The Green Jell-O That Changed Everything: Rethinking Food, Mold, and the ‘Right’ Diet with Alexx Stuart

About Today’s Show

Hi, Alexx. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here and helping us become a little more healthier in our lives.

You’re welcome. It’s brilliant to be here. I’m excited.

Before we begin, can you give me the cliff notes of your story of how you became this incredible health expert, helping so many people with their health?

Oh, it’s a complete accident, Orion, to be honest. For me, I was traveling along very happily as a business consultant, helping businesses of all kinds optimize. I had a strong hospitality and retail career background very early on. I just like making things better. I am wired to make things better. I always look around and think, ‘How can we do this better?’ It’s just been me since I was tiny. 

What did you do when you were tiny? How did you make things better when you were little?

Just simple things. I was a teeny tiny kid, and we would have these song contests at school, and I’d be like, “We should make this better so more kids feel like they can get involved.” 

At nine years old, I decided to take charge and produce the whole thing. This way, everybody could get involved, and we could tell the teachers how we planned to do it and where we wanted to set up, since the room was terrible. I just seemed to want to kind of be a bit of a bull in a china shop in my whole life. I’ve always been like that. 

One of the most allergic, eliciting sentences I can hear in a work environment or around a group of friends is, “Yeah, but that’s kind of how it is.” It is literally my kryptonite. How we’ve done it and how it is is my ‘kryptonite’ because I genuinely believe in evolution, up-leveling, and optimization. 

Not to the point where we don’t stop and smell the roses, like there’s so much wonder, beauty, and happiness to be had in the right here and now, but at the same time, we don’t have to just take it as it is. 

I don’t love the state of health. I don’t love the state of this evaporation of middle class, and everyone’s saying the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I don’t love the fact that we’re all feeling like ticking time bombs for cancer. I don’t love the fact that I have moved fifteen times in 15 years because of the state of our buildings when it comes to water damage and mold. 

I can’t just sit there. I cannot. I’m always about making things better. I think it’s this beautiful invitation we all have as humans, like, we have this one life. Imagine not looking around and seeing how you might want to participate beyond just your little world. There’s a lot that’s about the ‘me show’ in this last couple of generations. 

I think part of that has to do with the fact that many people are now having to live in that reality. But also part of it is that, like me, ‘I’m successful. Look at me.’ And then, social media is kind of added to that.

I see a world full of potential if we all take up the invitation.

What if we actually went, “Okay, I’ve got what I need,” or I could start thinking about how I could serve others to have more of a sense of gratitude in my life beyond myself. 

How can I show up for my community? What skills do I have that I can exchange with someone else who has different skills? Could the four families on my block start making quadruple batches of their specialty, swap them out, and then we’d all cook less? That way, we can enjoy meals and relax more. 

I genuinely think there is so much opportunity for optimization, but in a much broader concept than just success, money, and profit, which our world has told us is the only way we can optimize. I see a world full of potential if we all take up the invitation. And so, Low Tox Life.

That was so interesting and thought-provoking. I’m still thinking about what my neighbors are going to cook, hoping I’ll really like it.

Imagine if we all started reaching out and connecting more. I think everyone’s just so insular. 

Everybody is on their screens and in their own tiny world. I’ve never lived my life according to the norm. I left for Japan with $700 in my pocket when I was in my very early twenties, on my first time out of the country. Everybody told me I’m insane. Like, “What are you doing?”

I traveled, and I found my way. I ended up staying in Japan for three and a half years. I found love. And then I moved to the States, living in New York, LA, and Miami. I’m all about following my dreams. Even when the external world is telling me it’s impossible. 

I have my little son, whom you saw before. Doctors gave me 5% chance of conceiving. And in my mind, I was like, ‘No, I’m going to co-create with God, and it’s going to be 95%.’ 

