Explore why urine mycotoxin testing in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) patients might be misleading.
- Why the science behind urine mycotoxin tests is flawed
- How mycotoxins come from food
- Why people with CFS might have impaired detox pathways, making them sensitive to toxins
- The pitfalls of focusing on mycotoxins instead of a broader picture
- What better strategies to help CFS sufferers identify root causes and improve their health
Daniel cuts through the fear and misinformation, offering a science-based perspective on how to navigate mold testing and help those struggling with CFS. If you’ve ever wondered whether mycotoxins are the smoking gun—or just smoke—this episode is a must.
The Mold Money Podcast
TRANSCRIPT
I'm going to talk to you about my favorite topic, because I'm still trying to understand how, why do people do this test, the mycotoxin test.
The doctors that tell you, test your urine, if you're someone who, your doctor's telling you to test your urine for mycotoxins, and that's how we'll tell if there's mold in your house.
I've dove deeper into the studies and really trying to understand.
It started when I recently downloaded an e-book called Mold Testing Remediation and Detoxification, published by Austin Air Systems, the makers of the Austin Air Purifier, which by the way I like, Austin is only second to the IQ Air in terms of being an actual true air filter, a real no gimmicks. But the e-book, I don't know if they hired somebody to write it for them. There's a lot of misinformation in that. And today, I'm going to specifically speak about the mycotoxins and health stuff.
It says, mycotoxins are naturally occurring toxins in VOC form. VOC is a volatile organic compound in VOC form produced by mold. End quote.
So break this down. What is naturally occurring mean? Get rid of the unnecessary words.
What does VOC form mean? A VOC is like a gas. Ice can be a solid, ice, a liquid, water, or a gas, water vapor in the air.
What do they mean by VOC form? It is a solid, by the way. Mycotoxins are a substance mold slathers itself with.
It's not volatile. If I was to imagine it to be in like a piece of wood or sawdust, I'm slathering myself with, to turn it into a VOC, it'd have to burn it. It would turn into a char.
It can't turn into a gas. You literally can't just vaporize. It's not true.
And the ebook goes on to say, they, mycotoxins, will typically replicate on and attach to floors and walls in humid or confined areas. A lot of misstatements. Mycotoxins are not living organisms.
They do not replicate. This is like saying, back to my sawdust or anything, object, my microphone. Say my microphone's gonna replicate itself.
It's not going to. It's not live. Why does it say they attach to walls and floors?
This is presupposing walls and floors are the only thing they can attach to. Not the ceiling, not the siding on the house. Why is this even in here in context?
And lastly, in humid or confined areas. Confined areas, you get mold in anywhere that any house could have mold anywhere, not just confined area. And any house can have mold from other conditions besides humidity.
Humidity is not the only thing that causes mold growth. So why is it even in there? The whole sentence is not necessary.
And misinformation and the way the communication that it's intending, if the recipient accepts that, then now they're going to believe that, oh my gosh, my mucotoxins are replicating, self-replicating like some kind of science fiction movie on the
walls and floors because I live in Florida, and the humid climate in my apartment is kind of small, fortunately, but also confusing. This ebook contradicts itself in the next statement on a couple of pages later where it says more appropriately,
quote, mucotoxins are very tiny substances. Now I'm not sure why they felt the need to emphasize tiny. You cannot see, for example, a water molecule, and you can't see a mucotoxin molecule any more than that.
Yes, of course, they're small, even smaller than the mold spores. They're definitely microscopic. Maybe their intention is they think some people think, oh, I can see mucotoxins.
Let's make an assumption that that's what people think.
If that's how you're thinking, then start the sentence with, for those who think you might see mucotoxins, like a mouse running or cockroach running across your floor, or no, they're actually molecules.
So it says, mucotoxins can cause or worsen inflammation, which can result in stiffness, aches and pains. I'm continuing with the quote, in fact, it is not uncommon for fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome.
Here's where I want to focus because chronic fatigue is hard to diagnose. It's really easy to diagnose you're fatigued. I go to my doctor and I tell him I'm fatigued.
