In this episode, Jason from GotMold.com reveals the dangers of mold exposure and its impact on health. He shares how childhood asthma led him to discover that poor indoor air quality caused his symptoms. We break down the signs of mold exposure, its link to chronic inflammation, and why functional medicine often overlooks mold toxicity.
I’m very honored to have Jason on the podcast today to talk about if we have mold and mold illness and mold toxicity and how do we know and all that stuff because I always feel like there’s mold in my bathroom and I need to test and not guess as we say as FDM practitioners. So Jason from gotmold.com, thanks for coming on to help us learn more about mold.
My pleasure, good to be here, thank you.
So I was telling you before we hit record, my focus on this show is to help people be fit and healthy from the inside out as we age. Our podcast, we’ve had for 12 years, a lot of endurance athletes, but just high optimizers, health optimizers, high performers that we want to thrive hopefully as we age. And I think exercise is what people think of, and I’m trying to bring attention to everyone that you’re not invincible. You know, you could still have these environmental toxins, and we’ll talk about what those are, how and what mold can do to you, and that we’re all susceptible to mold exposure.
No doubt.
So tell us about you, why you have Got Mold, and everyone has a story. So I would love to start the show—what’s your purpose? What’s your why? What’s your drive?
Sure, well, thank you again for having me. Mold is kind of a funny thing. It’s not a subject matter that many people, I think, grow up aspiring to specialize in. I am no exception to that. In fact, when I first started doing this, there wasn’t an academic track even if I wanted to do so. People think about this being mycology, which is the study of fungi, or building science, or maybe it’s more construction-related. It’s kind of everything. If this is not multi-disciplinary, nothing is.
Because what we’re really dealing with is the anatomy and health of a building and the anatomy and health of a human, and the intersection of those two things. Really, it’s the nexus, if you will, of where buildings and people overlap. That was the “aha” moment for me when this all kind of came together.
My story begins pretty early. My mold story began when I was four years old. My family noticed that I lost a lot of weight in a brief period of time and I was having difficulty breathing, so they brought me to the pediatrician, who said, “Yeah, no, you should take him to the Children’s Hospital.” We lived about an hour away from what my mom called CHOP—Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—which is a renowned respiratory clinic.
They were concerned because my family history was such that we had cystic fibrosis in our background. So the first diagnosis was in fact that I had CF, and that devastated them because it was a death sentence. My father had lost four of his cousins to CF before the age of 14. They spent the next six weeks waiting for a second opinion, crying as they tell me.
Fortunately, they got the right diagnosis, which was asthma compounded by pneumonia, and I was allergic to every single thing that they tested me for—grass, wheat, corn, eggs, dogs, cats, cotton, soybeans. I grew up on this little farm in New Jersey surrounded by all those things. I essentially lived on inhalers until I was about 12, at which point my folks split up and I moved out of that musty old farmhouse. And all my symptoms went away. It was chalked up to what they call “spontaneous adolescent remission,” which is a fancy term for “we have no idea what the hell happened.”
Fast forward—two things happened right after that. One was that my mother died in that same home. She stayed; I moved out. She died two years later by suicide, which, believe it or not, is closely related to this conversation. I can explain that a little bit later if you’d like to dig into that.
The other thing that happened was I got diagnosed with Lyme disease. I’m not sure that I had Lyme, but I do know that I got the antibiotics, and I do know that messed up my gut. That helped me actually learn a lot about how to heal from mold-related illness, believe it or not, which is also something we could dig into.
Then I ended up dropping out of high school, working at a gas station, got rescued out of the gas station by a stockbroker who brought me to work on Wall Street. I unknowingly became the youngest licensed stockbroker in history with a Guinness World Record at the age of 17. Then I woke up one day, wasn’t having fun in my mid-20s, and decided to do something meaningful with my life. I went backpacking.
While I was away, I ended up in Hawaii and read a story in a local newspaper about a guy who’d gotten sick from the hotel where he worked. He had developed adult-onset asthma and all these allergies he never had before at 40 years old. I had never even heard of adult-onset asthma, so that was a complete surprise to me. But it was like my life in reverse, a déjà vu moment.
His story really brought me back to that childhood experience, and I kept wondering—did we have a mold problem? Sure enough, I called my father and asked him if he thought we had mold. He laughed and said, “Of course, we had mushrooms in the basement. Why do you ask?” It was just that kind of 70s parenting—mold? Just wipe it off, no big deal. They had no concept of the impact that that environment had had on my immune system.
Absent that chronic exposure, I’m no longer allergic to anything. I have not had to use an inhaler since I moved out of that house. In retrospect, I’ve seen this exact pattern manifest with hundreds of my clients over the years, especially with children whose immune systems are still developing. The body perceives this onslaught, this overwhelm, and goes on high alert for everything.
We see lots of autoimmune disease pop up with people exposed to mold on a chronic basis. We see lots of inflammatory disease. Mold is an inflammagen—all the compounds it produces are inflammatory to varying degrees.
That moment in Hawaii fascinated me—not with mold itself, though it is a remarkable family of organisms—but with the idea that buildings can make you sick. That was what really got my attention. The buildings we live and work in are not just inanimate boxes that protect us from the elements. They are an extension of our immune system—like an exoskin or an exoskeleton. When a building gets sick, people get sick. When the building heals, so too can the people if they’re doing the right things.
In recent years, I’ve become more fascinated with how buildings can actually heal people. The idea that buildings make you sick is no longer new to most people. But the idea that they can actually be a supportive mechanism in healing? That’s the most important realization that came from this whole series of awakenings I’ve had.
That’s really where I focus my time—bringing awareness through podcasts and conversations like this, especially when it comes to people looking to optimize their health.