I love what you’re saying about thinking outside the box and living our lives. Even within the health community, there are numerous bumper stickers and rigid beliefs about how we have to do things. People treat diets as dogma and religion and fight for them.

Talk to me a little bit more about expanding our mindset when it comes to our lives, our food, our health, and so on. It’s really interesting to optimize this whole thing.

That’s right. That’s how Low Tox Life began. I had a couple of health issues that the conventional system was unfortunately unable to support me with. And I want to preface this by also saying the conventional system has also helped me a lot in my life. It’s not that anyone is inherently bad or good in medicine; we just keep trying to help everyone succeed. 

But, indeed, sometimes a particular system, profession, or specialist can’t help you, and you have to look elsewhere. That’s what happened to me a couple of times, when I discovered naturopathy for my immune system. And then again, when it came to feeling really sick, I discovered building biology and mold technicians and that whole jazz for my health, because I had become very poisoned by a particular building we lived in and five buildings since. 

My friends started to ask me, “Oh, you know, you’ve had to go gluten-free. These recipes are amazing.” 

“My doctor said, or my naturopath said, or my nutritionist said, I gotta go gluten-free. Can you send me some of those?” 

Or, “My God, you’re telling me there’s Teflon on my tooth floss. How can I find out more information about this?”

It makes no sense that there would be one diet for everyone, for every age, for men and women, prenatal, postnatal, living in the tropics, living in the mountains. There’s so much diversity in nature.

And 15 years ago, there was very little on any of that kind of stuff. So, I just got my little sister, who was younger and good at tech, to start a blog for me. This way, I could pick up different household products, create recipes, and share them with my friends and family. It was just these random strangers commenting on this blog on the internet, saying, “You need a Facebook page so we can talk about this stuff. This is awesome.” That’s how Low Tox Life started. 

So very early on, I think, Orion, I understood the importance of engaging people who are at the top of their field in a pioneering sense in all different areas of health because I didn’t ever really believe that it could possibly be my way or the highway for everybody. 

It makes no sense that there would be one diet for everyone, for every age, for men and women, prenatal, postnatal, living in the tropics, living in the mountains. There’s so much in nature that is diverse; why would it not be? 

The journey of health is a much more diverse, complex network of a few basic things we know for sure. But beyond that, there is a real diversity in how people find optimal health based on what we eat, how we move, exercise, and in different seasons.

But I really think the productization of health into neat little protocols where we can make someone very scared of something unless you join me, that dynamic is wonderful in a way for small businesses because a whole bunch of people on the internet have been able to prosper and actually to be fair help a lot of people along the way. 

But you and I probably know, I don’t know about you, but I grew up watching Oprah go on my sick days from school. It’d be the next celebrity diet and the thing, and you’d follow it for two weeks, and then after that, you’d kind of be like, ‘Well, I don’t feel so good, or I’m not getting the results that the celebrity talked about.’ 

Then, you start feeling ashamed and you start feeling guilty, and then you’re not as pretty or you’re not losing as much weight or all the things, and it’s just this hyper externalization of what it feels like to feel good. 

I was really lucky because in my teenage years, I didn’t even think about diets. I just ate good food, and that was it. I know my sister, and she and her little friend started thinking about diet when they were pretty young, eating like an apple a day or something crazy like that. But for me, it wasn’t until I was older that I realized, “Okay, those love handles, we need to take care of them.” 

I’m way more in tune. I mean, of course, like I said, after so many years on this podcast, talking to so many people and even without it, just like going to a bazillion conferences and meeting lots of people, I was exposed to so many opinions about food and diet that I decided to try some things. But listen to my body. 

For me, what’s working best is having good quality, high protein. I get like grass-fed meats, and I get organic as much as possible and gluten-free works for me. Dairy less, cause I love cheese.

A lot of people do just fine with dairy. That’s the thing. We keep trying to say that everyone has to follow a rule book, or the new celebrity book has come out, and therefore, we’re all following that now. Like you, Orion, I’ve interviewed hundreds of doctors, scientists, farmers, and just about anyone else.

