Hi there. New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher. Formulator of the Canxida range of products. We’re going to talk about the connection between inflammation and Candida today. It’s quite a well-known connection between different kinds of infections and inflammation, but let’s first talk a little bit about what inflammation really is.
Inflammation itself is not really that bad, in fact, it’s a necessary response from the body to heal itself. So when you get a cut or a bite or a wound or a sting, inflammation is normal and an acute inflammatory response will occur by way of the immune system. This is how we heal. Acute bronchitis, a mosquito bite, a cut to a finger when you’re cutting up something in the kitchen. Inflammation is normal. It can cause a bit of pain, a bit of redness, a bit of swelling, and this will usually subside in a few days or a week and it will be gone. That’s an acute inflammatory response.
A chronic inflammatory response, however, can go on and on and on. It can last for weeks, months, or even years. I try to liken a chronic inflammation a little bit to an explanation that was given to me a long time ago when I went to a medical conference and one of the doctors said, “Imagine flying over a rain forest. Sitting in this little airplane.” I hate airplanes, by the way, especially small ones that are all over the place. Imagine you’re flying in this little airplane.
Going over a forest and you look down out the window and you see a tiny little fire burning somewhere in the distance.
You see a tiny little plume of smoke coming out between the big trees. It’s this huge big rain forest and you’ve got a tiny fire burning there. A little bit of smoke coming up. You’ll go past and you’ll think nothing of it. And then you go on your vacation. You might have gone to a dinosaur park. I don’t if you’ve seen Jurassic Park with the dinosaurs. Go to Jurassic Park and then you’re flying back. But then all of a sudden, the rain forest is gone. It’s all gone. What happened? Well, the fire took off. In fact, that small fire took out hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin forest that got burned by that fire. That’s chronic inflammation, folks.
Chronic inflammation can sit there for days or weeks or months or even years and then all of a sudden, bang. It can take off. It can gallop away on you or it can continually secrete proteins or cause an upregulated immune response that can weaken the body and make it prone to further inflammation, infection and disease. Smoldering fire. The smoking gun, we call it. It could be a diseased tooth. It could be a little infection you’ve got there in the ileocecal valve between the small and large intestine. It could be something wrong with your tonsils. It could be a small little infection called a “nitis”, a tiny little infection somewhere we call a focal infection. I see them quite in the teeth. They can sit there for months and months and months. Hard to detect sometimes. And if you keep an eye on blood tests and look at things like C reactive proteins, CRP, keep an eye on your white blood cells, kidney function, and do a regular blood testing, you may be able to peek if there is inflammation. Especially if you’re tired, you’re sick, you’re weak, you don’t feel well, you may have unexplained fevers. Things like this could point you toward chronic low grade inflammation.
Chronic low grade inflammation also happens around the heart quite a lot. It can happen in blood vessels. Different parts of the body. Chronic inflammation has been called the architype of etiology. So what that means in English is the mother of all causes of disease. Most chronic diseases have some route cause in chronic low grade inflammation. Whether it’s cancer, diabetes, heart disease, many different autoimmune diseases. These are all basically diseases that can come from chronic low grade inflammation.
What’s all this got to do with Candida? Candida can be both acute and chronic in the body. You can have an acute Candida problem that will last a few weeks or a few months. You can have a chronic Candida problem that can last for 20 years. Some patients I see with Candida have multiple bacteria, various parasites, low levels of beneficial bacteria and high levels of inflammatory protein showing in the stool test results. I keep banging on about the stool tests. That’s because I like looking at stool tests. You might look at newspapers or blogs. I like looking at test results from patients because it will give me a really good idea on how we can help that person out. Most all people with long term chronic Candida will have some kind of level of inflammation in the body and will signify by elevation of circulatory IgA in the stool. This is an antibody.
And it can also signify with an elevation of a marker called lysozyme, which is basically a protein made by white blood cells. So if you see an elevation there, then I immediately go back to the parasitology page and I’ll often find elevated parasites along with yeast sitting there. There is certainly a relationship.
