Hello there. It’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher and I’m the formulator of a range of products called Canxida. Thanks for checking out my video. I’ve got a question here from one of my subscribers, a nice guy called Angelo Macadaras, which is a Greek name for all of you people who don’t understand Greek names. Angelo has got a question here. “Hello, Eric, I was wanting to know if you could make a video about what to do if you do have any of these food intolerance reactions due to a lack of enzymes or beneficial bacteria. For example, I want to adopt a vegan lifestyle, but can’t because any time I eat a grain, my skin flares up. Does this happen more so because of lack of enzymes or because you’re feeding Candida? And if it’s just a lack of enzymes, should you just continue eating these foods in small amounts to slowly get your digestion used to it or should you just avoid it completely until you can stomach it without any issues at all? Sorry about this lengthy question. Angelo.”
Well, Angelo, let’s talk about this problem. Lots of people email me with similar kinds of questions. “I can’t tolerate this food. I’ve got an allergy toward this food.” Let’s get one thing clear right from the start. There is a big difference between a food allergy and a food intolerance and a lot of people get these two animals confused. They think that a tiger is a leopard and a leopard is a lion. Everyone gets these big cats confused. But when you look a little bit deeper into the animal and you see the environment it lives in, if you very carefully observe the animal, you’ll understand they’re entirely different creatures. What’s tigers got to do and lions got to do with food allergies? Well, let’s get into it. I’m just being silly there.
The point I’m making is if you read my book, there was a big article I wrote in my book and also on my blog site, yeastinfection.org. I’ve written quite a few articles on the difference between allergies and intolerances. Allergies, remember, are immune mediated. You need to have an antibody reaction that sets up in the body to counter a response of an antigen. An antigen is anything that comes into the body that’s perceived as foreign by the body’s immune system, so it’s going to cause a problem.
We’ve got a big problem in the world at the moment with global terrorism. This is almost like an antibody response isn’t it. People go a bit crazy with ISIS. Unfortunately, a lot of really nice Muslim people are getting attacked and affected really bad by citizens, by law abiding people who don’t understand the difference. Your immune system is a little bit like that, too. It can also get confused. It can get trigger happy. It can start blaming foods when foods aren’t really at fault.
I remember seeing on the new a report about a dark-skinned man who was taking device out of his bag. I think it was an iPod with a red cable on it or headphones. In fact, I think he was a medical student. Probably because of his race, his color and the fact that he pulled a device out of a bag, a woman immediately contacted the police and said, “Oh, my god. It’s a guy with a bomb. A bomb. A bomb.” People go nuts when you use the word “bomb”. Don’t use it at airports by the way. It doesn’t go down too well. Anyway, this poor guy got harassed by the cops because they thought he had an explosive device. When, in fact, it was a flipping headphones with an iPhone.
Your immune system can get so trigger happy and so on red alert that it can react to tons of stuff. What we’re going to do is calm the immune system right down. That’s going to stop a lot of unwanted reactions in the body. Many people have an overexpression of their immune response. This isn’t spoken a lot of or written a lot, but my clinical experience has shown me this through my understanding of cortisol and the adrenals and the response of this powerful hormone and how it affects the immune system.
People with high stress are much more prone to getting inappropriate reactions than people who are more chilled and more calm. So if you suffer with high cortisol levels, you’re more likely to have inappropriate immune reactions to foods that you may not have had previously. This can be happening when you’re going through a crappy relationship breakdown or something or your mother-in-law is annoying you again. I’m always talking about mother-in-laws. My mother-in-law is nice by the way. But you may have one of those mother-in-laws from hell. We don’t call them the in-laws. We call them the outlaws. If you’ve got a family member that’s really annoying the hell out of you, have a good look at yourself to see if you’re inappropriately reacting to foods are things in your environment. It could be cortisol upregulating your immune response creating this crazy reaction.
Angelo, I don’t know if you’ve got crazy neighbors or a crazy girlfriend or I don’t know what your situation is, so check that out first. That’s the upregulation. With continued stress, you can have a down regulation on immune response and that can also cause untold reactions. Many people suffer who some kind of stress can have a crazy reaction. Immune mediated, the allergies, intolerances are usually enzyme mediated. And I’ll find this will have to do with some kind of a problem with your pancreas. It’s a very common organ that will create food intolerances. This is when you can’t tolerate a certain kind of food or it sits there and you get bloating, gas, heavy feeling, weird bowels, and you could get skin reactions. You’re much more likely to have a very powerful reaction when it’s immune mediated as opposed to an intolerance. In my opinion, food intolerance reactions are nowhere near as strong as the immune mediated food allergies.
