Lindsey: Welcome to the podcast, Dane.
Dane Johnson: Thank you so much for having me, Lindsey. I’m excited to be here, and excited to share experiences and chronic disease and help people who are dealing with IBD, if you have it. Thanks for having me.
Lindsey: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. So why don’t we start by having us tell you about your own journey with Crohn’s disease and how it led you to helping others?
Dane Johnson: Wow. Yeah, pain to purpose. I really just was a guy who didn’t want anything to do with learning about bowel movements and learning about food and I just wanted to live my life. I was a country boy from Virginia, just living a normal life, and at 19 years old, I started getting blood in the stool, and I was ashamed to tell anyone, and I didn’t know why.
I didn’t know if it was from some beetroot powder I had eaten or some cranberries or something. I didn’t know what was going on. And it started getting a little worse and a little worse, where I couldn’t keep hiding it. And by the time I was about 22 or 23, the doctors had finally diagnosed me with left-sided ulcerative colitis.
At first, they thought IBS, maybe a little hemorrhoid or a wound. Then, okay, you have left-sided ulcerative colitis, and then it kept progressing. I went on medications. Mesalamine was the first drug they gave me, plus prednisone, which helped, then stopped working. And then I went on 6-MP, which gave me toxicity of the liver.
I had to come off of it. My body freaked out. And then I went on methotrexate and Remicade, and then Entyvio and TPN feeding tubes. I kept going further and further until I was about 26 years old, where I nearly had died from Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis complications. So I was diagnosed with both forms of inflammatory bowel disease by two different doctors.
One, the doctor at UCLA, said it was Crohn’s disease 100%. The doctor at Mayo Clinic in Cedar Sinai said, “Nope, it’s ulcerative colitis,” and one thought it was gastritis with ulcerative colitis. So I just kept hearing different terms of how I was chronically inflamed. No one knew anything about root causes. No one had checked on any of the root issues that you and I look at.
And I just got more sick and more sick, and it seemed like the more we suppressed my immune system, the more the underlying root issues festered, to where it nearly killed me in 2014 on my 27th birthday.
Lindsey: And how did you come out of this to being able to help others?
Dane Johnson: So I came out of this and started helping others because I was looking for answers everywhere. I think a lot of people listening have been looking for answers, and it’s hard to see the truth through the fog, through the dark night. And I did not get results quickly. I tried diets, I tried supplements, I tried working with different naturopaths, and I had a really tough case, and I did not get results.
Took about four years of trying and spending over 50, $75,000 of my family’s money. I didn’t have any money, and that was debt money. We were not wealthy. We were just middle class. To finally start getting some results. And I can tell you about the things that I changed immediately where it finally worked.
Past the diet, past the supplements, what were the things that finally worked? Which I’ll share in a second. But once I started to get my life back, Lindsey, I went from 120 pounds, 6’2″, all right? I was 190, 185 pounds down to 120 pounds in a wheelchair. I couldn’t walk. I’d failed biologics. I’d failed steroids.
I’d been on four different antibiotics. And I had already tried bone broth fast, paleo diet, carnivore. I had tried the fruitarian diet where you eat 20 bananas a day, try to get 2,000 calories, 100 calories each, right? I tried all these things, and I just kept getting worse and losing more weight and just feeling more lost.
And everyone who loved me, and I’m so grateful to have those people who love me, but they were doing everything they could with their time, energy, and money to support me, and it wasn’t getting better. So when I finally figured out how to get natural healing to be effective, which is not easy, it’s one of the hardest things, anyone listening, you’re ever going to do.
When I finally started getting results, I just had developed something that was so specific that I could be great at and that really mattered to me, and I could really resonate with the pain, that I found that I was all of a sudden connecting in ways that people had never been able to connect before.
And I think, like Jordan Rubin and Elaine Gottschall and some of these other people out there with building gut health books were trying to do through their books in the ’80s and ’90s. But all of a sudden, we were in this environment with social media, podcasting, Zoom meetings, telehealth. I found a way that I could help people in a way that I never imagined.
The first time I ever started helping someone, I just shared my before and after. Here I am in a wheelchair, not being able to walk, completely housebound for a year, told I was going to die in December 2014, and here I am medication-free with a 95% normal colonoscopy, normal calprotectin, eating 10 times more food variety, 185 pounds with a 300-pound bench press, and medication-free, and I never got a surgery. I willed that into existence.
It wasn’t like I just had this secret recipe, guys, behind me where I’m like, “Ooh, here it is. It’s this one supplement. It’s this one idea.” It was really hard to do, and it took a long time to figure it out, but I did accomplish that. And once I accomplished that, there were a lot of other people who didn’t want to just talk to someone talking out of an ivory tower, metaphorically.
I don’t know about your experience, when I kept meeting a lot of doctors, it was just like people were talking about what they read in a book, what they thought the clinical was telling them. But they had no real experience doing it. They couldn’t show me any testimonies of helping people do it.
They never had to normalize colonoscopy. They never had to gain 60 pounds of natural weight again. They never had to go with the shame of friends and family, and they never had to lead a new life and divorce this Western world while everyone else is eating gluten and drinking alcohol around them. So I just saw a lot of people who actually hadn’t done what I needed to be done, even though they were brilliant and smarter than me in so many ways, but they just had no real experience, no intrinsic experience with one foot in front of the other, I’m not meant to be sick, I’m going to take my life back from this.
And that’s how I got into it. And I posted that before and after, and a bunch of people said, “Can you just help me?” This was 12 years ago. And I said, “Sure, and I started meeting people online who just told me about their story and sickness, and I said “here’s what I read, here’s what I did, here’s what I learned, here’s what I tried,” and I find that we were looking in a lot of the same directions.
And I was able to help advance them on places they hadn’t gone yet. Now, it helps when you’re housebound for a year and you’ve got no job, no kids, no responsibilities – all I had to do was read, learn, try, implement. I was dying. So that was one of the benefits of such a terrible tragedy. And I found that I started helping people get their life back.
I was able to help people start getting rid of the blood and the mucus and see inflammation go down, and I kept learning and growing. And then I started working with my naturopath professors at a deeper level, and then I started, all of a sudden I had, a few years later, I had worked personally one-on-one with 1,000, 2,000 people around the world.
And I became passionate about it. I had two other jobs. I worked three jobs for three years because I wanted to make sure I could keep working as I was healing. And that’s another thing, to stay healthy while you’re stressed, Lindsey? When you’re working hard and you’re doing great things in life, and to try to keep yourself healthy while you’re trying to help other people is a whole other ballgame.
You really have got to know what you’re doing when you’re trying to help other people and you’re taking on their stress and taking on jobs and travel and work and trying to make sure that you don’t go into a deep reaction in your own life is another ballgame. But yeah, one foot in front of the other, and I’ve been dedicated to this.
I’ve probably put 20,000 hours into it, and I’ve been doing it for 12 years, worked with thousands of people, and I built a team of practitioners. We have two naturopath doctors on staff, an RN, a chiropractic doctor. We have an herbalist. Eighty percent of my team was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease themselves, and we see about 250 clients at any given time around the world, and we’ve worked with a few thousand.
