Category: Candida Crusher FAQ Videos

Welcome back. Thanks for joining me back again in my helicobacter pylori series. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand and author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida range of products. We’re going to do another video today called “What are the risk factors if H. pylori is left untreated?”

The risk factors really depend on you. It depends on how you’re experiencing your infection. Do you have a mild case? Do you have a moderate case? It depends a lot on your current diet and lifestyle. Are you smoking tobacco? Are you drinking alcohol all the time? Are you eating crappy foods? Are you eating a lot of takeaway food? Are you living a high stress life? Are you taking lots of medications? Are you ignoring health in general and just living a life full of whatever, booze, and I don’t know what you do out there. You get my point.

If you’re a person who’s living a healthy life, a person who’s getting plenty of sleep, a person’s who’s trying to eat a good healthy whole foods diet, a person who exercises regularly, a person who understands that smoking is the most stupid thing you can do. When you start living like that, the chances are you’re going to overcome the infection much faster than a person who’s not living like that. The risks will always increase with any kind of condition when a person doesn’t take their health seriously.

One of my favorite sayings has always been, “If you don’t take your health seriously, you should take it somewhere else.” And that’s what I think all doctors should tell their patients. If you don’t give a damn about your health, then the doctor shouldn’t give a damn about you. Then you’re left to your own devices. I could never understand why years ago, they had people in hospitals smoking tobacco, cigarettes, and they’d actually wheel them out of the ward outside with the nurses so they could smoke out there and then wheel them back in again. I could never work that one out.

When you do habits that are known to be detrimental to your health and you’ve got no control over those, then there is only one possible outcome for you and that’s living a pretty crappy life when you get a bit older. And it’s all your own doing. But if you’re not like that and you’re like me, you try to take care of your health, then the chances are the consequences aren’t so grave when you have an infection. Because there’s a huge chance for you to overcome this infection in a shorter rather than longer period of time.

Let’s just say you’re a healthy person with a helicobacter infection who’s probably taking a proton pump inhibitor, some kind of acid blocking drug or Pepto Bismol or something on a regular basis, and millions of people in America are doing that right as we speak. In Germany, in Holland, in England, in Singapore, many countries around the world, people are doing it right as we speak. They’re taking a medication for their heartburn. They don’t pay any attention to the infection. They think that they’ve got no helicobacter because their doctor said they’re perfectly fine, and they can’t find any cause for the heartburn or inflammation, so they just put them on a drug.

Well, the long term consequences for those people is not so good, unfortunately. I think you can get away with these drugs when you’re in your 30s and 40s and 50s. But when you get a bit older, that’s when your chickens come out to roost. Why would that be? And that’s because your body is getting older. Liver function declines. Kidney function declines. Immune function declines one to three percent per year. Everything is slowly declining. We’re all going to die. We know that, but all of us want to die slowly. We don’t want to die quickly.

Medications long term come at a huge cost to your health. The point I want to make out of the video is if you do have a symptom, your consequences are great if you keep taking a drug to suppress the symptom. That’s the problem. If you take a drug short term and then get off it, I think it’s okay. Try to see drugs like credit cards. Once you’ve used them, cut them up and dump them. Flush them down the toilet. Get rid of them. Don’t keep using it. Would you keep racking up debt on a credit card and not paying it back? You wouldn’t do that, but that’s what people do with medications all the time.

Don’t be a mug and stay on a drug. If you’ve got a symptom, find the cause and fix it. That’s the intelligent approach. And people who start thinking like that have got a much greater chance of not having serious consequences as they age than people who throw caution to the wind. Keep drinking wine or whiskey. Keep eating potato chips all the time. Keep taking drugs. Those are the people that end up with serious health problems down the track.

This is quite a serious video and I want you to think about it. If you take medications long term or have got a partner who takes them long term or a loved one or a friend or a family member in exactly this position, it’s nice to be able to urge that person to say, “Look, come on. Check this out. It’s not good long term. Let’s get this problem sorted. Maybe a bit of testing. Let’s try to clean up your act. Clean up your diet.” Those are the intelligent approaches that are going to help that person to have a better quality of life as they get older rather than misery, which a lot of people have. When they get to my age, 50s or 60s, they end up with serious, serious digestive problems, crippling pain, more drugs and more medication. It’s not really a nice way to grow up and to spend your last years in pain and misery.

