Author: Eric Bakker

Greetings. Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for checking out my video once again. I also want to thank everybody for all the wonderful comments I’m getting on the YouTube channel. I really appreciate them. I’ll try to answer them as much as I can. Apart from the crazy ones that I just delete, which I get every now and them.

Today, we’re going to talk about pharmaceutical medications. Pharmaceutical drugs and their interactions. This is an area that not many people talk about and it’s also an area that I don’t think many people in the natural medicine business are familiar with or dabble in or get involved in and that’s pharmaceutical medications.

Many people take pharmaceutical drugs. Now, I’m not one of these people who are either for or against pharmaceutical medications because many people long term will take some kind of a drug, whether it be a sleeping pill, an antidepressant. It could be a drug to regulate thyroid function, for example. It could be a drug for epilepsy, an anticonvulsant. It could be insulin to regulate their Type 1 diabetes. There are many reasons people take pharmaceutical medications.

People can also take pharmaceutical medications to switch off pain like headaches, period pain, or back pain. If you live in the States, particularly, have you seen an advertisement just to take a pill if you’ve got a headache or just to take a pill for your period pain. We get these ads here on TV in New Zealand as well. It’s crazy how many advertisements I see for pharmaceutical drugs. They’re even advertising antipsychotic medication on TV. Check to see with your doctor if you’ve got schizophrenia and this drug might be suitable for you. Then you see all the tiny little side effects down on the bottom. That is inappropriate.

But what we’re going to talk about is the interactions of pharmaceutical medications, particularly with diet and lifestyle and also natural medicine supplements. This is something I see a lot of patients being affected by. Only the other day, I had a young man I saw who developed convulsions. He came to me and he said, “Eric, I’m in my…” He’s a bit younger than me, about 50 and he developed convulsions and it’s something he’s never had it before. He had it about three or four weeks ago. I was quite alarmed so I said, “Well, let’s just have a look what’s going on.” When I took the case, I had a really good look at the medications he was taking. He was taking an antidepressant and a sleeping pill. And then when I inquired further about his lifestyle, I found that he was drinking beer. The doctor didn’t actually tell him that you couldn’t drink alcohol with the strong medications he was on.

A few weeks prior to the convulsions, he was drinking beer on a regular basis and then he was working with son working in the yard building a fence or something. It was quite warm weather. He drank about 10 or 15 beers over a period of a weekend. And then, he developed a major convulsion, a major convulsion. Lying on the ground writhing away. His son had to call the ambulance. Of course a trip to the doctor and the doctor basically said, “Well, that’s it. You’ve lost your driver’s license for 12 months.” And this guy was pretty devastated about that. But when we had a good look at the case, it was clear cut interaction between the antidepressant the and alcohol.

If you’re drinking alcohol, even small amounts of alcohol, let’s just say a glass of wine once or twice a week, a couple of cans of beer once or twice a week, and you’re taking any kind of pharmaceutical medication, you’re really walking a tightrope. It’s a very dangerous risky game. Why is that? That’s because drugs have to be metabolized by the liver, but the liver is also the same organ that helps to metabolize alcohol. Those two things often clash. If you look in the drug guide – your doctor will have one of these drug guides and the drug guide clearly states with many medications that you need to avoid drinking alcohol, but this is not told to many people.

But it’s not just alcohol. You may be eating far too much of one particular food, for example. I’ve seen some interactions with a high fat and even a Paleo diet with people taking multiple medications at the same time. If you’re taking a pharmaceutical medication, what I’d like you to do is go to drugs.com or go to a different website than that and print out all the information on adverse effects and reactions, just print out all the pages. And then get yourself one of these highlighters and then I want you to highlight all of the relevant areas, all the areas that stand out to you.

When I spoke with this young man who had the convulsion, I looked the drug up in the book and I said, “Do you suffer from da, da, da, da, all these side effects?” He said, “Eric, I’ve got all of those. Every single one of them.” And I said, “Well, why didn’t you talk to your doctor about it?” “Well, I did, but the doctor didn’t see a link.” Many doctors don’t see the links between side effects and drugs. What they will do is give a subsequent drug to treat that new disease. And then sometimes I’ve seen people being treated for side effects of drugs that were given to treat side effects of drugs. That’s how crazy it is.

