Candida albicans is a common yeast which actually lives in harmony with us in small amounts in our GI tract, the mouth and the vagina. Our friendly bacteria found in these places prevent it from over-growing, however, if these friendly bacteria become depleted, then candida can start to multiply as much as it wants since its surveillance team is missing.
Medications such as antibiotics, steroids, birth control pills and immunizations destroy this delicate friendly bacteria leaving you prone to an overgrowth of yeast, which can cause itching, burning, swelling, fatigue, cravings for sugar, brain fog and bloating. Not only that, once the yeast fills up in the gut it can migrate out of the gut, causing little perforations on its way out, known as leaky gut, which predisposes you to food allergies as the immune system launches its attacks on the food which has leaked out.
Modern medicine responds to yeast overgrowth by giving antifungal medications and creams, such as Monistat, Nystatin, and fluconazole. Some doctors have been known to treat yeast infections using antibiotics, which never sounded right to me since taking antibiotics is what caused it to overgrow in the first place since antibiotics kill the friendly bacteria while attacking the pathogens, resulting in yeast overgrowth.
Holistic doctors use more natural sounding remedies which don’t require prescriptions — such as grapefruit seed extract. It was found that fungus cannot grow on grapefruit seeds so this has been used since the 1980’s to treat yeast. Also used are garlic capsules, turmeric capsules, pau d’arco tea, and selenium, to name a few.
It turns out that both approaches, the modern medical model and the holistic model killed the yeast…and then it promptly grew back.
Then finally, in 1986 a book came out which described once and for all how to treat yeast by starving it to death by avoiding foods that it likes to eat. The only problem is that just about all foods can feed yeast, so the patient was left without too many foods to eat and in the end began starving themselves to death along with their yeast. And in the process of avoiding most foods known to mankind in order to get rid of their infections, they become quite neurotic about their diet, since just about everything they ate caused the yeast symptoms to return.
And the worst part of it all is that after two years of starving the yeast to death, the yeast was still thriving.
I had been trying to treat yeast for the first eight years of my practice and was not having much success, and then I was very fortunate to attend a lecture in which a doctor came from Europe to show us why we were having no success in our various approaches to treating yeast. He took a drop of blood from a patient who had yeast overgrowth and put it into a very expensive microscope where he could project the image onto a screen where we could see the yeast swimming around happily in the person’s blood.
The patient was then instructed to take a probiotic, and then we examined his blood again. And…nothing happened. The yeast was as happy as ever swimming around undisturbed by the probiotic.
This was repeated over and over again on dozens of patients who had yeast in their blood using several probiotic companies, all to no avail. Nothing seemed to touch the resistant yeast.
And then suddenly, a person was instructed to take a probiotic from a company called Natren. I remember gasping as I saw on the screen how the probiotic attacked the yeast, like on a battlefield, totally breaking it apart, creating incredible explosions going on right before my eyes. The whole room was filled with doctors who were totally astounded by this.
I couldn’t wait to get back to my busy practice on Monday morning to order this amazing probiotic and start it right away on my weary patients who had been diligently taking their garlic pills, grapefruit seed extract, turmeric capsules, and selenium to no avail, and who were pounds lighter from their starvation diets.
I contacted Natren and they told me that the owner of the company was a microbiologist who took the culture over from Russia, but also figured out how to protect the culture without destroying it during the manufacturing process.
I was told that most probiotics do in fact start out with a high amount of active probiotic culture but that many of the cultures die during its processing, leaving behind a very ineffective probiotic. They also told me that unless the probiotic states on the bottle “100% potency guaranteed” then it probably had mostly dead cultures.
I got up enough courage to have the patients discontinue all their yeast overgrowth remedies and yeast starvation diets and just used the probiotic. And to my surprise the yeast died off in most of the cases within two months, this after trying to kill it for two years. And it hardly ever came back.
But of course there were always a few who still were not helped enough by the probiotic. And luckily, it was around that time that I started studying with my Ayurvedic mentor and teacher, Vaidya Rama Kant Mishra. He was happy to see that I had already figured out that trying to kill the yeast and/or starve it to death did not work, but instead had shifted my approach to regrowing the friendly bacteria and let that do its job in mopping up the yeast.
He told me that it’s not always the best approach to try to kill infection in the gut because when you do you will always kill more friendly bacteria in the process. The better approach, he told me, was to create conditions where the bad guys, the pathogens, leave town.
So he proceeded to develop two other remedies, one which acts like a fertilizer to help the friendly bacteria to grow, and the other which is like adding new topsoil into the garden, both of which would allow the seeds, the probiotics to grow.
And once the probiotic cultures regrew back into the gut: it was like a miracle in that the yeast finally died off once and for all without going through all the difficulties of taking all the remedies to kill it and starve it to death.
And from then on yeast overgrowth has been easy for me to tackle in our patients.
So Vaidya Mishra was right: we never needed to try to kill the yeast, whether with prescription drugs or natural remedies. Instead, we had to heal the lining of the gut so the probiotics would have good conditions to grow, and then leave it up to the friendly bacteria to destroy the pesky yeast.
And one other thing he taught me was that if you just take a round or two of an antibiotic or maybe one immunization or a short round of steroids, it will kill the friendly bacteria in the gut, which then will need probiotics to replace them. But if you take several rounds of antibiotics, or stay on birth control pills for several months or even years, or receive several immunizations and/or steroids, then the repeated doses of these medications not only destroy the friendly bacteria, but also the mucus layer that they are growing in, which is what led him to develop the two other remedies to help heal the lining of the gut.
That’s why sometimes just taking a probiotic might not be enough. This is why some remedies such as slippery elm, marshmallow root and deglycyrrhized licorice might be necessary to regrow the mucus layer in the gut where the friendly bacteria grow. Otherwise the friendly bacteria might not be able to grow effectively, kind of like trying to plant seeds in sandy soil: you may get a little growth, but not robust enough to ward off the yeast.
Then there are prebiotics, which are a type of non digestible fiber that act as a food source for the beneficial bacteria. Because these prebiotic fibers are not digested, they remain in the digestive tract where they can feed the probiotics. Artichokes, chicory root, and pectin are some good prebiotic foods. Pectin is found in the stewed apple we recommend every morning: peel the apple, chop it into fours, add 2 whole cloves and cover it with water in a little pot. Let it cook until soft, discard the cloves and eat before breakfast.
Another source of fiber which encourages the growth of the friendly bacteria is sweet Thai tamarind. Don’t get the fermented tamarind paste available in Indian markets, but learn how to cook with the actual tamarind pods for best prebiotic support.
Keep in mind that the vaginal tract and bladder can also lose their friendly bacteria, resulting in bacterial vaginosis, yeast overgrowth and UTI’s. You can find specific probiotics for the vaginal tract and bladder in most health food stores.
D-mannose is a fiber which can act like a prebiotic to enhance the growth of friendly bacteria in the bladder, and taken along with cranberry juice can discourage the overgrowth of pathogens in the bladder which would otherwise cause UTI’s.
So now, when I take on a patient with yeast I know that it is a fairly easy problem to overcome if you get a good case history. You have to see how long they were on the offending medications which destroy the friendly bacteria to help figure out if they just need some probiotics or if they need extra help regrowing the mucus layer and some prebiotics to guarantee a nice thick turf of friendly bacteria in all the mucus membranes of the gut, bladder and vagina.
And the patients are so grateful to finally overcome their nagging yeast infections which they have been plagued with for months and sometimes even years.
I hope this information will help prevent you from having to take so many remedies which won’t help anyway and lead you away from following a diet which will deplete both you and your yeast at the same time.