Episode 313: A Simple Way to Test Your Home for Mold
By now you know your home can be riddled with mold and other hidden toxins that are preventing you from getting well. In-home assessments can be pricey and inaccurate, and I know many of you are looking for a less expensive, more effective way to have your home evaluated.
Today's guest offers a groundbreaking solution to this ongoing issue. I'm excited to be speaking to America's Healthy Home Expert, Caroline Blazovsky. For almost 2 decades, she has been helping clients diagnose problems that may be lurking in their homes. Her method has earned her a national reputation as one of the top home consultants in the country.
If you want to upgrade the wellness of your living space, and suspect there's something lurking behind your walls, this is an important episode you don't want to miss.
More about Caroline Blazovsky:
Caroline Blazovsky is nationally recognized as America’s Healthy Home Expert ®. She is a home investigator and media personality promoting healthier homes throughout the U.S. She has been featured in AARP, Shape, SiriusXM, House Smarts TV, The Jenny McCarthy Show, Reader’s Digest and hundreds of podcasts, radio and print interviews.
She is a council-certified Mold Remediator (CMR), and Indoor Environmentalist Investigator (CIE) with graduate Sustainable Design education from Boston Architectural College. She is also credentialed through the National Environmental Health Association as a Healthy Homes Specialist (HHS). Caroline is a member of the AAAS, ACAC, NEHA, as well as a founding member and scientific contributor to the national IAQA Public Education Committee. She resides as President of My Healthy Home ®, a company specializing in indoor air quality products, consultations and services.
In her spare time, she is a graduate candidate in Public Health at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Her focus is working with physicians, homeowners, other building professionals and the public to improve wellness through home environments.
Show notes:
To order your Examinair test kit which includes a full assessment and consulting session, please call 888-600-0642 or email support@revelationhealth.com and ask for Ashley Smith. Mention CHTV for a special discount.
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Transcript:
Dr. Pompa:
You’ve heard me say this if you watch a lot of Cell TV. If you still don’t feel well, there’s an upstream cause. No better place to look, in your very home. Is your home toxic? Is it making you sick? Is it keeping you from getting well? On this show, you’re going to learn an affordable, effective way to test your living environment and see if this is why you still don’t feel well. I believe every one of us need this test, and wait ‘til you see what I discover in this show about my home that led me to even do a second show about this topic. I can’t wait for you to see this episode of Cell TV.
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I am Ashley Smith, and today we welcome Caroline Blazovsky, who is also known as America’s Healthy Home Expert. She’s here to discuss simple ways to improve the wellness in your home. From how to test your home for toxins and mold to ways to improve and even heal your environment, Caroline has more than 19 years of experience as a council-certified Mold Remediator and Indoor Environmentalist Investigator with a focus on working with physicians, homeowners, building professionals, and the public to improve wellness through home environments. Let’s get started and welcome Caroline Blazovsky and, of course, Dr. Pompa to the show. Welcome , both of you.
Caroline:
Hi, guys, thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we love having you. This topic, oh, my goodness, we are just getting blown out. This is what we do on Cell TV. We talk about getting to upstream causative factors and no bigger than our homes, no bigger. This has been a recent topic on Cell TV. So many people are asking how do I make my environment safer with filtration units? The question of testing our homes, how do we know if we’re in a safe environment? How do we test for mold? How do we test for chemicals? How do we know? You’re bringing the answer, 20 years of experience, Caroline, so thank you for being here.
Caroline:
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Dr. Pompa:
I’d like to start with people’s stories. I mean, you don’t look like the person that I would expect to be the expert. This is a compliment. Testing chemicals in homes, I mean, how did you get here?
Caroline:
It’s been a long road, but back in my 20s, I had allergies just like most people. I worked in Manhattan, in New York, and I started to just wonder what was causing it. Then you go to a typical physician. They gave you a decongestant, and they send you on your way. I was very inquisitive. I’ve always been the kind of person to get my hands into things and get to the bottom of things. I had a background in communications and media, and then I just changed fields completely. I went back for a complete overhaul in education and started working with mold. I did mold back 20 years ago when people used to look at me and say, my God, what are you talking about? You’re crazy that mold makes people sick. That’s my passion, and I liked it. It just grew and grew and grew.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s amazing. I mean, look, I’ve been teaching and talking about detox for 20 years. You’re teaching testing on how to know if our—this is the perfect combination, man. You got to share this show.
Caroline:
It’s so fun.
Dr. Pompa:
Listen, okay, so let’s start with the basics. I’m not sure what shows people saw, so it’s estimated that indoor air is four to seven times more toxic than outdoor air. Talk a little bit about that because this is a big issue, and then we can talk about how this impacting beyond allergies in people’s health.