And our mission is just creating a home that specializes, that actually has walked the walk, that can really understand what you’re going through spiritually, energetically, mentally, and start making sense of how we get our power back So that’s kind of my story, yeah, if I could just sum it up and give you a bubblegum version. Yeah.
Lindsey: Yeah. So I assume that you’ve arrived at functional medicine as the sort of framework of how you deal with this. Is that accurate?
Dane Johnson: It is, but I’m more of a cherry picker. I will look at any form of medicine and say I think there’s something great there, in Eastern medicine, Chinese medicine, when, you know, functional medicine or conventional medicine.
There’s certain people that do need to use conventional medications to support themselves so they don’t have to get the surgery, or they don’t go into a life-threatening situation. So I believe you have to know all of it and build a custom plan. Don’t just put one flag up, but learn what everyone’s doing, and now in functional medicine or naturopathic medicine is really looking at what is the root cause driving the imbalance in the body, and that is the root of how the body heals. I think that’s the best way of understanding what else you can do besides taking a steroid, an antibiotic, immunosuppressant, immunomodulator or surgery, which is eventually what conventional medicine does.
So you have to look at root cause and how to empower the natural homeostasis of the body to regain balance, and I think functional medicine does that best, but there’s some really good stuff that can be really impactful both on the TCM side (Traditional Chinese Medicine), or the Eastern side that you can sprinkle in there if it fits the client or patient or fits their needs and, is making sense and congruent with their plan.
Lindsey: Yeah. So I just actually finished publishing and then publicizing a podcast with another gut health specialist and posted it in a Reddit group, and I got a negative reaction from somebody because there had been obviously one person who had posted about a negative experience with this person’s group, in a similar situation where it’s a practice with multiple people working there.
Dane Johnson: Oh, wow. Sorry to hear it.
Lindsey: Yeah. And I got the impression that this one negative post essentially poisoned the entire group against this practitioner who for me was a very intelligent, very informed person.
Dane Johnson: Yeah …
Lindsey: I’m curious, like anticipating that a similar reaction could happen, what preemptively would you say to somebody who criticizes functional medicine or naturopathic medicine as a whole if a group is already very oriented towards the conventional approach
Dane Johnson: First off, let’s all recognize something. Health and money is a bit like oil and water. They really don’t go together very well. In this world, we do– anyone in functional medicine needs to do their best to operate from a place of trust and integrity and operate from conscious capitalism.
We all have mortgages, we all have bills, right? And money is how we trade time and energy and effort, and you want it to be worth it. No one bats a thousand. No one’s going to be perfect, and sometimes people who are angry and resentful and are in so much pain are going to take it out on something outside of themselves, and they’re not going to hold personal responsibility for what they actually did and what they haven’t done.
And I bet if I talk with this person that they’re giving a hard time to, I would just be looking for flags that this person is in a very traumatized state or they’ve just been hurt. And I think a lot of people who are ready to really heal and are the right people can approach it with logical questions where they can hear a negative review and say, “Hey, how much of this do I need to watch out for? How much of this is applicable for what I want to achieve, and what can I take away from this negative review?” And also look for positive reviews. If a person’s only– has got a bunch of negative reviews and then all positive reviews, I think that’s a huge red flag. And I think that sometimes a negative review can scream louder than five positive reviews, but you really have to just put it into context.
So my opinion on it when you’re looking at working with someone is things that are going to be worth your time, energy, and money in functional medicine is number one is the plan needs to be customized to you. Okay? If someone is selling you cookie cutter supplements and cookie cutter protocols and cookie cutter diets, there’s a good chance that you won’t get great results.
Number two, I think the best impact is going to be private coaching. If you really do need a private coach, it’s really hard to scale as a CEO of a company. You can’t scale a multimillion-dollar company off the back of private coaching. Good luck. It’s really hard. But I only do private coaching because of the impact, and it also keeps my brand really strong, and it lets me sleep at night.
And I’d rather have a smaller company with bigger results, honestly, is how I come down to it. I think that number three is you want to work with a functional practitioner who specializes in what you’ve actually going through. If you have some rare disease and this person is just generally good at naturopathic medicine and they don’t specialize in what you’re seeing, there’s a good chance that they’re not going to be able to help with the little bit of details that you’re going through.
If your underlying problem is mold or Lyme disease and this person doesn’t specialize in mold or Lyme disease, it’s probably not the best person for you. But that practitioner could be great for somebody else. So I also like holding space for patients and clients, and I like holding space for practitioners.
I think we all need to love on each other more, as long as we deeply believe that the practitioner and the client are coming with integrity, with trust, showing up as our best selves. I work hard for you. You work hard for yourself. We come together, and we work at this together because healing is not linear.
Okay? It is tough. You go left, you learn. You go right, you learn. Let’s stay in the pocket, and let’s make sure that we’re being honest and we’re here for the right reasons. And that’s one of the reasons that, personally, I will still get on and record testimonies. I’ve probably recorded 3 to 400 just video-recorded testimonies that are 15 to 20 minutes long at a minimum of four months of private coaching each person.
We’re talking years of work because it helps to validate the experience of knowing someone. With a practitioner or a program, you need to go through with someone. That’s the oil and water of the money, is that if someone just puts together a bunch of videos and just tells you to do all these things and doesn’t hear your personal experience, you’re just not going to get that much impact.
Now, it can be really useful that if you are assertive and you could be the CEO of your health and then someone teaches you a bit about drainage pathways, they teach you about mycotoxins, hidden mold in the house, they teach you about parasites, they teach you about biofilms, they teach you how to unlock phase one, phase two detoxification in the liver, you might say, “Hey, this is great because I got what it was and I got what I needed to implement into my plan and I’m disciplined and assertive enough to implement it.”
But a lot of us aren’t. So I think we’re just lost in what we think we’re getting sometimes, what we want. If you think you’re going to spend $5,000 and every problem is going to go away, and you’re going to live in remission for the rest of your life of any problem, you’re going to walk on water, it’s probably not going to happen.
But can you get major symptom relief? I think so. Can you get empowered? Can you learn the traits that can help you not just now, but for the next 20 years? That’s what I would be looking for. If you’re looking for something that’s worth your money, it’s like, am I learning things that are going to make me empowered for the next five, 10, 20 years?
Is this something I would teach my children? Is this something I can help my parents with? Man, that might be worth more than symptom relief, if you really think about it. That’s the golden goose, to get self-empowered. So I think anyone who’s looking at natural medicine, I’ve bought programs for 10, $15,000.
I’ve spent over $100,000 learning about natural medicine myself. The things that I’ve gotten the most impact on is, I want a company and a leader who’s mission-driven, who’s passionate, who specializes in this specific thing. I like niche programs and need to be able to talk with the community members.
If you won’t let me talk with other people who’ve bought your program, that to me is a big red flag. So I want to be able to talk with other members. I want to be able to grow with them. I want to learn with them. I want to see testimonies of people doing what I want to do specifically. And that point, I’ll roll the dice.