Also be careful taking natural medicines when you’re taking pharmaceutical medicines because there can be an interaction there as well, so you need to check with your practitioner first if you’re taking any kind of drug long term to see (A) is it interacting with any kind of foods or drinks you’re taking on a regular basis. It could be tea, coffee or alcohol. It could be different kinds of foods you’re eating. You may have noticed that when you started taking that drug, the symptoms got worse that you already had or other symptoms appeared. You need to talk to your doctor about that; (B) you need to make sure the drugs you’re taking if you’re taking more than one don’t interact together. This is a very, very important thing to do; and (C) if you’re coming to someone like me for a consultation or a naturopath or a doctor and you’ve developed these symptoms, make sure they’re not related to the drug that you’re taking.

Classic symptoms are attached to classic drugs. For example, I’m interesting in growing rose, so I’ve noticed that some roses have got a very strong fragrance. Others have got other quite unusual habits how the petals will drop with a little bit of wind. Other roses clash when you put them together. The scents will clash. It’s the same with pharmaceutical drugs. A little bit of studying up and a bit of reading up and you’ll soon become – maybe not an expert, but you’re become an informed and aware person. Knowing what he or she is taking to see if there is any link between that and how you’re feeling. It’s very important to do that. Go back to your doctor and talk about these effects that you could be getting. They may be able to switch you to a drug, decrease the dosage or take you off that drug altogether, and that would be a really good thing for you to do.

I just thought I’d put this video up to alarm you about pharmaceutical drugs. I get these reports from people, particularly women taking the oral contraceptive pill, antidepressants, tablets like Zopiclone, sleeping pills. I get lots of people complaining about those with the side effects. Many medications. You could even be looking at acetaminophen, drugs like that. Paracetamol can cause a lot of problems. In fact, one of the leading causes of hospital admissions for liver failure in America is not alcohol. It’s in fact paracetamol or acetaminophen. You guys call it over there. That drug does not work at all with coffee, tea or alcohol. You can get very sick doing that. That’s very much Russian roulette. Check out the drug you’re on.

Leave some comments please and don’t forget to click on the link for your Candida report if you haven’t already done so and subscribe. Thanks for tuning in.

Greetings. It’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher, formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. Today, we’re going to talk about artificial sugars. Particularly artificial sugars and their relevance to Candida yeast infections. But also artificial sugars and their relevance to any kind of digestive problems or metabolic issues like obesity, weight gain, heart disease, many other conditions.

Contrary to what you may be fed by the media or by Wikipedia or sites like that, artificial sugars do create health problems and there are many, many different studies that actually substantiate these claims. If you’re a person who likes diet drinks or consume sucralose or there’s various names for these different types of chemical concoction that they put in food today. I recently saw a program where they had quite a large tub of water. I think it was like 5,000 liters of water and they literally put five buckets of sugar in there, mixed it up, and then had someone taste it and they went, “Wow, this is really sweet.” And then the lady in the lab said, “Yeah, this is how much sugar goes in Coca Cola. Now, we’re going to show you how much artificial sugar goes into diet drinks.” So she had a 5,000-liter tub of water and she only put like that much in a cup, just a tiny little bit of I think it was sucralose went into that 5,000 liters. And that was stirred around and the lady tasted it and went, “Wow, this tastes even sweeter. This is very sweet.”

These things can really, really make you feel like you’re having a lot of sugar when, in fact, you’re not, but they do create chemical changes inside your gut inside the body. They’re a very, very powerful sweet compound. One thing I don’t like about them is they actually make you think like you’re having a lot of sugar. Some studies have shown they actually increase the desire for more and more sweet stuff. You think about it. If something tastes really sweet, it means that you’re going to say, “Wow, that tastes good.” I’ve said in previous videos that when people tell me that they like the taste of something, it usually means it’s sweet. Usually, if someone likes the taste of something, it’s not because it’s very salty or high in fat or high in chili. It’s because it’s sweet and manufacturers know that.

What they’ve done very cleverly, certain companies that make soft drinks, for example, they’ve actually moved into these artificial sugars. And you’ll find it in chewing gum. You’ll find it in all kinds of diet products. You’ll find it in a lot of foods. I read a survey where it said something like up to three quarters of foods in the US contain some type of artificial sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Be very careful when you consume these sugars on a daily basis. They create a whole raft of different problems.

A study in 2014 looked at the effects of these artificial sugars on mice and humans and various other animals, but particularly mice and human beings. They found that blood sugars are actually raised more with the consumption of artificial sugar than with plain sugar. Blood sugar can be affected. How does it happen?

What we think happens and what science has proven through research. You can read it in the 2014 study. Just go Google artificial sugars and research and you’ll actually find this study on the internet. It actually changes the gut flora composition, so the bowel flora changes under the presence of artificial sugars. That’s really bad when you start altering your own microbiota. You’re leaving yourself wide open for a whole bunch of different problems. You’ve got your own gut flora.

