If you didn’t catch how this began, make sure to check out part one here.
When the moderate candida overgrowth was detected on one of the tests I took, I wasn’t really surprised. And to be fair, most people shouldn’t be if they saw this, too. This is because if you live in the modern world, ever received antibiotics in your lifetime or consumed an overabundance of sugar, you likely have some degree of candida overgrowth. I won’t get into the heavy metal component here, and why this would result in the presence of candida, but that is a conversation for another time.
For me it was mostly obvious because my hair had been doing this thing it did once before in my last year of med school, it was greasy even after one day of having been washed. While “cradle cap” is common in babies and has a very obvious eczema component, this isn’t always true in adults because we have hair and are no longer bald… unless you are? But seborrheic dermatitis, the fancy medical term for cradle cap, can present in this way and is oftentimes due to a fungal overgrowth, so that tracked.
While testing for mycotoxins isn’t always a requirement, knowing the specific types of mycotoxins is helpful as they don’t all require the same treatment because the various mycotoxins can be traced back to the specific mold source. In knowing this, we can try to narrow down the potential cause of the exposures, either past or present, to help prevent continued exposure and help to get rid of it internally.
Personally, I came up high on Ochratoxin A and Citrinin.
Both of which are due to aspergillus, a type of fungus that can be found in a variety of foods and the environment. OchA specifically can be found in a personal favorite of mine: coffee. That’s right, a common source of mold exposure is coffee, especially your Starbucks coffee – sorry guys, don’t kill the messenger. While the citrinin can be found in grains.
Before having even found this information out, I had begun to omit things like pastas, breads, and rice out of my diet. I was doing this to limit my carbohydrate consumption and increase my protein. I had begun to feel better, thinking it was because I wasn’t consuming as many carbohydrates, and while that was probably a contributor, it was also likely that I was limiting my exposure to the grains that could have been regularly inoculating me with mold.
Coffee and I were already on the verge of divorce, so I had been teetering with the idea of getting rid of it, just I wasn’t there yet. Our office hosted a 7-day liver detox which included the removal of coffee and caffeine… so here was my wakeup call.
The headache for the first couple of days was definitely not something I would choose to endure, but nevertheless needed to happen. Full disclosure, while I continue to drink coffee to this day, I don’t drink it every day, I stay away from the espressos and cappuccinos, and if its after 12PM, I will opt for a matcha.
If you feel like you’re doing all of the things and not getting better, this might be a hidden source of your health challenges. Also, to be fair, if you have been working with a functional/integrative/naturopathic provider to no avail, it’s not their fault they haven’t arrived here yet; mold isn’t at the top of most practitioner’s lists, but they will get there eventually…unlike other healthcare providers.
