The Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition · Reed Davis

Mold Illness is Why My Health Fell Apart w/ Katie Poterala

·51 min·3 clips

Katie says she felt “drunk driving for no reason” and had to stop driving to daycare.

Evan opens the episode in a warm, slightly off-the-cuff way. He frames it as one of his last podcasts at FDN and invites listeners to stay connected with him. The guest conversation then shifts into Katie's experience with mold-related health challenges. Her story is used to show how a body can break down before the cause is fully understood. The talk stays grounded in real places rather than abstract theory. They discuss how to look around a building carefully when you are considering a space to live or work in. Testing comes up as useful, but not foolproof. The practical advice is to slow down, inspect what you can, and not assume someone else has noticed the problem. A landlord or realtor may be on your time. That means you sometimes need to look in corners, ask direct questions, and take the time to notice what is hiding in plain sight. The episode also includes a blunt example from a commercial space search. A realtor saw black mold on a fireplace-like structure and suggested it could just be covered with drywall, which lands as a humbling reminder of how casually serious problems can be dismissed. Evan reacts to that with the kind of frustration that comes from seeing ignorance up close. The conversation leaves room for the idea that people can be well meaning and still not understand the implications of what they are seeing. That point matters because not every dangerous space is being hidden maliciously. Sometimes the bigger problem is that someone genuinely does not know enough to treat mold as mold. The final stretch returns to a simple health principle. Katie says the one thing she would ask people to do is listen to their body, because many of us have learned to power through instead. She ties that to her own experience with nervous system work and yoga. The episode ends on the reminder that listening to your body may take practice, especially in a culture that rewards pushing past it.

As heard by us

A mold story that makes hidden buildings and ignored symptoms feel hard to shrug off.

The episode keeps mold exposure at the center and is most effective when it treats the problem as something that has to be read in real time. It stays close to the body’s warning signs, where the answers are not obvious, and becomes most concrete when it turns to buildings,…

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Why you'd press play

A mold story that starts with a health wake-up call and ends with learning to listen to your body.

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