Tag Archives: Yeast Infection Cured

Questions & Answers

Finding The Right Doctor For You

Having an unsupportive doctor can cause a lot of problems. Many people I’ve followed for a prolonged period have shared with me how unhappy they are with their doctor. They could be unhappy with their naturopathic, western medicine, acupuncture, or whatever kind of doctor.

Most doctors are good people. They don’t set out to be unsupportive
Doctors are often very busy and stressed. Medicine has changed since I was a child. Sometimes it feels like a supermarket; it’s so fast-paced.

The days of a family doctor who knows many generations of a family has generally come and gone in big cities. But, you can still find lots of caring doctors.

Does your current doctor pull the wool over your eyes, bully you, or make you feel bad in any way. That is not what he or she should be doing.

I don’t like it when doctors disempower their patients. If your doctor makes you feel like a foo, incapable of making your own decisions, then you have an unsupportive doctor. You need to find a new doctor.

There are plenty of nice doctors out there, and you deserve to be heard.

You wouldn’t put up with being disrespected by an electrician or a plumber, right? Your health is well worth spending the time to find a doctor who will listen and work with you.

This is why many people come to naturopaths like me. Our profession takes the time to listen to people. We listen to things and take things seriously that often the medical profession disregard.

I don’t disregard anything a patient tells me.

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Some people may exaggerate a symptom up, or they may downplay a symptom. A good practitioner needs to be a psychologist to understand human nature, to work these kinds of things out,

How much time does your doctor spend with you? Five minutes? 10 minutes? That’s not good enough. That’s only enough time to say hello and goodbye.

It’s not uncommon for a conventional doctor to see 40 or 50 patients in a day. I’ve never seen any more than seven or eight patients per day in all my career.

I prefer not to take any more than two or max three new cases per day, and the rest of the day, see followup patients.

When you leave your practitioner’s office, you should feel inspired. You should feel confident.

You should feel happy and have some type of a plan in mind on which direction you’re going

I’ve always tried to make people feel good about themselves. It’s difficult sometimes when you work with mental health patients. But that’s the thing. When you leave your doctor’s office, you should feel good.

If you leave your doctor’s office feeling bad, it’s going to undermine your health and cause you more stress.

You need to have a positive relationship with the professional that’s going to help you through your health challenges.

Don’t give up. There are plenty of excellent doctors out there.

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Questions & Answers

What You Need To Know About Prebiotics

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.

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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.

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Questions & Answers

Multivitamins: Which One Is The Right One For You?

What makes a multivitamin good? How do you know a good one from a not-so-good one?

Well, many multivitamins are good today, and many are not so good. A lot of it depends really on the quality of the raw materials. Other factors to consider are the manufacturing process and the formula.

Are all the vitamins in there? Multivitamins generally contain vitamins A, Bs, C, and E. Those vitamins are pretty standard.

In my opinion, what sets a good multivitamin apart is the balance of all of the trace elements. It’s also essential that the multivitamin contains hard-to-get minerals like molybdenum, manganese, chromium, and vanadium.

In my opinion, many multivitamins are okay, but they are customized for people with digestive problems. For example, most don’t contain any digestive enzymes. I’ve also never seen a multivitamin with an antimicrobial back-end.

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After researching the multivitamin field for a long time, I realized that there was a need for a unique multivitamin that included an antimicrobial base. That is how CanXida Rebuild came to be.

Unlike other multivitamins, CanXida Rebuild also contains gum mastic and goldenseal root. Gum mastic can help treat Helicobacter pylori. Golden Seal Root is one of the most potent mucosal antimicrobial you can get in the herbal medicine realm. Rebuild also contains carminative herbs that settle the gut and reduce bloating and gas. Slippery elm is a probiotic that I’ve also included in CanXida Rebuild.

CanXida Rebuild can help reduce symptoms when you are going through a diet transition.
CanXida Rebuild also contains betaine-hydrochloride, a compound that optimizes stomach pH and absorption of nutrients.

Rebuild has now been around for several years. The feedback has been phenomenal. Many people take one to two pills a day on an ongoing basis.

