Greetings. New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker. I’m author of Candida Crusher and I’m also the formulator of a range of products called Canxida. Thanks for tuning into my video today. I’ve got a question here from a guy called Steven Hutchinson, and Steven is in a place called Sale in Victoria, Australia. Steven is asking me a question “Can antibiotics cure Candida?” That’s a very good question, Steve.
Antibiotics don’t cure any kind of disease, but what they can do in some instances is fight infections. But the problem is in most cases – this is in my opinion – they tend to be over prescribed and prescribed too freely for too many different kinds of conditions. For example, I’ve heard many instances of a person having a small cut on the finger and then going on a seven to ten-day course of antibiotics. In many cases, patients are prescribed antibiotics for digestive related problems. This is, in my opinion, a travesty. When you give antibiotics, particularly concurrent courses of antibiotics, because it creates an incredible amount of damage to the gut microbiota or the bacteria that reside in the gut.
Don’t forget the term “antibiosis” means “antilife.” So you’re actually killing life. You’re destroying a huge amount of life in the digestive system. When what we want is a prolife product. Because if you think about it, you don’t win wars by fighting wars. You just create more conflict. A lot of people think that wars really solve problems, but they don’t. People have been fighting for thousands of years and they’ll probably fight for thousands of more years, and they don’t seem to solve any kind of problems. Currently in 2015, I believe there are wars in over 60 countries.
Now, when you take an antibiotic, you’re creating a huge turmoil internally. The chances are that you may well have destroyed some of the pathogens that the doctor is trying to target, but the problem is you can’t destroy them all. What’s even worse is you’re actually destroying a huge amount of the beneficial flora that live in and around the gut. This creates a big problem for the body at many different levels. Multiple species get wiped out.
Here’s an interesting picture for you to look at. Antibiotics and the gut microbiota, so this really is a healthy digestive system. I’ve held this picture up, I think, previously. You’re looking at that and thinking, “What the hell is this guy on about? That’s the Amazon rain forest. This has got nothing to do with the gut. This guy is nuts.” Well, I’m not nuts. I’m trying to portray a picture here to you of a very, very powerful beautifully developed ecosystem. You’ve got thousands of species of plants, animals, insects, all basically living in a very carefully defined ecosystem. What you can’t see in this picture are the jaguars, anacondas, tarantulas or the poison dart frogs or all the interesting creatures that live in this environment. They all depend on each other. Some kill others. Some basically can only survive because they need to feed on other creatures in the environment. There are multiple species of very good plants in here. There are some plants that are not so good. There are some parasitic plants that live in the rain forest. They thrive by sucking the sap from other plants.
It’s the same in your gut. You’ve got parasites that live in there. What they’re just discovering now and I’m finding very interesting is they actually now believe that some helminths or flatworms, which are a kind of parasite, are actually necessary to live in your digestive system. That’s very interesting information. That information is only just recently come to light. That we actually need a small amount of bad bacteria or parasites, which seem to be very nasty. We actually need those in our digestive system. Having bugs like we’ve got in the rain forest, we’ve got all kinds of creatures that live there. Some we see as bad; some we see as good. It’s the same in our gut. We’ve got many different kinds of bugs that live in there and they all have good cohabitation going on there.
What we’ve got here is, as I mentioned, a healthy rain forest. But then what we’re going to do is we’re going to put the patient on antibiotics for about 10 or 14 days. Unfortunately, we’re going to napalm the forest. Now that picture you saw there of the one tree standing, that’s a person who has had four or five doses of antibiotics in a 12-month period. They’re getting increasing reduction in the microbiota, so they’re reducing more and more of the beneficial bacteria. It’s going to be harder and harder for these to come back again. Because what also happens in the interim is the person will be smoking or drinking coke, having pizzas and having crappy food, living a high stress lifestyle, and there will be not much attention paid at all for restoring the gut function. They might pay a bit of lip service to taking a probiotic.
Here we go again. We’ve got a nice picture of different kinds of bacteria that live in the gut. This is a microscopic picture, obviously. You can see all the lovely colors, the purples, the blues. And then, of course, we put the person on antibiotics and we end up with just a couple of select species.
The point I’m trying to make here is it’s generally not necessary to take an antibiotic for digestive related problems. Even with helicobacter infections, infections of the upper mucosa in the stomach, I’m finding that antibiotics just don’t really do much for people. Some of the highly experienced doctors and gastroenterologists I’ve spoken to at conferences tell me that they actually don’t even give triple therapy anymore. They don’t even treat a patient with antibiotics for stomach related infections. Because they find the recurrence rate is over 95 percent. It’s rare that you’re going to wipe out a bug and going to keep it away with an antibiotic.
How we actually can treat people with natural alternatives to antibiotics is a topic of a whole new video, but I want you to bear in mind that probiotics do play a very important role and prebiotic foods play an important role. I’ve done some videos on prebiotic foods. I’m not a fan of prebiotics in dietary supplements. I just find they create bigger problems. You don’t really want to go for things like inulin and FOS, along with probiotics. Not a good idea.
Look at taking a good antifungal/antibacterial product alongside a good probiotic enzyme formula, so those two formulas work quite well together. And generally, when you do take that approach, you don’t need to take antibiotics anymore, especially for gut related conditions.
I hope that answers your question, Steven, regarding do antibiotics cure Candida. They don’t cure Candida. In fact, they make Candida worse because they don’t touch yeast. They only kill bacteria, allowing the Candida to proliferate. You don’t really want to go there.
Thanks for tuning in.