Food allergies come in two types of animals. We’ve got the immediate one, the cheetah, pretty fast animal and then we’ve got the slow one, maybe the lion. Cheetahs are really quick, 60 mph. They’re the world’s fastest land animal. Type 1 response or IgE or Type 1 anaphylactic is like a cheetah. It goes gangbusters. You can have a person with a very powerful allergic response to peanuts or shellfish. I had a patient, a guy, who found out that he had a problem with fish when he walked past a shop selling fresh fish and he ended up waking up in the hospital. He ended up waking up in the hospital. He had an anaphylactic shock from breathing in the fish.
I had a woman bring me this girl, 14-year-old, and every time she went shopping, she’d come home, she’d break out in hives. She couldn’t work out why. Apparently what we worked out was when she walked past the dairy aisle, past these big refrigerators with milk and the mom would open up that. Usually what happened is about five minutes later, the girl started to get itchiness. What I had to do was a bit of investigation work to find out at what time of the shop did this occur. And I worked out it was five or ten minutes after the shop started that the itchiness started and it was the flipping milk aisle. How we proved it was I got her to go home and to open up a cap of a milk bottle and take a couple deep inhalations of it. Absolutely right. I was bang on. Within 10 minutes, she was scratching herself all over. And then within about two or three hours, she had hives on her body. That’s how powerful an immune reaction can be. It can be super powerful. That’s an extreme case, but remember, a lot of people are not like that girl. They may be 2 percent or 5 or 10 percent that reaction.
Food intolerances don’t generally have such extreme, powerful Type 1 allergic responses. They’re usually more delayed. I find them more insidious. They can be skin related. Often there is a huge element of fatigue with a food intolerance. A person will get all sorts of gut problems with intolerances. Because there’s no doubt about it, diarrhea is a classic lactose intolerance.
Typical. Again, that’s a problem where the body hasn’t got the enzyme lactase to break milk sugar lactose down. Nothing to do with allergies. It’s a problem with a deficiency with an enzyme. See how we talked enzyme again?
We talked about the cheetah. Now if you’ve got a lion, a lion tends to be a lot slower in its approach. It’s going to sneak up on the prey. It may follow a prey around for a day or even two days and weaken it and then attack. That’s what a Type 3 response is, IgG 4, we call it. That’s a delayed response. A delayed response, in my opinion, can occur quite often with multiple triggers coming into the diet. It could be two or three things overlapping that cause just the right conditions and then the person may get a headache three or four days after consuming the food. They may get joint pain. They may get skin rashes. Something will happen.
IgG reactions tend to me more acquired, in my opinion. I don’t know what you guys think out there or what the experts will tell you. But I believe that IgE responses tend to be more inherited. IgG more acquired. Most people when they get a food allergy report back and it’s full of Type 3 responses, IgG, my first question is “Did you take an antibiotic?” “Yes, I did, sir. I took an antibiotic.” I very commonly see an association between wiping out beneficial bacteria and elevated IgG response.
I didn’t even answer your question, Angelo. What was your question again? Let’s have a look here. “What do I do?” You talk about here the food intolerance reaction due to lack of enzymes or beneficial bacteria. First thing you’ve got to work out do you have an allergy or intolerance because we haven’t even established that yet. I don’t tend to waste my time with patients anymore doing FAPs or food allergy profiles. I prefer to cut to the chase and do the stool test and get the bacteria right first. I find if I can get the bugs right and get the enzymes right, the rest takes care of itself.
Taking foods out of the diet is a stupid thing to do or do a food allergy test and let’s just take this and that out and this and that. That’s like paint by numbers. People think if they take all the foods out of their diet that show high on a panel, they’re going to feel better, but they never do. They never do. They’re only $300 poorer and they’re still no closer toward getting a resolution of the cause of the problem. The foods didn’t cause the allergy. Something else caused it.
Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to get a piece of paper and I want you to write down all the foods you eat, Angelo. Just get a piece of A4 paper, make a column, write down the foods. All the foods. Milk, butter, eggs. I don’t know. You might eat a certain type of bread. You could be eating all sorts of foods. Write them all down. Tomatoes, celery, lettuce, whatever you eat. Not just the compound foods that you cook for yourself, but the ingredients in those foods. And then what I want you to try to establish is have three columns next to that and then write down a column called “mild”, a column called “moderate”, and a column called “severe or strong.” Strong is 3, moderate is 2 and the mild is 1.