Caroline:
There’s so many things that can go wrong in a house. That’s the first thing, but what I want people to realize is, whether you live in New York City, or you live in a suburb, or you live in the country, you can really create the environment that you want. It’s a misconception that people often say, oh, if I move to the country, I’ll be healthier. That’s a misconception. You can actually be exposed to more particulates, smoke, pesticide out in the country than you can in a very populated area. Studying homes for 20 years, I’ve worked with people all over the country. What’s so interesting is you can go to Pahrump, Nevada and still have 250 volatiles in your home, even though you’ve tried to avoid everything altogether. These things have become prevalent in our society that we carry them with us as we go. Not to scare people, but the chemicals that we are exposed to and dander and proteins, we carry them on us, and we exchange them with other people. We’re in this community together, and so it’s important that we all start making our homes better to influence other people and work together as a community to impact each other.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s great. What are we talking about here? When we’re talking about chemicals in our home, there’s a lot more than we talk about, I mean, a lot more things that we don’t realize, right? People look at dust, and they want that filtration because of dust. Talk about what’s in that dust. I mean, there’s a lot of things that can drive inflammation and make us not feel well. Really, people watching this right now, they just want to make sure their environment’s safe. They don’t feel well, and they want to make sure their environment’s not causing it. What is in the dust?
Caroline:
Dust is a combination of a lot of things. It’s particulate, but there’s also dander. We shed dander. You and I are not hypoallergenic, so we’re shedding dander all the time. What happens is this stuff builds up in our homes, and if we don’t know how to clean properly or we don’t know how to vacuum—and there are methods to this effectively, and a lot of people just don’t understand it or just were not educated on it. We want to get rid of this dander, but we often blame pets, right? We say, oh, people have pets. That’s where the dander is, and it’s not. We’re all accumulating that dander, so we have to clean effectively.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s the pets and the people, right? I mean, all of it is there. Then the chemicals that are in the home are there as well, right? Of course, you have running laundry every day, people using regular laundry detergents, your dishwasher, bringing things in with flame retardants. There’s a certain level of chemicals from the building materials. All of that ends up in your air and in your dust.
Caroline:
Exactly, you’ve got every product that you bring into a house. For example, if you have your soap, your detergents, even wine, people who store wine, people who use bacterial wipes, people who decide that maybe they are avid plant—agriculturists, painters, all of these things accumulate in your house. Everything that you bring in puts off a volatile organic or a VOC, and what we want to look for are the levels of VOCs in homes. There’s a certain level—I like to go with 500 nanograms per liter, which means nothing to anyone, but that’s the standard that I use as a health range. I want to see everybody under that range and the closer—or if you’re feeling that you have health issues, I like you to be even lower but 500. Most homes are coming in in the United States around 1,500 to 2,000, and the chemical load that we’re exposed to is just amazing.
If you have open paint cans in your home, that’s a really big one. People often think, oh, I’ve got two, three paint cans in the corner. It’s not bothering anyone. The top is sealed. It’s not. That’s always continually outgassing. All of these things that we store in our homes just create havoc. Then you get high volatile organics, and then you get high dander counts. Then you get high mold counts, and then you’ve got someone who’s sick and doesn’t feel well.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow! Okay, yeah, again, if I was watching this show and I know my viewers very well, their big question is, okay, you all can talk about what’s in it. I really don’t care. All I really want to know is is my home safe for me, and if it isn’t, how do I make it safe? We’ve done shows on filtration. We’re going to do more of those shows, but let’s talk about that. You have been testing homes and doing this for 20 years. I mean, there’s so much controversy about mold testing, this type of testing. You’ve went through it all.
Caroline:
That’s right.
Dr. Pompa:
You’ve put together what I believe is the most cost-effective, inexpensive test that looks at all of these parameters correctly, so let’s talk about that. How do we test for these things, and what does that testing look like? Where do we start?
Caroline:
Okay, so the first thing, I like to talk about mold, and even though it gets overplayed a lot, I like to clarify things because I think it gets really misunderstood.
Dr. Pompa:
I agree.
Caroline:
Molds do three things. They’re the fuzzy thing you see growing in your shower or on a piece of fruit, right? That has a protein and also a beta-glucan, which causes inflammation in the body, one. Two, molds also produce volatile organic compounds. Just like we were talking about paints producing VOCs, molds also do as well, so that’s like smoking. I always say it’s mold, smoking cigarettes in your house. It’s putting off this VOC into the air. Thirdly, if you have toxic mold that we often hear about, it produces the mycotoxin. If you get this great combination going with this mold, then you basically create health issues. That’s how it all transpires.
There’s three different ways to test for mold, and one is to take a spore trap, which is an air sample. Another one is to take a VOC sample. People often say, well, what if I have mold, and it’s in the walls? I don’t see it, but I’m sick. It might be behind my bathroom shower. That’s when the VOC test comes in. We actually can take the gas from mold, test for the gas itself, and then parlay it to a level to find out if you may have mold behind the wall, which is fascinating. I mean, we’ve been doing this for years, but most companies don’t do it.
