Jodi: Hi, I am Jodi Cohen, your host, and I’m so excited to share my friend Beth O’Hara, who has such brilliant insight on a topic that we don’t know that much about. She is a functional naturopath specializing in complex chronic cases of mast cell activation syndrome, histamine intolerance, and mold toxicity. Such important topics.
Right now, she’s the founder and clinical director at Mast Cell 360, A functional naturopathy practice designed to look at all factors surrounding health conditions, genetic, epigenetic, biochemical, physiological, environmental, and emotional. She designed Mast Cell 360 to be the kind of practice she wished existed when she was severely ill with mast cell activation syndrome, histamine intolerance, mold toxicity, neural inflammation, Lyme, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue.
Her mission today is to be a guiding light for others with mast cell activation syndrome, histamine intolerance, and these related conditions in their healing journeys. You are a guiding light. Thank you for being here.
Beth: Thank you so much, Jodi. It’s really an honor and this conversation might turn on some light bulbs for people for themselves or for their family members. Because here’s the thing, the reason I want people to listen to this is mast activation syndrome is affecting… the studies show up to 17% of the general population – that’s one in six people.
It’s massive. It’s one of the most under recognized, under addressed conditions out there and it’s still rising. It’s still increasing the rate.
So we all need to know about this and what it is.
Jodi: Absolutely. And before I have you delve into your own story, could you just kind of explain headline news, kind of what mast cell activation, histamine intolerance is?
Beth: These are two related conditions, but they’re slightly different. So we talk about mast cell activation syndrome first, and then I’ll talk about histamine intolerance. We first have to talk about what are the mast cells. They’re these frontline defending, sensing immune cells of our immune system. Very, very critical. We can’t survive without them. And what are they sensing? Everything, every molecule of air we breathe, everything we put in our mouths and swallow, whether it’s food, a beverage, a supplement or medication. They’re sensing everything comes in contact with our skin. They’re sensing everything that’s happening inside our bodies.
Every drop of blood that’s circulating, every hormone. How can they do that? Well, they’re in every tissue in our bodies except the retina. Everywhere has mast cells and they’re one of the most complex cells. They have over 200 receptors. That’s 200 different ways of sensing, and they also sense pathogens. So think viruses, bacteria, candida, mold, parasites. And then what are they doing with all that information? They are protecting us and keeping us safe, from primarily if we really boil it down, from pathogens, toxins, and stressors, whether that’s physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, whatever.
Really interesting to probably your community here is that they line every nerve sheath and every nerve ending. So we know essential oils have a wonderful effect on the nervous system. They also have an effect on the mast cells because the mast cells in the nervous system are actually not two separate systems. They’re interwoven and interrelated, and there’s constant communication between these mast cells and the nervous system. They’re actually the interface with the nervous system and the rest of the body. Super critical mast cells hold within them over a thousand different mediators. It’s just mind blowing. Which is what gives them so much versatility in what they can do and their actions.
The best known one is histamine, and this will tie in with talking about histamine intolerance in a moment, but they can release neurotransmitters, neuro peptides, a word that’s become a household word now is cytokines. They’re one of the major producers of all kinds of cytokines, and they can be inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. Lots of other things that people may have heard of, prostaglandins, interleukins, and so on. All these mediators do different things in our bodies. They can raise blood pressure, they can lower blood pressure, they can help us go to sleep. They can help us wake up, they can help us heal. They can help us detox, they can help us get rid of pathogens. They help us heal from injuries. We really should know more about these mast cells, just generally, and a lot is known, but it’s not really been on the forefront people’s attention until lately now.
Mast cell activation syndrome is where these mast cells, I say they go haywire.
They’re not functioning normally anymore. So normal functioning would be you cut your finger, or you sprain your ankle, or you get a cold or some other kind of virus and you get some inflammation and then it heals and it’s fine and you move on and you probably don’t even remember that happened six months or a year later.
In mast cell activation syndrome, and the reason this is so common is we are now flooded with toxins constantly in our air, in our water. We have levels of toxin exposure that have never existed in human history. Children, babies are being born with toxins and the cord blood. On top of that, we have all these electromagnetic fields. Studies show those actually trigger and confuse the mast cells and they start releasing inflammation in the brain. So if you’re wearing your AirPods, I know that those are really great devices, very helpful in all these wearables, but they are triggering inflammation. Release studies are clear on that. On top of that, climate change and building code changes and a number of other things have brought us an epidemic of mold exposures and mold issues.
