Author: Eric Bakker

Thank you for checking out this video today. I’ve got a question from a person in America. What is the difference between a white tongue and having oral thrush? Are they the same? Is there any difference between them both?

Yes. There are some similarities there, but let me first explain what having oral thrush is. Oral thrush really is a yeast infection of the oral cavity. It’s generally Candida Albicans. What are some of the causes of oral thrush?

Babies are more prone to having oral thrush. People who wear dentures, especially if they’re not fitting that well or if a person sleeps with dentures overnight. They could be rubbing on different parts inside the mouth causing a bit of discomfort. Those are things that can make the mucosal wall in the mouth around the gums more susceptible to a yeast infection. Taking antibiotics, especially recurring antibiotics. Sometimes dry mouth syndrome. There are some diseases, for example, Shogun’s Syndrome, an autoimmune disease where a person can have lack of saliva production that can predispose you toward a yeast infection.

Certain chemotherapy drugs or certain medications like anti-psychotic medications can dry out the mouth, or antidepressants. These can make you more prone to having oral thrush. Being a diabetic. There are many reasons. Even lack of sufficient vitamin B12 or folic acid or iron can predispose you to oral thrush. It’s not that uncommon and many of us from time to time may have had a little bit of thrush here or there in the mouth, sort of white spots. If you go to Google and type in “oral thrush image search,” you’ll see pictures of oral thrush.

A white tongue is a bit different, however. A white tongue may involve Candida, but often it will involve dysbiosis or a problem with a person’s digestive system further down. Let’s analyze this. What white tongue means and look at some of the causes of this and how we can remedy this.

The way to remedy oral thrush, obviously, is to understand the causes and make sure that we nip these in the bud. If we prevent the causes, we know we prevent the event. White tongue, however, if you’re a smoker, you could be more prone to a white or yellow tongue. Again, certain medications can color the tongue. Certain foods can create problems, but there is common white tongue on a person as if they’ve got poor bacterial levels in their gut.

I often see it with low stomach acid. One of the causes. One of the primary causes would be a problem with stomach acidity, especially the upper stomach or the upper digestive system and the stomach, I should say. Pancreatic insufficiency, so a problem with the pancreas. You will find that if you improve the person’s digestion with enzymes, often that will help the tongue significantly. Improper diet. Eating the wrong kind of foods. A lot of starchy and floury foods can predispose you toward that. Sugary foods. These also encourage bacterial levels, which are not really desired. So bad bacteria in combination with some Candida in the gut will invariably cause that.

I’ve previously done a video showing you different parts of the tongue and different areas of the digestive system that are affected, but I’ll go over that once again for your understanding. The tip of the tongue represents the stomach. The middle part of the tongue represents the small intestine. The rear part of the tongue represents the colon. If you poke out your tongue and have a look, if you’ve got discoloration at the back of the tongue, it’s going to represent more problems further down the GI tract.

If you’ve got cracked tongue, it represents heat or too much strength in the digestive system. I see this often with people who eat spicy foods or drink too much alcohol. In Chinese medicine, we call it “too much heat” or “too much fire” in the digestive system, so you need to eat more cooling foods and reduce alcohol.

Problems with the edges of the tongue will often mean liver problems. Thick flabby tongue will often mean liver. Yellow-coated tongue often liver or gall bladder dysfunction. White colored tongue, dysbiosis. Think about small intestinal bowel overgrowth.

I hope that answers your question. Thank you.

Thanks for tuning into this video today. I often get asked different questions regarding why medical doctors don’t pick up or diagnose Candida in their patients. Here’s a question I got asked recently from a patient. Eric, what are the key reasons why medical doctors so often miss the Candida diagnosis?
You have to understand that western medicine is practiced entirely different from the way that natural medicine, health care professionals like myself work.
They tend to have the pharmaceutical interests at heart. When you think of the pharmaceutical industry, it tends to dominate medical practice. It dominates because of many different reasons. Pharmaceutical profits tend to be very, very big and, in fact, the pharmaceutical industry and the chemical industry, in particular, tend to have the highest profits of any industry globally currently. When that kind of money is on the table, a lot of common sense really goes down the toilet, in my opinion. All the effort really goes into symptom prescribing, not in addressing the causation.

What’s the point in fixing people up and addressing causes? If you fix causes up, you don’t have any more symptoms to treat. It sounds a bit cynical. I can tell you now; I’ve spent over half my life in health care. I’ve worked in many medical centers and I believe this to be a fact. Let’s look at the four key reasons why medical doctors tend to ignore the Candida diagnosis.

