What is mold illness?

Mold illness, also called Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), is a multi-system, multi-symptom illness triggered by exposure to biotoxins produced by mold in water-damaged buildings. It affects the immune, neurological, hormonal, and gastrointestinal systems and is frequently misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia, lupus, multiple sclerosis, or chronic fatigue syndrome.

What are the symptoms of mold illness?

Mold illness symptoms span multiple body systems and include fatigue, brain fog, memory problems, headaches, joint pain, muscle aches, shortness of breath, chronic sinus issues, sensitivity to light, mood changes, anxiety, depression, digestive problems, and sleep disturbances. Symptoms often worsen in water-damaged environments and improve temporarily when away from them.

Why do most doctors miss mold illness?

Most conventional physicians are not trained in Environmental Medicine and are unfamiliar with mycotoxin testing or CIRS diagnostic criteria. Symptoms overlap with many other conditions, and standard lab panels often miss mold illness entirely. Specialized testing including urine mycotoxin panels, inflammatory marker panels, and HLA-DR genetic testing are required for accurate diagnosis.

How is mold illness diagnosed?

Mold illness is diagnosed through a combination of a detailed patient history, environmental exposure assessment, and specialized laboratory testing including urine mycotoxin testing, inflammatory markers (TGF-beta, MMP-9, C4a), HLA-DR genetic susceptibility testing, and visual contrast sensitivity testing. At Deeper Healing, diagnosis begins with a comprehensive intake questionnaire and is confirmed through targeted lab panels.

How is mold illness treated?

Effective mold illness treatment requires first removing the patient from the source of exposure, then systematically reducing mycotoxin burden in the body using binders, detoxification protocols, IV nutritional therapy, cellular cleanse therapies, and immune system support. At Deeper Healing, treatment follows a sequenced protocol that addresses each phase of recovery — elimination, detoxification, and rebuilding — in the correct order.

Do I have to live in Charleston to become a patient at Deeper Healing?

No. Deeper Healing serves patients from across the United States. Many travel to Charleston for the Stay + Heal program, an immersive multi-day treatment experience designed specifically for patients who cannot access this level of care locally. Mycotoxin home test kits can also be shipped to your location before your first visit.

What is mycotoxin testing and do I need it?

Mycotoxin testing is a urine-based laboratory test that measures the presence and levels of specific fungal toxins in your body. It is one of the most direct ways to confirm biotoxin exposure. Deeper Healing offers both in-office and mail-in home testing kits. If you have unexplained chronic symptoms — especially fatigue, brain fog, or immune dysfunction — mycotoxin testing is an important diagnostic step.

Does insurance cover mold illness treatment at Deeper Healing?

Deeper Healing is a self-pay practice. Most environmental and functional medicine services are not covered by conventional health insurance. However, financing options are available to make treatment accessible. Patients frequently find that the investment in root-cause treatment reduces or eliminates the ongoing costs of managing symptoms through conventional care.

Can mold illness cause autoimmune disease?

Yes. Prolonged mycotoxin exposure and the chronic inflammatory response it triggers can activate or worsen autoimmune conditions. Mold illness is frequently misdiagnosed as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and sarcoidosis. At Deeper Healing, we assess environmental toxin exposure as a root cause in all autoimmune presentations.

How long does it take to recover from mold illness?

Recovery from mold illness varies significantly depending on duration of exposure, mycotoxin burden, genetic susceptibility, and whether the patient has been removed from the source. Some patients experience significant improvement within weeks of beginning a targeted protocol. Others with longer-standing illness and higher toxin loads require months of treatment. At Deeper Healing, patients typically report meaningful progress during and shortly after their initial treatment period.

Watch on DrTalks

Nick Pineault — on body burden and what the world is asking us to carry

Modern environmental exposures accumulate quietly — and they add up. Plastics, heavy metals, mold toxins, PFAS, contaminated water, and EMFs are present in nearly every modern environment. Individually, each one may seem minor. Together, they form a cumulative load that the body must continually process and clear.
Environment often matters more than genetics. While genetic predispositions exist, it is frequently the environmental trigger that determines whether the body stays in balance or moves into dysfunction. Understanding what is being added to the system is often the first step in supporting the body’s natural ability to recalibrate.
Healing is possible — and it begins with awareness. The body has remarkable inherent capacity to support its own balance when the load is reduced and its natural pathways are supported. Small, consistent changes — when made over time — can make a meaningful difference. Individual experiences vary.

