💥‼️💥‼️I released a free training that shares the 4 steps I use to help clients reduce eczema, inflammation, and food-reaction symptoms by 50%+ in a few months — without restriction or overwhelm. Watch here: christabiegler.com/blueprint

This week, I’m breaking down the simplest, most practical steps I use with clients to spot mold issues and support cleaner indoor air. After talking with naturopathic oncologist Michael Robinson (his new episode airs next week), I was reminded how foundational air and water quality are for immune resilience and cancer prevention. Mold is far more common than most people realize, and with a few inexpensive tools and a calm, empowered approach, you can get a clearer picture of what’s happening in your home and your body.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Mold symptoms can look like skin issues, sinus congestion, yeast, or frequent illness
• Stress can reactivate old mold exposures
• Check water areas for bubbling floors, stains, or separating walls or baseboards
• Use humidity meters in bathrooms and the kitchen
• Fans and fast drying prevent many issues
• Thermal guns help spot cold or moisture areas
• ERMI dust testing is better than air samples
• Supporting your nervous system helps immune recovery
• I upgraded to Jaspr for stronger filtration and cleaner air

🚨⚡Jaspr Air Scrubber
Commercial-grade, steel-built, and filters 5× more than typical purifiers. Removes 100% airborne mold (per their testing) in 3 hours and may reduce snoring and throat clearing. $799 ($400 off) with code “lessstressed” through 12/1, then it goes back to $200 off.

Episodes Mentioned:

• 245 I split tested urine mycotoxins (mold) and here are my results with Christa
• 317 Environmental Mold Remediation with Michael Rubino, Founder of HomeCleanse
• 334 Mold Remediation Made Easier with Dr. Emily Kiberd
• 336 DIY Mold Inspection & New Construction (Part 2) with Michael Rubino
• 355 Air Quality After Floods and Fires with Mike Feldstein
• CLICK HERE for more mold episodes! 

❓Question for Christa? Submit here: https://www.christabiegler.com/questions

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
More Links + Quizzes: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

SPONSOR:
Thank you to Jigsaw Health for being such a great sponsor. 😎 Use code LESSSTRESSED15 for 15% off during Nov 2025. After that, use LESSSTRESSED10 anytime.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On the show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

Hey, it's Christa, and this week I was interviewing naturopathic oncologist Michael Robinson, and I asked him at the end of the episode, what are a couple things that everyone can do to support their cancer journey or prevention? And he said, air quality and water quality. And the other thing, my takeaways is I always think that sometimes when we're on the right track, there's common denominators.

I love focusing on patterns and common denominators, and. A lot of the stuff that we do in practice I view as cancer preventative. Absolutely. 'cause everything we're looking at is related to giving the immune system better information, stabilizing the immune system, removing any major disruptions, et cetera.

And today I thought, gosh, I should really walk you through some of the things we've learned about mold and mycotoxins. Dr. Robinson brought this up in the episode. He talked about how. Things like mold can essentially change how the cell is expressing to create cancer. I hope I'm gonna say it well enough.

Go back and listen to his episode. I think, I don't know if this will come out right before or right after it, around those same weeks, but I wanted to just share, gosh, we have been through this so much with clients and I think that the best thing I can do is try to share our best practices with you right now.

So why does this matter overall? I. I personally think that this is a skill we simply need to understand. We need to diffuse the fear mongering the crazy expense as much as possible around this whenever possible. So that is what this episode is meant to do, is how can you take a solid assessment and inventory of your current living situation?

Not in fear, hopefully, but from a place of empowerment. That's my entire goal here. Okay, so I think this is pretty dang valuable. I would say more than 50% of our clients have some kind of mild to moderate mold exposure history. If you see a mold, it gives off hundreds or thousands of toxins.

They are really aggressive. They're gonna look really fungal, but they're also going to overwhelm drainage and detoxification. So that can show up on the skim, but it can also show up in neurological symptoms. It can show up in other more severe things as well. Dr. Robinson was talking about it potentially being a thing.

He was essentially saying mold is so immune suppressive that it's hard to have good outcomes and cancer if your immune system's constantly suppressed. So just doing whatever you can to love on that. Something I've seen is that you can have a past exposure. It wants to hang out in your body.

I feel really, i'm passionate about this topic and trying to normalize it because I have this experience. Personally, I clearly had a moldy apartment in college. I can tell you that story another day, not today. Today I'm gonna try to be as succinct as possible, which mean luck and so you can have a past exposure.

