Author: Eric Bakker

Thanks for tuning into my video today. The question today is, is Brewer’s yeast bad for Candida? Is it something that’s going to create Candida? Is it going to aggravate Candida? Can I have Brewer’s yeast?

Some people have this belief that all yeasts are bad. It’s not really a good assumption to make. Similarly, a long time ago, people used to think that all bacteria were bad. There was no such thing as good bacteria. All bacteria are pathogenic and cause disease. And some people have this belief, unfortunately, with yeast as well.

If we look at bacteria, for example, we’ve got beneficial strains of bacteria and we’ve got pathogenic strains. We’ve got bad and we’ve got good, and it’s the same with yeast. We’ve got Lactobacillus acidophilus. We’ve got bifida bacteria. We’ve got many different species of these bacteria that are beneficial.
However, you’ve also got Campylobacter and Salmonella and Shigella and many other different types of bacteria that are pathogenic that are bad that we shouldn’t really have in our bodies.

With yeast, if we look at Candida. Candida Albicans is not good or bad, but it lives in our body. And in most people, it’s going to live in a balance, in harmony with other beneficial bacteria and some not so beneficial, but everything in the body is in balance. Good health is all about balance. It’s all about having our immune system powered up and being able to keep a lot of these bad guys at bay.

Let’s look at yeast. Brewer’s yeast is actually also called Saccharomyces cerevisae. The Saccharomyces has been used a long, long time for thousands of years. People have known about yeast. They’ve known about Brewer’s yeast. Brewing is something that people have done for a long, long time. The Brewer’s yeast is also called top fermenting yeast or budding yeast. There are different names for it. It’s very confusing, in fact, because Brewer’s yeast also forms a substrate from where other yeasts are made from themselves. It actually has some immune enhancing properties. It’s not a bad yeast to have.

Don’t think that you can’t have Brewer’s yeast when you’ve got Candida. You can. However, if you’ve got a severe Candida infection and you’re plagued very much by very strong Candida symptoms, I’d probably caution you to have any kind of yeast in your diet just because it could aggravate to some degree. In many cases, it won’t, but you just need to be careful. This is if you’ve got a major yeast infection. For most patients I’ve seen with mild to moderate, the Brewer’s yeast is not a real consequence to the body at all. You should be fine to have Brewer’s yeast in your diet.

There’s different kinds of yeast, also wild yeast or airborne yeast that you’re going to find that get into things like Kombucha that allow Kombucha to happen on sourdough bread. Many people think that these are really bad, too, and they can really cause a lot of problems. They can if you’re very, very sick with bacterial or fungal overgrowth. You can feel quite sick if you have these kinds of products in your diet. I’m not a huge fan of Kombucha for that reason. I find a Kefir culture more satisfactory than Kombucha. Sourdough bread in most cases is fine if you’ve got Candida. I’ve never found it to be a real problem.

Many people would argue this point with me and say you’re wrong. I can tell you from experience of having dealt with Candida for over 20 years with thousands of patients, most patients with mild to moderate Candida can tolerate sourdough bread. It’s what you put on the bread and it’s the quantity that you have that can make the difference. Putting honey or jam on sourdough bread is not a good idea if you’ve got Candida. Eating any more than two or three slices a day is not a good idea, but I’m not a big believer in taking all carbohydrates out of the diet entirely with Candida. I think it’s too prohibitive and it causes a lot of weight loss and dissatisfaction with clients, so I don’t tend to do that. But Kombucha, however, I’m not a big fan of Kombucha for Candida. I find it aggravates people too much.

Brewer’s yeast, you’re fine to have some Brewer’s yeast. Saccharomyces boulardii is a supplement we use too sometimes for Candida, particularly if you’ve got diarrhea or loose bowel motions. You’ll find the SB or the Saccharomyces boulardii quite a good immune enhancer for Candida. It’s a bit different from the cerevisae. So try those two out.

Thanks for your time.

Have you checked out my website yet, yeastinfection.org? And have you also looked at the other site, CandidaCrusher.com, and completed my online quiz? It’s the world’s best quiz. It’s taken a long time and a lot of money to make this quiz perfect. We’ve perfected this quiz. I think you’re going to be quite impressed. The whole reason for the quiz is to find out if you’ve got mild, moderate or severe Candida and how it could be affecting your life and what you can do about it.

The question today is from John in Florida. Is a Candida cleanse safe? Is it safe to undertake a Candida cleansing diet?

