 Welcome to Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill, your go-to podcast for the most cutting-edge insights in functional and integrative medicine. I'm Dr. Jill, and each episode we delve into the heart of functional medicine, into root healing and transformation, exploring frontiers like gut microbiome health. Today we're going to talk about fungus with one of my new friends and experts in the world that has been doing this work for decades. Let me introduce him and we'll get right into the show. Television show host Doug Kaufman was trained in emergency medicine by the U.S. Navy as a hospital corpsman in the late 1960s and served in the capacity while attached to the Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1970. From 71 to 98, his clinical nutrition and research work elaborated on a discovery he had made linking certain types of fungi, especially aspergillus and candida, to ill health and many diseases of Americans. He had a very successful radio show wherein he referred to the successes he had had with the doctors he trained and worked with when he had used this discovery of antifungal medicine to help sick people who were told that there was little hope. And again, we have lots of things to talk about there, Doug. Wishing to educate more than one patient at a time in a clinical setting, in 1998 he launched a television show titled Know the Cause. And that's where I got to know you, Doug. And soon after it was on demand, any physician co-authored up to actually 13 books on the subject of fungal illness and co-authored an important paper on the ability of fungi to induce human cancers. This was in oncology news in November 2014. And again, I think we connected over. I'd recently take some of that research and written a couple blogs on it. So I could say so much more, Doug, but first I'll just welcome to the show. What a blessing. Thank you so much for having me on. You are welcome. And I have followed your work for years, probably decades, because I've been in functional medicine a little over 20 years. And interestingly, as we talked in the beginning, you know a little bit of my story from the book with the breast cancer. So I have a special interest in this cancer-fungi connection. And I don't say this a lot publicly now. I finally can be very open. But fungi with Crohn's and with cancer was a huge, huge part of my illness, as you so well know. Let's go back though, before we go into my story or your experience, tell us, how did you really get into this? How did those doors open? And you really discover that fungi and fungus was at the root of so many chronic illnesses. You know this healthy 20-year-old Doug Kaufman goes off to Vietnam, right? And Corman, we're surrounded by Marines out in the field. Got our medical pack and IV bags and so forth. I came home a year later and had some kind of bizarre. I worked with Dr. Ever Hughes, the USC medical school, on the ninth floor. I'm telling you, Dr. Rujel, I couldn't ride the elevator up if anyone else was on it. And I couldn't fake it. We didn't have cell phones. I had to listen to that music. My hair started falling out in the back. I had horrible stomach problems. And what I would call anxiousness, you know, along with that, maybe some stuttering and so forth. My brain was moving quicker than my mouth. And I couldn't figure it out. And Dr. Hughes one day said to me, Doug, you didn't eat raw fish in Vietnam, did you? We Corman graduated in a few months and get to work at a hospital in Da Nang. And the people that would clean the hospitals, Quonset huts, they weren't hospitals with us. We're some of these wonderful women who would bring their meal in. And Nook Mom is raw fish and rice. And so they gave it to us. And I said, yes, Dr. Hughes, I did. He said, sounds like you have a parasite. I'm telling you, I went to the library. We didn't have, hey, Siri, you know, I went to the library and opened a book and it fell open to a chapter. It was a 1953 parasitology book. It opened to a chapter that said geese and fungi parasitize man. I had horrible jungle rot, which we are told is a mycobacterium. I think they behave more like myco than bacterium. But I thought, I wonder if this yeast could have gotten through to my, you know, to my bloodstream. Didn't know how that would work. But maybe that's what's wrong with me. Stop drinking, you know, Dr. Hughes, I'll never forget him asking me, what do you eat? And I said, well, I eat bologna sandwiches, I eat Oreo cookies, and I eat Coors beer. You know, I'm 21 years old, right? I'm home in Vietnam. And months later, after I read this book, I said, I'm still having some problems with this. And he said, did you change your diet? And I said, yes, I did. And he said, what do you eat? And I said, now it's salami sandwiches and oatmeal cookies and Budweiser beer. So I'm like most people, I didn't get it. You have to change bologna sandwiches. Well, I thought, well, salami sandwiches. And then I began understanding that fungi, unlike bacterium or vi-ri, protozoa, fungi must eat once inside the human body. So they're localized fungal