All this to say we are being battered every day in ways we’ve not had. Not even to have mentioned yet the level of stress we live under. So we get up, you know what’s normal is you wake up, you get the kids dressed, you gotta get their lunch made, you feed ’em breakfast, you get ’em on the school bus. Then you gotta go run your errands and you gotta get to work. After work. You stop and get groceries, you gotta make dinner, you gotta get the kids fed. You gotta make sure they get their homework done. You gotta get them in bed. You gotta pay the bills. If you have time to pay the bills, you know you have time to breathe.
It’s time to go to bed, get up and do it all over again. In the middle, you’re running them to three extracurriculars and you’re trying to get to your reading club. So that’s not a healthy way to live, but that’s normal. And I think the pandemic really gave us an opening to say, do we wanna live this way? But mast cells are responding to all of our stressors, and we’ve got these global stressors, these political stressors at levels that we’ve not had before, and they respond to every single thought we have.
So when we have an onslaught of toxins, we have pathogens. I mean, just coming out of the pandemic, we’ve got these new viruses, we’ve got super bacteria, we have super molds. Now, people aren’t talking about that yet, but super molds are out there. And tickborne infections are highly on the rise. Then we’ve got all of these stressors. So we put all that together and it’s like if the guards of the castle gate, which is kind of a metaphor for your mast cells or your guards of your castle gate, keeping you protected safe. If they never got a break, they had to be on duty. And they’re not just watching and guarding, but they are in constant battle against these threats. You can imagine somebody having to live like that for months and years on end would get very dysregulated. The mast cells get dysregulated, so they get hypersensitive and they start responding to things they wouldn’t normally respond to. And you can get all kinds of different symptoms.
And there’s lots of types of presentations, which is why many people have a hard time figuring out how do we simplify this to make it easy to understand? But people can have skin symptoms, flushing, itching, hives.
They can have respiratory symptoms, trouble breathing, tightness in the chest, sinus symptoms. They can have itchy, watery eyes. People may not have any of those. They may have some of the other symptoms, Gl issues, brain fog, insomnia, muscle joint pain, hormone dysregulation, osteoporosis. All of this has been linked with mast cell involvement. So that’s mast cell activation syndrome.
And if people wanna get into the symptoms, cuz we can spend the whole time doing symptoms and then we’re gonna run out of time. But I do have a free symptoms survey that they can go find on our website. They just go to mastcell360.com. It’s in the menu, it says symptoms survey, and it’s based on the research. Now that’s mast activation syndrome. The mast cells are hypersensitive. They’re overly responsive and producing inflammation, and there’s gonna be inflammation in two or more systems.
So if somebody just has seasonal allergies, that’s not this. If somebody has seasonal allergies, and GI issues and brain fog issues, any form of autoimmunity, people should look into it. Any form, Hashimotos, rheumatoid arthritis, any kind of bowel autoimmunity, anything psoriasis, mast cells are at the core of autoimmunity development.
Also cancers. People who’ve had a history of cancer, they should look into this cuz mast cells are the core part immune system that can lead over there now.
Briefly on histamine intolerance, much simpler. Histamine intolerance is where we have a buildup of just histamine. That’s what we’re looking at, just histamine in the body.
Now, you could have histamine intolerance and mast cell activation and other things, but if you have a buildup of histamine in your body from either over- consuming high histamine foods, or overproducing histamine from mast cells. There’s two other cells that can produce histamine, and your enzymes to break it down are not functioning quickly enough to bring that load down. Then you have an overload of histamine. Those symptoms can show up similarly to mast cell activation syndrome because that excess histamine can trigger those mast cells.
That’s where it’s related, but histamine intolerance is simpler. It’s usually not as severe for people, they don’t have as serious symptoms, and if they lower their histamine foods, they take a good quality Domine oxidase supplement that helps break down histamine. They support those histamine degrading pathways. They’re usually pretty good on their symptoms pretty easily. It’s takes, you know, three to six months, usually turn around easy. Mast activation syndrome takes a multifaceted approach of addressing the root trigger. So hopefully that put it in a nutshell.
Jodi: What an amazing explanation. Thank you so much. Can you share your story, your personal journey to discovering this?
