MODULE #5 - Lesson 2 - Amazon S3 · 2 Super utrition Academy DUL - Lesson b u Ç X } u Module 5 - Lesson 2 The Intestinal Universe, Bacteria and Candida Welcome to Module 5, Lesson

The Intestinal Universe, Bacteria, and Candida

MODULE #5 - Lesson 2

2Super Nutrition Academy – MODULE 5 - Lesson 2

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Module 5 - Lesson 2The Intestinal Universe, Bacteria and Candida

Welcome to Module 5, Lesson 2. We’re talking about the intestinal universe, bacteria, and Candida today. We are going to start where we left off in our previous lesson.

What We Will Be Covering TodayI’m just going to quickly recap some of the stuff that we talked about with respect to the small intestine and large intestine before we start the lesson. Today we will discuss intestinal flora and Candida. Intestinal flora is just another way of saying the bacteria within your intestines. We will look at gut inflammation and leaky gut, and we’ll finish off by looking at how to repair your gut and defeat Candida.


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Small Intestine Recap

Let’s have a little recap of the small intestine here. The food moves down the duodenum, which is the first part of the small intestine, into the rest of the small intestine. The small intestine is about 20 feet long with a surface area of about the size of a tennis court. The walls of the small intestine secrete alkaline digestive enzymes, which continue to break down proteins into amino acids, long-chain fats into smaller fatty acids, and to finish the digestion of carbohydrates into more complex sugars and glucose for their ultimate absorption into the bloodstream and then obviously to deliver.

The small intestine is all this kind of squiggly stuff that’s kind of all bunched up. The large intestine is this larger thing that’s wrapping around it.

The inner surface of the small intestine is covered with millions of tiny villi, or microvilli, which dramatically increase surface area of the small intestine and they kind of work like palm trees, waving in the breeze. They’re constantly


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moving and sucking up the small digested food particles. The fat molecules that eventually form chylomicrons are absorbed into the lymph and then go through that pathway and then eventually back into the bloodstream, whereas all the other nutrients go right into the bloodstream, into the portal vein, which goes into the liver for processing.

Ileocecal ValveAt the end of the small intestine is a circle valve called the ileocecal valve, and this is usually kept closed so that food stays in the small intestine long enough to be digested and absorbed fully because all the absorption mainly occurs in the small intestine and also to prevent the microorganisms in the large intestine from kind of creeping back into the small intestine and the stomach. We wouldn’t want that to happen, unfortunately, it does.

As digestion and absorption is completed, the ileocecal valve opens, and the smooth, rhythmic waves of contraction, called peristalsis, help move the food into the cecum, which is the initial part of the colon, or the large intestine. This allows the food to move into that area and then through the ascending colon and across and back down into the descending colon.


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It’s a very important valve because it allows time for things to be digested and absorbed properly. If that valve is open, then we’re going to have bigger food particles coming through into the large intestine, which is not good, we’re going to have microorganisms seeping back and toxins seeping back into the small intestine and the rest of the digestive tract, which is going to lead to a lot of issues.


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The Large Intestine (Colon)

The large intestine is five feet long which is much shorter than the small intestine. At the bottom we have the cecum. This is where the ileocecal valve is.


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The appendix is that little pinky thing that hangs off the bottom of the cecum. It’s sort of withered away over generations and it’s how our bodies have evolved. We don’t use the appendix, and that’s why it’s just kind of hanging there. Appendicitis is an inflammation of the appendix, foodstuff can get stuck in there and become inflamed, and there can be bacterial infections. This can lead to an appendectomy or the removal of the appendix. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen for most of us.

We have the ascending colon, which is the first part of it; at this point the food is really liquid, so it’s kind of moving along through the ascending colon, along the transverse colon, down the descending colon, into the rectum, and then out the anus.

The large intestine is not a sterile place. There are over four hundred different types of microorganisms found in the colon. Together they are called intestinal flora. Most of them are our friends, so they’re good bacteria. They are important aids in the digestive process. They make B vitamins; they make lactic acid, which improves digestion; and they also make vitamin K, which, as we’ve seen, is really important for blood clotting.