problems, ringworm, vaginal yeast, et cetera. And there are systemic fungal problems. I had a bad one, systemic. And I finally stopped drinking beer and doing everything, you know, lost all my friends, stayed home Friday night. And I felt great. And then I would go through that phase many patients do. Well, it's Friday night. I'm working in a hospital. I should be able to go out with my friends and have a couple beers every Saturday morning. I'd feel miserable against stomach and just feeling miserable. So I got it. I changed my diet. But beforehand, I really studied and I introduced in the 1970s, a diet that made sense to me that a young person at that time, an old person now, could adhere to and still feel pretty good. I knew we needed some carbs, you know, and I went through all of that. So the diet, I was at the time working in an allergy clinic. And he assigned, he gave me the job instead of a nurse because I was trained to emergency medicine. Sometimes we see anaphylaxis in an allergy setting. So I worked with these patients. Dr. Jill, if physicians will begin to close this and open this, these patients tell you everything. One day an engineer came in, he said, I don't need your allergy shots anymore. And I said, well, why? And he's holding a bowl, a white bowl. And he said, my mom, guys like 35, 40 years old, my mom ages milk. And if I take a tablespoon of this twice a day, I don't need allergy shots. And I said, well, that's ridiculous, Tim, because the sinuses are up here. And that's the gut. Of course, we've learned a lot in 15 years I've been in this. So I just learned so much from these patients. I convinced Dr. Godshock, Howard Godshock, ear, nose and throat surgeon and practitioner in LA. I convinced him on difficult chronic sinusitis to let me try nice statin. And of course, I was before the big Mayo Clinic study came out. Nice statin worked wonders. He sat me in the office one day and said, if we put all these patients on nice statin, are we gonna have a business left in allergy? And but he was a good man, decent man. And so we began, back then we had Amphotericin B and Nizrol and other drugs. We started experimenting with his allergy patients. Unbelievable results we had. I finally opened up a laboratory dealing with food allergy because I didn't know about that permeability caused by yeast. And the laboratory went very well until one day, thank you, until one day a paper came on my desk. Let's see if I can remember it, antigenically intact food macromolecules exiting the gut lumen. Yeah. Yeah, just testing what people were eating. And then they were changing their diet for a week or two, they feel better. And then they feel worse again, because those antigens are leaking through quit that. And when I went back into clinical work, I was recruited by a group in Dallas of doctors came out here dermatologists. Just unbelievable psoriasis. I asked the doctors if I could put these patients on, you know, at this time, sporn ox and nice statin in my diet. You know, Dr. Jill, because it's in your book. You know what happened. Over 50% of these people with major autoimmune diseases responded favorably. But not before they tell Dr. Weekly and I, could this have anything to do with my herpes? And Dr. Weekly would say, no, no, psoriasis, you know, could this look like my pants, I've lost 30 pounds in a month. Could this have any, and I had to hear this over and over and over again, to understand that fungi is a parasitic organism that can get inside your body, demand to eat. It must have carbohydrates. And if you don't feed it carbohydrates, you'll go through a die off, which you explain. And you'll feel quite miserable for a week or two. And then higher than a kite. And so that's been, I've been giving CME talks to, I don't know if, you know, Lee Cowden. Yes, yes, no, you really want ACIM, ACIM. But I've lectured to them several times and other doctors. Mostly, most of my lectures are on either neurotoxicology and mycotoxin induced neuro, the nerve super body can be adversely affected by certain fungi or cancer. You know, cancer grows in a lump. Fungi gathering a lump to bypass phagocytosis, so the white blood cells won't gather them up. There's power in numbers. And so polyps, lumps, et cetera, I began studying, published in 2014 with a couple of friends of mine who were physicians. And that paper really opened the eyes of medical science. I'm kind of like some of these doctors that come along and believe diet is everything. And they get looked at as kind of a quack. Quasi scientists, their peers, Robert Adkins was a good friend of mine. And I'll never forget he had demeanor that was so great. But the medical community hated him. And he eventually, he prevailed. And so that's what I feel like. I think before I die, I think the consensus is going to be, as this paper just came out, researchers in US and Israel detect fungal DNA and most cancer types found in the human body one year ago. They're finding fungal DNA and fungus in all 35 types of cancer. We're here now. We're here. I'm helping so many people like you are. And it's a very