Author: Eric Bakker

Greetings. It’s naturopath Eric Bakker from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher, and also formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. I’m going to do some more FAQs. I’m going to do a series of frequently asked questions on SIBO or small intestinal bowel overgrowth.

I get emails all the time from people from many different countries now. In fact, I have patients now in nearly 50 different countries around the world, all on Skype and on Face Time. It’s quite exciting meeting all these new people. It’s amazing the kind of position that I’m in. I really enjoy doing these internet consultations.

I’ve got a question here from a lady in India of all places. Eric, what is SIBO? Can you tell me what SIBO is?

There are a lot of misconceptions regarding SIBO. In fact, I think there are many different types of bacterial overgrowth and we get experts talking about SIBO, but what about LIBO, large intestinal bowel overgrowth. What about stomach bacterial overgrowth? There are overgrowths of bacteria that can live right throughout the digestive system. What about the oral cavity bacteria? Bacteria live all around us, in us, and on us. Bacteria are not necessarily bad.

If we look at the digestive system, it’s basically a 20-foot long tube broken up into various parts. And these parts do different jobs – for want of a better word. If we start with the stomach, we’ve got an area that’s very important, it has a very low pH and an acid forming environment, so it’s involved in taking the food we’re supposed to chew properly and mixing it up with enzymes, take it further down where digestion starts occurring in the small intestine.

The small intestine is a very important part of the digestive system where most of your digestive processes occur. There is also a large part of your immune system that resides in the small intestine, so this is the part that we’re going to talk about. What is SIBO? It’s an overgrowth of bacteria in this small intestinal tract. There are three parts to the small intestine. You’ve got the duodenum, the jejunum, the central part, and the ileum, or the terminal part. All of these parts have varying bacteria in them and varying pH or acidity or alkalinity by which they work depending on many different factors. If we look at the bacterial content of the small bowel compared to the large bowel, it’s quite remarkable. It’s estimated we have around 10,000 to 15,000 bacteria per milliliter, which is only a thousandths of a liter. It’s a very small amount of fluid. We’ve got 10,000 bacteria just in that small amount.

If we look at the large intestine, we’re looking at literally a billion bacteria for the same quantity of digestive juices, so you’ve got way more bacteria in the large intestine. That often is the reason why many people get sick and they get bloating, gas, and lots of digestive problems. Candida can thrive anywhere in the digestive system. Some people tend to have a lot more Candida in the large intestine. Some tend to have it more in certain parts of the small intestine, but the SIBO is a bacterial overgrowth.

Generally, what you’ll find is it’s not one particular species, but it will be several species of similar bacteria that we repeatedly find in people. And this can cause a really big problem with people when they get an overgrowth of these bacteria. Because the bacteria is so important for helping us maintain proper digestion and absorption of the nutrients in the food that we eat. They are also very important for ensuring we have good motility or movement of food and stool through the digestive system. Once we start getting an imbalance, an overgrowth, we start getting all sorts of flow on effects as a result of those processes being disturbed.

And you can see what happens if you’re not breaking down food properly, absorbing, and digesting it, you’re going to get a lot of fatigue. You’re going to get poor growth or recovery, poor recuperation, poor brain function, poor muscle function; lots of things are just not going to work properly. If you get poor motility or what we call peristalsis through the small bowel, you’re going to get a lot of pain, cramping, bloating, and all sorts of weird sensations in the gut. And often they’ll occur here around the belly button region, so SIBO will affect people here. People often say, “I’ve got a problem with my stomach.” People tend to point lower down. SIBO can present itself in many different ways.

But suffice it to say, we need very good bacteria in this area if we want outstanding health. That’s what we’re going to look at with our following videos. We’re going to look at causes of SIBO, symptoms of SIBO, testing for SIBO, all these sorts of things. I just want to explain in this video what SIBO really is. It’s an imbalance or overgrowth of these bacteria.

Thanks for tuning in. Catch up with you in the next video.

Hi there. It’s naturopath from New Zealand, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. We’re going to continue on with the SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or small intestinal bowel overgrowth. There are many different names for this condition. What we’ve got here is a condition basically where we’ve got an increase in bacteria in the small intestine creating all kinds of different problems. So check out my other videos on SIBO to understand a bit more about the condition.

