In this episode of Functional Medicine Research, I interview dietician Tracey Long in a deep discussion about how to overcome mold and biotoxin illness. Tracey has firsthand experience with mold and biotoxin illness so she brings a unique and valuable perspective to this topic. We discussed Tracey's personal journey with mold and biotoxin illness, how to test your home for mold, lab testing, associated conditions, symptoms, and management strategies to get well.
Full transcript on How to Overcome Mold and Biotoxin Illness
Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome, everyone, to "Functional Medicine Research." I'm Dr. Hedberg. Really excited today to have my good friend and colleague, Tracey Long, on the show. Tracey is a registered dietician, with specialty certification training in Integrative and Functional Medical Nutrition Therapy and The Bredesen Protocol to End Alzheimer's. She owns a private practice, Big Picture Health in Hendersonville, North Carolina, where she sees clients via video consultations. She specializes in working with clients with neurodegenerative conditions, biotoxin illnesses, gastrointestinal conditions, and nutrigenomics. She is a published author and teaches health coaches for Chris Kresser's Health Coach Training Program. Tracey's education includes a master of public health, an emphasis on nutrition and exercise physiology from the Colorado School of Public Health, where she studied under Dr. Loren Cordain who many of you may know as the author of "The Paleo Diet." And she's also a registered yoga teacher and certified exercise physiologist. Her personal interest include hiking with her husband and dog, urban farming, teaching yoga, foraging for mushrooms in the mountains of Western North Carolina, growing medicinal herbs and produce, paddleboarding, and visiting her three grown daughters in Colorado. Tracey, welcome to the show.
Tracey: Thank you so much, Nik. I'm so happy to be here with you today. Really appreciate the opportunity.
Dr. Hedberg: Yes. Yeah. It's gonna be fun. So why don't we begin by talking about your personal journey with mold? And that's gonna be the topic of today, mold and biotoxin illness. So why don't you share your personal journey?
Tracey: You bet I'd love to. And really, my personal journey, Nik, really started with a professional journey in that I became very interested in neurodegenerative conditions and I completed Dr. Bredesen's training, as you mentioned, The Bredesen Protocol to End Alzheimer's. And Dr. Bredesen has sub-categorized underlying causes of Alzheimer's, and one of those underlying causes he refers to as type three Alzheimer's that's really related to toxins. And he's identified three categories of primary toxins. The first one is heavy metals and the second one is biotoxins. And in that category, biotoxins, certainly, mold is included and also tick-borne illnesses. And now even recently we've added COVID-19, especially from the standpoint of, you know, people who have had COVID-19 and they haven't recovered. You know, we're referring to them as long haulers. And I bring that up. I'll tie that all in in just a minute. The third type of toxin Dr. Bredesen addresses are organic compounds. So there are things like herbicides and pesticides, things that we can be highly exposed to in the environment. It was interesting in that journey that I had that training and I started working with clients with all the subtypes of Alzheimer's, little did I know that I would end up having my own personal experience. So I was assisting clients who had been exposed to mold, certainly, and then we ended up moving to North Carolina. It's in the South. It's very moist here, as you know, I know you live here too. So, you know, we've had a year of record rainfall here.
So I moved from Colorado, which was very hot and dry to the Southeast, which is living like in the tropics, really. We're living in a rental house. And when we found the house, we were really excited because, for a rental, it looked really great on the surface. We just thought, "Wow. We found such a treasure in this house." And I was able to set up my office in the basement, which happens to have...it's kind of a partial basement, so it's got some really nice natural light and big windows and I thought, "Oh, even for a basement office this is just great." And got set up and started working. And after living in this house for about five months I just gradually started to get sicker and sicker. And it's interesting that even though I was assisting clients who had biotoxin illness, and especially mold illness, certainly some people with tick-borne illness as well, it's almost like I couldn't see it in myself. And that rings true with people with biotoxin illness, the impact that it has on us neurologically can really impair our ability to think and process information. And so I certainly was becoming more cognitively imperative myself. I ended up gaining about 20 pounds almost overnight, which really bothered me as a dietician because I practice what I preach. I eat a whole foods, paleo-based diet and, you know, a big exercise fiend, and I hadn't changed anything. So I'm just like, "Where the heck did this 20 pounds come from?" And then as I continued to get more sick, I suddenly was like not sleeping, like, I mean literally not sleeping. The insomnia was horrible, then exacerbated by hot flashes. And so I just continued down this decline.