The other thing that you can do is also do a mycotoxin test, and that’s looking at all the levels of mycotoxins. Say you have a mold issue that we can’t find. If the mycotoxin’s high in the home, we can correlate it back and see if there is something that we’re missing, so with those different types of trifectas of testing, we can really achieve a pretty good analysis as to whether you have a mold issue or not.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and mold’s the hardest. I appreciate that. Just for people to be clear, mold produces a spore. Yeah, you can do an air trap and collect the spore. I know you do this too. You test the outside air and the inside air because you could be getting a lot of spores.
Caroline:
That’s right.
Dr. Pompa:
Every house has mold, right?
Caroline:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re going to compare that, but you’re taking it to another level in testing the VOC, the volatile organic compound. That’s that smell. I have a nose for mold. I go there’s mold. I mean, I’m smelling the VOC, right? That’s what I’m smelling.
Caroline:
That’s right.
Dr. Pompa:
Obviously, you’re testing it even better than my nose. That gas that’s given off you’re going to pick up if you have mold behind the wall, which is awesome. Then you’re testing for the mycotoxin, aka biotoxin, that the really lethal molds put off that make people really sick. Looking at all three ways in your experience has been the best way to do it.
Caroline:
Exactly, not everybody needs all three tests. Usually, it’s a matter of one or two. What’s interesting about our VOC test which we do, volatile organic compounds, we obviously look at chemicals in our VOC test, which is called the predict, but we also look at the mVOC in that test, which is interesting. We do a VOC panel, but at the same time, when we pull your air sample, we’ll also look for a VOC for mold. I’m doing a double check. If you do our standard mold test and it comes back negative, I automatically go to a VOC test where I’ll run the VOC behind it or next to it, so I can see if there’s anything we’re missing, which is great.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I love that.
Caroline:
I’m looking at your VOCs and mold at the same time, and I’m assessing that.
Dr. Pompa:
I love that. I have to say this here early in the show. When I immediately saw all of the testing that you’re doing—and of course, I work with people who are very sick and challenged. Often times, they’re bringing in experts, $2,000 and more, to figure out if their home’s safe. One of the first questions I asked after I saw what tests you’re running was how much is the test if they do everything? You told me $450. I was like that is the best price for this testing I’ve ever seen. I think that’s the test behind you on the right, on your right.
Caroline:
Yeah, that’s our Examinair. That’s examineair.com. They can go and look at it too. We have a separate website for it altogether. That’s molds. That will do your dander counts. It’ll tell me your dust mite levels, how well you’re cleaning. That’s going to tell me your particulate, if you choose the option to do a particulate sample, and those are things that range from feather, cellulose, fiberglass, things that get into your environment from building construction, ash, fireplaces. If your fireplace is backflowing and you’re getting stuff that can be coming back and making you sick and not even realizing it, we can pick that up, so there’s a lot in there. Then the VOC test is separate, but that’s the one I usually start with because it gives me a really good assessment as to what’s going on at first, how well they’re cleaning and what else is going on in the air that could be contributing.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and Revelation Health is going to carry all of the testing that you offer. My doctors, if you are a client of one of my doctors, ask them because they may be carrying it too. I’m sure like us they will give you some type of a discount, or some type of code, or something to get the test. People are going to want to get the test. I thought I just muted my mike there. I apologize. I whacked it with my hand. I got so excited.
I think when we look at mold testing too and this is one of the big criticisms that I have is that you get people that you just know are in exposure, and they have an expert come out. They do a few tests, an air sample, maybe a tape test. It’s clear when in fact it is behind the walls. Having that three parameter way of looking at it is a really, really accurate way of doing it. Now, the other thing big problem—go ahead.
Caroline:
The other thing I just want to add is that these things can go both ways too. We talk a lot about—you’ll probably hear about the ERMI test, right? A lot of people will say…
Dr. Pompa:
I was just going to ask that, yeah.
Caroline:
Yeah, and I go both ways. I’ve seen the ERMI work tremendously well, and I’ve also seen it work not so well. People have to understand what the ERMI is. ERMI was always used for educational purposes. It wasn’t meant to be testing. I feel that the fundamental behind it is it wasn’t really based on science. It was based on, well, someone has a lot of mold. Someone doesn’t. How do we determine that? That was one thing with it.
The other thing with an ERMI is that it’s not necessarily giving you a true spore count. It’s giving you pieces of DNA that they group together into a—to call it a spore, so what happens is we track DNA from mold in all the time. If you go running down the road and you walk through the grass, you bring it in. I’ve seen it happen where you get false positives and false negatives.
Dr. Pompa:
I’ve seen it too. It’s like a better history of what the house has been exposed to.
Caroline:
Exposed to, right, it can be, or it can come in from other places too.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. That’s why I always say, if you get the ERMI, get some type of air samples as well looking outside and inside.
Caroline:
Exactly, there you go.
Dr. Pompa:
Compare the two. If there’s a correlation, if stachybotrys are on both high, then maybe—I would look into it. Yeah, that’s how I’ve dealt with that.
