Greetings. It’s naturopath Eric Bakker from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for tuning into my video. I’ve done quite a few videos already on SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. This video is going to be about how to effectively treat SIBO. Let’s have a good look at how we can offer the patient with SIBO some really good natural solutions on how to nail this thing. The different kinds of treatment options I recommend. What is already available out there, what experts are recommending, and what I recommend.
I’m by no means an expert. I don’t consider myself an expert. Some people call me an expert. I consider myself still a student and a practitioner. When you see patients, you’re a clinician, and you have a practice, which means you’re still practicing, you’re far from perfect. And anyone who claims to be perfect and who knows everything, you need to avoid these kind of practitioners because there is a lot to learn. I can tell you that much.
Treating people with SIBO is not really unlike treating people with a Candida yeast infection. It’s quite similar really, when we think about it. Candida yeast infections are opportunistic infections. But the difference between Candida and SIBO is Candida is a fungal or yeast infection. Whereas, SIBO is a bacterial infection. What we’ve basically got is an overgrowth. We’ve got an imbalance. When you’ve got an imbalance in your digestive system, it means that you’ve got an imbalance in your life. Something is not right. You’re doing too much of something or not enough. There is an imbalance going on.
When I wrote my Candida Crusher book, I wrote about basically – if you go into one of the introduction chapters, you’ll see I’ve got a see saw with resistance on one side and susceptibility on the other side. It’s a fine even balance. If you’ve got a heavy person on one side, if you’re pushing down too hard, you’re going to create an imbalance on the other side and vice versa. If we look at the middle, the balance, it’s stress. Stress you can break down, and understand there are many different kinds of stress that can cause imbalances in people’s lives.
If we draw stress – I’ll just get a piece of paper and I’ll show you what I mean because it’s good to illustrate what I’m talking about here. Stress comes in all shapes and forms. We can see the stress triangle here; you can see that one. If we look at the top part here, the little pinnacle of stress, that’s emotional stress at the top. Because I believe that the biggest stresses in our lives are people and how we feel about people and how they feel about us. They’re huge stresses. Stresses that we’ve got at home with our partner or our children or teenagers or mother in law or a mother or father or our neighbors or employers/employees. These are massive stresses.
We’ve got many other stresses in that triangle that affects the susceptibility and the resistance to disease. When you’re doing good things, you become more resistant. When you’re doing things that are not so good, you’re becoming more susceptible. We can shift that goal post either way depending on our attitude, depending on the changes that we’re willing to make.
Patients that I see with SIBO lead imbalanced lives quite often or they’ll do things to themselves that will cause them to be more susceptible to SIBO. For example, taking an antibiotic. I’ve done videos on this. You can have a look at that, antibiotics. Or, for example, the causes of SIBO. Pharmaceutical medications, medications to block stomach acid, medications to stop pain we call non-steroidal drugs. Advil, for example, paracetamol. These sort of medications can make us more susceptible to SIBO because they can attack our digestive system. Antibiotics are a key cause as well. One of the biggest causes, in fact, when it comes to pharmaceuticals.
But this video is not about causes. It’s about treatment. I want you to understand that stress packaged in many shapes and forms will make us more susceptible. So treating a disease is about understanding your risks and reducing the ability of the bacteria to overgrow in the first place because that’s the most important part of treatment is prevention. Preventing a disease from happening means that the treatment is going to be a heck of a lot easier for you out there. When you’ve got a full-blown SIBO problem, you’re looking at trying to get the balance back again, and that can come at quite a cost to you. Not just financially, but also in terms of side effects and symptoms, die off and all sorts of problems. You’re probably thinking, “Hang on a minute, Eric. Get to the point. You’re spouting off all this nonsense.” I think it is important for you to understand the foundation of treatment is understanding your risks and your causes. If you don’t understand those, go back and look at some of my causation videos.