It's what's causing it. Not the word uncommon. That suggests that in addition to ailments, it's not uncommon for mycotoxins to cause chronic fatigue syndrome.
The wording can result, in fact, in the same statement. There's a lot of assumptions and misdrawn conclusions. Let's keep it simple.
I'm going to focus on what some, and if you want to call them scientists, I don't, because it's not very scientific. Maybe doctors. I have a lot of respect for them.
Let's call them doctors, not scientists, though, because they're trying to treat people the best they can.
They appear to be making a casual, or maybe an observed and assumed association between the presence of mycotoxins and chronic fatigue syndrome. Although no one knows, of course, what the actual mechanism is by which of...
And even if mycotoxins are a factor, or just a symptom of me being fatigued, I can't detoxify mycotoxins. I noticed the references, so I looked them all up.
First one is detection of mycotoxins in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, posted on the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central website, which by the way is not hard to get publicized.
Just because the study's out there doesn't mean it's true, or real scientific.
So Austin is citing this reference, so I moved on to look at that in regard to doctors who suggest they can tell if a person has been exposed to mold in their home by testing their urine for mycotoxins.
For those of you not familiar with this, it's becoming quite common for alternative health care practitioners to test the urine of their patients for mycotoxins.
And if mycotoxins detected in their urine, to conclude, you have become ill from exposure to mold. Not in your body, mind you. Some even use it as a surrogate way to test for mold in their house.
Just test your urine. If you have mycotoxins, you must have had a mold exposure.
So the abstract for this paper says, the study conducted to determine if mycotoxins could be identified in human urine from patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. Now that seems quite common sense and simple.
Well, of course, I got chronic fatigue. Would you not be able to detect mycotoxins because I have chronic fatigue? But that's not really what they mean and where they're going, right?
They're trying to, as we're going to see, they're actually going to try to prove that if I can find mycotoxins and your chronic fatigue, it's from mold.
So it says, patients diagnosis for the chronic fatigue were evaluated for mold exposure in the presence of mycotoxins in their urine.
Ninety-three percent of the 112 patients tested positive for at least one mycotoxin, almost 30 percent for more than one mycotoxin.
Exposure histories indicated that these 90 percent had a past or present exposure to water damage buildings in 90 percent of these cases.
Environmental testing was performed in the water damage buildings from a subset, doesn't say how many, of these patients, and this testing revealed the presence of potentially mycotoxin-producing mold species in their homes.
Now, here's the part that caught my attention. And to believe this is valid, I'm like, wow, this is a good test.
Quote, prior testing in a healthy control population with no history of exposure to water damage or mold, and 55 people, revealed no positive cases of detecting mycotoxins at the limit of detection.
By itself, you might go, oh yeah, okay, then it works because no exposure to mold, no mycotoxins, exposure to mold, mycotoxins. But then we have that third variable, chronic fatigue.
This simply suggests that if mycotoxins don't show up in your urine, that you've not been exposed to mold, but that's not the case.
Let's take a deeper look at the second reference, the one, the first one, where Austin's also referencing in the same statement. This reference says, quote, help me control patients with no known toxic mold exposure. Those are 55 people.
Urine from these people used to develop the reference control. These same group were asked about complaints or did you have mold in your house? I don't completely understand this.
See if you can break it down. They were asked about their symptoms related to mold exposure, quote, as documented in the peer-reviewed literature, sounds plural, at the time of the study. I can't even, I don't know what that means.
Back to the quote. They did not give a history of mold growth in their home or workplace. It was assumed that the controls had exposure to food and airborne mold spores that occur in daily activity.
That's totally common sense. But notice the quick inclusion of the word food. That's important to overlook in the conclusion that Austin made about the microtoxins and the reference.
Microtoxins and urine can come from. Moving on to another reference. Microtoxin detection in human samples from patients exposed to mold environments.
This abstract says, the goal is to determine if selected microtoxins could be extracted from patients exposed to toxin producing molds in their environment. Why is the food not there again?
See, we jump to not the goal is, can we get, can we detect microtoxins and urine?