To answer that question, “What are the risk factors if it’s left untreated?” Well, the risk factors, in my opinion, are slim if you’re a healthy person who knows how to look after his or her health. But the risk factors are great if you remain on medication and you throw caution to the wind and don’t care about your diet and lifestyle, then you’ve got great risk factors.

Thanks for tuning in. Catch up with me in the next video. The next video, we’re going to do “How do I prevent from getting H. pylori?” Thank you.

Greetings. New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for joining me again in another video in our helicobacter pylori series. I’m going to be talking about the signs and symptoms of an HP infection, so I’ve got my laptop open here. I’m looking at my ericbakker.com website. I’ve got an article on there called “Heartburn,” which is all about H. pylori, that is one of the chief symptoms.

An interesting thing about helicobacter is it doesn’t produce exactly the same symptomatology in every single patient. Some people develop gastric ulceration, duodenal or gastric ulcers. The duodenal ulcer is further down the stomach. The gastric ulcer is a bit higher up.

Dr. Robin Warren, the chief pathologist who did a huge amount of research on helicobacter in the early days, believed that 10 to 15 percent of all people who get HP infections will go onto to develop ulcerations. Think about that for a minute, 10 to 15 percent; 10 to 15 percent is a lot when you think about how many millions of people in the US are infected and other countries with this particular bug.

If you think that the drug called Nexium, the acid blocker, in 2014 sold $6.4 billion US dollars. It makes me wonder how many of those billions of dollars have actually been treating people with helicobacter. They shouldn’t have been on this blasted drug in the first place.

The signs and symptoms are varied. It depends if the bacteria are stimulating overproduction and in some cases for reasons we don’t really understand, can actually switch off production. The patient can develop achlorhydria or an absence of stomach acid. In other people, it could just mess the whole lot up. So it can either over produce or under produce or mess up your digestion. And that’s why the symptoms can be varied from patient to patient.

I’m going to read out a list of the typical signs and symptoms of a helicobacter pylori infection. Nausea or queasiness, low grade feeling of queasiness, feeling a little bit sick. Some patients can really get sick and actually vomit at times or vomit for no reason at all, which is an unusual thing but it can be linked to it. Avoidance of chili, garlic, or specific foods that does not agree with your tummy. It could be Uncle Fred coming over or grandpa that says, “I can’t eat them potatoes. Every time I eat those potatoes, I feel sick. I don’t like garlic. Every time I have a piece of garlic, I feel like crap. I’m burping and I’m sick and everything.” If the person feels ill quite quickly after eating a certain food, it may be a problem with helicobacter pylori.

Bloating worse after meals. Feeling worse after meals or certain kinds of foods. Recurring abdominal pain, intestinal cramps, that’s a big one. This pain of helicobacter can make you think that you’re having a heart attack. If you think where the stomach is and where the heart is, they’re very close together. Many people, in fact, who do end up in the emergency room or get the ambulance are having indigestion. All could have a serious HP attack rather than a heart attack. It can be quite a sharp pain. You can actually think you’re dying sometimes. The pain can be that intense. I’ve had many patients over the years tell me they ended up in the emergency ward and the doctor said, “You’ve got heartburn. Go home. Take this antacid. You’ll be fine. There’s nothing wrong with your heart. We checked your blood out, did an EKG, everything is clear. Just go home.”

Peptic or duodenal ulcers, which we’ve spoken about already in this series. Over 90 percent of all cases of peptic and duodenal ulcers are caused by helicobacter pylori. In rare cases, you can actually have a small tumor in the stomach producing acid, but those are really rare cases. Burping, which can be pretty bad. You might have a relation that’s got actually a reputation for burping. Some people can burp the alphabet. I think I actually saw that in one of those Guinness records. If the burping is excessive and really over the top, it could well be helicobacter. Remember what we said. It can produce an over acidity and also under acidity, so food can sit there like a rock. It’s not being digested properly. You can feel like you swallowed a brick. It can be sitting in there.

