Questions & Answers

How Dangerous Is Mold On Foods

I have to apologize about my videos, which were put up yesterday, because I’d put up normally between eight to 10 videos per week, generally midweek, they get loaded up, but the sound was dead on this one. I think that my microphone developed COVID-19 because I had to bin it, got sick, threw it out. Got a new one and it’s good.

What do you think of Donald Trump taking hydroxychloroquine for COVID? I mean, makes you wonder doesn’t it? Person running a country, taking a medication with serious side effects, who’s borderline obese with arterial plaquing and… Yeah, I’ll leave it at that, but you can see what’s going to happen. I mean, it looks like another Titanic coming up, I’d say.

Right, we’re going to talk about mold on foods today. How dangerous is mold on foods? Many patients, for so long, have spoken to me about this issue. Being concerned about mold on food and throwing food in the bin and all this kind of stuff. So let’s talk a bit about that.

There are so many types of mold. You have thousands and thousands of types of molds. Some molds are highly beneficial. In fact, they’re used quite a lot. For example, there’s a particular type of penicillium. I think there’s one called penicillium roqueforti. And if you look at Roquefort cheese or the blue cheese, okay, that uses this particular penicillin mold to make the cheese blue and moldy. So Camembert, Brie and a lot of these softer cheeses actually use the penicillium molds to make them like that. Now, if you put the penicillium roqueforti mold on a hard cheese or a different type of cheese, you’ll spoil the cheese. You’ll ruin it.

Now, what about other hard cheeses? Do you have to bin all cheeses when they get mold on them? No, you don’t. Do what I do. Get the cheese slicer. If you ever see any mold on cheese, hard cheese, we’re not talking the soft cheeses because they are moldy, right? Just get your cheese slicer, whip the mold off it then bin it. Because the mold hyphae or spores don’t penetrate deep into hard surfaces like cheese, like hard cheeses, for example. In soft cheeses, they do, but they’re meant to be in there, particularly the blue.

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But what about a tomato? Or a cucumber or a food that’s high in water with mold on it? In the bin. Bin it. You should not have tomatoes with mold on them. This is the thing when you grow produce… Because I grow, of course, most of my own vegetables and fruits, but with tomatoes, I’ve never grown a tomato myself, picked it, had it inside and had mold on it.

Hydroponic ones are full of water. They’re pumped full of water, you’ll find the hydroponic tomatoes. I hate them. They don’t even taste like a tomato. They’re gross. If I ever eat a salad somewhere I can taste right away whether it’s a hydroponically grown food or it’s a normally grown food. The taste is just not there with hydro.

Anyway, getting off track. Soft foods, vegetables and fruits like peaches and apricots for example, if you’ve got citrus, anything with mold like that, you’re probably better off to throw it in the trash can. But if it’s a hard vegetable or a harder kind of fruit, it’s got a spot on it… For example, yesterday we harvested quite a few quinces, like a type of pear off the tree. Because my partner likes to make all sorts of things with quince. Now a couple of them, a couple of the large fruit had fallen off the tree and caught in the fork of the tree and had developed a Brown spot. So mold started growing in there. So, instead of throwing that whole massive big quince in the trash can, we just cut the moldy piece right off and make sure there’s a good half inch or more of clean pear or quince and we reject the rest. It’s common sense.

So you don’t have to throw all food away with mold on, okay. Not at all. I prefer to eat fruits, particularly when they’re ripe. And in fact sometimes quite ripe, the flavor’s really there. Nature’s intended us to eat the food in that particular condition. You cannot ever compare tree ripened stuff in a fruit ever with stuff that you buy in the shop.

And also I find that when it ripens really well, it tends to really, really give you not just a good flavor experience, but it’s full of nutrition there as well, but the birds will get it. And as soon as a bird picks a little hole in, for example, a peach or an apricot, you got a wound there, you can get bacteria and mold in there, it’s going to get sick. Yeah, you got to be careful. But don’t throw food away necessarily with mold on it. Not all molds are bad.

There’s an Aspergillus oryzae mold, for example, that’s used in inoculation of soy products. So some soy products can get a beneficial mold growing in them as well.

So let’s look at some, for example, fermented foods, cultured foods. There’s all sorts of bacteria and molds in these foods. We need these things in our body. I’ll do a video later on which I’d like you to watch, about apples, why eating the whole apple is so good. Because they’ve discovered over 1,700 types of bacteria in and on that apple, thousands of bacteria. We need those good bacteria in our gut.

So when you start peeling food and chopping all the seeds out and taking this and that out, and just have a tiny little piece of flesh you’re missing out, you’re really missing out. Talk about it in another video.

So back to molds, don’t chuck all the food out.