Category: Candida Crusher FAQ Videos

Thank you for tuning into this video today. This video is going to be a comprehensive video about irritable bowel syndrome. Irritable bowel syndrome is a condition that I’ve seen now for almost 30 years in the clinic, a long, long time. It’s quite a common complaint that affects probably between 10 to 15 percent of the population in the western world at any given time.

It’s not uncommon to get patients in with functional bowel disturbances. In fact, they probably make up about 10 percent of what a medical practitioner would see in his or her clinic at any given time and probably account for about 50 percent of all the cases that a gastroenterologist or bowel specialist would see.

Let’s just first look at the signs and symptoms that encompass irritable bowel syndrome. The typical signs and symptoms that we would see would be bloating and gas. There could be all sorts of uncomfortable sensations in the gut. There could be spasms or cramping sensations, constipation and diarrhea, particularly alternating constipation and diarrhea, are common with irritable bowel syndrome.

What’s not common, however, is to see a patient who’s bleeding from the bowel or have anemia, low iron counts, or would have fevers. Sweats at night. Those sorts of things that don’t tend to really be irritable bowel syndrome. I would refer you go to a gastroenterologist for scoping because you may have inflammatory bowel syndrome, which is a separate complaint. That’s an autoimmune disease. It’s less common than irritable bowel syndrome, but we still see it in the clinic quite regularly, particularly ulcerative colitis, which would be the feature of another entire video that I’ll do at some stage.

It’s interesting when I went to America in 2003 for some training, I heard Dr. Alan Gaby speaking. Dr. Alan Gaby is a past president of the American Holistic Medical Association, and Dr. Gaby calls IBS a “garbage can diagnosis.” Garbage can diagnosis is a condition he believes is the one where the doctors throw people in a rubbish tin and hope that someone else will take it away because they’re in the “too hard” basket. Functional complaints like adrenal fatigue, Candida diagnosis, irritable bowel syndrome; these are what Dr. Gaby calls a garbage can diagnosis.

I would tend to agree because it’s very easy to see a patient in a five-minute time slot and then say to the patient, “Well, we’ll run all the tests. But if we can’t find anything, we might give you an antidepressant. Or if it’s irritable bowel syndrome (which I see a lot), we’ll just put you on a fiber supplement.” So that’s a bit of a cop out because western medical doctors don’t tend to really be interested in looking at causes of conditions. They’d rather treat the symptoms that are presenting. Which is really unfortunate for the patient because if a patient has had a functional bowel complaint for many years, that can lead to anxiety and depression. And not only that, if a functional bowel complaint goes on for a long, long period of time, that can even lead to diseases in its own right, many types of conditions.

Let’s now explore the four main causes that I would tend to see a lot with irritable bowel syndrome. I’m just going to grab my note sheet here. The common ones I would see with patients would be allergies. Allergies are quite common. We’ll go into that in a minute. Bugs, all kinds of bugs patients can present with, which can often cause IBS. We’re looking at Candida or parasites, small intestinal bowel overgrowth. Stress is a really big one. Stress is often not spoken about with the bowel. And intolerances. Let’s clearly understand that food intolerances and food allergies are two entirely different things. People often get them confused. Allergies are associated with the immune system. And the common allergies I would see with IBS would be dairy allergies, probably number one.

Dr. Hyman on YouTube, and many other doctors, believe that gluten’s the big one, but I don’t believe that at all. I believe gluten problems become a real issue with people who’ve had a gut issue for a considerable period of time. People who’ve had poor bacteria levels, poor digestive enzyme levels for some period of time. Many times they end up becoming intolerant to gluten because of that. It’s not the gluten that causes the problem. It’s they had a problem and gluten made it worse.

The common allergies you’ll find in my Candida Crusher book. I wrote quite a lot about food allergies. But the typical allergies we would see would be dairy allergies, number one. I see a lot of banana allergies, pineapple allergies, peanut, chocolate, sugar allergies, and, of course, gluten is on that list as well. Egg is another allergy that we commonly see. I would say to you if you’ve got IBS, if you want to shake it really quick, have a look if you’re eating any of those foods I mentioned and certainly pull them all out of the diet before you go running off to the doctor. Take those foods out of your diet if you suspect an allergy and you have IBS.

