Author: Eric Bakker

Thank you for tuning in. Is SIBO Candida? What is SIBO? Small intestinal bowel overgrowth, SIBO. That’s what SIBO is. SIBO basically means that your body is being affected internally by an overgrowth in the digestive system of bacteria that are generally not beneficial.

There are many different types of bacteria in our digestive system that create many different types of actions. The unfortunate thing with some of the bad bacteria is that it can have really bad effects in our small and large intestine, particularly when they’re an overgrowth. Some of them, for example, can help to break down bile salts, the things that the body produces to break fats down. You’ll notice I’ve spoken before on some YouTube clips that when you’ve had a bowel motion, check the water. Flush the toilet first, have a bowel motion, and check the water around the motion. If you see an oil slick on there, that can be a lack of bile salts, something I commonly see people with a lot of gas and bloating. For example, they may have bacteria that are responsible for that.

Other people have certain bad bacteria that can produce toxins that can affect the lining of the small or large bowel, and these toxins can create all sorts of problems. They can create brain fog and fatigue. They can create memory loss. And many people actually think that they’ve got die off when, in fact, they’ve got SIBO. Other kinds of bacteria can ramp up inflammation, reduce immunity, and create all these immune byproducts that make you feel pretty sick and toxic.

Your digestive system relies on many different types of things to help it along. It needs enzymes. And if you look in the small bowel, particularly, you’ll find that there are muscles and nerves and neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are just basically hormones, chemicals in there. The enzymes help to break the food down, whereas, the nerves, muscles and neurotransmitters help to move food along. Along with it, they take bacteria to the areas of the colon, particularly where they’re beneficial.

When there’s a problem with this process, if we lack enzymes or we have a problem with our nerves or muscles or neurotransmitters, we can end up with quite bad SIBO. We will see this, for example, with inflammatory bowel disease. With Crohn’s or colitis, we often see SIBO. We’ll see this with bowel surgery. We’ll see it with people with diverticulitis, with bowel pockets. People who have had back injuries, for example or they’ve had a crash where they’ve injured part of their digestive system. All these things can create SIBO.

One of the most common causes of SIBO, obviously, is antibiotics and too much sugar in the diet. An imbalance of the refined carbohydrates, way too many refined carbs, sugars. You can see a lot of YouTube clips about how devastating sugar is. By 2040, one-third of America will have diabetes and part of this reason is just sugar. People have just gone crazy with sugar. The government is just subsidizing all these companies to the tune of billions of dollars a year and just fueling this whole process up.

If there’s anything you can get out of this video today, it is watch out for sugar in your diet. Six hundred and fifty thousand individual food items produced in American supermarkets contain 80 percent refined sugar as in added. You really want to try to do more like what I’m doing is trying to make your own food.

Cook your own food. Grow your own vegetables, if you can, salad vegetables at least. Eat basic things like good proteins and plenty of vegetables. Drink a lot of water. Cut down on stuff. Get rid of sodas out or your life, all this sort of junk. This is what creates SIBO.

Let’s look at some of the signs and symptoms of SIBO. In fact, when I say these signs and symptoms, you’ll think “Hang on a minute, Eric, this is Candida.” It’s funny because people often confuse SIBO and Candida and, in fact, both of them overlap. What I want you to think of is one SIBO circle and one Candida circle, and when they overlap, there’s a third circle. Most people I see are in that intermediate circle. They’ve got elements of SIBO and Candida.

The difference with Candida versus SIBO is people with a Candida overgrowth tend to have a predominance of Candida Albicans. People with SIBO tend to have more of the intestinal bacteria, the dysbiosis. But generally you’ll find that when a person’s had SIBO for a while, they develop Candida as well and vice versa. People with bad Candida end up with SIBO. How do I know that? I know that through doing many, many stool tests on patients and examining the results. Let’s have a look at Candida and SIBO now a little bit side by side in terms of the signs and symptoms.

SIBO, typically you’re going to find things like bloating, constipation and diarrhea, food sensitivities (very common). You’re going to find increased incidents of poor immune function with these people. Brain fog is par for the course.

