How Dave Asprey Recovers from Mold Hits
In 2015, Bulletproof founder Dave Asprey did a long interview with Michael Sandler of the Inspire Nation podcast on the treatment strategies that he has found to help him deal with continuing mold reactions.
The interview was especially interesting since Asprey – usually a very strong proponent of avoiding all kinds of sweets – suggests that eating a small amount of sugar after a mold hit can be helpful.
Following is a transcription of the section of interview in which Dave talks specifically about what he does to recover quickly from acute mold hits.
The entire podcast is can be accessed here.
Inspire Nation Interview with Dave Asprey
Dave’s movie “Moldy” can be accessed for free here:
A page of links to other resources in which Dave Asprey has discussed environmental toxic mold is here:
Interview Transcript
Dave Asprey:
To this day, I can tell you, if I was exposed to mold – either in my food or more likely in my environment – the day before, when I wake up in the morning, grip strength is one of the strongest indicators there.
I have a digital grip-strength meter that you can use to program your blood pressure on the Bulletproof website. But you can also use it to get a sense of, wow, this morning I’m weak!
After I’m exposed to Stachybotrys – this actually was just four days ago – I can recover very quickly now.
Unfortunately, I don’t smell Stachy very often, unless it’s really bad. But I feel it about half an hour after I’m exposed.
Most of the time, I walk in and I can tell within seconds if I’m in a moldy building. My nervous system tells me. It’s a great detector.
But I couldn’t take the lid off a bottle of sparkling water, because I couldn’t grip it strong enough. I mean, look at me, I’m a strong guy, right? But it was a temporary thing, and it resolved within four hours.
Because I took toxin-binding agents. Because I understood the inflammatory pathway. Because I knew what it did to my mitochondria.
It’s just an environmental thing. I’ll be fine.
But for 4-6 hours, I really need sugar to fuel my mitochondria. And at this time, I am going to use sugar as a medicinal substance. Normally I don’t eat sugar at all.
And I’m going to use coffee. And I’m going to use activated charcoal. And all the other things that work for this sort of stuff.
And I can bounce back.
Without having had that, I probably would have been out for at least six weeks of low performance, where I’m forgetting words. Where I’m just not feeling good. Where I have these weird pimples that are deep. Where my joints hurt all the time. Where I need extra sleep.
Like, screw that. I don’t have time for that stuff. I have no interest in that stuff.
I used to think that was what life is about – it ebbs and flows. But no. Sometimes things knock you over, and you can get up quickly and manage it. Or it manages you, and not in a good way.
I still have a box of “important papers” that were with me in a really moldy house. To this day, if I open that stuff, I get full-blown mold exposure symptoms. Like, this isn’t something you could make up. It’s too random.
If I’m going to open that up, I’ll put on rubber gloves, I’ll hold my breath, and I’ll open it outside away from the house. Otherwise, it’s in a sealed plastic container.
This is documented if you read the literature. Any mold remediation expert will tell you about this. This is just a fact of life. This stuff is really noxious and it sticks to things, like radioactive dust or something like that.
Michael Sandler:
So let’s say that you do get exposed. You know you’ve been exposed. What are some steps that people can take at that point?
Dave Asprey:
There’s an acute time, and you’re like, “Oh God, I’m crashing.”
Now that sounds really dramatic – crashing, really? But you felt fine, you went into the place, and then you were like, “I feel really tired. I can feel my brain going zzzzz.” I call it crashing.
It’s not like crashing with a cardiac event – although there is a great correlation between heart attacks and mold. One of my favorite quotes is from a guy from the WHO who spent 17 years researching mycotoxins – A.V. Constantini is his name. And he said, “There is a known cause of atherosclerosis. It is mycotoxins.” So flat out – heart attacks and mold are linked.
But let’s go back to this protocol. This is the kind of crashing I’m talking about. Not cardiac crashing. I’m talking about, my brain is turning off. I feel awful. I feel like I’m going to die.
