Author: Eric Bakker

I’ve got a frequently asked question for a guy here in California. How do you get Candida?

Well, you don’t get Candida. You develop Candida. It’s basically a yeast infection, and you develop it because there’s an imbalance in your life. Your lifestyle or your diet has become unbalanced. When an imbalance has occurred like this, you’re susceptibility increases and your resistance drops down. The scales get tipped against you and you’re more likely to pick up a yeast infection.

Yeast, molds, fungi, bacterial, parasites, they live around us all the time. We can’t escape these sort of things. No matter where we live in the world, we’re always going to have bacteria in our life, so you can’t avoid these. I find it quite hilarious these commercials on TV where everything is so sanitized and clean. The lady is always wiping the child’s hands down. It’s these clean sort of lifestyle, ultraclean lifestyles, that can make us more susceptible to infection because they weaken our immune system. It’s not a good idea to keep people ultraclean. They can’t build resistance against a lot of bacteria.

How do you get an infection? Well, we’re going to talk a little bit about that in other videos, but getting Candida is because the scales are tipped against you. You’re staying out too late. Eating the wrong kind of food. Stressing out too much. Poor immunity. Antibiotics is one of the prime ways people get Candida. Junk foods. Soda drinks. Chocolate. Too much alcohol, all these sorts of things. Many of these dietary habits and lifestyle habits come about because of stressful lifestyles that we lead. Many of us lead ridiculous lifestyle these days, very artificial lifestyles. A lot of it generated around the technology that we have. Many people need what we call a “digital detox” these days to get away from their mobile phone or their tablet or their computer. Staying up too late is a classic example and social media. This are ways that we increase our susceptibility and reduce our resistance. This is exactly how we get Candida by living weird lifestyles.

If you’ve got this yeast infection and you seriously want to get rid of it, you need to look at getting things back in balance again and powering the immune system; reducing adrenal stress, in particular. Many of my patients with Candida have got adrenal fatigue or thyroid malfunction. They have some sort of hormonal imbalance that could be estrogen dominant. There could be hypothyroid. They could be hypoadrenal. I very commonly see this with lots of people with serious yeast infection. They never address the underlying stress mechanisms, so they maintain this Candida and all they’re trying to do is take antifungals all the time that are a waste of time.

So how do you get Candida? Just to recap. Poor lifestyles. Stress imbalances. Alcohol. Takeaway food. Chocolate, candy, all these sorts of things. This is how we develop Candida. If we want to get rid of it, we’ve got to change our habits and lifestyle and diet.

Hope that answers your question.

Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about recognizing jock itch. How do you know if you’ve got it? How do you know if you’re suffering with this condition? Jock itch is a condition that affects men, but it can affect women.

Jock itch is generally a condition caused by some kind of fungus. You’ve all heard about Candida. Candida albicans is a common thing that we talk about, but Candida itself is not really a yeast that affects the groin of guys, necessarily. Candida albicans is associated with women’s vaginal infections, but not so much with a guy if he’s got it around the scrotal region or the inner thigh or around the rectal region. Those areas aren’t really so much affected by Candida, but probably more so by trichophyton or various sort of molds like that. So tinea cruris is another organism that can affect the groin region of the guy. How do we know we’ve got this thing? What are the signs and symptoms?

Let’s look at what signs and symptoms are for starters. Signs is something that the doctor recognizes. The doctor can see these. The doctor can do a scraping and actually culture that and get that checked out. That’s a sign that you’ve got a condition. A sign is also a redness or discoloration of the skin. That’s very objective. You can see that. It’s tangible. It’s quantifiable.

A symptom is what you’re feeling. You’re experiencing the symptom. Symptoms aren’t something we can necessarily see or quantify with a test. A symptom is subjective. You can feel pretty bad and yet the doctor may not be able to recognize this is a sign and maybe even say you’ve got it all in your head, and some people with Candida are often told that they’re going crazy and there’s nothing wrong with them.

