Your pH balance is an important factor for you to seriously consider if you want to beat that yeast infection once and for all, because pH affects the delicate balance of your biochemical health profoundly.

While it is a myth that a predominantly alkaline diet discourages yeast and a predominantly acid diet favors yeast, understanding the pH balance is important when it comes to maximizing your digestive health, and by optimizing your digestive health you will be discouraging a yeast infection. More importantly, by maximizing your digestive potential, it will be harder for candida to translocate from your digestive system into the bloodstream, where it can cause major problems.

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Let me explain first about acidity, alkalinity and your body. For example, the vaginal environment is acidic. Your digestive system is a predominantly acidic environment likewise, especially your stomach and small intestine, where most of the protein digestion occurs. Lactic acid favours the production of lactobacillus species in the digestive system, and without an acidic environment created higher up in the digestive tract, the pancreas lower down will not be sufficiently stimulated to create the alkaline pancreatic enzymes and juices.

Real problems arise once candida translocates from the digestive system, a predominantly acidic environment, into to the blood stream, a slightly more alkaline environment. Yeast begins to thrive in this slightly alkaline environment because the hostile environment of the digestive system does not challenge it. The pH change that occurs with this translocation allows candida to change into its more pathogenic fungal mycelial form.

Besides, your immune system will have become weakened over time and find it harder to counter the yeast infection once it has moved from the gut to the bloodstream. The more balanced your body’s pH levels, the healthier you will be and the easier it will be for your system to fight off a yeast infection.

Today I’m back with some additional yeast infection myths you need to be aware of. A lot of these have to do with improper diagnosis and treatment ideas, but they’re important to understand.

A Yeast Infection Can Make Me Infertile

False, there is zero evidence to suggest that a yeast infection can or will make you infertile. One of the most common reasons today affecting women and fertility is the stressful and very hectic lives they lead, and many are now leaving it until their late thirties or early forties until they have their first child. There are, of course, many other reasons for infertility, such as low sperm counts, but a yeast infection is not one of them. There is some evidence that a case of vaginal yeast infection when routinely treated and suppressed with vaginal applicator creams can lead to driving the condition further into the endometrium (womb), thus contributing to endometriosis, which can cause infertility. In case you have vaginal yeast thrush, don’t forget to address it locally in addition to a healthy diet and lifestyle change.

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Douching Can Cure My Yeast Infection

There is the false belief that just by regular douching you can get rid of a yeast infection permanently. What many women don’t know is that an acidic douche like vinegar does not necessarily kill a yeast infection because candida can live in an alkaline environment as well as an acid environment. Douching does not generally have an effect on the entire vaginal environment either, as candida can thrive around the cervix, an area notoriously difficult to access by way of douching. This way of vaginal cleansing will often have a temporary effect and can in some instances even shift bacteria and yeast further up the vagina or into the urethra, causing a urinary tract infection.

I Don’t Have A Yeast Infection Because I Have Never Had A Vaginal Discharge

It is not true that all yeast infections include a vaginal discharge. Indeed, many women suffer with candida overgrowths that have never had a discharge. Many female patients I have seen over the years have complained of intense itchiness and soreness yet with no discharge at all.

Yogurt Will Cure My Yeast Infection

I never established this specific to be the problem whatsoever. Yogurt can relieve the symptoms of burning and itching in particular, but I’ve never seen it actually cure any vaginal yeast infection. It certainly does make a lot of sense to continue eating a small amount of good quality yogurt each day to help repopulate the digestive system with plenty of beneficial bacteria, and in addition to continue to use yogurt as part of your treatment plan to help relieve any local symptoms.

Yeast Infections Are Not Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs)

Yeast infections are not true STDs, but yeast infections can certainly be transmitted between partners during sexual relations.

It is therefore important that both partners are treated for a yeast infection at the same time and in addition observe cleanliness before and after intercourse to prevent transmission.

FALSE: Cancer Is Caused By Candida, and Utilizing Sodium Bicarbonate May Prevent Or perhaps Treat Cancer

Some alternative practitioners, especially Dr. Tullio Simoncini from Italy, promote sodium bicarbonate as a cure for candida and for cancer. This claim is made on several Web sites, and in You Tube videos that Dr. Simoncini has posted on the Internet, and in a book he has written as well. Scientists require evidence and studies before they can recommend certain treatments. Absolutely no peer-reviewed publications in medical journals are to be discovered encouraging the speculation that cancer can be cured or perhaps prevented with sodium bicarbonate. Further, available peer-reviewed medical journals do not support statements that sodium bicarbonate has worked as a cancer treatment.

Although I do agree to the notion that alkaline diets have their place in protecting against numerous chronic conditions as well as assisting to lessen the likelihood of developing a yeast infection, I don’t agree to the belief that providing someone constant doses of sodium bicarbonate will treat their yeast infection or prevent cancer.

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That’s about it, for myths, for now. Make sure you double-check anything you hear about yeast infections you find questionable. You can always contact me via the form on this site, and I’ll do my best to help you out.

Today I would like to dispel some commonly held beliefs about candida yeast infections. There are so many myths relating to yeast infections, I think I have heard them all. Many people have accepted a lot of these beliefs as facts, and this has to change before people can get proper treatment.