These good bacteria make chemicals which are healing to the large intestine and also secretions that hinder the bad guys, the bad bacteria that we’re going to talk about. After the good bacteria die off, it’s actually a good thing because their kind of dead bodies provide much of the bulk for our stool. So, that’s interesting.

We talked about how this is a lot of liquid coming through the colon; the dying off of a lot of these bacteria, along with the fiber for our food, end up giving us the bulk in our stool.

Intestinal FloraAn important book was published in 1983 called Human Intestinal Microflora in Health and Disease. In this book the authors state that people with low stomach acid, or hypochlorhydria have higher counts of bacteria not normally found in a healthy stomach.


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We know that stomach ulcers are directly related to a bacteria. Acid is not the issue. Ulcers are directly related to the H. pylori, helicobacter pylori bacteria. One reason for this could be not enough stomach acid to burn off these bacteria.

We learned in the last lesson that if things are hot digested properly because of low stomach acid we have issues all the way down into the intestine. If the ileocecal valve is not closing properly, microorganisms are allowed to seep back through the small intestine and up into the stomach. This is why individuals with low stomach acid have higher bacteria counts because food isn’t digested properly, and that is the initial stimulus for all of these problems that we are experiencing digestively.

This is a quote for the book I just mentioned, “There’s convincing evidence that the indigenous intestinal flora provide natural protection against infection by a number of pathogenic—or dangerous—bacteria. The protective mechanism is impaired, however, when antimicrobial agents are administered. For instance, antibiotics frequently produce profound changes in the composition of the human intestinal microflora, permitting overgrowth of resistant, endogenous bacteria or colonization by exogenous—or organisms from outside the body—acquired from the environment.

“Once resistance is reduced by antibiotic administration, even a small number of pathogenic organisms can produce serious infections in the host. Clearly, the integrity of the intestinal flora is important to the well being of the host, and antibiotics, which upset it, should be used with extreme caution.”

So, antibiotics are like atomic bombs. When we were in Mexico a little while ago, Oscar was one and it was first experience with being surrounded by lots of other kids from different parts of the world. There was a girl there and she had this whooping cough. I was like, “Oh, man, if she’s going to be in the day care there, this is not going to be good.” Oscar ended up developing what she had. We took him to the resident doctor, and she wanted to put him on antibiotics right away, and we said no, we’re just going to let his system kind of work this through, and within a couple days, he was a lot better.


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The reason we didn’t want to put him on antibiotics was only a year old, and to administer antibiotics when he was just starting to develop healthy bacteria would’ve been catastrophic. Antibiotic use is a predisposing risk factor to a lot of the intestinal issues leading to dysbiosis, which is the imbalance of bacteria, good and bad bacteria, Candida, things like that. So if you’ve used antibiotics in the past, keep this in mind. They’re like atomic bombs because what they do is, they don’t only wipe out the bad bacteria, but they wipe out all of the bacteria.

It just so happens that the bad bacteria and the fungus and the yeast and the mold and tends to proliferate a little bit faster once everything’s wiped out because the good bacteria is no longer there to keep everything in check.

The other thing is that chlorine kills bacteria. Chlorine is added to municipal water a lot of times, municipal drinking water, to kill off bad bacteria so we don’t get things like cholera or giardia, all those kinds of infectious diseases. Unfortunately, if you’re drinking municipal water that is not filtered, that is not purified, you’re also consuming chlorine, and the chlorine will do the same thing in your colon. It’ll start to kill off a lot of your good bacteria. So, that’s why it’s really important to drink good, pure, filtered, healthy water, which does not contain chlorine or at least the chlorine has been removed from that.


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Candida and Bad Bacteria

There are over 400 different types of microorganisms. There are millions and millions of these guys in the colon.

I need to preface this by saying there’s been a lot of controversy with respect to this topic, especially if you go to your doctor within the medical community. If you went to Google Scholar and tried to find some scientific journal papers on Candida or Candidiasis, which is the overgrowth of Candida, they recommend to deal with it through pharmaceutical drugs. None of them talk about what I’m about to teach you here in this more holistic approach to healing yourself.

The sad part is that a lot of these drugs make the problem worse, for instance antibiotics. The problem with yeast and Candida is that they can cause virtually any disease anywhere in the body. Again, a lot of medical practitioners will resist this notion simply because they haven’t been taught this, but within the natural practitioner, within the holistic field of health it is accepted.