I reckon, I don’t know about you, but I think the beauty of that is you see patterns of similarities, a thread if you like, between what everybody’s saying, that actually we know a few things for sure and then different things work for different people beyond that. 

What do you know for sure?

We should be getting good sleep, and if you can’t right now, then you should be investigating how to do that better. Because sleep is so foundational, so cleansing, so restorative, and so powerful for hormones. 

Having a ton of blue light shining in your face once the sun’s gone down isn’t a great idea either. Eating a highly processed food diet is also not a great idea.

If sleep isn’t your thing, make it your priority and find a trusted practitioner to help you achieve quality sleep. There will be solutions that we know for sure. What else do we know for sure is great morning sunlight. If you can just stick your head out a window, if that’s the best you’ve got.

Rather than hitting a screen straight away in the morning, that’s going to be a really powerful way to send a whole bunch of messages down to the cellular level to start your day, to set your cortisol pattern up right for the day. Very powerful stuff. Having a ton of blue light shining in your face once the sun’s gone down isn’t a great idea either. Eating a highly processed food diet is also not a great idea. 

Eat local, fresh. I also feel like the older I get, the wiser I get, the more I think holistically. It is a privilege to be nitpicking on these kinds of things, given how many people struggle to access quality health professionals and medical care, and how many face challenges in obtaining fresh, affordable food. 

I will always add to that it’s nice if you get to nitpick and work on this stuff because there are a lot of people who aren’t, and I think everyone who does get to owes it to their fellow humans to think, ‘Well, how can we make this work for more people.’

But I’m also thinking about the diet I grew up on. I grew up on the Mediterranean diet. There were a lot of fruits, vegetables, and proteins in the diet and not very processed. But I remember eating lots of candies and not worrying about anything. I was just fine. I wasn’t worried about any of the things we talked about until I was 26.

I started to learn a little bit more about it, but I would eat anything and everything, and I was stronger and healthier. I think it also has to do with your mindset and your beliefs. If you believe something is bad for you, it will likely affect your body.

I genuinely subscribe to that to a certain extent. Of course, we can talk about body burden, toxic load of highly processed foods, foods from farms with very heavy chemical inputs versus pristine regenerative farms. There are going to be differences in the main, but at the same time, if we bring stress to the eating experience every single time, that’s also the number one biggest killer: stress.

It’s crucial to move forward, doing your best and appreciating the fact that you get to eat at all, starting from a psychological mindset. I interviewed a brilliant nutritionist, an older lady who talks about this indigenous American tribe she gets invited to have dinner with. She’s there thinking she’s a nutritious thinker,  thinking I’m going to get to experience all this Indigenous food, and it’s going to be amazing. 

The biggest killers are isolation, stress, and systems that hinder people’s ability to thrive.

‘I wonder what they’re going to do for a traditional dessert,’ and then she gets handed this bright green little plastic tub of Jell-O for dessert time. She said, “Alexx, I saw this Jell-O, my heart sank,” but then the chief gave the most spiritual and beautiful gratitude for a sweet something to finish the meal together, before we got up and danced, and I had goosebumps all over my body. 

I ate that green Jell-O with a whole new appreciation for the moment and the people and the connection versus the nitpicking of all the things that were toxic in that thing. This is a nutritionist with decades of experience saying, “You know what, don’t sweat the odd green Jell-O, sweat your attitude and how connected you are to the people in your life with a lot more.” 

Because that actually is one of the biggest success metrics for health. Like you, the gift of interviewing so many people and having worked in this space for so long allows you to see the themes. But then you see that the biggest killers are isolation, stress, and systems that don’t allow people to prosper. 

They don’t give people a sense that they’ll have a chance at success, thriving, buying a house, and raising kids in a relaxed way. We keep blaming the people for the processed food they’re eating, and we stop looking at the system that has set us up for such a colossal sense of failure. 

