Author: Eric Bakker

Greetings! Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. I’m the author of Candida Crusher and the formulator of the CanXida range of products. I’ve got a question here from my Facebook page from a guy called Martin. Martin is in the UK. It’s England. Martin is saying, “Eric, how do I manage my Candida during travel? Basically, how do I manage my Candida diet when I’m traveling, and how do I do the diet, because I’m always on the move?”

Okay, Martin, that’s a good question. If you’re always on the move like me (well, I used always be on the move and do a lot of traveling with my company years ago), it’s exciting initially when you do it, but then you soon get sick and tired of all this travel and you realize that you’ve got to basically be a healthy person interested in health and maintain healthy habits when you travel. Professional travelers like yourself usually work out pretty quick the right kind of foods to eat when you travel.

You didn’t mention to me which countries you’re going to, so if you’re going to some country with poor hygiene standards and poor food standards-I had a consultation with a guy in South Korea yesterday, and he spent some time in China. When he came back, he had really bad tummy problems. We’re doing a stool test now because I’m quite sure he’s full of parasites. So, if you’re going to go to a country like India or China or Vietnam or Laos or one of those countries…Indonesia, you need to take extra care with personal hygiene and how you eat.

For example, if you’re going to eat from street vendors. When you go to the bathroom, things like that, you need to really be on your toes. It’s very easy to get sick because remember: travel involves stress. Even though you think it’s exciting, everybody who travels is under a good degree of stress. The body’s under stress because it’s under time stress. It’s under dehydration stress. You’re going to go through customs’ checks and airplanes and airports. All this involves travel, looking at time zones and checking plane tickets, trying to get onboard. It’s all a little bit of anxiety and stress involved. Your stress hormones are going to be elevated, unless you’re one of these super chill, cucumber kind of people all the time, which I don’t think you are. Most people have stress when they travel. So your biggest thing in my opinion to tackle when you’re traveling when it comes to the diet or Candida in general is stress.

I have traveled with Doctor Wilson, the adrenal fatigue expert from Arizona, and I always noticed how Doctor Wilson was so calm and relaxed when we traveled. He’d say, “Sit down. Take the weight off your feet. Put your bag down. Relax.” He was always drinking water, relaxing, chilling out. That’s something I have learned to do over time is not to get stressed out. Allow yourself plenty of time when you travel. Planes arrive late. They arrive early. All these kinds of things can happen. Things get delayed. Carry water with you. Make sure you drink lots and lots of good water. Two key things pop out is: Hand washing and water drinking. Those are two things I’m really big on.

Getting off planes, wash my hands. On the plane, wash my hands. You’re touching surfaces everywhere. Not drinking alcohol when you travel, drinking water. Really good quality water all the time. Because you get very, very dehydrated. Watch out for snack foods. It’s easy to buy chocolate bars or candy bars or… it’s easy to drink soda drinks or have ice creams or all these crappy foods that are on show when you go into airports or street vendors or things. These things all compromise your immunity. It may taste good, but they’re not good for you. Drink water, cut the crap out of the diet, quickly find places. We’re lucky today with mobile phones. We can do a quick Google search for a really good restaurant or a good place to eat, and you can eat very high quality food in most places you travel to regardless of where you go. That’s one advantage of having Google now is being able to locate places, for example, like really good places to eat.

When I grew up, there was nothing like that at all. You had to look at Lonely Planet guides and stuff like that. But now, you just push a few buttons on a phone, poof. It’s got your location; it shows you exactly where to eat. For example, I love really good-I love Japanese food, especially high quality fresh Japanese food. So when I travel around New Zealand and Australia a lot, I grab my iPhone and I type in “Best Japanese restaurants in Melbourne” for example. Then three or four would come up and I’d check some reviews and I went to a really good one for example in Melbourne and it was fantastic food. It’s was like really fresh sashimi and beautiful seaweed. The Google takes you straight to that place. Catch an Uber, get straight to the restaurant.