The overgrowth of yeast least to Candidiasis. Candida, Candida albicans, is one type of yeast, and the overgrowth of that leads to the condition called Candidiasis. It’s not only caused by foods and medication. The foods that are the issues are the same ones that are causing digestive issues—specifically, Candida and yeast feed off sugar.

Yeast that’s used to leaven bread is going to feed off sugar; wine is created as a result of yeast fermentation. The same thing happens in the body, where yeast will feed off sugar and undigested foods from faulty digestion. So, it’s not only the foods and not only the medications. A faulty digestion is the real root of Candida overgrowth.

There are hundreds of different critters other than the Candida in the colon, and they’re like the cleanup hitters. They’re going to finish off digesting anything that you’re not fully digesting within your stomach and upper part of the intestine. So, if you’re not chewing your food, if big food particles are kind of seeping right through into the colon, all of these microorganisms are going to have a smorgasbord.


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It’s like when you put slow digestion together with these hungry little critters, you’ve got problems. Would you leave food lying around in a dark, damp, and warm, germ-infested tube for a day or more? These nasty critters gladly digest things for you.

If you unplug your fridge freezer and you went back and opened your freezer a day later, what’s going to happen is you’re going to start to get all this kind of mold, that kind of fuzzy mold creeping up on the sides of the freezer.

Well the mold and all those microorganisms have always been inside the freezer. It’s not like they opened the door and got in while you were sleeping. But the environment inside the freezer was too cold for them to proliferate. However, when you unplug the freezer, now the temperature rises, it becomes warm and more humid inside. They’re able to now multiply and kind of come to life.

The same thing happens inside your colon. If your colon is healthy, if the bacteria are balanced out properly everything’s okay. There’s supposed to be a healthy relationship. However, when dysbiosis occurs, when, for instance, you kill off a lot of the good bacteria through antibiotic use or poor food choices or chlorinated water and then you increase sugar intake, alcohol intake, things that are going to feed that yeast, those guys are going to multiply and they’re just going to ravage all that food, because that’s exactly what they’re looking for.

The dangerous part is that these bad bacteria and yeast expel more than 78 different types of toxins. So far, we’ve kind of discovered 78 different types, but there might be more. Things like sadoles, indoles, phenols, alcohol, ammonia, acetaldehyde, even formaldehyde. Another source is called mycotoxins. Candida gives off what’s called a mycotoxin, which is a specific type of toxin, inside your body.

Toxins are essentially large quantities of gas, often associated with fermentation and purification. Typical symptoms are bloating, burping, belching, and flatulence. If you ever have any of this after a meal or at any point of the day it’s not a good thing.


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Here’s another important distinction. Dysbiosis, which is the imbalance of the bacteria in your colon, can spread throughout the body and manifest itself in the weakest links. If you have a Candida problem, your experience can be very different from another’s. Your body will generally have tendencies to exhibit weakness in certain parts of your body. For instance, your joints might be the weakest link, versus somebody else, who might have their lungs or respiratory system as being the weakest link.

I know that if I consume wheat within a couple minutes I can start to feel a bit of wheezing in my respiratory system. I have asthma, so that’s obviously a weak link in my body. Somebody else might have a weak link in their skin, so when their Candida gets out of control, their skin starts to break out. They might have acne; they might have redness in the skin, and different things like that.

Dysbiosis can manifest itself in different ways in different people. None of this occurs independently of anything else. Now, when I mentioned that if I eat wheat, I get this kind of wheezing kind of sensation in my respiratory system, now is it because the Candida is doing that, or is it something else? Is it an allergenic response due to the fact that I’ve got something that we’re going to be talking about called leaky gut, and that’s causing an allergic response? Again, it’s tough to really distinguish but it’s all interrelated.

The problem with having too much of these bad bacteria is they give off too much toxicity. Even if you’re going to the bathroom regularly, even if you’re passing bowel movements two to three times a day, the toxicity, over time, is still going to irritate the lining of your gut. This is really important to understand now.

As a protective mechanism, the gut lining will secrete even more mucus to protect itself. It’s a protective mechanism; it’s going to produce more mucus than it normally does. So, if you think about this, when you have a cold, your body produces mucus as a way of expelling some of the bacteria in your body.

