Preventing Mold and Mycotoxins in your Home

In my practice, I treat patients who are dealing with an overwhelming burden from mycotoxins in their body. Mycotoxins are toxins created by mold when it feels threatened, as a way to help protect itself or survival strategy. These mycotoxins can also enter the human body and build up over time. Mycotoxin overload can present a variety of different ways, but most often shows up in my office as brain fog, fatigue, chronic sinusitis, and digestive complaints. Or even more often, a lot of concerns over their whole body without any clue as to why they’re feeling that way. The short and long-term effects of mycotoxins in the body can be far reaching, and is even known to cause cancer!

Some people are genetically pre-disposed to being more sensitive and reacting stronger to mycotoxins. However, there are things all of us can be doing in our homes and work environments to help prevent the growth of mold, and the creation of mycotoxins. Prevention is a much easier and cheaper process than dealing with the mycotoxins once they show up.

Here’s some of the things I recommend people do in their homes and work spaces as they can, to prevent mold growth and their exposure to mold and mycotoxins.

• Keep humidity to less than 50% to help prevent mold growth.

  • Mold loves damp spaces, and this can be a problem even in Bozeman. If your house or work space has had water damage (even as small as a leaky faucet under the sink or as big as a flood from a clogged toilet), it’s worth having a professional take a look at that space.

  • On a daily basis, keeping humidity in your space less than 50% can help prevent mold from finding a happy place to call it’s home. If you find that your house holds onto humidity, it’s worth considering a dehumidifier, but doing things like running a fan in the bathroom while showering, checking for small leaks from pipes on a regular basis, can also help keep humidity down.

• Regular cleaning of your house and work space is a great way to help remove things that mold loves.

  • Mold loves to live in dust, so managing dust levels throughout the house is an easy way to help keep mold levels down as well. Regular dusting (I most often using a damp rag that should help hold onto the dust a bit better and not saturate the environment with more water), vacuuming, and taking out the garbage on a regular basis, are all simple ways to keep down mold-growing things in your environment.

  • If you compost, I recommend taking the food scraps out daily as well, so they don’t start decomposing and growing mold inside your house. (Also some of my patients have reacted to the countertop/ inside composters, so use those only if necessary. I prefer for my compost to break down outside.)

• Keeping things like drains and faucets clean will also help prevent the growth of mold. If you notice a tap or pipe leaking, fix it as quickly as possible.

• Don’t use cardboard boxes as storage (especially on concrete floors or in the basement).

  • Cardboard just attracts water and water damage, and is more likely to grow mold than plastic boxes. If you use cardboard boxes, make sure to keep them elevated to help ensure adequate airflow so they aren’t as likely to hold onto the moisture and grow mold.

• Keep air flowing/ moving throughout your house.

  • As much as possible, ensure adequate airflow- whether this is during the summer, and you’re keeping your windows open, or it’s winter and you’re making sure that your house fan is running (if you don’t have central air- using fans to keep air flowing throughout spaces). This helps to ensure that mold spores don’t have a stagnant spot to grow and accumulate over time. It also works to mix air between damp spaces and more dry spaces, helping to keep humidity down overall.

• I also keep air purifiers running in my house for many different reasons, but having air purifiers that can pick up mycotoxins, molds and mold spores is a really good way to protect yourself. They combine airflow, and can clean up the air from the mycotoxins, molds, and mold spores, so that you aren’t exposed to those things.

  • Air purifiers can also ensure that your indoor air is kept safe from outdoor pollutants (like wildfire smoke, cigarette smoke, car exhaust, etc.), but also protect you from indoor pollutants (like mold, cooking fumes, animal allergens, etc.).

One important thing that I make sure my patients know if they have mold illness is to avoid cleaning up the mold themselves. More often than not, people will attempt to clean up the mold with something like bleach or vinegar that doesn’t work all the time, and instead of killing the mold, they just end causing the mold to make mycotoxins in an effort to protect itself. If you’ve found mold in your work or house, I recommend finding a mold professional near you to help identify and clean it up in a way that doesn’t just end up exposing you or your loved ones to mold or mycotoxins. (Often the best way is to just remove it.)

I get it. This list can feel really overwhelming! However, taking things one step at a time can make it more manageable and ensure you don’t feel overwhelmed. I created this list to be pretty comprehensive, but start wherever you feel like you can and most need to. One of the easiest ways to diminish how much moisture you’re adding to your house is to make sure the fan is running during and after showers. At work, it may be as simple as dusting your desk more regularly than the cleaning people are, or taking your trash out on a more regular basis.

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