About the Expert

Danielle Howley

Patient Advocate and Founder of Deeper Healing

Danielle Howley co-founded Deeper Healing by literally stalking Dr. Bauerschmidt. She was on a mission – determined to create an innovative, compassionate healing center she desperately searched for but could never find during the ten years her husband was chronically ill and bedridden (healed for years now and the inspiration behind Deeper Healing). Danielle holds a Bachelor of Science from Drexel University with a Minor in Psychology and attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where she focused on Education, Culture and Society. She's spent her entire career at the intersection of marketing and health/wellness. For twenty years, she ran a marketing consulting firm building campaigns for major clients including Aetna U.S. Healthcare, University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Novartis, Chester County Hospital, and Vanguard. Her personal journey into environmental medicine began when her firstborn arrived prematurely, pushing her to create a safe, non-toxic home environment. That commitment intensified when her husband became mysteriously, severely ill. Eventually, she combined her professional expertise with her hard-won personal experience to help others heal naturally through Deeper Healing—a dream come true.Through the years, Danielle became intimately connected to so many patient recovery stories that she wanted to create a platform for them to share their healing journeys in their own words. That vision became The Deeper Healing Podcast.

Guest

Nicolas Pineault

Nick “The EMF Guy” Pineault (*like the wine*) is the #1 bestselling author of The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs and an advocate for safe technologies. Through his unconventional approach blending humor, science and common sense, he’s becoming a leading voice on the topic of electromagnetic pollution and how it affects our health. For the last few years, Nick has been interviewing some of the best minds on health and technology and facilitating the creation of courses and educational materials to raise awareness on this very important issue. You can find more about Nick at TheEMFGuy.com.

More from Nicolas Pineault on DrTalks

If you have a condition, it can give you hope that, well, if I lower my body burden, the condition might get better or resolved itself. All chronic conditions have one component of it that is causal through the environment.

That's not even the radical thing to say. At least, you know, If You Have Lead Exposure, It Can Impact Your Pancreas. It can impact blood sugar. Welcome to the Deeper Healing Podcast.

I'm your host, Danielle Howley. This is for everyone who's been dismissed, misdiagnosed or told to just live with it and refuse to accept that answer.

You're going to hear amazing patient recovery stories, raw and real in their own words. People who found answers after everything had failed them. you're gonna hear from medical experts we trust that are pioneering new approaches to healing the body because we deeply know we're designed to heal.

Let's dig in. Welcome, everybody. I am super excited to have Nick Penalt here today, coming in from Canada. If you're not familiar with him, he is an amazing investigative journalist.

And before that, He was an EMF expert. He has spent a long time in his career, really educating families about the effects of the EMS. I'll let you speak to how you're broadening your scope, but he is the producer of the movie Body Burden, The Toxins We Carry.

I just want to say out loud, you are creating a mission, an actual mission for people to understand what the heck is going on in the world. What I love about the movie so much is it takes a regular person, and when I say regular, I mean those people that are just spending good money on toxic junk every day.

I see them every at the food store. And you literally take them on a journey that lets them go, oh, wait a minute. wait a minute, and it's an amazing awakening.

That is an, it is amazing. Awaken. Everybody should see this film. And so it available. It's available for free. You can see it anytime you sign up, you get it.

you can stream it, You watch it it great. Okay. So that just kind of lays the land for anyone who doesn't know about it and we'll put all the links in the, in, the notes here.

so Nick, tell me, like, give me a little bit of how you got here, Well, you know, I started 16 years ago writing about health. At the beginning, it was really just an interest because I wanted to do bodybuilding.

That's like my 2009 Nick that I was 120 pounds, very thin. I'm like, okay, I want to put out muscle mass. I started following people online about food, nutrition.

But very rapidly, through watching a couple of documentaries, one of them is Food Matters or Food Inc. They talked about, you know, pesticides and the contamination of our food supply.

And I was very alarmed, as someone with a background in communications. So I kind of was on that path to journalism. Although I never ended up going to a journalism school, copywriting professionally for TV.

But at the same time, I knew that, you know, writing for a TV, barely watched TV even at that time. So I know it wasn't my calling. On the side I was starting a blog and, uh, connecting with people online about nutrition, but really my interest was environmental toxins.

I felt like, okay, a lot of people talk about, carbohydrates and the importance of, reducing your calorie if you want to lose weight, But I'm like wait a minute guys, there's a hormonal effect of certain substances that leach out of plastic containers called BPA, and it's replaced with BPS that is something even more toxic.

You guys don't get it. And I was in that conversation in like 2010. No one really understood it except a small, you know, a couple thousand people that were following my work at the time.

It kind of led me into talking about nutrition and many other topics, but I the contamination in tap water, following, you know, sometimes articles from the EWG, but sometimes following some of the health pioneers, Dr.

Joseph Mercola, for example, and then discovering Children's Health Defense very, very early in my career. And then starting to read these other voices that we're talking about how things are completely messed up.

We are getting poisoned from, the tap, water to the air to, to plastics to our clothing, that's plastic. And I was like, oh my God, this is very overwhelming.