Me personally, that’s when I would invest the money. And if it doesn’t work out perfectly, I still probably have enough that I can keep working off of to get better and better from that program, and that’s where I’d say it’s worth it
Lindsey: Yeah. I think the important part is that, yeah, nobody does bat 1,000.
That is, everybody does not help every single person, and often the reason that you don’t help people is that whatever your approach is not the approach they want to take. They’re not prepared to, say, take the supplements that need to be taken or change the diet or whatever it is that you’re asking them to do. They’re not prepared to make those steps and therefore can fade away … or not follow your advice or don’t do it in a timely manner. There’s a definitely a give and take in this whole process, and we’re all doing our best to try and help people, and some people are not . . .
Dane Johnson: . . . I know.
Lindsey: … pulling up their end of the bargain and then blaming the practitioner maybe.
Dane Johnson: And, yeah, and let’s talk, for everyone listening to this, we all have been in a position where someone didn’t like us or didn’t like something we did, whether it was high school or middle school or business; and we’re in consulting. Lindsey, you as a practitioner have to guard yourself with knowing what you’re doing and the integrity that you come with, and you’re going to be right for the certain kind of person.
You are so detailed. You were on my podcast a little while ago, and I heard you. You are detailed. You are educated. You are well-read, and you are specific on what you want to do. The hard thing, and I think that’s going to be right for certain people, and other people are going to need something else, and that’s okay.
Be where you really want to be. Guys, if you’re going to get real results though, here’s some things that can really help you with when you’re choosing natural medicine and health, is the people who are paying did not sign up to become doctors. They don’t need a PhD in gut microbiome. They need to get a simplified, doable action steps that’s customized to their experience that fits their life.
That’s where a lot of people are getting overwhelmed is I come in, and yes, I should stop eating this. I should start eating this. I should add all these things. But how does that fit my kids’ schedule? How does it fit my work schedule? How does it fit my mental load? Because I’m overwhelmed. I’m probably battling a little bit of depression.
I also am dealing with insomnia. I have no weight gain. I’ve got stress on my marriage. There’s so much going on that what I think the answer is and what the world needs more of, if I’m being quite honest, I think we need more coaches. I think we’ve got a lot of people out there who are looking at the science and training on the science, but how do we take this huge overwhelming science base and simplify it into daily things that people in the United States or Canada or Europe can actually say, “This is applicable. It makes sense to me. It’s simple. I can be consistent with it, and I’m not overwhelmed”?
That is where the results are. It’s not the pro-. . . it’s not the answer. It’s how to integrate the answer in a consistent fashion where I can actually do it and keep doing it. Lindsey, I failed for all those years because people were telling me to go gluten-free, and I was going, “What? Gluten free? Everything I eat is gluten. Are you crazy? I worked at Papa John’s Pizza for four years.” I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve gotten so much success is I am the patient. I was the kid on McDonald’s, Papa John’s, drinking soda, chugging beers- … throwing a football down the beach to try to get a date.
I didn’t care. I grew up in South Carolina and Virginia, farm boy, and I wanted nothing. I didn’t want this. How did I go from that guy to now specializing in gut microbiome and giving speeches to doctors and working and having naturopath doctors on my staff and helping thousands of people?
Because I’ve tried to simplify it in a way that’s integrated. I’m not here to try to win an award of the smartest guy on Dr. Oz. I’m here to build solutions that work for everyday people, and that’s what we need. It’s like, how do I take this idea of food and make it happy and make it celebratory and make it fun and make it taste good and get the gut microbiome as good as Lindsey’s?
Like, how do I do both? How do I make sense? How do I get rid of these toxins out of my life without feeling like I have to be wrapped in a bubble, like, how do I not freak out that I have polyester underwear and I have to rebuy all my underwear and spend $500 because the organic cotton is double the price as the stuff at Walmart?
It’s like I think we’re just overwhelmed with stuff. We need to make it bite-size, and it’s how do I just look at my day to day? So I call that the daily blueprint, and we can talk about some of these things. What do I integrate that has the biggest bang for my buck, doesn’t cost a lot, that’s easy to do now, and then can start just being a part of my life and I don’t get overwhelmed with?
Because it’s overwhelming to try to do HBOT [hyperbaric oxygen therapy] and peptides and coffee enemas and castor oil packs. It’s like maybe I’m not ready- … for all that, I’m not ready. Yeah. And here’s the line that everyone will want to hear right now. Write this down. And at the end of the day, the practitioner’s not healing you.
You’re healing you. Your divine body has the ability. Anything a naturopathic physician can teach you is just igniting the body’s natural state. It’s signaling the body. Like when we add that more fiber, we’re signaling the microbiome to grow, like nitrogen on a garden.
When you do meditation, you’re signaling to have a healing response.You’re signaling the parasympathetic, the vagal nerve. You’re signaling for your body to salivate, to create natural digestive enzymes in your saliva. We’re getting the aha. When you learn from the science, it’s just reinstalling God’s creation. You are the answer. Your body already can do it. Get out of its way.
Stop poisoning it. Start giving it what it needs. Get into a place of happiness so you get the right hormone receptors and enzymic reactions released and then start stacking it. Because once it’s easy to be gluten-free, once it’s easy to get rid of alcohol, once it’s easy to start going to bed at time, once it’s easy to start making your own meals, now Lindsey can come in and start going, “Let’s double black belt this thing on higher levels.”
You’re not ready. You have got to get through phase one before you can go to phase four. And I think that person I bet was just overwhelmed with what they were being asked to do when they just weren’t ready, right? Yeah. And so start with the simple things.
Lindsey: Yeah. So let’s get into specifics of how you work with people. So from testing, to diet. Tell me what it looks like to start working with you.
Dane Johnson: Yeah. And so it goes into what I’ve built my whole plan and how I help people is really what we just talked about. I’m looking to try to meet the person where they are. I’m trying to figure out what excites them, and sometimes it’s an eight-year-old kid and we have to do it completely different than a 14-year-old or a 40-year-old or a 60-year-old who’s been studying this for 20 years, has a PhD, and has been trying natural medicine for a long time and says, “I already know probably 90% of what you want to teach me.”
And so there’s a lot of different energies. You have got to meet them where they are. So when I look at it, when I look at any case, and this is how success is done, you have got to get simple to get successful. If your life is too hard, that is the number one equation to get failure, okay? If life is too hard, you’re going to end up with some sort of failure.
If you can simplify it, that’s how greatness is done, right? LeBron James makes it look easy or Messi makes it look easy. Michael Jordan made it look easy. You have got to take something hard and make it simplified to start getting consistent and get more success. So I want to do whatever I need to get out of overwhelmed, get consistent, and build a plan that makes you happy and healthy and you feel you can do, okay?
So if I have to say, “It’s not the perfect plan, Lindsey, but I can get them consistent,” I’ll take 80% of the right plan with consistency over 100% of the perfect plan that they can’t be consistent with. Because if I try to give them the perfect plan, they’re going to get overwhelmed, they’re going to quit, and it’s going to end up with this didn’t work, right?
So when I look at lab work also, lab work is very expensive and it’s not perfect. Me and you both know that quantitative PCR stool tests, that urine analysis, that blood analysis are not perfect. They don’t find Lyme disease well, they don’t find parasites well, they don’t find viral load like cytomegalovirus or EBV well.
