Are you going to college? That’s awesome. I’m always proud of people who go to college. It doesn’t matter how old they are, I’m proud. I didn’t start studying until I was in my mid-twenties. I went to college, so I really flunked out when I was young, but I didn’t flunk out when I got older. So, how do you prevent getting gut-related issues, if you’re studying, if you’re a student, and you’re at your college. Well, it all depends really on your lifestyle, doesn’t it? It depends on your level of commitment with your study. It depends on the kind of guys that you hang around with. You know what they say, if you hang around with the turkeys, you can’t sour with the eagles. If you fly with the wrong kind of birds, you’re going to end up in a hell of a mess.

So I never really was much of a social kind of a person, particularly when I was younger, but probably a bit more now that I’m older, so I tend to hang around not many people. I spent more time at home really studying and eating, cooking and eating good foods. Now the choice is yours. The choice is yours of how you live and how you study. It depends what you want to get out of life. I know a lot of young people who go to college, and many of them I’ve seen over the years as patients, do the right thing. They leave home, they’ve learned some cooking skills from their parents, and they know how to make their own food, or know how to select or choose the right kind of foods to eat. Other younger people, unfortunately, not so good. They had parents who didn’t care much for what they ate. They might’ve had a junk food diet, and then they’ll continue that on through college.

So I really encourage you young people out there to try and really make your own food, rather than rely on food that other people cook. And it is possible, and if it isn’t possible for you to do that, at least select healthy kind of options, and don’t be spurred on by peer pressure, by other young people, and just thrive on junk food, because it will really pull you down. It will affect you mentally and emotionally, and physically, if you’re eating wrong kind of foods, and you’ll make consistently the wrong kind of choices. It will affect your grades. It will affect your study. Many years ago, research was conducted at universities and prisons and different institutions on how people would function under different types of diets. And there is no doubt, that when you eat really good food, particularly when it comes to your cognition, mentally you will function on a much higher level.

Related articles:

• All You Need To Know About Cryptosporidium
• Recurring Ringworm: Can It Be Candida?
• 8 Ways Fungal Candida May Reoccur
• Understanding and Crushing Male Yeast Infections
• Is Labored Breathing a Sign of Candida?
• Everything You Need To Know About Candida Glabrata

So I recommended that you stay with good fresh produce. If you can, eat lean proteins like fish or chicken, and especially eat plenty of vegetable matter. But the big thing is, watch out what you drink you young folks, because lots of it is soda drinks, and colas, and all this sort of fizzy crap, and energy drinks. One of my young guys went through a stage where he was drinking energy drinks all the time, but now thank goodness he’s caffeine-free. He’s kicked all that caffeine habit, because he was lots and lots and lots of energy drinks, and staying up all night as a student. It really messed him up. He developed insomnia, and headaches, and got quite grumpy, but now he’s great, because now we’ve got him cleaned right up. So just be careful of caffeine, and alcohol, and take away food.

Those are the three big things you need to watch out for as a student, because it can really mess up your student years. We all like to party, but remember, college isn’t one continuous party. You’re there for a reason. You’re there to learn, and get good grades. But better still, if you make the right diet choices, it’ll make that process so much more easy. And also when you’re young, when you learn to cook and eat properly, when you get to be an old bugger like me, you’ll be in a lot better condition, than if you lived for 30, 40 years on a crappy diet. Think about it. Food for thought.

Here’s an interesting question I get asked time and time and time again. And people get confused. They say, “Should I eat acid food? Should I alkaline foods? My body’s too acidic. It’s going to encourage the production of candida, it’s going to really take off in my body, because I’m drinking Dr. Peppers, I’m eating fries, and having pizzas and stuff, so that’s bad. And other people say, “Well, what the heck? I’m going on a cleanse, I’m going on a diet, I’m going to eat more alkaline. I’m not going to have a problem with candida. I’m not going to have a problem with Ciba or bacteria, because I’m going to put my body into an alkaline state. Well, let me tell you guys, there’s so much crap on the internet, and just like Trump says, fake news, fake news, fake news.