And started talking about it to try to distill it down in a way that is digestible on my newsletter. Eventually, it led me into EMFs, which is a whole other can of worms.

I started in 2016 looking into electromagnetic radiation emitted by cell phones and Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cell towers. It dug in that rabbit hole, the reading one book after a deed.

I did not know I would spend 10 years and counting on this almost exclusively. And yet here I am, you know, 10 Years later, have been talking about EMS, having, on hundreds of interviews on stages, I was invited everywhere.

Part of me was, you know, for many years I felt like an imposter because I'm like, I was early 30s or even late 20s, no former experience in EMFs. No former experienced in journalism.

You know some people call me a blogger and I am like… What am I? I don't know. I just want to talk about EMFs. Guys, this matters so much and I was screaming from the rooftops and then people started inviting me like, hey, what have you discovered?

And I'm like well, I've discovered that this is severely underfunded, that we should use precaution, You know, there is a synergy between EMFs and the cell phones and Bluetooth in your home and all other environmental toxins.

And it kind of led me into 2023, I got in touch with Dr. McCarter, who used to be at Deeper Healing, is now in Dallas, practicing in I am seeing a lot of these people that follow you are what we can say, you know, suffering from the EMR syndrome used to be called electro hypersensitivity.

And these many people do not understand what it's like because they had minor symptoms related to EMS, but some people have symptoms so major they cannot even live in a city.

I mean, some People can feel this sort of oppressive feeling or have weird heartbeats or start feeling this stress response even with just one single phone in a room.

This is how bad it is for some of these people. And some people wrote to me in the last 10 years and they said, Nick, I'm getting worse. I don't know what to do.

Well, look, as a citizen journalist, i'm going to send you to doctors, but I know which one understand it. Some people in functional medicine understood EMS a little bit.

But then I found that people like Dr. Neil Nathan and, you know, Lynn Patrick talked about EMS and she was from environmental medicine. And then Dr Stephanie McCarter also was also from Environmental Medicine.

I said, what is this Environmental medicine? I didn't hear a lot about it and then Dr. McCarter said, look, I am at the Deeper Healing Medical Center.

Come and see what we're doing. It is different and we are seeing people with environmental poisoning. We're getting them better, which is a rare thing to hear from.

my perspective of journalists, because most people have this narrative when they are environmentally injured, they're essentially doomed, right? The environment made me sick, like I had more toxicity and now my health will never recover.

And I discovered through, you know, the different stories I heard like that. And then other stories who told me, no, I was able to recover and I used XYZ or this other thing, or I saw a thousand different doctors and kind of had my own journey, but I wasn't able come back to a relatively good level of health.

So I said, okay, well, one thing is for sure. If you are environmentally injured or you have any chronic issue, maybe you haven't found the path to recovery.

But so far, I don't believe in, okay, you're doomed to something. I saw people with stage four cancer tell me, no, I was able to heal. So I said, okay, well, at a minimum, we could say, maybe you don't have a lot of chance if you have stage 4 cancer, but there is one chance.

And it's not guaranteed, it is not that, this magic pill will heal you, But we have to keep the hope. I want to add to that. And I'm seeing this a lot where people are coming in with their genetic testing.

I feel like it's the shiny object right now is like, I want to get my genetics tested. So they're looking for like these snaps or these predispositions to disease and And literally they're like, oh my God, I'm going to get cancer.

Oh my god, i'm gonna get Alzheimer's. I can't do talk, whatever the thing is. You see people doing dramatic, proactive, preventative things on a genetic test.

And this is what they are saying is genetics is the gun but environment is pulling the trigger. The good news is if it is environment, There's a ton that can be done.

You are not destined for any of these diseases. That is the hopeful conversation. It's like, what's your body burden? I've seen a lot of this too. My kid just got diagnosed with diabetes.

They're telling me it's genetic, but we don't have any diabetes on either side of our family. How is it genetic? I've heard that like literally a hundred times last year.

And then why are all these kids getting diabetes all of a sudden? Are we genetically defective all of a sudden? No, that's not it. So there's a much bigger, bigger picture, a bigger onion to unpeel back.

And that what I love about people who are seeing this film is it takes you on a journey. I feel like the EMF people are so far down the tunnel. that I always say, if you're failing the electromagnetic stuff, because that's a much smaller percentage, or that are cognizant of it, that they recognize that it's happening, I should say.

I think it is affecting everybody, but usually their bucket is really high, their body burden is very high. They have a lot of other stuff going on and I really think that is what you really unveiled in this conversation and even your own self-discovery.

It was kind of, it was my hope to, you know, why I decided to go first? It wasn't interesting preposition like, okay, let me go there. And then we started thinking about a documentary.