They can’t really identify biofilms very well, that there’s obvious multi-factor issues that make them constantly get false negatives. Also, if you haven’t even built the foundational plan and you’re spending $2,000 on lab work, which is what I was doing, if you’re on a budget, that money could have been spent better, I think, in the very beginning just building a foundational plan that’s low risk and high reward.
Because if I’m going to do $1,500 of lab work and then I needed to redo it in two or three months, I’ve spent $3,000 on a budget of, let’s say, $5,000, and all that is a North Star that might be false negatives and I might have been able to fix half of what’s in the lab with a basic plan, just getting rid of alcohol, getting rid of poor snacking habits, getting to sleep better, getting more sunlight, and if I can get those results in the first two or three weeks, it might change what labs I want to do. Because if you’re sick as a dog, yeah, I could justify spending $1,500, $2,000 wholesale, right? What it costs a practitioner to order, no profit, to check what’s going on with you.
So I think that labs are very important. I like them, I use them, but I always go with what that person is. I’m here to spend every dollar, every minute, every piece of time on what I think is best for that client, and if we don’t agree, we’re not doing it. That’s how I build trust. So my big thing is I work for you, I want to build trust with you.
Are you ready? What’s going on with budget, time, energy, or money? And then based on everything they’re telling me, I’m saying, “This is my recommendation. Do you agree? And don’t take anything, don’t do anything or take anything unless you can give me one to two sentences on why you’re personally doing it.”
Because if a person doesn’t understand why they’re doing it, they’re just choking down 30 pills, you are on a Russian roulette table of this client getting over you because they are just choking down what you are saying based on your authority. So if they’re overwhelmed by it and they’re saying “this authority said I’ll get better in three weeks, I’m going to watch it. If I don’t feel better shoving this stuff down my throat in three weeks, then they’re a hack.” And that’s energetically where a lot of people will go.
So I don’t build anything that this person doesn’t agree with, and if they’re telling me they’re overwhelmed and they can’t do it, I say, “Okay, why don’t we just do 60% of what we’re talking about? Let’s go ahead and see if you can incorporate it where you feel safe. Then let’s meet in another two weeks, 10 to 14 days later. Let’s just do a quick 30-minute check-in. Does it make sense? Were you able to do it? What was overwhelming? What started to make sense, and are we ready for more?”
I got to win that we are on the same page and we both like this.
Because if it doesn’t go right, we both agree that this was a good move. I’ll help build it for you, right? I’ll move on the chess match for, with you and for you, but I got to get you on the right team. I do not bark orders at people, and that really helps me with a person who’s brand new or someone who’s advanced.
With someone who’s advanced, I’m ready to go double black belt, right? Frequencies, biohacking peptide, stem cells, exosomes, red light therapy, meditation, hyperbaric oxygen, fasting, bone broth fast versus water fast, biofilms, parasites. Which antimicrobials work the best, why? Do we need to use antibiotics for a specific reason?
Why? Do we use conventional medicine? What’s the research say? Yeah, we can jump in. But if I’m also dealing with a 12-year-old or an 18-year-old who’d never asked for this and never knew anything about this, I’m going to build them a basic plan, and I’m going to be teaching them why I want to do what I do so I can get them excited.
If they’re not excited, maybe a little overwhelmed if they’re brand new with this by the end of the call, then we’re not going to win. I got to get out of fear, I got to get excitement, and I got to give them some really simple to-dos and then check on them again in two weeks.
Lindsey: Okay. So I’d love to get into some actual specifics of particular situations so that people can pull some value out of this.
For example, mycotoxins I’ve discovered in talking to other people and in working myself that’s a root cause for a lot of people. What percentage would you say is that a root cause for the people you work with?
Dane Johnson: Yeah, IBD, that’s great. Very interesting. I don’t think I could give you an actual number. I’d have to guess because we work with a few thousand people who are actually going to spend the money to check for mold, but then mold’s hard to check for.
You’ve got Dr. Andrew Campbell’s test in blood the MyMycoLab Test by Dr. Andrew Campbell that’s checking for mold. You can check that. We’ve seen a lot of positive come back where it was negative in a urine analysis, which is what Vibrant America and all these other labs do, is a urinalysis of mycotoxins where it might come back negative.
And there’s also just the symptoms. Sometimes we’ll go on symptoms and think it’s that, or we have to do more testing for CIRS, chronic inflammatory response syndrome. So I think it’s a really deep avenue with mold. I think that mold, the biggest thing is mold is weakening the immune system. It’s making you more likely to have autoimmune reactions.
It’s making you more likely to not be able to handle viral replication or Lyme disease or some of these other pathogens. I think they’re more likely to take over your body when you have an underlying problem of mold. And common issues I see with mold is they feel worse just walking into a room. They can go into a musty room and just feel terrible or headaches or systemic inflammation.
Or if they’re making all these changes and it’s not going away, some of these core problems are not going away, even like calprotectin, it can be underlying mycotoxins. People with poor drainage pathways and people who have a background of living in basements or living in areas that we know are notorious for mold, people with poor epigenetics, I’m looking for with mold.
So what percentage? I think a larger percentage. I’d say if I just take a guess, I’d say 25 to 35, 40% people with IBD are dealing with mold. But once your immune system is weak, anything can become a problem with that. And it’s never one problem. It’s always multiple problems. So I think the bigger question is, how can I start identifying if mold is a problem for me?
I would check your C4a in your blood work or your VEGF. These can be acute inflammatory markers that can be signs of chronic inflammatory response syndrome. So your doctor probably won’t know what these are, but you can keep asking for them and go check LabCorp and see if you can get those tested.
I think also the MMP-9 is also really good to check in the blood or the stool. The Gut Zoomer does check the MMP-9, so if I see that elevated in a quantitative PCR stool test called the Gut Zoomer, I’m going to think a little bit more about mold. And obviously, doing a urine analysis can be easy to check there.
But one of the notorious problems I see with mold is someone with backed up toxin load. If they just don’t seem to have good liver movement, good lymphatic movement, sinus infections, constantly swelling around their nose, I’m always going, “Okay, I think there might be a mold issue here that could be causing this problem.”
So those are some signs I see right off the bat and yeah, I think it’s a notorious problem for a lot of people dealing with chronic inflammation or chronic disease.
Lindsey: So you mentioned Andrew Campbell’s antibody test. And given that antibodies like an IgG can elevate from an exposure 20 years ago and stay elevated-
Dane Johnson: Yeah
Lindsey: . . . how can you trust? Like to me, mycotoxins coming out in the urine, then you know for sure there are mycotoxins coming through the system right now- … versus an elevated antibody could be from… obviously, if it’s an elevated IgM, then you know that’s a recent exposure. But if it’s an only IgGs elevated or IgA, how can you know that’s anything recent?
Dane Johnson: They do IgG and IgE, and you don’t, and no lab test is perfect. And what I’m looking for is further signs that mold could be an issue. But the people that we have said these symptoms are correlated with mold, and even the patient believes that they have mold, we’ve seen a lot of positive tests in the MyMycoLab’s indicating that when the urinalysis comes back normal, and where we say we know they’re living in mold.