With Candida, we’re going to get similar things, but we’re going to get a very strong craving for sugar on top of that. We’re going to get potentially more itching, itchy skin. Particularly, people I find who crave sugar after a meal; these are typical Candida patients I will see. But sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish one from the other. How we can pick it more easily are the overt signs and symptoms like the vaginal thrush and the jock itch, itchiness of the body.

If you get my book, Candida Crusher, you can actually see the eight different home tests that I recommend to determine if you’ve got Candida or not. If you do those tests, the itch test, the smell test, the sound test, the spit test, and various other tests. If you do those at home, it’ll give you a pretty good idea whether you’ve got Candida or not. You don’t have to spend a whole lot of money to determine whether you have Candida or not.

If you’ve got SIBO or Candida, the treatment is similar for both of these cases. I would treat them the same. I’m going to use an antifungal/antibacterial on SIBO as well as Candida. I’m going to be looking at eliminations from the diet of the allergy-forming foods. I’m probably going to clean the patient up for a week or two prior to putting them into a diet to stop them from crashing really bad. And I’m probably going to look at a long-term dietary recovery program. But the most important thing with SIBO and Candida recovery is the lifestyle. I’m going to look at the kind of things the patient’s doing right now that are contributing to this ongoing mess that they’ve got themselves into.

And this is something that most practitioners don’t do. They just do treatment. They don’t do a long-term maintenance phase with these patients, so the recurrence is there. This is how some practitioners make their money. They make their money by treating people. People get reasonably well. They come back with the same problem and they keep treating them. I don’t think that’s right. I think it’s about getting the lifestyle right. When the lifestyle is right, the digestive system becomes right. When the digestive system becomes right, the whole health of the patient improves.

I hope you took some of that onboard, but remember the take home message. Sugar, watch the sugar in the diet because I believe that’s the numero uno cause of SIBO. Are SIBO and Candida infections similar? They are and sometimes it’s difficult to understand one from the other.

I hope that gives you a bit of an insight into SIBO versus Candida. Thanks for tuning in. Have a great day.

Thanks for checking out my video. Is saccharomyces boulardii beneficial for Candida? Will it help me with my yeast infection?

Saccharomyces boulardii is actually beneficial yeast. It’s a variant from another kind of beneficial yeast called saccharomyces cerevisiae. It was discovered in 1920 by a French microbiologist in Indochina. What he noticed is he noticed that the people living in this country who were drinking a kind of tea weren’t getting sick from cholera, where other people who weren’t drinking the tea were.

This particular tea contained mangosteen and the skins from lychees and different fruits. It was like a cultured tea. And when he analyzed the tea, he found it had a very unusual kind of yeast in it called saccharomyces and he put that down to the fact these people didn’t get sick because of this tea. And he said the yeast had some beneficial effect on them.

Why is saccharomyces so good? Saccharomyces is a particular kind of a bug that likes our body temperature, 98.6 F or 37.4 C. It thrives in that temperature. It grows quite rapidly. Unlike other kinds of yeast, it doesn’t penetrate cell walls and become a systemic problem like Candida Albicans. It’s a beneficial yeast. People seem to think because it’s a yeast, it’s bad, but it’s not. It’s actually quite beneficial.

It is proven in in vitro and in vivo studies that it’s very beneficial against a wide range of pathogens, including Candida Albicans, Staphylococcus aureus, Entamoeba histolytica, the list goes on and on and on. It’s proven to have very powerful beneficial effects. And because it’s a yeast, it can’t be killed by antibiotics. It’s particularly good for traveler’s diarrhea and has many different effects on both aspects of our immunity, on the cell mediated response or first line defense or the humoral response, the secondary defense which produces antibodies. It’s a very, very, very good yeast to have when you’ve got a Candida yeast infection.

Go slow to start with and I think you’ll find it to be an excellent adjunct to your diet. I hope that answers your question. Thanks for tuning in.

Thanks for checking out my video. A question I get asked from time to time. I get asked about fermented and cultured foods. Patients often ask me is Kefir any good for thrush? Is it any good for a yeast infection? Will it be beneficial for me? How do I take it? How do I make it? What does it taste like?