exciting field to be in. Mycology is lonely. It's been lonely for 50 years for me. But all of a sudden it's doing quite well. What a story, Doug. And it's just so beautiful to see the woven, this like all of your experiences and how they've led you to this great influence that you have today. And what's interesting is I actually think it was a huge blessing that you weren't in like an MD because what happens is I think MDs kind of start to lose the ability to be curious. And you clearly in your story had this mark of a genius really, which is curiosity and saying, what if, what else, what else is possible? What else could be the cause? And that's part of why you made these discoveries that a lot of doctors. And again, for me, it was me facing my own mortality with cancer at 25. And then Crohn's at 26 and realizing, oh, it wasn't even the cancer. I don't think I realized it till the Crohn's and started seeing Saccharomyces Cervaceae antibodies, which of course is anti yeast antibodies in the gut. Now we know that that's contributing to inflammation. And for me, it was the very same. A low sugar diet and antifungals were a huge part of my cure and remission from both Crohn's and cancer. Absolutely. I'd say 80% of the cure was was the antifungal piece of the puzzle. So I very much am passionate. And it was exciting because that latest article you mentioned, I went ahead and wrote a blog about it. And it wasn't that there hasn't been data. And then we haven't been talking about this for decades. But it was finally that there was a very large study that could show this that we've been, you know, and start to then we could start to have the conversation with our colleagues who are a little bit unsure of what we're talking about. I know it's isn't it fun? My, my fact, we used to have fax machines. In 1999, when Mayo Clinic published that 96% of chronic sinusitis is due to fungus and everybody's writing antibiotics, which fuel fungus. Right, right. My fax, I heard I was with one of the doctor's patients and I heard ding, ding, ding, ding. All these doctors were faxing me. Hey, you might be right. Hey, you might be right. Hey, because they're seen. Exactly. And then Dr. Ghanoum at Case Western, mycologist, published that Crohn's. Yeah, it always looked at bacteria and we must, but also look at fungus. So this might be a dual etiological basis. And now this paper comes out last year, 35 different types of cancer all had, you know, they tested 17,000 paraffin cancers and found 35. And so once again, no longer my fax. It's that little guy ding, ding, ding, ding. And all these doctors are saying, Doug, you might be right. There's no doubt the evidence is in. We must consider a fungal etiology. And here's what still frustrates me. I understand COVID. We had to give Zithromax because we didn't know, you know, it's not an antiviral. As a matter of fact, it's contraindicated for a virus, but we had to use that. And I, it's so simple. Antibiotics have a dark side because they're mycotoxins. It's so simple to tell a patient when you first examine them. I don't know if tinnitus is a fungal problem, but here's what I want you to do. I want you to go on this diet for two weeks. I want you to come back and see me in two weeks. And when I put you on something, it's a bloodstream antifungal. It'll get me inner ear. It's called, you know, fill in the blank, Lamisil or something like that, usually used for onychomycosis, tonal fungus, but I'm going to put you on. What we saw David Weekly twice began emoting. Yes. He, he one day brought me his office and said, you saw Julie's chart and I said, no, but I saw her today. He had her cancer is in her lymphomas and remission. And he goes, Doug, that lump is gone. And I said, I know. And he said, what are you doing? And I said, I don't think she had lymphoma. I think many cases are misdiagnosed in our want to help the patient. I think what she had is a systemic mycosis. Thanks to you giving her sporinox, which is now FDA approved for cancers. I think that improved her. And she said her diet improved her. She lost a lot of weight. So what I've seen in my years, I've had the most blessed career Vietnam, a little tough. After the most blessed career you can ever imagine people in tears. David Weekly once told Linda the nurse when I was in the room, he said, look, I want Kleenex in every exam room now because Doug's patience. Hey everybody, I just stopped by to let you know that my new book, Unexpected, Finding Resilience Through Functional Medicine, Science and Faith is now available for order wherever you purchase books. In this book, I share my own journey of overcoming life-threatening illness and the tools and tips and tricks and hope and resilience I found along the way. This book includes practical advice for things like cancer and Crohn's disease and other autoimmune conditions, infections like Lyme or Epstein bar and mold and biotoxin related illness. What I really hope is that as you read this book, you find transformational wisdom for health and healing. If you want to get your own copy, stop by readunexpected.com. There