I’ve just spent a little bit of time online looking at various websites, for example, the Mayo Clinic in America where they believe that Candida doesn’t even exist. They believe that if anyone just takes white flour and these foods out of their diet, they’re going to feel better.

Well, Candida does exist. And how do we know that? Do we need all these double-blind placebo controlled studies to show us that people feel better when we treat them with diet and lifestyle? I don’t think we do. I think it’s a load of bologna that everything has to be scientifically proven all the time before it’s considered to be a valid treatment.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of patients who’ve come to me over the years with yeast infections and when we make the necessary changes, everything improves. It’s significant how these people can improve, and so many of their signs and symptoms and impairments just disappear. The improvement in their life is phenomenal in so many cases. To me, that’s empirical observation. Call it “placebo effect.” Call it what you want. The Candida diet is extremely safe. And, in fact, it can be used by children, by elderly people, by people in any stage of their life with any kind of an ailment because it doesn’t contraindicate healthy eating and healthy living.

If you follow the rules of nature and eat and live like this, you’re not only going to eradicate Candida, you’re going to prevent a lot of diseases from happening. We call it diseases of the modern civilization like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, the three main killers besides pharmaceutical medicine which is, I think, the second or third leading killer in America currently. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. It’s easy for the Mayo Clinic to slam the kind of treatments that I do because, in fact, they have their hands full of potentially iatrogenic disease themselves or drug-induced death and morbidity from treating people.

The thing with natural medicine is there’s not a lot of profit in it. There’s a lot of healing, a lot of wellness in it, but we don’t like hooking people up to pharmaceutical medications for 20, 30, 40 years. We don’t believe in symptomatic treatment. We believe in people making the necessary changes to improve their health, to eradicate conditions, to allow the body’s innate healing response to come to the foreground.

When you think about that, how can it be dangerous to recommend a healthy lifestyle and diet for people? Of course, it’s safe. A Candida cleanse is perfectly safe. Don’t follow some hair-brained schemes online that some people talk about. The lemonade detox diet, for example, ridiculous. The jelly bean diet. I’m not even a big fan of these Paleo kind of diets, large amounts of protein for people.

Diet is a really ridiculous term. I think people undertake a diet so they can get to a point where they want then they can go back to what they were doing in the first place, which is usually dietary offenses, drinking too much, not exercising enough, eating the wrong kind of food. And then, of course, when they gain weight or get sick, they go on a diet again.

These yo-yo events in life are dangerous. These are things you want to avoid. All these crash weight loss programs. All these YouTube clips about pumping up, getting a six-pack abs and all these sort of things. These are all ridiculous. It’s all about moderation in life.

If you follow my Candida Crusher diet, it’s a safe approach. It’s a natural approach and it’s a healthy approach, and there’s no danger involved at all. It’s all common sense. But remember, common sense isn’t very common today; that’s the problem.

I hope that answers your question, is the Candida cleanse safe? It is safe. It doesn’t contradict the natural laws as I mentioned before. It supports these kind of laws. You can read a lot more about what I believe to be an effective cleansing approach on yeastinfection.org.

I hope that answers your question. Thank you for tuning in.

Thanks for checking out this video. This video is for the ladies. It’s not for the guys. I’ve got a question here from a patient in England. This is from Jackie and Jackie’s 28 years of age. She’s from Buxton in Derbyshire in England.

Jackie’s asking me, Eric, how do you treat vaginal thrush? How do you get rid of a vaginal yeast infection? What’s the best way to cure it? I’m sick and tired of this infection. I’ve had it for years. I’ve been to doctors many, many times. And she writes here, ‘I’ve taken fluconazole on and off regularly now for the past six years. I’m taking it monthly and it’s not working. What can I do? I’m tired of this yeast infection.’

Jackie, the best way to get rid of this infection is by using a multi-stage approach. You’re wasting your time treating this vaginally or locally. It’s a complete waste of time. You need to tackle this from several different angles. Like anything in life, if you want to do something, there’s several ways of doing it. You can do it the quick, easy way, the lazy way, or you can do it the more convoluted way, also a waste of time, or you can do it the intelligent way.

I’m going to explain to you the intelligent way on how to nail a vaginal yeast infection and how to get rid of thrush completely. I don’t use the word “cure.” You won’t find “cure” in my book. In Candida Crusher, I didn’t write the word “cure.” It’s a four-letter word. I don’t like using four-letter words that much.

