Some experts claim your cell phone might be making black mold more aggressive and making you sick— citing Dr. Klinghardt and the idea that EMFs drive mold to release more mycotoxins. In this episode, I break down what the article gets wrong. Learn:
- The actual research behind EMFs and mold and what it doesn’t say
- Why it misrepresents the data and misinterprets the video reference
- How fear-based content like this spreads misinformation and harms those struggling with mold-related illness
- What to watch out for when reading online health advice — how to tell fact from fear-mongering
This isn’t about defending EMFs — it’s about protecting people from misleading claims that increase stress, instead of promoting healing.
The Mold Money Podcast
TRANSCRIPT
Today's episode is based on a blog, somebody forwarded me, titled, Your Cell Phone May Help Black Mold Grow.
My quick thought is, no, we can't, it's kind of silly, but I've spent a whole day now, and I'm also designing an experiment, because, you know, this is my job, maybe. How do you know if you don't look into it?
I'm not going to mention the blogger's name, links in the show notes. I met him a couple years ago to conference, and he seemed to have good intentions. He was really trying to learn, but he's not the only one making these statements.
I'm sure he's trying to be helpful, just cut and paste, and I can tell that by the references he lists.
I'm going to go through them, where I looked at the references, and ones in Russian, you can't even actually read it, and the video, which I'm going to start with, is real disappointing.
If I hadn't seen his post, I wouldn't have been inspired to do this episode and design and perform my own experiment, and I will admit I'm a geek. I'm enjoying the experiment, even though it's been three days of work.
Question everything, see it for yourself. So thank you, Mr. Blogger, for the inspiration.
I'm going to present my results. Feature episode. So, blog article, this again is, your cell phone may help black mold grow.
It says, watch this video by Dr. Klinghardt. People have told me for a while, you know, you need to, you know, Klinghardt does, Klinghardt does, he's some genius.
I'm staggered by, when I watch this video, how unscientific making statements for which there's no data. Unless someone could show me otherwise, he's making the stuff up.
It's kind of impossible, from what I can tell, to actually do what he'd need to do to prove what he's saying. So the blog says, Dr. Klinghardt performed a mold plate experiment.
First of all, he did not, his colleague did, which compared a mold plate shielded from electromagnetic fields, which it wasn't exactly.
There was a cloth made with the shielding fabric, the silver fabric, draped over the plates, not the bottom, and that's not an actual Faraday cage, as he said in the video.
Because as I talk with a guest on my Daniel Stih podcast, my other podcast, a company called Silver Scrubs, fabrics, shirts you can wear, hats that look cool and shield you. We talked about this. That cloth is like your microwave oven.
You can look through the door and see your food. Microwaves can't get out because it depends on the size of the screen hole. The wave can't make it out because it's too big.
And he said he compared that to another unprotected mold plate exposed to magnetic fields and unprotected showed a drastic increase in the number of spores produced. I watched the video. I only get to stuff because I've done this for 20 years.
I get why people, they latch on to this, they're desperate for answers. And if you watch the video, you'll see a red culture plate.
Either it's taken out of context, that's on stock video and not his actual experiment, or it's like the blogger references. They point to a lot of yeast study, yeast. It's not the stocky botchers black mold.
It's not aspergillus. It's a yeast or bacteria. Those red agar plates are used for bacteria, typically.
It's blood agar. And you can tell by the strains of stuff growing on it. It looks to me like a bacteria, maybe a yeast.
He did not expose one to EMFs and the other not. And when he said exposed to EMFs, I was thinking, OK, he measured them? He put them near a fuse box panel, like in my experiment?
He put them on top of the Wi-Fi? No. He simply uncovered the cloth, removed the shielding, and exposed them, as he says in the video, to whatever is in his office, computer nearby.
Not measured and actually just like that, well, we'll just compare one to normal. Here's what we get if, in a normal day of life, compared to one covered with the cloth. That doesn't work for a critical reason.
You have to start culturing something to have anything to grow. And whether it's a small bacteria, a small bit of yeast or a mold spore, you have to get it on that plate some way, shape or form. Otherwise, nothing's going to grow.
They'll stir a plate. Whatever you put on there, however you get it, it's going to take some time before it grows into something that's visible.
So what this guy did was he basically started with him by covering the plate with a shield, not seeing anything grow, and then removing the cloth, the shielding as he calls it, and saying, oh, all of a sudden stuff showed up, 600 times more
mycotoxins. And then he go on to say, he uses words that are really way out of context. He says, poisonous mycotoxins, vicious mycotoxins. He didn't even measure the mycotoxins.
That whole thing's bunk just because of the design. You can't just go, well, I didn't see it until I uncovered the shield. Here's how you can do this at home, yourself.
No special equipment required. You watch the video. It says, we put it in a faraday cage to protect it from the ambient electromagnetic fields in our office.