These are things we can do with technology. All the advantages. So, get lots of good sleep when you’re traveling. You get very tired when you travel. You must get plenty of sleep. It’s easy to go to a new city and get excited and want to walk all around the place or get in a taxi cab and go all around and it just adds to exhaustion. As soon as you’ve done your trip, you’re there and relaxed. You chill out for a while, and if you’re tired, go and sleep for a few hours. You’re going to just pick up your immune system. It’s going to stop you sliding into deeper stress. which is going to compromise your immune system even more.

Good food, lots of water, lots of relaxation. Plan your travels well. Have your paperwork done beforehand. Take the edge off stress by organizing yourself properly before you go. That’s a smart move. That’s how you’re going to manage your Candida really well. Some patients I speak to are so anal, they actually work out all the restaurants or all the places to shop or buy good food before they even go. They write it down on paper. They’ve got everything planned out. Planning is a smart thing because when you get there, you don’t have to worry about everything because you know exactly what you’re going to do. That’s how you’re going to manage your Candida is a bit of planning.

Stick with natural foods when you travel. Try not to eat a lot of processed foods. Spend the money on even better quality restaurants rather than the budget sort of places. I was very disappointed when I go to Los Angeles, for example. I find it hard to find good food in Los Angeles. Even when I order a healthy breakfast, they bring out this crap. Crappy food. I wouldn’t even feed my dog some of the stuff that I’ve been served up in so-called “health places.” But no matter where you go, the choice is yours. You can still manage to get good food.

Just to recap on a few things again. Organize your time properly. Work out where you want to go. Get your paperwork in order. Leave lots and lots of time for travel because always unforeseen things happen. Another good tip I learned from experienced travelers was inside your suitcase or rucksack or bag is having a list that’s been laminated with exactly all the things that you need, so that when you pack, everything’s there. You look at that list, “Everything’s there.” or “Oh, I forgot this or Oh, I forgot that.” Everything goes in the bag. You can find some of these lists on the internet if you look from very experienced travelers. You can take technology with you, but scope all that out properly. I mentioned that. You’re organizing your time. Eating good food, no matter where you go. Drinking plenty of water and getting lots of sleep. Basic stuff.

I hope that answers your question, Martin. So thanks for tuning in. Click on my link if you haven’t got my Candida report and subscribe. Thanks very much.

Greetings! Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher, formulator of the CanXida range of supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. We’re going to be talking about Ankylosing Spondylitis today, particularly with its reference to dysbiosis and Candida yeast overgrowth that I see in people.

Ankylosing Spondylitis is a condition I see quite regularly in my clinic with my patients. It seems to be more common in males, particularly aged between about 10 to30 years of age. It’s probably about the starting point. It’s one of the rare autoimmune conditions that tends to be predominantly male rather than female. Most autoimmune conditions tend to really affect women, but this one is really big with guys. In fact, 90 percent of the people who have AS are in fact male. There’s a gene involved here called HLA-B27 gene.

I remember first reading about this in a book called “The Four Pillars of Health,” written by a New York doctor, Leo Galland. I think it was written back in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Dr. Galland noticed the connection between Klebsiella, a bacteria, and people with AS. In fact, 70 to 80 percent of people with AS when we do stool tests, we find different types of Klebsiella, oxytoca, or pneumoniae or other kind of sub-species to be involved with AS. I think about 8 to 9 percent of the population have the HLA-B27 gene, but it seems to be big with people with AS.

The Klebsiella bacteria tend to get attacked by certain types of antibodies in a person who has this HLA-B27 gene, which causes inflammation and pain they tend to get in the lower back. AS often starts off with a lower back pain, and eventually, it gets worse and worse and worse to the point where the sacroiliac joint in the lower back can actually fuse and become so painful for these poor unfortunate people. The hip joints can be involved. The lower back can be involved. I’ve also seen in some cases the feet being involved and the knees being involved. Particularly the lower extremities. It can be a crippling terrible disease for a lot of young guys to have. It’s absolutely awful. I’ve helped many guys over the years with AS.

