Dhru Purohit Show
70% of Homes Have Mold: Here’s Why It’s An Issue And Why We Need to Protect Our Kids from Mold Toxicity
15 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi everyone, Drew Proud here.
Chapter 2: Why is mold suddenly a bigger issue in homes today?
You might be surprised to learn that an estimated 70% of homes in the United States contain at least one species of mold. And while humans have always lived with mold, mold toxicity is dramatically more common, more intense than past generations
experience, which is why I'm so passionate about sharing information with my audience about this growing problem and why I wanted to share a portion of my conversation with my dear friend, Dr. Pedgeman Katerai on this topic with you today. Dr. Pedgeman is a board certified pediatrician who is also boarded and fellowship trained in integrative medicine.
He completed his undergraduate at UCLA and obtained his osteopathic medical degree at Western University Health Sciences. He completed a pediatric residency at Loma Linda University, where he stayed on as a teaching faculty member for over four years.
Dr. Pedgeman is now in private practice in Santa Monica, where he focuses on helping children with severe behavioral challenges, many who have been impacted by mold.
Chapter 3: How do environmental toxins reshape our biology?
He's also working with an amazing team to build out Holistic Minds, an online portal that helps parents understand the root of their child's behavioral issues and what steps they can take to help resolve them.
In today's episode, Dr. Pedgeman and I explore the most common mold-related symptoms, why it's a growing problem today, how our modern environment has created a toxic soup for many people, including kids, and why kids today are more impacted than previous generations. and how to put mold in context without jumping to extremes.
So if you or anybody in your family has ever thought that mold might be impacting your health, today's episode is for you. Let's dive in. Mold has been an issue that we've dealt with as our modern human species since as long as Homo sapiens have been there and probably even before that, right? I'm saying Homo sapiens because of written history.
In fact, one of my friends, Dr. Ann Shippey, who also is somebody deeply in the mold space and has been on this podcast before, reminded me that, you know, mold was even talked about in the Bible and how problematic it is and how important it is to address it.
Chapter 4: What unexpected symptoms indicate mold exposure in parents?
In what capacity? I have no idea, but I'll take her word for it, right? So if mold has been an issue that humans have been dealing with for quite some time, and let's fast forward that to our modern industrial age where most humans are living, most people in the that could develop mold inside of there through, you know, water exposure, you know, modern plumbing is a big issue, leaky pipes, right?
Chapter 5: How does mold fit into the modern health puzzle?
Those are the main sort of things, like water exposure, leaky pipes, from my understanding, unremediated or unattended to, you know, drywall or other things that are there. Why does it seem that it's more of an issue for this generation that's growing up And you may not have an answer, but I'm asking you to maybe to like think about it a little bit.
And not the generation before them who also kind of grew up in homes and buildings and closed structures where you would think they would have just as much exposure to mold as the generation that's growing up now. Any thoughts on that? I do. I do.
Chapter 6: What steps can parents take to address unexplained health issues?
Great question.
So there's multiple pieces to it. First and foremost... When you look at how molds affect the system and then you add to that glyphosates and you add to that PCBs and you add to that BPA and you add to that other environmental toxicants. For instance, glyphosates and mold toxins, when you look at their physiological impacts, they're actually very, very, very similar. They actually cause harm.
They harm the microbiome. They hit the gastrointestinal tract. They hit the liver and the detox pathways. They affect the nervous system. So my mentor, Dr. Neil Nathan, actually talks about this in his book, Toxic, that we believe that one of the things that have happened is we have the existing toxic load. And we know, sadly, all human beings, newborns coming into the world.
I'm sure you know of the EWG study. Everyone has exposure. We can't escape it. Living in the world today, we are exposed. Even if you're eating organic foods, you still have some degree of glyphosate exposure. All of these environmental toxicants create a certain stress onto the human body. They create a certain vulnerability.
Now, my observation is that all of these toxicants create that load, but that load is not yet enough to break the system, right? Now, when you add the 500-pound gorilla on top of that load, all of a sudden, the systems that were still functioning, they had some vulnerability. The microbiome wasn't perfect, but it wasn't falling apart.
