Tag Archives: Candida Treatment

Questions & Answers

Candida And Agave Syrup: Do They Go Together?

Agave is a spiky plant that grows in Mexico. Over the years, I’ve had several people ask me if agave is better for people with Candida than Stevia or high fructose corn syrup.
The truth is, I don’t recommend it. Agave syrup is not a great food to add to your diet because of its high fructose content. One tablespoon can range from 50 up to 70 calories, and the fructose content is very high.

Table sugar is approximately 40 to 50 percent fructose. High fructose corn syrup is about 55 to 60 percent fructose. But agave can be 80% or more fructose.

Fructose, or fruit sugar, is a problem because if you eat a considerable amount, it affects different centers in the brain. The dopamine reward pathway is significantly affected by fructose. As a result, the more you eat, the more you want. This could be one of the reasons that people eat so much fruit – they are almost addicted to the sugar hit. Eating fructose can stimulate the appetite for more carbohydrates and more sugars. If you have a gas or bloating problem, definitely stay away from agave syrup.

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Fructose can also negatively impact the liver. If you eat enough fructose, it can even contribute to fatty liver disease and increase the risk of diabetes.

Honey, stevia, and xylitol are all much better alternatives to agave syrup. This is particularly true if you have Candida.

Unpasteurized, unprocessed honey is a much better sweetener than agave syrup. Honey contains a mix of many different sugars, as well as amino acids.

I raise my own bees and honey. In the morning, I will have rolled oats cooked in pure water with fruit and a little bit of honey on top. I consider that to be a very healthy breakfast.

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Questions & Answers

Candida And The Keto Diet: What You Need To Know

The keto diet is an excellent diet for people. It’s a bit like the MEVY diet – meat, eggs, vegetables, and yogurt.

The keto diet means eliminating sugar and the junk carbohydrates that many people eat like bread and crackers. The type of carbs that trigger a quick blood sugar spike is, in my opinion, a bad choice when it comes to Candida.

One of the reasons the keto diet is excellent is that it forces the body to use fat and ketones for energy rather than glucose or the carbohydrate pathway.

This can be a difficult transition to make, but it does seem to help with Candida problems. There are many dietary approaches when it comes to Candida, but the keto approach is particularly good.

I also like intermittent fasting because it trains people to eat differently. There is a lot of psychology involved in eating, and when you fast, you learn to push food away and not always ruminate about eating.

I’m not a fan of all-out fasting. I don’t see a role for fasting for most of my clients. However, skipping a meal or eating smaller portion sizes, in general, can be fine.

Mindful eating is also very important. Don’t less stress and boredom get in the way of making healthy diet choices. Especially stress and boredom come into it and tend to precipitate poor diet choices.

To my mind, heaving a healthy lifestyle is a necessary prerequisite to getting your gut health up to speed.

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I consider high meat consumption to be too hard on the gut and kidneys. Red meat, in particular, creates too much waste in the body. I support eating very good quality, ocean-caught fish and high-grade, free-range chicken. I think eating lots of lamb, pork, beef, and bison is over the top. It’s an overload for the body.

Lighter animal proteins and legumes such as nuts and seeds are great options. Even though I support the keto diet, I also not anti-grain. I don’t think people should avoid all grains in their diet. I recommend a balanced approach.

And, as good as keto is, it won’t entirely eliminate Candida. However, it will help clean up the gut, burn fat, improve cognition, and better your overall health.So, here’s what you do if you’re thinking about going on a keto diet.

Do a comprehensive, three sample stool test. After three months of the keto diet, do a single sample stool test. Compare the results of the before and after tests to get a good idea of where your gut health is headed.The signs and symptoms of how you feel will also give you a pretty good indication to what level the microbiology is changing in the gut.

So, I’m all for keto. Intermittent fasting is excellent for some people, but many people find it quite tricky. The bottom line is a yes for the keto diet and a question mark for intermittent fasting.

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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.

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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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