And so I’ve actually become a lot more, ‘Is it going?’ 

‘Yeah, I think so.’ 

I actually think like we’re gonna sweat over, and fight with strangers on the internet—the beef versus beans—when actually both are incredible whole foods. We do our best to procure as many of those as possible.

Are we able to eat both?

Yes, and then perhaps we should be looking more at the people telling us that cows are evil or beans are sacred, and that’s all you should be eating, or vice versa, because there’ll be people who say the exact opposite. It’s just exhausting, right? You can find science to back up pretty much anything. 

So where do we go from there? I think we’re moving towards a much more empowered health picture by tuning in and listening. How do I feel after that meal? Why do I feel so bloated? I may need to chat with a professional and say, ‘Every time I eat X, I feel awful. Is that like because I shouldn’t be eating that, or is my gut bacteria out? What can we do to incorporate more whole foods?’ 

Because a lot of people end up on really tiny diets these days, sensitive to everything. There can be cause to work with health professionals, of course, I love them. But at the same time, work with the ones that are on a journey with you to help you figure out what’s best for you, not just to tell you what you need to do, because that’s their way.

Work with those who want to stop working with you as soon as possible, because you’re already empowered.

Yes, exactly. So that’s where I’ve landed. I’ve noticed that different foods have suited me at different times in my life. That’s something I’ve tuned into, and only I can know for myself. I find eating smaller meals now at 49, that suits me better. 

You know a lot more than you think you know about what makes you feel good, healthy, thrive, and vibrant. So, tune into that.

All I will say to everyone out there is that you know a lot more than you think you know about what makes you feel good, healthy, thrive, and vibrant. So tune into that.

You’re the only one who knows. Nobody can feel what you’re feeling in your body. People can try to relate, but nobody can feel your feelings. You’ve got to be in tune. I love that green  Jell-O story. 

It’s good, isn’t it? I was really shaken by it because it can feel challenging in one way, but it can feel like such wisdom in another way, where you’re just like, ‘Of course, yes.’

Such a breakthrough for her in empathy and understanding the bigger picture. It’s like Dr. Masaru Emoto with the water experiment, where you put blessings on the water and it changes the structure of the water,  and you put bad words on the water, which changes the structure of the water. We’re 70 % water. The food we eat is mostly water.

So when we send even a bad thought or an imprint onto that food, it probably changes its structure and the way it absorbs in our body, because that thought goes into the water cells in our bodies as we’re eating that food. If we’re thinking, if we have guilt and shame and pain around this food, of course, in moderation, we can’t be eating all junk all the time.

But if you’re more easygoing, accepting, and grateful for having that food, and you just enjoy the moment, it’s not going to hurt you. It’s going to make you feel great, empowered and happy. Like yesterday, I had a chocolate dessert. I only had a few spoons, but I was like, “I’m going to enjoy this. This is fun. This is okay. Everything in moderation is totally fine.”

I come from a Jewish culture. Now, I’m not religious, but religious people for thousands of years, every time they eat an apple, they pray, “Thank you, Lord, for the fruit of the tree.” 

When they eat something from the ground, “Thank you for the fruit of the ground.” 

When they eat bread, “Thank you for the bread.”

Literally every time they put something in their mouth, they have to say a blessing. And after that, there is a blessing of after eating. So, the gratitude and blessing of the food are embedded in the culture before and after. 

We don’t even have to limit that to the construct of religions as we know them in modern times. You look at indigenous culture, and that means a connection to nature.

You don’t have to have a structure for the blessings, but I’m thinking about the wisdom of what happened somewhere in the unconscious collective. They understood that when they bless and give gratitude for their food, their food does better. Like they’re doing better. So, I think actually praying on your food and being conscious with your food, not that I’m doing it, I’m not perfect sometimes, just like, “Oh, food around!”