Intolerances are different altogether. Intolerances are developed usually because of enzyme problems that the person will have. Lack of sufficient digestive enzymes or one specific enzyme that will break one particular food component down like a starch or a sugar. For example, lactose intolerance. The person has an issue with lactase or the enzyme to break lactose down, so that will cause bloating and diarrhea. Lactose intolerance is not an allergy as such. Don’t get them confused. Tests can be done to work out if you have any of these allergies or intolerances.

There’s a very good food allergy test you can do through a company called US Biotech in Seattle. They do a very good food allergy panel, a blood-based panel, to determine if you have an allergy against up to 100 different common foods and beverages. You can even do a spice panel and an inhalant panel to see if you’ve got allergies for spices or anything that you might breathe in.

Those things are worth scoping out if you have IBS. Intolerances as well. If you believe you have intolerances, cut milk out because it’s the most common intolerance, dairy intolerance. It doesn’t matter whether you have organic milk or milk that’s unpasteurized or unhomogenized. If it’s straight from the cow, you can still have a problem with this food product. So I recommend that you get rid of all dairy if you’ve got IBS. That’s the first thing that you do.

If we look at the second category, that would be bugs. Bugs are quite common with many people. Many people take pharmaceutical medications like antibiotics, the Pill, hormone replacement therapy. There are many pharmaceutical medications that will disorder or disrupt the bowel. Once we start getting some changes in bowel flora, we’re leaving the bowel much more prone to developing a Candida albicans overgrowth, which is very common with irritable bowel syndrome. I see lots of patients with Candida who have IBS. But similarly, I also see lots of patients with parasitic infections like Blastocystis hominis or Dientamoeba fragilis. These are weird names, but these are bugs that we commonly see in people with IBS.

People end up with one pathogen; they could end up with multiple pathogens. It’s a bit like weeds in a garden. You end up with one weed and within a year or two; the whole garden is completely overgrown and unmanageable. Sometimes you go to the doctor and then the weed spray will be brought in, i.e., antibiotics or potent antifungals. They’ll kill everything off and you’re left with a decimated lawn. It’s a bit like what Monsanto does with the glyphosate or Round-Up, which is coming and round up the whole lawn, kill it all off. What a load of crap! It’s not really the way to go. I really don’t believe that drugs like fluconazole, these pharmaceutically prescribed antifungals or antibiotics, are the way to go. They’re many natural alternatives.

I developed a product called Canxida for that reason that contains 11 ingredients and it’s probably the best antifungal/antibacterial that you’re going to get on the market today. Canxida.com. I’ll guarantee if you take this product as directed, it will not aggravate you or make you feel sick or wipe out a lot of your beneficial bacteria.

With the bugs, it’s a matter of getting the balance back again. So don’t eat foods and take drinks that feed these bugs. You can read a lot about these on yeastinfection.org. So foods containing sugar, confectionary, candy, ice cream, alcohol, soda drinks, all these sorts of foods, white bread, too much bread in your diet, cookies, cakes, all these sorts of foods, they feed the bad bugs. Having a diet which tends to be a lot richer in the lean proteins and leafy greens and grains, which I believe are good like brown rice and quinoa, are very goods grains to eat. These things don’t play into the hands of the bad bugs. Getting your bugs back in balance is important. Understanding food intolerances and food allergies is important.

If we move on. Stress is probably never really spoken of. I watched Dr. Hyman’s clip on irritable bowel and Dr. Hyman never really mentioned stress or its implication with irritable bowel. I could tell you now, in my professional opinion, stress accounts for 40 percent of irritable bowel syndrome. That’s almost half. Think about this for a minute. Ten percent of people who go to doctors have IBS and about almost half of those people go to the doctor with gut-related problems that are stress induced. Stress is one of the biggest causes, silent causes, of most disease today. And it’s a very loose term, stress. Many patients when I talk to them about stress, they don’t even believe they’ve got stress or can’t see how the stress is implicated in their condition.

I saw several patients yesterday. And, in fact, I saw eight patients, and three out of those eight had a gut problem, a serious gut problem. And when I analyzed each one of those cases, I could see how stress affected all of those patients. In particular, the ones with the gut problem. Stress has the most amazing way of destroying a person’s digestive system, and it will do so on several different levels. One of the most common occurrences of stress is how it affects the gut. It’s going to really affect it because blood’s going to be taken away from the digestive system to go to the larger muscles, particularly in the “alarm” phase or the initial phases of stress.