But quote, from toxic molds in the environment, that assumes, presupposes the microtoxins you detect are somehow tagged with some kind of tracer gas or tag that, oh, I came from a house versus somebody's food and they're not.
So you can't possibly do it. And this is a compound statement, it's not logical. The goal should be, can we detect microtoxins and urine?
Yes or no? That's a yes. The way this is worded, it implies that we would also know in the same test if they came from the house.
So back to the quote, negative control patients had no detectable microtoxins in their urine basically. These data show that microtoxins can be detected in urine from patients exposed to microtoxin producing molds in their environment.
That's the conclusion it's making. And that's the one Austin is referencing. And it's not their fault for what they said then.
They confused microtoxins as a gas and a substance in the same paper. Okay. You know, they're doing the best they can.
I was tempted to believe it at first too. And so I'm like, no, it's a compound statement. You can't tell if it's from your food and environment.
And this is then getting taken out of context and re-propagated on the Internet and used by thousands of doctors without them actually probably really dissecting the study.
But I will get, I will say it took me months, probably been even years since I finally got around to dive in this deep takes a lot of time. And you really got to break stuff down logically.
Quote, specimens from patients, urine samples with no known toxic mold exposure were tested to develop a set of reference data. Okay.
So now we're getting someplace with no known exposure, then we'll test you because you shouldn't have any mycotoxins, but here's the flaw in their logic.
They seem to have gone and found people to use as a control group based on a questionnaire or medical history. Do you know if you had mold exposure?
If it was that simple, why would you need to test someone for mycotoxins to go, oh, you must have mold in your house. We could just ask you. You wouldn't need a mold inspection, a mold test in your house.
We just ask you. So they're throwing that in the experiment as if this is a fact. These people we tested did not have mold.
They also, here's what really gets compounded the more you think about it. They didn't limit those people to those who also suffer from chronic fatigue. They used healthy people as the control group.
And my logic is maybe a chronic fatigue person can't detox as well of anything, which is why they're fatigued. They can't detox micro toxins from your house, from your food. They can't detox chemicals.
They can't detox pesticides or smoke. And that's why I'm detecting it. Why would I go get some healthy people?
I should also be using, just limit my study to people with chronic fatigue, because how do I know the people I don't detect it in were healthy, just don't have better detoxification systems, versus, oh, you just don't have mold in your house.
So you cannot conclude that chronic fatigue is directly associated with mold in your house or your food. It confounded the study with another variable. We have healthy and unhealthy people.
We have people seeing and not seeing mold in their house. We have micro toxins in your urine or not. They should have limited the study to 100 percent of the participating.
You have chronic fatigue, and then divided those into two groups, those who not only see or think they were exposed to mold, but let's go test your houses as well. And then a conclusion could be made quite simple. Test them all for micro toxins.
Only those who have been exposed to mold should have micro toxins in their urine exposed to mold in their house. Now, we know it has to be common sense. The biggest source of micro toxin is your food.
This is why the FDA actually test milk for micro toxins, because cows eat moldy hay, moldy grass. They get micro toxins, the beef, the cattle, they could eat moldy grass, moldy corn, whatever they're being fed.
And then you get micro toxins in your meat and your milk. So the FDA actually has limits on this. So it's quite valid.
It is definitely a pathway for exposure. And I don't see how you're going to uncouple that.
The micro toxin chemicals are not marked with, oh, I came from a home in Cincinnati or Phoenix or an apartment in LA versus I came from a one-on-the-cob I bought it at the grocery store. I'm just going through the studies now.
And now that I go through them, it becomes quite clear that they are flawed. We can't conclude they became sick, acquired fatigue, from an exposure to micro toxins. Rather, it could just be they don't detox.
You can't have it both ways. There's toxins in our food. We get them in our body when we eat and drink stuff.
This study didn't even consider the diet of those participating. And if you were to, they would have had to feed them all the same thing and make sure that none of the food had micro toxins as well.
So the other reference in the Austin document, you can see I'm quite thorough about this. It's the way I think. It just keeps like, I'm, oh, what about that?