The first thing I do is a comprehensive stool analysis to determine what type of bugs they’ve got. Klebsiella we often find, but many people we find Candida in these people as well. Candida comes along for the ride, and they may have other parasites. They may have poor beneficial bacteria. They may have inflammatory markers. I tend to treat every AS case on a case-per-case basis, because no two cases of AS are the same.

So what do I do with AS? How do we alleviate the pain for these people? Many young guys I’ve seen with AS have already been doing things like acupuncture, massage, certain types of physical or remedial therapies to help them with their lower back pain. They’re usually quite good at that. I find the Candida Crusher dietary approach works quite well. The MEVY diet (Meat, Eggs, Vegetables, and Yogurt). We look at lower allergies, so we usually take the allergens out, the dairy products and gluten and certain types of foods we’ll take out of the diet.

We look at repairing the leaky gut, because most people with AS have got a seriously leaky gut. A lot of them will be taking Rheumatoid Arthritis I’ve just spoken about in the autoimmune video. They’ll be taking pain relief, which ends up wrecking their gut. Many of them end up on TNF (Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha) blockers. This is an inflammatory mediate produced by the immune system called tumor necrosis factor. These drugs block inflammation, but unfortunately a lot of side effects long term, and many people on TNF blockers long term end up getting off of these drugs and end up looking for more natural or alternatives to anti-inflammatory pharmaceutical intervention.

Candida is a big thing with a lot of people with AS, so I tend to work hard on trying to remove Candida, remove the dysbiotic flora including Klebsiella. I use my CanXida Remove which contains grapefruit seed extract and the oregano, many other components in there: The caprylic acid, the undecanoic acid, the clove, all the other ingredients I put in there to clean the gut right up and get rid of this bad gut issue these people have. We clean up the diet. Clean up the gut, and we tend to work on a low stress kind of lifestyle. There’s a very positive outcome for AS, particularly if the young person gets involved with remedial therapies. Looks at maybe changing their occupation, looking at a low stress lifestyle. It all has a very beneficial effect. Eventually, we can get them off these kind of medications.

I’m not against the disease modifying drugs, but I think long-term use there will be a price you will pay for these kind of medications, but certainly they have their place with Ankylosing Spondylitis. This disease can also precipitate psoriasis or a secondary autoimmune disease, and I have seen several cases of psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis combined with Ankylosing Spondylitis which is very unfortunate for the person. But, if it’s picked up early and we can correct the gut function early on in the piece, clean the Klebsiella up, which is present in 90 percent of cases, we can get a significant anti-inflammatory response without having to look at things like pharmaceutical intervention long-term.

That’s my approach to AS. It’s really identifying the problem with the patient, cleaning it up, and trying to look at a long-term kind of strategy. If you’re looking at this video now and you have AS consider comprehensive stool analysis including parasitology. Three samples on three days, look at the report, act on the report. Six to twelve months later, repeat the report, look at the difference, which I call test and measure. Test what you’ve got, treat and then measure the response. And if you’ve been successful, you’ll have both a positive outcome both in symptoms, and in the test result.

For AS patients, a clever thing to do is 6 or 12 monthly repeated stool test for a few years to gauge how effective the treatment regime really is, because in my opinion it’s all about the gut. You get the gut right, fix the leaky gut, get rid of the bacterial imbalance, you’re going to be in a hell of a position long-term.

Check out my CanXida products. If you’re living in countries like Sweden at the moment or in the EU region, we’re working hard to try and remedy this problem in terms of access to this product. 2016 currently, certainly by 2017 we hope to have the issue solved. I find the CanXida Restore, Remove and Rebuild to be very good products for people with conditions like Ankylosing Spondylitis.