All Yeast Infections Are Due To Candida Albicans

After having completed over several thousand comprehensive stool tests on patients with yeast infections over the years I have noticed that approximately 70% of the yeast found was candida albicans, the remainder being candida tropicalis, candida glabrata and candida parapsilosis. Occasionally I see more rare strains like candida krusei, but not very often. Did you know there are about 250 different candida strains, and that some are easier to eradicate than others? In my experience, candida tropicalis is much more difficult to shift than candida albicans.

While about 80-90% of yeast infections are caused by candida species, there are more than 200 different strains of yeast that can affect you. Sometimes, if you have been using drugs to wipe out the most common yeast strain, other non-candida strains can increase and cause a yeast infection. If you have recurrent issues with yeast it would be best not to self-medicate yourself but to get checked by your health provider who can send your culture to a lab for more detailed analysis.

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Strict Diets Cure Candida

Following a strict candida diet, which some call the impossible diet will most certainly provide symptomatic relief of your yeast infection but will not “cure” you. It is virtually impossible to eliminate the yeast in your body, but it certainly is possible to bring it under control. What you want to achieve is balance and awareness of the fact that your yeast population is carefully kept in balance with the many species of bacteria that inhabit your digestive system in particular. Whilst some experts believe that high yeast, high starch, or a high sugar diets do not “feed” a person’s yeast infection, I would tend to disagree here. Reducing the key trigger foods (which can vary greatly from person to person as I have discovered) allows the body to better handle the candida problem and helps to prevent an accelerated candida overgrowth, but in order to help accelerate the eliminate of the yeast problem on a long-term and even permanent basis we need to look elsewhere – the immune system and in particular the immune system residing in the digestive system.

Only Supplements Are Required, Your Diet Is Not That Important

Again, I have read this statement in countless blog posts, paper and e-books. This is simply not true, in fact in some cases nutritional supplements are not even required nor desired to affect a complete cure. I have seen this but it is the exception rather than the rule.

Best results will always be obtained by adopting the right diet, taking a few carefully chosen herbal or nutritional supplements and adopting the right lifestyle principles I outline as part of my Candida Crusher Program.

My Treatment Plan Is The Only One That Works

Bear in mind that there will be as many candida protocols as there will be religious belief systems, and there are literally thousands of them. Do yourself a favor and side step any fanatical belief systems, whether they be medical, religious or political! Have you noticed that some practitioners have extremely rigid treatment protocols and believe that their treatment plan is the only way to go? I’d suggest that you avoid any such doctor or practitioner who believes that his or her yeast infection protocol is the only way to cure your yeast infection. The Candida Crusher Program is certainly very effective, and several thousand patients have shown me that my system certainly does work, but I’m also sure that there will be other effective yeast infection eradication programs out there as well. Some believe in Jesus, some in Buddha and some simply don’t want to believe at all, and I’m happy with that. If you are open minded and mature enough then you will discover that there is plenty of room for many different belief systems, in medicine, in religion and in politics.

Probiotics Can Cure Candida

Despite the fact that a high quality probiotic can be quite efficient in controlling a candida fungus overgrowth in the beginning, there exists absolutely no substancial evidence to point out that any probiotic can in fact cure candida. A top quality probiotic can be most effective, but you will need to be cautious of many retail purchased products, many of which I have found to be therapeutically of little value.

As soon as the yeast gets more prevalent in the body you will notice that probiotics have minimal effect unless of course you take advantage of a good eradication supplement and work really hard out on diet changes. It is the combined and consistent effort placed on diet, supplements and lifestyle that will win the day in more than 90% of the most difficult cases I have seen. And of course, it pays to get in early before candida becomes too widespread.

Candida Yeast Infections Are Caused By Heavy Metals

This is another popular myth that has done the rounds, that mercury toxicity “causes” a candida yeast infection. I have read many blog posts and several e-books proclaiming that the only sure fire way to completely eliminate a yeast infection from the body is to get rid of all of one’s amalgam mercury fillings. Whilst eliminating heavy metals from the body is a good idea, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that all cases of yeast infection are improved by removing one’s mercury fillings.

Heavy metals can certainly depress the immune system and thereby exacerbate a yeast infection, but I am not convinced that they actually cause candida directly.

Detoxification does make sense to me though, and as a candida patient improves and regains more strength and vitality then I do recommend a detox. We’ll discuss detoxifications in detail later on.

If I Feel Itchy, It Must Be a Yeast Infection

I know of too many women who run down to the drug store to get Monistat, Fluconazole or another yeast medication as soon as they develop vaginal itchiness, believing that it must be a case of vaginal thrush (yeast) infection. The fact of the matter is the most common condition causing itchiness in women is BV, or bacterial vaginosis, and NOT thrush. There are potentially many other conditions that may be the cause of itchiness, and this is why it is important to get checked out at your doctor’s office before you decide on the correct line of treatment.

A swab will quickly and accurately tell you what kind of vaginal irritation you have, and whether it is itchiness due to an allergy, a case of BV, chlamydia of vulvodynia.

Don’t consider any of these without any thought. While it’s easy to look for a “simple” solution or diagnosis, nothing about yeast infections is cut and dry.

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Click here to read Part 2 Debunking Myths about Candida Yeast Infections.