Author: Eric Bakker

Greetings. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand and author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for checking out my video. Let’s look at the testing for dysbiosis today.

There are many different tests to determine if you’ve got dysbiosis and also what level you’ve got dysbiosis, like how good it is, how bad it is, how severe it is, so I like testing. Not because I test everybody, but testing with patients if they’re chronic and particularly if I haven’t seen them before will set a benchmark. It will give me an indication of where that patient really is, what their starting point is. It’s a bit like if you’re coming to me for weight loss. It pays to measure yourself and weigh yourself and then file that away and then dump your scales, get rid of them. I don’t like people weighing themselves every five minutes. And then let’s just have a look three or six months down the track to see what kind of changes have occurred. And it’s the same with testing. I’m not a big fan of testing all the time, but I like doing one good stool test upfront to give me a bit of a ballpark on where my patient is. It’s quite clever.

So what kind of tests can you do to determine if you’ve got dysbiosis? What’s a clever thing to do? My favorite test is the stool test. I’ve spoken about this on other videos before, but a CDSA x 3, including parasitology, comprehensive digestive stool analysis x 3, so it’s three samples, including parasites, is the gold standard for testing. These tests can vary between $300 and $500. They’re not cheap, but having crappy health long term is not cheap either. It’s going to wreck your life. You’re better off doing a really good test upfront and then getting an expert to go through the test results with you to give you an idea on what’s going on. I’m not an expert by any means. I’ve done stool testing now for 23 years. I think that I’ve got a reasonably good level of proficiency, but there are people out there that are way more expert than I am. But I’m certainly happy to interpret test results for you for a consultation fee. This is what I’ve done for a long time now. Stool tests give me a ton of information about your gut function, a ton. It’s like hooking up a modern car to a computer and analyzing the gases and the compression ratios and all these things. A good technician will get a printout and know exactly what’s happening with that car. And that’s why I like the stool test because I’ve gotten lots of very useful information. I can put it all together and come up with a very powerful protocol for dysbiosis or Candida or IBS or SIBO or whatever gut problem you’ve got.

Let’s have a look at dysbiosis and the stool test. What are we going to find? We’re often going to find low levels of beneficial bacteria. So a good stool panel will have the beneficials, the commensals, and the bad guys. Good people, bad people or ISIS, or telebomber if you want to call them, and I call them the politicians in the middle. Guys that will go either way depending on where the majority go. Not all politicians are like that. I’m not into politics. But from what I gather from politics, a political party can one day go left or one day go right depending on the majority.

I’m going to look in your stool test for three or four plus on the beneficial species. Many patients I see have got one plus and even NG, which is no growth. That is no good. You want to have lots of beneficial bacteria. If you’ve got lots of commensals or E.coli that have shifted from good into maybe not so good and low levels of beneficials, you’re going to have a likelihood of quite major SIBO on your hands and dysbiosis. The further we go down the panel, we start looking at Candida culture. Candida we look at with microscopy in the stool and also we culture the stool. If we can grow yeast from the stool, it’s bad. You shouldn’t pass out live yeast from the stool.

And then we go further. We look at another marker that I look at for SIGA or circulatory IgA. This is the body’s most abundant immunoglobulin or antibody. Your body makes up to a gram of this stuff per day in the bowel, mainly to bind with pathogens like parasites or bad cell fragments or all sorts of crap that wants to get out of the body. If you’ve got very high levels or it’s upregulated and very low levels if it’s downregulated, that gives me a lot of very important information on the kind of SIBO or dysbiosis you have.

I look at lysozyme, which is a marker for inflammation. I check mucous and red blood cells in the markers. There is a whole lot of stuff I can look at. I look at another panel at the back of the report we call short chain fatty acids, and these are a result of fermentation of beneficial bacteria. So if their levels are high or low, it tells me a lot about the colonic health. We can look at amylase or various kinds of enzymes in the stool to see how well the pancreas and other digestive organs are functioning. You can see, this is just giving you a snapshot of the complexity of the test and how much information we can get to determine where you are with your gut and how bad your dysbiosis may be.

