Author: Eric Bakker

Greetings! Thanks for coming back to check out the series on IBS. We’re going to talk about the signs and symptoms of IBS or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The most common sign I would see in a patient or when a patient presents with a symptom will be abdominal pain or cramping. That can occur anywhere in the lower abdominal region.

Don’t get confused with the pain of diverticulitis and IBS. Diverticulitis in my opinion occurs a little bit more on the left side here. So, if the bowel runs across like this and comes down and goes out like that, we’re looking at an area or spot right around here. So, if you’ve got a pain in one particular part of the gut, and it’s just a very low grade dull kind of a pain, particularly if you’re in your 50s or 60s like me, it can also be a diverticulitis kind of pain. This pain can come and go. This pain is particularly prevalent in people who tend to hurry up with their bowel motions. They force their bowel motions. They could have a little bit of stress. Sympathetic dominance. Bit of a dry bowel. Not consuming enough water.

Especially common to find diverticulitis in people who drink a lot of coffee or a lot of alcohol. People who have a dehydrated bowel. I find it very common in thyroid patients who tend to be very quick and irritated kind of people.

The pain with IBS is a different kind of pain. It’s accompanied often by irregular stools. Constipation, diarrhea, cramping in the gut recurring. If you’ve had it for over three months on a very regular basis, it’s considered to be IBS. It’s important if you’ve got any of these signs and symptoms that you talk to a healthcare professional about it, particularly if you’ve got things like rectal bleeding or bad hemorrhoids, or a lot of mucus in the stool, if you’ve got weight loss associated with it or if the pain wakes you up at night, then you need to see a GP urgently or talk to somebody like me about it so you can get properly assessed.

I believe I’m a responsible naturopath because I work very much with gastroenterologists and medical doctors. I really believe that it’s important to get the bowel assessed professionally, especially if a stool test is going to pick up high levels of inflammation, and there’s a bit of bleeding, you’ve got a low iron count, you’ve got weight loss, weakness, you definitely need checking out. Prevention is definitely a smart idea when it comes to digestive problems.

Remember in a previous video we said there were three kinds of IBS. IBSD: Irritable Bowel Syndrome Diarrhea, IBSC: Irritable Bowel Syndrome Constipation, or mixed, where you can have them both. It’s not uncommon to see mixed patients in the clinic who for a few days will have a normal functioning bowel, then for one or two days it’ll be quite loose. Or they could pass out sheep pellets. Then they may skip a day.

I’ll never forget when a patient came to see me a long time ago, maybe 20 years ago and I asked her how often she was passing a motion. She said, “About once every 14 days.” I said, “Well, what did your GP say about that?” “He said it was quite okay if that was my pattern, that’s normal to have a bowel motion every two weeks and that was okay for me.” My immediate reply was, “Well, how often do you put your garbage can out? Once every three months?” “No, every week.” I said, “Well, imagine all the crap built up in your gut. What happens to it all? How much are you eating? Where’s it all going?”

That made her quite horrified. That patient went straight off to a colon therapist. Sometimes these patients (hope you’re not watching this video as you’re eating your breakfast, if so, turn it off). Sometimes these kind of patients will pass out a stool that’s two-foot long. Literally 24 inches of bowel motion will come out when they get a colonic and we clean them out.

It’s incredible how many people are constipated. It really is. Particularly with my American clients. I would say about 50 percent of people I see in my online clinic, through Skype, have actually got quite major constipation. They’ll have a motion every two or three days. That’s not unusual for a lot of people. That tells me a few things: They’re not walking enough, they’re not drinking enough, there’s too much coffee, tea and alcohol, they’ve got the wrong food choices, and there’s a high element of stress there as well. Those are quite apparent when we talk about these kind of issues with our clients.

Let’s go back to signs and symptoms. Constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating, cramping. Some people have spasms or shooting or darting pains up their rectum or in the gut. Pattern that will go on for three months. Sometimes these problems can go on for years. Get it assessed, get it checked out. If in doubt, get a comprehensive stool test done. Stay tuned, we’ve got a few more videos coming yet up on IBS. Tests and diagnosis for IBS. If you haven’t got my free Candida report, please click on the link down below. See you in the next video.

Greetings! Eric Bakker back again. This is the last video I’m doing in the irritable bowel syndrome series. I just completed a video on best foods to eat. There’s a whole lot of videos in this series, so if you haven’t seen them, I’d like you to go back and look at all of them, because I think if you’ve got IBS you can get a lot of good knowledge. What is IBS? Causes of IBS, tests and diagnosis, best diet, best treatment, best supplements. Check out these videos. I make these videos and take my time out on a Sunday just so you can get this kind of knowledge – stuff that I teach my patients. I appreciate there are a lot of people who can’t afford to see me. I’m quite prepared to give a lot of free information away for people. It’s awesome to see people recover. It’s fantastic and that’s the best part of my job is to get someone back saying, “My life’s changed.” I really like that.