One size fits all. You can do this yourself. And just use your microwave oven.
Just put some food in it for a week. Don't turn it on. And will that prevent mold growth?
That's a pretty good faraday cage, I would argue. It's probably a metal box for sure. It's grounded there with a three prong plug shielding electric fields.
And it's got the door to shield from kind of radiation. It's pretty good, actually. Come to think of it, place to store stuff you want shielded.
Just put food in there for a week. Here's something even easier, simpler you can do. You know, the gym, your locker.
You could go to the YMCA. Metal locker. Leave food in it for a week in a metal box.
If that was the case, they wouldn't have ever had to invent refrigerators. We'd all have metal boxes that are faraday cages. That whole video is bunk.
And I'm very disappointed in the whole Klinghardt thing, because I never really discovered him before, and thought he was some brilliant guy.
All these sick people are following him to learn how to get well from Mold, and my gosh, it's no wonder people are still sick if they're following that nonsense. I don't like to use strong words like nonsense.
I don't know the other way to express it. Okay, now, the other references. So there's this Russian research project where they explored still highly radioactive damaged reactor in Chernobyl, and they sent a robot in.
You know the story. It's sad. They said, they brought back samples of really melanin-rich fungi growing.
To which the blogger just extrapolated that that meant your cell phone, which is also radiation, not the same thing. These keywords are radiation EMFs. An EMF can be anything.
Electric, magnetic, AC, DC. It could be sunlight, visible lights in an electromagnetic field. In this case, it's literally radiation.
It's something literally radioactive. It's only available in Russian, so I wonder if the blogger even read it. Also, here's where people that did read it, myself included.
Okay, let me break down the words. This is very complex.
It says, effective electromagnetic radiation on growth characteristics of Australian yeast, reliable increase of growth rate and change of duration of growth phases as a result of irradiation of yeast production. Oh, I can't figure this out.
It's because they're Russians. The translation doesn't go good. So again, you read that and I can't blame you if you're like, you know what?
Awesome study. It sounds complex to me. I believe it just because the title of the blog says, your cell phone may help black mold grow.
Moving on. Nobody's perfect. Let me go to the next study, which says the next link in the blog, quote, literally says a completely different study shows a similar relationship between this strain, which, by the way, is a strain of yeast.
It's not even mold. Biological effects induced by non-thermal levels of non-ionizing electromagnetic creation in the 200 or 350 gigahertz frequency range at low power density to observe possible non-thermal effects. See what I'm saying?
It's starting to think there must be some really serious stuff behind it. Exposure was conducted over two and a half hours. Okay, it's a yeast.
Yeast bud pretty fast. Mold does not grow in two and a half hours to where it's visible. So it's not even relevant.
It's interesting maybe. It's not actually a very good study anyhow. I'll tell you why if you were into yeast.
Here's a thing that wasn't clear until I spent a day thinking about it. The data were grouped into either large, medium or small size micro colonies to assist in accurate assessment of growth.
They're going to measure the stuff to see how fast it grows.
That's valid because it's actually kind of cool how you can identify certain species of Aspergillus, Stachybotus, those kinds of molds by their growth cycle and what size they are, like dime or quarter, certain timelines in their growth.
At four days it's nickel versus another species might be five days it's still a dime. The color on the front and the back, those are actually pretty good characteristics, except, something's not clear in my head. It's because this is a yeast species.
So I'm trying to get a picture. One of the ways I think is, let me get a picture of it. Before I can express it in words, think about it.
It helps me to get a picture. There's going to be pictures from my experiment, raw pictures, which you can see in my video next week when I post my experiment on how or if what type of electromagnetic field does or doesn't affect mold.
So they're yeast. I thought, well, why the small, medium, large? Here's why.
Unlike in my experiment where I captured some air, took what was floating around the air, this mold spores, injected them onto a plate using an Anderson device. They couldn't really do that with the yeast. Isolate a single yeast.
That's what they would have had to have done. So what they probably did, and here's what happens in all these experiments you do for mold, you get some yeast growing. Technically, yeast are fungi, but you really don't pay attention to them unless...
I did do an assessment for a house once, and it was all yeast in there because there was a flood, power shut off, and it was in the winter, so ironically, it was an ice box. And the only thing that grew was yeast.
It overgrew the plates because no other mold could grow. Most of the time, most houses, I kind of don't like it. It's a distraction, and that growth has taken up room on the plate for other molds to grow.
When it grows, it buds, so it's kind of random, haphazard, so that's what's happening. They're going, OK, let's grow some yeast first, and then we'll quantify, oh, that's a large, small, big colony.
Now let's expose it to something and see how the growth rate changes. The trouble with that confounds experiment because this is like assuming that no matter what size you start with, it continues to grow at a linear rate.
That would be like, let's say, let's mix some children with some adult humans, expose them to EMFs, and see the effect. Well, the kids are going to be more affected, why? Because they're early in their growth cycle, and it's not a linear growth rate.