The body has three stages of stress, but the alarm phase was designed to get us away from any kind of threat. What if my mobile phone rings or the telephone rings or a demand is placed on me? This is basically an alarm. So you may think that isn’t a stress, but repeated alarms punctuated by big emotional stresses that we have are things that affect our gut profoundly. If you look at your lifestyle and the kind of stresses you live under and you start analyzing your digestive malfunctions, you’ll see that there’s quite a strong correlation there.

Lots of people eat in front of computers. And, in fact, I checked with each patient I had yesterday about his or her handling of their mobile phone, and most people admit that they spend far too much time checking emails or messaging or calling on their cell phone, even during meals. It’s ridiculous. These are the things that cause functional gut problems. You clearly have to understand that your lifestyle affects your digestive function to a marked degree. If you want to kick that irritable bowel syndrome in days, you need to have some clear boundaries and go on what we call a “digital detox” and start realizing the connection.

As the years roll by, I tend to see more and more people with stress-related digestive malfunction and typically, irritable bowel syndrome. And once I teach the patient these concepts and we start teaching relaxation more, interesting how we find that the digestive system improves. Even without diet change or supplement change or anything at all, just by teaching the patient how to relax a lot more. Stress affects the gut on quite a deep level. Those are the key things that I believe are the causes of irritable bowel syndrome. Allergies, intolerances, bugs, and stress.

There are many different things you can do to get on top of irritable bowel syndrome. A key thing you can do if you’ve had IBS for many years is to do a comprehensive stool test to find out (a) what kind of bugs you’ve got, (b) what the imbalances are like of these particular bugs. Have you got any good bugs? You may have hardly any beneficial bacteria at all and only a moderate amount of bad bacteria and quite a lot of Candida. You’ll only know that through a stool culture; (c) have you got any inflammation going on in the bowel? This could be a prelude down the track toward inflammatory bowel conditions.

Sometimes IBS can turn into IBD. Irritable bowel syndrome can become inflammatory bowel syndrome. Doing a functional stool test will give me an idea on your immune markers or inflammation markers, the bacteria markers. We also look at things called short chain fatty acids, which are the products of bacterial fermentation. There are many different things we can find. Occult blood, we can see if there’s any blood in the stool at all. So a very, very worthwhile test. I tend to do a lot of stool testing and I work through Doctor’s Data in Chicago, who I believe have got the world’s best stool lab. After performing a few thousand of these tests, I’ve come to the conclusion that many people have got poor levels of beneficial bacteria, too many different kinds of bad bacteria, and also poor immune function. We can see that through a marker called Secretory IGA.

What are the solutions for people with IBS? How do we get on top of the condition? If you’re intelligent, you’ll try to work out what the primary causes are. What started you on this pathway to getting IBS? I’ll call that the “exciting” or the primary cause. And then the maintaining cause. What’s keeping it going? Those two things need to be addressed. Often if you deal with the causes, particularly the maintaining cause, you’ll find that you’ll get significant relief in a short period of time. Either doing a food allergy profile or a stool test will give you a pretty good idea on what to target.

Making a diet change is a very smart thing with IBS. You need to make dietary changes. If you go to yeastinfection.org, you can read a lot more about my diet advice for Candida patients, which certainly doesn’t contradict the information I give for IBS as well. I tend to put people on a low allergy diet; it’s a key thing. It’s an elimination diet. And as they improve, I start doing reintroduction.

I also recommend that you take some good quality probiotics. It’s very important to take probiotics to re-seed the gut. And then we recommend products like Vitamin A, Evening Primrose, fish oil, and glutamine. There are many different nutrients I recommend at the tail end of treatment to repair the digestive system. Most patients with IBS, in my opinion, have got stress-induced problems, Candida-related problems, and leaky gut syndrome.

I’ve written a whole big post on leaky gut syndrome. It’s when the gut becomes more permeable and proteins can start getting in through the digestive system and affect the immune system on the other side, and that can cause a lot of problems, a lot of low-grade inflammation and problems in the body. You can get brain fog out of it, sore joints, fatigue, many different things can occur as a result of leaky gut.

That gives you a little bit of information on irritable bowel syndrome. This is a condition that can be fixed up literally within a week. It’s possible. It’s possible to fully cure IBS literally within two to three weeks, but within days, you can get significant relief from this condition. And don’t let anyone tell you that it’s incurable. There’s no cause and that you’ll need to stay on anti-depressants or sleeping pills or Metamucil like fiber supplements for life. It’s a lot of nonsense. You don’t need to do that. Any doctor, who tells you to go on fiber because you’ve got IBS, in my opinion, is giving you wrong advice. You need to address the cause. That’s intelligence. Just remember common sense isn’t very common in medicine.

