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.
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.
Clostridium difficile (C. diff) is a bacteria that lives in the gut.
Some people can get a very serious C. diff infection after using antibiotics such as clindamycin. In one study, clindamycin was shown to wipe the gut almost entirely for two years. One dose.
Most cases of C. diff occur in hospital. One of the biggest causes of this infection is antibiotic use.
Conventional medical websites will say that the cause of C. diff is antibiotics and the cure is antibiotics.
To me, that’s like saying, “Watch out for handguns. They kill people.
By the way, if you carry a handgun, it’ll help you not get killed.”
If you’ve got a clostridium difficile infection, the concern is that you’ve got a 20% chance or recurrent C. diff infections.
If you have C. diff, my recommendation is to get a comprehensive stool analysis. The stool test will tell you if you also have problems with yeast, parasites, or other harmful bacteria. It will also indicate your levels of beneficial bacteria.
I highly recommend you use a proper lab like Genova Diagnostics or Doctor’s Data for your stool test.
Some people recover quite quickly from C.diff. For others, it becomes a chronic infection. Some will have relapses and recurrences. Unfortunately, some people have a very poor recovery from C. diff.
Fecal microbial transplants are recommended in some cases. Some people have to be hospitalized and have surgery for C. diff.
As far as diet goes, if you have C. diff, you should avoid aggravating foods.
To keep a long story short, with C. diff, it’s definitely an advantage to be alcohol, coffee, and caffeine-free for at least three to six months.
I would recommend including steamed vegetables and other easy to eat foods in your diet. You’ll have to monitor what does and does not agree with your GI system. For example, some people with C. diff have quite bad diarrhea and abdominal pain when eating salads. Lemon juice and apple cider vinegar may also be poorly tolerated on the presence of C. diff.
Yogurt is often fine, but be cautious with kefir, kimchi, and sauerkraut.
For protein, emphasize lean protein without too much fat. Fish and eggs are usually perfectly fine.
Proceed with caution when it comes to fruit. I don’t think bananas or oranges are great foods for people with gut problems. I think the same about white bread.
Drinking water is essential because C. diff causes diarrhea.
As far as supplements go, grapefruit seed extract works quite well for C. diff.
Try not to take antibiotics if you want to prevent clostridium difficile infection, especially if you’re older. I suggest avoiding antibiotics unless it’s a matter of life and death.
There are several steps you can take to make sure the meals you are cooking are gut-friendly.
1. Always use fresh food: There’s no substitute for fresh food. Fresh food, not canned and processed food, gives you the best possible outcome.
It’s great if you can grow your own vegetables but, if you can’t, try getting them from a farmers’ market. The fresher the better, and the more nutritious and tasty.
2. Eat alliums every day: Alliums include garlic, onions, chives, and shallots. Alliums are a fantastic food for the gut. This group of plants contains fibers that help build up the level of beneficial bacteria in the gut. Alliums also help keep the blood thin and clean.
I think ginger and garlic go very well together. And ginger is also very good for your gut.
3. Each brassicas every day: This group of vegetables includes cauliflower, broccoli, kale, bok choy, and Brussel sprouts. Brassicas are extremely nutrient-densee and cancer-prevening.
Brassicas are superb steamed or added to stir-fries.
4. Use sharp knives: Don’t use cheap, junky, crappy knives. Using sharp, Japanese knives makes it a real joy to cut things for your meals.
Along with good knives, I use good stainless steel or cast iron pans. I don’t use aluminum.
5. Cook at home rather than eating out: When you cook your own meals, you know exactly what goes into each dish. When you eat out, there could be MSG or other chemicals that you don’t’ need in your food.
If you do eat out, pick something fresh and healthy like Japanese food.
6. Include some cultured or fermented food into your diet on a daily basis: Even if it’s only a small amount of yogurt or sauerkraut, it’s still good idea.
Cultured and fermented foods will complement the allium and brassica vegetables in your diet. All of these foods are good gut-building choices.
7. Eat fresh fruit every day: I eat a lot of berries, avocados, sour apples, and other healthy fruits. I usually eat three to four pieces of fresh fruit every day.
8. Use cooking methods that preserve the nutrients in your food: Steaming and stir-frying are good options.
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.
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.
It’s important to know how to get prebiotics into your diet.
Prebiotics are a certain type of sugar, what we call oligosaccharides. Prebiotics go through the gut without being digested. When they arrive in the colon, prebiotics feed the good bacteria (probiotics).
My recommendation is that you get prebiotics from your diet rather than from supplements.
It’s much better to eat and chew the foods that contain prebiotic sugars. Food as a source of prebiotics is better for your colon than supplements.
When I first started to recommend probiotic supplements in the ’80s, people thought I was nuts. They couldn’t see the benefit. Why not just have a bowl of yogurt, they’d ask.
Let’s look at the different types of sugars. There are monosaccharides, polysaccharides, and oligosaccharides.
Polysaccharides tend to be starches or very undigestible kind of foods.
These are sugars, no different from white sugar. Polysaccharide bonds are more elongated and complex, making them more difficult for the body to breakdown.
The polysaccharides are also quite good for the gut, but it’s the oligosaccharides that have a tremendous effect.
Oligosaccharides are found in onions, leeks, garlic, Jerusalem artichoke, and chicory root, to name a few. The cruciferous (Brassica) family also contains a lot of prebiotic sugars.
The nice thing about the onion (Allium) family is that there are also good for immune function, mood, and blood pressure. Likewise, Brassicas have been linked to cancer prevention and immune health.
If you live in the U.S., you’re lucky if you are having any more than three grams of prebiotics in your diet each day.
But if you live in certain parts of Europe, you’d be consuming 10 grams or more. If you live in Africa, you could be consuming way more, like ten times as much.
The general rule is that if you are eating minimally processed food, you’ll be getting a lot of prebiotics. This means you’ll also be generating trillions of beneficial bacteria as a result.
At one time, I would recommend prebiotic supplements to my clients. Then I noticed that I was getting a stream of calls from patients who were having significant side effects like gas, diarrhea, and headache.
I also found research that linked prebiotic supplements to the overgrowth of Klebsiella and Candida.
I found that I got much better results if I gave probiotics mixed with digestive enzymes and then encouraged my clients to eat prebiotic foods. This is the reason I created CanXida Restore, a probiotic-enzyme supplement that is entirely free of prebiotic sugars.
The other thing to remember is that prebiotics are not good for people who have a very sick gut. Don’t pile on lots of fermented and cultured foods, followed by prebiotics, and probiotics, if you’re just starting to get your gut healthy.
Stick with whole food if you want to include prebiotics in your diet.