In natural medicine, cure is an “anathema.” An anathema is a word for “it’s really bad.” It’s just something we don’t do. I only let medical doctors use the word “cure” because I don’t really believe you can cure something entirely. You can get rid of something or inhibit it, but the best way to describe getting on top of a yeast infection is to control the infection.

How are we going to control this yeast infection and tame it? It’s like anything in life. You need to do it intelligently. When you’ve had the problem for a short period of time, I like getting patients to come down on an acute yeast infection like a ton of bricks. They immediately tackle it head on. It’s like anything in life. Push it hard, go for the max, get it over and done with, and then be vigilant for any signs of reoccurrence. That’s the thing. If you can be vigilant and understand that a yeast infection can recur at any time and you make immediate changes, which I’m going to explain to you right now, you can nail that infection within usually a week and you won’t get it back again for several months.

How do we go about eradicating a vaginal yeast infection or thrush? Obviously, we want to look at local treatment. In Chapter 5 of Candida Crusher, you can read a lot about the local two-stage treatment of a vaginal yeast infection. If you go to yeastinfection.org, my comprehensive website, you can read my two-stage vaginal approach, the kill phase and the build phase. I want you to go to that website, if you haven’t already gone there, and use that two-stage approach.

I presented a vaginal yeast infection treatment at a medical conference in Sydney last year, 2014, and it was well received by the 300 doctors, a good response from this presentation. Many doctors came up to me after wanting to know how I came about this treatment. How successful was it? So many doctors told me they’re disillusioned using fluconazole, and they really wanted something that was going to nail it once and forever. And I basically said to them, “You guys need to start looking at things that you don’t currently do that I do and that’s actually lifestyle changes, diet changes, and local treatment.”

Those are the three things I want you to get into your mind, Jackie. You need to look at changing the way you live, which can often mean sleeping better, eating better, relaxing more, understanding the connection between stress and impaired immune function, all of these things are written in my book, Candida Crusher. This is why the book has been so successful because it just doesn’t really tackle the problem; it tackles the cause of the problem. There’s always a reason why vaginal infection is there.

Local treatment is not that difficult. You need to use boric acid or you can use different types of douche treatments. You can read about that in my book or go to my website, yeastinfection.org. I’m not going to elaborate on those today. You look at dietary treatment. You need to stop feeding Candida internally. Most women who’ve got a vaginal yeast infection have got an intestinal yeast infection. Twenty percent of healthy women normally have Candida in their body, but I would say that 90 percent of women with vaginal yeast infections have got Candida in their intestinal tract in their large bowel. That needs taming. You need to really stop feeding these bugs, and you’ll do that by diet.

Again, I’ve got a three-stage diet. You can read about that in my book, Chapter 7. It’s in five sections and it goes into great detail more than any other book you’ll ever find about what to eat and what not to eat. My website, yeastinfection.org, has got hundreds of articles relating to diet, so go there and read about what to eat and what not to eat.

The third, but most important in my opinion, is the lifestyle change. You need to understand the connection between the adrenal and thyroid function, impaired immunity, and why you keep getting this thing back again.

I’ve treated thousands of women for vaginal infections, thousands of them. You name the occupation and I can tell you I’ve had a patient with that occupation with a vaginal infection. Recently, I’ve been treating several women from the US who work on airplanes, airhostesses. I’ve had several of them now. They work crazy hours. They’ve got weird hours. They fly to strange destinations and eat all kinds of crappy food. They’re under high stress. They’ve got impaired immunity because the lack of quality sleep. They’re eating the wrong kind of food. They’re drinking cheap booze. Many of them got crappy relationships because they’re away from their partners. Is it any wonder they’ve got these vaginal infections? They’ve got to wear pantyhose. Several cases, I’ve said to these women, “You need to get rid of your job for six months. Let’s get rid of this infection and then reapply and then let’s first get you to do some local flying in northern US before you branch out and go to Europe or intercontinental.” For some women, it’s made a massive difference. You need to tackle the lifestyle.

Are you a young woman with several children under high stress? Are you separated or divorced? Are you under a lot of financial stress? Have you got a poor relationship with your partner? These are all things that I want to know if you’re my patient because these things mean a lot to me because they can be impediments to curing your thrush or vaginal infection.

If you’re serious about getting rid of this infection, you want to look at the causes of the infection, not treat the manifestations or the outcomes of why you got this in the first place. Do you take an antibiotic routinely? You know what I mean? Look at these sort of things. If you can nail this, the infection is gone. Simple as that.

Jackie, I hope that’s answered your question today. Thanks for tuning in.