Beth: My story is pretty severe, so I don’t know how many people listening to this have had these experiences, but I share it both because if somebody’s been this ill, they know they can get better. And bring hope. And if somebody’s not been this ill, then they can go, “Oh my gosh, if she got, well, I know I can get well.“
So when I was young, I was seven. We moved to the country into an old farmhouse and nobody knew in the 80s, in the rural Kentucky, what mold was, or we knew what mold was, but we didn’t know mold was dangerous and there was a lot of mold in this house and I was playing outside and loved it, you know, rolling around in the fields and bit by a lot of ticks. So I had mold toxicity, lime, bartonella, and Babesia from a young age. And my health. I had health issues of severe hypoglycemia, significant chronic fatigue. I was kicked in the head by a horse when I was nine and had a serious brain injury, and that started anxiety, depression, insomnia. And it just kept snowballing.
So I was on track to go to medical school and had some scholarship offers, and when I got into my senior year, I crashed so hard. I knew I’d never make it through the coursework, much less the residency, which is 80 hours a week, and I had to turn the scholarships down, which was devastating and become a chronically ill patient.
And I made the routes. I exhausted everything traditional medicine had for me. The meds were making me worse. Some of them were quite scary, the side effects, and my health just continued to deteriorate until in my late twenties I was on a cane. I could barely hobble across the room to go to the bathroom. I didn’t sleep for four years and doctors kept telling me, you can’t go more than a year, a week without sleeping. Well, that’s not true. I went four years. I had severe anxiety, panic attacks. You can imagine what that does to your brain. I couldn’t even read a book anymore and you know, it was like it was a shell of a life. It’s not a life anybody wants to live. It was just a nightmare.
But I knew to my core, somehow I knew there was a way out of this. I didn’t know what or who was gonna have the answers or how I was gonna find it. And this was long before mast cell activation syndrome had a name, so we had no idea what was happening to me and I was itching head to toe. I got down to 10 foods. I lost tolerance to supplements and medications and just, it just kept going, Jodi. But, but here’s a real turning point. So I had exhausted holistic medicine. I had exhausted, I had been told I was crazy so many times. I, I went 10 years in therapy and it helped my coping, but it did not help my symptoms.
But I knew I wasn’t crazy. I knew I wasn’t making this up. There’s no way that, you know, the ground glass feeling in my joints. I was making this up and, I did shamanic work. I mean, you name it, I did, I did homeopathy. I was game for anything that could help. And functional medicine was in its infancy. But I got to the best trained functional medicine this way before we had telehealth like we do now, and we’d worked together for two years. I’d failed everything he wanted me to try, and he finally said, “Beth, I don’t know what else to do. We’ve really exhausted everything I know to do.” And that was devastating because if he didn’t know, I stopped counting at 75 practitioners I had seen to try to figure this out.
So if he didn’t know how was I gonna do this, I sobbed all the way home. It took everything I had just to get there and then to get home. I had a meltdown the whole rest of the day. And then in the morning I woke up and said, what else are you gonna do? You can lie down and die. Or you can figure it out. And I decided I’m gonna figure it out.
So every moment my brain would work, I would get textbooks. I would get medical books. I would get… at least I had the pre-med background, so I had the background to understand what I was reading. And I started putting it together. I started looking at genetic triggers.
I knew at this point I had tickborne illness. But I couldn’t tolerate any treatments for it, and then figured out I had mold toxicity, and that was the big turning point because that was what was holding my nervous system locked in, was the mold exposures I was getting. The mold toxicity and the Bartonella was keeping my nervous system such a wreck that I couldn’t tolerate anything, and I slowly started unraveling.
So this was many years ago. Now the story has a very happy ending in that I did climb out of that ditch and I’m not eating pizza and I’m not eating McDonald’s. I’m, you know, I still take really good care of my health. I still take my supplements. I’ve had so much mold toxicity. I’m on the tail end of the detoxing of it, but I’ve gotten my life back. I just went hiking for four miles. That’s huge for me, for somebody who could barely walk. And I travel. I just got back from two weeks in California. Um, I’ve been able to get all kinds of treatments to prepare the damaged ligaments that were affecting my nervous system and the pain and my sleep. And I have a really good life.
I went back to graduate school and instead of going into medical school, I got a master’s in emergent family therapy and a doctorate and naturopathy, and I can run this practice and I can work full-time and work on really complex cases.