I’m going to do over time a series of different videos on Kefir and explain a little bit more about it, but Kefir is quite an interesting substance. The name Kefir really originates from the Caucasus region in Russia from the 1880s. Like Bulgaria, the Russians and the Ukrainian people have long known about cultured milk. Now how this came about really a long time ago is milk would have been kept in skin bags and, of course, it soured over time. And then people started to realize that it didn’t taste that bad. And it, in fact, improved things like gas, bloating were improved by having this substance.

Back in the 1880s, they had no idea about bacteria. They didn’t know about lactobacillus, acidophilus or bifidobacterium, propanol bacteria, they had no idea, but they knew that this sour stuff stopped gas and bloating. This is called empirical observation. Empirical observation is very important and we know that people have had sour products going back hundreds of years.

Why I like Kefir. Not because I’m Dutch and I like saving money like some people think. I like Kefir because you can use it again and again and again. The grains basically keep growing, so once you’ve made this culture, you use some grains. It’s basically a lump of it. It looks like a cauliflower lump when you look at the grains. It’s basically lipids. It’s like fats and proteins and carbohydrates with different beneficial bacteria mixed in there. When kept at room temperature in a medium which contains enough lactose like a milk sugar in there or kind of sugar, it will feed on the sugar and create lactic acid. Kefir is about 25 percent lactic acid. And lactic acid is extremely good stuff for the colon to develop and to build beneficial bacteria on.

When you have Kefir in your diet, make darn sure that you eat also food for the Kefir’s bacteria. With lactic acid is going to help produce the bacteria, but they’ve got something to grow on. And this means eating the right kind of fibers in your diet. There’s no point in having a piece of pizza and a glass of beer and then having a glass of Kefir thinking you’re going to do yourself good. You’re wasting your time. If you’re going to have Kefir in your diet regularly, make sure you eat good vegetables. Plenty of good vegetables containing fiber, green vegetables, lots of green vegetables. It’s going to really help you a lot. And there are other kinds of soluble fibers you can have, too, in your diet. Go and check out my article about soluble fibers, insoluble fibers, on yeastinfection.org.

When you do Kefir, you start slow. Don’t start with a pint a day like 600 mils. You’re going to get quite sick if you do that. And many patients have contacted me with bloating and diarrhea, vomiting, nausea because they went hard out with these sort of foods. Always start slow. If you came to me and said, “Eric, I haven’t been to the gym before, but tomorrow I’m going to go. I’m going to work out three hours and then the following day, I’m going to work out for three hours and go for a five-mile hike.” I’m going to tell you you’re crazy. Because you’re going to hurt like hell. You wouldn’t do that because you know you’re going to hurt. But the thing with Kefir, people often will go out and make Kefir and start drinking three or four glasses a day and then complain to me they’re getting sick.

Remember, you’re changing your interior environment substantially and that could really upset the beneficial balance and the unbeneficial balance of bacteria and make you feel quite spaced out and sick. Many people think they get die off when they take these foods, but they don’t. What they’re doing is they’re creating a really big struggle between the good and the bad in their digestive system by starting out too hard out. Start out with a small amount. And I’m talking maybe a tablespoon, if that, per day. Maybe for the first week if you’ve got a bad yeast infection and gradually build up; 250 mils or a cup is not out of the question. It’s quite good to have.

Kefir is exceptionally good for thrush. It’s also really good for women who are breastfeeding because I know that it works well for infant’s oral thrush. I know that it works also for jock itch, vaginal thrush, toenail fungus, intestinal systemic yeast, and any kind of yeast infection. Use Kefir. Also what you can do is soak a cotton bud in it, squeeze it out and dab it around the jock itch areas or around the vulva if you have irritation there. It works quite well.

And I know some patients who actually soak their feet in a Kefir solution and swear that it works fantastically.

Do use Kefir. It’s a premium, premium food to take into your diet if you’ve got a yeast infection. You can’t go wrong. Thanks for your question.