Category: Candida Crusher FAQ Videos

Greetings. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand and author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for checking out my video today. As you can imagine, I get an incredible amount of emails from patients from all around the world from many different countries, particularly from the United States of America. I get lots of frequently asked questions. I’ve got a question here from a guy called Tom Rutherford in Texas, and Tom is asking me, Eric, what are the best foods to eat if I have a yeast infection? The best foods to eat with Candida.

Well, Tom, this is going to be quite an interesting reply to your question because it’s not just about what foods are the best foods to eat with Candida. There are many different ways we can answer the question and, unfortunately, many Candida diet websites, base a lot of their information around foods. Foods do form a very important consideration with yeast infections. But unfortunately, a lot of these websites and sources of information don’t contain the full picture. In fact, I’m absolutely stunned the longer I see patients, the more I realize that so many people can, in fact eat fruit, can eat gluten, and can eat lots of bread. Even some patients can drink alcohol and still recover from a yeast infection. So there is no one law that comes down like a hammer that says, “You shall not eat this. You shall not eat that.” But the guidelines I’m going to give you now, Tom, will be based on my experiences on many thousands of different patients. What I think works best for the general population. And I’ll throw some more information in along the line as we speak on situations other than foods.

Let’s just start by explaining a little bit about what is currently the whole idea with the Candida diet. Most people will be quick to tell you that you’ve got to avoid anything containing sugar or refined carbohydrates. That you’ve got to eat a diet that is quite high in proteins, preferably lean sources of protein and focus more on the green leafy vegetables. The general consensus is to avoid all forms of fruit and most forms of grain. In fact, it almost sounds a bit like a specific carbohydrate kind of diet, doesn’t it? It’s a paleo/SCD diet combined. That’s almost what this sounds like. There are no hard and fast rules, and I wrote about this extensively in Candida Crusher.

However, when you’re starting off with a Candida diet approach, the first thing I always get people to do is to do what I call a big clean up. So a big clean up means an assessment of what you’re currently eating, particularly if you haven’t already made the changes toward these types of foods, is to slowly wind down all your eating over a 14-day period. By that, I mean cut out all forms of alcohol over a 14-day period. Stop eating takeaway or refined foods, and start incorporating good foods into the diet.

What are the good foods? What are the best foods to eat when you’ve got a Candida yeast infection? Well, the best foods are foods that support good digestion, that support good immune function, and that support the proliferation of beneficial bacteria in the digestive system. They discourage dysbiotic bacteria and Candida, and they also discourage the ability to the challenge the immune system. Because nearly all people with Candida have leaky gut syndrome. They have intestinal permeability. Nearly all people I see with Candida have SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and all patients I see with Candida have got stress, which increases permeability umpteen times.

Focus on high quality proteins in your diet. Proteins are important to eat, particularly if you chew them really well. Chew them well. And also, I believe it’s important at this stage to recommend that you take a good digestive enzyme/probiotic supplement at least twice, if not three times per day. When you’ve gone through the big clean up and you’re going into the initial stages of a good Candida diet is to support your digestion with a very good quality enzyme dietary supplement. Because the enzyme is going to help your stomach, the pancreas, and the small intestine. It’s going to facilitate proper breakdown. It’s going to supply the body with some enzymes that it might be lacking.

A lot of doctors at this point will say, “What a load of bologna. You don’t need any supplements. You can get everything in diet alone.” Yes, you can, but you can’t fast track your results and you will not get a swift recovery and a full complete recovery without some kind of supplement aid when taken at the right time. You don’t need a whole bunch of supplements with Candida. You just need to take the right kind of stuff.

Make sure you chew your food. I haven’t even mentioned foods and I’m already talking about chewing food. Unless you chew your food properly, you’re not going to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. Your pancreas – I’ve mentioned this many times before in previous videos – your pancreas only has parasympathetic domination and not sympathetic domination. If you don’t know what that means, go and look up what sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are. So rest and digest is the stress part of the autonomic function. If you really want to digest foods properly, you’ve got to chew them properly. No point in taking pills. I don’t give a toss what kind of food you eat. If you don’t chew it properly, you’re not going to digest it properly. If you don’t relax when you eat, you’re never going to digest it.