What about the hydrogen breath test? This is another interesting test that will tell me a lot about you. They don’t do this one so much as they used to and it’s a shame because it’s a really good test. You drink this small amount lactulose, like a sugar, it’s not so bad for the gut. And then if you’ve got a lot of bacteria in your gut that will ferment this, you breathe into a tube, and we can measure a lot of hydrogen, we know you’ve got bad SIBO, small intestinal bowel overgrowth. We can also do an organic acids test. If you’ve got bad bacteria or Candida, for example, we’re going to find certain types of by-products of microbial metabolism, particularly things we call tartaric acid and arabinose. If they’re showing high amounts, we know you’ve got pretty bad Candida.

Leaky gut test is another test that they don’t do so much anymore. You drink two sugars, lactulose and mannitol, and then we can tell by what you urinate out how leaky your gut really is. There are tons of different tests we can do. But I think the stool test is about the best one you can do. It’s quite an interesting test and it’s one I would do all the time with patients from all around the world. It’s certainly the gold standard. I hope that’s given you a bit of information on testing.

Don’t expect your medical doctor to take you seriously when you talk often about SIBO or leaky gut or dysbiosis because they may just do a tiny little stool test for parasites and say, “Look, there’s nothing there.” Or they may even say to you something like, “If you’re not feeling good, we’ll put you on some antibiotics,” which is crazy. Because that’s only going to increase your amount of dysbiosis.

Functional testing to me is much more relevant if you want to determine the functional state of your gut than pathological testing that will purely look at parasites and diseases itself. And by then, it’s usually too late. You need to pick up stuff before then.

I hope that gives you a bit of useful information on testing for dysbiosis. Thanks for tuning in.

Greetings. It’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for checking out my video. We’re going to talk about testing for SIBO, so small intestinal bowel overgrowth. How do you test for it? How do you know you’ve actually got this bug?

If you know what the signs and symptoms are, you may identify with some of those that we’ve spoken about. But what are some of the medical tests we can do to determine the accuracy of our personal diagnosis? There are many tests you can do.

Breath tests have been used traditionally for some time now to measure hydrogen or methane gas that is produced by these bacteria inside. So if you breathe that out, we can measure that. But these are notoriously inaccurate, and I’ve actually given up on these tests now because I find many people, in fact, come back with false results. They can produce methane; they cannot produce methane. It’s not necessarily a 100% iron clad guarantee that they will have these bugs or even know exactly what bugs we’re dealing with.

A more accurate way to test for SIBO is a stool test. It’s a much more accurate way, and we take stool samples on three concurrent days. We can actually culture the stool and we do a microscopy, so we actually look at the stool through a microscope, and we can actually culture it in a lab in petri dishes to see what we can grow out of it. It’s a much more accurate way.

When you do these kinds of tests, you’re better off not having any pharmaceutical medications or dietary supplements that can influence the bowel, generally for about a week prior. I prefer it to work like that. And I usually let the patient eat what they feel like eating because that way we’re going to get a more true representation of what is really in the digestive system.

The first page I look at will be the bacterial panel to show me the beneficial, the commensal, and the dysbiotic, the three types of bacteria there. You should have high levels of all the healthy bacteria, the E.coli, the lactobacillus, the bifida bacteria. The various bacteria there should come back with 3 or 4 plus in a healthy stool in a stool test. Many people come back with very low levels. Enterococcus and other species I see. There are many species. We shouldn’t really see any dysbiotic bacteria. We shouldn’t be able to culture any bad ones, but with SIBO, we often culture multiple species of bad ones.

The next thing I look at will be the immunoglobulin circulatory IgA, and that should be at a healthy level. And we often see that at rock bottom levels with people with SIBO. If we want to look further, we can look at many other pages on the stool report to determine many other factors. This video is not really about stool testing, but it’s about testing for SIBO.