This is all fake. Okay? You’ve got to try and understand that yeasts are very intelligent little organisms. They’re very clever. They’ve been around for millions of years. They’ve been around a long, long time. They survived nuclear holocaust. They survived just about every kind of thing you can imagine. Well, they tell you that cockroaches were the only creatures that survived after Hiroshima, and Nagasaki after the atomic bomb. But yeast can probably survive anything. Yeast-like bacteria can live in the most ridiculous environments. Okay? I mean, they’ve found organisms in places you couldn’t even imagine organisms to live, but remember, yeast are survivors. Okay? They can adapt to just about any kind of environment, whether it’s an acid environment, or an alkaline environment, they will live there. They actually secrete chemicals, and they’ve got ways and means of manipulating ammonia, and different sort of nutrients around them to increase or decrease the pH at their own will.

So regardless of what you eat, you can live on apples all day. You can live on steak all day, you can still have candida. It can still thrive in your body. Now they will favor an alkaline environment. They’ll try and push that alkalinity up. Let me read something here for you. I’ve found an interesting study. Adaptation of fungi to pH. Variations in the host is critical for the survival of yeast. And fungal pathogens are capable of actively modulating the environmental pH. Acidification of the host tissues promotes expression and activity of fungus. So they do like acid, but they also will thrive on alkaline. Many fungi utilize nitrogen or carbon metabolism pathways to generate ammonia, which is released from the cell to raise the pH. So generation of an alkaline pH by the yeast favors morphogenesis, so actually the growth of more yeast. And also, the reproductive stages in fungi are greatly enhanced when the fungus can manipulate the area around it, and push up the alkalinity.

Further readings:

• All You Need To Know About Rhodotorula
• Recurring Ringworm: Can It Be Candida?
• Why Fermented And Cultured Foods With Candida?
• Does Candida Cause Sinus Infections, Headaches, and Fatigue?
• Is Labored Breathing a Sign of Candida?
• Everything You Need To Know About Candida Glabrata

So there’ll be more germination, there’ll be more hyphal growth. So more of those strands, more of those hairs. Also penetration actually into the gut wall and occur more easily under a higher pH, and under a lower pH, according to research. So the alkaline pH increases fungal virulence by facilitating penetration into host surfaces and hindering the immune processes. Remember also that candida albicans is a very clever little thing. It should have been a politician, it’s so smart, all right. And in fact, what it does, it also releases, almost like what these jets do. I don’t know if you guys are interested in jet fighter YouTube videos. Well I am. But a fighter jet can scream through the sky, and release little kind of things behind it to foil an attack of a missile. So a missile will hit those little things that the plane drops out of it, thinking it’s some kind of a heat coming off the plane.

Now, fungi are the same. They can release gliotoxins, and various kind of poisons around them, to neutralize the immune system, and also literally to sort of hide them or cloak themselves. They’re very, very intelligent. But I want you to try and get into your mind. Don’t try and have this fallacious belief, okay? Because it is a fallacy. It’s not real, okay? It’s not science. Don’t have this belief that candida thrives in an acid body, or thrives in alkaline body. Candida can thrive in any body. Especially when the immune system is compromised. So when a person’s taken a big hit stress-wise, they’ve had a poor diet, they might have gone through a divorce, they’ve had something bad happened to them, or whatever, and they feeling like crap, all right? Now the operative word is feeling. They’re feeling bad, their immune system is going down.

And of course that’s when candida strikes. Especially after the person’s been to the doctor, and had a prescription for antibiotics, because they’re told that’s the only drug they need to cure all their illnesses, an antibiotic. It’s either that or an antidepressant, take your pick. So one of those two are thrown into a patient, and they’re feeling bad, and of course down they go. So, don’t be fooled. All right? Don’t think just because you’re eating junk food, you can get candida. Because I’ve seen some people with outstandingly healthy diets be full of yeast infection as well. Remember, okay, it’s the terrain, the environment of the person. It’s not always just the organism.