Dramatic words, right – no! This is your nervous system, your sympathetic nervous system telling you, “Mortal danger! Run away! Fight! Do something! You are dying!”
You don’t see any tigers. There’s nothing that’s an obvious threat to your nervous system. So it’s a sense of impending doom and you don’t know what it is, but you feel it.
And you can measure it, with heart rate variability. That’s something that I write about on the Bulletproof website. How you use heart rate variability – whether or not you’re mold sensitive – to know whether your fight-or-flight response is triggered.
So let’s say it’s triggered. Now you’re like, okay, I feel like I’m going to die. Not like I’m in pain, but just a sense like, there are vampires here. I don’t know, but something’s not right. My brain is starting to go down.
Okay? What are you going to do?
Here’s what I do.
I get the hell out.
You leave the building. That is so important.
But let’s say it happened 20 minutes after you were in the building. So you already left the building, but now you’re like – okay, I’m kind of like a zombie.
You’re very likely to be more light-sensitive – like, “Why is the sun so bright all of a sudden?” Well, the sun didn’t change its brightness for you. It’s you.
Or – why are people making all these irritating sounds? Well, they’re just normal people sounds that weren’t irritating before.
So something in your sense of perception changed, as a result of this exposure. Not everyone gets that, but a lot of people do.
So you know this happened.
The first thing is that you want to address the energy crash that’s happening.
Because what happened is that you’re body’s like, “Oh God, toxins. Get ready.” So it dropped your blood sugar. It used all the glucose in your body to protect you.
So what are you going to experience? You’re going to get a sugar craving. A big sugar craving.
Now, good people don’t eat sugar. Did you know that? Right. Sugar’s bad for you.
It is bad for you. I don’t eat sugar. But – if I’m crashing like that, I will. Absolutely.
I will make Bulletproof Coffee, for a very specific reason. Bulletproof Coffee is mold-free, upgraded coffee beans. Why do I make mold-free coffee beans? Because I can feel the difference. Because regular coffee makes me angry. And coffee without mold, like mine, doesn’t.
I add grass-fed butter and Brain Octane Oil.
Brain Octane Oil is a small extract of coconut oil. It’s about 6% of the fat. It’s not just a medium-chain triglyceride, it’s only one of the medium-chain triglycerides. So it’s an amplified effect. You put that in there.
It turns out, with Brain Octane Oil, that if you pour it on mold on a desk, mold generally doesn’t do well. It’s just called caprylic acid, that’s another name for it. This is a distilled version, that doesn’t have a flavor. You put it in your coffee and it makes ketones in your body, so that you can have energy in your brain.
Now your body’s like, “Give me all the glucose! I have to get rid of these toxins! I have to get ready to run! I have to fight!”
So the blood sugar crash happened, and now there’s no energy in your brain.
Guess what happens when there’s no energy in your brain. It’s an emergency! You pump out adrenaline, pump out cortisol.
Now all of a sudden, those raise your blood sugar, but now you’re a little bit shaky and you’re ready to completely take down anyone near you, including your partner.
There’s a reason. Your amygdala, which is responsible for why tigers don’t eat you, it’s fully charged and ready to do this. Its job is to shunt thoughts that would have gone to your prefrontal cortex and take them away.
You don’t need to use a prefrontal cortex. You’re in survival mode, and survival mode is much faster than thinking mode.
So it cuts off your ability to have rational thought.
Also, there definitely was an emergency, because I’ve got no sugar to feed the prefrontal cortex.
When I lived in that moldy house, I got a Daniel Amen spect brain scan with radioactive sugar. It showed no metabolic activity in my prefrontal cortex when I tried to pay attention. I was pretty much always in panic mode. When Daniel Amen saw my brain scan, he said, “You had the brain of a hard-core street drug addict. I can’t believe you were going to business school with a brain like that.”
So there’s that sugar crash. It’s fine to have a little bit of sugar, if it’s going to make you feel better.