What you want to do also is clearly understand that many people with chronic Candida actually have chronic SIBO and Candida in combination. They have both of these infections combined, and that’s a real problem with some people. Particularly people who’ve had antibiotics recurrently. This is what I commonly find. Antibiotics will actually allow Candida to thrive and also kill off the beneficials and allow the dysbiotic bacteria to come back again along with the Candida, so they’ll have a whole mismatch of different types of bugs in their system.

The worst-case scenario when we do stool testing is multiple Candida species, low beneficial bacteria cultured, and high amounts of dysbiotic bacteria. Those are truly difficult cases to work with, and it’s taken me years of experience to work out how to deal with these patients. One of the reasons why I developed my own range of Canxida products to deal with these types of patients.

I’m going to do some videos shortly on why I don’t agree with prebiotics as part of dietary supplements. In fact, I was just listening to a very interesting podcast from Dr. Siebecker, the SIBO specialist in America, who agrees with me that prebiotics are not a good idea to add in with probiotics. And when I developed Canxida Restore, I purposely left inulin, FOS, and these other sugars out unlike other brands like Syntol, ThreeLac, Floracor-GI, all these products; they actually put prebiotics in. I’ve given up using those products now because I’ve just found that people with SIBO react too much to these products.

Just be careful what you’re taking. If you’ve got SIBO, avoid prebiotics. But testing, have a good think about it. Do my Candida quiz. That might give you an idea on Candida and dysbiosis in general. Generally, you don’t need to do a test to determine if you’ve got SIBO. A good idea for you is to take a good antifungal product to see what happens. That will be a good step in the right direction. If you start getting improvement, you know that you will have wiped out some bad bacteria.

You can do the methane or the hydrogen breath test if you want. But if you come back with negative, it’s not necessarily positive that you’ve got no bugs. I think the best way is to treat. If you’ve got the gut feeling you’ve got SIBO, just treat it. Take a good antifungal like my Canxida Remove product. Just take that for a week or two and you’ll soon know if you’ve got SIBO or not.

I hope this video was of some use to you today. Thanks for tuning in.

Greetings. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand and author of Candida Crusher, also formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. Let’s look at some dietary recommendations for dysbiosis. What you can do to help your gut restore function. This could be literally an hour-long video, but we haven’t got that much time. So we’re going to talk about some of the most important foods to eat and also some – not so much the foods to avoid – you probably already know that from some of my other videos.

There has been a lot of work completed in the last several years and research on the right kind of foods that you should really eat when it comes to improving your gut. A lot of people believe that the best way to do that is to stop sugars, yeasts, processed food, and to eat a lot of fermented and cultured foods. That’s what I used to think. In fact, it’s a load of crap because research I’ve done recently in the last few months of people who eat lots of kefir, yogurt, kumis, kimchee and Kombucha and all that sort of stuff, it’s only very temporary colonization of the gut. Putting these foods into your diet even on a regular basis is no guarantee that you’re going to get high levels of beneficial bacteria and also to colonize those high levels for long periods of time. There was plenty of research in 2013 and 2014 that has shown that to be a fact. So I’m not really pushing these high levels of cultured and fermented foods anymore in people’s diets.

I’m much more interested in how you consume these foods, how you chew them, how you eat them. Do you have one of these iPhones in your hand and are you liking people on Facebook when you’re eating food? That’s more important to me than drinking a pint of kefir every day. Are you sitting there in bed with your iPad watching stupid home videos or something at 10 o’clock at night when you should be resting? The use of electronic devices, not chewing food properly, eating too quick, to me are very, very important factors when it comes to eating and dysbiosis.

I want you to understand that you need to separate yourself from technology a lot more. Spend less time checking emails. Spend more time sitting there relaxing, taking your time to eat food, making the right kind of choices when it comes to the greens, the leafy greens. Let’s talk also more importantly, about the right kinds of oligosaccharides or beneficial sugars I want you to have in your diet when it comes to dysbiosis and SIBO.

