Tag Archives: candida

Questions & Answers

8 Things You Shouldn’t Do If You Want A Healthy Gut

What are the things that can cause harm to your gut health?

1. Having too restricted a diet is going to impact your gut microbial growth negatively. From what I’ve read, people in western countries, only consume between 12 and 15 types of vegetables and four or five different types of animals. If you look at indigenous people in Africa, who don’t suffer from the chronic diseases seen in the developed world, they eat a far more diverse range of plants and have a much wider range of bacteria in their gut with all the associated benefits.

2. Lack of prebiotic in the diet is another common problems. Most people don’t include high-quality, sour yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, or kombucha in their diet. Fifty or sixty years ago, cultured and fermented foods were commonplace. Now it’s become something special rather than routine.

3. Drinking too much alcohol with a detrimental impact on the gut is a common habit. Studies have shown, for example, that when you consume spirits like gin or vodka, you dramatically reduce the population of beneficial bacteria. If you can stick with small quantities of red wine with a high polyphenol content, you can increase the beneficial bacteria content of your gut.

4. Antibiotics are very challenging for the gut flora. Some clients I had would go on antibiotics twice a year for infections that could have been fixed by natural methods. You don’t’ have to automatically jump to ciprofloxacin as soon as someone has a mild sore throat or a little skin rash. Herbs have been used for hundreds, if not thousands, of years for these sorts of reasons. See a naturopath or a functional medicine doctor if you want a second opinion about antibiotic use. Antibiotics are one of the key factors that undermine gut function.

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5. Lack of activity can be a detriment to your gut flora. Exercise is very beneficial for your microbiome. I read a study of professional rugby players that demonstrated they had much higher levels of good bacteria compared to less active men of the same weight and age.

6. Smoking can harm the GI tract, particularly if you’re a heavy smoker. Not only are smokers more prone to strokes and heart attacks, they also have higher inca1dence of inflammatory bowel disease. For example, the risk of Crohn’s disease is twice as high in smokers as in non-smokers.

7. Sleep deprivation can damage gut health. When someone has a healthy circadian rhythm, they have a far better balance of microbes and range of beneficial bacteria in their gut. Good sleep patterns are correlated wth good microbiome patterns. Disturbed sleep can interfere with hormonal levels and thereby impact the appetite and immune systems, including the immune system in the gut.

8. Too much stress can be very damaging to the gut. It can also interfere with appetite regulation and lead to snacking on junk food, which in turn changes the microbiome for the worse. People with low-stress lifestyles tend to have much better gut health.

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Questions & Answers

What Is The Connection Between Rheumatoid Arthritis And The Gut?

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune condition that can be very painful.

I worked with clients with rheumatoid arthritis for years, and I noticed that every patient I saw with an autoimmune condition had preexisting issues with their gut.

In my opinion, there is a significant connection between rheumatoid arthritis and a faculty gut microbiome. Genetics also plays a role, but it’s also possible for mothers to pass on microbial communities to their children.

I mentioned before that I have a collection of old medical books. I have a British Medical Journal from the 1930s that includes a chapter on rheumatoid arthritis. The author recommends that “in all cases, look for the hidden infection.” I think they may have been smarter back then than we are now.

If you intervene earlier, before the structural joint abnormalities develop, it’s possible to stop rheumatoid arthritis in its tracks. You can reduce the pain very significantly. The gut has to be in a good place to reduce the inflammatory mediators that play such a big role in autoimmune conditions.

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The gut is the seat of immune dysfunction because much of the immune system is located in a part of the small bowel. In fact, I think it’s the first three inches of the small bowel that contains about 60% of the body’s entire immune defense system.

When people eat an unhealthy diet, drink too much alcohol, take drugs, don’t sleep enough, and live a highly stressful lifestyle, their gut will suffer. When the gut suffers, so does the immune system.

But what if you have an exemplary diet and you’ve got rheumatoid arthritis? How do you get rid of it now?

The key starting point, and I can’t emphasize this enough, is to get a three sample comprehensive stool analysis, so you know exactly what’s going on with your microbiome. It’s essential to cleanse the gut of harmful bacteria. Get rid of the Citrobacter overgrowth and the yeast overgrowth.

If you have no choice but to take pharmaceutical medications, make sure you don’t take more than prescribed. Steroids, disease-modifying drugs, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs can themselves have negative side effects, including on the gut. But, remember, don’t ever feel bad about taking medication to improve the quality of your life.