What experts believe is the gut flora is determined at a very young age and it doesn’t really change that much over a person’s life. So when you start drinking diet drinks every day, you can actually manipulate the gut flora and create big health problems for yourself. Gut flora are responsible for a whole lot of different reactions in the body. We know that there’s a link between the gut and the brain through neurotransmitters or hormones. We know the gut flora are responsible for making folic acid and B vitamins. There are many, many different reasons why you need to keep a very healthy, stable gut microflora and these artificial sugars can alter that. A good reason not to have them.

What happens higher blood glucose actually occurs under the presence of this as I was saying. When you get more blood sugar in your bloodstream, it can make problems. It can certainly increase the risk of infections and particularly yeast infections that like to eat sugar. The other problem when you’re starting to change or manipulate the glucose levels in the blood artificially, you’re going to put a big stress on your endocrine system, on the adrenal glands, on the pancreas. Glands like that get affected. And we all know what happens when you start playing around with adrenals, especially playing around with cortisol and insulin with the pancreas. We’re going to get fatigue. We’re going to get obesity. We’re going to get metabolic syndrome. We’re going to get inappropriate inflammatory responses in the body that can lead to autoimmune diseases, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. It goes on and on.

I had a very good friend of mine pass away two years ago, Paul. Paul was 58 when he died. Paul was a Type 1 diabetic, so he was relying on insulin shots. Taking insulin in the morning. His slow release insulin, Avandia and then taking a couple of other shots during the day. Paul had a Masters in chemistry. He was a very clever man. He was a teacher, but Paul passed away. Paul was obese. Paul didn’t understand the link with obesity and health. Science doesn’t equate to common sense.

Paul always said to me, “There’s nothing wrong with Diet Coke, Eric. I’m perfectly fine with drinking two liters a day. I’m happy with it. My doctor told me that it would have no risk to my diabetes or heart disease.” And I said, “Paul, look at you. You look like a beach ball. You’ve got a round gut. Your face is all flushed and red. You can’t continue on like this. You’re going to have a heart attack.” Well, that’s what happened. Paul passed away of a heart attack. On one Sunday morning, he woke up and he passed away. And I was gutted. I felt so upset for his wife and his daughter that his happened at 58 years of age. Ignorance is bliss. Did Diet Coke contribute to Paul’s passing? Hard to say. The funny thing is Paul kept drinking two liters of it every day, if not more. And not only that, Paul loved sweet stuff. Paul loved food. He also liked to have deep fried chips. He liked take away food. And I believe that continually drinking these diet kind of drinks or artificial sugars, it fuels the desire for more and more. It’s almost an addiction. It fuels the addiction.

The other thing with artificial sugars is they increase digestive permeability. This has also been found through research that your gut becomes more permeable under the presence of Splenda, Sucralose, NutraSweet, Aspartame, all of these kinds of sweetening agents. Don’t chew chewing gum with this junk in it people. Keep away from this crap. You’re being deluded here that this sugar is okay for your health. Everyone will tell you that.

We were told for years that smoking was okay for your health. Go to YouTube and have a look at the 1960s ads. More doctors smoke Camel than any other cigarette. All this sort of junk. There’s even an ad on YouTube you can find on Coca Cola that I’ve pasted on my own Facebook page, my Eric Bakker, MD Facebook page and it’s showing you an attractive lady in her 20s drinking Coca Cola saying, “It’s good for me because it keeps the weight off. It helps to suppress my appetite.” People were actually fed this kind of junk back then, and now we know Coke contains about 17 teaspoons of sugar per can. It can’t be good. Back then, they peddled these kind of lies. Many people now believe artificial sugars are safe for them. The truth will come out eventually, so I just want you to be careful consuming any kind of artificial sugar. In my mind, it’s poison. It’s toxic. I wouldn’t even consider it.

Other reasons you want to avoid these kind of toxins in your diet. As I mentioned, increased risk for different autoimmune diseases, cancers, increased appetite as in Paul’s case, especially for sugar carbs. Paul loved Dunkin donuts. Paul loved all kinds of those box cereals, probably like Cheerios like you guys have in the States. Paul loved Kentucky Fried Chicken. Paul loved pizzas. He just loved carbohydrates. He couldn’t get enough. I believe he kept right away from the soda drinks and drank water more, maybe flavored with lemon juice or some minted orange floating in it. If Paul started to consume more berries and changed his eating habits, actually lost a bit of weight, Paul would’ve still been with us today.