Because another thing is to get the mycotoxins to actually move through the urine. So if your liver’s not moving and you’re overwhelmed with toxins, it’s going to show a false negative. Yeah. So one thing I also do to help with that is I’ll use a little biofilm disruption and liver support about anywhere from four to seven days, sometimes 14 days, prior to doing any urine analysis.
So I like one to two grams of N-acetylcysteine*. If they’re very sensitive, I’ll go on maybe 500 milligrams of N-acetylcysteine to support, and maybe a castor oil pack. If they’re super stuck up, I might need to use a little extra DMSO to support in that, and I’m going to stop the binders to make sure it’s more likely to show up in the test.
But also, do they start getting better? If I start putting them on specific binders, if I get them out of that house, if their house tests positive for mold, that’s also indicative. So there’s a lot of ways to skin the cat. I think the harder time is even finding the mold in the house. I personally have not found great results with ERMI tests, open air tests.
I think the best bang for your buck looking for mold in a house, if you believe it is, it’s in-wall air cavity sampling, where you actually need to draw a little incision in the drywall and vacuum out the air from that area, that cavity, and then that vacuum goes right into a sample.
And you need to do probably about 12 of those, 12, 15, depending on how many rooms you think is a problem, and probably multiple ones in a room. I actually just opened up my walls where I thought there was mold when I bought this house. I just opened up my ceiling, and I just went up there and had- got a mold guy also come and visually look and then scrub the actual wood and test that sample, and we found large amounts of Stachybotrys black mold up there when two different ERMI tests had tested negative in the house So-
Lindsey: This was prior to buying it or after you bought it?
Dane Johnson: This is after I bought it.
Lindsey: So you didn’t pre-check for mold?
Dane Johnson: No, I did, but sometimes you’re in a case where it’s like, it has got to go off the market, you got three different buyers who are trying to buy, you’re trying to take their word for it. Oh, like buying a house, yeah, and trying to get a good price on it.
I bought a house in southern California. It’s not easy. Yeah, you got it. But I knew that I thought there was mold in there, but I got such a price in there that I said, “Okay, I can justify spending $10,000 on mold remediation in here because of the price and the deal I’m going to get on this.”
Lindsey: Yeah.
Dane Johnson: You sometimes have got to come out with your deal-making situation. But here’s something also just to help everyone. If you work on the foundations of functional medicine, natural healing, no matter what the underlying problem is, there’s a good chance your body will start feeling better, even when living in mold.
One of my coaches is super sensitive to living in mold, and we’ve gotten him, he got about 70% symptom relief without moving because he couldn’t move. He couldn’t afford to move. So I do think, yes, you can’t get fully better unless you get out of the mold if you are one of those people who has mold sensitivity or mold allergy or really bad epigenetics, you can’t release these mycotoxins at all.
But you can help your body in a great level of ways. So if you think there’s any underlying problem, you’ve got to focus on enhancing digestion, repairing the gut lining, rebuilding the microbiome, opening up the drainage pathways. The five drainage pathways I like to focus on, there are more, but these are the big ones that anyone starting out needs to fix: the kidneys, the liver, the ability to poop, the ability to sweat, and the lymphatic system.
And then if I was to add a bonus that I go more advanced, it’s the cellular detox that I know Dan Pompa talks a lot about, but that’s at that more advanced, deeper level. But I like to start on those because if you can’t get those moving, you’re going to feel terrible with Lyme, parasites, biofilms, candida, proteobacteria.
You’re going to feel terrible with any of it. So you’ve got to get the drainage pathways open. You’ve got to enhance the physiological imbalances in the gut. The five that you have to fix: digestion, microbiome, gut lining, the nervous system, and the drainage pathways. So, okay, you hit those five physiological imbalances, and every single disease will start getting better, and that’s something simple that everyone can understand.
We’re not talking about the woo of parasites. We’re talking about how the body actually works. Every doctor you’ve seen knows and believes digestion is real, right? Digestion is a real process that could cause… That if you have low digestion, it’s likely you’re going to get bloating, gas, more likely to get SIBO, parasite infection, undigested food in the stool, or inflammation from undigested food in the gut lining, or damage to your epithelial cell lining.
It’s just obvious. One plus one equals two. Digestion needs to be enhanced no matter what disease for a better gut experience. Every doctor will believe microbiome. Every doctor believes in the epithelial cell lining, the mucosal membrane. These are real. It’s not up for debate. It’s not woo. So I love to start there with clients, where I can say everyone can wrap their head around it.
“It’s like you’re right. I have IBS and IBD. If I enhance my digestion, I’ll probably feel better. You’re right. If I rebalance my microbiome, I’ll feel better.” Now, it can help to do labs, but you and I both know that there is no stool test that can perfectly assimilate how strong the microbiome is because it’s a flash shot.
It’s one day, and it can change day to day, week to week based on what’s going through. Or if you’ve got the flu or a virus could change those, the inflammatory markers, right? And if leaky gut, I can look at gut permeability in the Wheat Zoomer, right? I can look at it in the blood. I can look at it in the Gut Zoomer with zonulin or anti-lipopolysaccharide antibodies, right?
So I can start to see the signs of gut permeability. Your stool can tell you, right? If you’ve got these broken down, weak, broken apart stools, and all of a sudden you’re getting more formed stools and you feel fully relieved, and they look more like the Bristol stool that you want it to look like, that’s a good sign that the leaky gut is going away, the microbiome’s getting better, and digestion is enhancing, so we’ve have got to go with symptoms. We have got to go with intuition. And then we also look at lab work to give us a little bit more data on what that means.
Lindsey: So I know there’s sort of two schools of thought on fiber and IBD. One school of thought is just pull all the fiber out. Do like an SCD or an IBD- AID or even just a low FODMAP diet.
And then another school of thought is throw all of the fiber at once. Just try and absolutely fiber max somebody, and I’ve had both kinds of speakers on my podcast before. I’m curious where you fall in that spectrum?
Dane Johnson: Yeah, I think one thing that’s just made me successful, I said it earlier, Lindsey, is I love to cherry pick.
I look at all avenues. I have worked with people who cannot handle animal food. They just cannot do it, and they don’t want to do it. That’s fine. And then we have got to handle fiber. If you’re eating plants, you have got to handle fiber. You have got to work that in. It’s just the kind of fiber. I’ve worked with people who absolutely cannot handle fiber.
They cannot do it. They only feel good on the carnivore diet. They wish they could handle plants. Every time they eat them, they freak out. Their body does so bad. I think you and me dived into this a little bit. In a perfect world, and as you go, I want you to be able to handle fiber, okay? So I think I’m pro-fiber, but I like to be strategic about it and intuitive about it.
So how much fiber? What kind of fiber? Where do we get the fiber source? Is it food or supplement? A lot of times I’ll start with a supplement, because I can control it better, all right? I can control it a little bit better, and if I use foods with fibers, I’m just going to take my time on it. I’m going to look for really gentle, light fibers, or I’m going to cook it in such a way that I’m really breaking down a little of that insoluble fiber.
