Nutrition

Is Candida Syndrome Actual? | NutritionFacts.org

Does the presence of candida in stool correlate with symptoms of “candida hypersensitivity” such as headache and fatigue? And what happens when people are fed a diet high in sugar?

Despite its extensive use in the brewing and baking industry, only about 5 percent of healthy people – 1 in 20 – areto have Anti-yeast antibodies in their bloodstream, while that percentage is closer to 60 or 70 percent in people with Crohn’s disease. Most people with Crohn’s disease have antibodies that respond to normal baker’s, brewer’s, or nutritional yeast. These are all just different forms of a yeast known as Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

But baker / brewer / nutritional yeast has never been direct involved at Crohn. Perhaps the antibodies are a direct response to it, or perhaps they are a response to another yeast in general and react incorrectly with normal yeast. Indeed it was discovered that antibodies to Candida, a completely different type of yeast (the yeast that causes thrush and vaginal yeast infections), can Cross reaction with Saccharomyces. Is it possible that baker / brewer / nutritional yeast was just an innocent bystander the whole time? I am exploring this in my video Is Candida Syndrome Real?.

We have known for almost 30 years that there are antibodies against Saccharomyces connected to Crohn’s disease, but instead of the bread, beer, and nutritional yeast that lead to Crohn’s disease, Candida may cause Crohn’s disease and the antibodies. Or maybe candida is the innocent bystander, and exposure to food and beverage yeast is the real culprit. You don’t know until you put it to the test: Remove Yeast from the diets of Crohn’s patients and see if they get better. If so, then yeast was actually the culprit. Unless? Then maybe Candida is the real cause.

Before I get to the study, let me first bust some candida myths. Candida is a normal part of our intestinal flora. However, if some candida gets into your bloodstream, it can cause a life-threatening infection. But it’s normal to have candida in your mouth or colon – it’s location that matters! Location! Location! It’s similar to normal to have stool bacteria in our colon, but stool bacteria in our blood or a wound would be bad. Because of the ability of candida to cause problems in the wrong place or in people with compromised immune systems, a candida syndrome theory emerged that links the presence of candida to all kinds of health problems. As a result, “mycophobia” – or fungal phobia – “spread because of the wrong interpretation” that finding candida in your mouth or stool is more indicative of an infection than just normal. (If you think the authors of this paper were a little overdramatic with their phobia talk, just google “Candida” and you will see.)

Not only is it normal to have candida in your stomach, you can’t seem to get rid of it even if you wanted to. Give people strong antifungal drugs and you can fall Levels down, but they’ll jump up as soon as you stop the antifungal drugs. What about the concept that sugar feeds yeast, so should you be on a low-sugar diet? It doesn’t make a lot of sense because sugar should be absorbed high up in the small intestine and should never get into the colon unless you are lactose intolerant. Indeed there appears no correlation between candida numbers and sugar consumption. You can put people on a high-sugar diet by adding an additional 14 spoons of sugar to their diet and still see no effect. Of course, there are plenty of science-based reasons for eliminating sugar from your diet, but candida doesn’t seem to be one of them.

That does not exist appear to be good “evidence for the existence of the so-called” Candida Syndrome “at all. But these are fighting words! “Have few diseases sparkled as much hostility between the medical community and a section of the lay community as chronic candidiasis syndrome. “The medical community has dismiss alleged victims as emotionally disturbed and so were they synchronized just crazy. Of course, you can’t just come out and think people are crazy. “Psychiatric diagnoses are a must presented gently… ”For example, some patients prefer to believe that it is a mental illness caused from the candida, in which case doctors can simply pat them on the head for them to take their pills. “However, patients who have been self-diagnosed as having a yeast compound rarely give up on their disease” – some even to the extent that they do attempt to use their yeast as a drunken driver defense: I didn’t drink, Your Honor. My yeast only brewed its own beer in my gut!

The whole concept of Candida Syndrome is official ridiculed by the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology as “speculative and unproven” without evidence. The presumption that “the ubiquitous C. albicans [Candida] Has some toxic effects on the human immune system …[is] without a trace of clinical evidence or scientific evidence. “If you want evidence argued an answer to the study, what about the millions of unnecessary tonsillectomy surgeries and all those radical mastectomies? At the very least, disfiguring people on low-sugar diets does not disfigure them. Though some anti-candida therapies can As “potentially dangerous”, antimycotics can cause resistance and have side effects. Nystatin is not so bad but ketoconazole can damage your liver. And indeed there are reports of people treated for which a wrong diagnosis can be and therefore gets into quite a dire straits. So it’s important to know if the syndrome actually exists. The researchers decided to test it out in a super-simple study: Give Subjects use stool tubes to take samples and ask questions about their symptoms – headache, stomach pain, fatigue, and any other typical symptoms of Candida syndrome. The result? The researchers found no relationship to whether or not the subjects grew candida in their intestines. No evidence of Candida syndrome could be found.

This was a bit tangent to the subject of my video Does nutritional yeast cause Crohn’s disease?. I return to this topic in my video Is Yeast Healthy For Everyone? and then hope for patients with another inflammatory disease in Dietary Cure for Hidradenitis Suppurativa.

In health,

Michael Greger, MD

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