Have I thought about that idea? Let me go read that reference again or find one. So this one's titled Allergy and Toxic Mold Syndrome.
All these again are, this is Reference 30 in the Austin eBook on Mold Remediation and Health Effects. The objective of this study was to characterize symptoms in patients with complaints related to mold exposure.
Symptoms were recorded and skin prick puncture test performed. Symptoms included fatigue 23%, which means like 75% of this study didn't have to do with chronic fatigue. 53% had skin reactions to mold.
Conclusion, microtoxins, irritations from spores or metabolites must be culprits. I'm quoting you. Allergic rather than toxic responses seem to be the major cause of symptoms in the study group.
How do those two even go together? They're basically admitting, like me, if you prick my skin, I'm going to give you an allergic reaction, hopefully, if my body's operating properly. What does that mean?
I'm really, really, really allergic to it? Or, oh, my gosh, it's toxic microtoxins must be the culprits.
So it appears the Austin study and other reference overlooked the statement about the allergic fact in that, and they just wrapped on to, must be the culprits, the microtoxins and spores.
And by the way, that was 65 people, only 23%, 15 people had fatigue. 53%, let's call it, even 7 people had response. It's a pretty weak study.
Hardly significant or conclusive. And if you prick my skin again with something, just because I have a response doesn't mean I'm allergic or I'm gonna get sick from a microtoxin. Something penetrated my skin, a foreign substance.
Skin pricking to me is an outdated, non-scientific way to test if someone's, for the purpose of a useful diagnosis. And I'm not a doctor, but I actually have been a state-registered, certified nursing assistant, and I went back to college.
I have quite a diverse portfolio of studies. Besides being an aerospace engineer, I've gone back to school to be a nurse and to be a builder. I've also taken homes at college for residential building construction.
I know how to build houses. I know how to test them for mold. I also know a little bit about medicine, but I'm gonna stay away from going deep into the medicine, not my expertise.
My expertise is logic. And I'm sure someone will say, wait, we have more studies. Ones of just subjects who have chronic fatigue and some who did not see mold or have a mold exposure and did not have mycotoxins in the urine and so forth.
I believe you. My thought is this. I don't want to use someone as a guinea pig by putting them in a moldy environment to see if they suddenly have mycotoxins in the urine.
That would be one way. The other would be, if you're no longer in the moldy building, how come they don't go away? It's because you're not detoxing.
Not because you have mold in your building, because you no longer do.
If there's a simple and direct correlation between mold and water damage in building and mycotoxins in urine, why do those who report they're sick from mycotoxins in mold not show the mycotoxins in the urine after they leave the moldy building?
And there are people who are frustrated and they spend thousands of dollars being treated by doctors, and they've already left their home. They're no longer being exposed to mold, and they still have mycotoxins showing up in the urine.
My hypothesis, and I know this is one a lot of doctors do logically come to, they simply can't detox. We all agree. Even some of them are coming around now too.
We can't ignore the contribution from food. But yet still, it starts with you go to the doctor because you're sick from mold. Why are they even giving you a mycotoxin test?
I am still trying to think of the logic here. Maybe the logic is so that I can see if you're not detoxifying it.
I don't know if it came from your food or your house, but we should definitely test your house to make sure you don't have any because that's something you're not detoxing and you shouldn't be in that environment anymore.
I kind of agree with that if that's the logic. Also think we could find a better test, a cheaper test, mycotoxins aren't cheap to just evaluate. Do you detox in general very well?
What else are you not detoxifying that's a good indicator of a poor detoxification mechanism in your body at this point, and one that we could rapidly repeat daily to see if you're making progress, yes or no.
Because the mycotoxin test is very expensive. People normally only do it once, twice, maybe a year later. You can't really track your progress and labs make error in this variability in your urine.
We all know that. You go to the doctor, you get a urine test. Is it a fresh sample?
How old is it? What do you eat? So there's got to be a better way to evaluate if it's just a detoxification system, because also that presupposes as a doctor, you are saying matter of fact, this is a significant hazard.