That’s just the body’s way of defending itself, and the same thing is happening inside your gut lining. Imagine having a mucusy coating inside your gut lining. That’s going to protect it to some degree, but it’s also going to impair absorption. So, if this is happening in the colon, we know absorption is reduced. There


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is some B vitamin, there is some vitamin K that should be absorbed from the colon, and that will be impaired if there’s too much mucus production.

And if this production’s occurring in the small intestine that’s a problem, and, over time, this continued irritation leads to inflammation. In Lesson 4 we will talk about inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, stuff like that. But anything with an itis—colitis, arthritis—any of the itises, those indicate inflammation.


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Gut Inflammation and Leaky Gut

Continued inflammation from these bacterial toxins irritate the gut lining, and, over time, this leads to inflammation. Here’s the reason this is problematic. When you inflame your gut over time, the pores of the intestine become enlarged, and this leads to leaky gut. Again, a much disputed term in the medical community. You talk to your doctor about leaky gut; they’ll tell you its nonsense, its snake oil. Believe me, it’s not.

It’s actually becoming a lot more prevalent in the scientific literature that leaky gut is actually more technically known as intestinal permeability. It’s a very important disease accelerator or to kind of defend or against disease.

The top picture is a normal epithelial cells inside your small intestines. The epithelial cells are the ones with the microvilli, those little spiky, kind of palm tree projections; they would be on the top, on the upper layer here. This red layer on the bottom is your blood.

So, if we see the upper part here being the lumen, the inside your gut, and these round circles being the food particles passing through, in a normal situation, the epithelial cells are held together through, as they’re known, tight junctions and a couple other things. These tight junctions allow the cells to be compacted together so that only the smallest nutrients, amino acids, glucose can pass through. That’s what the blood wants, right? It goes right to the liver; very easy processing.


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As you can see in the normal picture here, these bigger, perhaps undigested food particles that may have crept their way through cannot get through because they’re too big to get through the pores. Not only do the bacteria and their toxins inflame the lining of their gut, but, so, too, do these undigested food particles. If you’re constantly eating food and not digesting it properly and they cannot get absorbed into the pores and then into the bloodstream, they’re going to be sitting and sticking to the lines of your colon or your small intestine. That, over time, is going to create irritation and then inflammation, which will also lead to the widening of these pores.

With leaky gut these pores become enlarged. So the pores become widened, now we’re not just getting these small particles coming through but we have big, undigested food particles and proteins from food getting through the pores and into the blood.

That’s a problem because the proteins in foods will trigger allergic immune response. So, if you have an apple, if you have a chocolate bar, if you have a piece of meat, whatever it is, if that food is not broken down properly into its smallest possible form—a couple amino acids, then that big, undigested food particle gets into the blood through leaky gut, because the gut is now more permeable.

Then that protein, once inside the blood, is going to trigger the immune system to say, “Hey, what is that?” The immune system does not know what this is. It’s not supposed to be in the blood because it’s too big; it’s unrecognizable. So it mounts an immune response, and this is how we develop allergies which we will talk about in the next module.

All of this comes back to the single most important thing, which is digestion. If we’re not digesting food properly, that is the beginning of the cascade of all this.


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Leaky Gut and Liver Toxicity

Leaky gut leads to liver toxicity. The previous images showed these larger food particles getting through the pores, but in addition to the large food particles, we also have those toxins that are being given off by these bacteria. So, this is known as autointoxication, where the body is now reabsorbing toxins that are produced outside of the body, remember, the gut is outside the body, and only through this selective permeable membrane known as the gut, or the epithelial cells lining the digestive system, only through that is the body taking in nutrients, and selectively at that point. But if these pores become bigger, then these toxins can get through, into the body, into the bloodstream, and so can these larger food particles, and that burdens the liver.

The liver’s going to process all these food particles and toxins coming out of the digestive system. Since the liver is the main detoxification and filtering organ in the body it will lead to the liver being overly burdened and increasingly toxic.

These two filters would be like air-conditioning filters. The one on the left is obviously dirtier and filthier. This is what most people’s livers look like. Their livers are so overburdened with this constant bombardment of toxicity and undigested food.