Thanks for checking out the video. Don’t forget to click on the link below if you haven’t already got my Candida report, and thanks for tuning in.

Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. Author of Candida Crusher, and formulator of the CanXida range of products. Thanks for tuning in. Today, I’m going to talk about an article I read online, which I found quite interesting. It’s basically called “The 8 non-food reasons why you probably suffer from bloating.”

If you get bloating (and lots of patients I see get bloating all the time), and they immediately assume that it’s got to do with the food they’re eating or something they’re drinking, but they don’t think about these kind of reasons we’re going to talk about. These are non-food related reasons why you may well be bloating right now, going to your doctor and saying, “I feel pregnant! I’ve got a big gut! What’s wrong with me? I’ve got this awful churning pain here in my digestive system. The doctor may say, “You need an acid blocker. You’ve got a problem with your stomach. You just need a drug.” Well, maybe that doctor’s got one of these reasons too that we’re going to talk about.

Bloating is something that afflicts a lot of people. In fact, most people during their lifetime will suffer from bloating at some stage. It’s awful to be bloated. You could be sitting there with family or friends or you could be in a meeting, and you feel this awful sensation in your tummy… so yeah let’s get into it. Let’s look at some of these reasons.

The first one’s distractions. How many times have you seen somebody talking on their mobile phone while they’re eating food or drinking a coffee? How many times have you been in a restaurant where someone’s on a mobile phone and they’re eating food and they’re checking their twitter feed or their Instagram or they’re eating while on the computer. A key thing with a lot of people today is we want information and we want it fast. We want it right now.

Lots of people are involved with SM (social media). I’ve read on the internet recently that young people on average check their social media feeds up to 50 to 60 times per day. I can guarantee that some of those times will be around food.

Apparently, 25% of all meals consumed in America are when people are on Facebook. One in four meals are consumed when a person’s on Facebook. Can you imagine that? Imagine how much bloating that’s causing. Lots of bloated people out there.

Terrible. So how can you chew food and swallow it and digest it when you’re looking at how many times someone likes a comment about you or some crap like that.

When I grew up, there was no internet. There were no computers. We sat around the table having food. There were no distractions. We would talk about stuff to mum and dad or siblings, and meals would take time. Today, the average person doesn’t sit around a table anymore. And if they do, it’s around a desk as their table. They’ve got distractions. They’ve got buzzers and beepers and bells and noises going off around them all the time. All of these devices make noise. My parrots have become quite good at knowing all the Facebook notifications from my wife, so don’t get a parrot, because you’ll be running to your phone or your computer thinking you’ve got a message.

I just want to bring to your attention that distractions are a big part of bloating today. If you’re going to have food, I want you to have food over here and your computer over there and have them separated. Particularly breakfast, lunch and dinner. Try not to have meals around technology. It is not a good idea. You can’t chew food, and swallow it and digest it properly when your brain is engaged in something else. It’s called mindfulness: being mindful of the task at hand. That’s one, distractions, particularly technological distractions.

Number two is depression. Depression is a very big thing today. Many people suffer from depression. What I find quite amazing is in the last 5-10 years in particular, we’ve learned so much about the digestive system. We’re starting to see that many people with depression could have gut issues causing the depression, or the depression causing the gut issue. It’s a catch-22 really. We know also that beneficial bacteria play a very key role in the production and utilization of hormones like GABA and serotonin and other hormones. Many of these hormones are actually made in the gut. So having a very good gut can alleviate depression. In fact, some researchers are now using probiotics instead of anti-depressants and getting very favorable results with people. Moods can affect the gut which is non-food related. So think about that for a minute. That’s a quite interesting slant isn’t it?