I'm like. Well, what if I discover like one of the places in the world where they can get people with electro hypersensitivity better. Isn't that something like everyone keeps telling me on my newsletter that it's impossible.

At a minimum, it's not like they have found a magic bullet, but they haven't approach, right? This approach of environmental medicine, I know that they're getting right because I knew Dr.

McCarter and then I met Dr B and clearly the physicians there, when I entered the place, these guys know everything is done the right way. So at a minimal, It's a good example of how to get things right.

And I note that even among environmental medicines, there's always practitioners that try to push the envelope. Some of them are, you know, I've been told Switzerland, Germany.

I know Deeper Healing is one of these places, too, because Dr. McCarter and then Dr B told me, well, we have practitioners from functional medicine or from environmental medicine that go see what we do.

And that's the thing with environmental medicines. It's like it's one these things when I started to look into it and look in to what Dr Ray did, what Doctor Crinian brought.

and it is something that has been developing, but not nearly enough because the environment You know, it is developing at a snail space, but the environment is becoming poisonous and more poison at at rapid pace.

So it's something where a lot of it, is cutting edge, new modalities that they are trying and they see the clinical proof and the move forward. It was super interesting for me to just look at, okay, what is kind of the cutting-edge of environmental medicine?

But you know this entire project was not supposed to be about anything about me, to to honest. So what happened is, you know, in the documentary, we see my results like a year before, a, year after I film.

Wait, wait, before you go down there, because I want to make sure we cover this in this podcast. This project wasn't even supposed to be a movie. It was originally supposed to be a little reveal at an EMF summit.

It's supposed be short. Hey, Nick comes in, you follow what he does. He does a big reveal. And then all of a sudden, it really was over the course of the year organically.

So you did that. You came in and you had your testing and your detoxification. because I almost forgot I had to think about it like oh yeah yeah this thing became so much bigger then when you were here you started talking to patients and it's like, oh, yeah, I was in a wheelchair before yeah I would you know really really like the worst cases and then they're recovered and you're like wait I want to interview them wait a minute I wanna know what happened that that story is really interesting to me So all of a sudden now it's your story, but then it like that woman's story with her daughter and that person's, story and Mac guy's and everyone's stories, their diagnosis is there.

Everything was very, very different symptomatically and, and manifestation wise, all recovering. So let's capture these stories and go, okay. And, the other, like the link that, that finds them all together is they were all told nothing could be done.

Nothing can be. and you're stuck with this and whatever things they were doing, and they're pretty much hopeless. And here, now they are on the other side of it.

So you are like, no, I think this is maybe a short movie where I combine this together and then all of a sudden as one interview, another interview. All of a sudden, this turns into Bill Ray, Walter Crinion, environmental godfathers, legacy movie, taking the audience on a journey and then showing the authentic proof that it's working.

Recovery is possible. It's not. A hundred percent. And it's not even that. I have to shout out, you know, Mike Schatz that with Horizon that did an incredible job.

Obviously it was the filmmaker behind this. Still doing edits today. We're still texting back and forth because still preparing the movie. But I feel like not only it says.

Part of his vision when he saw the material and started working and then we, you know, all together it was kind of a collective project, starting to intertwine the storyline where I go to the clinic, which is I think a cool thing to see, but there's not really the human aspect.

All of the sudden, when I saw interviews, many of them I cried listening to them and I'm like, I mean, for me, it's Brendan. I think it is probably because I just see myself in like 10 years, you know, a little bit more gray.

The guy couldn't remember his friend's names. And just that part, forgetting. about things that are important to you. It just gets to me. I'm like, Oh my God, imagine if it happened that soon in like my late fees.

All of a sudden, I can't even remember my old buddies from primary school and that I see every year. He was losing everything. He touched me. But what I wanted to say is that in the end, when I film the documentary and then did follow-up testing and got my testing results, this is when i got the testing result.

probably a week or two after filming, I was back home in Montreal and I saw the PDFs and we had a call with Dr. McCarter and i was like, wait a minute.

Are you telling me I have like these lead levels? And I did have brain fog. I didn't have acne that has now pretty much resolved at this point that can flare back sometimes.

But I had brainfog, you know, just very poor ability to concentrate at a computer. And it was getting worse. So in the end, you know, it was a little bit for me and I'm like, well, I don't have a condition.

I am not diagnosed with anything. In fact, they did some testing, some basic testing. And, my hair mineral analysis was very good. So I had been eating mostly organic for what, 15 years?

I mean, that was really early to all these precautionary measures from environmental medicine, but even then I find the lead super elevated and the mercury fairly elevated than mycotoxins.

And it made me realize, geez, it's going to turn into something else. So in the end, because the editing process took a long time, I was able to film what is my, you know, my own conclusion a year after, and I'm just in a much better place mentally.