The gastrointestinal tract was maybe a little off, but nothing bad. The mycotoxins, when the exposure is high enough, long enough, especially early enough, that's like the 500-pound gorilla that comes and sits on that load and then suddenly breaks it.
So you've got the total toxic load with the mycotoxins pushing that toxic load way beyond what our physiological buffering capacity or tolerance capacity is. Then you get into building science. So think about... 50 years ago or even 20 years ago, we didn't have this kind of energy efficiency, right? Buildings were way more leaky.
They leaked. Yeah. And not water. We're talking about air. Like air would come in. They were heating and HVAC systems and cooling. Like they weren't as tight. Not at all. As they are today.
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Chapter 7: Why are children more vulnerable to mold toxicity?
In fact, you know, getting LEED certified often means that you have a building that's like totally unbreathable. So is that what you mean by leaky?
Exactly. Yes. Okay, got it.
Yes. So you're saying building standards and the fact that we're trying to make our buildings more green by making them energy efficient in a way has created more of a protection layer for the mold that ends up growing inside. Life can pull you in a dozen different directions. So this year, I want you to implement something that helped me slow down while still feeling sharp, grounded, and focused.
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Well, it's a protection layer. And there was this really amazing publication that actually talked about how through this energy efficiency, we have created buildings that have the potential to become more toxic.
Not that they are inherently more toxic, but now because you've got this completely closed system that does not breathe at all, if there's some kind of contamination, whether it's you put down carpet or whatever, something is off-gassing or paint or in this case a mold, all of those toxins recirculate continuously in the home. So let's say you've got a tiny little leak, you don't even see it.
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Chapter 8: How do building practices contribute to mold problems?
So it turns out that up until the 1950s, U.S. homes and most homes in North America were built with plaster. Plaster is basically concrete, which actually happens to be resilient to mold. So if plaster gets wet, it doesn't get moldy as quickly. Not to say there weren't mold issues in the old homes. There were still mold issues for sure.
It turns out that drywall, because drywall is basically paper, paper, and calcium carbonate, I think, is sandwiched together. Paper that's in drywall comes from tree bark. It turns out that tree bark actually has mold spores in the bark. And it turns out that drywall has some amount of mold spores actually just built into it. So when you add water to drywall,
You can quickly get mold contamination because as soon as that drywall gets wet, presuming you don't have the fancy moisture mold resistant green drywalls or whatever they are. But most common drywall, once that sucker gets wet, it can develop mold contamination quite easily within a few days. And this is the environmental experts that I've talked to teaching me that.
And there's studies that look at that. So our building methodology has also changed over the last several decades. And combination of these things, the closed systems, the drywall, sadly nowadays construction techniques are not as good as they used to be because a lot of builders are just trying to throw up homes as fast as they can, right?
So sometimes they'll cut corners here and there just to cut down costs. All of this combined with the total toxic load is part of the issue. The other part of the issue is the food supply. So corn, grains, a lot of these different foods are now stored in silos. They've been stored in silos forever, right?
As we've had climate change and humidity levels, heat levels have changed, all of these grains that are sitting in these silos sometimes for months actually can become moldy. And those grains are then fed to the animals and we consume the milk, we consume the meat of these animals, which means we get exposed to this.
People say, well, the FDA regulates that and we can't have mold contamination in the food and it can't cause a problem. That's until you actually look at the FDA regulations and the guidelines. And it turns out that certain mold toxins like ocrotoxin, I think gliotoxin and one of the other mold toxins are actually not regulated at all.
Like we don't – if it's there, it's not being controlled, which also means that these toxins are getting into the food supply. So you've got the food supply having mold and with environmental change studies have shown.
started hinting at the possibility that these grains are becoming more moldy animals are getting the mold passing it on to us so we've got that load we've got the toxic load from glyphosate pesticides whatever coming up you've got the building science the drywall and then when you add all of that together all of a sudden you're like oh that's why it's becoming a problem
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