One of them apart from these four reasons is that Candida really is a functional problem. It’s not exactly pathology. Most patients we’ve seen don’t show very strong signs and symptoms of a disease as such, but they have functional problems. They have things like bloating, gas. They have headaches. They have fatigue. They might have blurry vision or brain fog. And when test results don’t come back showing anything positive, the doctor’s going to say, “Go home. Just take an aspirin or take an anti-depressant. They’re nothing wrong with you.”

Doctors prescribe drugs that cause Candida. That’s number one. When you’re actually giving an antibiotic or allowing a woman to remain on the oral contraceptive pill, you’re actually playing into Candida with many patients. Antibiotics are the scourge of medicine in my opinion. They’re a terrible drug and they create a lot of disease in their own right. We’ve got now the age of the “superbugs.” We’ve even got diseases, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. There’s an incredible amount of antibiotics that go into the food chain as well as into humans through the way of pharmaceutical prescribing.
When you’re giving a drug that causes Candida or has a potential to cause it, it’s almost like you’re selling alcohol and turning a blind eye to the violence and carnage caused by alcohol. You’re really responsible for something. If you’re responsible for causing something, why are you going to turn around then and try to remedy that? Think about that. That’s number one.

Number two. Patients have to be diagnosed before they can be treated. As I mentioned earlier on, if you can’t diagnose a disease, if you’re a doctor, you can’t treat the disease. We don’t care so much about diagnoses as naturopaths. We just tend to treat patients. We always look for the causes and try to eliminate the reasons why people get sick, and we allow the body to heal itself. We don’t always have to know exactly what name a disease has when we treat somebody. We tend to treat the dysfunctional lifestyle patterns and the terrible diets many people have, and we allow nature to take its course. Isn’t it common sense?

Number three. Doctors disallow a patient’s subjective feelings. This is very common. It’s very important for me to listen very carefully to what a patient tells me. For this reason, a new client will take an hour often because I need to let that person talk about how she feels, what she’s eating, what her lifestyle is like. In a five or ten minute slot in a medical clinic, you don’t really allow people any time to open up and share their subjective feelings with you. Subjective feelings are not important to most doctors. It’s the objective that’s important to them. What they can see. What they can test. What they can prove for their own eyes and their own brain what’s wrong with the patient. When you think about it, the patients almost become like a bystander or a participant in a game the doctor’s playing to get rid of their disease. Instead of actively participating in their own healing, it’s taken away from them because they’re given drugs. There’s a lot of collateral damage that goes on, that kind of carnage.

The fourth one. Doctor’s work with normal ranges of testing prescribed for symptoms. Medical doctors always test. They have to test. They like to test because then they’re trying to push the results back to the normal range. The ranges, in my opinion, vary dramatically from patient to patient. Many doctors get trapped in a cycle of just treating paper instead of people, and that’s a real trap. In a lot of the cases, patients don’t even need testing when it comes to functional or digestive disorders. You need to carefully listen to what’s going on with them and make changes where changes need to be made. Experience helps.
When you’ve treated a lot of people, you generally have developed a sixth sense and you will know how to get people right. Test results sometimes don’t really pan out. I often use the phrase “paralysis from analysis.” If you’re just treating paper, you’re forgetting there’s a living person in front of you.

Those are four reasons why medical doctors often miss the Candida diagnosis. Candida is very real. We’ve read many different studies even in prestigious mainstream like the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. We know that Candida exists. Just like we know adrenal fatigue exists, but often medical people pay no attention to syndromes. They’d rather treat symptoms instead.

I hope that answers your question about why doctors don’t recognize Candida as a condition that needs treating. Thanks for tuning in.

Thanks for checking out this great video today. I think you’re going to enjoy this video, particularly if you’ve been struggling with Candida for a long, long time.

Many people have this idea that if you change your diet and eat specific foods, you’re going to cure Candida. Other people have got this idea that if you take antifungals, just pop a few probiotics, antifungals; you’re going to cure Candida. Other people have this idea if you take one of these chitin inhibitors like Lufenuron; you’re going to cure Candida. Everyone has got their own take on curing Candida.

What a lot of people don’t look at are some of the major factors, underpinning reasons, why people continue on with Candida infections. Where they go from one infection to another or they relapse. They’ll partially get better, and then they’ll get sick again. I see this a lot with patients. Patients who come back to me even five or ten years after treatment and they’re still back in the Candida phase again. Why is this so? Why do some people get cured quickly and easily and other people five or ten years down the track still struggle with sickness? They’re just not getting well.

This video doesn’t just relate to Candida. You can actually draw parallels with this video with a whole raft of different types of conditions that affect people. Whether it’s heart disease, diabetes, any kind of autoimmune disease. The chief thing I want you to remember that keeps us alive is our immune system. A strong, viable, healthy immune system will keep us in a very good state. In my book, I wrote about this quite extensively about resistance, how we’ve become more susceptible to certain things and how we can become more resistant to things. So it’s basically a seesaw.