Eggs, especially good quality free-range eggs. Chicken, clean fish, if you can get a nice ocean caught fish. We’ve got plenty of beautiful fish down here in New Zealand. A good quality fish. You guys in the States call it “grass fed” beef. We don’t have anything but grass fed beef here in New Zealand. Everything is grass all around us, so all our sheep and cattle all eat beautiful green lush grass. As far as I know, no cattle are fed with grains down here. Grass fed beef. These sorts of proteins are going to help improve your digestion. Try and eat them at least twice per day, if you can.

If you’re a vegetarian watching this, make sure that you incorporate good quality nuts, seeds, and legumes into your diet. There are many different kinds of legumes you can eat, different beans, and peas. I’m also a fan of soy and tofu. I know a lot of people out there think it’s almost like toxic nuclear waste going into the digestive system because it’s so maligned, but a lot of my patients have successfully eaten organic tofu now for as long as I’ve been a practitioner. I’ve eaten tofu for over 30 years and I haven’t grown breasts or become retarded or anything out of it yet. And a lot of my clients do have soy products. That’s your call. I think soy does form an okay part of the diet.

Let’s look at the vegetable sources. I can do a whole video on vegetables alone. There are so many different vegetables that are great with Candida and SIBO, particularly the vegetables that have got plenty of starches in them. We call them resistant starches. Vegetables contain different kinds of oligosaccharides, particularly sugars that they get broken down to and feed up the beneficial bacterial. I think I’ve done some videos on FOS and GOS foods with the SIBO videos that I’ve completed. Fructooligosaccharide and galactooligosaccharide. You’re going to get these out of a lot of foods. Globe artichokes, asparagus, many different foods contain these beneficial sugars.

See, not all sugars are bad with Candida. The sugars that we don’t want you to have are Mars bars or Coca-Cola. These sorts of sugars are not good. Confectionary, candy, chocolate bars, chewing gum with artificial sugar in it, processed foods, a lot of boxed cereals; these are all junk foods. You shouldn’t really be eating these if you want to recover from any kind of illness. Proteins, many different kinds of vegetables. Leafy greens are my favorite. I like broccoli, spinach. Carrots, celery, there are many of them. There is a lot of debate about can I eat carrots, squash, pumpkin, and the cucurbitaceae family with Candida. Yes, you can, but you need to avoid them if you’ve got a seriously bad yeast infection. In the first three to four weeks, you probably want to avoid things like pumpkin and squash. In America now, you guys are going into fall, going into winter, so a lot of people will probably be eating things like sweet potatoes, pumpkins, squash, and those sort of things. Sweet corn also falls into that category. You need to be careful with sweet corn. When it’s first picked, it contains a lot of sugar. But after three days of it being picked, a lot of that sugar converts to starch, so it’s not quite so sweet anymore.

If you look at bananas when they’re green as opposed to yellow, corn when it’s very fresh, just picked versus a day or two or three old, there’s a big difference how that can affect your gut. You may want to experiment with half green/half yellow bananas. If you like bananas and you don’t want to avoid them, don’t eat them yellow. Eat them green or half-green. The safest bananas are the plantain or the deep green bananas because you can cook them in coconut milk, which is very nice. As you can see, you can modify food and it may be okay by looking at the ripening of that food.

Most vegetables I’m quite happy with you having with Candida, providing you chew them well. I don’t like raw vegetables too much unless we look at salads. Steamed and stir fried are a very good way of eating vegetables. A lunch for me will often mean a small piece of fish or two free-range eggs or a piece of chicken and some vegetables out of the garden, like some steamed broccoli or some steamed spinach, and then there might be a little bit of quinoa with that, a grain like that. I tend to eat very light lunches, light dinners. I tend to eat smaller meals frequently. Vegetables are generally fine. Just be careful of the starchy ones when you start. Leafy greens, proteins are fine.

