Tag Archives: Candida Treatment

Questions & Answers

Is The Carnivore Diet The Key To Losing Weight?

Does the carnivore diet work for weight loss?

You can find a lot of good information on this topic by reading Chris Kresser online. He provides excellent, balanced information about several diets, including keto, paleo, and carnivore diets.

A carnivore diet is built around beef, lamb, pork, chicken, fish, and eggs. In some cases, dairy is also included to a limited extent.

I heard from several viewers on my YouTube channel that the carnivore diet is the way to go. I’m sure that it can be helpful in the short-term, but I think a long-term carnivore can lead to problems.

If we go way back, there are no groups of people who lived solely on meat. That type of eating pattern didn’t exist. It’s a fallacy to think the carnivore diet the the “natural” human diet. That is simply not true. Chris Kresser writes exceptionally well about that.

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For example, the Canadia Inuit would go to great lengths looking for lichen, berries, and other foods they could use to supplement the seal meat they ate. Most tribes have always foraged for carbohydrates to eat in addition to meat.

It’s a myth that our ancestors lived by roasting huge steaks over open fires.

If you look at what a carnivore diet does to your gut over the long term, the colon will lose out a bit. Meat is almost always exclusively digested higher up in the GI tract. As a result, there is not much residue left in the stool. It’s also a very low fiber diet.

It’s been shown that within 48 hours of starting a carnivore diet, the gut microbiome starts to change. I don’t like that at all.

For those people who promote the carnivore diet, I’d like them to show me someone who has been eating like that for forty years. I’d want to know what their gut looks like. What is their blood pressure like? How are their liver and kidneys doing? How has their heart managed all that animal fat?

I’ve been following the Mediterranean diet for forty plus years, and my heart and circulation are in fantastic shape.

I believe meat is an important part of the diet, but it should be consumed in small amounts. I think the carnivore diet can cause problems with vitamin and minerals levels over the long-term. I would worry about calcium, magnesium, and manganese, to give a few examples.

With my vegan patients, many will add some dairy or lean meats back into their diet after five years or thereabouts. Their B12 levels had become so low that they were starting to feel sick.
I think that the carnivore diet would also be hard to tolerate for more than five to seven years. I couldn’t stomach eating meat for breakfast for the rest of my life.

The carnivore diet may be an effective way to lose weight in the short-term, but I think the keto diet is a better option. If you wanted to do the carnivore diet for a short period, then you could slowly add some vegetables and fruit when you reach your weight-loss objective. But, for overall health, an all-meat diet is not the way to go.

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Questions & Answers

The Impact Of Sugar On The Gut

Can too much sugar affect your gut?

Absolutely. Too much sugar can wreck your gut.

Sugar, as you probably have realized by now, is highly addictive. When you start hitting seven teaspoons or more a day, the addiction becomes very strong.

I know some people are so addicted to sugar that it’s almost impossible for them to come off it. Sugar has demonstrated addictive qualities like narcotics. That’s how strong it is for some people.

But, I can assure you once you get through the cravings stage, you won’t want to add any more to your diet. As you focus on eating fruit rather than sweets, you’ll be even less inclined to eat a high-sugar diet.

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Sugar can damage your gut in many ways. When your intake is seven teaspoons or more of sugar, the body has difficulty processing it properly. As a result, a significant amount of sugar passes into the colon, where it can cause intense fermentation followed by gas and bloating.

Sugar that hasn’t been digested properly will also prevent good bacteria from sticking to the colon wall. As a result, there is a reduction in the levels of beneficial bifidobacteria.

Lower bifidobacteria accounts are associated with fatigue, which can trigger a desire for sugar, and the cycle continues.

If that’s the cycle you’re in, I recommend intervening to prevent health problems over the long term. Sometimes replacing white sugar with a little bit of honey is a relatively easy first step.

Refined sugar is not good for your gut. It’ll cause a mess that’s not worth it in the long run.

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Questions & Answers

Alcohol And Your Weight: What You Need To Know

Can high alcohol consumption cause long-term weight gain?

I can talk about alcohol with a lot of experience. I grew up with an alcoholic step-father, and I drank excessively in my late 20s. I didn’t get fat, but I did drink too much alcohol.
Many people drink too much alcohol. It happens particularly with high stress and life transitions.

How many overweight people have you seen knocking back shots of Vodka? Usually, people who drink excessive amounts of hard alcohol are quite skinny.

