah, I was told.

SPEAKER_02 39:27

I'm I was a shy rat. Yeah, so wow, okay, yeah. But I think that's where people who want to be on the North Shall go but can't afford it. I think maybe obviously cheeky. Um I think I think that like my genetics means I have a toxic cup that doesn't empty very fast.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

Right.

SPEAKER_02 39:52

My husband But it doesn't mean it doesn't empty, it just doesn't empty. And this is quick. Yeah, I should thank you, Heather, because I put a post up this day, Posha, going, this is what my mold results came back as. And she said, Well, now you've got the information. You don't need to be alarmed, you just need to get on with it.

SPEAKER_00 40:10

I was like, okay, all right, for you that actually celebrate, you know what you know one thing that is probably causing a lot of your problems. So wow, that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 40:22

A few months ago I said to Mark, I don't think we've found what's causing it. And I sat in on one of it's your Thursday night, so it's my Friday morning chats, and it was you and Patricia, and I just said, I've done everything like I'm I'm actually now eight months into a really clean diet, and I meditate, we've got the water filter into the house, we've got clean water for me to drink, and I just had this distended belly, and Patricia said, She goes, I think you probably haven't found something that's affecting you. And Mark and I were making this comment. I had like this Buddha belly that was really hard as a rock, and it was um, it was amazing because once we really started cleaning here, it's gone down dramatically. And I think I was watching one of the reversal videos, and um he was saying the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

Yeah, see once he cleaned out all the mold, his candida in the gut, and also a bacteria imbalance in the gut and in the small intestine. Uh when it gets into the small intestine, they call that SIBO, and that can cause really painful and hard gas. So that sounds like you may have an a bacterial uh imbalance also.

SPEAKER_02 41:47

Well, a lot of those symptoms have gone now as well, which is really good. And we've just done another um microbiome test. And but the first one I did back last October, I had uh, I think I had all four markers for um leaky gut.

SPEAKER_00 42:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:08

And yeah. What's leaky gut?

SPEAKER_00 42:11

It's when the go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 42:13

Do you do you want to explain it? Well, you might know more than me, Heather, but it's like your gut wall is like one cell thick, and things can damage that. And so byproducts of your digestion that shouldn't be going into your blood do, and so your body ends up having a reaction to that, and it can cause inflammation anywhere in the body, really.

SPEAKER_01 42:37

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

Yeah, so the gut wall is supposed to have tight junctions that are fit together tight, and they just they have space, they get spaces. So as you eat, the food actually leaks into your blood, and then your blood has to attack the food. So you think it it seems like you're allergic to certain foods, but it's just that your body is doing its job and that it your gut is actually leaking into the blood, and it and it causes a lot of problems. Yeah. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 43:07

And you think about something like ALS, what uh like what I've got, um, that neuron it's uh the hallmark is neuroinflammation. That's a lot of it.

SPEAKER_03 43:21

Yeah, so so hang on, is this a precursor to something like diverticulitis and Crohn's?

SPEAKER_00 43:29

Uh a little bit different, but you know, I think every disease is caused by our environment, our thinking, and you know, toxins, which are the environment, what we eat. Um, I don't know how bad your food is over in Australia, but I know in the in the United States they let in all kinds of toxins that they don't let in in any other country. It's like you shouldn't eat a lazed potato chip in this country, but you could eat it anywhere else because they use a different formula, they feed us some.

SPEAKER_03 44:02

We have some bad ones too.

SPEAKER_02 44:04

Yeah, we've got some bad ones as well. Interestingly enough, I think that we've got a couple that in the US have now been banned as well that we're still spraying. Even if you buy organic um sweet potato, for example, they're allowed to spray Roundup on that as a defoliant before half. Even if they call it an organic, and they're allowed to call it organic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:30

So the advertising laws here look strict, but there are idiots making them.

SPEAKER_02 44:39

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got to be really careful. Like I we literally, and I'm lucky in that um, you know, we've got a vegetable garden here. We grow all the leafy grains that I eat, you know. So um coming into winter, it's more kale and you know, perpetual spinach, some of the more hardier ones, but but yeah, I you buy something organic, I didn't even trust that. Yeah. Well, shame. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:08

Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

I have a cousin who is a food inspector here in the United States. He says, if you're buying organic vegetables and fruits, you're wasting your money because he he goes to the farms and they spray the farm and the organic vegetable, they just don't spray it directly. You think the wind isn't getting it to it? Yeah, spraying around it.

SPEAKER_03 45:29

Yeah, yeah, not good. So, Heather, we're about to wrap up today. This has been extraordinary, PS. What hopeful message would you like to give to listeners out there?