The third point: dehydration. Lots of people today drink way too much coffee or tea. Remember, we’re talking about foods here. Coffee and tea are not really foods, so if you’re drinking way too much coffee or tea, you could be doing too many trips to the toilet and peeing all the time. Lots of urination can cause dehydration of the body, and we’ve seen that dehydration is actually a link with that and bloating. You can’t digest food properly if you’re not hydrated properly. Drinking more water, particularly away from food, is going to help you a lot and reduce your ability to be dehydrated and therefore reduce your gastric discomfort and stop bloating.

I wrote about this in my Candida Crusher book. Not that you guys would do this, but if you make cement, you’ve got to have cement powder, your builder’s mix, which is gravel, and then you’ve got to have your water and you’ve got to mix them all together into a nice smooth mix, and that’s cement. Well, to me, food and water go well together. Some people say you’ve got to have the food away from the water. Some people say you can drink with meals. I personally find that I can drink water perfectly well before, during and after meals. I digest food much better when I have water with it. To me, that’s like a mix. You’re mixing things properly. Just be mindful that caffeine can cause dehydration, and so can alcohol. So that’s number three, dehydration.

Number four: meal skipping. This is a problem with a lot of people today. About 30 percent of women don’t even have breakfast anymore. They skip breakfast because they’ve got to get the kids off to school or they’ve got to go to work and they’ve got kids. Skipping meals is a bad idea, because what will happen is you become ravenously hungry later on in the day, and then you’re going to stuff your mouth full of food. You’re going to have these candy bars, coffee, donuts, everything you can throw into your face because you’re hungry. That causes bloating. We’re not talking about the food. We’re talking about meal skipping. Skipping meals can be linked with bloating, because it means that you’re going to get inappropriate cravings for food. Make sure that you eat meals at regular times through the day. It’s going to keep you feeling better. Your blood sugar will be better balanced.

Number five: poor hormone control. Many women, and also men, suffer from the inability to manufacture proper hormone control. These could be stress hormones. These could be sex hormones. These could be neurotransmitter hormones. Hormones have a very big influence on gut motility and regulating the gut. Even hormones like estrogen play their role in the proper regulation of the gut. So if you take things like the birth control pill, for example. If you have xenoestrogens in your diet (these are chemicals which can mimic estrogen). These can really affect the gut. These can speed it up or slow it down. These can create cramping and bloating in the gut.

Poor hormone control. Menopause can sometimes be a key time. Pregnancy can sometimes be a key time when a person gets more bloated. Be sure to get estrogen and progesterone and also testosterone checked out. Urinary metabolite testing can be performed, or salivary testing, to determine whether you’re in the ballpark or way out of the ballpark. That’s poor hormone control.

Number six: medications. Many medications affect the gut. The worst medications I think for the gut are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS). They wreck the gut. Absolute destroy gut function. Many medications are linked up with it, but also other kinds of pain pills. Paracetamol, gout medications, anti-depressant medications can affect the gut. There are a whole raft of drugs that can really affect how your digestion works. If you’ve got bad bloating and you’re taking medications, talk to your doctor about that or someone like me, and try and work out what the hell’s going on. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen over the years, once we’ve got those stupid drugs away or changed the type of drug they’re on, their bloating went away and their digestion improved.

Number seven: desk jobs. Some people spend way too much time on their desk. So when you’ve got that kind of a job, how the hell can you expect to have a good digestive system, if you’re sitting there all day? The body was designed to move around. That’s going to really increase your circulation and decrease your ability to have bloating, but also it’s going to be very effective and that it’s going to help you burn up a lot of stress hormones that will cause the gut to slow right down.

That leads us into point number eight: stress. Stress to me is the biggest reason why people get bloating. They get an increase production of cortisol. Like that notification you heard before, that’s a tiny mini stress. Cortisol is designed to move blood to the bigger muscles, but reduce the blood to the digestive system. It reduces the body’s ability to produce enzymes, and slows bowel function right down. Stress is the key denominator when it comes to a non-food cause of bloating.

I want you to take some of that information and think which of those eight categories you belong to. If you haven’t got my Candida report, please click on the link below. Thanks for tuning in.