Author: Michael

Greetings! Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. Author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for checking out my video. Water Kefir or Dairy Kefir? What’s better? What are you currently making? I’ve looked at many websites just now and checked out YouTube videos and had a bit of a good think about Kefir. Kefir is something I’ve tried to make a long time ago. I personally don’t like Kefir. I’m a sauerkraut guy. Probably because my grandma used to make it, and I grew up with the taste of that nice piece of sausage and a piece of sauerkraut I loved. I don’t really care what kind of culture of medifood you eat. That you desire to eat. I think it’s important to pick something that you like to eat. Not that you think: “Oh it tastes so sour and crap but I have to eat it because I was told to eat it.”

Don’t eat something you don’t love. What’s the bloody point? That’s like trying to wear a dress that you hate the color of or trying to be with someone that you’re supposed to be with because your parents like that guy or woman, but you don’t like them. You only get somewhere in life, I believe, by really enjoying something that you’re doing, someone you’re with, or the food you eat. If you’ve got a desire for something and you love the taste of it, it means, in my opinion, you’re going to digest it better. It’s going to suit you better. I like sauerkraut, so you might like Kefir. That’s fine by me.

What’s better? Water Kefir? Dairy Kefir? Well, Water Kefir is something that some people start out with because it’s simple. They just get the Kefir grains, they get fruit juice or they might get coconut water or coconut milk. I would consume Water Kefir or non-dairy Kefir. If you look at the origins of Kefir going back a long time ago near the Caspian Sea in the Corpus Mountains in Southeast Asia somewhere. It’s near the Black Sea, near Russia or one of those Slavic countries. It’s a bit like kumis and yogurt and these sorts of foods.

When people made them originally they used to keep them in bladders or skins of animals they found. I think that’s how yogurt started. I think they were kept in sheep’s bladders and hung on the backs of camels or animals walking around the desert. Natural fermentation took place. But with Kefir, the grains got put in bags and hung. I was just reading on Wikipedia interesting hung in doorways. When people would walk past the doorway, the bag would get bumped, which would mix the Kefir to keep it well mixed.

I personally find Water Kefir quite strong. You’ve got to be careful with Water Kefir if you’re going to use a fruit juice, for example. If it’s not fermented properly, it could have a bit of an alcohol content about it. Also, it could not be properly fermented, which could give you a bit more sugar than you’d like in that product, which could actually make your Candida worse. Water Kefir can certainly make Candida worse. I’ve had many patients contact me saying, “I read in your book that you said to take Kefir, and I did, and I felt like crap! I’m feeling much worse.” So if you make Kefir, make darn well sure that you know how to make Kefir.

I think there are many people at home that don’t make these foods properly. They end up in worse positions than they were when they started. I think milk Kefir is better. You’re getting the added benefit of calcium and magnesium and the minerals if you use raw milk, especially. Unpasteurized with all the junk in it that the farmers have to put in there. They put the teets on the cows, and they’ve got to put them in iodine or in different solutions to clean them, and then animals get injections and chemicals and all that junk. You’re better off having a free-range organic or biodynamic milk as a starting point. That makes premium Kefir. I’ve tasted that kind of Kefir and it is amazing how good it tastes. If you’re going to use dairy products for Kefir, please use a good starting material. Use an organic or biodynamic certified biogrown kind of a product. Raw milk tastes beautiful. I’m no fan personally of dairy products. I’ve had milk occasionally, but I don’t really feel the need to drink milk in my diet. When it comes to yogurt or cultured food like that, I do like it.

Let’s go back to the dairy. As I mentioned, you’ve got the additional minerals in there that you won’t necessarily get in the Water Kefir. They’ve also found through research that Dairy Kefir contains up to three/four times more bacteria than the Water Kefir. You’re getting also different types of streptococci. You’re getting about 25 types of lactobacillus. One thing I haven’t found with Kefir is bifida bacteria. You don’t really get that in these kind of foods. Lactobacillus is what a lot of people don’t have a sufficient amount of anyway. Especially because it inhabits the small intestine where you really need these bacteria.

Water Kefir or Dairy? I think the Dairy Kefir is a better Kefir. But if you’ve got Candida, Coconut Kefir. Super. You’ve got the Capric Acid, the Caprylic Acid, you’ve got a hundred different minerals in that coconut. Also, I think it actually ferments better than the fruit juice does. It gives you a better quality product. Less chance of sugar in it. Anti-fungal activity. What should you do now? Now you’re all confused, aren’t you? Should you do Water Kefir? Fruit Kefir? Coconut Kefir, if you’ve got Candida.

If you haven’t got Candida and you’ve done a stool test, and you’ve got bad bacteria there or some parasites you want to conquer – Dairy Kefir. But it’s got to be made properly. That’s the big thing. If it’s not made properly, you buck it. That’s what we say in Australia. Because that means you could be literally creating a problem internally with something that you’re eating. You’re going to come to me saying, “Well, you told me to have Kefir.

But since I started, I’m feeling a lot worse!”