Very powerful. And that's the thing that powerful. Look, if you have a condition, it can give you hope that, well, If I lower my body burden, the condition might get better or resolved itself.

All chronic conditions have one component of it that is causal through the environment. That's not even the radical thing to say. At least if have lead exposure, It can impact your pancreas, blood sugar, it can impact Alzheimer's.

Like we know all these things, but the science is severely lacking to make the link between all of these different environmental toxins, how they play with each other, and then how that in turn will impact your risk of chronic disease.

But if we push the chronic diseases aside, How are you underperforming in your life? I realized, oh my God, I was like, mildly excited about projects, going through the motions.

I have to tell you, Danielle, it's almost funny because we talk almost every month, sometimes just to organize things and do business meetings, but we haven't updated each other about me personally.

But at one point I had to rewatch the movie and I cried because I realized, where was I? Where I was, yep. That's, it's powerful. It's only after the fact.

Once you, once your brain fog lifts, you have to deal with the facts that like, why was I behaving a certain way? Like feeling depressed, not really, Not answering people for weeks because I felt overwhelmed and maybe not being as present with my wife as I wanted to be and being, mildly happy at a maximum and mild, unhappy most of the time.

And I'm like what's wrong with me, right? Like just because if your brain is not online, and me as an entrepreneur, I have to deal with my business growth with, my personal organizations.

Like no one looks after me. No one pays me a salary. So I had a stressful life and I'd have be on to be able to grow each aspect. And I wasn't really doing a good job at it all.

I was feeling quite overwhelmed even through the video shoot and everything. It's just I was dealing with so many things and in this sort of anxious energy.

And now I'm just in a much better place where to be fair, I am not necessarily calmer. I feel like I m getting overexcited about, you know, research. That's like the passion.

but I'm able to just show up more in every single aspect of my life. And that is not, you know, curing a disease per se or anything like that, but it's precious.

It's something that I think everyone listening to this probably want for themselves. Yes. Do you how many guys, and in fact, I just did two, just dropped two podcasts that are, one guy's name is Stark and one guys name was Chip and they both talk about this for men.

They're both like, I have a business, I'm a high performer, i have wife, i have kids, I have all this stuff and their pressure and they were like I didn't realize how bad I was until i was better because you get there slowly, right?

The decline is almost imperceptible. It's like a moodier, a little more tired and then you have people like oh you're getting older, oh, you are getting in your 30s, oh you getting your 40s and all of a sudden you like this is me now.

You almost look back at an old picture and be like, oh yeah, it used to be so much more whatever, energetic. But when you come out on the other side of it, you really feel it because you're doing it somewhat quickly where the decline is very long and floggy.

You know, and like both of the guys said this separately, they're like, I wish I didn't wait so long. I wished I hadn't waited till I was broken. Like that was the gift that you got.

You weren't, you were on a slow decline, but you weren' broken, You caught it and you're were like okay, yeah. And now you are like whoa, whoa I don't even realize how bad I am.

This, when I talk to regular people, They're all sluggish. Why is everyone, I say they're propping their eyes up with Adderall and coffee, like literally.

And you know, we're not meant to lose our, Like I've had people like, it's between the bun with cheese. I'm like a hamburger. They were like yeah, want a hamburgers.

We can't think of the word. Like you said, you can think about your friends and you're like you, know your brain's not working, but you are like what's going on with me?

You know? It's just not normal. It is not. And it can be very, very different. And the movie's amazing at showing that. Yeah. What I realized is the more brain capacity you unlock, if you can remove some of this toxic sludge.

To be fair, my latest test, a year and a half later, when it comes to lead, it is primarily stored in bones. Now I have more mental capacity to look at, wait a minute, I had this lead in my body, what could it impact?

blood sugar regulation, which is a problem for me. I have, you know, pancreas, inflammatory markers are high and I was like, what is that? And, part of it is mold also that can also have a link with the pancrea.

So anyway, I'm learning about what this burden is doing to my body, but I more mental capacity to think about how I used to, think and to solve my problems.

And that's the kind of loop that I that I realized I was in is where your mental capacity declines and then your ability to get out of this rut declives too at the same time.

So for some people it is spiraling down and down. And eventually you're like, well, you know, anyway, health is kind of set in stone. I'm getting older.

You don't have clarity about the fact that, wait a minute, something is wrong here and maybe I should seek help. But then are you finding the right help, right?

Yeah, it's finding that right. Oh, my God. It's tough. And this is why everyone's on there buying their supplements from the TikTok shop, because they're watching some reel in bed while they were kind of half out of it.

You're like, oh, that girl said it was great. I'm going to order it for 30 bucks. This is where people are. They're just desperate for like But just some guidance, you know, what do I do?

You know I feel Danielle like maybe if I could have redone the movie I would have done it a little bit differently. Some people told me, oh I wish you threw out the documentary you would've learned more things and things like that.