No, but because we’re talking about it, both of us are now going to bring that conscious awareness into tonight’s dinner and thinking, “Hang on, family, let’s just take a moment and be grateful for this.” 

I think that’s what it’s about if we talk about it more. Let’s just think for a minute about bringing negative thoughts and stress to a meal. “Oh, I probably shouldn’t. Oh, that’s probably going to make my tummy feel weird.” Now, of course, you might have an allergy and anaphylaxis. You might be working on some serious healing of big issues digestively. And of course, there are times and places for really strictly following stuff to get better. 

But an average everyday situation where you’re feeling fine, like you’re just trucking through life and if you bring stress to a meal because on the internet you saw a doctor say that this is going to kill you or increase your chances of cancer. You’ve seen one 30-second Instagram reel that got you terrified of the bacon that got put on your breakfast plate the next day. What does that do? That puts your body in fight or flight. What do we know about fight or flight? We know that all our digestive power shuts down because we’re now about to chase the bear.

If there’s anything bad in the food when it shuts down, it’s actually going to be really bad for you, regardless.

We’ve reduced our ability to digest it in the first place by being stressed about it. It’s really important to re-evaluate our thoughts on food based on what we learn from the internet. If food is stressing you out, simplify your digital life, tune back into what works for you, and work with a practitioner who knows you as a person and is on your team.

It’s crucial to reassess our food-related thoughts based on what we learn from the internet.

Because I think you will find a lot more empowerment in those kinds of practices versus trying to find the answer online ironically, of course as we record a podcast but I hope that this really kind of makes a few people think like, ‘Oh yeah, I really have given a lot of my power over to XYZ doctor influencer.’ What do I know about myself? Where can I find more empowerment, relaxation, and enjoyment in meals with the people I love?

I think everybody who is listening to this right now has to hear what was said here. There is something magical about why we sometimes hear what we do. Sometimes I’ll say a word to my partner, and I’ll hear it in a song the next second. And if we get tuned into that matrix, we do get a lot of information and signs if we just tune into them.

Alexx, I want to discuss why you’ve moved 15 times, the health of our home, and how we can determine if the new place we’re moving into has toxic substances. How do we check for that? And if we are exposed to it, what does that mean, and how do we deal with that? And also a little bit about your background story. What did you have? What did you go through in order to help so many people with that?

So, welcome to our three-day seminar. 

I know, I’m like, “Let me just ask you a question that has like one bazillion questions and then I’ll get it off my chest.” 

Okay, so how do I do this in a way that’s not going to terrify me? Okay, here we go. Imagine, if you will, a year where I had about 35-40 symptoms, and they were kind of all kind of dominoing into my body over the course of about nine months. It started with a leaky eye, which culminated in tear duct surgery because that’s what they said I needed. 

By then, I was the Low Tox queen. I was running my courses, helping people ditch their everyday toxins in their lives. I was very healthy, and then this weird leaky eye thing happened. I need the surgery. After that surgery, I started having all sorts of issues from irregular heartbeats, atopic beats, arrhythmia, tachycardia, and POTS symptoms, where even rolling over in bed, my heart rate would skyrocket to 220, and I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep for like three hours. So scary.

I don’t know whether it’s because I’m still traumatized that I’m finding it really hard to connect to just how bad it was, but I started getting shooting pains. I started having twitching tremors. So if I were looking at my phone in the morning, it’d be like this. I couldn’t hold a plate properly. I started dropping things randomly. I started to think the worst. Do not Google. Trust me, don’t Google your weird symptoms. What the internet tells you is probably not accurate.

Are you going to the worst-case scenarios for sure? I’m sure it was an insult and an injury to your identity as a healthy person. You start doubting yourself. My life project is like, ‘Everything I do, does it even matter if I have all the symptoms?’ But you had like imposter syndrome and lots of thoughts around that too.