you can also collect your free bonuses. Grab your copy today and begin your own transformational journey through functional medicine in finding resilience. Start crying. You know what? No, we talked about this right before we came on. The reason why I get up every day is to inspire and change the health and lives because I know I've been given a second chance and I know that that's what God has on my life is that mission to help other people to understand. And just like you 20 years ago, I couldn't really say to a lot of other doctors what I was doing in clinic, but the antifungal piece is so core and now with mold-related illness. One thought, a couple of things. I'm just have so many thoughts as we're talking. First of all, I have a friend and very well-known colleague in naturopathic medicine that taught, was one of I won't say his name, but he died of cancer. And what happened in the beginning was it was actually, I'm sorry, it was a, I said that's totally wrong. He died of aspergilloma in the lungs and who was originally, as you can so imagine, he did, they did the CT, the MRI and they said, you have cancer in your lungs. You need chemotherapy. You need aggressive treatment. Well, as we know, here's the underlying piece about all this is cancer takes, is opportunistic. It takes advantage of a weakened system. So part of our helping them is getting them back strong enough and giving the antifungals to suppress that. And of course, as you can imagine the story, he gets chemotherapy and further weakening his immune system. He just goes downhill. It's not touching the cancer. And then of course, towards the end, he died because this fungal ball was not treated appropriately. It was treated as a cancer and no one knew until the very end when it was completely full of him and all over his body. And they finally realized, Oh, this is aspergillosis. It is not cancer at all. And he literally passed away. And he's one of those people, if I named his name, you'd have heard of him. And in my realm, he was one of my most admired teachers. But it was also for me, even more of a passionate cry for talking about this topic and going to the steps of patients and thinking about it. And then the Crohn's piece, I just want to mention, I think it all goes together with the bacteria and the fungus, because someone like me has this genetic predisposition to have an overactive immune system for normal bacteria. So say you get weakened immune system from cancer chemotherapy, and that's all part of the picture. And then you have a very permeable gut. You get dumping of the bacterial coatings and weakened immune system. And then of course, this fungus goes crazy. But that fungus is just creating the permeability, which then creates this immune reaction to normal microbiome. It's not really the biome or the microbes at all. It's the fungus in the weakened immune system. And as we talked about before, part of the secret to me completely, I don't, I'm not an remission, Doug. I am healed from Crohn's disease. And part of that secret is the antifungals. And I took for decades. Now I'm on a very minimal regimen because I'm healthy and it took me a very long time to get to the place where I was completely free of that fungal burden. But I am so passionate because that story about my mentor and then the story about my own life is all around how important it is for us to address the fungal burden. And I don't think his case is rare. Yeah. If you look up the scientific literature, go to pubmed.gov and type in, what was it, misdiagnosed aspergilloma. It's unbelievable the papers that pop up. We must begin. The treatment for bacterial infection is pretty harsh. Antibiotics harsh on the gut, contributing to various incendiary diseases. Viruses may be even worse. But to put a patient on a stand for two weeks in a changed diet, and then come back, I want to take your blood pressure again, or I want to do another cholesterol test on you, or we're going to see about your depression. What I've seen in my years, I wish when I die, somebody would squeeze my head and divvy it out to doctors because I've literally seen it all. I had it like you. I didn't have it as severe as you. It was causing my biggest problem at 21 was I couldn't drink any. You know, that was a big problem. And so many people don't. I talked to a young man today who's got horrible gut problems. And I said, he was referred by a friend of mine, and I said, how long has this been going on? About a year and a half. And I said, what dental work did you have just before that? And he just paused. I didn't take that. I know, but pretty certain you had a root canal or dental amalgam. And he said, well, the doctor put me on antibiotics for two weeks. And since I've had this jabbing pain in my gut, I've read, I've seen your show, Doug, and I asked the doctor for the dentist for a nice statin. And he said, no, you didn't have a yeast. You had a bacteria problem. So it's difficult. And yet I'm in a much better position than physicians because I'm not one. I was so angry at God. I went to Santa Monica College after I got