Author: Eric Bakker

Here’s a question. Will a male yeast infection go away on its own? It can. In fact, it is possible if it’s a very slight yeast infection and not much is done about it. Particularly, if the guy makes a few changes to his diet and lifestyle and starts to realize that he’s really gone off track and makes a few changes and then the body will pick up; the immune system will get on top of it. But in most cases, it will not go away unless the guy makes a significant change or starts using some kind of cream or pill to suppress the symptom, but those treatments are only temporary, and they can harm your body in the long term because you’re still doing the things that maintain the Candida and now you’re taking a drug, whether it’s topical or oral, to try to get rid of the problem.

I’ve always been a great believer in identifying the cause and treating the cause, and if you understand that with Candida we’ve usually got an exciting cause or something that starts the yeast infection and then we’ve got a maintaining cause, something that keeps it going. For example, you may have had an antibiotic for an illness or an infection and that could’ve started your jock itch like it did with me. I had a chest infection. I worked in a flourmill as a young guy doing rotating shifts, I got very sick and developed a bad bronchial infection and the doctor gave me antibiotics. And I went on a few rounds of them and then I started getting itchy skin and the jock itch and it didn’t go away.

And how did I maintain it? Well, I was drinking beer like all guys do. We all drink beer. And I drank stupid things like Coca-Cola and I had a poor diet back in those days. I lived in a house that was quite moldy. It was in a low-lying area and when it rained I used to get sometimes water in my bedroom. There was even like a black mold on the walls, so I was sleeping in a moldy environment. I was eating poor foods. I was living in a high stress sort of job with rotating shifts, midnight, working days, and the midnights and crazy hours, so all these stresses on the body maintained the jock itch.

These are the sort of things that you’ve got to look at. You won’t get rid of this problem unless you make major changes, so I got rid of my job, just got rid of it. I moved out of that house, moved away, and I saw a naturopath, which was the start of my naturopathic career. The naturopath helped me to understand that all that Candida was was a combination of all of these factors that I had to make changes. And when I made the changes, the jock itch slowly went away after about a year.

So this is what you need to do. Identify what caused it and what’s maintaining it and deal with this problem correctly. When you do that, you’ll put an end to this nightmare. That’s how you get rid of it. It won’t go away on its own accord. You need to make those changes.

Check on my other videos and do the yeast infection quiz, the world’s best one, on yeastinfection.org you’ll find links to that or CandidaCrusher.com will take you directly to my quiz. Thanks for tuning in.

This is going to be part three of Does Stress Feed Candida? What I’m going to talk about now is a concept called gluconeogenesis, so the production of new blood sugar; “gluco,” meaning blood; “neo,” meaning – whatever it means, I’m not sure – “genesis,” meaning basically “new,” so I know that gluconeogenesis means the production of new blood sugar.

What happens is when your energy drops and you’re feeling tired, the brain starts telling the hypothalamus, I can stimulate the pituitary to get onto the adrenals to produce more amounts of cortisol. Because what cortisol does in the presence of low blood sugar is to stimulate the release of fatty acids, which these fatty acids get converted into eventually in a long convoluted process into blood sugar.

Stress, we know that high stress particularly in the alarm phase, initiates the production of increased blood sugar. If you’re going from one stress to another or in the alarm phase quite a lot, if you’re phone is ringing all the time, your children are placing demands on you, your employer is placing demands on you, you get pissed off or stressed out quite a lot, you’re going to be in the alarm phase of stress quite a lot. I see this commonly in my patients, so these sort of people have too much blood sugar elevated.

Unfortunately, with high blood sugar, we also got insulin elevated. Insulin is produced by the pancreas gland that allows blood sugar basically to be pushed into the cells. In the initiating phases where people have too much stress, they get too much blood sugar, too much insulin. I guess what too much blood sugar means for Candida, it means if you’ve got systemic Candida, it can really help the Candida to grow. It can really promote Candida.

We’ve had emails before about people asking if ketosis induces Candida. Ketosis being a condition when the body is in a very low, extremely low, carbohydrate state, when the body produces energy from stored fatty acids produced by the liver. But in this case, the fatty acids are not produced because of starvation. They’re produced because of low cortisol. Low cortisol or low cortisol state when the patient has an issue there and blood sugar is produced in abundance there; it gives you high cortisol.

We can get a problem with Candida, and I often see the patients who get the most severe Candida aggravations are the ones often who get the most anxiety and stress, vaginal infections or jock itch, toenail fungus are recurrent, systemic infections, tinea cruris, tinea vulgaris, all kinds of microsporum. Various kinds of fungal reactions we see in patients are often as a result of high cortisol levels and continual production of too much blood sugar.