Let’s talk a bit about the inflammation in general. What do you do when you’ve got inflammation? The first thing to try to do is to track down where the inflammation is. There is no point in dumping buckets of water all over the bush unless you know where the fires are, is there? What’s the point of that? If I see smoke over there, I’m going to tell the pilot to fly there and dump some water on it. Targeted approach to chronic inflammation makes sense. Taking pharmaceutical medications for chronic inflammation is dumb. It’s a dumb idea. It’s a stupid idea. That’s like getting hundreds of people out with little garden hoses just hosing trees down and doing stupid things and not really being targeted and focused on the cause of that fire. You really want to try to find out where the problem is so you can deal with it.
You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen patients with teeth problems or infections. Even a tiny little stone in the kidney can hold proteins or bacteria that can cause an upregulated inflammatory response. It’s good to do a kidney and liver detox. It’s good to get the digestive system in top shape. It’s good to make sure that your blood work is done and if everything is in perfect condition. Do the ground work first. Do a stool test to find out if there is any inflammation. If you’ve been howling around with a torch in the dark to corners to see if you can find where the smoke is.
The diet is a key thing to do with inflammation. Obviously following my Candida Crusher approach is going help you a lot because we’re going to take the sugars out of the diet. We’re going to get rid of alcohol. We’re going to get rid of all of the crap out of the diet. This is going to stop feeding any potential inflammation. Very smart idea. Don’t over exercise. Be kind to your body. Too many people go hard out when they’re feeling not well, thinking that “I’m going to go and run today. I’m going to do a marathon next month. I’m going to run 40 miles. It’s going to really improve my health.” Right. It’s going to really screw up your health because you’re only adding more inflammatory mediators into the pool of inflammation. Hard grade or consistently hard out exercise is actually pro-inflammatory. It’s a stress your body has to deal with.
Many people with long term low grade chronic inflammation have got an element of adrenal fatigue. They’ve had an elevation of cortisol for too long, which upregulates the inflammation response. Then eventually, they get a downregulation of cortisol and depletion as the gland gets more functionally exhausted and tired. With each increment of decrease in cortisol, we’re going to get an increase in inflammation. Initially, we can shut the immune system with high grade stress. Doctors are good at that. They give steroid to patients, which whips the immune system up. And then long term, we get depletion of cortisol and we get inflammation again because now we’ve got a weakening of the immune system. We’ve got an immune system that’s getting more and more powerful. The response gets stronger and stronger. This is why people love steroids when they’re not feeling well because they switch off these inflammatory signals.
Diet needs cleaning up. Lifestyle needs cleaning up. Sleep needs improving. Stresses need dealing with. These are all lifestyle changes I talk about in my program. Very clever idea. Deal with the parasites. Deal with the fungus. Get the bacteria right. Walking is fine. Never exceed your ability to recover when you exercise. Spend more time relaxing. More time trying to understand how to intelligently balance a work life approach. All clever things to do. Get the adrenal fatigue sorted. Smart thing to do.
I hope that explains a little bit about inflammation. Candida can cause many different kinds of problems in the body just by itself. Acetaldehyde, ammonia, uric acid, Gliotoxins, mannan. These are all different chemicals that Candida alone can produce. Of course, these things all fan the fire. All these things just make the fire hotter and more intense and burn deeper. These things all need cleaning up. If you get on top of your Candida infection, if you’ve identified it, that’s going to go a long way toward reducing chronic long term inflammation.
Consider taking my Canxida Remove as an antifungal/antibacterial. We’ve worked with a lot of patients now with that formula in particular and we’ve had outstanding feedback on its ability to help reduce the inflammatory response. I’ve seen this now with many hundreds of stool tests, pre and post. We’re starting to notice a trend now where this antifungal product is definitely driving the Candida down and driving the lysozyme down. It’s taking the circulatory IgA down. We’re getting a lot of people back into foods that they couldn’t previously eat for a long time. We’re noticing energy coming back. I’m quite pleased with the results we’re getting.
I hope that gives you a bit of an insight into inflammation and Candida. They certainly are bedfellows. They get on well together. They form a great relationship and it’s in your hand to break that relationship between those two. Thanks for tuning in.