Typical beer drinking is often associated with a beer belly. But, there are many studies that show that alcohol doesn’t make you fat. But, what it does do is severely impact your metabolic rate.

Alcohol slows the gut right down.

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People who drink a lot of alcohol often don’t care what they eat. Big drinkers often like to have sweets to go along with their alcohol. Other drinkers want to have something salty to go along with their alcohol. If it’s bar food, it’s high-calorie food.

Drinking can also stimulate the appetite. Also, people drop their inhibitions when they are drinking, which can lead to eating too much food.

There is an even more sinister side to alcohol. In my experience, stool testing is always abnormal when people are drinking a lot of alcohol.

Moderate levels of alcohol intake can increase the lifespan of some women due to improving healthy cholesterol levels.

I urge people not to drink every day. I enjoy drinking, but I do it in a very controlled way. You don’t want to be controlled by alcohol.

Moderate alcohol intake won’t cause significant weight gain.

If you’re using mixes for cocktails, you can end up consuming a lot of sugar and calories. Now you can see how weight gain can happen.

I think it is the cheese and crackers that cause more of a weight problem than the glass of wine.

The key is nothing in excess – this holds not only for alcohol but for anything in life.
Yes, high alcohol intake can contribute to increased weight over time. I recommend moderate to light intake to avoid the complications associated with drinking too much alcohol.

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Questions & Answers

Antibiotic-Associated Diarrhea: Words of Caution

Antibiotic-associated diarrhea is very common.

I’ve seen many people over the years who’ve developed diarrhea after using antibiotics. Clostridium difficile (C. diff) is the most common cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea.

An interesting study by Dr. Lisa Dawson and colleagues reported that C. diff produces a compound called Para-cresol. This chemical inhibits a wide range of microorganisms. By dispersing surrounding bacteria, Para-cresol opens the door for C. diff to colonize readily.

There aren’t many species of gut bacteria that produce Para-cresol, but C. diff is one of them. As a result, C. diff has a competitive edge in the gut.

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Candida does something similar. It creates various toxins, including gliotoxin. These toxins are almost like shards of glass – no matter how much you try and clean them up, there’s still some left behind.

Gliotoxin can travel through the bloodstream and cause a lot of problems.
It’s defense mechanisms like gliotoxin and Para-cresol that have allowed yeast and bacteria to survive for thousands, if not millions, of years.

To my mind, the best solution is not to take antibiotics in the first place unless absolutely necessary. I think that over time, scientists and the medical field will come to see that the collateral damage caused by antibiotics is intolerable. There has to be a better way.

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Questions & Answers

Your Gut Biome And Your Bloodstream: An Important Connection

Gut bacteria work in teams, and they influence the quality of your blood.

Gene testing allows us to see how important the microbiome is.

When I started practicing, they didn’t have gene sequencing like they had today. If they wanted to study the gut flora, they had to do it by culturing samples in Petri dishes. In some cases, the bacteria were very difficult to culture in the lab.

DNA sequencing allows for accurate identification of the wide variety of microbiomes in the gut. Genetic analysis also facilitates tracking the interaction between gut bacteria within and outside of the GI tract.

The microbiome is responsible for your digestive and overall metabolism. I believe that over time, thousands and thousands of pathways will be discovered using genetic analysis. These pathways will be the link between specific bacteria and specific diseases. I think it will be the absence of beneficial bacteria that will be most commonly associated with sickness.

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The more biodiverse a person’s gut, the more powerful and resilient they will be. People with a more narrowly defined band of gut bacteria have many more health-associated problems. This would explain why people living in the Amazon basin with 4 to 5 thousand species of bacteria in their gut have far more robust health that someone in NYC who only has one-quarter of the biome diversity.

I found it interesting to read about the powerful communication that occurs between the gut and the bloodstream. Whatever you eat, has an extremely powerful influence on your bacteria and what is happening in your blood.

When you eat crap, it negatively influences the blood. Eating healthy food improves the quality of your blood. Your blood is such a vital organ that you want to keep it in good shape all the time. You can do that by keeping your biome in good shape. That means eating the right food and having the right kind of lifestyle.

The bacteria in your gut work together in harmony to provide a robust, powerful bloodstream. Your beneficial bacteria work in teams. That’s no surprise. The best companies, businesses, and families also work in teams.

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