Over time, this can lead to larger problems like compromised blood sugar, fat, protein regulation because the liver regulates all of that. If the liver’s not functioning properly, it’s all going to be out of whack. We’re going to have issues like hypoglycemia and too much fat in the blood and all sorts of stuff.

The liver’s also responsible for regulating hormones. So, if you experience PMS, if you’re very moody can comes back to having a toxic liver and a faulty digestive system.

Your skin is a reflection of your liver. The skin is just one way that toxins get out. So, if you’ve got acne, blisters, dry skin, those are issues that can be remedied pretty efficiently and safely through purifying your liver.

If you go through ups and downs, whether it’s hypoglycemia, low blood sugar-type stuff, or just crankiness a lot of that comes back to the liver. This liver is arguable the most important organ in our body and if we’re toxifying it by the fact that we’re not digesting them properly it is not a good thing.


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Leaky Gut and Auto-Immune Disease

Leaky gut also leads to a precursor to autoimmune disease. As you know, I have an autoimmune condition called alopecia, which I developed when I was 17 and it was basically caused by years of terrible eating. I’m just talking about processed foods and very little produce. When leaky gut occurs because of faulty digestion and poor foods that irritate the gut, food particles can get into the blood, and the ultimate level of allergic response is autoimmune disease, and that’s essentially what happened to my body.

I didn’t know this, the doctors had no idea about this at the time until I went back to school and studied holistic nutrition. That’s when all my professors were like, “Oh yeah, we see it every day.” Multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, alopecia, you name it. Any autoimmune disease has the same cause. It’s actually pretty easy to reverse. It takes time and diligence but you can definitely reverse it.

A lot of doctors are like, “Leaky gut doesn’t exist.” Well, it actually does. There was actually very recent research in the February 2012—that would be, as I’m recording this, this year—a researcher, Dr. Fasano, showed the pioneer in showing this. There’s a protein called zonulin, and it’s the only physiological modulator that we know of these tight junctions that I mentioned in these epithelial cells of the intestine.

When the zonulin pathway becomes deregulated, which means that too much zonulin is activated, in genetically and nongenetically susceptible individuals, so pretty much anyone, it literally just breaks down these pores, it enlarges them and allows things to occur or to flow through into the blood. Obviously, this is at the ultimate level autoimmune diseases, disorders can occur.

Another study in the Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology in 2006 showed that gliadin, which is a protein found in gluten—it’s one of the gluten-associated proteins—it activates zonulin, signaling irrespective of the genetic expression for autoimmunity, leading to increased intestinal permeability to macromolecules, or big molecules.


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This study was looking the association between gliadin, zonulin, and gut permeability, and it showed that it’s very much an accelerator, if you will, of the widening of the pores. That’s why people with Celiac disease cannot consume wheat. They cannot consume gluten because gluten contains gliadin, and that accelerates the zonulin signaling, which widens the pores, and more of that stuff gets into the blood, more of those wheat proteins get into the blood, and then it’s just a full-on disaster.

This has also been shown with type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune condition, and we’re seeing more and more of this now. This is now the physiological reasoning, which your doctor says, “Hey, this doesn’t exist.” Well, you can refer them to, just have them look up zonulin, and they will, hopefully, get back to you with a little bit of shock and awe in their face, because this stuff does exist and it’s occurring all the time.

Another interesting finding by Dr. Fasano was that zonulin, it’s also known as prehaptoglobin-2 I think. Don’t quote me on that, but I believe that’s the name. It does not exist in animals and those animals do not exhibit autoimmune disease. There’s no known autoimmune disease in monkeys, chimpanzees, and other animals.

In 80% of humans, zonulin is present. This is speculated to have come about 2000 years ago, in India. That’s really kind of based on Dr. Fasano’s research where this kind of evolved from. Because of its presence in the intestinal epithelial cells, that is really what predisposed us to developing leaky gut syndrome and allowing these big molecules to come into our bloodstream and start this whole cascade of events: allergies, immune response, and autoimmune disease and it all starts with digestion.

My good friend, Dr. Peter Osborne, runs an incredible mission. It’s glutenfreesociety.org and I’m actually going to interview Peter about this in our gluten and Celiac disease lesson later on. This image is from his Web site, and this specifically talks with reference to gluten and the different factors affecting the mucosal immune system, so the immune system resulting in intestinal barrier dysfunction.