Caroline:
Exactly, yeah, and that’s absolutely right. That’s why I like this test. It gives us a basic overall, and then if we see nothing and we still suspect mold, then we do a VOC, which is going to look at chemical load anyway. When you’re looking at patients, you want to look at, okay, what are they exposed to on a mold level, but chemicals, what are we exposed to on a chemical level? We know that that’s going to promote even more inflammation. Then I double check it, and it works real effectively. You’re running more information, but you’re not repeating something unnecessarily.
Dr. Pompa:
I’ve had it so many times too where, okay, we think it’s mold. We think it’s mold, and it ends up being another toxic source of something else in the house.
Caroline:
That’s right.
Dr. Pompa:
To your point, high dander levels are causing inflammation. Whether it’s mold, or dander levels, or another chemical in your home, it will drive inflammation, and now you don’t sleep as well in that home. You don’t feel as well in that home. That’s the thing I like about testing everything like you’re doing because it may not be what you think.
Caroline:
Absolutely, and a lot of people—I get clients all the time. They’re like I’m sure I have a mold issue. I’m sure I have a mold issue, and I try to explain to them we’re talking about there’s formaldehyde in homes. There are volatile organics. You’re talking about it could be radon issues. You have water issues. I mean, there’s so much more than just mold, and usually, when it’s just mold by itself, you’re typically not going to be sick. When you start looking at houses in people who have mold exposure and are sick, they also had high volatile organics. They also had high pesticide exposure. It’s not just one thing, and I need people to really understand that. We need to go down—sorry.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, here’s the point. I mean, of course, everybody has dander. Everybody has mold in their house. Everybody has chemicals, right? There’s a certain point that creates sickness. Now, it’s funny. I’m an expert in the body and what makes people sick, and I make an analogy of the perfect storm, meaning that we’ve all had heavy metal exposures in our life and still do. We all have had mold exposures.
When I hear a sick person’s story, it’s this perfect storm. They’ve already accumulated a certain amount of heavy metals, and they are living now in a mold exposure higher than normal. Then they get the emotional trauma, or it could be two chemicals and an emotional, or two physicals. The point is is it’s three stressors that come together and bam.
Caroline:
That’s it, trifecta.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and then that creates the perfect storm. The genes get triggered, and now you’re sick.
Caroline:
That’s it.
Dr. Pompa:
What I do is I, basically, peel it back and look for those stressors. Your home could be part of that stressor, but you talk about the trifecta in the home the same way I talk about it in the body.
Caroline:
Isn’t that amazing, though? That’s what it is. It’s incredible to put the two of us together. What it’s showing is that, however that exposure happens, once it does, you’ve got to monitor your food and monitor your environment. It doesn’t mean that I want you to live in a bubble, absolutely not. I want you to come home to a place where your body can decompress from everything that you’re exposed to at work. People work in bad environments. You go to the grocery store. You think they don’t have mold at the grocery store? Of course they do.
You’re exposed to all of this, but you don’t need to come home to it. Your body needs to decompress and be in a good environment. We can go back out in the day and have offenders, and then come back and decompress again and get rid of it and detox.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, so to your point, it’s this trifecta in the home that, obviously, then creates a problem: high dander, too high a mold, too high of VOC. Bam! Now it’s unlivable. When you assess this test, give us a way how you assess it. Again, you’re going to see these—all of these things in everybody’s home, and I know you said about 500. I’m 500 on one thing but not other things. How bad is my home? How do you assess this test?
Caroline:
I usually look at—with tVOCs, when we’re looking at chemical load, those are things like benzene, toluene, how much gasoline you’re exposed to. Maybe you drink wine in the house, and you have exposure to volatiles that way. Disinfection wipes, those are huge. People love to use disinfection wipes, and let me tell you, they are the worst offender in indoor air quality that you can imagine.
Dr. Pompa:
We don’t use them. We don’t use them.
Caroline:
They’re terrible. They leave behind D-limonene, which is a citrus-based volatile organic, and they really create a lot of havoc. I try to tell people stop using them like crazy. Don’t use them all over the house because your VOCs quickly get up to 1500 just from disinfection wipes.
What’s interesting about the VOC test, Dr. Pompa, is you can see everything people are doing in their house. It’s almost scary. I talk to my client. I’m like, “Oh, you drink wine a lot.” They’re like, “How do you know that?” You’re using the disinfection wipes. You have mothballs. You have gun solvent. All of this, when you start to know the compounds, it puts together this picture, and you know your client so well. It’s amazing. It’s really amazing.
People get freaked out. They’re like, “Oh, my God, how do you know this about me?” It’s like CSI, but that’s what it is. They don’t need to tell me. I can see what they’re doing, and I can tell if they’re lying. I’ll say, “Oh, you’re using disinfection wipes.” They go, “No, I don’t.” The husband will say, “I don’t use that,” and the wife has them stored from Costco underneath the cabinet where there’s big barrels of these disinfection wipes, and they don’t even know that they’re there. It’s really fascinating what you can find out and know about these.