Fruit. Be careful with fruit with Candida. The permissible fruits are green apple, kiwi – one kiwi fruit per day is usually okay – pomegranate if you can get it is quite a good fruit. Avocados are always fine to eat. Some of the nicest fruits to eat and healthy ones with Candida are blueberries. Any kind of berry is generally acceptable as long as you don’t have too much of it. Blueberries, strawberries, boysenberries, raspberries, huckleberries, any of those kind of things. Don’t buy them in cans with syrup or sugar in them. Make sure they’re fresh and raw. Raw berries put through smoothies are quite nice. I’m not a big fan of processed jams or berries like that. But if you grow them, they’re a fantastic food to eat. Quite a nice adjunct to add to your diet.

Grains, plenty of grains you can eat. It’s up to you to experiment with them. One of my favorites is sourdough rye bread. I’ve discovered that this food contains a lot of wild yeast like sourdough does, and generally, it’s quite acceptable to eat this with Candida. If you’ve got a phobia with gluten, then you want to avoid rye, of course. You can actually get gluten free rice bread. Rice doesn’t contain gluten. That might be a good option for you. Quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, wild rice, I love wild rice, red rice. You can get brown basmati rice. There are about 50 different sorts of rice you can get. Try to avoid white rice, but stick more with the brown rice. For every cup of brown rice, I generally put in one to two teaspoons of the black wild rice. Try the red rice. It’s quite nice, too. How much rice? I just had an email saying Eric, how much rice can I eat per day. You probably want to stick with about half a cup of brown rice per day, but see what the digestive comfort is like, the bowel motions, the gas and the bloating.

Be sure to take a digestive enzyme/probiotic, particularly when you’re changing your diet and when you’re staying on the diet long term. Initially, you may want to take two or three of these enzyme/probiotics per day. As your bowels improve and the bowel motions really improve, you can cut back to one per day maintenance long term.

Check out my Canxida Restore. I worked a long time on this formula. I’ve put in it the best enzymes and probiotics. I’ve taken fructooligosaccharide out of this product. In my opinion, avoid dietary supplements containing prebiotics, inulin, and FOS. I found too many problems with these products with patients long term. I’ve used many of these products like Syntol and ThreeLac and Floracor-gi and the list goes on. There are many of them. Many companies now believe that you need to put a prebiotic with a probiotic. I think it’s a wrong move. I’ve been disappointed using these products time and again because I had too much feedback. That’s why I created my own product. But check it out. Go to Canxida.com and have a look at Canxida Restore. It’s a fantastic product. And it’s a particularly good product when you’re going to look at this kind of dietary approach. And it partners up absolutely perfectly with my Canxida Remove, an antifungal/anti-bacterial product.

Check out my next video. I’m going to do a video right now on foods to avoid with Candida. I hope you got a good picture on what to eat. There are lots you can eat. Now, remember, the diet is modifiable at any stage. I get so many emails from people saying, “Can I eat this? Can I eat that?” Try. See if it works for you. Some people can actually eat bananas, pineapples and apples every day, one or two, and have no problem at all. Other people can’t. How is that so? It’s got to do with the type of bugs that they’ve got in their gut at the time. It’s got to do with how well the pancreas is functioning, how much amylase it produces, for example. How effective their digestive organs are. How relaxed they are when they eat can make a big difference. It’s not just the foods you eat. It’s what your body does with the food you eat that makes all the difference with Candida. And that’s why there is no complete black and white, yes and no list. There never will be. It’s fluid. It’s modifiable. What suits you may not suit another person. And I know that after seeing now thousands of Candida patients. You need to experiment. What works for you, works for you. Make a note of that.
Catch up with me in the next video. Thanks for tuning in.