Brain fog likely from intestinal permeability, so you can actually get brain fog. It has been associated with these artificial sugars. I had a lady contact me here in New Zealand about four or five years ago who was in the media, who was actually going to look for a law suit against a chewing gum manufacturer because after chewing one packet of a particular gum every day, she started to develop serious brain fog with major headaches. I’ve had several patients I’ve treated over the years with headaches that they thought they were going to die and they were consuming diet soda drinks. One patient drunk between two to four liters of diet drinks per day and she actually thought she had a brain tumor, so she went to about 20 doctors. She had brain scans. She even brought a bottle of diet drink into her doctor who said, “It’s perfectly fine. You can drink this stuff. It’s not linked to headaches.” The funny thing is, once we got her off the diet drinks, what do you think happened to the headaches? Food for thought.

I hope you’ve learned something from this video to please avoid artificial sugars for the sake of your brain health, for the sake of your endocrine health, for the sake of your gut health, for the sake of overall health, for the sake of not really maintaining problems like a yeast infection, for the sake of not pushing yourself into diabetes, into obesity. Don’t believe the hype. Just because experts say something is good, it doesn’t mean to say it’s good. Think about it. Food for thought.

If you haven’t already clicked on the link below to get my free Candida report, please click on it and also subscribe. Thanks for tuning in.

Hello, again. It’s Eric Bakker, back again, naturopath from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher, creator of the YouTube channel that you’re currently looking at. Thank you so much for checking out my video. I do appreciate it.

We’re going to talk about tuna today, tuna fish. We’re going to talk about fish and probably protein consumption a bit in general. There is a lot of fear factor regarding tuna and ocean fish in general. I’ve just spent probably a good half an hour looking on the internet at different websites, Candida websites and various other sites, sites regarding food consumption and healthy diet in general. And a lot of people now are worried about fish. Many people now believe you shouldn’t even eat ocean fish because it all contains mercury. Many people now are starting to post blogs that you shouldn’t eat any sea creatures at all because they’re all radioactive from the Fukushima fall out that we had in Japan. For God’s sakes, next thing people will tell you to stop breathing air because it’s toxic that you should maybe buy bottled air and breath that.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous video, I had a very good friend who subscribes to a top health magazine from the US, but he gave up on it because he said every time I open it up, there was something else that was supposedly going to give me cancer if I didn’t watch out. He said, “In the end, I thought, well, if something’s not going to kill me, something else will kill me to cancer,” so he gave up subscribing to this magazine.

Is tuna okay? Is tuna not okay? Here’s what I want you to carefully think about. It all depends on you. It depends on how much you eat. It depends on your body in general. Eating any kind of protein, you’re going to take a risk that that protein could have some kind of contamination regardless of what kind of protein it is. Regardless of what kind of animal it is, whether it’s a bird, whether it’s a cow, whether it’s a sheep, whether it’s a fish, animals in general can contain lots of chemicals. If you want to drill it right down and get anal, what about if an animal, even an organic animal, has a high fear rate because it’s going to be killed and it secretes a whole lot of hormones, cortisol and adrenaline into its system. That meat become toxic. “Hang on a minute, isn’t organic meat supposed to be good for you?” Well, not if the animal knows it’s going to be killed. This can create quite a nasty situation for animal and also for the person who’s going to eat the animal.

It depends on how you want to take this. I personally don’t have a problem with tuna. I do eat tuna. And I’ll tell you why I eat tuna. Some research I did online last year was quite interesting. If we get a look at fish like shark, tuna, swordfish, the bigger kind of fish species that are prone to building up mercury levels in their body, the interesting thing is that these fish also have high levels of selenium methionine build up in their body, too. You can do your own research. Selenium tends to be in these animals by default at higher levels to get rid of the mercury. There is some debate now whether mercury in fish really is an issue or not.

I do know from some of the stuff I’ve read online from the EPA, the environmental protection association in the states, they were worried, particularly a few years ago, about a lot of the fish internally in the US in the lakes with mercury. How could mercury get into lakes in Northern America? For a couple of reasons. Area where a lot of gold is being mined, mercury was used in the process of extracting gold from particularly types of ore. It was used as a by-product and it was dumped, so you can find mercury in rivers and lakes. Also another crazy thing you might not have thought about is until several years ago, they put these special caps on top of crematoriums. They’re burning so many deceased people that the mercury fillings are being vaporized and again this would just come down like acid rain, would be dumped into mountainous areas and this would wash into rivers, lakes and streams. In fact, some of the lakes are so full of mercury that they actually don’t even want people to swim in them anymore. From crematoriums, would you believe it? What a crazy thing.

