Is Your Gut Is Fighting a Mortal Enemy? (Plus, How to Win the Battle)

January 23, 2018 Dr Daryl Gioffre

Mortal enemy sounds pretty bad, right?

So I’ll get right to the point. What is this scourge you have to fight on your insides?

CANDIDA!

What is candida, or candida albicans?

It’s the clinical term for yeast, and it can sabotage your health, your energy, and your efforts to lose weight. The picture above is budding yeast cells in the blood of one of my Live Blood Cell clients.

Now before we go any further, this isn’t just for women. Men might read yeast and think this doesn’t apply to them, but all of us have some candida in our bodies and men are just as likely to suffer from a yeast overgrowth as women.

Women are more likely to be aware of it, and in a way, that makes it more dangerous for men. Any woman can tell you that a round of antibiotics is likely to lead to a yeast infection. With men, that yeast is there, but we don’t even know it!

And this is even crazier – EVERYONE whose live blood I have tested have one common trait – they ALL have yeast in their BLOOD, and you should never have it there! And many of these patients had NO symptoms at all!

In fact, many people have a candida overgrowth and don’t even know it.

Antibiotic use, other drugs, and our modern diets loaded with yeast-loving foods such as sugar and grains make candida an enormously common problem.

Antibiotics kill off all bacteria, taking out infection, but also taking out good bacteria with it, and once the beneficial bacteria are depleted, yeast takes over.

How do you know if your body is fighting yeast?

Here are the most common symptoms:

Fungal or yeast infections like athlete’s foot or nail fungus
Repeated colds or other viruses
Gas and bloating
Headaches/migraines
Sugar cravings and alcohol cravings
Skin itching or conditions like acne
Anxiety, mood swings, or brain fog
Stubborn belly fat

If you aren’t able to come into my Wellness Center in NYC, there is a simple test you can do at home to find out if you have a candida overgrowth.

At Home Candida Test

First thing in the morning, before you put anything in your mouth, fill a clear glass with room-temperature, filtered water.
Work up a bit of saliva, then swallow. Then do it again, and this time, spit it into the glass of water. Check the water every 15 minutes or so for up to one hour.
If you see strings (fibers) traveling down into the water from the saliva floating on the top, cloudy specks (particles suspended in the water) or cloudy saliva that sinks to the bottom of the glass, you have a candida problem.

Here’s the bottom line…

Chances are, if you have ANY health problems, your body IS fighting candida.

How can I make such a big claim?

Here’s the truth coming from a health professional. As I mentioned before, I look at blood test results each and every day. Out of the last 200 live blood tests I have done, ALL 200 have had candida in the blood!

And you might be thinking, “Well maybe that’s the case for all of us,” or even, “Is that how it should be?”

NO! And yet for so, so many of us in the modern world, it is.

This is not how it works in the digestive tract. Yeast can be found in there, and as long as it’s not an overgrowth, that’s ok.

If yeast is found in the blood, it means 2 things are happening:

Leaky Gut Syndrome is taking place. I’ve talked about Leaky Gut before (read about it in depth here), but the basic idea is that the lining of the gut becomes damaged from antibiotics, inflammation, and/or foods you are sensitive to like gluten, dairy, or sugar.

You have small, porous holes to absorb all the good stuff, which are normal. But from a toxic and acidic lifestyle, these small permeable holes become CRATERS!

And as a result, toxins, waste, and yeast are able to get past the ‘guards’ or ‘barricades’ and enter your blood when they should be on their way out of your body.

It’s a downward spiral from there. Nutrients from food aren’t properly absorbed, more of the bad stuff makes it way back into your body, and inflammation only increases.

The blood is so acidic, it is allowing the yeast to take up residence. If the blood was healthier, and you had a reserve supply of minerals, it would kill the yeast on demand.

Think of it this way… If your pet fish gets sick, you are not going to treat the fish. You are going to change the water.

The same goes with yeast in the blood. When you improve the pH and detoxify, the body will take care of the yeast in your blood on its own.

You do not want candida in your blood, period.

This is the most important thing I can tell you today and if there’s one thing you walk away knowing about candida, it should be that you don’t want it in your blood.

So how do you stop a candida overgrowth?

If you want to win the war, you’ve got to know what weapons both sides are using.

Sugar feeds candida. Candida LOVES sugar. On the other hand, candida, like bacteria and viruses, cannot thrive in a clean, non-toxic alkaline environment.

So first and foremost, if you are dealing with candida, you have to starve it of the food that it loves.

You can take all the probiotics in the world but if you’re feeding candida what it loves, you’ll still have too much of it.

If you have a stagnant pond, you will have mosquitoes. You can kill off the mosquitoes, but they will come back, right? Why? Because the environment was not cleaned up. The swampy water is still there.

So, eliminating sugar is the most important, but not just sugar (grains = sugar as well).

You want to focus on the big picture, which is what can you do to make your body and your internal terrain more alkaline. If the environment is alkaline, the yeast goes away.

Just like that stagnant pond, you have to clean up your environment, stop poisoning the system, and give your body what it’s deficient in. Your body will heal itself and will know exactly what to do.

Here’s the protocol for winning the war against candida:

Yeast lives on sugar, so eliminating sugar is step 1 and most important for this protocol. Fruit is okay in moderation, but I recommend alkaline fruits that are low in sugar like lemons, limes, grapefruit, avocados, coconut, pomegranate.

When it comes to sugar-filled fruits, the important thing is that there is a net alkaline effect. If you are making a smoothie and you add a few healthy fats like chia, coconut oil, and/or raw almond butter, it’s okay to add bananas or berries because the fats will slow down and prevent fermentation of the sugar in the fruit. Removing sugary fruits altogether and having a true alkaline green smoothie is an even better choice.

Add veggies you like to your smoothie such as cucumbers, celery, and avocados. There should always be a couple of big handfuls of greens like spinach, watercress, kale, and chard.

Liquid should be filtered water, almond milk, coconut milk, or coconut water. Most importantly, I would load up the healthy fats (2 to 3 in each smoothie).

Next, eliminate anything made with yeast, which is more than you think (read labels carefully), as well as vinegars, nutritional yeast, kombucha, and fermented foods. These foods also feed yeast.

As always, it’s about moderation, not deprivation! Replace sugar-filled foods with other foods you enjoy that will alkalize your body. You can eat boatloads of veggies, low-sugar fruits, and alkaline grains like quinoa, and the yeast will have nothing to feed on.

If you are dealing with a fungal yeast issue, a couple of supplements, olive leaf extract, caprylic acid, and oregano oil work well to kill off yeast.

It is important to restore the friendly bacteria in the gut by taking a good, refrigerated probiotic. Change it up every 30 days as the bacteria gets used to the same probiotic.

You also may want to consider taking a good digestive enzyme. When yeast is overrunning us, our digestion gets stressed, and can use some help.

Last but not least, alkalize! Take extra servings of Alkamind Daily Minerals and Alkamind Daily Greens up to 2 to 3 times daily. This is raise the internal pH of your tissues so you can clear out that swamp the mosquitos are feeding on, so to speak.