Category Archives: Questions & Answers

Questions & Answers

Does Coffee Make Candida Worse?

Why would you want an alternative to coffee? Why not just drink coffee? If you’re gonna drink one or two cups of coffee a day, I really don’t see that being a problem for most people. Now, I didn’t say for all the people, I said for most people.

Some people watching this video should not be drinking coffee, but they are most likely to be the minority. What are the alternatives if coffee isn’t a healthy choice for you?

There are many things you can have. It really depends on your personal preferences. Do you like something like Chai? Do you prefer something spicy or stimulating?

Why do you want to cut back on coffee? Is it because of caffeine? If it’s because of caffeine, you could try roasted chicory or dandelion root.

Chicory is a plant that looks a little bit like lettuce. Chicory has strong roots that, when dried and roasted, almost give an instant coffee kind of a taste.

Related articles:

Don’t drink instant coffee. Why would you drink instant coffee when it’s junk? If you’re going to have coffee, get a coffee machine like me and make real coffee. It’s much, much nicer. I have one cup of coffee every morning. I put honey in my coffee, and I love it. I can’t see any problem with that at all.

When you start having multiple cups of coffee a day, like eight, 10, or 12 plus cups of coffee, it’s become a problem. The most amazing patient I ever had, I don’t think I’d been practicing all that long, drank 30 cups of coffee a day. 30, three-zero, in one day. I’ve had many more clients who drink eight to ten cups of coffee per day. It’s not that unusual, you’d be surprised. It’s not great for your stomach or your digestive system.

If you are drinking lots of coffee each day, alternatives are a better approach because they’re caffeine-free. The bitterness of the dandelion or chicory also ensures a bit of bile release, which is good for liver cleansing.

Other alternatives to coffee are green tea, which has only a little bit of caffeine but high flavonoid levels. Herbal teas like chamomile and peppermint are also good options.

Sources:

Questions & Answers

Muscle Pain: What Should I Do?

A viewer asked me, “Why do I have an achy and sore body even though I don’t do any strenuous exercise. Is it Candida? “If you’ve got body pain, it’s good to determine where the body pain is. How severe it is, the frequency, how often do you get it? How long you’ve had it for? All of these questions are very important. There are many reasons why people get body pain despite not exercising. If you were my patient, the first question I would have for you is, “What about your digestive health?” I want to know if you have any bloating, gas, constipation, or diarrhea. Do you have any food intolerances? Have you had antibiotics and, if so, when and for how long?

I really want to know if antibiotics have destroyed or partially destroyed the gut’s beneficial bacteria. Many other drugs can cause a problem for the gut, including acetaminophen, oxycodone, sleeping pills, anxiety pills, proton pump inhibitors, and statin drugs.

The first thing that comes to mind when clients complain of body aches, but they haven’t been exercising is leaky gut. Another possibility is fibromyalgia.

Related articles:

I recommend getting a comprehensive stool analysis (CSA) through your naturopath or medical doctor. The CSA will reveal the microbiology in your digestive system. It will also measure inflammatory markers, blood, and mucus. You may also want to do a SIBO breath test and a lactulose/mannitol permeability test to determine if the gut is leaky.

If fibromyalgia is a possibility, I would suggest testing adrenal, thyroid, and hypothalamic function. I do very extensive thyroid testing, including thyroid antibodies, TSH, T3, T4, and iodine levels.

The pharmaceutical medication T3 can have an incredibly powerful effect on reversing body pain with fibromyalgia. Literally, within a week, I had a patient who could barely lift

their arms suddenly improve significantly. I’ve seen it right in front of my eyes. It was mind-blowing.

The bottom line when you have an unexplained symptom is that you need to investigate before you treat.

Sources:

Questions & Answers

How Should I Treat My Chronic Prostatitis?

I’ve had many male clients over the year who suffer from suprapubic pain, pain running down the legs, pain on urination, and pain with ejaculation. Many men have this type of presentation.

I read a fascinating study published in 2013 in the European Journal of Urology, which stated that over 80% of men with chronic prostatitis respond very to antifungals rather than antibacterial. Candida is notoriously hard to culture in urine, so many doctors may misdiagnose the problem. Many labs get it wrong too because they can’t find the Candida.

In my opinion, antibiotics are usually quite useless when it comes to treating prostatitis. Worse, if you take antibiotics for a prostate problem, you can cause a lot of gut problems, including SIBO and intestinal Candidiasis.

Another interesting finding is that if you have bacterial prostatitis, you have a much higher chance of having an elevated prostate serum antigen (PSA) reading, which should be very low by default. If PSA is quite elevated, it can signify bacteria in the prostate region but may be misinterpreted by the doctor as a sign of prostate cancer. The result may be treatment for cancer rather than for an inflamed prostate.

My advice if you have prostatitis is to treat it with an antifungal, not an antibiotic. One study looked at about one thousand men with chronic prostatitis with an average age of 34. It turns out that eight percent of men who go to a urologist complaining of a urinary problem have acute or chronic prostatitis.

If you’ve got a prostate issue and it’s painful, and it’s sore, you need to get checked out for STDs but take an antifungal product. Don’t take an antibacterial product.

The other tip I’ll give you with burning urination or pain is to take some potassium citrate capsules to alkalize the urine. More alkaline urine will reduce the burning and stinging you experience with urination.

