To this day, Western medicine does not recognize intestinal and systemic candidiasis as a health condition. Don't be surprised if you take this information to your doctor and he or she dismisses it or tells you that you are crazy. Often doctors only recognize and treat Candida albicans overgrowth in cases of oral thrush and vaginal infections or in conditions associated with HIV/AIDS.
With antibiotics, hormone replacement drugs, birth control pills, and steroid drugs accounting for millions of dollars in prescriptions written each year, doctors are going to be the last ones to acknowledge that the drugs they so freely prescribe are actually creating the problem and that intestinal candidiasis even exists. While there are some doctors who will treat intestinal and systemic candidiasis, they are few and far between.
THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM AND THE ORIGIN OF DISEASE
One of the most overlooked systems of the body is the digestive system. An imbalance in this system - comprised of the mouth, salivary glands, stomach, pancreas, liver, gallbladder, and small and large intestines - is responsible for the onset of the majority of health conditions and chronic progressive diseases plaguing Americans.
While there has been a lot of attention focused these days on the importance of a healthy immune system, few people realize that about 75 percent of the immune system's cells are produced in the digestive tract. For this reason, no matter what condition a client is experiencing, I always start treating them with my foundational program of cleansing and re-balancing the digestive system. I'm still shocked to see some top medical specialists continue to ignore diet and infection (including candida) as the source of serious gastrointestinal conditions, including ulcerative colitis and Chron's disease, even after their treatments consistently fail to help their patients, many of whom end up in my office.
As naturopath Mark Percival states in Functional Dietetics: "Destructive eating habits lead first to gastrointestinal dysfunction and then subsequently contribute to virtually every noninfectious disease known to us (and likely some of the infectious diseases as well)."
Scientists tell us that there are ten times more bacterial cells living inside the gastrointestinal tract (GI tract), the stomach, and intestines than there are human cells in the entire body. The small and large intestines alone have a combined length of twenty- to twenty-five feet, the width of a tennis court if you stretch them out. A balanced ecosystem in the GI tract has a ratio of 85 percent healthy microorganisms to 15 percent unhealthy ones. Inadequate diets based on foods that are depleted of nutrients and filled with chemicals and preservatives upset this ratio and can create maldigestion, malabsorption, intestinal dysbiosis (overgrowth of microbes such as fungi, parasites, bacteria, and viruses in the gut), and elimination problems. What's more, these problems are not isolated conditions that affect just the digestive system; they also affect other systems of the body, including the immune system.
MALDIGESTION: THE CAUSE OF INDIGESTION
Maldigestion occurs when the body is unable to properly break down food. Reasons for this include lack of hydrochloric acid (HC1) in the stomach, inadequate chewing, poor food combining, excessive drinking of liquids with meals, pancreatic enzyme deficiencies, hiatal hernia, and stress. Chronic poor diet contributes to maldigestion.
When food goes undigested, the particles create toxic by-products that irritate the intestinal walls and cause increased permeability. The toxins can then cross the mucosal lining, where they enter the bloodstream (leaky gut syndrome). The blood sees these particles as foreign invaders and creates an antibody response by having the white blood cells come to the rescue to defend your body. However, this activity produces inflammation, allergic reactions, and food sensitivities. In addition, the undigested food particles produce fermentation, which fuels fungal overgrowth and the proliferation of bacteria and parasites. Symptoms of maldigestion include belching, bloating, gas, abdominal pain, and heartburn. To find out more, you can check out How Are Yeast Infections Caused.