This is going to be part three of Does Stress Feed Candida? What I’m going to talk about now is a concept called gluconeogenesis, so the production of new blood sugar; “gluco,” meaning blood; “neo,” meaning – whatever it means, I’m not sure – “genesis,” meaning basically “new,” so I know that gluconeogenesis means the production of new blood sugar.
What happens is when your energy drops and you’re feeling tired, the brain starts telling the hypothalamus, I can stimulate the pituitary to get onto the adrenals to produce more amounts of cortisol. Because what cortisol does in the presence of low blood sugar is to stimulate the release of fatty acids, which these fatty acids get converted into eventually in a long convoluted process into blood sugar.
Stress, we know that high stress particularly in the alarm phase, initiates the production of increased blood sugar. If you’re going from one stress to another or in the alarm phase quite a lot, if you’re phone is ringing all the time, your children are placing demands on you, your employer is placing demands on you, you get pissed off or stressed out quite a lot, you’re going to be in the alarm phase of stress quite a lot. I see this commonly in my patients, so these sort of people have too much blood sugar elevated.
Unfortunately, with high blood sugar, we also got insulin elevated. Insulin is produced by the pancreas gland that allows blood sugar basically to be pushed into the cells. In the initiating phases where people have too much stress, they get too much blood sugar, too much insulin. I guess what too much blood sugar means for Candida, it means if you’ve got systemic Candida, it can really help the Candida to grow. It can really promote Candida.
We’ve had emails before about people asking if ketosis induces Candida. Ketosis being a condition when the body is in a very low, extremely low, carbohydrate state, when the body produces energy from stored fatty acids produced by the liver. But in this case, the fatty acids are not produced because of starvation. They’re produced because of low cortisol. Low cortisol or low cortisol state when the patient has an issue there and blood sugar is produced in abundance there; it gives you high cortisol.
We can get a problem with Candida, and I often see the patients who get the most severe Candida aggravations are the ones often who get the most anxiety and stress, vaginal infections or jock itch, toenail fungus are recurrent, systemic infections, tinea cruris, tinea vulgaris, all kinds of microsporum. Various kinds of fungal reactions we see in patients are often as a result of high cortisol levels and continual production of too much blood sugar.
So keeping your blood sugar under control can be arranged by making sure that you’ve got a handle on your stress by eating three square meals a day, taking time to relax, and identifying what the stressors are in your life. I hope you understand the concept that high stress or continual low grade stress punctuated by events of high stress will eventually mean relatively high cortisol levels, stimulate the liver to produce products basically which get converted to glucose, which can certainly have an effect on continuing Candida.
Always remember stress certainly does feed Candida. It’s the best-kept secret, and it’s one that you really need to look at if you want to get a handle on your chronic or severe Candida.
I hope that sort of rings a bell with you. Thanks for tuning in.