back, use my GI bill. I was going to be a doctor. If you were a doctor today, Dr. Jill, I would be saying, we're really good news. There's a new class of antibiotics because we're all becoming resistant because we're over-prescribing. That's what I'd be doing on television. That's why I love that because you have this beautiful platform. And part of it, God has you exactly where he wants you because for me, for many years, I've had to be very careful. And now, again, we have enough evidence that I can talk very freely. But it's funny to you, you mentioned a statin. A statin is non-absorbable. We give it to newborn babies. It's so safe. It's one of the most safe things that I prescribe. And I prescribe it frequently because just like you, I see a massive difference on how powerful it is. So obviously, you're educating doctors and bringing this to light. Tell us maybe recently, you've had a couple of testimonies. Just give us an example of maybe something that you've heard lately that really was a game changer, whether it's a cancer story or... Sure. I have to be very, very careful. I work because I'm on TV. I have FCC rules. Do you know everything I say must be, because we do close caption, go off to one attorney licensed in Texas. He must review it, get it back to us and approve it before I can put it on TV. That's how I have heirs and omissions insurance. It's tough being on TV. I know what I have to do. A lady in Whittier, California called me not long ago with lymphoma, another lymphoma case, and said, Doug, could I follow your diet and take caprylic acid and get rid of this because I'm really sick? And I said, here's what we're going to do. I sent her to an NMD, a naturopathic medical doctor, San Diego, a friend of mine. And I called him and said, hey, can we do this? And two months later, I get a letter from him saying, Doug, this is unbelievable. I just got a letter from her oncologist who, by the by, does not want to know what we did. It was amazed that the lump is gone and she is in total remission. So I don't see that once. I see this with arthritis and diabetes. How do we induce diabetes in study animals? Baflamycin and streptozotacin. Two mycotoxins that give all of them beta cell complexes blows out their pancreas. How do we induce cancer in laboratory mice? We use aflatoxin B1 and aspergillus mycotoxin. How do we give animals Alzheimer's or other neurological problems? We give them another mycotoxin. It's fascinating. We use these for study animals and then the PhD must go home and say, don't tell anybody. But we need to start looking at this really honestly. So let's talk specifically about mold because that's my platform and I talk so many times with patients about their mold exposure and they're getting sick. And this is what we're talking about. So just to be clear to those of you listening, Doug's talking about mycotoxins. Mold is something that might be growing in your home or under your floorboards in your cross space or even outside. But typically it's in spaces that are more concentrated because part of the solution to pollution is dilution. So when we get outside, we have a little bit more dilution effect. We can still have significant effects, but it's usually more serious in homes. And these molds then secrete because they're protecting themselves, these mycotoxins. And you mentioned many of them. Aspergillus can secrete mycophenolic acid, which is an immunosuppressive. And all of these other trichocytines have been known to cause kidney toxicity and lung toxicity and brain neurotoxicity. And I could go on and on as you could as well. But you're talking about in some of these studies to induce the diseases that we have seen in chronic America, we use mycotoxins. And therefore, these things are very dangerous. And I could not agree more. That's a really good point. Of the millions, when I get in this field, there's probably 100,000 fungal species. Now we're saying over two million. We have thus far categorized of 40,000 of them and have discovered a very low number of 350 of them make a poison, a secondary poison to protect itself, actually. And these poisons are called mycotoxins. And that's not such a big deal outside. But if it's growing in a closed environment, like your ducting system or antibiotics, if you think of antibiotics, the mold is penicillium. The mycotoxin it makes we call penicillin. I think we've all taken that. So we have to be careful. So that's a really good point. I'm sorry I get technical. I don't I don't mean to. But in explaining it to these doctors patients, really simple. Have you had antibiotics when this started? Yeah, you know, I did. Are you a drinker? Yeah. Do you smoke, you know, cigarettes? Dr. Costantini told us if you roll your own tobacco, no problem. It's that we dip tobacco, commercial tobacco in sugar and then hermetically seal it. And so it ferments and, you know, you're so there's so many things that you can ask a patient in advance, like Bill Crook did, you know, with his questionnaire that helps you discern and helps them understand, my gosh, this makes sense. The stress I've