It can live inside of you, it can be stuck and stored in the tissue. And, there can be things that happen. Maybe you can go through a stressful period, like of a month or a chronically stressful period and everything falls apart because it uses up a lot. The stress uses up a lot of nutrients.

The nutrients then are the workers at all the machines that are helping you stay afloat. And when suppress or deplete all the workers that make the systems work, things start to fall apart a little bit. So that's a really common scenario I've seen. People are getting along okay.

And then something happens and things fall apart. From a kid perspective, kids are not as developed as adults. There's multiple ways to look at it. And then about half of us don't really metabolize these toxins very well as well. We have these specific genes. So anyway, I just think it's everywhere.

It's always been everywhere. Our building materials now. Are really porous and very mold loving. Mold loves dust essentially. And so sheet rock is just a bunch of compressed dust. A lot of plywood is a lot of compressed material. And so anything that's been wet for more than 24 hours can be a problem.

And I like to, again, my entire goal here is just to normalize this. This doesn't mean you're a. This doesn't have anything to do with being dirty. Three years ago, I had a record hailstorm in my area. In that year I had four water intrusions. I've mentioned this several times. We had like issues around the windows, et cetera, and so today I was actually contemplating it in a thermal gun.

That shows like areas of installation things. And I was actually just reflecting on how much DIY work and how much building experience I had from building our house back in around 2010. And again, there's a lot of things in life that are skills that we are like, man I didn't think I wanted to know anything about this skill, sometimes life has other plans. Okay, so first of all, the first step to anything is assessment. And so first of all, if your symptoms are pointing toward these types of symptoms, it would make sense. And there's a real, there's, so I have a three page assessment. I actually give clients, I'm gonna give you a really brief one.

So if there's skin issues, but specifically at the base of the scalp, if you're having rashes in the armpits, the groin, if you have swollen lymph nodes, if you have sores around the nose, rashes around the mouth. Unproductive sore throat, meaning sometimes you wake up with a sore throat. This is usually a bad sign that you got a big exposure, the unproductive sore throat where it's like a little bit sore, but then you wake up and then it's gone.

Mouse sores from citric acid can be a history of mold stuff. Chronic sinus congestion and throat clearing can usually be fungal, white coated tongue or any kind of fungal symptoms, vaginal stuff, any kind of recurrent yeast infections. Even interstitial cystitis can be mold history. Athletes' foot recurrent yeast infections, just itchiness in general.

Any kind of allergies to mold, anything like that. Frequent illnesses more than like quarterly. Those are, 'cause it suppresses the immune system. So that's an extremely surface level assessment from the body perspective. And then what I recommend, I think the cheapest thing we can do, that you can test the body.

I've talked about that. I've talked about, I've compared tests. I've used the same urine on two different tests. I've got, I'll link that in the show notes, that episode. But I'm gonna keep going on what we do now. So I think I like to be. Conservative on testing costs. I like to do what's gonna be effective and helpful and supportive and actually change the game for people.

And I think finding out if we have a run a miles to moderate mold exposure just makes your life better. So then what we say is we want you to do a visual inspection. And so on a visual inspection, here are some things that I would maybe want you to do. And again, don't just think I know none of us have time, but.

you pay someone $300 to come in and do two air samples, I think this is a waste of money. It's not gonna do that much. It's only gonna if it's absolutely horrendously terrible, maybe you'll see something, you wanna look for any signs of any damage. I would encourage you to look around water sources under sinks, around showers and tubs where flooring is.

Is there any bubbles? Cracking discoloration, any separation of drywall, any baseboard separating from the wall, all kinds of things. I have someone in my life, I was coaching her through this and she's a college student and she was telling me how the baseboard was separating from the wall and like how she started to get sick six months after moving into this basement apartment.

And she ended up in the er 'cause she felt like passing out. That's pretty significant exposure. I was like, absolutely, this is probably her problem. We did some testing, talked through it. How you feel in certain rooms, can be a more severe thing. Again, it doesn't have to be that severe.

So after you do a visual inspection. The next thing, I think this is pretty innovative and really inexpensive, is I think everyone could get $20 of humidity meters. Don't get one. Get at least enough for all your bathrooms in your kitchen at minimum, because those are the areas with all the moisture. And so this is all about moisture control and humidity control because mold is gonna grow at too high of moisture.

We work with a lot of skin issues, so too low of humidity can also be an issue. It really will draw you out. I think this is. More important right now as we hit the winter and we're using forced air dry heat for most places. I have geothermal heat luckily. So mine's a little bit more moist. I've got a cabin that we Airbnb that has a fireplace and it's got forced air dry heat.

