Category Archives: Yeast Infection Signs And Symptoms
Yeast Infection Signs And Symptoms Vary Widely But Can Include Vaginal Thrush Or Discharge, Athlete’s Foot Or Jock Itch, Toe Nail Fungus, Psoriasis Or Eczema, Diaper Rash And Many More Signs And Symptoms. This Page Covers The Common And Rare Signs And Symptoms Of A Candida Yeast Infection.
Investigations for Abdominal Pain When I see a client with gut pain and loss of appetite, there are many causes to consider. First off, I want to know where the pain is located. Is it possible to point a finger at it? Is the pain in the lower right quadrant? Is the pain in the lower left quadrant?
I also want to know the characteristics of the pain. Is it sharp? Is it dull and throbbing? How long does the pain last? When does the pain come?
These and other questions are important to start narrowing down the possible causes of abdominal pain.
The most obvious investigation to do is a comprehensive stool analysis (CSA). When I hear the phrase “painful gut,” I think of microorganisms like parasites or bacteria. Candida can also cause abdominal pain, but a dysbiotic load of bacteria or parasites are more common causes. Parasites very commonly cause pain around the umbilicus or around the ileocecal valve region on the right. I’ve seen that presentation many times in the clinic.
Pain means inflammation. Evidence of inflammation will almost certainly show up on the stool test. It could be elevated IgA that surfaces or high levels of harmful bacteria. Inflammatory markers may be elevated on the CSA.
The timing of the pain in relation to eating can help determine the location of the harmful bacteria. The SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) breathe test will spike based on the location of the problematic bacteria in the GI tract. This is particularly true if the SIBO breath test measurements are done at thirty-minute intervals.
Doing a SIBO test and stool test simultaneously gives the practitioner the ability to identify the target species and location. Do those two tests as a starting point when you are trying to figure out the cause of your gut pain.
A Candida cleanse certainly can improve your digestive health. It’s one of the biggest reasons people undertake a Candida cleanses in the first place. Remember to be careful and not keep cleansing and cleansing and cleansing. Some people cleanse that much. It’s amazing they’ve got anything left to cleanse — what a crazy thing to do.
Don’t keep going on and on with cleanses all the time. It’s not a great idea. You’d be surprised, I had a patient two weeks ago, ten years on the Candida diet. Ten years. It’s like she’s in jail. You don’t need to do that.
You can seriously improve your digestive health by making very small calculated changes in your diet over a prolonged period. It’s a much, much better, and safer approach.
People often ask me, “What do I need to put into my diet?”. When it comes to a Candida cleanse, it’s not what you need to put into your diet; it’s the crap you need to take out of your diet that will make the difference.
Most people, to some degree, will eat a reasonably healthy diet. It’s the added associated junk that they put into it that must go. Once you start doing that, changes you should notice include your GI tract becoming more silent.
You shouldn’t be experiencing bloating, gas, or abdominal discomfort. You should have a flat tummy. You should be able to poop nice and easily. Bowel motion should be very easy, not strained. You shouldn’t be going to the toilet multiple times in the day, a little bit coming out here and a little bit more there.
Before you start a Candida clean, don’t automatically assume that our digestive problem stems from Candida. Try and determine the source of the problems. I call GI symptoms the “noise,” and it’s your job to find the signal that’s creating the noise.
Most people create their digestive problems through how they eat and how they think. Digestive problems don’t just drop into your lap. They develop over time. You don’t really “catch” a cold. You’re not running around with a net actively trying to catch a cold. You develop a cold through faulty ways of living, which increase your vulnerability. Your
susceptibility goes up. Your resistance goes down, you get sick, and it’s the same with a GI problem.
If you want to improve your digestive health, you need to change some of the foods you eat and your lifestyle. Taking those two steps can lead to great results for your GI tract.
Studies on rats and other rodents often have some relevance to human health. There are a lot of correlations. Often studies are initially conducted on rodents with human studies coming later. Many times, experiments on rodents and humans have similar results.
A study conducted at the Institute of Aging in Baltimore found out something very interesting with either rats or mice. The researchers were looking at beneficial gut bacteria called Akkermansia. This is a type of good bacteria that perform many vital roles in our gut. Akkermansia help break down fiber into short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), including butyrate, acetate, and valerate, to name a few. These short-chain fatty acids are very important for intestinal health. SCFAs help fuel intestinal cells and provide a healthy environment for the colon to reabsorb what it needs from stool. SCFAs also create different types of signals that communicate with the immune system. Researchers found that insulin sensitivity is very much affected by Akkermansia. When the level of Akkermansia goes down, insulin resistance goes up. If insulin resistance goes high enough, it can result in blood sugar problems and, eventually, type 2 diabetes.
Even though the research is still in its early phases, there could well be a significant link between gut bacteria, blood sugar, and the development of diabetes. I probably won’t see it in my lifetime, but eventually, I think most chronic diseases will be linked to certain types of bacteria.
I suspect that the ability to “fingerprint” a person’s microbiome and then make the appropriate adjustments will form the basis of medical treatment in the future. Incredibly, we will go from killing bacteria with antibiotics to building up beneficial bacteria and using probiotics.