Think about that for a moment. If you’re feeling worse on a food like Kefir, back off. Remake it, get a batch from somebody else, try that to see if that works. Always start these foods slowly into your diet. I’ve had some patients who will drink four or five cups of Kefir. They’ll drink it all day long the first week they make it. Then they feel terrible. Think about it. Common sense – you know my thought on common sense. Click on the link below if you haven’t already grabbed my article, and don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks for tuning in.

Thanks for checking out my video today. I’ve got an email here from a lady called Donna in Connecticut. I think that’s in America. If I’m correct, it’s on the east coast. Donna is saying here, I just had an ultrasound done on my gall bladder and liver and found out there’s something wrong with my gall bladder. Eric, I have fatty liver. Can you help me? Can Candida cause any of this? Is there something natural that I can do instead of having surgery to the gall bladder?

That’s an interesting question. Let’s have a look at this. There’s quite a few topics here. We could do literally 10 videos just on this one email here. What Donna is saying basically is there’s some issues with gall bladder and liver. Fatty liver is very common. Lots of people have fatty liver. In fact, in America, Australia and New Zealand and most western countries, I would say over half the population have some degree of fatty liver. This doesn’t necessarily come from drinking lots of alcohol all the time. You can get fatty liver from carbos, from eating bread, would you believe it, and sugar. There are lots of foods that can cause fatty liver. Eating too many Omega 6 in comparison to Omega 3, rancid fats, too many saturated fats in the diet, having a poor functioning stomach and pancreas are very common ways to develop a fatty liver even faster. Because if you can’t break fat down, it’s going to be much harder on your liver to deal with fat.

Your gall bladder stores about a pint, about 600 mils of bile, during the day. The liver makes bile and stores it in the gall bladder. The purpose of bile is basically to get rid of rubbish, spent blood cells and all sorts of rubbish, hormonal residues. All sorts of crap the body doesn’t want it will actually help to shunt into the bile canaliculi. It will get rid of a lot of waste products. The bile serves a very useful purpose to breakdown and emulsify fats in the body. It’s a very important organ to have.

I don’t recommend people get their gall bladder removed at all, and it’s not necessary in most cases. Cholecystectomies are performed by the tens of thousands in America every year, removing the gall bladder, and gall bladder operations are far too common. And in many cases, they’re performed needlessly without any real need for the gall bladder to come out.

Often when patients complain of digestive pain, the doctors are going to think about appendix problems or gall bladder problems. They’re very convenient little areas for the surgeons to get in and to pull these organs out on the laparoscopy. But in most cases, the problem is not resolved. That’s my opinion.

I’ve seen thousands of women over the years that have had gall bladders removed and have come back and told me that they’ve still got the same problems. It didn’t help. In fact, they got fatter. They put on more weight. They ended up having lots of different problems. You need to have good bile production and bile storage, in my opinion, also to be able to utilize the fat-soluble vitamins more effectively.

What can I do for fatty liver? To start with, you can really look at eating foods that are friendly to the liver, and these are the bitter foods. The liver loves bitter foods. You may have heard of Swedish bitters. Bitters are very important because they help to generate the production of more acids and enzymes in the body. They help to stimulate bile flow. The gall bladder doesn’t like sweet foods. It likes bitter foods. Sweet foods can lead and contribute to elevated triglycerides and also to gall bladder dysfunction and fatty liver.

Get a liver function test done by your doctor, an LFT, and look for alkaline phosphatase, ALT, AST, and GGT. These are various liver enzymes which will give you an idea if your liver is fatty or not. The ranges generally vary on these, but you can look at around 0 to 40 depending on the country you live in and the reference range. I think the alkaline phosphatase is up to 200. If you’ve got a higher end of the reference range or over, this could mean fatty liver. Fatty liver is very common. You’d be surprised how many people have it. And a good way also for you to assess your liver, Donna, to see if it’s painful or engorged is I’ll just stand up and give you a demonstration.

Your liver is obviously on the right side, so I’ve got my rib cage here. Just get four fingers like the blade, breathe in, breathe out, and then push hard up underneath this whole edge here. The top of the liver is here and it goes right through to here. By pushing underneath here, if you’ve got any pain in there or it’s very tender to touch, that could mean you’ve got a bit of an enlargement of the liver. It’s something again, I commonly see when I palpate patients is there will be pain there. Look at the stool. Lots of problems there with constipation or diarrhea can also be a prelude to fatty liver. The blood test is quite important to do. But if in doubt, get the doctor to check out the liver region.

There is certainly a connection with Candida and liver. Patients who’ve got major Candida problems often end up with a lot of bowel disorders and also congestive liver. The liver contains many different cells in it that help to filter the blood and clean it. There are these cells called kupffer cells which are liver cells. And the liver will often become burdened to a very high degree when the person gets quite toxic in terms of their diet and their lifestyle. The Candida metabolites or the by-products of Candida as it dies and bacteria and dead cells and pollens and viruses and all these things clog up the bloodstream, so the liver has to filter these things out. People with toxic bowels, lots of bloating and gas, are much more prone to having fatty liver than people with clean living. We don’t drink alcohol or eat a lot of sweet foods.