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So, we have all these things like dietary proteins and peptides, antibodies, drugs, physical stress, infections, cytokines, neural transmitters, and enzymes, and all these things can increase gut permeability. First of all, it leads to intestinal barrier dysfunction, so the barrier is no longer there; it’s like the bad guys have broken through, which then leads to food allergy and intolerance.

Remember the last lesson we learned if clean up your digestion, you’ll be able to tolerate more foods? If you don’t clean up your digestion, you’re always going to have issues with a lot of different foods, because a lot of these bigger food particles are getting through this barrier which they’re not supposed to get through. So, until you heal this, until you rectify this, you’re still going to have intolerances for a long time.

Food allergy and intolerance occur. Immune system abnormalities then occur, and, over time, this leads to autoimmunity. The interesting thing is that there’s a lot of research as well that shows the link between gut permeability and depression. So, you might think Okay, what does the gut and brain have to do together? Well, they have everything to do together. Remember, everything is linked inside the body.

Just think if you ever had butterflies. You go out on a date with a beautiful woman or a good-looking guy or if you have a big event coming up. You’re


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nervous, you get these butterflies. First of all, it is created in your mind, but it’s manifested in your gut. So, there’s a huge relationship between the brain and the gut. And this is one example where these proteins, whatever’s seeping through the gut can actually also get past the blood-brain barrier and affect neurotransmitters in your brain, leading to or being part of the whole depression umbrella.

Clean up your digestive system, you’ll improve your mood not only by reducing toxicity, but you’ll also reduce the amount of toxins getting past the blood-brain barrier in your brain, which is obviously pretty important.

Here’s another way of looking at this leaky gut syndrome issue. Up here we’ve got the disruption of the gut lining from food intolerances, alcohol, stress, anti-inflammatory drugs, antibiotics, Candida, all that kind of stuff, which leads to improper absorption. And the disruption of the gut lining can really also be caused by improper digestion, so there could be another thing here which leads to that.


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The destruction of the gut lining leads to improper absorption, and we’re going to get bigger food molecules being absorbed, which leads to food being seen as an invader, and then the immune system sends out these IgG antibodies to create an immune response. Inflammation then occurs and now we’re talking about inside the blood. So, now we’re almost, like, really inside the blood or at the level of the epithelial cell.

These IgG antibodies form a complex with the food antigens—and, again, we’ll go into this in greater detail in the next module—but these immune responses are occurring at the level of the epithelial cell as well as in the blood, and this inflammation further leads to leaky gut issues where those pores are widening and, obviously, more IgG antibodies are produced and which then leads us to developing even more food intolerances.

The destruction of the gut lining leads to improper absorption and also leads to multiple food intolerances, and this kind of just goes back and forth and around. It’s all part and parcel of this issue, which comes back to not only bad food choices, but faulty digestion, low stomach acid, slow digestion, and all of this is occurring as a result of it.

Some of the most debilitating diseases of today, autoimmune conditions, are self-inflicted by not eating properly, by eating in a rush, by being stressed out when we’re eating, by not chewing our foods properly. It’s actually pretty sad when you think about how simple a process digestion is and we’ve literally just killed it based on our lifestyle.


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How to Repair Your Gut

Okay, let’s look at how to repair your gut, and the good thing, the good news is that it’s actually very easy to do. It just takes time and you just have to be really diligent with what I’m about to tell you.

First of all, you need to improve your digestion, which means that you just follow the steps to good digestion from the last lesson. Just go through those again, just make those part of your daily practice, and that’s the most important thing you can do for your health. I firmly believe that if you’re going to improve your digestion, everything else will fall into place.

The second thing we need to do is minimize damage. This actually all happens at the same time. So, we improve digestion, at the same time, we minimize damage, which means that we avoid wheat gluten, we avoid the yeast-feeding sugars, we avoid chlorine, we avoid antibiotics and other pharmaceutical drugs.

And, at the same time, we also want to heal the gut and reestablish a healthy flora balance, so we want to use things like probiotics and fermented foods, which are going to replenish the good bacteria into your colon; we want to


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supplement or eat omega-3 fatty acids because they’re an anti-inflammatory, which is a great thing, and they lubricate the lining of your gut and they lubricate your stool, so they help all that.