You’ve nailed it. I was so ashamed. I felt so quiet. I couldn’t even talk anymore because everything felt like I was lying. It was so awful. And then I can’t even explain it. So I would start to have hives, itching skin, so many symptoms, just the worst digestive symptoms.

I bounced around from doctor to naturopath to the best of the best in my network, including cardiologists and neurologists, until people started calling me a mystery. One doctor looked at my blood after I’d told him everything that I was experiencing and got me up to show me the door while saying, “Well, you’re a bit of a mystery, aren’t you?”

It was so lonely, and it was so horrifying that I could have this experience. It has opened my eyes to the many ways humans experience environmental illnesses that are not yet fully understood, and we lack clear pathways and sufficient research. 

But to be in the dark place where you think I’m going to be in a wheelchair soon because walking hurts, and to not even have an answer, that’s the thing. When you can label something, Parkinson’s, cancer, ALS, I’m not saying any of these things is good to have, mind you. But everyone can kind of fall in line, and we know what support looks like, and we know that it’s all systems go on meal rotations for the family. 

When you’ve got a random, weird illness that no one knows how to explain, you don’t know how to explain. No one has any answers, but you just kind of keep feeling this bad as a society, and we don’t really know what to do with chronic illness.

It’s really hard because we can’t define it. We’re not very good at saying where it comes from. And people are largely on their own to figure it out themselves. That’s exactly what I was. And I, in the end, just looked at forums in the middle of the night, trying while my heart was beating and I couldn’t sleep, trying to find answers. It was awful.

I honestly just started to put things together. It’s like, ‘Oh, histamine. Mold.’ ‘Oh, shooting pains. Mold.’ ‘Oh, 60% of buildings have water damage of some kind.’ I wonder if that’s, and it just mold just kept kind of coming up. I spoke with a doctor in America, and he had a patient intake form that was nine pages long. One of the questions was, ‘Do you remember any point where you experienced a storm, there was flooding, where your roof leaked while you were living in that building?’ 

I answered yes. When we first moved into this apartment six years ago, a huge storm hit, and water started coming down our wall and into our son’s bedroom. By the way, he was also having nosebleeds and constant congestion, all this kind of stuff. 

So you’re trying to sort yourself out so that you can sort your kid out, like awful for any parent who’s been there, like I 100% see you, it is very, very hard and dark when you’re trying to do it all on your own with most of the people you know thinking you’re crazy or just kind of avoiding you because it’s weird. 

I found that it was mold. And the thing that really blew my mind, Orion, was that it’s not like you looked at our apartment and thought, ‘Whoa, how come you guys are living here?’ There was no big black wall of fur. It wasn’t like a hideous, dilapidated, peeling paint kind of situation. Couldn’t even see it was in the walls. 

And this really opened my mind up to, ‘Well, hang on. What’s the point of having a human sense of safety if we can’t even detect a toxin through our senses?’ That’s usually how we use our senses.

But in modern buildings, we have a number of situations where we’re either building badly or a leak is happening, and we don’t know that mold can start to grow in two days. So we don’t do much about it straight away. Or we get it fixed, but it’s essentially a cowboy industry out there, with people who fix things around the home. There are some amazing tradespeople, but there are also a bunch of cowboys who kind of just say they fix stuff. But they’ve really patched over things and repainted something and then called the job done. 

When we lived in our house in Miami, we had a house on a lake, and near the outside area, the outside bathrooms, you could actually see the mold. What the landlord did was just paint it over. I’m like, “No, you don’t deal with mold like that. That’s not how you deal with it. You don’t just paint over it. It doesn’t do anything.”

That’s a band-aid on a laceration that actually needs surgical repair. You also have insurance companies that fail us, shuffling papers and pushing your case to the back of the line, saying, “Okay, yeah, we’ll send someone.” But if you’ve got two days before mold starts growing, and the average call-out is like a month or two.