Maybe but at the end, I wanted to leave people with practical steps because what has been the biggest impact for me the visit that Deeper Healing was like, three, four days of treatment, that's not enough to lower a body burden.

It has to be the work afterwards. So for me, for example, if I could tell a single thing that made the difference is a year and a half of three saunas per week.

45 minutes, I sweat, you know, my butt off and it's a non-negotiable. And when I didn't start right away, again, even knowing the test results, it was tough to incorporate that and every morning I go and pick up and go drive Elliot to school and right afterwards, I have a place where I do the sauna and I wipe myself off exactly the way I've learned from environmental medicine physicians and have been doing it.

And I feel like it's probably one of the strongest modalities I use. I used a lot of other things, but at least that is a constant of like, okay, now atleast I'm opening this excretion pathway that before I mean, to be fair, I told it, you know, very honest in the documentary.

I think my sauna used before was something like six times per year, and it was just completely insufficient. How can you move the needle if you just open your detox pathways that way, like, six time per years?

It doesn't work. And then I started. learning about the recommendations of environmental medicine physicians. And I even, you know, looked at this study where Dr.

Walter Crinion would take certain patients that are so sick. It would have them under physician supervision, to be fair, but twice per day was the sauna routine for some of these people short term.

So he had specific ways of saying, okay, these are people are. so overwhelmed with toxins that we have to find other excretion pathways. Consistency is really what I learned from this entire experience.

It's consistency in what you, you know, in, what your drink, your tap water, is it filtered? Is it not? It is consistency and what to breathe. Is the air full of toxins or is that cleaner?

And it's a consistency, consistency. And what do you do? Do you move your body? So I've been just steadily getting better and more disciplined on these things that I know will work.

I think the lifestyle stuff can't be minimized. And one of the things, a deeper healing mission is to help heal the sick, but to prevent everyone else from becoming so.

Two of things that I want the listeners to hear is, because these are free and they're just things you can just incorporate. We just created the body burden assessment, which is what are my body burdens?

It's going to ask you, it's a quiz, I feel like it is 38 questions and you get a report. for free on like, what are your issues that are, that're, and it, but just two things.

One, it helps them become aware by the questions themselves. Like, yeah, do I run the exhaust fan for 20 to 30 minutes to an hour after I shower? Or do even have an exhaust fans?

You know, as just one example. And then the, um, the other thing is. Just what you said, clean air, water, food, you know, using your money to, like people say to me all the time, is my refrigerator filter any good?

It's really hard to find what is an actual good product. So we have the guidebook for free that just has like, how do you figure out what's in your water?

All the links are live. If you're on a well, your test it this way. Your municipality, this is where you get your reports. And just knowing what you're dealing with.

And then you are like, okay, my water's crap, which great is you can get a report from any municipality. Then you know your water is crap. Well, then how am I going to filter it?

Okay, well, here's the cheap way and here is a whole house filter. So like these are things, and like you said, everyone starts off overwhelmed. You just do one thing at a time.

I'm just going get my clean up. you know, I'm gonna do better buying organic, whatever it is. You know you just, you start and as you, because you were already down the road, so was I.

Then I found my lead. I have a very similar story. Now I've been chipping away at my led. My brain functions better and I know like, yeah, on 50, but guess what?

I am not worried about aging because I look under the hood. Everyone deserves that. And I say it all the time. I saw some TikTok guy like, everyone, if you haven't checked your medals yet, it's true.

He's right. Everyone deserves that before they're, you know, in the memory care facility in their seventies. They deserve to know like do I have an issue?

I believe this is, I think this movie is elevating and COVID is a big gift of that. of really knowing that you're on your own and you gotta be vigilant about what you are doing.

No one's out there protecting you. You gotta protect your family. And how am I gonna do that? Clean air, clean food, and clean water. That's the easy start.

Yeah. And, and those resources are out there. When I always say like, people ask me a million times about this one and that one, just like the EMF stuff.

There's a lot of marketing, there's lot a chatter, a there a lots of noise, lot confusion. So it's best to get your advice from people who have really gone down the rabbit hole.

like you have, and kind of know, like, okay, at least if I'm going to spend money on something, I know that it's going work. And this is the world we're in.

What I think is funny is I still talk to people who are like are they really toxins? I mean, really? Like, oh dear mother of God. That's true. And you know, what I've been doing in the last, I must say, two months is organizing my research database.

A lot of it's using AI because I have too many documents. The more I dig into what is accumulating in human body, the more alarmed I am. because I didn't know.

I looked into PFAS with a half life of, what is it, nine years or five years, years in the body with excretion routes that are very difficult and it doesn't go out in sweat that easily.