Greetings. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out part two of the video today. This video series on what to eat and what to avoid with Candida. I’ve produced these two videos for a person called Tom Rutherford from Texas, who has actually emailed me. Eric, what can I eat? What should I avoid? So Tom, I hope you’ve checked out my first video and had a good look at that. This is really part two, the foods to avoid with Candida.

Well, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out what you need to avoid with Candida. You know what to avoid with Candida. It’s the foods that you look around and you see other people eat, other people that complain about bad health, people that complain about bloating and gas and fatigue, bowel problems. People who go to the doctor looking for different kinds of medications for relief. Most people I see say the same thing to me. “I thought you were going to say that. I had a feeling you were going to tell me to stop drinking. I had a feeling you were going to tell me that I can’t have three candy bars every day.” Every patient I see with a chronic health problem has got some kind of habit underpinning that health problem, and often there will be a dietary indiscretion and there will be a lifestyle indiscretion. And when you peel those layers back, there will be some kind of stress underpinning that.

I’ve spoken enough now in my videos about the relationship with stress and chronic Candida. There is no doubt about it. Every single case of ongoing Candida I see there is usually some kind of unresolved issue underlying that. I had three patients from the U.S. yesterday, and one patient, in particular, I saw has got a public service job. I said, “Do you like it?” He said, “I hate it. I hate my job.” And I said, “Well, why would you stay in a job that you hate?” “I don’t know. I haven’t decided to get out of it yet.” Now, he’s had Candida for a long time. This guy is on an amazingly good diet and he’s been on it for some time, and he can’t understand why after three or four naturopaths and two doctors, no one has helped him to resolve this problem. And basically, when I told him that the job’s got to go, the diet doesn’t. I think he understood what I was alluding to.

Maybe you’re a person looking at this right now who’s on a perfect diet. You’ve been to a really good naturopath or the best doctor in town who’s given you an incredible diet. You’ve been to maybe a psychotherapist or a counselor. You’ve been to a chiropractor. You’ve been to all these kinds of people and yet you’re still not right and you’re still eating the best foods. Try to understand that it’s a lot more than just food that you need to eat and to avoid to get rid of Candida. That’s the secret.

Let’s delve into the foods you need to avoid now. I’ve written quite extensively on this in my book, but I’m going to go through a list of different things that I think you’ll know when I read these out or mention these. These are the foods that can affect you quite badly, and it’s not necessarily the quantity of these foods that you eat or the frequency of foods that you eat. It’s how much you’re enjoying these foods, so you’ve got to stop the relationship that you’ve got with that food. You’ve got to stop it. We have relationships with foods. I don’t know if you realize that. Just like we have relationships with people. And sometimes people can really piss us off. We can have bad relationships with people. We can have good relationships with people. And sometimes when we sever those relationships or change them, it’s like a breath of fresh air.

What food do you really enjoy eating that’s a naughty food, that’s a bad food, a food that you shouldn’t be eating? Is it a chocolate bar? Is it peanut butter? Is it going to the cupboard and getting a slice of bread and putting peanut butter and jam on it? Is it going to the refrigerator and having a glass of milk two or three times a day? Is it really wanting that beer or wine at the end of the day? That’s what I want you to think about right now. What food immediately comes to your mind that you’re having on a regular basis that you know in the back of your mind you shouldn’t be having, but you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, a little bit here or there is not going to hurt me. One or two drinks a week, I’ll be fine.”

Well, you won’t be fine. Because the top of the tree on the “no” foods is alcohol. If you’re not prepared to stop alcohol, even one drink per week, then just turn this video off now and go and look at one of those funny cat videos or something. Because it’s not really going to make any difference to me. You’re not going to get well. You’ve got to stop that relationship. It’s not just a matter of saying to you “Here are all the foods you avoid.” Because if I gave you a list now of 25 foods to avoid, I can guarantee if you went down the column, you could put a circle around one food that you find hard to avoid and that’s the problem.