Heartburn. Maybe reliant on Gaviscon or Losec or Tums or some kind of antacid drink or pill. If the person has always got a pack of candy, sweets or something in their pocket, pop in their mouth because of heartburn, this is the sort of patient I’m looking for that has probably got helicobacter. The person always wants mints. I had a friend like that. Always wanted to buy mints all the time because it made him feel better. Didn’t know why, but he felt better. Those are the sort of key things I look for.

Diarrhea or constipation after several years of infection. Well, is it any wonder? If the stomach is going to play out sooner or later, what happens downstream is going to be all affected as well. It’s no wonder why.

Disturbed sleep. Maybe waking up with a hollow feeling or heartburn. These people can sometimes wake up really early in the morning being really hungry and having to eat food. I’ve also found at times that some patients have got issues with their position, so they feel better semi-reclining or they feel better in those chairs. They’ve got the foot rest that goes up. They feel way better like that. Other people feel better propped up. Some people have a couple of bricks under the head of the bed to prop the bed up a little bit. Other people don’t have that at all. As soon as I hear people talking about this position or problem with gastric discomfort, helicobacter. When you think about it, if the stomach, if you’ve got acid in here and it’s moving around a bit, it could affect the symptoms of that person quite a lot.

Here’s an interesting one that many people don’t think about, vitamin B-12 deficiency. If you’ve had a problem with your stomach for a long time, there may be an issue with what we call the parietal cells. These are cells that produce a hormone called “intrinsic factor.” That binds to vitamin B-12, which is found chiefly in animal sources. Intrinsic factor binds the B-12. It’s produced by this particular cell, or parietal cell. It goes down the small intestine and there’s a small area there that it gets absorbed. If the stomach is playing up, not working properly, there is a chance that the B-12 is not really efficiently being utilized with the intrinsic factor. I always recommend people with a stomach problem of long duration to always get vitamin B-12 checked.

People with helicobacter, I’ve spoken with some specialists on my trips to Australia at some of these big conferences, say they’ve even seen it linked with serious depression and anxiety disorder. If you’ve got no B-12 in the body and it’s never checked, you can have serious anxiety disorder and major depression if the stomach is playing out. Of course, your doctor may refer you to a psychiatrist thinking you’re nuts. Get your B-12 checked because B-12 is important for another chemical reaction we call “methylation,” which we haven’t got time to go into today. Just check out methylation.

Altered appetite. Sometimes you feel like eating. Sometimes you don’t feel like eating. After being infected for many years, you may have developed deficiencies that can lead to a whole lot of health problems. If the stomach is not working efficiently, how the hell can you ever breakdown and absorb and utilize the nutrition from your diet. I don’t care how good your diet is. I don’t care how biodynamic it is or how GM free or how perfect it’s grown. If the stomach is not working efficiently, you’re completely wasting your time with the best foods. You need to have a stomach in very good condition to utilize the nutrition properly. Give it to the end target, to all cells in the body.

Helicobacter is implicated in Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. There is actually a link there with Hashimoto’s patients and H. pylori. If you have got Hashimoto’s and you’re watching this, I think it may pay for you to do a fecal stool test and maybe a serum antigen test just to make sure you haven’t got HP.

Forty percent of migraine headaches offers a positive with HP and eradication subsides the headaches in a lot of cases. If you suffer from recurrent migraines, get checked for helicobacter.

Acne rosacea. I don’t know how many patients I’ve seen with acne rosacea over the years. Helicobacter pylori is suspected of causing acne rosacea, and eradication of HP often results in a significant reduction of these symptoms.

Have a think about those signs and symptoms. But the key ones are burping, heartburn, tired, fatigue, not feeling well, funny diet or what we call a dodgy diet or strange like some foods you can’t tolerate, some foods you can or if people find you a fussy eater or a finicky eater. Look carefully for these in children as well, especially if children don’t like foods or argue with you they can’t eat this or they can’t eat that. They may have a problem. In Europe, this problem is so big that the European Helicobacter Foundation has actually set up a whole institution just to study this in children, so bad is the problem. Countries like Spain, Portugal, they’ve got a major problem with HP.

Think about those signs and symptoms. If you’re unsure about them, check with your health care professional. Thanks for tuning in.