Let’s talk about the three key things underpinning the immune status, which are responsible for making us feel really well or feel really sick. One of the key things I want you to think about initially is your nutritional status. You all know about this in terms of our diet. Eating the right kind of foods. The right kind of foods are going to supply us, obviously, with the micronutrients that we require to feel well. We know about proteins in our diet, about carbohydrates, about fats, about vitamins, minerals, and all these nutritional contingent factors we need to build robust good health.

The smallest trace elements are critically important for our vitality and to keep us alive. The tiniest little things that we need in our diet, very small amounts of copper, selenium. It’s not just about the big macro elements like calcium and magnesium, but also the tiniest of elements. We might only need them in microgram amounts, but they’re crucial for survival.

I once saw a drawing of this huge big jumbo jet and there was a big arrow pointing towards the tiny rubber wheels saying without this rubber wheel on this massive big 360-ton aircraft, the plane’s going to go nowhere. It’s not going to be able to take off or land. And even though that rubber makes up a tiny amount of that aircraft, it’s crucial for passenger’s safety, just like a tiny bit of a trace element that’s in your diet is crucial for your well-being. It’s not all about the big wings and the body. It’s also about the tiniest elements that we need in small amounts.

These can be often hard to get from the diet. That’s why it’s important for us to eat a wide variety of high quality organic fruits and vegetables. I prefer to grow all my own vegetables these days, and I find the taste is incomparable. If you’ve got any garden space and you can grow something like spinach or kale or broccoli, it’s very worthwhile doing that. It’s a great exercise. It’s something I highly encourage you to do. Also some clean meats, if you are a meat-eater like me. Clean free-range poultry. I like to catch my own fish when I can, fresh fish. You may have a clean source of poultry like free-range eggs or chicken or good quality fish, maybe some beef or some venison or some animals that you know that are clean. These are all important things to include in your diet. Nutritional status is everything when it comes to building robust good health. Ensuring that the digestive organs are functioning optimally, the stomach, the pancreas, the small intestine, large intestine, the liver, all those organs need to function quite well. But that’s not really the topic of this video today.

We’re going to look at the immune status. The second thing I want you to look at and understand is how stress underpins immune function for many, many of my clients. They have low cortisol levels. They have adrenal fatigue. They have thyroid dysfunctions. A lot of these endocrine malfunctions come about because of our imbalanced lifestyles today. Not sleeping enough. Working too hard. Stressing too much. Deadlines. Too much time on computers, on Facebook, things like that. Most of this is really self-punishment. You can see some of my other videos on adrenal fatigue. I explain a bit more in those videos how the key hormones, when they are basically in hyper drive or they’re way insufficient, it’s going to create a huge amount of immune dysfunction with us. And this is the hidden source of immune dysfunction is chronic, low grade, unremitting stress. Nobody talks about it. Nobody does anything about it. Everyone’s concerned about diets and gluten-free this, but no one is concerned about relaxing more and chilling out more. That’s a key thing.

The third point is the toxic status. You can have the nutrients there, but as an expert told me recently, you can also have nutrient blocks. Nutrient blocks are when a nutrient is available, but for some reason, a toxin blocks this nutrient, really jams up the site. A typical one we will see would be, for example, if we look at zinc and copper in your body and you’ve also got elements of mercury or lead arsenic, or cadmium floating around in the system. This can come from smoking. It can come from past smoking. It can even come from living near a highway where you’re breathing in fumes, and those fumes could contain elements of rubber from tires because cars shed that into the air. We know that contains large amounts of cadmium.

Cadmium is a great block for zinc in the body. You’re going to block zinc. You’re going to block copper. The sites on cells that take up these metals, zinc and copper, also compete for heavy metals. Dental fillings. There are many different ways you can get heavy metals into your body. Through the food. Through the water. Through the air. Getting a regular hair analysis maybe once per annum is quite a smart move to assess what kind of heavy metal burdens you’ve got. Because you will have a heavy metal burden, we just need to determine to what degree it’s causing a problem and what imbalances are being caused by chemical levels there as well as a result of those toxins.

That’s the three core things which I think are important to talk about when it comes to immune status. That is the nutrients have to be correct and you have to be able to uptake them and excrete the waste properly. The stresses, you need to understand the relationship between stress and your immune function. Very important point is point number two. It’s completely overlooked by most practitioners I know. And the third point, of course, is the toxic status.

Most people focus on point one and three, but nobody looks at point two. In my book, Candida Crusher, I write a huge amount about that particular section, so I’d like you to check that out on yeastinfection.org or if you’ve got the time and inclination, read my book, which I think will be an eye-opener for you and for a lot of people who don’t really understand that stress and poor immune connection with Candida.

I hope that answers a few questions for you, this video, that you got some useful information out of it. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye. Bye.