What autoimmune disease affects the eyes? What’s the most common autoimmune disease to affect eyes? Well, there are many autoimmune diseases. I think there’s about 70 different autoimmune diseases. There’s probably at least a dozen that are linked with eyes. Uveitis is one, for example. I know in some Crohn’s, or ulcerative colitis patients can get visual problems as well. There is also, of course, what’s that condition called again? The common one, multiple sclerosis. That’s the other one where the optic nerve can get affected. But probably the most common one that I’ve seen in the clinic myself would be thyroid disorders. Many people with thyroid disorders get eye problems. If they’re overactive thyroid, or underactive thyroid, they can get a visual problem. You may have seen some people with even eyes that are a bit bulging. A bit on the large side. So that’s Graves’ disease. And those eyes can always like pop out.

Related articles:

• Your Decision to Eat Soy is a Personal Choice
• Antifungal Drug Side-Effects
• What Not to Eat When You Have a Yeast Infection in Your Throat
• Adding Miso to Your Candida Crusher Diet
• Identifying the True Cause of any Medical Condition – Part 1
• What Is The Best Diet To Follow When Taking Antibiotics?

They get a lot of pressure and fluid build up around the eyes. Me having thyroid conditions in my family now for quite a few generations, I’ve had overactive thyroid on and off, particularly affecting the eyes where I get photophobia, or I find that the light too bright, and I need to wear sunglasses, even inside sometimes, I’ve had to wear sunglasses in the past. So if you’ve got a very light sensitive problem with your eyes, you may want to get some blood tests done, to make sure that the thyroid is not sort of doing a bit of a problem, becoming a problem for you. So get that checked out. But yeah, that’s the most common one. But thyroid conditions can create so many problems in the body, but also many autoimmune diseases can see, can create symptoms that you may not even be aware of. So always pays to get checked out, if in doubt.

If you go to a doctor, there’s different ways that many medical doctors will work, but generally they will do a blood test. They’ll do a preliminary blood test first. Even if you go to a doctor saying, “Look, I’ve got all the signs and symptoms of lupus, or rheumatoid arthritis, or an autoimmune disease.” He or she, your doctor, is not going to say, “Okay. Well, let’s test for that.”

What the GP is going to do … they’re going to do a broad spectrum of basic tests to begin with to see what’s wrong. These tests could involve a whole bunch of different types of parameters. Generally, this sort of probing tests to see what’s going on in the body. Then these tests will lead to further tests, of course, because they’re going to refine things down. But these are the basic tests here. Just a few of them I’ve written down here … a few that I commonly see people getting regularly for autoimmune disease. So, I’ll explain a bit about them.

Probably one of the more common ones is ESR, erythrocyte sedimentation rate. Red blood … as you know, when you cut yourself, not long after you have it cut, the blood will start clotting. It will start sort of forming a sediment, and it will dry up, and then the wound will heal. When we look at that … at the ability of blood to clot in a test tube, we can see that there’s something going on with the blood. There’s some type of inflammation going on there. There’s some type of healing response. It’ll give the doctor an idea that something’s wrong with the body, but not specifically what area the problem really is.

This is an inflammatory marker, a nonspecific inflammatory marker. ESR really depends on age, gender, the health of your red blood cells. Lots of factors will account for ESR, and how fast or slow the blood will clot. It’s not a super reliable marker in terms of autoimmunity, but it will give the doctors some idea what’s going on with your body. It’s not diagnostic of autoimmune, but it’s diagnostic of some type of a problem in the body. Some inflammation. It certainly lags behind treatment as well, meaning … so, when you get treatment for the inflammation, if the inflammation goes down, the ESR may not go down at the same rate as the inflammation. It’s a great opening test to do for someone, not one that you would regularly do as you’re following the progress of treatment.

This ESR needs to be basically processed within hours, because it’s a very time sensitive test. That’s a good opening one to do. Now, if they’ve completed ESR, for example, and they’ve looked at a whole blood panel of red cells, white cells, everything, and they’ve seen the ESR’s elevated, they may go further, and then start looking at something called the C-reactive protein or CRP.