Can you eat tuna or not? Eat albacore tuna. I like pole caught, so you can actually buy now tuna that’s been caught with poles not with nets. I don’t like the idea of consuming tuna from companies that use large amounts of nets and have dolphins and turtles as a by catch. So you can actually shop around online and read about how tuna is caught. If it’s caught sustainably with poles by small companies in certain parts of the world, you’re going to really help to provide for those families. You’re going to be eating fish that’s caught in a sustainable manner. It makes a lot more sense to me. Albacore tuna is a smaller tuna. Blue fin and yellow fin tend to be the really big tuna. So the bigger the fish and the older it is, the more likely it’s going to have higher levels of a metal in its body.

But the amount of tuna you’re going to eat, come one, for God’s sakes. Are you going to eat a kilogram of tuna per day? You can have a can. You’re probably not going to eat tuna every day. Eating tuna here or there, especially if it’s packed in spring water or a good olive oil. I tend to avoid the ones in vegetable oil or soy oil or those crappy kind of oils because you don’t know where they come from. But if it’s a reputable brand, I’ve got no problem with it. Don’t get anal about this mercury thing.

Chances are as I mentioned in a previous video, you’re talking on your mobile phone. If you’ve got a mobile phone, you’re using regularly, if you’re on Wi-Fi all the time, chances are the damage to your DNA or your cells is going to be far greater than the microgram amount of mercury you may net from fish. If you’re worried, do a hair analysis. You can even do a provocation urine test. Get a DNPS injection or take some DMSA tablets, what we call a provocation test. You’re going to pee out urine that can be assessed for mercury and lead and other metals. Look, everyone has got metals. Every single person on the planet will have some degree of heavy metal toxicity ranging from miniscule up to serious. But is it causing them a problem, I can tell you now, I’ve tested many, many people over the years who’ve come back with metals in perfectly good health. And I’ve tested many people who come back with no metal at all that are really sick. But is it all mercury to blame?

We seem to have developed this blame culture in society. Today gluten’s the blame. Last week mercury was the blame. Every so often, there’s another kind of substance that we blame for our ill health. We don’t look at ourselves. We’ve got to blame somebody else or some other substance that makes us sick. I went through a phase probably about 20 years ago where I blamed everything on mercury. Where everyone had to their mercury fillings taken out. My wife has had mercury fillings ever since she was a little girl and she’s now 50. She’s in perfect health. So you can’t necessarily point a finger at mercury and say it’s the main cause for Candida.

A website I just looked at said that nearly all cases of Candida are caused by mercury. What a load of crap! There are many people out there with amalgam fillings that are not sick. Dr. David Quigg from Doctors Data in Chicago, America’s premier lab for heavy metal analysis, said to me, “Many people can detoxify mercury perfectly well from their system, especially if they don’t load up on Budweiser beer and drink gin and tonics every night and smoke 10 cigarettes a day. If you don’t create massive toxicity levels and you eat good food and you regular cleanse yourself, you’ve got a good ability to reduce a lot of this crap from the body.

If you pollute the hell out of your body, of course things like mercury are going to be bad, especially if you eat 10 cans of tuna a day. Use your head. A lot of this stuff is common sense that we’re talking about. A tuna salad here or there. Eating a fresh tuna steak here or there is perfectly okay. Don’t freak out about these kind of things. It’s all common sense. There’s plenty of ocean fish that are still safe to eat, especially the young species, the smaller fish that haven’t had a long life span or the ability to gather a lot of these toxins in their body.

My wife and I eat fresh fish twice a week. We love eating fresh fish. A Candida website I just looked at said to avoid all ocean fish because it’s all toxic. You need to be careful of red meat consumption. Try to keep it to 500 grams, which is about a pound or less per week. All red meat, regardless if it’s organic or not. I prefer to eat fresh fish as one of my primary proteins, certified free range eggs, tofu, and protein from things like chick peas and legumes and things like that, nuts and seeds. I prefer not to eat a lot of red meat anymore. I prefer to put that on the back burner.

There you have it. Tuna is okay. Small amounts, high quality product, not a problem at all. Don’t worry. None of us are getting out of this alive anyway. We’re all going to die. Don’t freak out. Thanks for tuning in. Don’t forget to click on my link below if you haven’t got my Candida report and subscribe. Thanks for tuning in.