Confectionary, particularly, so we look at alcohol. Then we’re going to look at things like lollies or candies or confectionary, chocolates, biscuits, any kind of sweet foods like that that are really full of sugar. I’m no fan of chewing gum either. I tend to avoid chewing gum. I think it’s a bad habit chewing, chewing, chewing all the time. You see people at airports. I see a lot of employees for companies sitting there chewing, taxi drivers, bus drivers, bored people, frustrated people; they sit there chewing. Very bad. You’re giving your stomach all these bad signals that food is coming. You’re swallowing saliva laden with artificial sugars. These are neurotoxins. Avoid chewing gum. You don’t need it. And it’s the same with that candy bar. If you go shopping, you don’t need to buy that candy bar when you’re sitting there waiting at the checkout. A lot of things are just habits that you’ve accumulated. Again, you need to make some changes with these relationships, with these habits. Cut them out of your life.

We’ve talked about candy. We’ve talked about chocolate. We’ve talked about biscuits, cookies, cakes, slices, all these kinds of foods, again, full of creams and colors and sugars with trans saturated fats, all these things with margarine in them. All this crap you don’t really need. Lots of refined sugar and flour, processed peanuts in there and grains and junk. When you buy a packet of cookies and keep it in the cupboard for six months, it’s probably still okay to eat. Chewing gum will keep for years. It shows you how processed this food is. As they say, all the food in the middle of the supermarket is a highly processed food. That’s the stuff you want to avoid. You’ve probably heard it before. You only buy what’s on the perimeter, the perishables; the food that goes off quick because that’s the food that’s healthy for the body.

Foods to avoid in the first few weeks of Candida include, if you’ve got a “bad” yeast infection, you need to be careful of grains. Too much wheat. Too much rye. Any kind of grain too much of, it could upset your digestion when you’re trying to switch into a tighter dietary approach, especially if you eat too much of it. Avoid those sort of foods. In the previous video, I said avoid pumpkin, squash, sweet potato, carrot, and sweet corn. These foods in the first two or three weeks when you’re switching from a non-Candida to a Candida diet, just slowly cut these things out and focus more on the greens, leafy greens. Just be careful with your grains.

When you’re switching into a Candida diet, I want you to focus on chewing food properly, getting to bed on time, taking plenty of enzymes, learning how to relax more, and improving your gut function, improving the digestive capabilities of your gut, so it can handle a better quality diet. Because digesting food is quite hard and tough on the body.

The focus also is on really improving the bowel tone and having really good bowel motions. Because most American and European patients I see, as well as Australia and New Zealand, have a bowel motion maybe every day, maybe every second day.

Constipation is endemic, so you want to have two bowel motions per day as a minimum if you’ve got a very good gut function.

Takeaway food. Do you often go to the shop and buy takeaway chicken, deep fried chicken, for example, or pizzas? Even these greasy Asian meals or things like that. Be careful of takeaway foods. They are convenient, but they’re not convenient for your digestive system. Tin foods, packet foods, anything in boxes, packets, or tins. I do use occasionally tin food, but it may be sardines or salmon, but most of the food that I cook and consume is all fresh and raw foods that I’ll turn into meals.

The fresher and cleaner you eat and the more you avoid the processed foods, the more you’re going to increase your digestive capacity, the better the enzymes will work and you’ll also produce more enzymes, and the better the bowel function will be because you’ll also produce better or more of the beneficial bacteria. Remember, you’ve got anywhere from 500 to 1,000 species of bacteria in the gut, and they shape and form themselves depending on the stresses and also the diet. When you improve your diet, you can slowly improve the bowel flora. When you can improve the bowel flora, you can crowd out the Candida, the SIBO infections, and your health will really improve in a seriously big way. Because all health starts from the inside out of the gut.

I think you know by now what foods you want to avoid. You want to avoid the foods that you know you shouldn’t eat, and most people know that by now. You can read a lot more in my book, Candida Crusher. I’ve written over 100 pages on these sorts of foods. I prefer to talk more about what you can eat rather than what you can’t eat. That’s more important to me.

