Category Archives: Questions & Answers

Questions & Answers

Candida And Reishi Mushrooms: What You Need To Know

We’re going to talk about Ganoderma lucidum, or reishi mushroom.

Mushroom extract is very popular with people, especially people who suffer from conditions like hepatitis or HIV/AIDS or people with autoimmune diseases. People with many chronic diseases often rely on different mushroom extracts.

There are many different types of mushrooms you can get. You can get caterpillar fungus, and you can get turkey tail. They’ve got funny names, but they contain unique sugars or polysaccharides in them that have an interesting effect on the immune function.

Mushroom extracts help the immune system recognize pathogens or bad cells by showing the immune system receptor sites on these cells. It’s almost as if the extract is shining a spotlight on the dangerous cells so the immune system can target and kill them more effectively.
The chemicals in specific mushrooms can also improve various aspects of your immune system by reducing inflammation and stimulating the killer cells to rid the body of rogue cells.
Mushroom extracts can also have a role in cancer treatment by keeping the immune system quite clean and pure and improving liver function. There are a couple of different liver enzymes that are normalized by these polysaccharides or these special sugars.

Some people mistakenly believe that because they have Candida and mushrooms are fungi, they should avoid mushrooms altogether. But nothing could be further from the truth.
I have no problem with people eating mushrooms in their diet, as long as they cook them properly and don’t have them raw. There’s no problem with eating cooked mushrooms, even if you have Candida.

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Are reishi mushrooms particularly good for Candida? Yes, they are in some cases.
In some cases, reishi mushrooms produce spectacular benefits for people. But for others, this same mushroom extract makes no difference whatsoever to the Candida levels in the stool. This is particularly true for the more invasive strains of Candida, like Candida glabrata, Candida auris, and Candida parapsilosis. These strains tend to be a bit more elusive. In contrast, Candida albicans tends to be much more responsive to extracts like the one from reishi mushrooms.

So am I in favor of mushroom extracts for Candida? I am, but don’t use them as a primary way of cleansing Candida from the body. There are far more effective supplements to take when it comes to Candida, particularly if you’re going to use combinations of grapefruit seed extract or garlic extract, and then some monounsaturated, some fatty acids along with that, like caprylic acid or the eicosenoic acid.

If you put all of these compounds together, they work better as a team than alone. The combination is more effective at targeting Candida, bacteria, and parasites in the gut. That’s why I prefer to use more of a broad spectrum antimicrobial than just pure reishi extract.
But if you’ve got an autoimmune disease, it’s certainly worth trying mushroom extracts like this to see if they affect the autonuclear antibody or the inflammatory pathways. If they start normalizing with reishi, definitely stay on it. But if they start elevating, then get off it, because it can go either way with autoimmune disease. For cancer, reishi extract is excellent. This is quite a good supplement to take for people also with HIV. Many HIV people will take a mushroom extract because it helps to normalize the immune function.

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Questions & Answers

The Natural Approach To Gut Health

I often get asked by people, “Why is the natural way better for treating candida, SIBO, or IBS, better than the pharmaceutical, evidence-based way?

There are many reasons why the natural way is better.

One of the most important reasons why the natural way is a better way is because you got less chance of destroying the microbiome using a natural treatment then you would using a pharmaceutical option.

Medicine has only just woken up to how important bacteria in the gut are.

Is wasn’t all that long ago when I was a kid that everything was about destroying bacteria.

When I was a kid, no doctor ever made a call for a probiotic.
Everything was antibiotics and it still is to this day to a considerable degree.

To my mind, any drug that is “anti-“is not going to have natural effectiveness in your gut. It’s going to damage it instead.

The non-natural way is always pharmaceutical.

And when medical practitioners do talk about diet, they are only paying lip service to it. They don’t talk about the importance of prebiotic foods.
All you’re told is to eat a healthy diet, whatever that means, or go to the dietician.

The natural approach to gut health is the superior method because a) we’re not using any chemical concoctions that will kill the beneficial microbiome, and b) we’re not putting chemicals into your body that can cause side effects.

You would not believe the amount of time I’ve spent in my career trying to help people recover from drug side effects. I probably have spent at least 50% of my time doing that for clients.

For example, I recently saw a 20-year-old man who came in with sever years of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. During those seven years, he has been taking methylphenidate for ADHD. This medication caused increasing GI side effects over the years to the point that he was vomiting five or six times a day by the time he came to see me.