You need to take responsibility in your own hands when it comes to healing yourself from this condition because most all cases of IBS are diet and lifestyle related. Just about all cases have some component of stress. Don’t forget that. If you’re living in a stressful situation, you’re stressed in your relationship either professionally or socially, with your children or your employer, employees, whatever, this is what needs fixing up. You need to get to the root cause. If you can get this sorted out, along with your diet, maybe a few carefully placed supplements, you can get on top of this problem. You don’t need to have constant diarrhea or constipation and gurgling sounds and bloating. You don’t need to have any of those complaints. They can all be remedied, but you have to take matters into your own hands.

I hope this YouTube clip has given you some good information today on irritable bowel syndrome. The last words I’ll leave you with are “it is curable, but it’s all up to you.”

Thanks for tuning in.

Thanks for checking out this comprehensive video today. In this video, I’m going to talk about leaky gut syndrome. It’s a functional complaint that’s often been maligned by medical practitioners. Before I delve into it, I just want to read out an email I got from a first-year medical student from America regarding leaky gut.

I wrote an article on EricBakker.com regarding leaky gut, and this is what this particular student wrote. She says, ‘Mr. Bakker, leaky gut syndrome is pure naturopathic nonsense. It’s just like adrenal fatigue, just another fictitious man-made disease. Many people confuse adrenal fatigue with Addison’s disease, which is an actual, real and diagnosable medical condition when you don’t make enough cortisol in your glands. This can only be diagnosed by your real doctor, and various tests are needed to diagnose this disease. Candida is bullshit, too. It is possible to have a full body fungal infection, but you’d be in the intensive care unit nearly dead.’ Signed, Miss so and so.

This is a very interesting email from a person, obviously a first-year medical student, so I’ll forgive her for her ignorance. When I was a medical student, I was quite ignorant, too, and had a lot of strong opinions about things which I know now 27 years later I’ve got completely different ideas about. It’s interesting and I think back at my dad who was a very pragmatic man, and Dad said that opinions are like bowel motions. We all have them from time to time. Sometimes some people have more or less. Sometimes people are full of these things and just pass out bowel motions all the time. Almost like verbal diarrhea. And that’s what we’ve got in this case. A person with verbal diarrhea. So I’ll forgive this person, of course, because she’s a medical student. And if she happens to see this YouTube clip, I welcome her to contact me when she’s qualified and maybe 10 years down the track when she’s settled into a practice a bit more and overcome a little bit of that verbal diarrhea.

Let’s now have a look at leaky gut syndrome, what the condition really entails. Leaky gut syndrome is not a fictitious disease. In fact, there are many different research papers in mainstream medical journals that have been written about intestinal permeability. It’s certainly not fictitious by any means.
When we examine the small intestine, there are three sections to the small intestine. The first part, which connects up to the stomach, is called the duodenum. And in America, I believe they call it the duodenum. The duodenum contains quite a lot of intense solar activity there in terms of digestion. In fact, there’s a very small section at the beginning of the duodenum which is about 75 to 90 mils that contains most of the person’s immune function activity of the whole digestive system. We’re talking about probably three or four inches of bowel, which is impacted with an incredible amount of immune cells.

It’s estimated that about 60 percent of a person’s immune activity is located in the small intestine, and probably three quarters of that is in the first three to four inches of that section of small intestine. If we examine the small intestine and open it up, it has a surface area of about a tennis court. It’s remarkable. You may see some pictures on the internet of what we call villi and microvilli. Villi are basically, I’ll draw a picture for you. They’re small, funny shaped objects like this. That’s a villi and a villi looks a little bit like that. Microvilli are basically the little projections that run off the villi. You can see those. If you have a look closer, we’ve actually got even smaller villi that run off those. The point I’m making here is the surface area is dramatically increased because we’ve got a huge amount of digestive area that we’re looking at.

If you look at the microvilli, little finger-like projections, there’s basically one cell layer that goes around the microvilli. These cellular junctions in a healthy person are very tight and well-controlled spaces. And the body does this to allow very well digested particles of proteins, carbohydrates and fats to get through to the circulatory system. These food components have to be broken down to the tiniest unit before they’re allowed to get into the body. Sometimes, however, with people these cellular junctions aren’t as tight as they should be, so they’ll be a slight gap in the cellular junction. And this will allow partially digested food particles to get through those cellular junctions into the bloodstream and affect the immune response on the other side. This is what we know as “leaky gut syndrome.”