Another heads up for you on what you shouldn’t be doing is cooking meals and then covering them with saran wrap or cling film when they’re cold, placing them in the refrigerator, and then microwaving them the following day to heat them up. I think that is a no-no because bacteria, molds, and fungi will grow on that food overnight. It’s not a fresh meal anymore. Cook a meal, consume it, and eat it. If you don’t do that, then deep freeze it straight away, and I prefer oven warming rather than microwave. I don’t really like microwaves at all.

Sauces, that’s another thing that I didn’t mention is watch out for tomato sauce, chili sauce, ketchup, any of these kind of sauces. If I went into your house now and opened your refrigerator, how many bottles or jars would I see that have been sitting in there for weeks, if not months. I guarantee there will be a few, if you know what I mean. There will be lots of different jars in there. Lots of people have got these jars lying all around the place. These things are mold traps. They’re fungal traps. They’re bacterial traps. Try not to do that. Use something and then throw it away.

When you’re going into a transition stage with a healthy diet, try not to use any kind of sauces at all. I’ve got only one sauce in my house and that’s tamari. I use quite a bit of tamari, which is a Japanese kind of a soy sauce, and I use sea salt and I use cracked pepper and I use a lot of different dried herbs and fresh herbs. But I prefer not to use tomato sauce, chili sauce, shrimp sauce, oyster sauce, and all these sort of sauces. They’re not really good. We only tend to have a little bit of them and we keep the bottles accumulating for too long.

We’ve spoken about confectionary. We spoke about things like ice cream, chocolate, all this sort of junk, cakes, biscuits, slices. We spoke about alcohol, which is the first thing I mentioned. We spoke about not reheating food. We spoke about sauces, bottles, and little things like that. What the hell does it leave you with? Well, it leaves you with a diet that your great grandparents probably had. It leaves you with a diet that’s fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, and fresh proteins, meats, all legumes, all nuts or seeds. There are plenty of foods you can eat and combinations of these foods.

I’m just going to give you a little plug here about my new product I developed called Canxida Restore. Canxida Restore took me a long time to make. I had to really have a good think about the different combinations that were going to be most beneficial for patients. The best enzymes to facilitate digestive recovery and improvement, and the best probiotics. I selected seven enzymes and six probiotics, and I’ve kept the fructooligosaccharides and inulin out. There is no prebiotics in this. And I call that product Canxida Restore. It partners up beautifully with Candida Remove, which is antifungal/anti-bacterial/anti-parasite product, so that’s in a tablet.

It’s a really difficult product to make, the Canxida Remove. I’ve had to work with several manufacturers now to find someone who can really do the job properly because it’s not an easy product. Anything new, a new formulation, particularly herbal, is very difficult to make if it’s never been made before. And I can tell you, it’s super effective. We’ve had so much good feedback from Canxida Remove. But when you partner that tablet now with a capsule, Canxida Restore, you’re going to get an even better effect because they work perfectly together.

Check out my site, Canxida.com, and also be sure to have another good look at yeastinfection.org. There are over 1,000 articles on that site now. Have you done my quiz yet, my Candida Crusher quiz? You can do that through yeastinfection.org. If you like this kind of information, please subscribe to this channel because I’m very keen to build the channel more and give you some videos. I’ve got some more topics to do from people just like Tom. So if you send me a message through YouTube, comment on the kind of videos you would like, I’d be glad to accommodate you with that. Because the channel is all about helping people out.

Greetings. It’s Eric Bakker, New Zealand naturopath, author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for tuning into my video today. Today I’m going to talk about factors that actually damage your intestinal microflora. Let’s get into it.

We’ve spoken previously about antibiotics, so you’re probably quite aware that when you take an “anti” biotic, you’re going to affect the “pro” biotics, so antibiosis means anti-life. Probiotics mean pro-life or for life or what will generate life. We’re not going to go into it in this video today. But there are other medications apart from antibiotics that adversely affect the beneficial flora in the gut.