If I can come out of that ditch by addressing the root causes, I think there’s hope for everybody. And no matter how complex or how simple. And the key really is finding what is triggering this. Cuz these things we’ve been told like, well it’s just genetic. I was told, well you have must have some weird genetic thing and you’re gonna be in a wheelchair by the time you’re 35. And I was like, no, I’m not gonna accept that. I don’t believe that. And that’s not what happened. So I think we’ve gotta change that paradigm. Why is this occurring? And those of us are sick like this. The reason I talked about what’s happening with us environmentally is we’re all being impacted. It’s just some of us are the canaries in the coal mine sounding the alarm bells saying, “Hey, this is not sustainable. We can’t keep drinking the tap water with all these chemicals in it and eating the food that’s conventionally grown with all of these chemicals and hormones. And we, we’ve gotta change the way we’re living.” And those of us who’ve gotten so sick from it early, We’re all getting sick. It’s just, is it manifesting early in life like mine did, or later in life with Alzheimer’s and stage four cancers and things like that where we’re all getting sick.
Can we use this? What we’ve gone through to really be leaders to change the world that we’re living in?
Jodi: Yeah, and I think I just wanna acknowledge I definitely had that moment of, am I gonna lie on the floor and die or not? And I think that’s step one is just deciding this is not the hill I’m dying on today. But I do wanna talk about it. It’s interesting because the combination of challenges and kind of the perfect storm of the mold with the lime, with the bartonella…
If you can kind of talk people through how you unpacked things and where you started when nothing was working, like what was step one and how did it really unravel, you know?
Beth: Well, what I think I’d really love to answer that question by talking about the method I used today. Because we could talk about my journey, but it was really windy and nobody wants to do that.
Jodi: And for people that are listening to this and are saying, “Oh my gosh, that sounds like me. What do I do next?”
Beth: And the truth is, I spent so much money, I stopped counting at $350,000. I know it’s over half a million now. We don’t have to spend that much money because we know what we’re doing now and we don’t have to spend all that time. It took me 20 years to get my life back. People can get their lives back depending on how complex in one to five years. Most people, depending on the complexity and the level of sensitivity. So that’s just short, short timeframe compared to what it took me. So after going through all of this and working with hundreds and hundreds of people in the clinic, and also I kind of stalked all of the groups and everybody and what they were doing for years.
And put all this together and then mentoring with some of the top people in this field. I’ve consolidated in what I call the MC 360 method, and it’s five steps. The most important first step is stabilization. And this is so key. Now, this is key for people who have a lot of illness, they’re chronically ill.
They have sensitivities if somebody just has some mild GI issues, but they can take anything they wanna take, they can do a glutathione IV and they’re fine and they can do high dose ozone and they’re fine.
Jodi: The people that are sensitive, a little bit push, it’s like trying to walk across the floor with a glass of water. If you go too fast, you. And then…
Beth: Yeah. So what I’m saying is this method is for those people who are more sensitive, who are failing the protocols. It’s not that this is the only way. There’s ways.
Jodi: I can’t, IV It makes me feel horrid.
Beth: That’s true. And I’ve had people that it made them bedridden for months. So that’s who we’re talking about here. But again, it’s not the only way, it’s just what oversensitive people with mast cell issues. In the stabilization phase, we have to stabilize the nervous system, which is key. And that’s really two parts of the nervous system. A lot of people are like, okay, I’ll meditate with the YouTube video. That’s great, please do it. Or they say, well, I’m doing yoga. That’s good too. Please do it. And you’ve gotta really target the limbic and the vagal nerve systems. So that’s really key in these chronic illnesses, cuz those are what keep us trapped in the sensitivities. And then we have to stabilize the mast cells.
Jodi: How do you stabilize the limbic system?
Beth: There are the couple key programs that are out there right now. The most popular, the Gupta program or DNRS. They’re both excellent. I tell people just to watch some videos of both and see who you resonate with. There’s another one. Some of my clients are trying now called Primal Trust by Kathleen.
Jodi: Is that Annie Hopper?
Beth: Annie Hopper’s, DNRS.
Jodi: And then what’s the third one?
Beth: Primal Trust is one some people are doing. And then there’s another one that’s come out recently called Direct Your Own Care. And so those are four. That last one is good for people with chronic pain.