Coming back to the foods. Bitter foods are what the liver likes to have. When I think of bitter foods, I think about lemon, olive, olive leaf, olive oil, quite good.

Artichokes are good. Carrots are good to have. Anything that tastes bitter in the mouth. Chinese vegetables. Endive. Rocket. Salad. These are the sort of things that you really want to focus on with liver cleansing. And you want to avoid the junk foods in your diet, alcohols, soda drinks and these sorts of things. They’re going to contribute to liver congestion and ultimately fatty liver.

Low-grade nausea, sickness, bad taste in the mouth, headaches in the morning, feeling very tired, very emotional, very angry, these are all signs that you could have a fatty liver. You don’t need to get the gall bladder out. I’ll do some other videos on the liver and particularly the gall bladder flush on how to clean the gall bladder out because it’s one organ that can be cleansed in the body effectively. You need to take care when you’re going to do a gall bladder flush, but I can show you specific ways to achieve this and to get a very, very nice outcome to prevent you getting your gall bladder out.

Focus on the bitter foods. Kick the sugar. Kick the sweet and processed foods. I just actually shared a post on Facebook where they found out the processed foods now are absolutely linked to autoimmune diseases. Foods that are packaged and processed in boxes and this sort of rubbish from the supermarket. Fresh foods are always going to keep the gut and the liver clean. This is what you want to focus on.

I’ve written extensively about this in Candida Crusher in the section called the MEVY Diet. I’ve written hundreds of pages on diet and nutrition. You can read that on yeastinfection.org or you can purchase my book and you can read up to 700 pages of information on how to keep your health in top shape and how to get rid of Candida and avoid getting it in the future.

I hope that gives you a bit of insight into fatty liver and gall bladder, Donna. Thanks for your email.

The question today is, is molybdenum any good for Candida? There’s debate about that. Some people say “yes.” Some people say “no.” I used molybdenum a few years ago clinically on many different Candida patients and found no benefit at all. Other patients have reported significant benefit. It really depends, I believe, on the level of die off or how Candida toxins are produced in the body, how many occur, and how the body’s own system deals with those toxins.

To understand acetaldehyde, for example, is an important part of the molybdenum equation. Acetaldehyde is something that Candida toxins can’t produce. We can also find it as a by-product from alcohol consumption. Acetaldehyde is actually also found in some types of fruits, in bread, for example, in coffee it’s found. It’s a compound that can be naturally occurring or produced by the body as a consequence of ethanol. If you drink ethanol or basically alcohol, there is an enzyme in the liver called alcohol dehydrogenase that helps to break acetaldehyde down. But in some people, there’s a real problem. They have way too much acetaldehyde production in the body and that can contribute to the hangover or the drunk feeling that can hang around. Other people experience it in sore muscles or sore joints, for example, as a common occurrence.

Molybdenum can help to basically play an important part in the cycle. It can get a hold of acetaldehyde and break it down to acetic acid, and that’s very important. If you can bust something down into a smaller compound and acetic acid again forms part of an energy cycle in the body. It converts to acetyl enzyme, CoA, which helps to provide energy in the body.

Molybdenum, a few milligrams per day, is often lacking in people’s diets. You can take it as a dietary supplement. It’s pretty hard sometimes to find in different foods. But I have my doubts whether everybody with a yeast infection should take molybdenum to help break down some of the by-products of Candida. You’re really better off getting the liver to work effectively by taking in the right kind of foods and herbs to achieve this end. And also reducing the amount of antifungal product you take, so you don’t get massive die off in the body occurring.

Because the big mistake a lot of people make, they take too much antifungal and get a massive amount of death occurring with the yeast cells. If they do it slowly and methodically, it’s going to be much easier for the body to process and, therefore, a heck of a lot less chance of die off.

People who sell these supplements claim that everybody has die off, which is a load of crap, because not everybody has die off. Thousands of patients I’ve treated with Candida who’ve experienced severe die off have almost always told me that they made major diet changes and took lots of antifungals and lots of probiotics all within a matter of a week or so. Of course, you’re going to experience severe die off when you do silly things like that. If you do it methodically and slowly and carefully as I’ve outlined in my book, Candida Crusher, it’s not going to happen.

If you do want to go like a bull at a gate and like hard on into a Candida kill, molybdenum may be a benefit for you. But for the majority of people, it won’t be required. Molybdenum should be part of a multivitamin that you take every day just like cobalt, copper, selenium, zinc, all those other essential trace elements that are lacking in people’s diets. Manganese plays a vital role in Candida, biotin, zinc; there are so many elements that to single one out and say this is the silver bullet. This is the nirvana of Candida treatment is not really the right thing to do. Don’t fall for the line that molybdenum is going to make you feel loads better because in a lot of cases, it won’t do that. That gives you a bit of an understanding on molybdenum’s role in Candida toxin metabolism.

I hope this video is of use for you today. Thank you.