Glutamine is also really important. Glutamine’s an amino acid which, at the dosage of about 5 g/day is very helpful at healing and repairing the gut. It’ll actually help to close up some of those pores in the intestine. You can also look to things like cabbage juice. Cabbage is a very high source of naturally occurring glutamine, and you can just drink cabbage juice to help you repair your gut. Aloe vera is also really nice because it’s very soothing, it has some anti-inflammatory properties, and, again, it lubricates the lining of the gut.

This is a very simple three-step process. You’re not going to repair your gut tomorrow, but if you can do this for several weeks, you will be amazed at the improvements in your overall health. Your sensitivity to different smells, chemicals, allergies, will be lessened. If you have any health issues, a lot of that stuff will be improved. Again, this is something that needs to be part of your lifestyle, so improving digestion, minimizing the damage, and healing your gut and reestablishing the good bacteria balance.


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Do You Have a Dysbiosis/Candidiasis Problem?

How do you know if you have a dysbiosis or Candidiasis problem? If you have this, you have an intestinal problem, because they go hand in hand. Like we did in Lesson 1, I’m going to take you through a little quiz here.

Do you:

Experience extreme fatigue?

Get recurring vaginal infections? If you’re a woman, obviously.

Get mental confusion or memory loss?

Experience numbness, muscle aches, or weakness?

Get frequent abdominal gas and bloating?

Get rectal or jock itch? More specifically in men here.

Frequently use antibiotics?

Do you have a white-coated tongue, also known as oral thrush?

Do you have athlete’s foot or fingernail or toenail fungus?

Do you experience frequent mood swings?

Do you have intolerances to things like cheese, wine, perfumes, or other sensitivities?

If you answered yes and, in some cases, an emphatic yes to one or more of these, then, most likely, you have a Candidiasis problem. And it’s okay because a lot of us do, and we don’t even know it.

The first five here are the most commonly seen or most, I guess the major symptoms, if you will, for Candidiasis. And, again, the recurring vaginal infections could be kind of substituted out for rectal or jock itch if you are a man. The athlete’s food/fingernail stuff as well; toenail fungus, that’s also a big one, as are pretty much all of these. There are a few other symptoms that


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I have not included here, but these are really the big kind of self-diagnosis symptoms of a Candidiasis problem, which is, essentially, an intestinal issue.

So, assuming you have some degree of Candida overgrowth, how do you get rid of it? How do you kill off Candida? Well, first of all, we want to really lower the levels of Candida in your body because, as we’ve seen, Candida can float pretty much anywhere and manifest its problems anywhere in your body. Wherever your weakest links are, that’s where the problems will occur.

As with repairing your gut, we want to first look at improving your digestion, so we follow the steps to good digestion. We want to cut off the fuel source of these little critters, so avoid the gluten, yeast-feeding sugars, chlorine, antibiotics, drugs, all that stuff that’s going to hurt the gut lining is the same stuff that’s going to feed the Candida. You can see here, the protocol is very similar to repairing your gut.

We cut off the food supply—so, we’re literally starving them—and then we want to kill them off. We can use anti-Candida agents like caprylic acid, which is the main fatty acid that’s found in coconut oil. Oil of oregano is very potent, but it’s also an immune booster, so if you have an autoimmune condition like I


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do, you don’t necessarily want to use oil of oregano, because it’ll exacerbate the immune response, and it’ll actually make your immune condition worse. If you’re healthy, if you don’t have any autoimmune conditions, oil of oregano should be fine; but if you have an autoimmune condition, then you don’t necessarily want to use this very often. And garlic, you can just eat it as much you want, because garlic is an antiparasitic, antifungal, antiyeast, anti everything, and it’s also very good for you.

So, we kill off the bacteria, we kill off the Candida by using these specific anti-Candida agents, and then we need to ship it out. We need to ship out that Candida by improving our bowel movements. This is very simple: water, omega-3s, and fiber. That’s the three, kind of the three-prong approach to improving your bowel movements, and the best way to do all that is through fruits and vegetables and, obviously, I believe supplementing with fish oil is the best way to get the omega-3s. If not, flax oil or whatever the case may be; it doesn’t really matter, because even if they’re not converted to EPA and DHA as well as they could be, you’re still going to get that lubrication benefit to help you improve your bowel movements. So, again, we’re looking at two to three bowel movements, ideally, per day, and we’ll talk more about bowel movements in the next lesson.


