Last week, I shared the first step in fighting Candida: Diet. Today, I’m sharing the second step: Removing bugs.
Once we stop putting junk into the gut with bad food, instead we're putting in good nourishing foods for cleaning out the digestive tract, now we want to think, "What can we do to remove the Candida, or the parasites, or the bacteria?"
Again, depending on the type of pathogen, you would need to include different types of herbal therapies, but for the most part, what I'm sharing here today will have some type of an effect.
First things first, consider this. With bugs, let's pretend there's a little colony of Candida. A lot of bugs, especially Candida, have the ability to create a protective barrier between itself and your immune system. That protective barrier is the lining of the gut. The Candida colony creates a little biofilm. The biofilm is a protective barrier that inhibits your own immune system from getting fully over to the Candida. These bugs are very smart.
Your immune system can see the bug. It's not like it's totally hiding it, it just can't get to it. Your immune system sees the bug, and what happens is your immune system starts throwing bombs, cytokines and pro-inflammatory markers, to attack the Candida. Yet, because of the biofilm, all those little bombs are just bouncing off the biofilm. Now you have all these pro-inflammatory markers and immune reactions happening within the tube of the digestive tract, not totally effective in killing the Candida strains.
This is why, when you have chronic Candida overgrowth you end up with things like leaky gut syndrome, or you can start to then develop other forms of dysbiosis, because now this internal environment, this tube of the digestive tract is filthy with inflammation. Now your environment in your gut is more conducive to the growth of bad bugs like Candida and other bacteria than it is to good bugs, like your good bacteria. Your good bacteria will fight a good fight for a while, but over time your immunity comes down because it gets tired.
It’s critical that we kill the Candida. You have to address the biofilm. This is where a lot of people mess up, where they're constantly on this cycle of having to go through Candida cleanse, after Candida cleanse, after Candida cleanse.
You need to handle the biofilm component.
How to break up biofilm
The first thing is bringing in digestive enzymes and not just taking them with your meals. When you take enzymes with your meals, it's going to eat up your food. But if you take enzymes between meals, kind of like on an empty stomach, then it's going to go and it's going to help you eat up any rancid food that might be hanging out in there. And it will help to break up biofilm.
When I say "empty stomach", what I mean is about two to three hours away from food, and make sure that if you're doing it before a meal. You do it at least an hour before a meal as well. Ideally, if you're going to go in and be realistic about when you're going to be able to eat up biofilm with an enzyme, primarily it's going to be in the evening time after you've eaten dinner. Two or three hours after dinner and before you go to bed because that's when your body's going to go in and do immune clean up anyway.
Then typically people can fit in a dose between lunch and dinner, because most people will eat lunch around noon and at least here in the Bay area, a lot of people get home around six or seven, so you could probably pop one in around three or four and still be good if you're eating dinner around seven, to get that biofilm clean up.
Biofilm is actually bound together by positive ions and one of the most common positive ions that we are exposed to nowadays that actually bind the biofilm together are heavy metals. So, heavy metals, if you have a lot of them hanging out in your body, especially in your gut, that could be what's holding together the biofilm. You know, be heavy metal cleansers, would be like cilantro is really good to use. I like the cilantro oil, or you could cook with cilantro, or you can make a cilantro-infused water. I like the Zendocrine blend by dōTERRA - it has a little bit of cilantro in it that's also palatable, it's not super strong.
You can also use calcium bentonite clay - a nice heavy metal cleanser. It's also very cleansing for the gut. My favorite brand for calcium bentonite clay is Biopure, Biopure.us. I am not an affiliate of them so you can access that all by yourself and it's a great, great product and it does make your stomach feel really good. Just make sure you mix it up with some grapefruit juice.
Curcumin, which is an active component of turmeric. So doing more turmeric as well, would be helpful. The dōTERRA Alpha CRS is helpful in this case because there is curcumin in there. But I do recommend that you do something to cleanse the heavy metal component as well.
Let's talk about now that we've removed. Now that we've removed the biofilm, helping your body to at least poke holes in the biofilm, your immune system can more effectively go after it. Any botanicals that you include in your day can then more effectively attack the Candida as well. Now we've got some space in here for some things to affect the Candida.
What do we use to kill Candida?
Some of my favorite ways to clean out Candida are essential oils. Essential oils have an easier time than herbs penetrating the biofilm because of the chemical constituents being so much smaller than the herbal components. I'll share herbs and essential oils that you can use to go after Candida.
Essential oils that would be fantastic to support your immune system in going after this would be oregano, clove, fennel, lemongrass, melaleuca, and myrrh.
Herbs that you can use, Andrographis, artemisian, echinacea, caprylic acid, and not just the myrrh essential oil, but the myrrh resin as well, you can get from an herbal company. These all help your body to go after the Candida.
The third step is to start healing that digestive tube, because once the digestive tube is healed, then your immune system can more efficiently recognize when the Candida starts to come back into overgrowth. Let's say you had a stressful couple of months, you've slipped up on your diet now, and now the Candida's starting to come back.
A really great food for restoring the digestive lining is bone broth. I know that's not an option for vegans and vegetarians, but the bone broth is really fantastic. It brings in a lot of essential fatty acids. For vegans, quercetin and turmeric are wonderful for healing leaky gut. You can also use okra. Okra is very mucilaginous so it helps to sop up excess mucus, making it a little bit easier for your own natural healing pathways to be activated. Sometimes with excess mucus, it can slow down that healing process, and mucus is just a result of all the immune system activation that's been going on for so long, so the okra can help to sop some of that up. Essential oils like frankincense are also great.
Lots of vitamins and minerals are the building blocks for restoring the lining of the digestive tract. A lot of people like to use things like glutathione. You can certainly bring in some glutathione as well. You can use collagen, too. All of that stuff is going to work on rebuilding the lining of the gut. Then for anybody that uses dōTERRA, I recommend that you bring in some DDR Prime soft gels. Those are going to help support some good, healthy cellular renewal as well.
Candida's a very hot topic. To be honest, we could continue to dive deeper and deeper and deeper into those cleanses, but for now, I've started you out with steps to begin with.