Leaky gut is actually very common. And, in fact, I would say easily three quarters of my patients have some variant of leaky gut, and it’s not hard to see why. There are many causes of leaky gut, but the common cause, I again, would anticipate to be stress, pharmaceutical medications, diet, alcohol, various toxins and various other causes, but those are the common ones. Alcohol is a very common cause of leaky gut syndrome because just about everybody drinks booze. Lots of people take paracetamol or Tylenol, ibuprofen. Antibiotics are one of the biggest causes of leaky gut syndrome. You’d be surprised how many millions of tons of antibiotics are used in the food chain every year in America and in Europe and in many other countries. These are the silent causes of leaky gut syndrome. Leaky gut syndrome is also implicated very much with irritable bowel syndrome, which I’ve done another video on, and also inflammatory bowel syndrome.

If you’ve got leaky gut, what are some of the primary causes and what are some of the effects of leaky gut on our body? How would it affect our health? Some of the symptoms that you’ll experience with leaky gut are typically bloating, burping, gas, altered bowel motions. A little bit like what you would expect with irritable bowel. You would also find, though, that many people with leaky gut have got some type of a food allergy. Something I very commonly see.

Before you go running off taking all gluten out of your diet, why don’t you do a test called an Intestinal Permeability Test? Which is a lactulose mannitol test. So you basically swallow these two types of sugars and you see by what comes out of you which sugar is held back and which one is passed out if you’ve got leaky gut or not. That’s certainly a viable test to do. Before you start taking all gluten out of your diet, maybe you should start taking alcohol out of your diet. Maybe you should have a look at the stress levels that you’ve got. Whether you like your work or your partner. If you have issues with people close to you. If you’re sleeping properly. If you’re relaxing properly. If you’re doing too much. These are all common things you need to really analyze before you start making major dietary changes.

I’m not a huge fan of everyone going off gluten. I mentioned this before in many videos and I think it’s a bit of a cop out that everyone’s going on a Paleo diet or a modified carbohydrate diet. People need to go on a modified stress lifestyle before they go on these modified carbohydrate diets. Stress is never looked at with people. It’s silent. It’s in the background. It’s just never really attended to. It’s one of the key causes of most people’s gut dysfunctions, is stress. We’re living increasingly stressful lives.

Leaky gut syndrome. You can also experience sensations in the digestion system. You can experience sensations anywhere around here. Off on the sides here. Centrally probably more because of the small intestine. Irritable bowel you’re going to probably experience sensations more along the top or in the colon. But the small intestine, you’ll sort of feel it there really in the middle of the gut.

If we’ve got this condition, what the heck can we do to get on top of it? How can we fix it up? As I said in my irritable bowel syndrome video, you need to address the causes. You need to look at the primary cause, the exciting thing, the thing that got it started and you need to look at the maintaining causes. Have you taken antibiotics in the past? Are you on the Pill? Are you taking medications? These things need to be changed. If you’re currently taking pharmaceuticals and particularly if they’re non-essentials or you don’t really need them, I would recommend you stop taking them. If you’re taking a drug and you think it’s affecting you, go and see your doctor, your naturopathic doctor or medical doctor, and have a talk with him or her about this and ask if there are any alternatives. There might be a natural analog or a natural product you can take.

Analyze your lifestyle. As I mentioned before, look at the kind of stresses that you’re living under. Are you happy with the person you’re living with? Have you got a mortgage over 200K that you can’t service? Is there some kind of stress that you’re going to bed with every night? Is your mind taking over and you can’t switch off? Maybe you’re one of these type A people that I see, one of these human dynamos that has to do everything perfectly. Everything has to be cleaned and wiped down and tidy. You’ve got millions of lists of things to do. Maybe your thyroid or adrenals are being overactive. That can certainly cause a lot of hormonal disturbances leading toward leaky gut syndrome. As you can see, there’s a lot for you to think about.

If you don’t attend to leaky gut over time, what you’re going to find will happen is you could get increasing cognitive dysfunction. So the mind could become affected. Brain fog is quite real. You could start losing train of thought a bit, memory loss. You’re losing that sharp edge that you used to have when you were in your 20s and 30s. You could be noticing some pains around the joints, finger joints or wrists or shoulders or elbows. These things can happen.

