Category: Candida Crusher FAQ Videos

What I’m going to talk about now is the effects of the stress hormone cortisol, particularly on your immune system, and how cortisol affects white blood cell integrity and activity.

One of your most powerful white blood cells is called lymphocytes, so lymphocytes are what I would call the “commander” of the immune system. There are many different types of lymphocytes, but lymphocytes also have an effect on activity of many other kinds of white blood cells and also inflammatory mediators or chemicals that they produce themselves. So cortisol influences these what we call the “generals of the army,” has a very powerful effect. And the generals, of course, are in command of various other soldiers underneath them that are subordinate to the general, and cortisol being the “admiral” controls the “general.”

So when you think about it, stress has an amazing effect on your immune system, an incredible effect. Let’s forget about sugar for the moment. Let’s forget what you’re eating. Let’s look at the stresses that are effecting you right now in your life and how they could basically affect your Candida or continuation of Candida. Very important concept that’s never spoken about and never written about, but I’m going to bring it to your attention because you may not be aware of the situation.

The stresses affecting your life right now, high mortgage, relationship problems, libido issues, problems with your partner, problems with your children, problems with your mother-in-law, problems with your boss, problems with your employees, whatever kind of problems you’ve got; these things affect us on a stress level, but we’re not even talking about the other stresses that affect us. Things like cell phones, using mobile phones, nutritional deficiencies, heavy metal toxicities, all sorts of other kind of stresses that affect us. These things affect the chemical that our adrenal glands produce.

Adrenals are the master glands of stress. They’re very powerful glands and the adrenal glands sitting above your kidneys produce cortisol and adrenaline, very powerful stress hormones. Now cortisol, as I mentioned, helps to regulate lymphocytes or the very powerful white blood cells, so a very high level of cortisol, which is produced in the initiating stages of stress, can have a very powerful suppressing effect on your immune system. Because when you’re under high stress, you hate your job or you don’t like your relationship or whatever is going on in your life, cortisol will be elevated in the alarm phase of stress. The first stage of stress response.

As cortisol elevates, what happens is the lymphocytes, in fact, their activity gets suppressed. They get pushed down. What you’re going to find is with very high cortisol, in fact, you can have an almost complete disappearance of lymphocytes from the body. When that occurs, you’re going to have a very poor immune function. This is why a lot of people get sick after they get stressed. They have the stress response. A few days later or a week later, they get sick. It’s very common to occur in people.

How many people out there with Candida know about this kind of effect about stress, a bit of a washout period, and then an exacerbation of their Candida? It’s important to make sure that you’ve got good cortisol levels so they’re well balanced. Cortisol not only affects your lymphocytes in terms of suppressing their effect, but when cortisol is high, as we said, it suppresses it; but when it’s very low, the white cells, in fact, increase in numbers and this can cause increased inflammation, pain and redness and swelling of the area. So with this regulation of cortisol, we get an inappropriate wound healing response, inflammatory response, an inability to counter Candida, plus also the inability to counter the cellular products as a result of Candida death. When Candida dies, the cell walls break up, and these little proteins called mannan are released into the circulation system. Now mannan will normally get attacked by particular inflammatory compounds that the immune system produces. If there’s not enough inflammatory compounds there, you get a lot of mannan being produced. And then eventually as cortisol rises, the person ends up getting what we call a Herxheimer reaction or a die off.

When we get stressed or an inappropriate stress response, we get massive die off. The die off can also be caused as a result of inappropriate cortisol regulation. If you send me emails that say, Erik, I’m getting die off. Why am I getting die off? Think about the kind of stresses that are involved in your life. And maybe think about salivary cortisol testing because that can have a good – that will teach you really how stress is affecting you, and whether stress or not is a factor in your recovery from Candida. Very important concept.

Catch up with me on Candida and Stress number three, and I’m going to go into a bit more detail, so I hope to catch you there. Thanks for tuning in.

Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about why stress feeds Candida. In fact, this is going to be a series of a few different videos explaining about the connection with stress, your immune system, and the promotion of yeast infection.