So I’m like a chess player. I’m looking at the fiber game. I’m just trying to win it for that person. So we’re talking generic, guys, which takes my power away. I don’t do generic. I do customization. So for instance, if I’m hearing someone on one side or the other, I’m trying to help with what other side of the fence they land on and how they’re feeling.
But I think the end goal is if you can’t handle fiber, that means you can’t handle a wide variety of food, and if you can’t handle a wide variety of food, I don’t think you’re that healed. The one thing I would say to a carnivore person is, if you can’t tolerate oats, you can tell me and you and Dave Asprey can tell me that oats are crap.
Great. If you can’t tolerate sprouted, rolled oats, that tells me the integrity of your gut is weak, and do you intuitively, just I’m going to ask them the answer with a question, “Do you feel healed? Do you feel robust if you can’t handle these variety of whole foods, right?”
Foods that have been here for thousands of years. And so that’s where I got. If I can’t handle quinoa, I don’t really feel that strong. I might say that it’s not part of my therapeutic response, and I don’t want it because of plant defenses, great. Okay, cool. But if you can’t handle it, I think that’s something going on, unless you’re actually allergic.
But for most of us, it’s not a true allergy. It’s a sensitivity or Herxheimer reaction due to poor digestion, weak gut lining, weak microbiome imbalance. And that’s where I took like– I think Dr. Gundry is one of these people that lands on the really intense fence, and I’ve really learned some stuff, and I like to use him as an example because I interviewed him a couple times, and I really like him, and there’s things he said that I really like, and there’s things that I absolutely do not use that he says, but I still love him, and I think we can all do that.
The power is just to take– There’s things I’m saying, take what works and leave the rest. That’s how you win. Stop trying to raise the flag of some famous diet and just win where it makes sense to win. What he said about grains and reducing lectins and phytates and some oxalates with some of these plant foods, that really helped me when I was chronically sick.
It really worked, where I started adding in more polysaccharides and not having a response because I was stuck on the SAD-type style or the paleo-type style, and I wanted to add more food variety because I didn’t feel healed living so restrictively. And I wanted to add more fiber because there’s way more research to suggest fiber is better for you than there’s research to suggest that fiber is bad for you
Right? It’s 100 to one in the research column. But when he talked about how fruit was high in lectins and it’s bad for you and you shouldn’t do it, I said, “You can keep that. Then you just go ahead and keep that card.” I actually completely disagree with that, and fruit’s been very healing for me, and I’ve found it to be really good at evacuating the toxins.
We’re helping with constipation. It’s high in water. It’s a natural, raw food that we can do really well with, and I can get alkalizing fruits that are high in antioxidants, polyphenols, like berries. So I just said, “No, the research is going to go against that one.” So take what works. So my theory I’m thinking with fiber is, okay, if you can’t handle fiber or you’re wondering about fiber, I’m always going to start with prebiotic soluble fiber. Okay?
So if it can’t absorb water and it’s not delicate, then it’s not the best place to start. So think no seeds, no skins. If you can’t squish it, don’t eat it. That really helps you with the fiber game. All right? So it’s about that food, and then realize that it’s not the type of food that is good or bad.
It’s the manner in which it’s prepared that actually means more. So you might do bad with lettuce, right? But if I break down that lettuce in a certain way, you might do better with it, or an almond. If I have sprouted almond, stone-ground nut butter, you might do great with that. But if I give you a raw, organic almond, you eat it now, you’re probably going to freak out to that.
You’re not going to feel as good. And those oxalates might be irritating you. So the manner in which food is prepared has to be awoken with the idea of food is good or bad for you. You want to be aware of plant defenses. You want to be aware of fiber. But there’s a reason why a baby can handle applesauce but not a raw apple.
Because it’s produced in a way that they can handle. So you can cook something to also change that amount of fiber you’re getting. When you cook it down, it’s breaking down some of those insoluble fibers. So I’m always going to start with soluble fiber. I’m going to start– I like acacia fiber to start with.
I might start with a little blueberry, I might start with a little banana. Depending on a person, if they’re constipated, how they handle fats or histamine, I might start with a little avocado because it’s really soft and really easy. But a lot of us who can’t handle fats, have histamine reactions, or are having bowel movements too quickly can’t do avocado.
That’s why some people are so in love with avocados, and some hate avocados. So that’s what I call food philosophy. So I teach people food philosophy, no famous diets. I just learn from famous diets and customize you a plan. So from there, I agree with you, Lindsey, on there. Like from there, I want to start scaling.
Can I add psyllium husk, psyllium seed? Can I add in sprouted flax and chia that has a nice mix of insoluble and soluble with natural omega-3s? And can I add things in that feed the good bacteria? And I actually was beginning to bring up Dr. Gundry. He said this thing that he thought that a bit of doses of things every once in a while can really help build up your microbiome diversity.
I agree. Having a little bit of arrowroot, buckwheat, quinoa that are gluten-free and are ancient grains that are clean, I think is good for the microbiome integrity. And I’ll also note this, I’ve worked with thousands of people, some of the best bowel movements and most consistency I’ve seen actually was from vegans, where people were eating Swiss chard and artichoke and asparagus every day.
And everyone I’ve known with severe IBD would die on those things. But I’ve seen people work that up where they’re eating that, and they never worry about a bathroom because their microbiome can handle it, the diversity’s so strong because fiber is nature’s binder, and it cleans the colon. Last thing I’ll say about fiber is like physical therapy.
In this metaphor, if you have a bad knee and you do too intense of physical therapy in the beginning, it’s going to make you worse, and you can mistakenly demonize the fiber. All of us are different, and you might not be ready for a long period of time to handle any plant-based foods or fiber. So customize it to you and work up based on what your body’s experiencing.
But just make sense of the type of physical therapy you’re doing on your body and why.
Lindsey: So there’s lots of anti-inflammatory supports for IBD while you’re working on the root cause, like curcumin or omega-3s or PEA. So I’m curious if there’s any that you particularly like or favor or find have been more effective?
Dane Johnson: I have found, I like what generally has worked for a lot of people. So if I’m recommending something, I would prefer that 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 people have used it. I would prefer that there’s more clinical research on it. I would prefer that their doctor has heard of it, so when they tell their doctor they’re using something, no one has an aneurysm on this wild new thing.
And so I like curcumin as my favorite because it is most well-known, it is most studied. Everyone agrees, even conventional doctors will agree curcumin’s going to be good. Obviously, you have got to watch out for contraindications with certain medications or liver issues. I also like to use a curcumin… I think a big mistake the market’s making is they’re looking for bioavailable anti-inflammatories.
When I’m dealing with IBD, I want to coat the gut with anti-inflammatories. I want it to get to the colon. I don’t necessarily want it to absorb in the jejunum or ileum, right?
Lindsey: So you’re not looking for the super advanced, expensive forms. You’re looking for the regular Joe curcumin with some bioperine kind of thing, or?
Dane Johnson: That’s it, Lindsey. I want the most basic stuff. I want C3 curcuminoids* with no MCT oil, vitamin E fat solubles to increase it. I want no black pepper [bioperine]. Black pepper is the antithesis of the value of curcumin. Never take a curcumin with black pepper unless you’re trying to deal with arthritis or something of that systemic.