been under the alcohol that I've got way too much. It's not coincidental that our I'm sorry about that. It's not coincidental that our hospitals, ERs are filled because from those little goblins coming to our home, getting our Halloween candy all the way up to New Year's Day, we've been imbibing when we shouldn't and people never put diet and fungus together, but they should. Yeah, something you mentioned earlier, I think is important. I totally agree with you diet is core, but then also the antipungals and whether it's prescription, which I can use, I'm a medical doctor can prescribe, but I do use natural products and find them very helpful as well. What percentage would you say is diet versus the supplements or the medications? Did you say it's 50 50? Is there more one than the other that you see? Really good question. I have a pulmonologist in here who wrote me the nicest letter. I was a keynote speaker at a mycology meeting and Saturday night I went on and Sunday he sat by me and then he wrote me an email and said my life has changed. I do bronchoscopies for a living and my nurse used to say that smells like yeast when it comes out of there and he said, but 100% of these patients go on antibiotics. So he and I began testing them for yeast. 90% had yeast. How much of this he would go on to tell me, Doug, I'm going to put them on antipungals. I think that's a good jump start, but I'm considering diet as the core, the base of this. And I think all that depends, Dr. Jill, on how deep your mycoses is. You know, there are some people who can go off alcohol and they have no problem and they can continue eating cereals and so forth, but deep mycoses, my money, patients are in a hurry. They've been to six other doctors. They want to get better. Give them some dive looking and I stab and the diet and tell them you will know in four or five days, you're going to come back here to our office. We're going to know in two weeks. And that's when they deemote. Many of them would just, it was amazing. Why have I gone through this for six years and none of these physicians knew that. Thank God for your book and you. You are going to change lives like you can't believe. Thank you for that. And it's interesting because you're mentioning mucosal. So one of the things that's as you're talking, of course, sinuses are huge and all the ENTs are starting to realize and the studies have been coming out lungs, which is mucosal surface and gut. And all these surfaces have something called SIGA, which is our mucosal immune system. And I see over and over, many people have deficiencies in SIGA or impairments in that mucosal immunity. And that's, once again, something that's just going to almost guarantee you're going to have a little bit more trouble fighting off the yeast because you have an impairment in the immune system. And that's. Would probiotics help that? Yes. Yes. Probiotics would help. And then immunoglobulins like colostrum, bovine immune globulins. Those are kind of powerful as well. You are a wealth of information, Doug. And I'm so glad you have made your life's work this. What's the one last bit of information that you would like to leave people with that maybe you wish you would have known 30 years ago or just the kind of core of your work that you really want to leave people with? I concur with you. When you said diet is everything, it's okay to veer off, but we get used to gaining weight. We get used to lymphedema. We get used to inflammation. The watching audience right now needs to understand if you'd go back to the basics, take grains and sugars and mushrooms out of your diet. Although mushrooms, we could do a whole nother show on those. And stop drinking alcohol. Then you won't need to run from doctor to doctor and get an antibiotic after antibiotic. Another mycotoxin. I think the most important thing I've learned is that we own the key to our good health or conversely, our bad health. And very few of us know it because our medical personnel don't know it. I would be so honored to have you. We have an audience on TV that's very large in a couple hundred countries. And I'd love to host you when you get to town to begin educating these people. It's one thing for Doug Kaufman to be saying this. It's a whole nother thing for a very bright physician to be saying it. You'll help so many people in your career. I'm getting in my car hiring a kite. Just meeting you, I've heard so many good things about you. Yeast isn't going to go away. It isn't going to go away. And we've got to aggressively fight it sometimes over months and months and months like you have to. Thank you, Doug. Thank you for your work, your tireless efforts to bring this out well before it was popular. And the good thing is we both know it's shifting because docs are interested in their open-minded more than ever before. But I know you and I both have been going against the grain for many years and I'm excited to see that change. It is an honor to talk to you today. And thank you again for taking the time to come on the show. It was my honor. Thank you so much, Dr. Jill. You're welcome.