And then vagal nerve. You’ve probably talked about that a lot here, but there’s different listening programs, sometimes we love…
Jodi: Parasympathetic essential oil. What are your other favorites for vagus nerve?
Beth: Well, I love your parasympathetic. I just actually put this on my feet, but I also like to put it right back here where those nerve branches are. My other favorites are Frankincense and rose.
Jodi: Those are my two favorites too. We carry those. And then what about the other? Do you like any of the other, you know, like there are all these gizmos and gadgets that people can use.
Beth: I don’t have a lot of experience with the nerve stimulators, but I have had some people who like the alpha stem and, and those types of things. A lot of our clients do brain tap. They do safe and sound protocol, and we usually have a practitioner who specialize in it for sensitivities in our clinic, who does it remotely. Some of those things and working on the structural, osteopathic cranial work, those types of things to release pressure on that vagal nerve.
The other thing with the essential oils that I love is that when we smell them and whether we’re, you know, smelling out of the bottle, or we are putting them into diffuser or however we do it. There’s a nerve in the nose. I know you know this, but for your audience, the olfactory nerve goes straight into the limbic system and there’s lots of studies on how these oils help calm the limbic system. So, and that rose is particularly powerful for the limbic system.
Jodi: There’s a lot of research. Linda Buck was, she found kind of olfactory receptors for predator odor and then she like took it a step further. What calms them? It’s rose.
Beth: That makes so much sense. And I love, I have a diffuser. I always have my diffuser back here and always have something that I’m running in there, so, so that’s the nervous system side. On the mast cell side, we have to calm those mast cells.
And I talked earlier about how the mast cells are the interface of the nervous system, the rest of the body. They’re also the interface to autoimmunity, to cancer, to whether or not we’re gonna fight off infection. I’m not saying they’re the only player, but they’re a big player and we can, there’s all kinds of ways we can work with the mast cells. There are gentle entry level medications that some people are very helpful for them.
Some of my top supplements are super simple. Baking soda actually calms inflammation in the body.
Jodi: Do you ingest it? Do you do it in baths? How do you do it?
Beth: Depends on how sensitive people are, but if they can just put some in water on an empty stomach. And if you have high blood pressure, don’t use baking soda.
You can work with a practitioner potassium bicarbonate instead. But if you’re taking blood pressure meds, work with your practitioner so you don’t, you know, mess your blood pressure up. But baking soda inhibits inflammation production. Oh, bicarbonates. It’s actually the bicarbonates that do. So whether it’s sodium bicarbonate or potassium bicarbonate.
Some of the other big ones are quercetin. That one’s huge. I love perilla seed extract, has a wonderful effect on mast cells and Chinese skull cap extract called Bain. It’s both mast cell calming and reduces neural inflammation.
Those are just some great starters and I’ve got more, if people really wanna go in depth, I have a course that goes into some of those, and also in the nervous system to really go into some of these modalities and what to choose.
Then on the mast cells as well, there are essential oils that are mast cell. And we can inhale them. There are mast cells in the limbic system. Plus, if we’re telling the nervous system we’re calm and it’s safe through that olfactory nerve where we’re inhaling the scent because of this interface. The mast cells with the nervous system, the nervous system’s gonna tell the mast cells, oh, it’s safe. You can calm down, you can call off the guard.
Jodi: I have never heard that before. That’s brilliant. So we’re communicating through the mast cells to the nervous system with essential oils.
Beth: You can, yes.
Jodi: That’s genius, Beth. That’s real. I know that works, but I never thought of it that way before.
Beth: That’s the mechanism. And I work with a lot of super sensitive people who are having trouble ingesting anything right now. Sometimes they have trouble with scents, but sometimes they could find an oil that’s working for them. So I really start by just asking, “What do you do well with the smell of, what do you feel well with the smell of?” But a lot of oils have good effects on the mast cells – lavender. It’s really good. Holy basil is a lovely one.
Then some of the others that we’ve got research for, I was looking at my list here, I have to have my little cheat sheet. Things that have peppermint, that have a helichrysum. I know you have some nervous system blends.
Jodi: Helichrysum is so expensive and actually it’s funny that our nerve repair blend is holy basil and helichrysum.
Beth: And I have somebody who swears by it for sleeping. She puts it on her feet every night, and if she forgets she has trouble falling asleep.