But I’ll tell you right now, all autoimmune disease is a weakened gut lining. I don’t like black pepper in my supplements. And the whole point is it damages the gut lining to drive in the curcumin. That’s the whole point of it is it helps drive the curcumin in, but at the same it’s injuring the epithelial cell lining.
I just don’t understand it, I don’t need that. I need the gut to calm down, which will also help systemically. Work on the gut and then systemically it tends to work better. Now, if I’m dealing with someone with severe arthritis, I might put them on something I call, like a product called CurcumEvail*, which has annatto E, an organic raw sunflower lecithin, and an MCT oil to help drive in the curcumin for more bioavailability.
So unless I’m dealing with severe arthritic issues, I like a local, a gut topical curcumin, and I’ve even seen it work in suppositories or enemas to help with fissures, things of that nature. I then like fish oil. Now fish oil has a bad rep because a lot of it is trash. It is crap.
The best you’re going to get is anchovies, wild mackerel, or wild-caught salmon. That’s your best source. If you’re going to get omega-3s, you actually don’t need as much as you’d think. I don’t really think you need 1,000 milligrams of these triglycerides. I think you need much less that’s actually usable and living by your body.
The brain only needs to operate on 10 to 20 milligrams really. And so I think high dose is good. It can be therapeutic, but a lot of it’s just trash, and I think if you get better stuff, it’ll just work better, and you don’t need to do as high dose. So my favorite is a product by BodyBio. It’s called Resolvin*, but it’s a CO2-extracted fish oil from organic sardines and mackerel, and it’s wrapped in a phosphatidylcholine lipid fat that protects it from going rancid or oxidizing.
Because omega-3s in supplements, it’s like probiotics. Omega-3s and probiotics are the hardest supplements to get that are actually clean and work and are- aren’t bad. And I think 99 out of 100 products in the world, you wasted your money with both probiotics and fish oil from what I’ve just seen. And I think that you can get both of these things in nature.
If you’re uncertain about probiotics, work up your ability to handle fermented foods. It’s nature’s natural ferment, probiotic. Now obviously, if you have histamine problems, mast cell activation, SIBO, you have got to be really careful with this because you could Herx on it, so you just need to take time to work up on it.
But that’s why I only use single-strain probiotics. But in the anti-inflammatory, I’d say it’s C3 curcumin directly to the gut. Then I like an omega-3. I do like PEA*, but it’s a little bit newer. Not as many people know about it. It’s a little bit harder to get in a supplement, but I think it’s really impactful.
I’ve seen it most impactful with systemic pain with people. That’s where I’ve seen it work. But I usually can get the job done if I fix the gut lining, I clean out the liver, I calm down the inflammation in the body, or I’m sorry, in the stomach that has a systemic reaction. And obviously calm down the nervous system, better sleep, stretching, sweating.
There’s a lot of ways to quote unquote, “skin the cat” to calm that down. So if I can get the job done with really well-known products that I’ve used thousands of times that everyone feels comfortable with, I’m going to go with that before I use less-known products
Lindsey: So I’ve discovered in dealing with mold more now than I actually would like to, or had planned on, but, you find the mold, you have got to deal with it, right?
That there seems to be two camps of people in terms of treatment for mycotoxins. And one camp seems to be the Shoemaker camp, where it looks like it’s mostly prescription binders, cholestyramine, and the other camp is more like the Neil Nathan camp, and I think Andrew Campbell might be more on that side in terms of treatment, but not in terms of testing but using itraconazole and natural antifungals and compounded nasal sprays. So I’m curious where you fall in that that?
Dane Johnson: Oh, you’re taking me to no man’s land. You’re taking me to the great debate I like to call. The functional medicine arguments of the 21st century here. Yeah, I know all those practitioners. I’ve spoken with them. I’ve heard their arguments, and I cherry-pick. I look at everyone. They know more about mold than I do, than you do. Let them go run. They could probably run circles in a debate, but at the end of the day, what do our patients or practitioners need to get results? And so I kind of look at all that. Here’s what I’ve found that I feel works the best.
Mold is so hard to test. I’m pro the MyMycoLab test. I’m pro cholestyramine, but it’s really hard to get one that actually works that’s not filled with the crap natural sweeteners and binders. So if you just get a cholestyramine from your local office and you don’t get it custom made, it’s crap, because they put a bunch of sweetener in that can aggravate the gut lining.
I think another way of doing that is just getting a really good binder like a high-dose TUDCA*, get bile salts where you’re moving that bile, and then get a plethora of different binders, like GI Detox* by Biocidin I think works really well. I think Carboxy* by CellCore works really well too. That high-dose carbon technology of fulvic and humic acid I think works really well.
I do like the cholestyramine. It does work. You just need one that you go to a local pharmacy that they can make it proper without the sweeteners in it, and then slowly work up on it. So I do think that’s good. The itraconazole, I haven’t seen as much positive results as I’ve wanted. It leads me more that we actually need the real Sporanox.
And Dr. Campbell says that too, that you actually need the Sporanox.
Lindsey: Ooh, okay … not the generic itraconazole. The brand name.
Dane Johnson: But it’s, Lindsey, it’s freaking crazy expensive. I had a client. We did six months of itraconazole because she was testing normal in her urine analysis but high in the blood analysis through the MycoLabs, and she believes that mold is still in her body and driving acute inflammation.
She just, “Dane,” so I’m letting her. “Do you believe it? What do you think? Here’s my thoughts. What are your thoughts?” She goes, “I think it. I want to keep pushing.” We do six months of itraconazole. The MyMycoLab barely moves. Barely moved. She’s doing 200 milligrams a day, one cap morning, one cap night, just like we’re recommended, right?
And I’m also putting in other stuff in there, all this stuff, and it’s just not working. And she also noticed this with her cat who had a fungal issue, because Sporanox is sometimes used on animals, and she felt like the Sporanox was the only thing that worked on her cat. So we decided, okay, we’re going to go with Sporanox.
It’s costing her eight hundred dollars a month just to get Sporanox in its real form. because itraconazole is in generic form, and it’s got fillers, and a lot of times it doesn’t work as well. So now we’re trying the actual Sporanox. I’m going, man– And I’ve talked with other, like the naturopath medical doctor on my staff specializes in mold, and she says she’s gotten great results using fluconazole and even other antifungals.
And I’m going, maybe other great debaters in this case are saying these antifungals are not working as well, that you actually need something like Sporanox to really work or using natural antifungal properties, like herbal ones, black walnut, olive leaf, wild oregano. What I think is the number one thing you have got to do, you have got to work your drainage pathways, you have got to work your mitochondria energy.
You’ve got to do advanced biofilm disruption, advanced liver detox, and then you should be throwing on antifungals, and you should be stacking them. I think that itraconazole, I’ve seen some good results with some. Some other clients, I feel like it hasn’t worked as well, where Dr. Campbell says to work the Sporanox.