So keeping your blood sugar under control can be arranged by making sure that you’ve got a handle on your stress by eating three square meals a day, taking time to relax, and identifying what the stressors are in your life. I hope you understand the concept that high stress or continual low grade stress punctuated by events of high stress will eventually mean relatively high cortisol levels, stimulate the liver to produce products basically which get converted to glucose, which can certainly have an effect on continuing Candida.

Always remember stress certainly does feed Candida. It’s the best-kept secret, and it’s one that you really need to look at if you want to get a handle on your chronic or severe Candida.

I hope that sort of rings a bell with you. Thanks for tuning in.

What I’m going to talk about now is the effects of the stress hormone cortisol, particularly on your immune system, and how cortisol affects white blood cell integrity and activity.

One of your most powerful white blood cells is called lymphocytes, so lymphocytes are what I would call the “commander” of the immune system. There are many different types of lymphocytes, but lymphocytes also have an effect on activity of many other kinds of white blood cells and also inflammatory mediators or chemicals that they produce themselves. So cortisol influences these what we call the “generals of the army,” has a very powerful effect. And the generals, of course, are in command of various other soldiers underneath them that are subordinate to the general, and cortisol being the “admiral” controls the “general.”

So when you think about it, stress has an amazing effect on your immune system, an incredible effect. Let’s forget about sugar for the moment. Let’s forget what you’re eating. Let’s look at the stresses that are effecting you right now in your life and how they could basically affect your Candida or continuation of Candida. Very important concept that’s never spoken about and never written about, but I’m going to bring it to your attention because you may not be aware of the situation.

The stresses affecting your life right now, high mortgage, relationship problems, libido issues, problems with your partner, problems with your children, problems with your mother-in-law, problems with your boss, problems with your employees, whatever kind of problems you’ve got; these things affect us on a stress level, but we’re not even talking about the other stresses that affect us. Things like cell phones, using mobile phones, nutritional deficiencies, heavy metal toxicities, all sorts of other kind of stresses that affect us. These things affect the chemical that our adrenal glands produce.

Adrenals are the master glands of stress. They’re very powerful glands and the adrenal glands sitting above your kidneys produce cortisol and adrenaline, very powerful stress hormones. Now cortisol, as I mentioned, helps to regulate lymphocytes or the very powerful white blood cells, so a very high level of cortisol, which is produced in the initiating stages of stress, can have a very powerful suppressing effect on your immune system. Because when you’re under high stress, you hate your job or you don’t like your relationship or whatever is going on in your life, cortisol will be elevated in the alarm phase of stress. The first stage of stress response.

As cortisol elevates, what happens is the lymphocytes, in fact, their activity gets suppressed. They get pushed down. What you’re going to find is with very high cortisol, in fact, you can have an almost complete disappearance of lymphocytes from the body. When that occurs, you’re going to have a very poor immune function. This is why a lot of people get sick after they get stressed. They have the stress response. A few days later or a week later, they get sick. It’s very common to occur in people.

How many people out there with Candida know about this kind of effect about stress, a bit of a washout period, and then an exacerbation of their Candida? It’s important to make sure that you’ve got good cortisol levels so they’re well balanced. Cortisol not only affects your lymphocytes in terms of suppressing their effect, but when cortisol is high, as we said, it suppresses it; but when it’s very low, the white cells, in fact, increase in numbers and this can cause increased inflammation, pain and redness and swelling of the area. So with this regulation of cortisol, we get an inappropriate wound healing response, inflammatory response, an inability to counter Candida, plus also the inability to counter the cellular products as a result of Candida death. When Candida dies, the cell walls break up, and these little proteins called mannan are released into the circulation system. Now mannan will normally get attacked by particular inflammatory compounds that the immune system produces. If there’s not enough inflammatory compounds there, you get a lot of mannan being produced. And then eventually as cortisol rises, the person ends up getting what we call a Herxheimer reaction or a die off.

When we get stressed or an inappropriate stress response, we get massive die off. The die off can also be caused as a result of inappropriate cortisol regulation. If you send me emails that say, Erik, I’m getting die off. Why am I getting die off? Think about the kind of stresses that are involved in your life. And maybe think about salivary cortisol testing because that can have a good – that will teach you really how stress is affecting you, and whether stress or not is a factor in your recovery from Candida. Very important concept.

Catch up with me on Candida and Stress number three, and I’m going to go into a bit more detail, so I hope to catch you there. Thanks for tuning in.