And then you look, okay, well, this is just one class of things. What about lead stored in bones? Okay, it's stored and bones. Is it stable in bone? No, there is a bone turnover that is natural.

There is this 20 something day cycle. So that lead will leave your body, recirculate to wreak havoc and then restore in bones. And I'm like, oh my God.

So you're not even protected. It's not like your lead and bone is just hanging out there and you are like oh yes, it's stored at least. But it is also wreaking havoc.

Then of course, It is not just stored in bone. it could be in other tissues. And it's something that is not even controversial to say that lead is extremely neurotoxic.

And I'm saying this now, and I like, uh-oh, I alarm myself at what I am saying, right? So the reality is that it is it extremely uncontroversial to see that we each have a body burden.

We don't know to what extent. No one has the probably the budget or the time to test for every single chemical that exists. It's not even that useful, but we have to, I think, a framework where you say, okay, i surely have more toxins in my body than I should.

You know, the amount that should be there is near zero, right? It should, back in ancestral times, it wouldn't be these modern exposures. So all of them need to go to as close to zero as possible.

So everyone can therefore benefit from looking at strategies that are time tested. Strategy of avoidance by filtering out your water. Avoidance, the strategy of opening up detox pathways by moving your body or by sweating more.

Like these things are not controversial either. What is controversial, I think, is just health authorities are still completely stuck in a paradigm that was never useful to start with, but like studying one single toxin and the impact on one, single disease category, we are so far behind.

So the reality, yes, and it's a sad and dramatic reality is that it is up to us to take control of that and to be loud, because eventually, I have great hope and I'm trying to connect with the right people that You know, environmental medicine needs to make it to public health in a big way because the population is not getting better.

And while we have all these different tools, I hear about peptides and you know that. Yeah, maybe some of them can help alleviate symptoms, but the fundamentals need to include environmental medicines.

This is what I'm convinced about and it needs to include EMFs. And that's part of what excites me is, you know, the physicians know about toxic exposures and they know the importance of the environment and then the important of removing the bad stuff from the body, bringing the good in.

I just feel like this is a paradigm that needs make it everywhere. So that is my hope that the movie will contribute to that at least a little bit. It's a mission and it's been interesting where the past two years, we've had a lot of physicians referring their patients to deeper healing.

They are recognizing, I don't know what to do with this patient who's super sick and I'm not trained in environment. I know I am out of my depth, you know, with person and I'm like, okay, this is cool.

So they're really starting the, the educated physician, practitioner, naturopath, you know, nurse practitioner. They're starting to recognize, Okay, This is a missing part of what I've learned.

And I really think that we're barreling towards. Um, this becoming part of medical education, just becoming of naturopathic education that environmental medicine will actually be one of the categories that you can specialize in and know deeply because as you said, we are, were an epidemic of people who were sick from environmental factors.

And then where'd he go? What do you do? You know? I mean, we're talking to people all over the world and they're like, there's nowhere to go. It's just, it's not, It is really, really not.

So I do think that has been the greatest gift of COVID. I think it has a really big gift. And I love the work that like Food Aid is doing. Like the people who are really like taking something, like whether it is Roundup or they are taking on the EMFs.

Thank you for taking on the food or taking the guys or just one aspect of what's going on. Because at the end of the day, no matter how much cleaning up we do, which you're doing and I'm doing personally, I am still living in the same world as everyone else.

So this is why you need regular sauna. You could sit here and do a bunch of rejuvenates and get your body, get you organs all cleaned out. But guess what?

You're back out in the world again. So we also have to fight the fight of we don't want this in our world. We don' want PFAS in out world, you know? Watching the movie, I'll never forget when I watched The Devil We Know, which was, it's a movie.

It's years old, but it was about the PFAs journey. And you get to the end of the move and they're basically like, This can't be removed from the body.

It has a super long life in the world. And they just changed the name and they're still doing it. You're like, are you kidding me right now? You think you're watching something that's going to have a nice bow at the end?

Like, oh, and it's all better now. No, not. So, you know, I think a lot of people who feel overwhelmed are kind of like I don't want to look at that. I say to people all the time, like, hey, I get it.

Ignorance is bliss. But it doesn't make it untrue if you ignore it, right? It's still happening whether you ignored it or not. So you can do something about it or not, and you will pay the price or no.

So I like to be an educated person. I say I'd like choose my toxins. But I don't want to choose a cleaner and a toothpaste. You know, I want those things to not hurt me.

Do you have to eat perfectly clean all the time? No, you could have joy. It's not about not living, you know, it's about having a long life well lived.

And that's what I love about the movie. Nikki did such a good job. Michael did a such good a job, I'm very proud of the film and I really gonna shout it from the rooftops.

Everyone needs to see that movie, they need to understand for their benefit of their children, their families and their future. and fight the fight every day.