As these partially digested food particles get into the bloodstream, they upregulate the immune response. White blood cells start recognizing these things as foreign invaders and secrete chemicals, which can attack them and form what we call “circulating immune complexes.” These CICs then can travel through the bloodstream and lodge in different parts of the body where they attract more attention and inflammation can increase. There’s potential there for quite a lot of serious problems down the track. Many people, I believe, develop leaky gut syndrome in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and tend to keep this condition for 30, 40 years until they end up with all sorts of autoimmune responses and even cancers.

The problem with medicine is there’s never any attention paid to cause and effect. So a person develops a functional complaint 20 or 30 years prior to a major diagnosis, it’s never taken seriously. Like anything in life. If you’ve got a small problem, fix it now before it becomes a serious problem. If you found rust on your car, would you ignore it? Probably not. You’d probably get it cut out and fixed. Because if you left that rust for 20 or 30 years, your car’s a write off. If you live in Australia where I used to live and you’ve got termites that are boring into the walls of your house, you better get the pest control guy out and get that attended to. Because if you turn a blind eye to it, that whole house is gone. Small problems fixed up don’t become major problems where your life is in jeopardy.

Many different issues there with leaky gut syndrome. How do we remedy it? As I mentioned, stress, attention to diet, maybe some dietary supplements, and an antifungal/antibacterial product is worth taking. I developed a product called Canxida, which you can get from Canxida.com. That’s going to help clear any potential pathogens like small intestinal bowel overgrowth or what we call SIBO or Candida or parasites. It’s going to help clear that from that bowel. In my opinion, it works as effective if not better, than most of the prescribed antifungals/antibacterial products, antibiotics you get on the market without having the side effects. That product is going to work quite well if you use it in conjunction with a carefully controlled diet and you cut booze out of your lifestyle for a while.

And, of course, you need to include fermented and cultured foods into your diet like some kimchee, some yogurt, and some sauerkraut. There are different foods that you can include in your diet which are high in lactic acid, which build up the beneficial bacteria. That’s a very smart move to do, particularly if you’re going to pull alcohol and these sugary foods out of your diet. So take these things out of your diet. Include these cultured foods, and I think you’ll find that a lot of your functional digestive symptoms will disappear.

You’ve got to try to understand that your digestive system is like a garden. You’ve got to weed it from time to time. You’ve got to culture it. You’ve got to nurture it. You’ve got to tend to it. You can’t have a beautiful garden per chance. It needs attention and regular maintenance. And the digestive system is no different. And some people’s lawns and gardens look absolutely beautiful. They’re a joy to behold. Other people’s gardens like my neighbor I used to live next door to will have a car body in the yard and beer bottles piled up in the corner and no doubt there’ll be a few rats and mice running around, which really are the parasites, aren’t they?

How do you treat your lawn? As a dumping ground? Or is it a place where you like people to come and really enjoy it because it’s such a beautiful thing? I think you get my point by now. It’s really up to you how you develop and culture your internal garden. You don’t need to develop a botanical garden, but surely you can weed and mow quite regularly. The product Canxida will do that. It will tidy up that interior. The fertilizing is really the fermented and cultured foods. Eating foods rich in lactic acid are going to help to provide compost and fertilizer and really help to build a beautiful garden. Both of those things are worth thinking about.

I hope that’s given you some good information on leaky gut syndrome. You can fix this condition up within a week by making some serious changes to your lifestyle and diet. But in all honesty, it’s going to take probably three months and even six to twelve months before it’s 100 percent again. The garden is not dissimilar. When you start with bad dirt, you can’t have a beautiful lawn in a week. But you can certainly get rid of the symptoms in a few days with leaky gut syndrome by making the significant changes I’d like you to make, particularly to your diet up front. And when you do it and the symptoms improve, that will give you more confidence to go further and start tackling the bigger projects like the stress, maybe that job you don’t like, or you need a relationship change or you need to scale down your house or things like that.

Remember, and never underestimate stress. To me, it’s one of the biggest causes of irritable bowel and leaky gut. If you can get that nailed and your diet sorted, you’re going to be well on the road to having a very good functioning digestive system and no doubt perfect health in time.

Thanks for tuning into this video today.