And I would agree that mold is a significant hazard and common hazard. How would you pick mycotoxins out of all the other possible contaminants like your water? How about what's in your water that you drink that could be affecting your health?
Why pick on mycotoxins? And all this stuff is expensive, and this is why I'm glad I'm not a doctor. That's a tough job.
So I don't mean to be disrespectful of them. I'm just being factual and logical in regard to this test, because it's not cheap test, and a lot of people are being asked to do it.
And they call me, I'm just the mold inspector, and they literally screen share with me because they're desperate for help and solutions. If I can help them by looking at their urine test, I can't.
And I don't think it's logical, so I don't even want to. Most of the time, actually, I say it's private. I don't even want to look at any of your medical stuff.
But once in a while, before anyone can say anything, I've already started to read it because they put it up on the screen. I read all this to mean that in 70 percent of the cases from this other study, only one toxin was detected.
The aforementioned study appears to suggest that 93 percent of those with chronic fatigue and known exposure to mold have mycotoxins in the urine. And here's the important part, because 93 percent, you have chronic fatigue.
Well, you mean, mycotoxins, association in the urine, kind of, all you with chronic fatigue have it, kind of interesting. How does it mean there's mold in your house? Here's what's next that's key.
Quote, and almost 30 percent of those had more than one mycotoxin. So how is it that 70 percent of all of them with mycotoxin in their urine, the chronic fatigue, only one other toxin was detected? You see, I am the mold expert.
My library, my bookshelf is full of very technical books on mold. Any given mold is capable of producing a toxin. Every mold, I repeat, every mold can produce a toxin, every single one.
And every single one is capable of producing several different ones depending on what bacteria organism is trying to fight. So my point here is, in a water damage building, we always have more than one type of mold, several types.
Yes, I've seen walls covered with just aspergillus slash penicillin. That's not been speciated, by the way. Aspergillus slash penicillin is a class, it's a group.
It's not even a species. The labs grouped aspergillus together in the same column in the lab port as penicillin. It hasn't even speciated it.
If you speciated it, you probably have more than one species. My point is, it's unrealistic to think that when you say, I have mycotoxins in my urine from a building as mold, there's only one mycotoxin in your blood.
So the thought I have is that perhaps this is a clue regarding why those who have one detected are not detoxifying it also. So if it's really from your house, how come you don't have all of them or more than one?
Having only one almost indicates it's not from your house. It's from something food-wise that is spiked with it. Maybe, I don't know.
Here's my next thought. That's a clue regarding why those who have just the one, maybe they're not detoxifying it from their general food building, environmental exposure. It's as if they're detoxifying, which is the good news, all but one.
That's positive and powerful and hopeful because it's a clue to perhaps what the problem is and how we can fix it. And I'm all about get rid of the one and fix the problem. What is the one?
Why does the one differ from person to person? Why is it not the same one for everybody? Or is it?
This is something I haven't done, gone and seen what the one is. And if it's a common one, maybe it's tied to food or maybe it's tied to something biologically that we can fix for that one chemical.
The quick answer is everybody's bodies are different. My quick one is, have we considered interactions with other variables, those outside the body, other chemicals in people's houses, cleaning products?
For example, if you get a PCR test for mold, sometimes it will tell you results skewed by chemicals in household dust.
If what you used to clean your house and you can't even see the residual spray anymore, it's dried up and it's in the dust and microscopic particles can affect the lab test, the PCR DNA lab test, certainly it could affect if theoretically you're
being exposed to mold in your house from the same microtoxins in the same dust sample you're sending to the lab to test for microtoxins. Those chemicals could affect that test and could affect your body.
We should also be asking people not just about their mold exposure, what are you using to clean your house with? Are you using pesticides on your lawn? And what are you eating?
Or maybe all but the one toxin are being partially metabolized, partially by their body. If that's the case, we might study what's working for most of the toxins and for that other partial ability that was removed.
In other words, we get the lab results from micro toxins in urine. What's the level? Well, is it skyrocketed, the one, or is it partial the one?
Maybe your body's trying, it can't remove all of the one. And could this be a coincidence, a random chance? Could it be laboratory error with that one?