Then the damage has already started to be done. As I started to learn about this, it began to make sense to me how places could look great but actually be highly toxic. And that can sound really scary because, to be honest, I’m not a building professional. So, it could be just feeling like you have to be a chemist to choose beauty products these days. 

To find something safe, and so ordinary people are being asked to learn extraordinary things to create a sense of safety and assuredness. It’s way above our pay grades, basically, and it’s unfair. To me, human rights mean having a safe place to live. Every human deserves that. 

Human rights mean having a safe place to live. Every human deserves that.

Many humans lack it for various reasons, including conflict and the numerous terrible events that have occurred throughout history. But let’s just say you live somewhere very peaceful and you still don’t have the right to a safe, healthy home. Then that can put a burden on people that is very rarely talked about. 

But once I started to realize and talk about my own story about moving, not just from there, but from the next place and the next place, we have a lot of investment properties in Sydney. And while I spent all of our savings on what we would have spent to buy an apartment way back when, trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with me with all the testing and treatments in that dark year, it then puts you in a rental loop, and when you’re in a rental loop, you’re at the behest of investors. 

Investors have quite a few front people. They have the property manager, they have the leasing agent, and they have the tradespeople. So there’s a whole bunch of people between you and the person who actually owns the home, and very few conversations being had about properly, truly repairing or maintaining a home. But everyone’s just trying to get everything done on the cheap, on the quick. And in a big city like Sydney, New York, Paris, London, like big places where that lovely apartment will have a queue down the street if you open it again next week. So yeah, screw you. If you don’t wanna live here, bye. 

We have huge injustices that I have started to realize. And so from the health perspective, it’s very expensive because it’s a chronic environmental injury in illness that you have to fix on your own dime largely because you don’t have the public health research and treat, heal, cure kind of paradigms that you have for a lot of illnesses that are well known and recognized and super thoroughly researched. 

And then, like mold, it is a bit like bacteria; there’s so much of it, and there are so many different types. We have not conducted nearly the same amount of research on fungi as we have on bacteria. Most people could go to the doctor and say, “I’ve got tonsillitis.” 

“I feel revolting, awful.” 

“Here’s your antibiotic because without this, it’s bad news. We really do want to make you better. This is one of those save-the-day situations. Here you go, and you’ll be better in a week.” You have mold toxicity and fungal colonization.

My doctor, thank goodness, he’s a family friend, and he knows I’m a smart chick. I am not someone who tries to come up with ideas of fictitious things that aren’t happening. I’ve come with receipts when I see him and I say, “Look, I really want to try an anti-fungal because I think it’s going to be really important to reduce the fungal load from these water-damaged buildings.” 

Our homes need healthcare as well. That’s a memo we haven’t quite got right there yet.

What was your process? So you moved from one apartment to another or home, whatever it was. How did you discover it again and again and again?” What can somebody do when they go into a new place?

I’ve actually done this. I’ve done a number of podcasts as well, but blogs to help with visual cues, questions you can ask about building history, things that can really help you know and even though we’ve had a few unfortunate home situations now, because of course things can happen while you’re in a healthy home and then they don’t deal with it properly. That’s a whole different bag as well. 

There are many ways to learn the basics and avoid being taken advantage of. Prime example, a few months ago, we were looking at a place. Just from the window, we could kind of see the carpet had like a bit of a water line in it, and so I made the decision not to go in. My husband went in to just ask the first preliminary questions, have a bit of a sniff and see if it was going to be safe for me because I’ve remained quite sensitive since the initial event. 

He said, “So what’s with the water line here that I can see on the carpet?” and the person who was showing the apartment that day said, “Oh, the dishwasher leaked a couple of months ago.” Remember, we have two days before mould starts to grow. The carpet should have been ripped up and replaced immediately, along with the replacement of the dishwasher and the pipes. But clearly wasn’t. 