Thanks for checking out my video today. Thank you so much for all the wonderful feedback. I’m building up the Candida Crusher channel. Eventually, we’re going to have so many more videos on this. I’m answering lots and lots of frequently asked questions from patients all over the world. I have currently patients now in over 70 countries around the world approaching me with all kinds of yeast infection problems, but also questions they’d like answered.

Here’s a question I got from a lady in Spain. Spain’s quite an interesting country. It’s incredible how many people in Spain or Portugal and also South America, these sort of Latin countries, have got yeast infections. In fact, Brazil is one of the top areas I see lots of patients. This lady is asking me, Eric, why is the Candida Crusher diet in three stages? Why not just have one stage?

I’m going to explain to you why I’ve devised this diet over many, many years and thousands of patients to be in three parts. This will give you a good understanding. I believe that when people come to see me with a problem of yeast infection, we first have to clean them up.

If you look at my book, Candida Crusher, you can get a copy of this at CandidaCrusher.com; you’ll find that I like what’s called the Big Clean Up. This is to get people to tidy up their diet, basically to get them away from coffee, tea, alcohol, and these sorts of foods. This is usually about a 10 to 14 day period, but we give people a warning, for want of a better word. We get them down off these diets. This is going to seriously diminish the ability for the body to produce a strong Candida die off. We’re not eradicating Candida, but we’re basically cutting back on the foods and beverages that help to feed yeast infection up and that contribute to dysbiosis and a lot of gut dysfunctions. We’re gently easing them into the diet.

After this 14-day period, we put them on the first stage, which is the MEVY diet, meat, eggs, vegetables and yogurt. Nothing new. This diet was devised by Dr. John Trowbridge back in the ‘80s. It’s a very good Candida approach, which I’ve used for many years. You can read about MEVY diets again in my book or on yeastinfection.org. MEVY diet lasts for two to three weeks, sometimes a month.

Then I move them into stage two, which is a low allergy diet or the hypoallergenic diet. Now we’re going to take away potentially allergenic foods from the gut, ease up on the digestion by reducing the amount of circulating immune complexes in the body. Most patients with Candida have got leaky gut syndrome. You need to read up on leaky gut on EricBakker.com or on yeastinfection.org and familiarize yourself fully with what leaky gut is.

Medical practitioners don’t believe in leaky gut, but then again medical practitioners don’t believe in a lot of things. A lot of them don’t even believe that adrenal fatigue exists or yeast infection exists. But I don’t really care what medical practitioners think to be honest. I care about what my patients present with and how I can help them.

The low allergy diet has a very, very profound effect on reducing again once more the ability for the body to create major die off because we’re taking away foods that challenge the immune system. By reducing the amount of antibody/antigen complexes in the bloodstream, we’re giving the immune system breathing space so it can actually start fighting the Candida itself and the metabolites. And if you think about it, it’s quite a clever approach because at the same time, you’re working with your lifestyle. We’re pointing out in my book and my writings. We’re showing you how stress affects the body and how to reduce the impact of stress and adrenal and thyroid exhaustion on the body. We’re boosting immunity by changing the diet.

Then stage three of the diet is reintroduction where we’re starting to get you back down to common ground again. You’re going to be including the foods that you like to eat. The foods you introduce first are the foods that you tend to eat but not desire the most. The foods we introduce last are the foods that you like eating the most. That is quite common sense from where I’m sitting because I believe people often eat the foods they desire the most which gives them the most amount of grief. Junk, alcohol, sodas, sugars, all this sort of stuff that we love to eat, but it’s not good for us. Those are foods we don’t introduce for well down the track until you’ve fully recovered.

You’re going to write down a list on paper all the foods that you eat, for example, and have two columns, what I love to eat, what I like to eat. The foods you love to eat the most we bring those in a bit later down the track. Mind you, these two columns are the foods that we’ve taken out at the onset, the beginning stage, if that makes any sense.

You can read about the three stages to the Candida Crusher diet much more fully in the Candida Crusher book, Chapter 7, particularly Section 1. It’s about 120 pages just on this alone, very comprehensive.

I hope that explains to you in Spain, the lady in Spain, about why the three stages of the diet. It’s a logical progression of how I ramp the diet up. Generally, the three stage diet can take anywhere between two months up to four months. Four months is about the average period of time I find that most people with Candida improve, certainly not 24 hours like some ridiculous websites claim.

I hope that answers your question. Thanks for tuning in to this video today. Thank you.