Medicine and science will finally realize you can’t get people’s health right by giving toxic chemical preparations that kill cells and cause extreme chemical reactions in the body. I think people will realize that the only way to build health is by eating the right kind of foods and getting the correct type of bacteria in the gut to a high level. Whether
it’s emotional health, cognitive health, blood sugar health, endocrine health, or overall health, it won’t matter. All types of health will improve with improved gut bacteria.
Eric Bakker, the naturopath. Thanks for coming back. Let’s talk about sugar addictions, cravings for sweet foods. It’s incredible. This is just out of my book, Candida Crusher, How to Break the Sugar Addiction. So it depends really how bad your sugar cravings are. I mean, for some people that I’ve seen in the clinic over the years, I worked out it takes sort of on average up to eight to 12 weeks to really properly break the sugar addiction cycle. Eight to 12 weeks, that seems like a long time but the first four days are the hardest.
So let’s just say you’re a person who’s had a cup of coffee, or a cup of tea, or some type of beverage with a few spoons of sugar in it. We’ve been having tradespeople over working on our kitchen now for some period of time and the man who did the roof, our roofing guy, [Al Rordy 00:00:50], the old Scotsman, he would drink seven or eight cups of tea a day with two or three teaspoons of white sugar in each cup, which seems crazy to me.
Now, Rordy’s uninterested really in anything but doing roofs, having some cold beer and drinking cups of tea or sugar. I mean, that’s fine. That’s Rory’s life. He enjoys it. But you’re out there and you’ve got a gut problem and you’ve got a sugar addiction, what the hell do you do? Or, you go an immune problem? The guy who did a lot of work on vitamin C, Sir Linus Pauling, who got two Nobel prizes, quite a remarkable guy, he worked out that the biochemical structure of sugar is very similar to the chemical structure of vitamin C. in fact, they compete with each other to get inside the cell of the human body. It’s quite amazing. So people often who love sugar often have vitamin C problems.
Try this tip. Take one to 2,000 milligrams of vitamin C per day for a few weeks. Start maybe slowly. So if you’re eating a lot of sugar, just start maybe with a quarter of a teaspoon of vitamin C powder per day and build it up. Just make sure that your vitamin C powder hasn’t got sugar in it. When I was in L.A. last time walking the health food stores, I was surprised how many vitamin C products I found actually listing sugars as an ingredient just to sweeten it up. That’s not what you want. You want pure vitamin C powder, and you’ll have to go to a company may be like Pure Encapsulations or Thorne Research, but you will get a pure product if you look.
Now, that product will have no sugar in it just vitamin C. Watch what happens when you start taking one to two grams per day ongoing for several weeks. You will notice that the sugar craving drops off. In fact, many people have told me that on three grams a day, it disappeared after 14 days. So there you go. That’s one trick.
The second trick is, which I wrote about also in Candida Crusher, I wrote about a herb called gymnema. Many people have said, “How do you spell that?” So here, now you can freeze it on the computer, gymnema sylvestre. So I’ll just hold it there. Right, did you get your photo? Good. Off to the herb shop or herbalist and try and get yourself some liquid gymnema. Okay? Now you only need a small amount of the gymnema really, just a little bit of that per day. If you get a killer craving or if you really want to have a candy bar or if you go shopping, that’s a good time to take gymnema. You take just a few drops in a glass of water, you drink that. Take some vitamin C if you want, go shopping, you won’t really be looking at candy bars or chocolate bars or things like that.
So gymnema is extremely bitter and what it does is it suppresses the sweet craving. It really does. It works marvelous. I’ve had gymnema. I’ve used it for so many people with diabetes. I’ve found it to be invaluable for a diabetic because it also helps to improve the sensitivity of insulin in the body. So when you’ve had gymnema for some time, you’ll find that when you do have sweet stuff, it tastes so disgusting that you’ll get sick of just tasting that sweet stuff. That’s how I feel now. If I put a teaspoon of sugar in my mouth, I’d feel like… just like… sick because I just don’t eat sugar. The only sweet stuff I have in my diet is honey because I’m a beekeeper and I love honey.
I’ve had a lot of honey for many years now and in fact, my gut has never been in as good a shape as it has been the last 12 months since I’ve increased my honey intake. So don’t always think that sugars are bad. Some sugars are actually very healthy for the body and good quality, raw, unfiltered, unpasteurized honey is one of those sugars. I use it for basting. I marinated some lamb the other day with the honey, and soy, and garlic. It was fantastic. So not all sugars are Darth Vader. Okay? Not all sugars are evil.
It’s the refined white stuff that’s crap, stuff that we buy from the supermarket. If you get a really high-quality, pure maple syrup without all the junk in it or high-quality honey, small amounts regularly, no problem at all, especially when the tummy’s in good shape. But it’s the refined stuff that really encourages the production of candida in your gut. It’s the refined sugar that encourages the production of the bacteria that you don’t really want like Klebsiella and Citrobacter, bacteria implicated in autoimmune disease.