Further readings:

• Feeling Fatigue, Low Immune System And Mood Instability
• Preventing Vitamin and Mineral Loss when Cooking Vegetables
• Can Pineapple Help Against Yeast Infection?
• Do I Have A Vaginal Yeast Infection Or Is It Something Else?
• Have You Ever Considered Colonic Irrigation?

CRP has been around for a while. And more recently, CRPHS, or the high sensitivity C reactive protein … which is good for monitoring cardiac inflammation. CRP is a more reliable marker for inflammation, and it’s basically under the control of cytokines or chemicals produced by the white blood cells … which themselves are responsible for inflammation. These are tumor necrosis one, tumor necrosis six … Sorry. Interleukin one, interleukin six, and tumor necrosis factor alpha. TNF alpha. That’s right. So, IL-1, IL-6, and TNF alpha.

Those cytokines … or immune proteins, basically, they can help to ramp up or ramp down the production very quickly of C-reactive protein. It’s a stable marker. This is often a good one to see how well the treatment is going in terms of how successful it is, whether it’s natural treatment or pharmaceutical treatment. We can see if the marker is going up or down, how reliable the treatment’s going to be in terms of giving you what you’re looking for. So, that’s a C-reactive protein.

The other marker that we sometimes look at is ferritin, which is an iron storage protein. Especially I do this one a lot with a blood disease called hemochromatosis, but it also is done with certain types of arthritis and tests like that. Again, ferritin … which is a storage protein of iron, depends a lot on the iron. The serum iron but also, again, those three chemicals we mentioned. Interleukin one, interleukin six, tumor necrosis factor alpha. Those three, again, inflammatory mediators are affected by … they will affect ferritin itself. So, this is a reliable marker and can show you kidney damage, or liver damage, or many other issues going on there.

Probably the most popular one would be the ESR followed by CRP. And then there’s also anti-nuclear antibody, which is another one that’s done. They’re particularly diagnostic of lupus, SLE, or lupus. Yeah. That can also give us a very good idea. Other markers, which I like to do, are request with autoimmune disease of vitamin D naturally, and then I’m going to look at a full panel of all of the white cells or the red cells. I look at liver function, kidney function, et cetera, et cetera.

Depending on the type of autoimmune disease that the person has, then I can go more into that particular area. But when I get any autoimmune disease, the test I always recommend that I’ve completed my clinic is the stool test. That’s the one I do the comprehensive stool analysis. I will request that for the patient, and then also look at all of the blood test results that came from the clinic. That gives you an excellent idea of the level of gut health, i.e. their immune health. Also, then you can see what’s happening in the blood. Get a more full picture, and give you a better outcome with that patient. That’s just a bit about blood testing for autoimmune disease.

Let’s talk about autoimmune disease and hives. Well, potentially any autoimmune disease can create a problem with hives, with a histamine kind of a reaction.

But thyroid conditions are particularly one condition which is linked most with hives more than many other types of autoimmune diseases. But I also have seen it with Sjogrens, and sometimes with rheumatoid arthritis you can get hives.

So whenever you’re going to get an immune system that’s attacking part of itself it’s not difficult for that immune system to overexpress itself and develop a high level of inflammatory mediators which can distribute through the body and cause chronic skin itching and all kinds of problems like that.

Related articles:

• Can Fecal Body Odor Cause Yeast Overgrowth Or Bad Bacteria?
• Test Results Should Never Be Considered Exclusively
• Recurring Ringworm: Can It Be Candida?
• Candida Patients And Low Blood Sugar Issues
• Trichosporon and Candida Connection
• Cortisol and Candida Connection

But chronic thyroid problem, and I believe the Tashimoto’s or the autoimmune disease where the thyroid can flip from hyper—overactive—to hypo, that’s the one often linked with skin problems. I’ve seen more patients with skin issues with thyroid disease than probably any other kind of autoimmune expression. So that’s the one: it’s thyroid conditions.