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This poor young man was at risk of losing his apprenticeship. His doctor couldn’t find any reason for the vomiting. But it was obvious to me, it was the flipping drug he was on. I’m taking him off the medication and clean up his GI tract. I’m guessing that in about six weeks, his GI symptoms will have cleared up.

That case is just one example of why I’m not interested in pharmaceutical intervention for gut issues – or just about any kind of long-term health issue.

When you come to see a naturopath like myself, we’ll never tell you that side effects from drugs are all in your head. Further, naturopathic treatments don’t induce side effects. They might induce strong healing responses, but that is different than side effects.

I also don’t like pharmaceuticals because, in my experience, people get stuck on them for years, whether they still need them or not. To me, that’s crazy.

When I treat clients, the idea is to get them well as quickly as possible and then transition off the program. Then, let their body build up on its own steam. Let the beneficial microbes flourish.

Natural treatments for GI problems are effective and make the patients happier over the long term.

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Questions & Answers

How To Avoid Candida Die-Off

Candida die-off is something you want to avoid if possible, but it’s not always possible.

If you’re concerned about die-off, and especially if you’re very unwell, I urge you to have a comprehensive stool test. That analysis should give you a general ballpark of where your gut is at the moment.

A stool assessment will tell you whether the severity of your gut imbalance is mild, moderate, or severe.

The approach I take is, the stronger the problem, the smaller the hammer. People often say, “The bigger the problem, the bigger the hammer,” but the bigger hammers often inflict the most amount of damage, don’t they?

If you want to minimize the amount of die-off, you need to proceed very cautiously with treatment.

Most people I work with don’t get die-off, because they go very slowly and gently, and as they feel more confident and their level of health improves, they keep pushing it harder and harder.

Fixing your gut is not a rodeo. Don’t come out of the gate full speed.

Further readings:

The quickest way to get severe die-off is to double or triple all the dosages of everything, and just make a diet change on a dime. Go from a completely crappy, shitty diet into an incredibly healthy diet, and take a lot of supplements. I can pretty much guarantee you’re going to feel like death.

This is why I talk about the warm turkey approach, okay? I don’t like cold turkey. Cold turkey means you stop something on the spot. Warm turkey means you stop something over 14 days.

Some clients I work with take three months before I can start treating them. I need those months to transition them from a very poor diet and lifestyle to relatively reasonable ones.
Other people I see are pretty healthy, to begin with, and just need a bit of fine-tuning.

So, it depends on your starting point. The more dysfunction you’ve got, the longer you’ve been sick, the worse the gut problem, the longer it’s going to take to get better.

Even before you see a practitioner or try and get help regarding Candida, start making slow, positive changes. Think about the warm turkey. You will mitigate your outcome seriously by changing your habits before you even begin treatment.

You can slowly make changes to your diet, your alcohol intake, your cannabis habit, and your high-stress lifestyle. If you do that, you’ll find treatment much less problematic. In fact, in most cases, you’ll be able to avoid die-off symptoms altogether.

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Questions & Answers

Your Microbiome And Your Weight: What Is The Connection?

Does the gut microbiome influence your weight?

I’ve been telling people now for 20 years plus that if they get their gut in great shape, that the weight will fall off, and it’s been validated now in several studies.

A study out of the Mayo clinic followed 26 obese adults over a 90 day periods. The researchers found that one group of people had a 527% greater weight loss than the other group.

The amount of exercise and the type of diet was the same for the two groups of people. The difference between the two groups was the gut bacteria.

The group that had lost the most weight had a large amount of Phascolarctobacterium in their gut compared to the other group.

The first group lost an average of 17.4 pounds, and the second group lost an average of 3.3. pounds.

The second group had ore Dialister bacteria than the first group. Dialister consumes carbohydrates. Therefore it can interfere with the people obtaining energy and nourishment, leading to a desire to eat more and more.

What this study demonstrated is that even though the diet can be the same, if the bacteria are different, that weight is not going to come off.

Further readings:

The University of Copenhagen did a very interesting study.In this study, there were 62 people divided into group A and group B. Group A followed a very healthy Mediterranean
Group B were put on the Standard Danish diet, which is similar to the Standard American Diet (SAD). SAD is high fat, high salt, high sugar, white bread, lots of margarine, and deep fried foods.