A typical one that I see is called PPIs or proton pump inhibitors. These drugs are really designed to treat GERD, gastroesophageal reflux disease. Many people in America, New Zealand, Australia, and many countries get heartburn, so they go to the doctor. And the doctor will prescribe a drug that basically works on the enzyme where it blocks the enzymatic production of hydrochloric acid in the stomach. Pretty stupid thing to do when you think about it, blocking the production of acid. Because you need acid to help break down food properly in the stomach. And not only that, when you start playing around with the pH of the gut, you’re going to adversely affect the pH of the whole digestive system, which means that taking anything up here is going to affect everything further downstream. Even though you’re working on a symptom by reducing the discomfort of GERD and heartburn, you’re actually destroying your gut in the process, so it’s a crazy thing to do.

Another drug, chemotherapy drugs. These are very powerful drugs that help to kill off a lot of cells in the body. Not only cancer cells, but also beneficial cells. So people on chemotherapy also end up destroying their gut function to a big degree. Radiotherapy, chemotherapy, NSAIDs, or non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs. You may have taken one of these for a headache or arthritic pain like Advil, which contains ibuprofen. Tylenol, drugs like that that contain paracetamol. These are non-steroidal drugs that reduce inflammation and pain in the body. These things have a very powerful effect on toxifying the body, particularly the liver, but they also destroy the beneficial bacteria in the gut. NSAIDs aren’t really a good idea.

Other factors that can damage it that are not drug related that I see quite a lot are stress. And I’ve written extensively about stress in my book, Candida Crusher. If you suffer from stress, it can have a very significant impact on reducing the amount of beneficial bacteria that you’ve got in your digestive system. Nobody speaks about stress in the gut. People talk about alcohol. They talk about antibiotics, but they don’t talk about stress. Stress has an interesting way of really crippling a person’s immune system, particularly the alarm phase, or the acute stage of stress that reduces the blood supply to the digestive system. It slows down the movement of stool through the bowel. It has an incredible effect on your circulation, and many aspects of human health are affected by the alarm phase or the acute phase of stress.

You need to be aware that stress also has a significant impact on the gut. Stress also makes us want to drink more alcohol, drink more coffee, take drugs that help us to counter the effects of stress like headaches. Eighty percent of headaches are tension headaches caused by stress. What do we do? We take a pill. We just swallow another pill and that’s going to stop all our pain and we’re going to wreck our gut, which means we’re going to take another pill. Playing right into the hands of big pharma.

I’m not a conspiracy person at all. Medical people are required in our society, and we all benefit from surgery and drugs when applied at the right time. But there is certainly a massive overprescribing of a lot of pharmaceuticals that make people sick and kill a lot of people.

And, of course, there are dietary factors that also affect us. This video is just really about some of the pharmaceutical approaches that have a significant effect, but potentially any one of these drugs in my drug guide, and there’s what 1,200 drugs in my New Zealand drug guide, that if you were in America, you could be looking at 2,000 pharmaceutical medicines. And a lot of these drugs do have an effect on the gut. If you’re taking a medicine long term and you’re suffering from gut problems, bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation, you need to go back to your doctor and ask if this drug is really necessary. Does this drug have side effects? Do a Google search for that drug. Spend a bit of time also looking at stress. You can read more articles on yeastinfection.org. Don’t forget to take my quiz on CandidaCrusher.com because there are a few questions in there relating to stress and the gut and Candida to see what kind of effects you’re potentially experiencing from stress, from drugs, from things like that. And then make some informed decisions.

Think about what you’re doing and what changes you can make to improve this incredible organ that we have here called a microbiome. We want to get the bacteria right in the gut. It’s your main foundation for health. There is no point in taking natural or pharmaceutical drugs for symptoms. It’s about restoring gut function. It’s one of the key tenets of naturopathy. Eat well. Drink well. Live well. Sleep well. Breathe well. All of those things need to be done right before you even look at taking medications.