Dr. Pompa:
That brings me to the next question. I mean, part of the solution is, okay, you see these high levels. Then, obviously, we’re backtracking into where are these exposures coming from? You already started talking about some of the surprising ones like that. In our home, we don’t use any regular cleaners, right? We use all plant-based types of cleaners or laundry detergents.
Caroline:
I want to say this. Because something’s green, does not mean it’s healthy. People think that, oh, I use green cleaner. I use essential oils. That’s okay, absolutely not, adds to your VOC level, puts you over the edge, stresses the body. For volatile organics, I would say, if you’re using essential oil, you only want to use it 15 minutes a day. You cannot put it in a diffuser and let it run rampant because your volatile organics climb.
Formaldehyde is a naturally occurring thing. People get worried about it, but it’s in wood products. It’s naturally occurring. It doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Same thing, D-limonene, a lot of the essential oils, pinene, which is pine, which comes from building products, all of that’s natural, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for you in high concentration.
Dr. Pompa:
Especially because we build homes that are just totally sealed up.
Caroline:
That’s right.
Dr. Pompa:
Those things build up over time.
Caroline:
That’s right.
Dr. Pompa:
That becomes a real problem.
Caroline:
People don’t realize they do it. They’re not realizing their essential oil can contribute to that. They just think, oh, it’s natural. It’s okay.
Dr. Pompa:
What’s your favorite cleaner that you use day in, day out?
Caroline:
I mean, most of my clients, I really recommend use a mild detergent if you need it. I like Oxiboost products. Natural Choices is a line. I like the Sun & Earth line, very mild stuff. I mean, I clean my whole house. I’m a neat freak by nature, so vinegar and water goes a long way. I mean, you really need don’t need to use all these cleaning products. You want to try to stay away from them.
Dr. Pompa:
I hate fragrances.
Caroline:
Yeah, me too.
Dr. Pompa:
They’re the biggest culprits, actually. It’s funny. Even the natural things like Meyers, they’re loading them up with unhealthy fragrances. They did a study that people would look at a very obvious dirtier shirt versus an obviously more clean shirt, but one had scent and the other didn’t. They said which is cleaner? People did this, and they won over this as opposed to the visual. Nine times out of ten they’d pick the dirtier looking shirt because it smelled fresh. I hate that.
Caroline:
Oh, my gosh, don’t even get me started on fragrance. I tell all my clients no.
Dr. Pompa:
You went into my next question. I’ve been in the homes. You know who you are out there. Okay, so they have all of the fragrance things everywhere. It’s the candles. It’s the plug-ins. First of all, I go what are they covering up? Typically, it’s a mold, nasty odor, a damp odor, right? They have a mold problem. Talk about the homes you’ve tested with all the air fresheners and fragrances.
Caroline:
Your house should smell benign. It really shouldn’t smell like anything.
Dr. Pompa:
Thank you.
Caroline:
If it starts to smell like something, then you need to investigate what that is. If it’s a chemical, if it’s mold, pet, all of that is a sign that something ‘s not right, so don’t cover it with a fragrance. I’m okay if you want to use fragrance, something natural, maybe some lemon, a cinnamon stick 15 minutes a day to just freshen air. I’m okay with that. You can’t be using these things that are continuous. They launch your volatiles up and cause problems, even natural ones do. Then the other ones can contain things like benzene, toluene, all your petroleum families, and those are obviously linked to carcinogenic situations. You really have to watch the fragrance. It’s really, really unhealthy. It’s not as good for you as you think it is, and you really have to moderate it. If you’re someone who’s a fragrance person, 15 minutes a day is my guideline.
Dr. Pompa:
Again, I’ve been in homes where the couch is—we’ll just be nice and say very old. You can see it. Then you sit on it gently, and it still creates the little—the thing. I have a nose like an animal.
Caroline:
I do too.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m like, okay, this thing is—so furniture, old furniture must be major culprits to some of these dander and off-gassing.
Caroline:
It’s dander. It’s dust mites. I mean, you’ve got to remember dust mites are like little creatures, and they produce proteins that cause inflammation. All of these things—I look at the body as I want it to have as low inflammation as possible. For any disease state, that makes sense, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, no, absolutely.
Caroline:
What I find is, when people are chronically sick and I reduce their VOCs, they feel better. It’s not necessarily that maybe the issue goes away, but the volatile organics are—your body’s got to clear all of that stuff. The harder it has to work—and if you already are comprised in some capacity, reducing the VOCs takes the inflammation away, and then the symptoms feel better. It’s so important. I mean, I have story after story about people who were sick and had issues. We fix things in the home, and they get better. I mean, this isn’t made up stuff. This is legit science. This is the problem. We fixed it. The symptoms went away.
Dr. Pompa:
Caroline, look, I train doctors, and they’ll put people on a lot of—not the doctors I train, but many in functional medicine, they run thousands of dollars’ worth of test, all the new genetic testing. They’re putting people on all the supplements from the testing, and they never asked them about silver fillings in their mouth that are vaporizing mercury in their brain. They never asked them about their environment, their home that they’re going in every day. You’re 100% right.