So, what foods should you avoid with IBS? Well, if you’ve got IBS right now, what I want you to do is to get a piece of paper and I want you to write down all the foods you’re eating. It’s not hard to do. Might take you 10-20 minutes. Instead of watching your favorite soap opera or football match or whatever you do, think about not procrastinating longer with the IBS but actually doing something about it. Get a piece of paper, write down all the foods that you eat, all the beverages that you have.

What I want you to do is I want you to get one of these. What’s that? It’s not a piece of candy. That is a highlighting pen. So what you do is you open it and then you have a really critical look at that piece of paper. You highlight all the foods that you know you shouldn’t be having. I’ll do it right now. I’ve just highlighted my foods. Look at that. Chocolate, ice cream, candy, Coca-Cola, rum and coke. I know I shouldn’t be having those. I’ve been a naughty boy. But you get my point; I’m just being a bit silly at the moment.

The point I’m making is if you’ve been honest to yourself and you’ve written out that list everything you eat and drink, then the highlighter should reveal at least six if not more choices on that list that you know you shouldn’t have. Then why the hell are you having them? Your bowel’s irritated. Why are you having these foods and drinks for? Think about it. “But I only have a piece of chocolate once a week. I only have a bag of chippies once a week when I’m watching my rugby game. I only have XYZ food here and there.” It’s not the point. The point is you want to recover. If you want to recover, you need to harden the bleep up. You need to make choices. The choices are either going to work for you or against you. It’s your call.

Now, if you haven’t already clicked off this video because you feel annoyed by me, you’ll be surprised how many times a person has said to me, “The best advice you gave me was for me to analyze my diet very carefully and be totally honest with myself.” Because I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself. If you’re going to seek help with IBS and you haven’t been very honest with yourself and made a critical assessment of your diet and made strong choices. You know what to eat. No one has to tell you to avoid sweets, to avoid ice cream, to avoid Coke, to avoid take away food, all that sort of junky crappy stuff in your diet.

The best foods to eat in my previous video were more about a full recovery from IBS. This one is the food that you should avoid that are going to aggravate you. That’s point number A. Avoid the stuff that you know is not going to do you good. You don’t need your husband or your wife or your son or daughter, or Jesus or whoever to tell you that. You should know that in your own mind what to avoid. So now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s have a look at foods that you should avoid. That’s the big point is stuff that you know you should avoid but you’re still having anyway.

When you eat a food, the food’s either going to make you feel okay, make you feel good, or make you feel not so good. When you get older like me, you should have developed some kind of an intuition or sixth sense about a food. I know myself that I feel really good when I have rolled oats in the morning. I get high quality rolled oats. I just cook them in spring water and that’s my breakfast every morning. For lunch every day, I have a similar kind of lunch where Tracy and I will have a stir-fry dish either with tofu or it’ll be egg or it’ll be chicken (some kind of protein) and a whole lot of garden grown vegetables and sprouts go through that. That’s our lunch every day. For dinner at night, we usually have some kind of protein and we’ll have quinoa. We’ll have some kind of steamed vegetable or a baked vegetable dish. It’ll be eggs again, be protein dish.

I’ve learned an important thing I want to really talk with you now, and that’s inappropriate snacking with IBS. Please watch my video on stopping the late night snacking. When you’ve had your dinner at night and you’re sitting down and watching TV, or reading a book or going on Facebook or doing whatever you do. This is the danger time with IBS patients. Be careful not to inappropriately snack. Stick with your three meals per day. If you’re going to snack, try not to do it after dinner at night, because this can upset your tummy when you’re sleeping. You’re better off having a snack in the afternoon, say around two or three o’clock.

A good thing to do after your dinner is to go for a walk. Come home, have a glass of water, have a shower and then relax and then go to bed. Break up your ritual, because this will stop inappropriate snacking. If you’ve eaten a food, and you feel it doesn’t sit right in your gut, make a note of that food. Couple of days later, have that food again. If again you think, “It doesn’t sit right with me,” you want to avoid the food. The other thing that you want to do also if you’re unsure is the Dr. Coca pulse test. Check that out online. C-o-c-a Coca pulse test. That could give you also a bit of an insight into foods that could be really problematic for you.