Each food I want you to write down your desire or wanting that particular food. Some foods will be 3. Steak could be 3 because you’re a guy. I mean guys like steak. Beer might be a 1 or a 2. You know what I mean? So write all of these foods down. And then what we want to do is total up and see what your totals are. Try to work out what foods come back to the highest ranking of 3. Get maybe one of these things. Get one of these highlight pens and just highlight each food that comes back with a 3. So you could have 20 foods you’ve got quite a good desire for.
The first thing you do when you see the food is you tick a box, 1, 2, 3. You don’t think about it. You immediately tick that box. We want to work out what the 3s are. The 3s are the foods most likely to cause you the problem. The 2s have got a moderate to cause a problem, and the 1s have got a much less ability. I’ve always found this to be true with people. I don’t know why, but it’s just that my experience has shown me that we’re always drawn towards the stuff that doesn’t really serve us a good deal when it comes to digestion. Be careful, Angelo. Work out the grade 3s. And then out of those grade 3s, I want you to systematically go through them and try to work out which food potentially is causing you the problem. Try to eliminate some of those foods or have them far less frequently. Move the 3s to the 2s and move the 1s to the 2s. The foods you like the least try to move them up a little bit up the chain. Eat them more often. The 3s move them down the chain. Eat them less frequently. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
And then what we’re going to do at the same time is keep an eye on the bowel motions. This is a guide. Chew your food properly. Keep an eye on gas, bloating, energy, a whole bunch of different things. Analyze yourself to see how you feel. And most importantly watch the stool every day. Is it well formed? Is it coming out easy? Does it smell like a death trap when you’ve been to the bathroom or is it not too bad? Healthy stools should have minimal odor, easy elimination, you should feel very satisfied after full elimination. You should be passing out quite a lot of stool every day. One or two pieces is acceptable. When it’s all sheep pellets or like cow pats, you’ve got a problem.
The stool is a good indication often of the bacteria and will tell you often what the colon is doing. If you’re going to find undigested food particles, it’s going to tell you that your small intestine is not working properly. If you’re going to find a lot of looseness, it’s often telling you that you’ve got parasites or bad bacteria. I’m going to do some videos coming up specifically on stool odor, texture, all those sorts of things. It’s a pretty “shitty” topic I know. But I think people need to hear this.
It’s very important to understand. Keep an eye on the stool. Make some changes. In time, I believe you’ll be able to go back and eat all the foods that you like to eat. I’ve told people many times I don’t bind to that gluten is like radioactive waste. We shouldn’t eat it. Everyone will die and we all need to eat large amounts of meat and fat, which will save us. I think it’s a load of crap. I really don’t believe it. Most people do like a bit of gluten in their diet. Strictly avoiding foods for the sake of trends or because you read it on Huffington Post or some crap like this, it doesn’t mean to say you’re going to get better at all. It could mean that you’re going to piss off people around you and that you’ll end up becoming the food police yourself, so just be careful. Small amount of gluten, in my opinion, for most people is totally acceptable. But eating five pieces of bread a day is not a good idea either. It’s all about balance, moderation and common sense. It’s what it is.
In time, you’ll be able to eat that grain. Now you mentioned here “Anytime I eat a grain, my skin flares up.” Cool. So what we’re going to do now is we’re going to write all the grains down that you and then we’re going to grade them, 1, 2, 3, as I mentioned. And then you’re going to eat the grains. With a 1 grain, you’re going to shift them up to 2, and the 3s you’re going to move down to 2 and maybe eventually 1. The stronger the desire for the food, the more you need to put it on the back foot. The weaker the desire for that grain, the higher you’ve got to push it up. I also want you to include more grains into your diet, Angelo, that you previously haven’t been eating. Maybe you haven’t had buckwheat before. Let’s put a big of that into the diet.
Now, once you’ve done all this, if you still have issues, I want you to start including some digestive enzymes into your diet or probiotics. Give my Canxida Restore a go, Angelo. It’s got seven different enzymes in and six different probiotics and it was designed for people just like this with gut issues. It’s going to help to stimulate the breakdown of various carbohydrates and it’s going to increase the production of various kinds of bacteria that allow the proper fermentation of the breakdown products and a good stool, minimum gas and bloating.
That was a long video. I hope that gives you a little bit of an insight into allergies and intolerances, into my grading system, how I like to work with people, and give it a try. Thanks for tuning in and thanks for that question, Angelo.