We have a stress bucket. When that bucket gets full—and genetically, yeah, we have different size, but when it gets full and starts going over, good luck. This is to your point. What I found is, once that bucket gets full, you have to deal with the person’s day in, day in environment, where they’re sleeping for eight hours a night.
Caroline:
That’s right.
Dr. Pompa:
You better make sure that environment is clean. That’s why I’ve done shows on even EMF now. EMF is a new toxin to say that we have to deal with. It fills your bucket. The air that we’re breathing, this dust that contains all of these things that we’re talking about, you better deal with that. If your goal is to feel better, you have to empty that stress bucket, and your internal environment is a big part of it.
Caroline:
That’s absolutely right. I want to say too—and this is something that I saved for your show. It’s something new that we’ve been doing that nobody even knows. I was one of the first people in the country to do this. Unbeknownst to me and the Indoor Air Quality Association, I’m the first one to do it, but we started looking at glyphosate, which was a big issue. We were testing it in water for years to find out—and for people watching, glyphosate is Roundup. We were watching it in water, which was an easier test to do, but last year was the first time I actually tested it in air quality.
I had a client who was very sick, had cancer, lymphoma. They swore. They said, “I really think it’s here.” They pushed me, which was nice, right? My client pushed me to expand out of my realm and go into something else. I said, “Okay, we’ll test the water.” The water was fine. The glyphosate came back. I took a filter, first time we’ve ever done this. We sent it to a lab that we specially designed to have this filter tested for glyphosate, which was never done before.
Sure enough, it came back on the filter. It came back 110 parts per billion and also with ampho, which is the metabolite that breaks down from—glyphosate breaks down, which told me that it had been there for a while. My client was not using it, but the neighbors were using it.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow!
Caroline:
I don’t mean to cut you off. I want to say that we are so interconnected as a society, and what we are all doing impacts each other. We really have to look at this and say, okay, I know I’m using something, but it really makes someone else sick too. I think we have to come together as a collective and say, look, we want a better world. Maybe this is idealistic, but I think we need to understand that what we do to each other affects each other. That’s a perfect example.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there’s no doubt. I want people to understand that glyphosate—obviously, now you see the commercials, right? I’ve been talking about glyphosate for ten years, but no one was listening. One of the things it does is it opens up the blood-brain barrier and the gut barrier, so the toxins that you’re exposed to now become more lethal because the glyphosate opens it up. Now it’s crossing into your brain.
Stephanie Seneff, 2012 study, she’s a senior scientist at MIT. That study showed that. That she believes that—this massive rise in neurodegenerative conditions from Parkinson’s, dementia, and Alzheimer’s, autism, she believes that—the chemicals that we’re being exposed to daily and even from utero that are in us, that the glyphosate’s opening up and allowing them to go deeper into the brain. Again, it’s no doubt opening up our gut leading to the leaky gut, food allergies, the food intolerances. Your test is now testing for that in the air.
Caroline:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, I want to point put—you just said something, though. We have people that want to get their water tested, and you do that as well, correct?
Caroline:
Mm-hmm. We basically handle everything pertaining to the home so if you want to test for whatever, and let me reiterate. Not everybody needs every test. What I do is I try to say do one test a year. Unless you’re sick and you really got something going on that we really need to assess. Start by doing one thing a year, and put yourself on a regiment just like you go with your blood test. This year I’ll do mold. Next year I’ll do VOCs. Next year I’ll do radon. Then you have a really good assessment as you move forward that your house is healthy.
A lot of the things don’t have to be repeated. I mean, mold, I’m an advocate of repeating it every three years at least because you want to know, if not more frequently.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m so glad that you were recommended to us. By the time this show airs, we’re going to have all of your testing on the Revelation Health website. I mean, it’s a real—and I’m going to use every one of your tests. Of course, I’ve done different tests, but I’m going to run every one of them. We’ll do a post-show. I’m willing to expose, hey, the things I miss. I am.
Caroline:
We’ll know if Dr. Pompa’s lying.
Dr. Pompa:
No, right, hey, I’ll be the first to be like I didn’t see it. I didn’t know, right? No, it’s fun for me, honestly, because I’m all about discovery. I learned everything doing things—from pain to purpose is my story. I really believe so strongly the only way to get your health back is to look upstream. Get rid of everything that’s upstream. In your home, your air in your home is part of what could be upstream keeping you sick, not healing, so I want everyone to hear that very clearly. Your water and air are two places that absolutely affect you. You may not be drinking your water at home. That’s one of the reasons why I have whole water filtration, house filtration. You’re showering in it and your dishwasher and everything.
Caroline:
Also, water, people think you have to drink it. They often say, well, I don’t drink my water, but you shower in it every day. A lot of these contaminates go right into your body. Arsenic can go right in through your bloodstream through your skin. Your skin’s your largest bodily organ. All of these things, whether you put lotion on your skin, you forget your body absorbs it all. It goes right into your bloodstream within 20 seconds.