Greetings, it’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher and the formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thank you for checking out my video. We’re going to talk about helicobacter pylori today. I’ll probably end up doing a few videos on helicobacter. It’s such an incredibly endemic problem. So many patients we see in the clinic have got H. Pylori and so many patients are misdiagnosed. Testing is not always very accurate with HP. In many instances, I’ve noticed that patients come back positive with the symptoms who swear they’ve got the condition. They go and get a stool test or a blood test. It comes back negative. But when you treat them, they get no result. I’ve seen this time and again. It’s amazing. It’s nice to have a test confirmation. But in most cases, I will just treat the patient for helicobacter if I suspect it.

Back in 1984, an Australian doctor, Dr. Gary Marshall, discovered helicobacter working in the lab. He started to wonder why so many people were getting gastric ulceration, heartburn, peptic ulcers, and discovered that there was a spiral shape bacteria involved. I think it was originally called campylobacter pylori, but then the name got changed to helicobacter. Helico as in a spiral or a helicoid. It’s an incredible bug and it is endemic in many countries around the world.

In New Zealand and Australia, 25 percent of the population are infected. In North America, I believe it’s about 25 to 30 percent of the population. In some countries like Africa, it’s up to 90 percent of the population. Not everybody who’s infected will necessarily be symptomatic. Some people are asymptomatic, which means they’re not necessarily presenting with symptoms. They could be carriers. Many people who have got it will certainly notice the symptoms, which could be burping, bloating. Often it’s digestive discomfort with eating certain foods, so certain foods won’t agree with that person. That person may have been taking some type of an antacid or an acid blocker for a short period of time or for many, many years. Once you’ve got helicobacter, you’ve generally got helicobacter for a long time.

The key issue we get with it is heartburn. It will be like GERD, a GERD kind of a symptom, gastroesophageal reflux. So you could have it every now and then, hot stuff or sour stuff coming up. You can feel a discomfort here behind the sternum in the part of the chest here. It may feel really uncomfortable especially after eating. You may find that standing or sitting or changing position could increase or decrease the discomfort. You may find that by taking an acid blocker you get a lot of relief of this symptom.

If you’ve got HP, have a look around at your family and friends to see who suffers from a similar kind of problem. I see it often in relationships. It will be in family relationships. Your mom could have it or your dad or your auntie or your sister could have it or your husband or wife could have it. It’s quite common for this bug to be spread with utensil sharing or kissing. It can be spread, so just be careful if you’ve got it. If you’ve been taking a medication for many years to block acid, you may well have helicobacter pylori. My advice is to go and get tested on the off chance that they pick it up. If you get tested and it comes back negative and you can relate to helicobacter pylori, then my advice is to treat it. Even if you just treat for SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, you may end up finding a very, very good result.

Chances are if you’ve got bad GERD or reflux and you’re taking a blocker and if you treat it and get a very, very good outcome, my advice is to slowly wean off the acid blocking drug and to take more of an antibacterial/antifungal approach for three to six months to try to eradicate all this rubbish you’ve got up here. It can change your life. Many people with H. Pylori end up with a lot of tiredness and it’s no wonder they get tired because they end up getting a reduced ability to really break down and absorb and utilize the nutrients coming in through the food. It’s like starving an automobile of gas or petrol going into the carburetor. If you’re going to starve the vehicle, the power to the wheels is not really going to happen properly. So your muscles aren’t going to really feel good if you’ve got helicobacter long term. Your sleep is not going to feel good. Your mood is not going to feel good. You’re going to feel grumpy. You’re going to feel pissed off. You’re going to feel tired. You’re going to feel you’re getting older. You’re going to feel a lot of discomfort and then your doctor is just going to keep writing out prescriptions for these darn acid blocking medications.

The drug Nexium in the US is a typical example of an acid blocking drug. It netted the pharmaceutical companies $6.1 billion US dollars in 2014. That’s one drug for one symptom. There is about 10 drugs all in the top 10, so we’re looking at literally a trillion dollars’ worth of pharmaceutical drugs each year in North America alone just to block stomach acid. My guess is that one in three or one in four are those people who’ve got HP.