I get a little worried about, no one in this world– I was just listening to Sinclair Kelly do a lecture at this, at the last conference I was at, and she was saying “We don’t know which binders work best for which mycotoxins.” We don’t have enough research around it. And I think both Neil Nathan and Shoemaker are still studying and trying to learn how much is this causing a problem and what binders, what antifungals do we use.
But I think our best bet is, I think Campbell’s onto something. I have seen people recover quite well. I think the problem is we have terrible ways of identifying mold in the house, and I think that broad-spectrum anti-pathogens with advanced biofilm protocol and advanced detox pathway protocol is the best thing you can do.
So my takeaway is get the mold out of your house, go advanced, spend some more money on there because that will last you, okay? And put systems in place so mold doesn’t keep growing in your house. Two, work advanced drainage. Three, work advanced anti-biofilm, anti-pathogen protocol, and then add in some natural antifungals.
If you want something a little stronger, Sporanox. Itraconazole seems to be the strongest. Maybe fluconazole. I think it’s still hard to tell. And then binders. You have got to work advanced binders. I think if this is a big problem, you want to work up to two or three different binders. I’m going to go with Carboxy, I’m going to go with GI Detox, and I’m going to go with cholestyramine made properly.
Lindsey: Yeah that’s interesting about the Sporanox. I didn’t realize that the generic versus the brand made such a difference and had not,
Dane Johnson: Yeah …
Lindsey: pointed that out to anybody. But most of my people can’t get access to prescriptions anyway, so they’re doing the natural. And I’ve actually, I’ve-
Dane Johnson: We test. Yeah, we’re testing this …
Lindsey: as I’ve had to work with so many people with mold, I’ve seen more results come back with the natural antifungals like Biocidin*, for example, has been working pretty well, has seemed to have eliminated, in a round or two, two-thirds, three-quarters of the mycotoxins. So I’ve seen some pretty positive results.
Dane Johnson: Yeah. because it might be biofilms or it might-
Lindsey: Yeah, I’m using biofilm disruptors too, the SFI stuff, the Interfase.
Dane Johnson: Yeah. Or Biocidin is also is, it’s just stronger because it’s able to break apart some of those films, and mycotoxins, and I’ve actually seen more mycotoxins in a urine analysis after going on Biocidin/
Pushing it … because it’s releasing toxins. Yeah, it’s pushing it out. So it’s not a perfect scenario, but if you do those things, I think it’s going to really change the game for you, and you’ll feel better. I think sometimes we’re getting neurotic about the labs, where it’s like at the end of the day, don’t stress about things because it’s going to make you more sick.
The stress of it might make you more sick than the actual problem. If you see a little bit of a mold in there, if you get a little bit of something, there’s not one lab, not-
Lindsey: Yeah, if it’s down pretty well. But I’m also conscious of the fact that like mold can be at the root of cancer. So you don’t want to just leave it in your body. You do want to keep working on it. If it’s there, you want to keep pulling it out.
Dane Johnson: Absolutely. But there’s also mold in our forest, and there’s mold on the beach, and there’s mold in every house and elevator
Lindsey: Sure, you’re going to be exposed, of course, yes.
Dane Johnson: And that’s why, when you build these ideas, you really just support your body’s ability to handle this. So yeah, I try not to stress about it because I think the biggest one is going to be living in a chronic state of stress. So if you’re stressing about health, and you’re stressing about the fact that you’re stressed, that’s a problem, right?
We have got to let go but be empowered. So binders, drainage support, get yourself sweating, get yourself happy, get yourself moving. And a lot of people aren’t having this problem with mold. If you take a person who lived in the forest for 30 years, why aren’t they dying of cancer and then mold?
Lindsey: Well-
Dane Johnson: Because it, first of all-
Lindsey: The microbiome of the forest …
Dane Johnson: Yeah. And I know we’re out of time on this, but just one thing that’s going to answer. The mold that’s growing in our houses is transforming because we put antifungals everywhere that’s making the mold transform into something new that makes it more aggressive and more intense.
It’s fighting for its existence here as we try to spray it with things. That’s the same problem with antibiotics. The bacteria’s getting stronger. So it’s just a core problem you have to be aware of. But, also the people’s epigenetics are getting worse. Some people have no problem.
A person could walk in and have massive exposure to mold and get no health issues because their body can handle it. Their genetics can handle it. Their liver can handle it. So we’re all a little bit different, so also be aware that a problem isn’t always a problem for everyone else. And there’s other people who feel like they’ve been able to reinduce certain things like foods or gluten or stress because they’ve worked on the nervous system, and that’s where low-dose naltrexone or low-dose allergen therapy gets interesting. This pipeline goes very deep. But no matter who you are, work on electrolytes, minerals, cellular health, work on your drainage pathways, rebuild those five physiological imbalances, okay? Use lab work as an idea of what’s happening.
Get empowered. Don’t be a victim to this. Have something more to do than just those medications the doctor throws at you. And if you do that, your chance of living your best life ever goes way higher, and your ability to serve others goes way higher. And just get a part of a community who thinks like you, because now we learn together, we grow together, and it’s not out of fear, it’s out of desire.
And when you’re acting out of desire, now I’m excited. I’m just moving forward into a place of love, possibilities, creativity, and I’m building relationships and friendships that matter because we carry the same values. And you can’t win. And we all, we’re all going to pass one day.
There’s fear every day. We might be stressed about this and get hit by a car tomorrow. So use it as a way to get free. Use it as a way to get empowered. Use it as a way to get happy. You have got to get happy to get healthy. You do that, you’re going to continue to get better with this. Don’t solve it all in a day.
You’ll get better at this, it’ll get easier, and then all of a sudden you’ll just eliminate these Western world, false ways of living and you’ll know how to take care of yourself, and you’ll know how to take care of your children, and that’s a gift
Lindsey: Great thought to end on, but let me just also ask you where people can find you.
Dane Johnson: Guys, you can find me online, Crohn’s Colitis Lifestyle or Dane Johnson. Check us out on Instagram, YouTube. Do some research. Make sure you feel good about who we are and what we want to do. If you have IBD and you really feel like you need someone who specializes in IBD in a community, private coaching, you can schedule a free one-hour session with our team.
We hold space for you, no hassle, no gimmicks, no tricks. Let’s just deep dive in your case and learn about it and see if we can support. But make sure whoever you work with, you have trust, integrity, and they specialize in what you specifically want to achieve in your life.
Lindsey: Okay, great. Thank you so much.
Dane Johnson: Thank you.
If you’re dealing with gut health issues of any type (diarrhea, constipation, bloating, SIBO, IMO, H2S SIBO/ISO, IBS, IBD, gastritis, GERD, H pylori, diverticulitis, candida, etc.) or have an autoimmune disease and need some help, I see individual clients to help them resolve their digestive issues or reverse autoimmune disease naturally, You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session to see if you’d like to work with me. I also have my own two products, Tributyrin-Max, which is particularly helpful for loose stool and diarrhea as it slows your motility and firms up your stool, and SBI powder, which is an all around gut pathogen binder, which is super safe and won’t harm beneficial bacteria, and is usually the first line of treatment I educate my clients about in order to avoid stronger antimicrobial herbs.
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