People, think, before you put something on your skin, go do I really want to put this on? It doesn’t mean that I don’t want you to use things. I mean, I use makeup. I use hair products, but I think about what I’m doing. I try to balance every day and say, okay, well, I’m going to do this now, but maybe for two weeks I’m not going to do it. It’s just a balance that you constantly have to achieve, and it’s really important to do it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, man, air quality, I actually do worry about my air quality. Salt Lake’s down here, which is one of the most toxic places on the planet. Because of inversion, it gets trapped in, the pollutants, right? Now, we live up here, but every once in a while, a little bit can seep up. I mean, literally, you see—you go have way down the mountain at about 4,000 feet, and you literally see the air change. Every once in a while I see it coming up close, and I get nervous.
Caroline:
What I tell people too is so when you—what we found with particulate— and I went back to school at University of Southern California. I went to Keck School of Medicine, and I took classes in public health. I’m working towards my MPH. I had to do Continuing Ed anyway, so I figured I might as well go there because I really like their program. What we found is a lot of the studies showed that high particulate level increase disease state. For example, if you had the ApoE4 gene for Alzheimer’s and you work—they took mice and exposed them to high levels of particulate. They grew the amyloid plaque much quicker.
Also, when people have cardiovascular disease, if you expose them to higher concentrations of particulate matter—and particulate matter for people, it’s your pollution level. If you live in the city, you’re going to have all this particulate that affects you. What I recommend to my clients is 65 and over always need HEPA filtration. That’s going to help improve your cardiovascular function much more effectively. They did studies in Sweden and all over that basically shows, if you use HEPA filtration, your cardiovascular function will improve more than medication, which I think is huge, so over 65, HEPA filtration. You’ve got to make sure you’re changing these filters. You have to follow the instructions on a filter.
I have a lot of clients who go, “I have filters all over my house.” Then when I test, the filter is holding that debris, right? You’re not getting rid of that. That’s a no-no. You can make your problem significantly worse with filtration if you don’t utilize it properly, so you’ve got to follow the instructions. Most of the time, I don’t even recommend filtration. HEPA, I will, but I don’t want people storing that stuff in the corner, and when I test the air, it still is in your airstream. You really want to get rid of the toxins, get rid of the stuff, and make it healthy to begin with. Then we can supplement in.
Dr. Pompa:
I agree. I’m going to do a whole show after this one on air filtration, right? There’s some new technology there too, but I agree with you 100% on that where I see the same mistakes with the air filtration. I want to do a whole show on that. To your point, R1 of my 5Rs of how you get well, how you fix the cell is removing the sources. You can do all that, but if you have a source in your home, you have to get rid of it, and therefore, starting with the testing is the way to go. Then you know what you’re looking for.
Now, let me ask you something about the test. Okay, let’s just say it shows a high level of X chemical, right? Does it give you an idea of where X chemical could be coming from?
Caroline:
Yeah, so what we do is we break down the top 20 contaminants. When you do a VOC, you’ve got all these VOCs in there. We take the largest offenders, and we reduce those. For example, say you have cans of paint in the corner, and your volatiles come back at 1500. Three hundred of those volatile organics are coming from paint cans, so we break that down for you and show you. If you take those off, now you’re at 800, let’s just say, by removing 350 volatile if you’re at 1200 or something.
We show you how to exactly take those off to get that number lower, and once you do that, I mean, you don’t really have to test volatiles again. As long as you don’t start introducing stuff back into the environment, you should be fine, and I allow you a certain amount of stuff. It’s not like I’m saying, hey, live in a bubble. I don’t want you to have anything. It’s not even possible. I mean, people who go live in the middle of nowhere—I have chemically sensitive clients that said I’m going to go live in Pahrump, Nevada. I don’t want to be exposed to chemicals. I don’t feel well around them. They’re still exposed to 250 volatile organics.
Gasoline is prevalent. We carry it with us. If you go to a pump and you pump gas, you are covered in gasoline vapor. You’re covered in that volatile. You don’t have to touch it. It doesn’t have to leak out of your car. Just simply the vapor gets on your clothing.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, of course.
Caroline:
Then what do you do? You go home, and you sit on your couch. Then your pet sits there. All of this gets transferred all over the world, and we basically have these things in our environments all the time.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and I want to point out to people it’s like—look, to your point, it’s unavoidable to a certain point, so we have to deal with what we can control we have to control. I didn’t know about paint cans. I thought if they were sealed—why would they off-gas? You taught me something. I had no idea.
Caroline:
A lot of my clients, they’ll come, and they say I have that brain fog feeling. Nine out of ten times it’s the paint cans. Everyone is storing paint cans, and they feel stoned.
Dr. Pompa:
I have paint cans that I’m going to—I have some stored downstairs in my…
Caroline:
That’s it.
Dr. Pompa:
I have to get rid of.