Not just food, babe, and not just, there are these people who are really fighting hard, but we need to sign their petitions and get behind them as well.

Like, we don't want this. We don' want it. And we deserve better. Exactly. And I feel like the movie is filling kind of a gap in that entire conversation of we're getting poisoned.

Yes, we are. We have to fight against the polluters, including, for me, it's the telecoms. For Food Baby, It's like Monsanto and these pesticide corporations.

But what do we do? in the meantime, to start undoing some of the damage that we have inside us. And that's kind of, the accumulation of that body burden.

I feel like there's not a lot of people who talk about that framework that exists. It's a seven-day green smoothie diet, it's just not that. a certain framework and that framework is environmental medicine, I'm convinced of it.

I just hope that many people start looking into it and at a minimum start taking their personal intake of toxins more seriously and do what they can to get them out.

And I know it is a daunting journey, but for a lot of people, they told me, Okay, well, at least now I know and I'm inspired to do more and see if I can feel better.

Right. Because in the end, I want to spin it as a positive here. It's not just about, you know, removing these toxins and, blaming these polluters. Can you feel now while you have a life to live?

Right? You can. You certainly I am the example. And if you tell me that Maybe in two years, I'll feel even cleaner here, especially in my mind. I love it.

It makes you able to cope with the fact that it is a messed up world. The pollution is there and there's a lot of injustice. You know, the huge march against Monsanto people versus poison.

Yesterday, I'm going to have to look at what happened. I know so many thousands of people, you know are fighting against this nonsense. But the thing is, if you clean yourself up and you become, have more mental capacity, then you can contribute even more.

So we have work on that individually to be able to contribute to this world. At the end of the day, we vote with our dollars. We vote our money. Dr. B says all the time, he's like, there's the mirror and the window.

And I love that. He's, like you can't control what's going on outside the windows, but you control with going in front of a mirror. So what do you do with that?

You control how you spend your money, you controlled what you bring into your environment, and you controls your daily decisions. How am I going to live my life?

And your health is priceless. Everyone agrees on that. Everyone agreed on. And the more that, um, the morning we just shed the overwhelm and just take it one step at a time, you know, I'm going to switch out this for that and there's loads of help out there.

I would say the easiest quickest thing to do is take the toxin quiz. See what your areas are. Okay, it'll tell you for free. What's your number one driver?

What can you do about that today? These are resources right at your fingertips. They take minutes. So these are things that are available to help guide you down the right path.

And as we continue these conversations, not just Nick and Danielle and deeper healing and Dr. McCarter and all the pioneers that are out there, Dr McCollough, everybody, you know, it's going to just become more mainstream.

People are going have a better understanding. They're going make better decisions, which is going change the market. That's what changes the markets. And that's when everyone's load goes down.

So I think that's a great way to close it up. If you have not signed up to see this movie, Body Burden, The Toxins We Carry, that is one hour of your life that it's worth it.

I know you guys are all watching shows, binge watching show that aren't changing your lives. This can change your And then there's an eight minute quiz that'll help you determine what you need to do.

If you're really sick out there, Deeper Healing's there to help. And every day, everyone needs to make better lifestyle choices. Nick, you are a shining example of what can happen, what could happen.

Now every aspect of your life can benefit. Your marriage, your parenting, work, everything. That's what we all want. We all need quality life. It's as simple as that.

You're amazing. I'm very grateful to you. Who knocks on the door and says, can I make a movie about what you're doing? I don't know. Yeah, it was kind of crazy.

That is kind crazy! DeeperHandling did not sponsor this movie. This is Nick Penalt made this. And it's to help as many people as possible wake up. So good job.

Good job, amazing work. Very grateful. Thank you, Danielle. Thanks for having me. And I hope that people learn a thing or two and help spread the word to everyone they know, of course.

Well, I want to add one more thing. I wanna also mention we have a foundation. The other thing that comes up all the time is the cost. and I can tell you for deeper healing, we're all about getting people what they need.

So if someone cannot afford it, you have our foundation where patients pay it forward and we pay forward by putting into a to help pay for people who cannot afford it.

Because everyone deserves to live their best life. So I gotta put that plug in there. Okay, sign up for the movie. All the links are gonna be below. And Nick, thank you so much.

Thanks so for having me, Danielle. It's a pleasure. We hope this episode inspired you. Here's how to go deeper. Visit deeperhealing.com to become a patient.

Online, we have loads of courses and a free toxin quiz. Subscribe and please, please share this episode with someone who needs it. It's always that one-on-one support that really gets people to find deeper healing.

Remember, this is educational content, not medical advice. The information shared here should be discussed with your own personal healthcare provider.

If you're excited by listening to the medical experts or the personal recovery stories on here and you want to start your deeper healing journey, go to deeperhealing.com and start the process.