Jodi: That would make sense. If you have any kind of pain that’s interfering with sleep.
Beth: Anything we do on the nervous system side, these other modalities are gonna calm those mast cells as well. So because those mast cells have these 200 different types of receptors, there’s no single, just take this one thing and it’s gonna calm them down. Unfortunately, it takes a synergy. And what that synergy is gonna be is different for everybody. But we have some formulas that work for the majority of people in terms of the nervous system, the supplements, the essential oils, and so the, the third part of stabilizing, that’s what we’ll really focus on here. Cause that’s where people will start. Third part would be is remove the triggers. Is that mold? Is that Kim? I have so many people who are super educated and they come in and they’re not drinking enough water, which shocks me. Or they’re using a really poor quality water filter.
And then I run a chemical toxin panel and we look at it and it’s like, wow, you have a lot of waterborne toxins that aren’t getting filtered out.
Jodi: Oh my goodness. I didn’t even think of that. Do you have filters that you recommend that you love?
Beth: My favorite is AquaTru. And the reason I really like them, most of the people I work with are, again, really sick. They don’t have the bandwidth to get under the sink and install something. It’s just plug-in the counter. It’s reverse osmosis. So I do really like that one. And it’s really good quality. And it’s affordable. You don’t have to pay $2,000 for a good water filter and then you can add the minerals back.
So you use like a trace mineral drop. Other big triggers can be EMFS for some people, like not sitting in the room with the router, turning the router off at night, those things can really help. Air quality is another big one, especially for people in cities or people I work with people in rural areas and they have their windows open and then the crops are being sprayed in the field next door, and all that’s drifting into the window.
Golf courses are huge. And then we’ve got all these forest fires going on, so that smoke both triggers mast cells and is gonna trigger the limbic system not feeling safe. So that’s another big one. Then, um, in this phase we also see how if we can optimize sleep, we can optimize adrenals, and hormones, can’t usually get it fixed entirely until the major toxins are out of the body, but we can start making people comfortable.
Then in terms of what people have, they have all kinds of stuff like I did SIBO, SIFO, they’ve got parasites, say that hormone dysregulation name all this stuff. We start with mold, toxins and gently detoxing those. And I have a whole course on how to do that for people that you know how to, from the very beginning, how to look at the testing, how to figure out what it means, how to do a targeted approach.
The one nugget I wanna share with people is don’t get seduced by the wonderful marketing of supplement companies that you can take just one binder. And clear all your mold toxins because this is some in-depth research I’ve done with Dr. Joe Mather and Neil Nathan. We can’t just take a single binder. These mold toxins are very complex structures and as many binders that are targeted for that toxin as you can take the better. So you wanna target the mold toxins you have in your body that you’re excreting. That’s why I like urine end testing.
Jodi: Do you have any favorite binder?
Beth: Well, again, it depends on what people have. But the top ones that we use, most people I work with have a lot of different, one different mold toxins. The top ones we use are activated charcoal. Most people, if they’re not super sensitive, any kind of charcoal’s fine. We use chlorella and it’s very important to get an indoor glass ground chlorella because a lot of chlorella has mercury in it. Then bentonite clay, And bentonite also can have a lot of toxins. So you gotta make sure you’ve got a real clean one. And there are two probiotics. We use a good bit, saccharomyces boulardii, which the cell wall actually has properties for certain mold, toxins.
And rhamnoses has the cell wall has binding properties for certain mold toxins. And then people have a pathogen load like viruses, bacteria that comes after the mold because the mold, this is why I want people to pay attention to mold. Mold is more toxic. I would rather have tickborne illnesses again than to have mold toxicity.
Again, a couple reasons. Mold toxins disrupt every single system in our bodies. Our hormones, our immune system, they’re toxic. They’re not just disruptive, but they’re toxic. They’re genotoxic, they’re toxic to the fetus. So if you have mold toxicity and you’re thinking about getting pregnant, please detox it before you get pregnant, cuz it does pass through the placenta and the breast milk. I’ve seen a lot of children who are sick it’s from mold. Toxins are used in chemical warfare. I mean, they’re that toxic. And then once we inhale mold, which happens in a real moldy environment, you inhale the spores into your sinuses, then you swallow that mucus. We all swallow mucus as gross as it is.