I found other holes in it, too, and won't bore you with. Oh, I would have liked to have read the whole study. It cost $152 to buy.
I'm the kind of type who, when I do this, I do it right. You know, when people go, how do you know? There's $152 to buy.
Okay, tempting. And then I saw it was be physically mailed to you. You can't download it.
Maybe that's because this study was published in 2002. I'm not going to go on with all this stuff, because the more I read and try to look at these references, the more holes I find. I reached out to the blogger, asked him if they could send me them.
I haven't got a response. Maybe they didn't get my email. Why choose black mold?
Wouldn't all molds be affected? The title of the blog, Your Cell Phone May Help Black Mold to Grow. It's intentionally fear mongering.
Here's the problem with that. And mind you, I'm with you guys. I'm with you are sick.
I'm with you who we need a healthy living space. My business is named Healthy Living Spaces, not Acme Mold Testing.
But it seems to me you're pushing an agenda to warn people about cell phones, which is fine, but not providing any responsible journalism in regard to learning more and how and why, other than just trust me because you don't understand these
references. The trouble with that is, there are people who are going to spend the time and they're going to see that it's junk. It's hard to use that word. I don't think I've ever used that in the podcast before.
I have no other way to express how disappointed I am in spending time looking at this stuff and wondering how much other junk is out there like this.
The issue is, then when you have a valid complaint, the effects of smart meters of a 5G and people don't listen to you and it's unfortunate because there's always a truth behind something.
Nothing is completely fake except for your cell phone may help black mold growth. Oh, I can think of a way. Mold likes heat.
You feel your phone sometimes, it's hot because the battery is going. It's always texting, it's always tracking you. There's a little heat there.
So technically, see, there's an example and that's the thermal effect, by the way, which you read people arguing, oh, there's non-ionizing, non-thermal effects. Those are the ones that will hurt us. That would help, Mold Girl.
Mold loves heat. One last thing about the Klinghardt. Why is so disappointed?
Keyword, mycotoxins. He says mycotoxin over and over. He says, then he measured how much mycotoxins are these molds producing on a daily basis.
He did not. It would be impossible. You would have to destroy the organism to extract the mycotoxins, to measure the mycotoxins every day.
Your experiment would be over. There's no like magic pen or light meter you can, or gauss meter you can turn on and have the organism tell you how many, how much mycotoxins are present. And he shouldn't have said it that way.
It seems real aggressive to make the statement, then he measured how much mycotoxins are these molds producing on a daily basis. Quote, very easy to do. Not easy to do, not possible without any experiment.
Quote, he found that production of biotoxins increased more than 600 times. Next question is, what's a biotoxin? Is that the same as a mycotoxin?
He's just making stuff up in my opinion. If you can tell me otherwise, I'd love to hear. I'd love to be straightened out on this.
An important thing here, for Klinghardt is respectable, respected as he is by people, the least he could do is repeat his own experiment and from the language of the video, at least at that time, he had not.
And this is a common way things are taken out of context, misinformation is created, because you read, somebody else wrote, to make assumptions and beliefs on what they did and wrote. By plate exposed to EMFs, it was just the office.
They just took the cover off the plates, the shield and cloth, and they allowed it to grow in the office, quote, exposed to EMFs.
I am not aware of any study that contains data for an experiment in which the variables such as electric, magnetic, and high-frequency exposure controlled outside, no fields, inside just magnetic, inside just electric.
If you believe you have one, send it to me and be clear, they actually measure specific electric, magnetic, or RF frequencies and what power level. I'm going to do something I encourage everyone to do with questions. See it for yourself.
I'm running my own experiment. Listen to it next time and watch my video of me performing the experiment over the course of a week.
And most important, I welcome your feedback on my experimental design execution and conclusions, because I mean, I might be able to draw some more results from your questioning of how I did things.
It's just an initial experiment to see, is there any logic to this all? I'm not saying EMFs are harmless. I'm not saying they have no effect on your health and well-being.
I am one actually who helps people measure their house and minimize the fields, not by shielding, by simply unplugging stuff next to the bed, not sleeping with your head, the head of your bed against where on the other side there's an electric hot
water heater that's always running in the middle of the night. You should minimize your exposure to EMFs. In the simplest, most practical way, unplug everything next to the bed.
Just trust me, save your time on the meters, get a battery operated alarm clock, leave your phone on the other side of the room, and you do this at night, because in the daytime, it is difficult to minimize your exposure.
And at night, it's time to rest, rejuvenate, have some good dreams, get some good sleep.
REFERENCES
Links to the “Your Cell Phone May Help Black Mold Grow” and the references it cites:
https://themoldguyinc.com/your-cell-phone-may-help-black-mold-grow/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMAV-pZMlZshttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15456218/ https://www.prohealth.com/blogs/wellness/?ref=message