Let’s get into the proper treatment itself, the natural treatment. Before we jump into natural treatment, you can also have a think about what Dr. Allison Siebecker talks about when it comes to SIBO. Dr. Siebecker is an expert with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. But one point that Dr. Siebecker and I differ on is Dr. Siebecker is okay with using antibiotics with many patients. But the antibiotics that Dr. Siebecker recommends, in fact, in about half the cases are either ineffective or there is a recurrence of the problem.
I’m not a big fan at all of using any kind of pharmaceutical intervention when it comes to SIBO. My experience has shown me that I can treat people just as effectively with natural treatment methods as there are pharmaceutical options available. So don’t think for one minute that you have to go for pharmaceutical medication like metronidazole or low-dose erythromycin or a drug like that because you don’t need to do that. There are highly effective natural protocols that work quite okay as well.
The biggest part of treatment that we’re going to start talking about is the diet. Now, if you don’t really understand much about diet, I urge you to look at yeastinfection.org. There are about 1,000 of my articles on that website. Many articles I’ve written now on how to eat properly. The kind of foods that you really should eat and that you shouldn’t eat. Very shortly, I’m going to do an in-depth video on the “yes” foods for Candida and SIBO, and the “no” foods for Candida and SIBO. That’s going to give you a ton of good information.
But suffice it to say, the foods that you need to eat are the whole foods, the fresh foods. I prefer to grow a lot of my own vegetables, and I always urge people to do the same. There is always room somewhere in your garden to grow some kind of green stuff. If you can’t do that, you can also go to your local farmer’s market and buy nice fresh leafy green produce. My diet is a good diet when it comes to SIBO because it’s a lot of fresh green food. I had a lot of steamed spinach for lunch today and two free-range eggs. I consider that a good lunch. For dinner tonight, I’m eating some certified free-range chicken and there will be some broccoli out of the garden, and probably a couple of Jerusalem artichokes and a little bit of quinoa or a grain like that. I tend to eat smaller meals relatively frequently. High quality protein, green foods, whole foods.
If you’ve got bad SIBO and particularly a lot of gas and bloating and maybe some abdominal pain, which are some of the chief signs and symptoms, you may need to be careful with the starchy vegetables particularly when you start treatment. We’re talking about things like potatoes, pumpkin, squash, carrots; even sweet potatoes can give some people a lot of grief. Some people believe the best SIBO diet approach is a completely grain free specific carbohydrate diet approach. I don’t really believe that SCD diets are the way to go for SIBO. In my opinion, the SIBO varies from patient to patient. I’ve got some patients who fair quite well on fruit, others any kind of fruit they feel sick on it and get a lot of gas. I’ve seen other people who can eat certain types of grains. We’re talking rye or oats. And others have a problem with that.
What I want you to do is get a piece of paper and write down all the foods that you’re currently eating, all of the foods on a piece of paper. And then grade all those foods. You have a column next to the food, one, two, or three. Three means you love the food; you want to eat it a lot. Two means you like it. And one means you can take it or leave it. Be careful of the foods that you love the most. I’ve mentioned this before in videos because they could give you a lot of grief. Be aware about any food you eat, any protein, carbohydrate, or fat could invoke symptoms if you’ve got SIBO or Candida. There are no rules here. I’ve got many patients that can tolerate gluten and fruit and all the “no” foods quite okay on Candida, and I’ve got others who can’t. It’s impossible for me to give you a very specific diet when it comes to SIBO. You’ll have your own reactions to certain foods. You know that you need to avoid those foods. Just be aware that the foods that you love the most could be giving you the most symptoms.
Good foods to include with SIBO are things like fresh ginger and fresh garlic. And in summertime, oregano is a good one to have in there, thyme. So these sorts of herbs, rosemary, basil, these are good herbs to include because they have antimicrobial qualities. Put some fresh cloves or some dried cloves, I should say, in with your cooking. Cinnamon and cloves are quite good, woody herbs to include because they also have antimicrobial properties. I generally find that sourdough bread, and I’m discovering that rye sourdough is a very good one for SIBO and Candida patients. If you have a problem with it, toast it because you seem to be able to tolerate it better toasted.
