Is SIBO Candida?

Thank you for tuning in. Is SIBO Candida? What is SIBO? Small intestinal bowel overgrowth, SIBO. That’s what SIBO is. SIBO basically means that your body is being affected internally by an overgrowth in the digestive system of bacteria that are generally not beneficial.

There are many different types of bacteria in our digestive system that create many different types of actions. The unfortunate thing with some of the bad bacteria is that it can have really bad effects in our small and large intestine, particularly when they’re an overgrowth. Some of them, for example, can help to break down bile salts, the things that the body produces to break fats down. You’ll notice I’ve spoken before on some YouTube clips that when you’ve had a bowel motion, check the water. Flush the toilet first, have a bowel motion, and check the water around the motion. If you see an oil slick on there, that can be a lack of bile salts, something I commonly see people with a lot of gas and bloating. For example, they may have bacteria that are responsible for that.

Other people have certain bad bacteria that can produce toxins that can affect the lining of the small or large bowel, and these toxins can create all sorts of problems. They can create brain fog and fatigue. They can create memory loss. And many people actually think that they’ve got die off when, in fact, they’ve got SIBO. Other kinds of bacteria can ramp up inflammation, reduce immunity, and create all these immune byproducts that make you feel pretty sick and toxic.

Your digestive system relies on many different types of things to help it along. It needs enzymes. And if you look in the small bowel, particularly, you’ll find that there are muscles and nerves and neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are just basically hormones, chemicals in there. The enzymes help to break the food down, whereas, the nerves, muscles and neurotransmitters help to move food along. Along with it, they take bacteria to the areas of the colon, particularly where they’re beneficial.

When there’s a problem with this process, if we lack enzymes or we have a problem with our nerves or muscles or neurotransmitters, we can end up with quite bad SIBO. We will see this, for example, with inflammatory bowel disease. With Crohn’s or colitis, we often see SIBO. We’ll see this with bowel surgery. We’ll see it with people with diverticulitis, with bowel pockets. People who have had back injuries, for example or they’ve had a crash where they’ve injured part of their digestive system. All these things can create SIBO.

One of the most common causes of SIBO, obviously, is antibiotics and too much sugar in the diet. An imbalance of the refined carbohydrates, way too many refined carbs, sugars. You can see a lot of YouTube clips about how devastating sugar is. By 2040, one-third of America will have diabetes and part of this reason is just sugar. People have just gone crazy with sugar. The government is just subsidizing all these companies to the tune of billions of dollars a year and just fueling this whole process up.

If there’s anything you can get out of this video today, it is watch out for sugar in your diet. Six hundred and fifty thousand individual food items produced in American supermarkets contain 80 percent refined sugar as in added. You really want to try to do more like what I’m doing is trying to make your own food.

Cook your own food. Grow your own vegetables, if you can, salad vegetables at least. Eat basic things like good proteins and plenty of vegetables. Drink a lot of water. Cut down on stuff. Get rid of sodas out or your life, all this sort of junk. This is what creates SIBO.

Let’s look at some of the signs and symptoms of SIBO. In fact, when I say these signs and symptoms, you’ll think “Hang on a minute, Eric, this is Candida.” It’s funny because people often confuse SIBO and Candida and, in fact, both of them overlap. What I want you to think of is one SIBO circle and one Candida circle, and when they overlap, there’s a third circle. Most people I see are in that intermediate circle. They’ve got elements of SIBO and Candida.

The difference with Candida versus SIBO is people with a Candida overgrowth tend to have a predominance of Candida Albicans. People with SIBO tend to have more of the intestinal bacteria, the dysbiosis. But generally you’ll find that when a person’s had SIBO for a while, they develop Candida as well and vice versa. People with bad Candida end up with SIBO. How do I know that? I know that through doing many, many stool tests on patients and examining the results. Let’s have a look at Candida and SIBO now a little bit side by side in terms of the signs and symptoms.

SIBO, typically you’re going to find things like bloating, constipation and diarrhea, food sensitivities (very common). You’re going to find increased incidents of poor immune function with these people. Brain fog is par for the course.

With Candida, we’re going to get similar things, but we’re going to get a very strong craving for sugar on top of that. We’re going to get potentially more itching, itchy skin. Particularly, people I find who crave sugar after a meal; these are typical Candida patients I will see. But sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish one from the other. How we can pick it more easily are the overt signs and symptoms like the vaginal thrush and the jock itch, itchiness of the body.

If you get my book, Candida Crusher, you can actually see the eight different home tests that I recommend to determine if you’ve got Candida or not. If you do those tests, the itch test, the smell test, the sound test, the spit test, and various other tests. If you do those at home, it’ll give you a pretty good idea whether you’ve got Candida or not. You don’t have to spend a whole lot of money to determine whether you have Candida or not.

If you’ve got SIBO or Candida, the treatment is similar for both of these cases. I would treat them the same. I’m going to use an antifungal/antibacterial on SIBO as well as Candida. I’m going to be looking at eliminations from the diet of the allergy-forming foods. I’m probably going to clean the patient up for a week or two prior to putting them into a diet to stop them from crashing really bad. And I’m probably going to look at a long-term dietary recovery program. But the most important thing with SIBO and Candida recovery is the lifestyle. I’m going to look at the kind of things the patient’s doing right now that are contributing to this ongoing mess that they’ve got themselves into.

And this is something that most practitioners don’t do. They just do treatment. They don’t do a long-term maintenance phase with these patients, so the recurrence is there. This is how some practitioners make their money. They make their money by treating people. People get reasonably well. They come back with the same problem and they keep treating them. I don’t think that’s right. I think it’s about getting the lifestyle right. When the lifestyle is right, the digestive system becomes right. When the digestive system becomes right, the whole health of the patient improves.

I hope you took some of that onboard, but remember the take home message. Sugar, watch the sugar in the diet because I believe that’s the numero uno cause of SIBO. Are SIBO and Candida infections similar? They are and sometimes it’s difficult to understand one from the other.

I hope that gives you a bit of an insight into SIBO versus Candida. Thanks for tuning in. Have a great day.