SPEAKER_00 45:45

Never listen to a doctor that tells you there's nothing you can do, there's always something you can do. And doctors are told to give pharmaceuticals and you know, you have this symptom, fix the symptom. That's not how it should be done. We need to look for the root cause of things and fix health from the bottom up. Yeah, you know, just just do the right things for the body. The thing the things if if it wasn't a food a hundred years ago, we shouldn't be eating it.

SPEAKER_03 46:17

So that's a really good bite. If it wasn't a food a hundred years ago, we shouldn't be eating it. Like, I'm not gonna live by that, but I love for anybody with an illness that that is such oh, that's such a great line.

SPEAKER_02 46:36

It's a beauty, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 46:37

Yeah, because you have changed the way you eat, haven't you, Lisa?

SPEAKER_02 46:41

Yeah, oh completely. You know, I had dinner with Porsche and Mark in Sydney last week, and we had dinner at the apartment so that I could eat, and it is that was probably about 80% organic that meal. And I have a smoothie I take on the road, so you know, I drink my two liters of purified water a day, and and I had I went to a trial with Ony Dog um yesterday.

SPEAKER_03 47:13

And I have a champion onidog.

SPEAKER_02 47:15

Yeah, he did well, didn't he? I have a Shetland sheepdog. I have a Shetland sheepdog that I spent huge amounts of money getting him in from Ukraine of all places, and um and anyway, he went to an obedience trial. So I use a wheelchair when I'm not in the house now, and um I have some really awesome friends. Jane handles him for me, and he got two titles. So yay! Oh wow, it was fantastic. Yeah, it was good fun, and you know, um it's interesting because I had so many people come up because a lot of those people haven't seen me since before I was diagnosed, and they often say to me, You look really well, you know, and I'm going, Well, yeah, I feel really well, it's just my arms and legs, and occasionally my tongue doesn't want to work, but in myself, I'm gonna give you a little story of someone with ALS that I started working with in 2022, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:13

And at that time, he was he was diagnosed in 2011, so he had had it for 11 years. Wow, he had spent seven years uh not being able to move at all. He was in a a bed. When I met him, he was already starting to improve some. He could use his arms again, but he couldn't use his legs at all, and we couldn't understand him at all. Wow. Um, but he was still swimming with his arms because he said when he got in the ocean, he felt like he could swim around. Yeah, so but he he was wasn't able to walk at all. He's now walking, he's driving a car again. Um speaking again, and when you said you were you saw friends that you hadn't seen again, I'll never forget the time he's he's been going to the same family reunion all of his life. They said they've been having it for 90 years for his family.

SPEAKER_01 49:04

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_00 49:05

So they saw him go all the way downhill, yeah. And now he got to walk in there and talk to everybody. He's like goosebumps.

SPEAKER_02 49:18

It makes your heart sink, doesn't it, when you hear that? And you know, um, I have to thank Healing ALS because you know, I go to appointments where they talk about as you progress, as you progress. And I know, and but you know, I have to say the neurology team I see now, they are saying things are moving fast, and they they they talk about we know it's environmental, we just don't know what yet. They're very optimistic, like they're still fairly conservative, but they're not all doom and gloom. And and and it's great, but you know, I had one day when I had to be at community health and they wanted to talk to me about bed sores for when I ultimately became bedridden. And um, I just got in the car and I think it was it's is it Stephen Cherry? Yeah in Houston. I love his story. Uh he would be a great guy to get on the podcast pusher, but he's he's just uh optimist and he has a beautiful view of the world, and I listened to his story. I pulled them up on YouTube and I just go home listening to that, and it does, yeah, shifts your mind straight away.

SPEAKER_03 50:33

So beautiful humans. Yeah, we have been talking for 50 minutes, yeah, and I have loved every moment of it, but we are going to wrap up now, Heather. The lovely Heather Plude, thank you for coming and joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 50:49

It's been really it was it was wonderful meeting you.

SPEAKER_03 50:54

Yeah, right back at you. And Lisa Rice, yeah, darling.

SPEAKER_02 50:57

Freaking love you, I love you too. I love you to the moon and back.

SPEAKER_03 51:01

To the moon and back. Thank you so much. It's been a really good podcast.

SPEAKER_02 51:07

Yeah, it has been a good one. This has been a beauty.

SPEAKER_03 51:10

Be well, both of you. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_00 51:13

Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_02 51:14

And that was this week's episode of A List to the Moon and Back. Thanks for listening. And if you can share, like, review, we'll always be incredibly grateful. And we hope to see you next time around. Thanks again.