And it's a great experience for me 'cause I'm like, whoa, it's dry here. Once it gets under 40% humidity can be really dry. So there's been times with that cabin, we had mold in a carpet when we got there and I had to use a dehumidifier. It's part of how I learned that there was mold in the carpet.

Brand new white dehumidifier, little tiny pieces of mold or like little specs of mold in the water tank. Pulled that out a lot less mold symptoms. It was great, but now when it's really dry, I need to actually add humidity back. So the leather on the couch isn't cracking, it's for the health of the house and the health of the human.

When the humidity is too low, you'll have more nosebleeds and things. So anyway, you can get a handful of humidity meters for sure, for less than 20 bucks online. Put one in each bathroom, kitchen, anywhere where there's moisture. I think you know where you sleep is an important. Area, but I've got some other tools for that as well.

So if you put them in the bathrooms, I want you to know, like after a shower, the humidity, you should have a baseline humidity. In most places, you're gonna need to look up for your area. 'cause some of you live in coastal regions. I live in the Midwest, it's landlocked. You know what's going on outside. I had fog this week, so of course the humidity was super high outside.

It was 75 to 90%. It's gonna change things. So just use your. SPR a little, right? And keep that in context. But I would encourage you, we actually give people a little sheet to fill in to look at some trends for just a little bit. So you should have a baseline in the bathroom, no one's showered all day.

That's your baseline, what is it? And then someone's gonna shower. It's gonna be probably a hundred percent when they shower, but within two hours, usually it should go be back to baseline. If it's not, you might have some ventilation issues. Old houses, they're maybe not gonna vent very well. You wanna consider that those vents sometimes are going into.

The ceiling cavity and then they're not being vented out properly and so they're actually adding a lot of condensation, right above your head. And so that can be an interesting thing. I've been in my attic and poked around. I had replaced the vents in the bathrooms mostly 'cause I hated them, the lights that were in them.

Last year, so I got to be up in the attic. It sucked. But you could use the flashlight and kinda look around for things. It wasn't that bad. It was fine. I put a really good mask on 'cause there was fiberglass insulation up there, just using my head here. So humidity meters, they're huge.

I actually had another colleague who works with skin issues. She's thanks so much for recommending humidity meters. They like helped me realize I had this leak with the dishwasher. So anywhere you've got an area where there's like plumbing going to and from there could be. Issues with leaks. So I'm always just being aware of that wherever possible, having drip pans.

So underneath my washer I automatically have a drip pan no matter what. It's a choice I make, just, I think it's just generally smart. So anyway, humidity meters can really, for a low price can help direct you to there could be some issues with things. Then next thing I would do, just to keep this kind of brief, there's some other lower cost things you can do, but they're just not as.

Maybe effective, potentially. I think what I might suggest from there is potentially a thermal gun. Now those, I am looking at one right now online. And again, I could have recorded this after I tested it, but these are gonna show you this could save you a ton of money really, with your home, because of course, if things are poorly insulated with a lot of things are not well insulated, depending on age and whatnot.

And when you add insulation, that can be very supportive and reducing your heating costs potentially. Right there, there's a lot of nuance there, but you can get a thermal gun and it will show you cold patches. And so it'll like light up if there's an area that. I think the external walls will be the tricky part, and I think generally that's tricky around windows and doors.

Another episode that I might direct you to was Dr. Emily Berg came on and she shared how she dealt with mold stuff at five homes and she asked Hashimoto's would always flare her Hashimoto's symptoms and she had five inspectors and none of 'em found mold. So this is why I'm harping on like, how can we be as smart as possible with.

Low cost tools and these, she basically, she went through a lot of these tools also and she said, these are what some of the inspectors were using. So she's I just got my own tools. Something I haven't done yet but you can do is there's inexpensive little boro scope cameras you can get that are standalone or you can attachment, attach them to your phone.

That's been something I've been wanting to do behind. We have a tile shower at the Airbnb cabin and I'm sure it was poorly installed 'cause. The builders of the house did a lot of things really poorly. And it's a great experience 'cause I'm like, oh, you forget, you don't realize some things are done poorly until you experience them.

And I don't spend a lot of time there. I'm not really getting any kind of symptoms from there. When I used to be there for several days in a row, I'd get significant fungal symptoms 'cause I'm a little bit of a canary in a coal mine. 'cause I have a. I have mold history and exposures and and that's a long process to clear all that out.

I don't think we get to ground zero. I just think we get to ground no symptoms most of the time at first. So those are some of the simple 

basics.