When we use the word “sugar,” people are horrified. “I don’t want any sugar. Yeast infection; can’t eat that.” When in fact, there are a lot of sugars that are very beneficial for your gut health. Look at breast milk. Breast milk is full of oligosaccharides. Would you dare tell a mother not to feed her baby breast milk because its high in sugar and it could cause a yeast infection? No. It’s a very, very beneficial food. There are lots of popular studies now that actually show that babies who are breast fed very sweet milk have got much better immune health than kids that are put onto formula feeding.

Oligosaccharides are a particular type of sugar that is found in different kinds of fruits and vegetables. If we took a look at the FOS and GOS foods, they’re made up of oligosaccharides, Fructooligosaccharides, galactooligosaccharides, and inulin. Inulin is found a lot in foods like Jerusalem artichokes and gum Arabic. Jerusalem artichoke contains up to 65 percent inulin in its dry weight. It’s a very, very beneficial little tuber that grows into like a tall small sunflower, exceptionally good for gastrointestinal health.

These are the foods I’m going to encourage you to eat now are the FOS and GOS foods. These foods are colored, often quite dark, dark sort of purple, black sort of red colored foods. If we look at things like red onions, red cabbage, dark grapes like the black grapes, dark red, the blood red plums, for example, these are quite high in these kind of fibers. Also legumes, adzuki beans, lentils in making these Indian dahl dishes up, quite good to do. These foods are beneficial for gut health. Potatoes are okay if you have the dark purple colored potato and just have a small amount in your diet and boil them, cool them, and add them to salads. Red carrots, purple carrots, even better. Very good to eat. Green tea, another food very beneficial. It contains the polyphenols that are good for gut health.

There are tons of different kinds of foods you can eat that improve your digestive health. But just make sure that you’re eating a large arrangement of these colored vegetables in your diet and incorporate them slowly into your diet. Don’t put large amounts in at once because that’s going to upset you again and it could potentially cause a lot of gas and pain, so go slow to start with. Sprouted grains are a very good addition to your diet.

I like eating lots of leafy greens in spring, in particular, when they’re coming out of winter. In New Zealand here, we’re now in August. September we’re coming into springtime, which will probably be fall for you guys in the States. That’s when I start eating a larger amount of rocket, Mizuna, beetroot leaves, spinach, broccoli greens, all those things really go into a big salad. I put large amounts of lemon juice and olive oil on that, some black olives, and I usually have a big salad like that every day. And it’s a great way also to cleanse the gut from the kind of heavy casserole foods that we’ve eaten over the wintertime.

Look at the different foods that are growing in your region at that time of the year. It’s crazy here in New Zealand, people are going to eat mangos in the middle of wintertime, or pineapples bought in Ecuador right when it’s freezing cold. It doesn’t make sense to do that. I prefer to eat the kind of foods grown in our region at that particular time of year. They’re going to be much higher in vitamins and minerals and minimally processed, and they haven’t been stored or ripened with gases or things like that.

I’ve got no problem with you eating cultured or fermented foods, but just don’t think that they’re the be all end all. Because I’ve had too many patients on kefir for years with minimal outcomes. But when I started moving patients into the FOS and GOS foods, I was noticing big changes in people. And that was also the time I started encouraging people to eat sourdough bread. I’ve gotten a lot of flak for that on the internet that I should be going 100 percent gluten free. But I’ve never believed that going 100 percent gluten free for everyone is going to save the world. I would rather people seek out alcohol free than gluten free. But most people aren’t prepared to do that.

Sourdough rye bread is a very beneficial food for the gut. It contains these particular sugars that feed the gut up. And another food you might like to try is dark cacao or the raw cacao powder is a good food as well. Green plantain bananas excellent for the gut. Yellow bananas are too high in sugar, cause bloating and gas, especially bad for SIBO and dysbiosis. But green bananas, especially the plantain ones that the people in the islands eat, cook them in coconut milk, very beneficial for the gut health. Are you getting the picture now on the right kind of foods to eat? Grapes, no problem, because you only have a small amount and you have the dark purple grapes. Very good to eat.

I hope that gives you some insight. Send me some feedback on YouTube if you want and watch my other videos. There are plenty of videos for you to watch on the Candida Crusher channel. Thanks for tuning in.