Author: Eric Bakker

Hi there, Eric Bakker. Here’s a question from a man called Tom Lewis in Florida.

Tom asks me. Eric, what should I do about Candida die off? What can I do to stop feeling terrible?

That’s a good question, Tom. This is a question I hear many patients tell me; also many practitioners are concerned about the levels of die off that they experience with their patients. Die off is generally when bacteria die and cell wall fragments are released into the bloodstream and also the immune system can attack Candida and also the metabolizer the Candida produce. This can come about also through weakened immune response and can make the person feel very washed out and wasted, and some people can aggravate from mild up to severe and debilitating where they can be bedridden for days on end. It’s particularly nasty to have a die off. And this is again another reason why I don’t like people to talk about killing and eradicating and wiping out Candida with all these very powerful types of drugs.

Nystatin, I’ve written extensively about Nystatin in my book, Candida Crusher, about the side effects from Nystatin. They can be quite devastating for many people. If you are a sensitive person, if you know you’re sensitive and you react to things, then be careful; use common sense and don’t take strong things and go very slowly when you start taking supplements, whether they are antifungals or probiotics or enzymes, go very slowly to start with. You can avoid most aggravations and most die off. Even if you’re a strong person like me, go easy into treatment. Step it up over time. Don’t go all hell bent and straight into it. You’re going to get a problem.

Second thing is, don’t undertake anything new like skydiving or bungee jumping or go-kart racing or go on a 20-mile hike or do things like that or start a gym membership when you’re trying to treat yourself with a yeast infection. Take some time out and rest up a bit. That’s good advice. So give yourself plenty of time to recover and ease yourself into treatment.

Those are two good things that are going to help you avoid aggravation to a large degree.

There’s a lot more questions that you can check out on my YouTube channel. If you haven’t got the answer to a question, please go to candidacrusher.com and ask me the question. Subscribe to my channel, that way you’re going to be the first one to find out all the new FAQs that come out on yeast infection. And also go to yeastinfection.org and do my survey. That way you’ll find out what level or degree of severity of yeast infection you’ve got.

So I hope that answers your question there. Thank you.

Hi there, here’s a question from Katherine Smith in Wellington, New Zealand.

Katherine’s asking me, Eric, are Candida tests accurate?

They are Katherine. They are accurate, but it depends really what test we’re talking about and how the test was performed and under what conditions the test was performed. You can get false results with testing, whether it’s a blood test, a urine test, or a stool test. There are a few things that you need to take into account to make sure that test results are going to be accurate.

There are many gray areas when it comes to testing; and many practitioners, unfortunately, just treat off test results. They’ll see a result and they’ll treat off it. They actually forget they’ve got a real living patient in front of them. And I call that paralysis from analysis. They tend to overanalyze bits of paper and forget that the person in front of them is actually a real living, kicking, breathing patient. I learned those things quite early on in practice. The results may actually be wrong and what then? You’re going to get a wrong result because you’re treating a patient with the wrong piece of paper in front of you.

So how can tests be deemed accurate or inaccurate? Well, to begin with, if a person’s been taking many pharmaceutical drugs like antibiotics right up until they test, it’s not a very good idea. If a person’s going to perform an allergy test and they’ve been on a very strong exclusion diet right up to the point of doing the test, it’s not a good idea. If a person’s been taking lots of probiotics and antifungal products right up until they do a stool test, it’s not a good idea. You need to really talk with someone who’s quite experienced with functional medicine testing to make sure that your test results are going to be accurate. The results are going to be accurate if the test is performed correctly, and if the sample is taken correctly, and if the test results are interpreted correctly.

So there are a lot of different loopholes when it comes to testing and areas where it could go wrong. The sample may be handled incorrectly. It may not be placed in the container properly. It may take too long to get to the lab. So you need to be careful when it comes to a test.

And the other thing with testing is never just look at the results; look at the patient; look at the totality of signs and symptoms and try and correlate the test results you’ve got there preferably with other tests. And for that reason, I’ve devised a whole set of home tests you can read in my book, Candida Crusher, Chapter 3. So you can read all about them. I hope that answers you question.

You’ll probably find the answers to a lot of other questions on my YouTube channel. If you can’t, please contact me on candidacrusher.com and I’ll answer your question. Subscribe to my channel, you’ll be the first one to know of the latest videos and also go to yeastinfection.org and complete my survey.

Thank you.

Good day, Eric Bakker, naturopath, author of Candida Crusher, here with another video for you today. This time we’re going to talk about garlic; about the benefits of garlic as a Candida crushing food. So this is video number one in terms of the Candida crushing foods.

Garlic would have to be one of my number one favorite foods to get a person to incorporate into their diet if they want to crush Candida. Garlic, along with other allium-containing vegetables, such as red and brown onions, spring onions, shallots, leaks; these foods are very good to fight a yeast infection. And, in fact, I’ve written in my book that I believe that when I can finally convince the person to incorporate these foods into their diet on a regular basis, is when they’re luck begins to turn in terms of eradicating the yeast infection.

So garlic has been used as a food now for approximately 7,000 years. The Egyptians used garlic. The Greeks used a lot of garlic. A lot of people think garlic was used to flavor foods, but in fact, it wasn’t. And like Oregano, garlic was originally incorporated into the diet to help to wipe out microbes, parasites, bacteria and yeast. People didn’t know what those bugs were back then, but they did know that when they ate those foods, it made them feel a lot better. So, we’ll talk a lot more about Oregano and then a Mediterranean connection there with microbial inhibition as well in another video.

Garlic is an interesting vegetable and is certainly one of my favorites. I tend to eat quite a lot of garlic in my diet. It has very powerful activities. Research, I think it was in 1979 at the Indiana University in America, showed very strong anti-fungal activity with garlic over many different strains of yeast. Research has also shown in 2000, not that long ago, that garlic, in fact, is just as powerful as Ketoconazole or Nystatin when it comes to eradicating yeast. So you don’t need to take these drugs; you just need to incorporate garlic into your diet.

So there are two particularly strong components of garlic which have this activity, allicin and alanine. Allicin seems to be quite strong and Alanine seems to be quite strong. And there are a lot of arguments as to which one is stronger than the other. I’ve also read a lot of research saying that when you cut fresh garlic, the content of these oils tends to increase and then decrease. It makes more sense to have this stuff fresh in your diet.

So what I like people to do with a yeast infection is to start off with just a small clove every day like I’ve got here. You can see this clove is not peeled. So what I’ve done is I’ve peeled a clove here; I’ve just crushed it and then what you can do is just crush a small clove. And when you crush it, it will generally break open and fall apart anyway like this one has. And you can just swallow it like a capsule or a tablet. Good to have this with a protein-containing meal. A bigger clove you can cut up in pieces and incorporate in your food and eat it or you can crush the juice out of it and mix that in with a salad or salad dressing. There are many ways you can use raw garlic. Crush it, get the oil out of it, mix it with a little bit of oil like Olive oil, rub it on your toenails. You can drop garlic juice directly on a nail. I know a lot of women who make garlic tampons. They actually thread the garlic which they’ve peeled on a piece of string and insert that and leave that in for several hours. So there are many ways you can incorporate garlic into a diet. And I’ve written extensively on garlic in Candida Crusher, Chapter 7, Section 4, you can read a lot more about it.

So tablets, capsules or fresh, what should I do? I think you should do fresh and I also think you should also do cooked and incorporate garlic into your supplement, into your anti-fungal regime as well. Something with a small percentage there of an active ingredient usually will be okay. Try and incorporate garlic in your diet on a regular basis.

So I hope that answers some of your questions on garlic. Thank you.