There’s no hard and fast rules on foods to eat and foods to avoid, but common sense prevails. Avoid what aggravates you and eat what makes you feel good. No inappropriate snacking, healthy clean food choices and avoid processed foods. This is the big one guys. Stuff in cans, packages, frozen dinners, basically the stuff in the supermarket is not conducive for good gut health. Unless it’s fresh, I would recommend you don’t eat it. I prefer to cook all my meals from scratch. I grow most of my own vegetables now. I prefer not to buy any processed food at all. The only thing I would get in a can would be sardines or maybe some chickpeas if I’m lazy, or maybe some canned tomatoes, but I don’t really eat anything in tins. Everything’s freshly made. I think it’s paid off with great gut health.

That’s what I want to say to you. What to avoid is stuff you know that you shouldn’t be having, and processed foods, takeaway foods, snacky kind of biscuits and stuff like that. Avoid all that. Eat fresh stuff. It’s going to make a big difference with IBS. I hope you’ve enjoyed my series on IBS. Most of it’s common sense. There’s no space-age information here.

If you’re not a subscriber to my channel and you’ve watched my series, please subscribe. I do appreciate the feedback and the comments I’m getting. I look forward to catching up with you guys in the future. Click on the link down below if you haven’t already got my free Candida report. Thanks for tuning in.

Greetings! Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. Thanks for checking out this video in the Irritable Bowel Syndrome series. If this is the first video that you’ve seen in the series, please be sure to check out the other videos. There’s about seven or eight videos in the series, so it’s well worth you checking them all out.

This video, we’re going to talk about the best supplementation for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. As I mentioned, if you haven’t seen the videos previously, go check them out, especially the one “What is IBS?” and “Causes of IBS.” Then you’ll understand more about why I’m recommending the supplements that I do.

It’s true that around 75 to 80 percent of people with IBS have got some kind of a gut dysfunction that’s quite major. And a lot of people that we see have got SIBO or Candida or a parasite problem. They actually have some kind of a trigger – some kind of a pathogen or bug. You can’t really call Candida a pathogen or a lot of bacteria because they live in harmony in our gut. But, for one or many different reasons, this balance can become disturbed. You can get an overgrowth, and that overgrowth can even lead to infection, and that infection can often lead to inflammation. That inflammation can really irritate the bowel quite a lot.

Many people take things like turmeric or ginger, different anti-inflammatories to work on this pathway called a COX-2 inhibitor to reduce that inflammatory response. It makes more sense to me to assess the gut and eradicate any overgrowth, rather than to primarily deal with inflammation to reduce the pain you get in the bowel. I think the best supplements to take are the ones that help to get the balance back again of the bacteria in the gut to start with. That help to curb any Candida overgrowth and help to eliminate and wipe out parasites in the bowel.

For that reason, I created my CanXida range of products. I did not only create the CanXida products for Candida. You may see the word CanXida and think Candida, but CanXida is perfect for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. There are three products in the CanXida range, CanXida Remove, CanXida Restore, CanXida Rebuild. Those are the three main ones, which I think will be important for you if you have IBS or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. They’re also excellent for people with IBD, or Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which I’ll create some videos in that series as well.

What we want to achieve with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and supplementation, we want to achieve a microbial balance. We want to eradicate stuff that’s not supposed to be there in large numbers. We want to improve the beneficial bacteria. We want to get those counts up. We want to facilitate or assist and help the stomach to work more efficiently. The pancreas, the small intestine. We want foods to be able to be broken down properly, so they can ferment further down in the gut and stop creating things like gas, bloating and pain.

Many people have issues with food intolerances with IBS. Meaning, they have an enzymatic issue – they can’t break disaccharides down properly. This is why I created CanXida Restore to be very efficient, containing multiple enzymes that work on different kinds of carbohydrates. Some work on the short chains, some will work on the long chains. Taking CanXida Restore will give you significant improvement and help to reduce pain, gas and bloating.

The CanXida Remove will eradicate and help to get rid of a lot of different bugs in the body. It’s been used very successful with people in about 40 different countries. We’re getting incredibly good reviews with IBS patients right now on that product.

The CanXida Rebuild is a multi-vitamin I created with eight different herbs in it, which is going to inhibit microbes. It’s a perfect supplement to take one per day on a very long term basis of 12 months. It’s going to help to give the cells in the body nutrition when they’re under stress from Irritable Bowel Syndrome. When there’s inflammation. When you’ve got issues with enzymes for example not breaking food down properly and resolving them.

The Rebuild and the Restore work particularly well together. Remove, Restore, Rebuild is the triad of products that I recommend for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Check it out at CanXida.com. Thanks for tuning in. We’re going to do another video now on foods to eat for IBS. Catch up with you then.