Those spores go into the GI tract and when those spores start to live in us, just like a bacteria virus can live. The bacteria viruses wanna weaken us. Molds growing in us have to decompose our tissue from the inside to get the nutrients out to sustain themselves, and that’s why they are such a big deal for people. And then two mold toxins, ovatoxin and aflatoxin are highly, highly carcinogenic. They’ve been linked with all kinds of toxins, all kinds of cancers. So I hope people look at it because it’s a game changer to get it outta your body. It’s really big.
Jodi: How would people, I mean, sinus issues are obvious. What are some of the other obvious symptoms that people might notice with mold?
Beth: Chronic GI symptoms you just can’t get rid of. SIBO that you do in protocols, it’s not going away. Can’t get rid of candida. Having any kind of dandruff or toenail fungus or what’s called tenia versa color, which is the fungus on the skin where you get white or brown patches on the skin. And what that’s saying is your immune system can’t keep those organisms in check anymore. Chronic vaginal infections.
Jodi: And would those patches be in a certain place, like on the chest or…?
Beth: They’re more frequent in places that stay kind of moist. So in the groins, under the arms, under the breasts, these types of areas. But you can get them anywhere. I’ve had it on my thighs, I’ve had it on my lower legs. And again, it’s where the immune system is getting so affected, you can’t keep up. And there’s a couple telltale signs. Not everybody gets this, but lightning bolt kind of nerve pains where people describe it as ice pick pains, internal vibrations. And I used to feel like there was a low grade earthquake.
And I’d be looking around like, is anybody else feeling this? Oh, it’s me. I’m vibrating on the inside. But those are some of the big ones, it can be bartonella, but mold – frequent static shocks. If you’re the person that’s always touching the dog and you get shocked, you put your socks on, you’re getting stuff out of the laundry, you touch the doorknob. It has to do with the chemical, uh, electrical properties in our bodies that are being disrupted.
Jodi: This is so amazing
Beth: Thank you…
Jodi: Wow. I think we all need your course. What’s it called?
Beth: The mold course is called the MC 360 Precision Mold Masterclass.
Jodi: Well, this has been so fabulous. I’m sure our listeners are gonna learn, wanna learn more and go further with you. How can they find out more? Can you tell us about your coming summit, your classes?
Beth: Sure. So we have, our website is mastcell360.com, and there’s all kinds of blog posts on there. There’s my three courses on there. We have a great Facebook community. We’ve got Facebook Lives most Mondays, but we have an upcoming summit starts October 18, and it’s called the Reversing Mast Cell Activation and Histamine Intolerance Summit.
It’s free for seven days, all kinds of talks. You’re on there with us, which I’m so excited about your interview. Talking about essential oils in these conditions. And all kinds of just incredible top-notch speakers. I’m so proud of the summit and how it’s come together and all the speakers and their knowledge and it’s free. So people should check it out. You can sign up and just listen to one talk, but you know, go on there cuz it’s such just wealth of resources and then we’re gonna have two Facebook Live Q&As that people will find out about if they wanna join it.
So I really hope people will come join the summit with us and I think they’ll learn a lot or share it with somebody who’s had chronic issues and they just can’t figure it out. You know, they’re stuck. It might save their lives.
Jodi: Or improve the quality of their life. Is there anything that we didn’t touch on that you’d like to?
Beth: I think the last one is, I know these are heavy topics and sometimes coming off it can feel like, oh my gosh, where do I start? Well, one, you don’t have to do it alone. And two is to just, no matter what happens every day, have a why. What you’re living for. I lived for my dog and my stepkids and my husband. Have a why, if you’re single, it may be a plant, but why are you on this planet? And to know that if you keep putting one foot in front of another, no matter how dark it gets, no matter how bleak it looks, you will get there.
If you give up, you’re not going. But if you just keep going, okay, what’s the next little chunk I can do? What’s the next thing I can learn about, the next thing I can read? What’s the next step? And then find a guide. Whether it’s what we do at Mast Cell 360, it’s somebody else specializing in this, but find somebody who can guide you through it so you’re not stumbling a lot in the dark because it’s just, it’s too hard to do this alone and it’s too isolating and, and we don’t have to anymore.
Jodi: Well, this was amazing. Thank you for your time and your brilliance. And everyone should go check out your site and your summit. Thank you.
Beth: Oh, thank you, Jodi. I so appreciate your time today.