Caroline:
It comes all the way upstairs. If I take an air—it’s in a basement, and I take an air sample. It’s there. Then people go, “I walk around, and I feel stoned. I’m not clear.” I said, “Take your paint cans out of the house for a week. Then call me back and tell me how you feel.” They go, “Oh, my God, my brain fog cleared up.”
Dr. Pompa:
I can put it in my garage. I mean, there’s obviously way more ventilation.
Caroline:
As long as it’s not—if it’s connected to the house—anything that’s connected to your house—picture your house as a big bucket. Everything that’s connected, it goes through the walls. It doesn’t stay in the garage because you put it in there. It goes everywhere.
Dr. Pompa:
Where do you put them?
Caroline:
Shed, you need a shed, outside shed or a storage unit. I have a storage unit, like a heat—one that has heat and air conditioning. We put all of our stuff in a storage. I mean, look, I do this for a living. My house, I don’t have any of the stuff. I live exactly like you do. I live this way. That’s my life. I’m sorry.
Dr. Pompa:
My life was really good until I discovered paint cans, okay? Now I’m going to—I almost want to measure my house before and after my paint can.
Caroline:
You can.
Dr. Pompa:
We’re going to have to do Part 2, Dr. Pompa’s paint can discovery.
Caroline:
It’s amazing to see the changes when people start changing things. It’s incredible. I can really see stuff, so [00:39:04].
Dr. Pompa:
Now I want to develop these boxes that we put in our garage that seal, that have no way of—there’s a market here. I’m just thinking another business idea.
Caroline:
Like we need anymore. It’s like, oh, my God.
Dr. Pompa:
Come on, Caroline. Yeah, you should be the one to do that, though. You’re like, oh, you’re telling everyone, and then you develop this, right?
Caroline:
I would love it. I would love it. Listen, I got into this business to help people. I’ve been fortunate to make a career. Twenty years of being in business. It’s not about the money for me. It is about making a difference in people’s lives. It always has been. I’m fortunate to do something that I love, and it’s fun. I mean, it really is fun.
Dr. Pompa:
No, I love it too. I love making a difference. I love exposing these things like that, like paint cans. I mean, I’m exposing people about their darn laundry detergent for years and their dishwashing detergent that gets on your plates and your food. I mean, my gosh, you’re eating this stuff, right?
Caroline:
Oh, it’s so bad, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s so bad.
Caroline:
You don’t think about it. Once you start thinking about it, then it opens up all these other things, and you’re like it’s [00:40:07].
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I’m going to have to change it to the toxic top 11 because I have to add paint cans to it.
Caroline:
That should be up there.
Dr. Pompa:
I have to rewrite my article. No, that’s great information. I feel blessed. I tell you, we’re going to do Part 2 where Dr. Pompa tests his home.
Caroline:
I love it. I love it.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to tell my story. Caroline, thank you so much for your testing. Thank you for making it affordable. Thank you for making it available. What a blessing. This has been a missing piece of the puzzle where we can go to one place and get everything we need and done right, so I appreciate that.
Caroline:
Exactly, and thank you for having me. It’s so fun to be here. I want to tell you a quick story when I started out. When I first started out and I was getting my bearings, I started testing homes. I think it was my first or second client. She was really sick, and she’s like, “I’m so sick in my home. Nobody can figure out what’s wrong with me.” I said, “Okay,” I said, “so we’ll do some volatile organic testing.” I think at the time it came back that she had methylene chloride, which is a—it’s associated a lot with gun solvent. When people clean guns in the house and they store guns in the house, that’s a big thing, so it easily builds up.
I said, “Look, there’s other chemicals here too that indicate that somebody has a gun in the home, or there may be a gun in the home.” She said, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re a fraud. You’re making this up.” I was just like—I’m right out of the gate. I’m like, oh, my God, but I think I’m right. I’m like, oh, my God, am I in the right career? What am I doing?
I talked to the lab. I said, “I really think there’s a gun here.” They’re like, “You can’t influence them. They’re just going to have to deal with it.” She was just so—just upset, so she calls me two weeks later. She goes, “I want to apologize.” She goes, “My husband was cleaning guns.” She goes, “We have a gun. I never knew we had it, and we’re storing it.”
He was storing it under the bed, and she was getting so sick from the solvent. Took it out and she got better. After that, she referred clients to me. Those kind of stories, I mean, they’re just—I have thousands of them. People have to realize everything you do in that house can affect you, so you have to think.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow! Yeah, that’s powerful. Yeah, it wakes me up to another level. That’s for sure. You need to test your homes. This is where we spend our time. If you want to get well, be well, downregulate inflammation, which is the cause of all disease arguably, then we have to pay attention to these things that we’re living in every day. There you go. Yeah, appreciate it. This is great information, great testing.
We’ll put the links here, folks, that you can get the testing with a great discount. Thank you for that, Caroline, and we’ll have it on our website. Thank you.
Caroline:
Thank you.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by Cytodetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here, and as always, thanks for listening.