When they looked at both of these groups, group A had a weight loss of 7.7 pounds. Group B had a weight loss of 3.7 pounds.

When they examined group A, they found two types of subjects in
group A. One group lost a lot of weight and the other not so much. The group that lost the most weight in group A had a particular ratio of Bacteroides and Prevotella.

This study points out that despite a good diet if you haven’t got good levels of Bacteroides and Prevotella, you still might not lose weight.

A healthy gut microbiome results in better fermentation and better levels of long-chain fatty acids. These long-chain fatty acids make sure that the hormones that regulate appetite are made in sufficient amounts.

The other thing I like to talk about is metabolic endotoxemia.

When you have bacteria that die in your gut, they leave cell fragments behind. Yeast will also leave cell fragments behind that need to be cleaned up.

In people with a leaky gut, this clean up doesn’t happen. The end result is metabolic endotoxemia, which is a fancy word for a sick, dysbiotic gut.

This situation occurs a lot in people who are overweight or obese. Along with metabolic endotoxemia comes fatigue, poor sleep, poor libido, anxiety, and depression.

That’s when people head to the doctor. They get put on half a dozen drugs, puts them in a downward spiral.

Now the way to avoid metabolic endotoxemia is by having a very good diet, eating good foods all the time, trying to work on relaxation, and improving your lifestyle.

Healthy gut bacteria produce an ample supply of short-chain fatty acids. Short-chain fatty acids are the by-products of bacterial fermentation of healthy foods. One of these fatty acids is called propanoate, and it has a vital role in regulating appetite.

Taken together, the research proves eating healthy food, creating healthy bacteria in the gut, means you’re going to have a way better chance of having an appropriate body weight.

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Questions & Answers

What You Need To Know About Prebiotics

It’s important to know how to get prebiotics into your diet.

Prebiotics are a certain type of sugar, what we call oligosaccharides. Prebiotics go through the gut without being digested. When they arrive in the colon, prebiotics feed the good bacteria (probiotics).

My recommendation is that you get prebiotics from your diet rather than from supplements.
It’s much better to eat and chew the foods that contain prebiotic sugars. Food as a source of prebiotics is better for your colon than supplements.

When I first started to recommend probiotic supplements in the ’80s, people thought I was nuts. They couldn’t see the benefit. Why not just have a bowl of yogurt, they’d ask.

Let’s look at the different types of sugars. There are monosaccharides, polysaccharides, and oligosaccharides.

Polysaccharides tend to be starches or very undigestible kind of foods.
These are sugars, no different from white sugar. Polysaccharide bonds are more elongated and complex, making them more difficult for the body to breakdown.

The polysaccharides are also quite good for the gut, but it’s the oligosaccharides that have a tremendous effect.

Oligosaccharides are found in onions, leeks, garlic, Jerusalem artichoke, and chicory root, to name a few. The cruciferous (Brassica) family also contains a lot of prebiotic sugars.

The nice thing about the onion (Allium) family is that there are also good for immune function, mood, and blood pressure. Likewise, Brassicas have been linked to cancer prevention and immune health.

If you live in the U.S., you’re lucky if you are having any more than three grams of prebiotics in your diet each day.

Further readings:

But if you live in certain parts of Europe, you’d be consuming 10 grams or more. If you live in Africa, you could be consuming way more, like ten times as much.

The general rule is that if you are eating minimally processed food, you’ll be getting a lot of prebiotics. This means you’ll also be generating trillions of beneficial bacteria as a result.

At one time, I would recommend prebiotic supplements to my clients. Then I noticed that I was getting a stream of calls from patients who were having significant side effects like gas, diarrhea, and headache.

I also found research that linked prebiotic supplements to the overgrowth of Klebsiella and Candida.

I found that I got much better results if I gave probiotics mixed with digestive enzymes and then encouraged my clients to eat prebiotic foods. This is the reason I created CanXida Restore, a probiotic-enzyme supplement that is entirely free of prebiotic sugars.

The other thing to remember is that prebiotics are not good for people who have a very sick gut. Don’t pile on lots of fermented and cultured foods, followed by prebiotics, and probiotics, if you’re just starting to get your gut healthy.

Stick with whole food if you want to include prebiotics in your diet.

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