So a while back, my college age daughter shared with me that she was tossing and turning and waking up several times per night after a period of stress. We started her on magnesium and her sleep immediately improved. I personally think magnesium should be your first thing to try if you're having trouble sleeping or staying asleep, especially tossing and turning, and it's a no brainer if you have any restless leg issues.

The thing about magnesium at that is that there's a lot of types of magnesium that will give you symptomatic relief, but I like to steer my clients and loved ones to a more absorbable form of magnesium because most big box magnesium is mag citrate, and that will push bowels, but it can be damaging to your teeth if it's used daily and it's not the most absorbable.

Rather, jigsaw Health makes one of my favorite great tasting magnesium powders called Mag. So that has magnesium glycinate, my favorite calming and absorbable type of magnesium. It's available in both a great tasting powder and to-go packets. And they also make a product, that's great for slow release, especially if you have restless legs called Meg, SRT.

So if you are not falling asleep easily, or if you have disrupted sleep, you can try at least 200 milligrams of. Great magnesium like Mag Soothe or mag, SRT, especially if you have restless likes, it works better to take this at least 20 minutes before you go to bed to allow it to kick in. And you can get a discount on all of jigsaw's amazing products, including Mag Soothe at Jigsaw Health with a code less stress, 10.

Now you can use. Less stressed, 10 as many times as you want with every order at Jigsaw Health, which is honestly pretty unheard of with coupon codes. So enjoy the magnesium from jigsaw with my code less stressed, 10.

The other easy button we now do is we encourage clients if they're checking yes. The symptoms are too significant here. We wanna make sure we're not dealing with an issue.

It gives us a decent idea of how big the issue is. We recommend clients do an IMI ERMI test. It's a dust test, and we also recommend that they do a consult. With an environmental expert in and out, it's under 400 bucks, which is really good. Really good. So we've arrived at this because it's a lot simpler.

It's more. There's just some issues sending people out to inspectors. It can be like running the thousands of dollars. And so we just want people to be able to make, do the most cost conscious things and there's so many cost conscious things we can do. And before you move in somewhere. Do one of these, please.

I've had a couple people recently move. I'm not saying it's super common to move, but I've had a couple of people recently move and they moved into Moldier homes than they had left, so make sure you're testing the next home. There's a lot I could say about that and the nervous system impacts of it in general.

I do wanna give some lift service to the fact that when you are attending to your nervous system, you are communicating to your immune system safety and you can. Calm reactions in general. This is why good practitioners always recommend nervous system support and anytime there's been any kind of chronic issue or anytime there's something really negatively communicated in the immune system.

The last thing I wanna say, and it's, this is just timely. This took me a year to arrive at. I've got two brands of air purifiers at home. I've got a whole air purifier handout from testing different things we've pulled costs the square footage that they filter the micron size that they filter, et cetera, et cetera.

And, it's a great resource. And so Inteper has some great low cost filters. They're a couple hundred bucks, they're about bedroom sized. A lot of times I'll recommend that at least. But last year I interviewed Mike Feldstein and he owns Jasper. Interesting episode. We'll link that one also.

And I think his background was really in, oh, assessment and remediation. I can't remember exactly. He did a lot of stuff with like forest fire stuff and whatnot. He just got really passionate about air quality and how big of an issue it was. And he wanted to come out with an air purifier. That was just better.

That's great, right? Like when we have this type of integrity behind a product, usually that's how we come up with good things. So he made a steel casing, not plastic casing, which is not the that big of a deal, but their air purifier is. Rated as a scrubber. So it's about five times more filtration than a regular air purifier.

So I also have a rabbit air purifier, 'cause it was like pretty, and it was wall-mounted and I paid 7 99 for it a couple years ago. And right now Jasper has a $400 off coupon code. So last year I passed on this. I said I don't need a purifier, but. They've got some interesting claims. Their studies are, that within an hour they can scrub through or clear all airborne mold, 97% in an hour, and within three hours it's a hundred percent clearance of airborne mold.

And so for this reason he's got some really small in-house studies where snoring has improved when you turn it up to not maintenance volume, but like level three, like a little higher than it would automatically run. Improvement in snoring, and then throat clearing. Throat clearing is usually fungal anyway, but so I went ahead and bought two Jasper's this week because I have a $400 off coupon code.

It's, the code is less stress just this month. And then on the back end, they offered a $500 off coupon codes. So the second one was 6 99. And I do consider it my job to test things. Test things in general. I test a ton of skincare products and healthcare products and et cetera, and I'm always trying to figure out what would be best for people and in general, and I just had this feeling.