So, two months later, they’re showing this place, and she mentioned that the owner would be open to replacing the carpet if that’s something you’d like to include in your application. And my husband just said, there’s going to be an application, all the best. And we just walked away. But this is really common in big cities where they know there’s competition, and therefore they know they don’t have to care so much about people. It’s really devastating. 

Remember your best friends, cherish them, and spend time with them often to cultivate those friendships.

But I’ve talked to people in all sorts of situations where you find out, you know, big new military bases are being built. They’re being built in a poor way for hurricane relief. After a hurricane, they just need to erect a whole bunch of housing because they’ve got to get people in houses again, but it’s not done well. And then everyone’s been given the runaround. 

But if you want to become a bit more literate, I’ve got tools for that. And I think one of the main things you mentioned, Miami before, if you know you live in a humid climate and your home seems pretty healthy, no one’s sick, then keep it that way with humidity and moisture control. A lot of people don’t realize that having things like a really good dehumidifying strategy and keeping your humidity low can make a massive difference to the health of the people inside. 

So it’s not always about leaks and water damage. It’s often about excess humidity in the built environment. Imagine we didn’t have buildings that just stood there for a hundred years or more. And so if they’re in a humid or seasonal climate, whether it’s dewy in the cold months and then really sweltering and humid in the hot months, like a New York kind of East Coast America vibe, then you need a contingency to monitor moisture during the change of seasons and manage it. 

But like I said at the start of this story, you’re not a building professional, I’m not a building professional. How are we supposed to know this stuff? I’ve had to learn it by baptism by fire, big time. But, as I mentioned at the start of our conversation, I can’t help but notice that people are suffering and not doing anything to help. 

So it was kind of the unexpected plot twist of Low Tox Life, adding in a whole bunch of mold information for people trying to navigate illness, as well as people trying to do their best to acquire or rent a healthy home and to keep that home healthy while we’re in there. It takes work. 

We know we’ve got to look after our bodies. We’ve got to move it. We’ve got to eat good food. Our homes need healthcare as well. I think that’s a memo we haven’t quite got right there yet.

Alexx, I have so many more questions for you.

I know this totally feels like a bit of a part two is coming in a few months, right? 

Take a walk in the park and enjoy the morning sunlight. We are supposed to feel all these variations that our planet gives us.

I know maybe we need to do a part two. I would love it. So, before we say goodbye for now, what are your three top tips to live a stellar life, and where can people find you?

I’ll start with where people can find me, that’s Low Tox Life. I trademarked Low Tox Life when I created the term back in 2012, and so a lot of people use the term “low tox” for something. That might be called Low Tox farm or Low Tox this and that, but Low Tox Life is podcast, website, Instagram, that’s how you know it’s me.

Then, in terms of stellar life, the top three are to remember your bestest, most cherished friends, be with them often, and cultivate those friendships. That is just the kind of medicine that money can’t buy, and a good laugh or a good cry with a good friend, who you never have to pretend to be, is truly one of the best things we can do for our health. 

Next, be of service. Think about how I can show up for other people because I think we forget how good that medicine is for us as well. And third, I will say, remember what we are. We are nature, and anything we can do to reconnect, go for that walk by the park, look at the water, just even look out at the horizon, get that sunlight in the morning or go for a walk on a frosty day and feel the cool on your cheeks.

We are supposed to feel all these variations that our planet gives us, and I think again, forgotten medicine. They might not be three things that we often hear, but we need to start filling in the gaps with the less tangible, less protocolized things that drive health in people.

Thank you, Alexx. This was amazing, very interesting. I hope you’ll come visit us again here and share your wisdom.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me, Orion. I love what you’re doing. I love your bravery in having big, varied conversations where you just go where the wind blows because I think that’s where the juice comes out. I mean, that’s how I always feel. So really, I appreciate your work.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you from one podcaster to another. I appreciate you, too. Thank you, and thank you, listeners. Remember, your connection with your friends is medicine that money cannot buy. Be of service. Connect to nature and have a stellar life. This is Orion, till next time.