Tag Archives: Yeast Infection Treatment

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.

Further readings:

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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Questions & Answers

Your Microbiome And Your Weight: What Is The Connection?

Does the gut microbiome influence your weight?

I’ve been telling people now for 20 years plus that if they get their gut in great shape, that the weight will fall off, and it’s been validated now in several studies.

A study out of the Mayo clinic followed 26 obese adults over a 90 day periods. The researchers found that one group of people had a 527% greater weight loss than the other group.

The amount of exercise and the type of diet was the same for the two groups of people. The difference between the two groups was the gut bacteria.

The group that had lost the most weight had a large amount of Phascolarctobacterium in their gut compared to the other group.

The first group lost an average of 17.4 pounds, and the second group lost an average of 3.3. pounds.

The second group had ore Dialister bacteria than the first group. Dialister consumes carbohydrates. Therefore it can interfere with the people obtaining energy and nourishment, leading to a desire to eat more and more.

What this study demonstrated is that even though the diet can be the same, if the bacteria are different, that weight is not going to come off.

Further readings:

The University of Copenhagen did a very interesting study.In this study, there were 62 people divided into group A and group B. Group A followed a very healthy Mediterranean
Group B were put on the Standard Danish diet, which is similar to the Standard American Diet (SAD). SAD is high fat, high salt, high sugar, white bread, lots of margarine, and deep fried foods.

When they looked at both of these groups, group A had a weight loss of 7.7 pounds. Group B had a weight loss of 3.7 pounds.

When they examined group A, they found two types of subjects in
group A. One group lost a lot of weight and the other not so much. The group that lost the most weight in group A had a particular ratio of Bacteroides and Prevotella.

This study points out that despite a good diet if you haven’t got good levels of Bacteroides and Prevotella, you still might not lose weight.

A healthy gut microbiome results in better fermentation and better levels of long-chain fatty acids. These long-chain fatty acids make sure that the hormones that regulate appetite are made in sufficient amounts.

The other thing I like to talk about is metabolic endotoxemia.

When you have bacteria that die in your gut, they leave cell fragments behind. Yeast will also leave cell fragments behind that need to be cleaned up.

In people with a leaky gut, this clean up doesn’t happen. The end result is metabolic endotoxemia, which is a fancy word for a sick, dysbiotic gut.

This situation occurs a lot in people who are overweight or obese. Along with metabolic endotoxemia comes fatigue, poor sleep, poor libido, anxiety, and depression.

That’s when people head to the doctor. They get put on half a dozen drugs, puts them in a downward spiral.

Now the way to avoid metabolic endotoxemia is by having a very good diet, eating good foods all the time, trying to work on relaxation, and improving your lifestyle.

Healthy gut bacteria produce an ample supply of short-chain fatty acids. Short-chain fatty acids are the by-products of bacterial fermentation of healthy foods. One of these fatty acids is called propanoate, and it has a vital role in regulating appetite.

Taken together, the research proves eating healthy food, creating healthy bacteria in the gut, means you’re going to have a way better chance of having an appropriate body weight.

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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.

Further readings:

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.

Further readings:

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.

Further readings:

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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