So symptoms and signs are what you commonly experience. For symptoms of athlete’s foot, itching because we can’t really see itching, but we experience it. We can feel it. And, generally, the itching, I find, will often start on one part of the body first, so the guy will often experience itching here, for example, on the side here right around this region here. He could experience it on both sides or around underneath here, but will generally experience it on one side first. And then when he’s got that on one side, he’s going to be scratching that pretty bad. It could be anything ranging from mild scratch up to like a real severe scratch, bad scratch. It can also not just involve the inner thigh up around the scrotal region, but it can involve the whole penis region or around the anal region as well. I’ve seen people so bad with it. The skin is just cracked and bleeding. It’s pretty shocking.

Jock itch can involve that whole area. But the characteristic symptom you’re going to experience is itching. Now that itching can sometimes be relieved by hot water or cold water that can sometimes make it feel better. The signs are really the rash, so you’re going to see a rash here. It’ll be a red rash, and there could be a bit of bronzing or browning sort of towards the center of the rash. There could be little blisters or bubbles around it. You really don’t want to scratch this with your fingernails. If you’ve got fingernails and you’re going to get into it and scratch it, you can really rip the skin open and create bacterial infections. So then you not only got jock itch to contend with, but you’ve got a bacterial infection that will need some kind of an antibiotic or cream to heal that, so you really don’t want to go there and scratch the hell out of it. It’s not going to fix it up.

So sometimes cold or hot water applications will make it feel better. You can also use different types of natural products on this. Tea tree oil based soap to wash the area twice a day with is a pretty smart move, and also some tea tree oil cream I find to be quite good.

Check out my other videos and I’ll talk also about lifestyle and diet changes, alcohol, foods you can eat that aggravate it, and things like that. So you’ll pick up some more tips on this channel.

I hope that sort of answers your question about the signs and symptoms of jock itch. The itch is characteristic. There can be a musty odor about it sometimes as well. The redness or the bronzing or the browning, these are all common things that you’ll experience as well.

Thanks for tuning in.

I’m going to answer a frequently asked question today. One I get asked quite regularly by people. How do I know if I have Candida?

Well, there are many ways you can find out if you’ve got Candida. I’ve probably addressed some of these particular questions in other videos, but it’s important, I think, to explain to you if you have Candida or not.

You can spend a lot of time looking at different websites or going to doctors or different people and trying to work out if you’ve got Candida. You can go to friends. You can go to Facebook. There are many ways you can find out about Candida. But probably one of the most intelligent ways to find out if you’ve got Candida to a mild, moderate or high probability is to do my online quiz on CandidaCrusher.com.

This is the world’s best online quiz you’re going to find on Candida. It took a long time to put together and to get all the bugs ironed out. It’s a very, very accurate quiz. You’re going to find out with quite a high probability. So I’ve spent 26 years now in a clinic, and I’ve treated many thousands of people with yeast infection. I’ve worked out what the most important questions are when it comes to Candida to working out what the probability is that they have Candida.

You’ll find, for example, that quite a few of the screens of the quiz involve questions like “Have you taken an antibiotic like a tetracycline?” “Have you been on the oral contraceptive pill?” “Have you taken steroids?” These three classes of drugs, in particular, are one of the strong causative factors of Candida, particularly the antibiotics.

I’ve seen thousands of people with yeast infections ranging from mild to severe systemic Candida particularly who’ve been affected by antibiotics. Antibiotics are a terrible drug for many people. In fact, some people have never come right with their health since taking antibiotic. I’m sure there are some people out there now that can really relate to this. That when they took that course of antibiotics, their health has never been the same.

But there are many other ways you can work out if you’ve got a yeast infection. The sugar cravings will often let you know. Do you want cookies or ice cream? Have you got a desire for sodas? Do you have to stop off at McDonalds quite frequently when you’re driving around? Do you eat a lot of chewing gum with sugar in it? These are all ways to find out.

So it can be also subtle things like muscle aches or pains can also be a telltale symptom. Brain fog. What you often find is these things are in combinations with the other things I was mentioning with the causes and other signs and symptoms. So by doing the quiz, you’re going to really work out if you’ve got this problem or not. So please go to CandidaCrusher.com and do my online quiz, and that’s how you got to work out if you have Candida or not.

Thank you.