How can I diagnose if I have candida or not? How candida is diagnosed?

Thanks for checking out my video today. How is Candida diagnosed? How do we know we have it? How do we know we’re not just imagining we’ve got this disease?

I think the best way to diagnose chronic Candida, particularly, is the stool test. I think it’s the ultimate way. There are different ways you can test for Candida in the body. You can do blood testing, for example, for particular antigens, Candida antigens in the body. You can do what we call organic acids urine test to look at the metabolites, the products broken down in the body that tell you if Candida has been there. There are different ways we can test, but I think the ultimate test is the comprehensive digestive stool analysis test. Three samples. Three concurrent days. I work with a couple of labs. If you go to ErikBakker.com, you can find out more about testing there. I work with a couple of labs in America. My favorite lab is Doctor’s Data in Chicago.

I’ll tell you why I like the stool test. It’s because it just doesn’t tell me if the patient’s got Candida or not. It tells me a lot of information. They do a really good microbiology panel to show me the level of beneficial bacteria, what we call the commensals and the bad bacteria. So the beneficial bacteria should generally in a healthy patient be a three or a four plus behind the beneficial. Many people, in fact, have a zero like NG, no growth, or one plus.

The commensals are bacteria that can turn good or bad. Healthy people have got no commensals or very low levels. People with severe Candida can have 9 or 10 different strains of commensal bacteria, and the pathogenic ones are the nasty ones. These are the terrorists of the gut. I call the commensals the politicians of the gut. They can change. Go good or bad depending on what’s happening around them at the time, so you’ve got the good guys, the politicians, and the ISIS militants or the terrorists. These guys are downright nasty, so you don’t want to have those in the gut at all.

So this is a culture, so they actually try and grow these bugs in the stool. They do a microscopy as well, so they actually microscopically – so they look at the stool to see if they can see any white spicules or Candida there. They also try and culture the stool for yeast, and I’ve seen anything up to 5 or 10, even 15 strains of Candida grown in stool samples. Just imagine if you’ve got low beneficials and you’ve got Candida albicans cultured in all three stool samples, it’s quite bad. That’s a serious yeast infection.

When you pass out a stool sample, you should not be able to pass out any viable live yeast. If you can culture Candida from a stool sample, it means you’ve got active growing Candida in the stool itself, which is a pretty serious yeast infection.

The other thing I like about the stool testing is the fact that we can look at the immunology of the bowel. We can look at what we call the circulatory IgA, which is an immunoglobulin A, which is one of the most abundant immunoglobulins or antibodies found in your whole body. The body makes a couple of grams of it, one to two grams of it per day. You’ll find it in the stool in set levels, so if we find the levels very high or very low, it will give us an idea that you’ve got serious immune activity happening in the digestive system. The body is trying to bind to things and take it out. If it’s very up regulated or down regulated in conjunction with these bacteria, it gives me a lot of useful information about you, what’s going on in your life.

We can even do a cancer marker in the stool, so we can see how high your risk is for bowel cancer, if you’ve got a risk there at all. There are many other things we can look at. They also look at a fat stain, for example, and they check for fibers and meat fibers and things, so they can see how well your digestive system is working, to see if the enzymes are breaking things down properly. It’s very important for good health to have very good digestive function, to break down food properly to the smallest substrates that allow the beneficial bacteria feed on those things and thrive. We need to feed them up.

Fiber to me is like compost in the garden. We know that if you’ve got a vegetable garden, you know, I’ve got a nice veggie garden so I put compost in there and I grow good vegetables. So if the soil is barren and there’s no compost in there or no food, we’re going to grow crappy vegetables.

Your health is the same. Lots of good fibers, different types of fibers in your bowel allow beneficial bacteria to thrive, keeps gas down, keeps bloating down, and these beneficial bugs produce things like Vitamin K, for example, and B vitamins that sustain good health. So it’s important to have these, and the stool test will assess all of that and more. Isn’t that amazing? This is how I like to test patients for Candida is I like to do the CDSA times three. It’s a stool test, so that’s a good test that you might want to consider if you’re interested in a Candida diagnosis.

I hope that gives you better insight into how to diagnose Candida. Keep away from these cheap budget tests. Go for the stool test. It’s the best one. And check out my home test. You’ll also find some videos I’ve done on the several different home tests, the spit test, the tongue test, the taste test, the sound test, so you can see all those videos as well. It’s all no charge at all to do the home testing. Stool test costs money, but it’s the Rolls Royce of tests. I do several of them every week on patients all around the world and it helps to solve problems. Some patients have had these conditions for 10 or 20 or 30 years, and the stool test will just throw it all up and say, “This is what’s wrong.” It allows me to pinpoint the treatment for that client.

I hope that answers your question. Thanks for tuning in.