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Questions & Answers

Improve Your Carb Tolerance In Five Easy Steps

Some people complain about not being able to tolerate carbs. They might have issues with resistant starches or soluble fibers. They’ll complain of bloating and gas. These people will believe that they can’t eat bread, potatoes, carrots, squash, rice, pumpkins, and other kinds of carbs.

In my opinion, there are five core reasons why you might have issues digesting starchy and carbohydrate foods.

1. Low levels of stomach acid is a key reason for problems digesting starchy foods. Low stomach can be caused by a myriad of reasons. It could be an infection such as Helicobacter pylori. It could be stress-induced or lifestyle induced (e.g., staying up late night after night).

Eating the wrong kinds of foods can also play havoc with stomach acid levels. Low levels of zinc and B vitamins can reduce the production of hydrochloric acid by the stomach. Lifestyle and diet play a huge part in getting your stomach back into working order.

If the stomach isn’t working correctly, the pancreas won’t function properly. That leads us to reason number two for poor carbohydrate digestion.

2. Lack of sufficient pancreatic amylase interferes with carbohydrate digestion. Check the level of pancreatic elastase 1 (PE 1) in your stool to determine if the pancreatic exocrine function is sufficient.

Exocrine means non-endocrine because, remember, a small portion of the pancreas makes insulin. But the largest portion makes enzymes and also bicarbonate to neutralize the acids – both of which are considered an exocrine function.

The pancreas doesn’t like alcohol. Pancreatic function can also be impaired by type 1 diabetes.

If you have a pancreatic problem, you need to consider enzyme supplements to make sure you don’t develop serious health problems.

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3. The third reason for carbohydrate intolerance is the type of diet you eat. Some people go back and forth between different types of diets. You shouldn’t do that to your digestive system. It’s too abrupt.

Be very careful with making dietary changes, make them very slowly and consistently over time. If you want to add a new carbohydrate to your diet, do it slowly, over a couple of weeks. Also, make sure you are eating the right kinds of foods – not the type found wrapped in plastic and packaged in boxes.

4. The fourth reason you might be having problems digesting carbohydrates relates to cooking methods. Some people can tolerate a boiled potato, but not a baked one. Experiment with different ways of cooking carbohydrates until you find one that suits you the best.

5. The fifth factor that can interfere with carbohydrate digestion is stress.
Stress can interfere with digestion, and that includes anxiety about what you’re eating.

You need to back off and relax a lot more, and you’ll find that it’ll be a lot easier for your digestive system.

When the brain is in a relaxed state, the digestion is seriously improved.

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Questions & Answers

Estrogen: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

Estrogen has been very maligned for many years. Many people believe estrogen is a “bad” hormone, but if you have a healthy, balanced body, estrogen is perfectly fine.

The problem is that obesity has become the norm in many countries. The diet in these countries is high in saturated animal fat, which can cause estrogen problems.

Saturated fat influences certain types of intestinal bacteria to produce an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase. Beta-glucuronidase makes estrogen a lot more able to move through the bloodstream and into the body where it can create damage.

Estrogen is a proliferative hormone. It makes things grow. When in excess, estrogen has been linked with many different types of cancers. This is why you don’t want a whole lot of beta-glucuronidase activity going on in the body.

One of the reasons vegans and vegetarians tend to have a more streamlined body shape is that they have a more balanced estrogen and progesterone profile.

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By changing the amount and types of fats that you eat, you can avoid estrogen problems. For example, lean protein and fish protein are god choices. Fish protein is often associated with an anti-inflammatory fat.

Beef fat, on the other hand, tends to trigger inflammation through a particular pathway.

In order to reduce the build-up of estrogens in the body, you need to be aware of xeno-estrogens (foreign estrogens). Xeno-estrogens are found in the diet as well as plastics like cling wrap. It’s not a good idea to use those types of plastics, especially on high fat foods, because artificial estrogens can get sucked into the fat.

Use containers with a lid rather than plastic wrap.

Dietary fiber can reduce estrogens levels. So can certain probiotics, particularly lactobacillus acidophilus, which has been linked with a reduction of both beta-glucuronidase and estrogen. I recommend having a bit of yogurt in your diet and taking lactobacillus acidophilus supplements.

The critical steps to keeping your estrogen at a health level are to keep at a healthy weight, eat the right foods, including plenty of fiber, avoid deep-fried foods, and cut back on alcohol.

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