This video is about why is it so difficult to treat? Why do so many practitioners get it wrong and only have temporary results with SIBO? It’s not just SIBO, it’s also Candida yeast infections in general that people have a lot of difficulty treating and eradicating in their patients.

If we look at SIBO, Rifaximin is an antibiotic that’s commonly recommended for this condition. With SIBO, many doctors are actually recommending Rifaximin. If we got doctors like Dr. Allison Siebecker, who’s a SIBO specialist, she recommends Rifaximin or a botanical anti-microbial treatment. The problem with Rifaximin and natural anti-microbials is that research has shown that in many cases, in fact, the natural treatment probably works better than Rifaximin. But the problem with both treatments is that about half of the patients have shown through research to have a recurrence within 12 months. I think one of the reasons why is that lifestyle and diet changes are not addressed long term sufficiently for patients to get a full recovery. And that’s the problem. People seem to be all hell bent on getting treatment. But when it comes to maintaining good health, this is a whole new ballgame.

When you go to a practitioner and you’re not feeling well, you expect a treatment. You expect a resolution. But then when you get well, are you going to maintain a natural healthy lifestyle and diet to maintain wellness or are you going to slowly slide back into drinking alcohol regularly, not getting sleep, stressing out, eating the wrong kind of foods, not chewing properly, all these sorts of factors come into play. If you go back to what you’ve always done, you’ll go back and get what you got in the first place as to why you went to the doctor originally.

It’s common sense again. As I usually say in my videos, most good health is common sense. Don’t just focus on treatment. Focus on your long-term strategy. How you’re going to stay well for years and years ahead. The gut, the digestive system, is the heart and soul of the person. If you can maintain a high level of wellness in the digestive system, you can maintain a really high level of wellness in the overall body. In the brain, in the immune system, the musculoskeletal system, all of these systems will function optimally if your digestive system is functioning optimally.

But in order to get the gut to function optimally, obviously assessment, I think, is important. Correction and treatment is important, but then maintenance is the golden rule. You’ve got to maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle to stay well. No rocket science. In all these videos I create, there is no rocket science behind them. You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to work this out.

If your doctor or naturopathic doctor or integrative doctor, whomever you’ve seen, is giving you recommendations; you followed them. You followed a course of treatment. You’ve improved. Why wouldn’t you maintain that kind of treatment long term to get amazing wellness? Why would you slowly slide back into what you did then get the condition back, and then go to another doctor and say, “Well, the first doctor was no good. It didn’t work out. I’m sick again”?

It’s important to look at yourself if you don’t fully recover or if you recover and then relapse back into the condition again. That’s why SIBO is difficult to treat. Because I really believe after having seen patients now for nearly 30 years that the majority of clients I see end up going back to do what they did when they got sick in the first place.

Check out my website, yeastinfection.org. Make sure you do my Candida Crusher quiz. You’ll find links on CandidaCrusher.com and yeastinfection.org. And do consider my supplements I’ve created especially for SIBO and Candida, Canxida.

Greetings. Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for checking out this video again.

We’re back into SIBO again to explain a bit about what some of the causes of SIBO are, small intestinal bowel overgrowth.

We spoke in the initial video about what SIBO really is, about it being a bacterial overgrowth. Bear in mind that the digestive system is quite a long organ with many different parts to it, different components to it and varying levels of acidity and alkalinity along the way. The small bowel, in particular, has many mechanisms by which it protects itself to stop from getting an overgrowth. And one way it will regulate that is by having the right balance of pH.

If we look at the stomach, the pH of the stomach, is anywhere between 1-1/2 and 5, which is quite acid forming, so around 3-1/2, I think, on average, a lot of people’s stomachs are. And they have to be to initiate protein breakdown. We start by ingesting food in the mouth by chewing it. Chewing is a very important part of SIBO prevention. Crazy as it may seem. Because what we’re doing is we’re breaking the food down to small particle size, and we’re already to starting to put enzymes in the mouth and even much more, so we’re allowing the small particle size to be coated in proteases and various enzymes before it even hits the small intestine. This really allows proper digestion to occur. So if you’re not really chewing food properly, this is already a cause for SIBO, as crazy as it may sound. This is really the sort of information you don’t read on the internet, but it’s very true. Eating food, taking your time to eat food properly away from technology is a very important thing to do. Gastric acid secretions help protect the small intestine. When you’ve got a significantly low pH, it’s going to allow the body to really start killing a lot of yeast and bacteria that are rampant in the food and around the places where we eat.