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Anti-Candida Diet

This is how to get rid of Candida. It could be a lot more. I could get into a lot more depth here, but this is really the nuts-and-bolts of it. Improve digestion, cut off the food supply, kill it off, and ship it out. And yet, the Candida diet is extreme and followed to the letter. It’s probably the most intense and unsustainable way of eating you could possible imagine. Here we are: no sugar or yeast for six months; that’s the protocol. So, all you can eat is pretty much protein and green vegetables only. That’s it. No sweet potatoes, no starchy vegetables; it’s literally just green vegetables and protein, animal protein.

You try doing that for six months, and then let me know how it goes. I have not been able to do it; I’ve not tried it more than a couple weeks at most. It’s very, very unsustainable for the majority of people that do, so that’s why I would not recommend doing something like this, because it’s just, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

However, you can apply elements of it by limiting or reducing or just avoiding refined sugar intake, removing refined carbohydrates—white bread, white pasta—getting all that stuff out of your diet, focusing on eating more vegetables and, in this case, even fruit would be included in this, so no fruit for six months. So, if you do have Candida issues, maybe some of those sweeter fruits like bananas and mangoes and pineapple, you want to avoid those, you want to minimize those and focus on the nonsweet fruits, like the berries, the apples, the pears; those would be better options initially until you’ve kind of healed your gut and improved your digestion.

Next, focus on green vegetables. In conjunction with all this, you want to kind of add in the antifungal and parasitic agents like we talked about, the caprylic acid. If you’re supplementing with it, you’re looking at about 1–1.5 g/day, or, like I like to do is take one or two tablespoons of coconut oil, extra virgin coconut oil. Just one or two tablespoons right out of the jar, into your mouth.


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Garlic, as I said, consume liberally. Probiotics, you’re looking at 3–8 billion germs per day; so, depending on the type of probiotic you use, that might be one capsule, two capsules, three, I’m not sure, but you want to be looking at, on a maintenance level, 3–8 billion per day. At the same time, if you’re eating fermented foods, that’s great. Sauerkraut, stuff like that is awesome.

Optional, again, are like oil of oregano and things like goldenseal, barberry, Oregon-grape, those are all really helpful for killing off Candida as well.


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Coming in Lesson 3So that is Lesson 2. It’s probably not as long as other lessons, but we got right to the point. I hope you got all the important things that were said in this lesson. First of all, leaky gut is a very, very problematic physiological occurrence that’s happening in so many people without them even knowing it, and it’s all starting with digestion.

If we can fix our digestion, we can minimize the leaky gut issues, which means we’re not going to get as many food proteins into the blood, which means that we’re not going to have as many allergic, inflammatory responses, which means that we’re going to reduce our susceptibility to systemic inflammation and autoimmune disease, which is obviously a great thing. And when we’re looking at repairing our gut or killing off Candida, it’s almost the same thing, it’s almost the same protocol.

Go through those steps again if you need to. Coming in Lesson 3, we’re going to be talking about what your poo says about your health. This is going to be fascinating stuff, believe me. How to cure constipation, how to cleanse your colon safely, and more.

I look forward to seeing you in that lesson. There’s no assignment this week other than going back over your food journal or continuing with it and maybe just looking at some of your food choices, looking at are you consuming high amounts of sugary fruit. Or if you have a lot of these Candida type symptoms, try to relate those to some of the foods you’re eating, or relate them to some of the feelings that you’ve been feeling, and relate that to what that might say about your digestion. It’s all about becoming more aware of what’s happening within your body, and, from there, you can make the steps forward to improving it. Thanks again for joining me. I had a great time taking you through this lesson, and I’ll see you in Lesson 3.

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MODULE #5 - Lesson 2 - Amazon S3 · 2 Super utrition Academy DUL - Lesson b u Ç X } u Module 5 - Lesson 2 The Intestinal Universe, Bacteria and Candida Welcome to Module 5, Lesson