I was like, I need to record something and just talk you through the lowest cost things that you can do. I never tell people they have to go buy a new air filter if they've got like a whatever, unless it's like just totally nothing. Dr. Robinson said, something is better than nothing. I absolutely agree.

Most filters are essentially just a fan with a filter on it, right? So you could technically make your own, but this is rated as a scrubber. And so I bought it because I thought, I feel like I'm getting, I wasn't comparing apples to oranges. It was an orange to a watermelon.

I view the Jasper as like a bigger, more superior product. From the reviews and the specs and the other things I've looked at, especially with using other filters, and again, I think Mytel peers are really lovely as well. I can't wait to compare these. I'm happy to do a follow up on this, but basically I look at it as I'm getting.

A watermelon for the price of an orange, I'm getting a higher quality product for less of a thing. So the thing is even if you are dealing with mold stuff, I don't think we get to zero mold. Michael Rubino, not to be confused with Michael Robinson. He's been on the show and we did a couple good episodes.

He's got a construction background and does some remediation. I think his. What is his company called? Can't remember right now, but we can link his episode as well. Learned a lot from him, but something he really said was like, get as much of dust outta your home as possible. 'cause it's what mold wants to feed on.

But that's the thing. If there's been drywall that has been saturated and not dried out within 24 hours. So again, another really simple tool is having a fan. I cannot tell you how many times I have had issues in my home as a homeowner. And I have used the heck out of a fan. I literally just had our I'll call it sewer.

It's not exactly sewer, but like our drain field backup. Last week, I had like water running outta my utility room in the basement because we, our ground is saturated. The drain field isn't keeping up, all this stupid stuff. I can't believe I even know. And I was running the dishwasher and the washing machine at the same time.

And the drain field's can't do it, and really the, this, the, I guess the, I'll call it the sewer needs to be pumped essentially. Anyway, good times. Good times. Being an adult. Being a homeowner, and I look at this topic as I'm really just trying to help you breathe the cleanest air, especially 30% of the day while you were sleeping.

I cannot believe the issues with people with sleep issues. Some interesting stories. Lately I had a client moved into a different home. This is fascinating. I wanna share this as well. Moving into a different home. I've only seen this a handful of times, but I can't imagine how it could be possibly even more common.

So I wanna make sure we're adding it to our checklist for people to consider. But she was sleeping on the opposite side of the house of her bedroom 'cause her husband was sick. And she was jerking awake in the night. She had just moved into this new home. She was jerking awake at night. It was fortunately she was renting.

And I can't remember how she decided to check this, but long story short, the gas company checked and she had a gas leak and it was slow and steady and it was. Disrupting her sleep and she was having, major anxiety situation going on at this time. So like this toxic gas in the atmosphere, from this leak. And yeah, it's just bonkers. I just want you to have the best health outcomes, the cleanest air, and I guess I'm. Weirdly passionate about cancer, and I always say to some of our skin clients, and I don't think it's necessarily well received early on, I say this as we get farther on, it's thank God your body's just showing this as skin stuff.

At least it's showing you this on the outside. At least it's something you can do something with. Like having a skin issue is just a signal from the body that there's stuff to do on the inside. And it's I can be frustrated and think my body sucks, or I can be in gratitude that at least it's showing me something I can do something with.

And I think that everything we're doing, whether it's getting some kind of air purifier or not, all of this is cancer prevention. Anyway, I can let you know. You can let me know if you're interested. In my air Pure. I will say like I've had some, I know for a fact my $200 in inteper filters are pretty solid.

I've had some stories about that where I've had a water experience a while back and I could smell the difference with different things. But I'll be really interested to see. I may or may not give the second. Air scrubber to my in-laws. 'cause I'm just really curious. They sleep in separate bedrooms because of snoring and my father-in-law curl his through all the time, which of course I could help him with.

But some people, are hard to help. And I used to say that with love, some people there's a lot, there's like a lot of recurrence that could happen 'cause of what you're exposed to, et cetera. So anyway, I think no better do better. I hope that you found this brief. Episode, solo episode helpful.

I would love to continue to do more. Pay it forward episodes, but I just wanted to tell you where we are with things. I've got a lot more information about this and a lot of feelings about it, but I hope that this is helpful to you, whether you are a human, a homeowner, a practitioner for your own clients.

And yeah I'm curious. Any feedback you have, you can always send a message. I think we've got a, anyway, I think right here in the app it'll even say send fan mail or send a message or something. So happy to hear back from you and your feedback on this or any other questions you have. Have a great day.