Waves of bowel wall activity. So we call this peristalsis or the movement of food through the digestive system, which will stop it from piling up in one area. It will continue to move through. This can be affected by different mechanisms as well. Stress has got an ability to inhibit peristalsis. When we’re in the “fight or flight” mechanism, we don’t need a good digestive system, so this already means that we’re slowing our digestion down. You’ve heard of “fight or flight” that’s the sympathetic mode or the stress mode. “Rest and digest” is the parasympathetic or the relaxation mode. If you look at a snake, a big anaconda will engulf an animal and then it will gos relax, wait for a couple of weeks, and digest the whole thing. I’m not suggesting that we eat like that. Eat 25 burgers and then go somewhere and relax. But the point I’m trying to make to you is that we can only really digest our food when we’re relaxed, not when we’re stressed out. Eating food in a stressful environment is really bad in terms of digestive function. You’re also a sitting duck for a SIBO infection.

Taking medications to block stomach acidity is just a stupid thing to do. I just read online that Nexium, one of America’s top drugs for blocking stomach acidity, $6.2 billion last year, so that’s a lot of SIBO going on in America.

Immunoglobulins produced in the intestinal fluid. Your body produces a particular antibody or immunoglobulin to bind with pathogens like bad bacteria and Candida and cell wall fragments. It will bind to these and help to take it out of the digestive system. This is circulatory IgA made in the small bowel, so healthy people make up to a couple of grams of this per day, which is quite a lot. Many stool tests I’ve seen come back with very low levels of circulatory IgA, and these are the people we often see with very high levels of bad bacteria or SIBO.

Ileocecal valve. We actually have a valve that separates the small intestine from the large intestine, and it prevents flow back or reflux of contents or food back into the small intestine. The pH really varies. In the upper parts of the digestive system, the pH can be anywhere between 2.5, 3 or 5, right up to about 8. But as soon as we hit the ileocecal valve and we get into the large intestine, the pH tends to drop again a little bit. That valve is a very important redactor or reducer of allowing bugs to go also from the small bowel into the large bowel. The ileocecal value also for some people can be a hot spot or literally, a smoldering area where there can be a low-grade pain or low-grade infections can occur in there.

Particularly people with low circulatory IgA counts can have a little bit of digestive pain on the right side where the ileocecal value is, so between the hip bone and the belly button. Probably about here. If you’re feeling pain here on the right side, that’s your ileocecal value. Now you know. If you’ve got a little bit of discomfort around that area, it could be bacteria creating a low-grade infection.

These are all protective mechanisms that the body has to help you prevent SIBO. Causes, malfunctions in all our systems. Problem with gastric acid, acid blockers, not chewing food properly, stress inhibiting peristalsis, low antibody count in the digestive system for many different reasons, ileocecal value problems, that can happen for a lot of reasons. Constipation, diarrhea or food poisoning can affect that area. Pharmaceutical medications. There are a myriad of causes for SIBO.

One of the biggest ones I see would be antibiotic use, particularly recurring antibiotic use. Recurring proton pump inhibitors or drugs to block acidity in the stomach. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. I’m doing a whole lecture on these kind of drugs, in fact, tomorrow up near Auckland here in New Zealand to a bunch of health care professionals about how pharmaceutical medications wreck a lot of people’s digestive systems. These are one of the leading causes, drugs. Recreational drugs or particularly prescribed drugs. Recreational drugs like alcohol are probably top of the chain when it comes to wrecking the gut. And then we get the non-prescribed OTC drugs, stress, poor diets, crappy food, not chewing properly, eating basically crap food. A lot of people get SIBO from that.

Now you get a bit of an idea on how SIBO happens. It’s really a 21st Century disease that’s rampant and many patients actually present to my clinic with. We’re going to do another one on the symptoms of SIBO, so we’ll catch you in that video.