I had to cut my work back by at least half. I really was becoming dysfunctional. And then this profound fatigue set in where I almost...I would be sitting at my desk working and I would get hit with this fatigue where I almost just had to, like, lie down in the floor. I didn't have enough strength left in me to up the stairs and, you know, lie on the couch or even get in my bed. And I would curl up on the floor in my office and just fall asleep for two hours, you know, and it was really at about that point that I just thought, "My gosh, what is wrong with me?" And so I ran the tests on myself and discovered that I had really high mold levels. And we started... We had our home inspected. Our landlord happened to be very much on board with that and very supportive, and we found some pretty significant high levels of very toxic mold growing in this house kind of underneath the surface.
So I ended up leaving the home for about three weeks, my husband, who was not feeling, you know, the drastic health issues. And I would love to talk about that too, Nik, in that you can have people in the same household who, you know, one person can be very sick or a few family members, very sick, and then other people not sick at all. And we have theories around why that's happening. But luckily, my husband maybe was experiencing some hormonal dysregulation and some issues, but I was able to go back to Colorado and stay at a friend's house for three weeks. And our landlord's very fortunate because my husband's very handy and he was able to do a bulk of the remediation to making the house at least safe for me. And I didn't mention too that I'd also kind of spontaneously developed asthma, which I never had in my life.
So it was interesting, you know, just getting out of the house and, you know, being in that safer place in Colorado, my asthma just went away immediately and I'd had to go... I went to see a doctor and I was using an inhaler here in North Carolina. And so I instantly started feeling better when I got out of this environment. But I ended up coming back and I was able to help my husband with some of the remediation. It really took us about three months total. And it's been a journey. I mean, this has been really going on about a year and a half. And I would say that I'm about 80% improved, but I still have a little ways to go. So mold really did a number on me. Yeah. That's an overview for you.
Dr. Hedberg: The immune system remembers, that's one of the difficult parts about it. And you mentioned testing. So what does that look like for people if they suspect that they have a mold issue? Why don't we start with home testing? Are there regional labs that will do this? Or is there, you know, a standard test people can get?
Tracey: You know, that it's a tricky area to work in because it's relatively new. And, you know, I don't mind sharing with you that I've done a deep dive. I love learning. And then when something like this happens, I think, you know, "I wanna advocate for myself and my clients." So I've recently attended three big deal mold conferences. I mean, it was really bringing the best in the world to these conferences and they were presenting on this very issue. And I mean, I do wanna come back to something you said, you know, how does someone, if they suspect they have mold, how do they start testing? And I wanna answer that question, but I would like to circle back around to how does someone know or how would they suspect they might have a mold issue? So I I'd like to come back and speak to that in a minute.
Right now, we could really look at this two different ways. You could start by testing your home or if you suspect that you have mold illness, you could test yourself. And our best tests right now are urine mycotoxin tests. So think about it this way. Mold is an organism. I think we're all familiar with it. We can picture mold growing on yogurt or bread, and it's white, or green, or blue, and it's fuzzy. So when mold grows, it needs substrate, like in the case of bread, that works. And then it also needs moisture. So if you have those two things combined, you can grow mold, but mold makes spores. Spores are very tiny and they can float around in the environment. I mean, just walking through a room or having your HVAC system running and circulating air, these spores will filter all throughout, you know, the area and then they can land on surfaces. And if those surfaces have dirt or substrate like wood and then also moisture,