So a big thing that you need to bear in mind is one of the main hormones that influence stress is called cortisol. Cortisol can increase or decrease in the presence of stress, and what you’re going to find is that in the alarm phase or in the initial phases of stress, which happen to people all the time. For example, if your mobile phone rings or if you’ve got an appointment or if you’ve got something to do. If there’s any demand placed on your body, cortisol will increase.

With severe stress, cortisol can increase at an alarmingly high rate. If you’ve had a car accident or if you’ve fallen down the stairs, if you’ve had any kind of injury, cortisol is going to go up. Even a sporting injury. If you’ve got prolonged pain or emotional stress, if you’ve got problems with your boss, with your employee, with your mother-in-law, anything like that, if there’s a prolonged duration of stress, you can be in an alarm phase on and off for quite a while. These alarms can occur and then you can back off and get down into what we call the “resistance” or “adaptation” phase of stress. I’ll explain a little bit more about this general adaptation syndrome in another video, but you can probably see some videos online explaining the three stages of stress. You may want to know a little bit about this.

With the alarm phase or basically the initial stages of stress, cortisol gets elevated. And what we find is the white blood cells, particularly the most important white blood cells, or lymphocytes, can, in fact, disappear with very high levels of cortisol.

Now the body will do this because if you’re running away from a threat or if there’s a problem that you need to escape from, the immune system is not initially important. What is important is that you have a good amount of blood flowing to the muscles and to the brain, to the larger muscles and the brain, so you can escape from this threat, so immunity is not really a critical issue.

The point I’m making here is if you’ve got high anxiety or you suffer a lot from stress, if you have a lot of demands placed on you, you feel recurrently ill; this is going to be a problem because you’re going to have a low state of immunity. And what does that mean for Candida? A perpetuation of Candida. So this is how stress can feed a yeast infection, can allow it to keep going.

We all talk about, we’ve got to stop the sugars, we can’t have Mars bars or Coca-Cola or we can’t go to McDonalds and have their nice sundaes, we can’t have the sugar, but we don’t talk about the reduction in the immune system that occurs with stress.

You can read a lot more about this in Candida Crusher, but I really want you to understand the principle that with poor immunity will be perpetuation of Candida. I’ll explain a little bit more in-depth about other kinds of cellular responses with the immune system in subsequent videos on stress and Candida.

Thanks for tuning in.

I’ve got a question here asked from a patient in America. Does Lufenuron kill Candida? No, it doesn’t kill Candida. It doesn’t kill it at all. In fact, the two websites that promote this product claim that it helps to inhibit the cell wall of Candida and, therefore, helps to eradicate it.

This is a line of crap. Science has shown that in 2005 research was conducted at the University of California showing it was a completely ineffective Candida cell wall membrane inhibitor. So I would not recommend you purchase this product at all and stick with the more traditional antifungal medicines that were designed for their intended purpose.

Lufenuron, a chitin synthesis inhibitor, was designed by a chemical company to get rid of fleas. Unless you’re infested with fleas, you’ve got them all over your body, all around your scrotum, all around the vaginal area, fleas in your hair, and fleas inside your tummy, whatever, it may be effecting, but not many people I see are covered in fleas, so I recommend you avoid this product like the plague.

I’ve seen too many patients with massive side effects from taking Lufenuron and I don’t want you to be another person who contacts me saying, “I think I got scammed. I took this product. I feel sick.

What am I going to do? I contacted the people I purchased it from. I’ve heard nothing back. Eric, help me please?”

Now I’ve had many emails like that. I’ve had many Skype consultations like that, so I don’t want you to be another one of those people, so please avoid this product and stick with more traditional things like garlic and oregano oil, grapefruit seed extract, these are things that are proven to work.

There’s even many university studies in varying states around the U.S., the U.K., and Germany, different places like that, that endorse these sorts of natural products. Science has shown that garlic, for example, is a highly effective antifungal, but it’s not just an antifungal, also it helps to keep the blood thin, reduces blood pressure, has many effects on the immune system, so these are very good things for you to take. And they’re also foods. You can actually buy these things as foods and take them as standardized medicines as well. But to take chemical treatments designed to kill fleas, it’s not a good idea, so please avoid these sham treatments.

Thanks for tuning in.