Do it in coffee, because the caffeine is going to cause a vasoconstriction and get more blood circulating, and there are some polyphenols in coffee that are of positive benefit, that are naturally occurring antioxidants.
If you do that, all of a sudden you’ve got energy from the caffeine, you’ve got energy from the Brain Octane Oil, you’ve got energy from the sugar. You’ve added energy back into the system.
So you’re like, “Okay, now my crash is better.”
The food cravings will subside, just because you’ve got enough energy all of a sudden. Those food cravings were actually the body screaming to give you more energy.
Then you need to start binding the toxins.
Imagine if you put a drop of blue food coloring in a glass of water. It drops in and then it slowly spreads.
Mold toxins do the same thing in your body. If you can get them out quickly, they don’t have a chance to spread.
If they have a chance to spread, they will saturate the cell membranes in all the cells in your body and get into your nervous system and really wreak havoc. So what you want to do is to prevent that from happening.
You can take Upgraded Coconut Charcoal.
I manufacture the finest size particle charcoal on the market. This is a Bulletproof product. But there is a reason I manufacture it, because I use it. Any charcoal will do in a pinch, but there are studies in animals that show that particle size matters, which is why I make the finest particle.
You take as much charcoal as your body will handle without giving you constipation. You must not take charcoal with drugs, because it will absorb them. It’s used for poisonings in hospitals. So if you’re on any prescription meds, particularly psychiatric meds, you need to talk to your doctor before you take charcoal.
You might also consider adding bentonite clay, which is more of a U.S. military style of thing. It works. It also will plug you up.
And finally, cholestyramine, which is a pharmaceutical. It’s one of the first anti-cholesterol drugs. The way that it works is by binding to bile in the gut. It doesn’t absorb, it’s not like a statin drug.
It just so happens that a lot of these toxins that make you sick are structurally similar to cholesterol. In fact, a lot of the anti-cholesterol stuff could easily be anti-mold toxin stuff because they’re so structurally similar.
So a lot of times people will say, “Saturated fats are bad.” But are you measuring saturated fats, or are you measuring saturated fats that are saturated with mycotoxins? Well, you didn’t measure in your study, did you? So I have to ask about the quality of the study.
So you go in there and you take this powder, and you can feel better within an hour or two. It is amazing what binding these toxins can do for you. So that protocol works really well.
And there’s nothing like a good anti-inflammatory. The stuff works. It stresses your liver, but if you take one or two of those spaced out, specifically the liquid gels, they can help to turn off the inflammatory cascade.
In order to help your liver excrete these toxins, you can also take something called Glutathione Force.
Yes, I make that stuff too. It’s the most orally absorbable delivery mechanism that I know of to get this glutathione into the body.
If you can get intravenous glutathione, though, do that. It costs about $100-150 in most places.
What oral glutathione like this does is it absorbs, and your liver needs glutathione to get rid of most toxins, and this helps you to have more of it in your body.
If you did just one of these things that I’m talking about, you’re going to feel better.
If you do all of them – and if you don’t take the glutathione at the same time as the charcoal, because the charcoal absorbs everything – you’re going to be like, “Oh, man, you know, I was down for three or four hours where I felt kind of crappy, but that was it and I can go on with life and it was okay.”
Rather than “I felt bad for days and days.”
The next morning, you may need to repeat that stuff. You may need to do it for several days.
The other thing that works – your mitochondria take a hit. There are multiple studies that show that the mitochondria, the power plants in your cells, don’t work as well after exposure to certain mycotoxins.
So if that happens, you make less electrical energy. There’s less spark of life in you. There’s that quote in the movie that mold makes the light dimmer – that’s what I’m talking about.
So to turn the light back on, this is what I use. It’s called Unfair Advantage.
The reason that it’s called this is that anyone who takes this is going to get the mitochondrial benefits. It’s a new form of a compound called PQQ. We synthesize it from scratch rather than purchasing it from a big chemical company. You open up the ampule and you drink it.
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