Have a look at some of my writings on the FOS and GOS foods, fructooligosaccharides, and galactooligosaccharides. These are specific types of sugars, and certain foods like asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, there are many different kinds of foods like it that contain these sugars. And they often contain resistant starches in them as well, which allow the beneficial bacteria to grow. I’m not a fan of recommending oligosaccharides or sugars as prebiotics in the dietary supplements because I’ve had too many bad experiences with patients with these dietary supplements like ThreeLac and Syntol and products like that. I just get too many bad reports on them. When I designed my own product, which I’ll mention later, I didn’t include the prebiotic sugars. I believe you should get these from your diet and not from supplements. That way you can regulate them much better and include or exclude them from your diet. Because once they’re in a supplement, you’re going to take them in every day. You can get a lot of problems.
Get a feeling for the kind of foods you need to eat. Green bananas, the plantain green bananas cooked in coconut milk are a good snack. Sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, globe artichokes, chicory root. Asparagus is one of my favorite foods steamed up. So there are many different kinds of foods that you can eat that contain these prebiotic sugars, and they seem to be good for SIBO patients. Initially, be careful of gas and bloating. You might need to use some supplements that we’ll mention later that will help to reduce the bacterial load until you can tolerate these kind of foods. Sometimes stool testing is good upfront with bad SIBO to determine your level of beneficial bacteria and dysbiotic bacteria, so we get a ballpark on where you are before we start with the treatment. But just remember, diet is a very important part of SIBO.
Eating light proteins, fish, good quality eggs, and free-range chicken are good foods. Lamb, we’ve got a lot of nice organic grass fed lamb in this country. It’s beautiful meat. Red meat is okay. I’m not a big fan of too much red meat into the diet. I love fresh fish. We have an abundance of fresh fish in New Zealand, ocean caught, good quality fish. Really good proteins to eat. Plenty of fats you can eat, coconut is one of my favorite fats for the gut, pure butter, if you’re getting a nice organic unsalted butter is really nice to add to the diet. I tend to use a good quality extra virgin olive oil. I buy a high quality one that’s not rancid. Be careful of the oils because a lot of them are rancid, particularly fish oils. Many fish oils today are rancid, so you need to be buying a good quality one.
SIBO treatment is a lot more than just diet. I’m really big on lifestyle with patients. Many of my SIBO patients stay up too late. They live under high stress. Remember what we said initially about people being your biggest stress. Lots of SIBO patients lead unfulfilled and unhappy lives. They can work in dead end jobs or have shift work. They can have low incomes and feel very financially stressed. They can be going through messy divorces, separations, or custody issues. They can be looking after elderly relatives or things like this. These are stories I hear every day in my clinic with SIBO patients.
The bowel is very susceptible to stress. The small bowel particularly susceptible to stress. You need to understand the difference between sympathetic dominance and parasympathetic dominance. Sympathetic dominance is the “fight or flight,” it’s the stress mechanism. It’s what drives us, keeps up going, makes us do things, makes us act, and also makes us react to situations. Whereas, the parasympathetic is the “rest and digest.” All your organs in your body are stimulated by the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.
Some organs only have sympathetic stimulation. The thyroid and the adrenals, for example, are stimulated by the stress mechanism, and they are not deactivated by the parasympathetic, which is very interesting. So the only way you can relax the adrenal and thyroid is by conscientiously relaxing. Other organs like the pancreas have only got parasympathetic stimulation and no sympathetic stimulation. What that means in normal English is that you can only digest food when you’re relaxed, not when you’re stressed. Many people I see don’t even digest food properly because they’re so stressed out all the time. They’re on their mobile phone trying to eat food. They’re having arguments with people. They’re unhappy. They’re not chewing food properly. They’re not digesting food properly. How the hell can you have a well-functioning bowel and small bowel if you’re eating under any kind of stress or duress?