If you work on getting the gut healthy by eating the right foods, taking a few supplements to take the microbiome back in balance, and living a healthy lifestyle, you’ve made a huge step towards improving your rheumatoid arthritis. Digestive enzymes and probiotics are also crucial for improving the gut in the hopes of mitigating the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.

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Questions & Answers

White Rice And Weight Management: What You Need To Know

I think it’s entirely possible to eat white rice for breakfast and still lose weight. I would probably recommend opting for brown rice or a mix of three or four grains together. I like the combination of long-grain brown rice, black quinoa, and white basmati rice. Quinoa makes up about 20% of my mix because it can be a little overbearing.

I’ll mix the grains, put them in my little French cast iron pot, and steam it for 25 to 30 minutes. I think you will appreciate the flavors and textures of this grain combination more than just plain white rice. It looks better, tastes better, and has more nutrients to offer.

If you really want to have plain white rice for breakfast, I can’t see any particular problem with that choice. But I suggest having something else along with the rice; otherwise, it’s purely a carbohydrate breakfast. You could opt for egg or fish as the protein and some vegetables on the side. Even a few shiitake mushrooms are better than just rice on its own.

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Protein helps make sure that your blood sugar doesn’t fall flat a few hours after you eat the rice.

I remember that when I spent time in India, I was amazed at the health of people that were just eating plain bags of white rice and occasionally a handful of lentils or some tomatoes and lettuce. That was the extent of their diet, and yet they seemed to be in excellent health. They weren’t obese. They didn’t have diabetes.

Sometimes simple everyday food is all you need. You don’t have to have the whistles and bells to be in good health.

When it comes to breakfast, I prefer oats. I think oatmeal is one of the best breakfasts you can have. But if white rice works for you, then do it.

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Questions & Answers

Treating Vaginal Yeast Infections With Pau D’arco

Pau D’arco is very good for vaginal yeast infections and symptoms such as burning or itching.
For those of you who don’t know, Pau D’arco is a supplement that comes from tree bark.

If you’re going to treat vaginal thrush with Pau D’arco, you need to get about 15 to 20 grams and place it in about five to six hundred millimeters of good quality water in a good quality steel saucepan. Don’t use tap water.

Make sure you are using authentic Pau D’arco. You’ll have to do your own online research to source it appropriately. It should be between two and four percent lapachol content. If the Pau d’arco you buy has less lapachol than that, you won’t get the results you want.

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Next, bring the bark and water to a rolling boil and simmer for about twenty minutes. Cool the mixture down. When it is tepid, soak a tampon in the liquid. Insert the tampon and leave it in overnight. You can do that for several nights if comfortable.

This treatment has helped a lot of women tremendously, particularly if they were getting thrush premenstrually. Pau d’Arco offers an alternative to other treatments for vaginal thrush.

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Questions & Answers

How To Manage Oral Thrush

There are a number of options when it comes to treating oral thrush.

Colloidal silver can help with oral thrush. I particularly like the colloidal spray produced by Silver Biotics. A couple of sprays in the mouth, anywhere from ten to twenty ppm is fine. You can use that two to three times a day without any problems.

In the case of children with oral thurs, borax may be of use. Boric acid is very antifungal and has fantastic results when used against yeast. I have found that homeopathic preparations of borax are fantastic for mouth and throat thrush. Brox works particularly well for the oral cavity.

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Another option is to put a drop of tea tree oil in a small container of warm water. Shake it up, gargle, and spit. I’ve also seen some benefit from Lapacho Tea or Pau D’Arco tea, although I don’t recommend it for pregnant or nursing women. You can drink the tea or garble with it.

Even more important than treating thrush is preventing it in the first place. The critical step is to eliminate sugar from your diet. If you remove candy, ice cream, soda pop, and the like from your diet, the chances of getting oral thrush drop dramatically.

Sugar encourages the development of a thick, white coating on the tongue. If you look at the indigenous people of the Amazon, they’ve got healthy, pink tongues. You don’t see vending machines full of candy bars in the Amazon.

Amazon tribes eat food that runs on the ground or grows out of the ground. I saw an interview with a 60-year-old tribal leader from the Amazon, and he had beautiful teeth, a pink tongue, and bright eyes. All were signs of a healthy diet.

No sugar if you want to avoid a round of oral thrush. Prevention is far better than treatment.

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