I don’t need to tell you all the reasons why you don’t need to have sugar. I’m just trying to explain to you that wean yourself off this stuff, you won’t really wanted anymore. You’ll have no need for it, no taste for it. But allow yourself several weeks in that process. Don’t forget the vitamin C powder. Don’t forget the gymnema sylvestre herb. Also, don’t forget the fact that it’s not good to hang around people who drink Sundays all the time and have lots of sweet stuff in their diet. There are other ways that you’re going to get happiness and enjoyment in your life just apart from sugar. Because sugar addictions end up in misery for many people who develop heart disease, autoimmune disease, lots of issues.
I’ve seen this now for so long, the connections there. I saw the connection with sugar very early on in my practice days. So don’t be a sugar addict. Once you’ve understand this principle, you get away from it and your gut turns into a better shape, you’ll find that the sugary foods won’t be calling your name so much anymore. You won’t have those strong desires. The desire will be gone. Why? Because the bacteria have changed? And you will be desiring spinach and healthy food like salmon, and broccoli, and some Brazil nuts. These are the healthy foods to eat. Right? Did we get that right? Good. Watch out for that white stuff.
Back at the naturopath, thank you for coming back. I’m from New Zealand. I probably say that a million times. Now let’s talk about apple cider vinegar. Is it any good for SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Well, check this out, here’s an old book, Apple Cider Vinegar Health System. This one’s from Paul Bragg. Remember Bragg? Bragg cider vinegar. Bragg was a huge fan of cider vinegar, and when you read his book and his article you’ll understand why, because the guy developed TB when he was quite young, but his dad was a farmer and he made barrels of apple cider vinegar. He would ferment his own cider vinegar, and Paul Bragg’s dad would be drinking this regularly on the farm. He was a strong guy.
But when Bragg went to the military academy, he was in a crazy military academy, I thought that was something in Russia, but in America they have it, too, apparently. When he went there, he got sick, he developed TB. And then, when he was sent to a sanatorium, guess what he got to recover? A Swiss doctor gave him apple cider vinegar again, and honey, and water. Bragg owes his recovery, he believes, to cider vinegar.
Why is cider vinegar so good? Well, it’s fermented, it’s high in potassium, it helps to stimulate the gastric function. It really is good for low functioning stomach. Many people who go to a doctor with heartburn, in fact, it’s probably about a 60/40, 70/30 ratio, about got 60% of people, they think they’ve got heartburn, in fact, they’ve got underactive stomach. But where is just underactive stomach come from? There are many reasons, many theories on this low functioning stomach, but cider vinegar has a nice effect on it.
I find cider vinegar also helps people with constipation quite a lot, it’s great for the bowel in general. It really does work quite well. It also helps because it’s high potassium, so it’s going to help regulate the heartbeat. It’s going to help with nerves, and muscles, and bones, and a whole lot of things, so it’s a fantastic food, regardless whether you have SIBO or not. If you have cider vinegar regularly in your diet, there’s one thing I guarantee you’ll notice, your energy will increase, your stamina will increase, you’ll just feel you can work harder and longer. Also, mentally, you’ll feel pretty good with a regular consumption. It’s so cheap for what it does, it’s almost ridiculous how effective cider vinegar can be.
If you get cider vinegar, I think you should try the Bragg cider vinegar. It’s the real McCoy. Okay. It’s the fermented one. It hasn’t been made in a factory involving the processes that they’ve got today, well, it’s made in a factory, but it’s a different kind of a cider vinegar. I’ve tried many cider vinegars out, but the Bragg’s is definitely the best one to get. It’s like anything that you get, there’s usually good quality stuff and one is better than average, and that’s the Bragg’s.
But why is it effective for SIBO? Many people with SIBO have got issues with their stomach, they got issues with bile production, they got issues with their large intestine. They basically need to rejuvenate and to freshen up the gut, and that’s what cider vinegar does really well. I also find it helps to stimulate appetite and improve bowel tone, so people who have just a tablespoon once or twice a day in a bit of water, even better if you add a little bit of honey with it, thoroughly mix that and drink that, you’ll notice changes in the consistency of the stool, in the comfort of the gut, and also in the appetite. If you take it long enough, you’ll notice the sleep and energy improve.
SIBO will not be cured with apple cider vinegar, but it will be ameliorated, it will be improved. If you want to get a handle on SIBO I still think the best tests are, I’m not a big fan of the breath test, but many people still do them, I recommend the comprehensive stool analysis by Doctors Data in Chicago, get that completed to find out where the real problem areas are before you start launching into a proper treatment. But suffice to say, if you take a small amount of cider vinegar every single day for several months, you will notice improvements in your gut. Also, that those improvements will be complimentary to the treatment that you’re using, whether it’s supplements or diet or whatever.
Am I a fan of cider vinegar? I’m a big fan, okay. But remember, in some cases it can aggravate you, so start very slowly, in small amounts, and gradually build up to one or two dessert spoons per day. Especially good for people my age in their 60s, who may have arthritic problems or things like that, or high blood pressure, start slow and build up. And guess what? In time you’ll probably throw all those drugs in the trash where they belong.