Think about it. If you’ve got heartburn, reflux, burping, bloating, sick after certain meals, sensation of fullness after meals, or certain foods disagree very quickly when you eat them. There could be some queasiness or nausea there. You may find discomfort when lying in bed at night. You may need to prop up the bed head with a brick. Some people put a brick under the bed head. It makes them feel better. If you’ve got any of those kind of symptoms, you need checking out. If you have HP long term, you’ll end up a very sick person on multiple medications with multiple diseases.

HP is often found in conjunction with Candida. Candida like other kinds of bugs is opportunistic. If it sees the opportunity, it will start taking off and growing. My guess is that many people with helicobacter also have very poor levels of beneficial bacteria. They have a yeast infection in the body and other associated gastric problems. The reason why is because they’ve been on medications for so long. They take acid blockers and some take sleeping pills and some take antidepressants and they take all this cocktail of drugs and then they wonder why their whole insides aren’t working properly. The big thing is to wean you off this sort of stuff in the long term, so you don’t need to rely on it and eventually get you off all medications, so your body can run on its own steam, produce its own power with the good diet that you’re eating and it will turn your whole life right around. I’ve seen this with many patients over the years.

Consider taking the Canxida Remove tablet. It seems to be working very well for helicobacter. It’s a product I initially created for Candida yeast infections. We’re getting very, very good feedback from people with helicobacter pylori, with parasites. Many different kinds of parasites responding to that product, Candida, of course. I’m using it for SIBO patients as well very successfully. Food allergy patients, leaky bowel patients, all sorts of conditions. But I’m also noticing good results with helicobacter pylori with the Canxida Remove.

The Canxida Restore is a fantastic companion product. Because everybody I find with helicobacter will have a lack of beneficial bacteria. Everybody with helicobacter will have an issue with digesting food properly. If the pancreas doesn’t function properly, that’s because they keep putting these acid blocking medications in the stomach that changes the pH, the acidity of the stomach, which renders a lot of the pancreatic enzymes ineffective. Taking a digestive enzyme with meals when you’ve got HP is a very, very smart idea. Especially if that enzyme contains probiotics.

I don’t recommend you take prebiotic supplements like inulin or FOS with helicobacter. I’ve had too many bad results when it comes to that. And these are some of the reasons why I created Canxida Restore. Because I wanted to give the patient a product containing high quality enzymes, high quality probiotics without FOS, inulin or any of that prebiotic crap in there. That causes too much nausea, bloating, sick feelings. I’ve taken all of those out. The Canxida Restore with helicobacter is best taken one with each meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The Canxida Remove, the antifungal/antibacterial, is best also taken with meals. They work perfectly fine together. They don’t cancel each other out at all, so you can take the Canxida Remove twice per day initially, and the Canxida Restore you can straight away take three per day with meals. If you start noticing increased acidity, burping and bloating on that regime, you just back off by one dose. You can still take your acid-blocking medication at the same time, and slowly you can be weaned off that.

A very, very good tip that I’m going to leave you with. The last tip and a very, very worthwhile tip that’s helped a lot of people out. I want you to get some green cabbage and then juice one or two cabbage leaves every single morning. When you get up, juice one or two cabbage leaves in a juicer or blender and you extract one to two tablespoons of the cabbage juice and you drink that on an empty stomach. It’s a fantastic tip. It’s a tip that’s won be a huge amount of fans in many different countries around the world. I’ve got a lot of satisfied patients now just from that one tip alone, so that’s a real gold nugget for you. If you’re taking Nexium or esomeprazole or any kind of an acid blocker, you try that tip and then you get back to me and tell me how you went with that tip. I’ll be very pleased to see the comments on this particular video for people who’ve tried the cabbage juice trick.

Cabbage juice goes back centuries for stomach problems. It contains a substance in it that is superior to any acid blocking medication you’ll find. Once you use it for a while and you’ve eradicated bugs, you should have no more problem with acidity in your stomach. That’s my promise. You keep on trying the cabbage juice. Stick with it for about three months. Every morning when you get up, one to two tablespoons, empty stomach. Some people respond to potato juice, but I find the cabbage juice to be superior.

Thanks for watching my video today. I appreciate it.