If you have confirmed bacterial prostatitis, some men find D-mannose helpful. D-mannose is more commonly used for bacterial urinary tract infections, but some men use it for bacterial prostatitis.
Sources:

Questions & Answers

Foods To Eat If You Have Food Sensitivities

The best foods you can eat if you’ve got food sensitivities? Well, obviously, not crappy food. Hi, I’m Eric Bakker, the naturopath. Thanks for coming back. We’re going to talk about what are some of the best foods to eat if you’ve put sensitivities towards foods. It makes sense to eat foods that are conducive to building really good health. For example, you might not be able to tolerate fermented or cultured foods at present if your gut’s really weak or suspect, but slowly over a period of time like me, you’ll be able to eat sauerkraut and yogurt and foods like that.

These are really good, pinnacle foods for the gut. They build great gut health, but you need to do that slowly over a period of time. I get sick and tired of seeing websites where they put three, four, five different fermented and cultured foods, and all the same day and they expect the person’s gut to turn around and feel amazing within two weeks. It doesn’t work, okay.

I’ve been eating sauerkraut now, for what, 50 years? That’s a long time, and my body’s really used to the bacteria that come with this food. The mouth’s used to it, the stomach’s used to it. You’ve got to get used to certain types of foods, especially if you’re coming from a dysfunctional gut. Slowly but surely, okay. So just because a food reacts with you now is no reason why it may react with you in another week or two. You may know a lady or a guy or have a friend who is not really nice so you didn’t get along well with but now you’re probably getting on really well with that person. So it’s the same with food. You want to work on building that relationship up. That food has to like your gut, has to get used to the bacteria. You have to like it before it can like you. That’s how I sort of see it with food.

But there’s one thing you’re probably forgetting, there’s a huge psychological component to eating too. Foods can make us feel good. We can tell ourselves that foods make us feel good and we can have a great relationship with those foods. And we can do conversely. We can think that food’s not nice, it smells awful, it tastes awful. We may read something that tomatoes or potatoes and nightshades will make us sick and cause all these diseases, and that’s probably what will happen. So there’s a lot of malalignment with inflammation these days when it comes to food and health, I’ll tell you that much. So good foods would be fermented and cultured foods, but you need to slowly work towards that way. If you’re coming from a background of avoiding a lot of foods because of allergies, make sure that you’ve tested and you’ve cleared that.
Some people will stop drinking milk or having a food all their life because they had a test 35 years ago that showed this.

It doesn’t mean anything. If I pulled you up and booked you for speeding your cat, would that affect the rest of your life driving? Likely not.

So think carefully before you take that food out entirely. Best foods to overcome the sensitivities of foods that are really easy to break down.

Spinach, broccoli, green beans, steamed up. There are many vegetables like that you can cook up. There’s buckwheat. There’s quinoa. There’s brown rice. There are many grains that you can eat that are quite alkaline and neutral and easy to digest that could really get you up in health. So you need to eat lots of different types of foods, foods you feel happy with, foods that are good, that taste good for you.

Pick your favorites. As long as they’re in a healthy category, you can’t really go wrong. So the best foods are the ones also that don’t cost a ton of money, so you can keep on eating them. That’s why I’m not really keen on a lot of processed foods because often they’re expensive and they’re crappy and they’re full of chemicals. So eating well and transitioning, getting off the crappy food onto good food, is a huge transition for some people. But this is the best possible way to overcome a sensitivity towards a food.

And remember, I’ll say it again, foods, natural foods contain enzymes, which allow you to break them down properly, whereas manmade foods don’t contain those. They’ve been destroyed. So best diet for food sensitivities are the healthy natural diets. It’ll work. Give it a try.

Questions & Answers

Who Gets Food Sensitivity?

I’m Eric Bakker, the naturopath from New Zealand. Thanks for tuning back. Anyone can get food sensitivity. Children are especially prone to allergies, especially younger children. I’ve seen many children over the years with food allergies. So a very observant parent will pick this up and correct it, before it needs antibiotics. My son had that when he was quite young. He was coughing a lot. And I said to Tracy, it’s cow’s milk, let’s get him off that crap. And once we did that and we started looking at other forms of milk, like nut milks, the coughing and mucus all went away. Because the doctor was very keen to look at antibiotics. So again, many doctors don’t understand allergic symptoms with children and they’ll routinely prescribed antibiotics. Which is something that I cringe of when it comes to a child.

But sensitivities can happen also to busy moms. So ladies that are nursing, or running around all over the place. Taking children in the car to soccer games, or to football games and then to all sorts of lessons. Really busy people are stressed people. And you can get sensitivities to food, especially if you’re rushing around food, rushing around meals and not eating properly. Businessmen with lots of worries and concerns, I’ve seen these. PhD students, retired people on medication, to poor dentures. You name it, I’ve seen that kind of person.

Any person can get a reaction to food. The reaction is not the issue. It’s the cause of the reaction that needs addressing. And that cause, we’ll talk about a bit later on and how to deal with that. But if you go to a physician, or a naturopathic doctor, or someone for help, be sure to tell that person about your lifestyle, your background, your diet and the things that could have contributed or led to the point where you’ve got this reaction to food. Because it’s pretty silly taking pharmaceutical medications for reactions. There’s something that you could switch off by stopping their food, or stopping that action that caused that problem. That’s the intelligent approach and it’s definitely achievable.

So who gets food sensitivities? Well anyone can get it, from babies up to elderly. I’ve not really seen one group have it more than the other.

Generally, people who don’t get food sensitivities are the people who tend to eat… I don’t want to blow my trumpet, but people who tend to eat like I eat. People who eat lots of fresh produce all the time. Lots of berries, lots of vegetables, lots of nuts and seeds, lots of legumes. Those people don’t usually get food sensitivities. It’s the people who have weird diets, or strange diets, or stress diets. Or relying on medication too much. They’re more prone to it.