Look at shift workers eating at crazy times of the day. So never forget, you need to have a nice relaxed easy going life with a positive frame of mind to have good digestive capacity. It’s not just all about “is this gluten free?” Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that every bit of food you eat is the most important aspect when it comes to SIBO because it’s not. I believe that stress is one of the key things overlooked when it comes to SIBO. It’s an area I’m going to spend a lot more time on in the next few years is understanding the sympathetic and parasympathetic dominance in the gut because it’s completely unspoken of on YouTube or you don’t read about it much in books. But in my clinical experience based on nearly 20,000 patients, I can tell you that stress is what I believe are the aetiology or etiology. Those two words mean, is probably the mother of most diseases is some form of stress, so think about that.
Sleep and SIBO. Many SIBO patients don’t sleep properly. And a lot of rejuvenation of your health and digestive repair occurs in the deep phase of sleep. So if you’re not sleeping well and having really rested sleep, you’re not digesting well. You’re not rebuilding well. If you’ve had SIBO and gut problems for years, think about working on your sleep patterns. It’s a profound thing that you’re doing to yourself by improving your sleep. That’s only a couple of aspects of lifestyle I’ve spoken about, but I could spend an hour on this video just going into more detail on all the fine shades of lifestyle imbalances I see in my patients.
Let’s look at another quadrant and that’s supplementation. It’s your call. You don’t have to supplement. You can treat a lot of gut problems with diet alone. But the problem is it can take you months and years and years to get on top of the problem. Whereas, a good quality supplement is going to fast track your healing. That’s one of reasons why I developed my own product line. This video is not about selling supplements. It’s about you understanding the full picture of SIBO itself. It’s also explaining to you that you can get well without supplements. But a quality supplement taken at the right time is going to make you feel pretty darn good pretty quickly.
I’ve used all kinds of supplements now for over 20 years in my practice from many different companies. I’ve tried them all. I’ve tried just about every probiotic, professional ones, and retail ones on patients. The same with enzymes. The same with multivitamins and fish oils. I’ve looked at all of those things. I’ve also been a company director, I think they call it president in America, of a dietary supplement company and manufactured my own products here in New Zealand now for about 15 years. I’ve been involved in the actual manufacturing of supplements.
I’m quite aware of all the products on the market, the raw material suppliers, how products are made, the tablet versus capsule debate, looking at PABAs, looking at different countries where raw materials come from, these are all things that are close to my mind. Having been involved in the industry for nearly 30 years now, I worked out a few years ago; it was time to make a really high quality range of Candida dietary supplements that were also suitable for people with SIBO. Also suitable for people with irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s and colitis, food allergies, leaky gut syndrome, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, gas, parasites, it goes on and on. I wanted to make something that nobody really had made before. I wanted to design something that was amazing for people. And I think I’ve achieve that with my Canxida range of supplements. I’m very passionate when it comes to helping people, and I wanted to be able to put something in someone’s hand that was of very high quality that actually did what it’s supposed to do and actually works. Because a lot of the junk that I’ve used over the years just didn’t work as well as I’d like it to.
So the first product I made was called Canxida Remove. Canxida Remove is a special tablet containing 12 different anti-bacterial/antifungal components in it. These are all standardized herbals predominantly. Standardized herbals are very important for you to understand, as opposed to herbals that are non-standardized. Non-standardized herbals give you a dose every time you take it, which is not consistent in terms of its therapeutic value. So every time you take this product, it could be hit and miss and the potency will vary from batch to batch.
Standardized herbals, however, are much stronger and consistent. This is a bit like how pharmaceuticals are made. Every time you take a tablet, you know you’re getting a specific outcome from that therapeutic does you’re taking. I spent a huge amount of time formulating Canxida Remove. It took six months, even longer, just to really work out the right kind of standardized herbals to use. I sincerely believe that Canxida Remove is the quintessential anti-parasite, antifungal, anti-bacterial product on the market today. If you find a better product than Canxida Remove, I’d like you to email me and show me. I don’t think you will because I’ve tried every single product out there on the market, and that’s why I designed my own product range because I just couldn’t find products with the same clinical efficacy I thought I could if I made it myself. I trust that you’re going to be very happy using Canxida Remove. We’ve had thousands of satisfied customers.