The 93% of the one, like 93% of all chronic fatigue people had one, and only 30% had any second one, is a significant observation made with no explanation associated with it in any of these studies.
The authors of these studies are emphasizing it to make their point, that those exposed to mold, aha, 30% of them also had this other one detected compared to the control group that had zero.
Yeah, we get that, but it's not understood or explained why not 100% of all mycotoxins, not to mention that further studies required to investigate this, and as if it's not significant. You know, again, water comes to mind.
What's in the water you drink, particularly fluorine, fluoride. Since I'm in the business, I get so many people ask me things about, can you test for this? Could this be make me sick?
And I buy the equipment, I buy the test. I do it myself before I charge a client. Like, would this work?
Does it detect that? Is that hazardous? What's the detection limit?
How bad is it? In regard to fluoride, I've always been one of those like, yeah, it can't be good to dump sodium fluoride to treat our water.
Mind you, it's not calcium fluoride, the stuff that's good for your teeth, it's sodium fluoride, which is not good for your teeth.
Skipping any kind of controversy in terms of it being a bad chemical, the most conservative people I know, a few of them, they mentioned to me that there are medication from the doctor because they have fatigue, and their doctor thought it was from
the city they lived in. It's a big city, Phoenix, for example, from the fluoride added to the water. In regard to that, I normally actually recommend everyone have on their kitchen sink if you're renting.
I think I talk about this in another podcast, Water, and it might be in my other show, because this is all about mold on this podcast.
And the Daniel Stih Podcast, my big podcast, I think I have one on water and water filters, what works, what doesn't, for what. Everyone should have at minimum a Brita filter, something like it for the chlorine and for the lead.
If you own a house, you probably have an averse osmosis, awesome.
But did you know that averse osmosis only moves like 90, 98% of a lot of things at best, which is fine, unless if you're sick, you should be drinking bottled water from a pure source, not from an RO and not water from the store.
If you read the label, it says purified by reverse osmosis, or consider installing a whole house tank system to remove the specific compounds, i.e. the fluoride. So back to the chronic fatigue stuff in these studies.
If it's as simple as asking, were you exposed to any mold and then suggesting you can draw a conclusion between the group as a control group that said, we did not have exposure to mold, you wouldn't even need to test.
Everyone would just simply say, yeah, I have mold in my house or not. You don't know you need the testing. It's flawed and experimental design.
And a lot of these authors are biased to this pre-drawn conclusion. I would bet some of you even have a vested interest in the technologies used to do the testing. They're looking for what the answer they want.
To me, there's no correlation between mycotoxins in your urine and mold in your house. What it basically shows is you're basically not detoxing possibly in general. So why not find something else to evaluate?
How well is my detox doing something cheaper than a urine test for mycotoxins and with a bigger bandwidth to cover other types of toxins? And it's good to eat healthy and it's good to inspect your house for mold. So that's it for today.
If your doctor suggests medical diagnosis based on mycotoxins in your urine, I just suggest you, number one, one test is never good of any test.
Do a second test because one of tests of anything could have error at the lab and there's variability in all of this depending on what you eat. So get two urine tests and average the results.
Sometime later, I may finish critiquing the remainder of the Austin paper, including misinformation that contains regarding the types of mold testing you might do and proper mold remediation.
There's a large picture on the header of someone in this e-book in a hazmat suit, wearing a backpack like a pesticide applicator might, spraying what appears to be the ceiling over lockers at a school as part of mold remediation.
I'm concerned about the statement in this e-book under this picture. The area, the mold, will be treated with an antimicrobial.
The standard for professional mold remediation states, quite simply, that antimicrobials are not a substitute for removing the mold. There's no space in mold remediation to be wearing a hazmat suit while applying an antimicrobial.
Thanks for listening. I'm Daniel Stih, an engineer, aerospace and a board certified microbial. That means mold viruses, bacteria, you name it.
And my certified microbial consultant certification is accredited by the Council for Engineering and Scientific Specialty Boards, a nationally recognized independent accreditation body.