My second product is called Canxida Restore. Canxida Restore is basically a combination of seven different enzymes and six of the best probiotics combined. As I mentioned earlier in the video, I’ve left out the FOS component, the fructooligosaccharide. It’s not a good idea in my professional opinion to add prebiotics in with probiotics. I think it’s a bad move. And I’ve heard this also from many professional people going to different seminars. Many people I’ve spoken to say that prebiotics have aggravated their patients. Many patients have contacted me who’ve been on products like ThreeLac and Syntol and there are many others that have aggravated on them. They’ve had more bloating, more gas; they felt sick on them. I used these products for several years in my clinic and thought, “That’s it. Enough is enough. It’s time to make something now that’s going to give me a better therapeutic outcome with my patients.”
I also picked the best enzymes in terms of their effect on the carbohydrates, fats, and the proteins. All patients with Candida and SIBO need some kind of enzymatic support. The enzymes will help to break down the foods much more to their molecular components. This is going to allow increased absorption, digestion, and therapeutic value from that food. It’s also going to give the bacteria downstream a better substrate for feeding on, which will mean less bloating, less gas, less brain fog, less inflammation, and just more comfortable digestion in general, and more energy and better sleep patterns happen. I’ve chosen the best probiotics as well in this product. You can read a lot more about why I’ve chosen each specific enzyme and probiotic on the Canxida.com website. I go into detail about why I created the products, exactly what’s in them, so you can read a lot more about that.
I’m also now designing my third product called Canxida Rebuild. This will be the first time a product like this has ever been created. It’s a specific multivitamin designed just for SIBO patients and for Candida patients. It’s going to help to rebuild people’s digestive systems. It’s also got a fungal/bacterial backbone, so it’s got a base in it that allows a low-level amount of cleansing to occur for a long period of time. The Canxida Rebuild was designed for you to take one or two per day for a long period of time to keep you clear from fungus, to keep you clear from imbalanced bacteria, to keep you clear from parasites. So many patients I see have got parasites today, Blastocystis, Citrobacter freundii, the list goes on and on. I get them every day. I see them in stool test reports. And this is why I created the Canxida Rebuild.
The Canxida Remove and the Canxida Restore are both best taken together. The Canxida Rebuild can also be taken, so this trio works fantastic together. It’s a really good product range. Not just to help you recover from Candida and SIBO, but also to keep you clean for a long, long time to come. The dosage for Canxida Remove is generally one tablet, two to three times per day. The Canxida Restore you take one with breakfast, and you take one before bed, so two per day. And the Canxida Rebuild will be anywhere between one to four tablets per day. But generally, one per day long term maintenance is going to go a long way. That’s the product range. That’s the Canxida product range.
I’ve got some more exciting Canxida products coming out and also specific foods I’m designing just for Candida, SIBO, irritable bowel patients. Stay tuned to see some future videos. That gives you a little bit of an insight into the kind of work I do with people. I’ve got patients now in about 50 countries, all through Skype and through Face Time on Mac. I catch up with patients on an almost daily basis during the week and get feedback from people that allow me to fine-tune my protocols.
If you have any questions, please come in through my YouTube channel. If you have any topics for YouTube, make sure that you let me know what topics you’d like me to speak about. Please subscribe to this channel because you’ll get a lot more videos like this coming. I look forward to you also doing my yeast infection quiz through yeastinfection.org. I think it’s probably one of the best websites currently online for Candida. We’re also working on some cyber websites as well to create a lot more information on small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
I sincerely hope this video has been of use to you in your quest to help you get on top of a SIBO infection. Just some parting words for you. You don’t need to take antibiotics to beat SIBO. You need to look at a holistic, natural approach, and that will involve eating the right kind of foods, avoiding certain types of foods, understanding the diet and lifestyle, and understanding the importance of supplementation. If you still have questions, make sure that you look at a lot more of my articles that I’ve written on SIBO. As I mentioned, I’ll be doing a specific one shortly on the “yes” foods and the “no” foods for Candida, which is going to be a perfect one also for SIBO patients.