Common and Unexpected Causes of Candida Overgrowth

There are more microbial cells than human cells in our bodies. Collectively the microbes are called the microbiome. Many different kinds of bacterial and non-bacterial organisms make up this microbiome. We breathe in and swallow some of them, but most are produced in our gut based on the foods we eat. Most of these microbes are in our gut, but they also reside almost everywhere else in the body. Our gut supplies our body with these microbes. In other words, even a healthy gut leaks. Beneficial microbes crowd out pathogens and help keep infections from setting in all over the body. A gut teeming with pathogenic activity supplies the body with pathogens. It’s imperative that the gut houses a diverse, healthy microbiome for the body’s immune system to function properly.

Candida resides in a healthy human gut, in the yeast form. A healthy gut colony will keep this yeast in check. In an unhealthy gut, yeast is allowed to flourish. It converts into its fungal form, grows filamentous, burrows into the gut lining, and then deposits yeast spores into the bloodstream. This also causes the gut to become “leaky”, which is to say it’s much more porous than it is supposed to be, and consequently, undigested proteins and pathogens leak into the bloodstream. This causes an immune response. If we didn’t live in such an antibacterial world with such an incredible abundance of sugars, candida would not thrive like this, but it is a tremendously versatile and opportunistic pathogen when left unchecked.

If candida is allowed to take over the gut and form its own biofilm, it becomes incredibly difficult to kill. The spores produced are nearly impossible to kill. For more on this, check Why is Candida So Hard To Kill. It’s freaky what these microbes can do!

Inflammation

An abundance of candida in the body is known to cause chronic inflammation, but what’s less common knowledge is the feedback loop this creates.

Pathogens feed off of sugars, starches, and fats (lipids). Our cells are made up of sugars, starches, and fats. Some pathogens prefer one over the other. For instance, Lyme bacteria want starches, and candida loves sugars.

Pathogens flourish in a damaged body and the presence of these pathogens causes more inflammation. When cells die, they also trigger an inflammatory response. Chronic inflammation also causes more cellular damage, leading to more cellular die-off. A chronically inflamed body is a damaged body with a lot of damaged and decaying cells that are feeding pathogens creating a positive feedback loop.

Related: Best Supplements To Kill Candida and Everything Else You Ever Wanted To Know About Fungal Infections

Alcohol

Alcohol kills beneficial bacteria in the gut. It can kill fungi too, but candida spores are virtually indestructible and its biofilm can protect the microbe from alcohol as well. In other words, you’re disrupting your beneficial bacteria which allows candida to flourish. Alcohol can also raise your blood sugar which can feed candida and other pathogens through the body.

Alcohol also damages cells.

Antibiotics

Antibiotics kill bacteria, leaving fungal infections to flourish. Some antibiotics also kill fungi including candida, but nothing adequately kills fungal spores. And even if something did, they’ll be back faster than a healthy bacterial ecosystem could develop to curtail the candida and other pathogens.

Vaccines

Research has shown us that some vaccines will disrupt the gut’s microbiota. In addition to that, one’s gut microbiota affects how the host interacts with vaccines. A less healthy bacterial colony in the gut is more likely to lead to an immune response with inflammation throughout the body, which in turn can also, eventually disrupt the gut microbiota. Intestinal injuries caused by the rotavirus vaccine have been added to the government compensation program for adverse events. With the recent findings of how vaccines are more likely to cause damage with an undeveloped gut microbiome, scientists are very interested in how gut bacteria and vaccinations interact. We should see a lot more scientific discoveries about this issue in the near future.

Amalgam Fillings

When dental amalgam fillings are in the mouth, tiny particles break free and mercury vapor is released, inhaled, and swallowed. Incidentally, the mercury release is 50 times higher for those who have mercury fillings capped with gold. For a multitude of reasons, the body can’t get rid of mercury easily.

Mercury suppresses the immune system and creates an environment that is not friendly for beneficial bacteria, but candida doesn’t mind it. In fact, candida and many other fungi love toxic heavy metals and actually thrive with mercury present.

“Mercury fed Candida become more and more virulent and eventually penetrates the intestinal walls and invades the cells. These fungal microorganisms become quite at home in the cell, and can easily be considered a principle characteristic of cancer.” – Dr. Mark Sircus

Antiacids

Many people are under the mistaken impression that all disease needs acidity to thrive. This is not true. It depends on the disease. Candida likes alkalinity. The presence of candida can help to make the body very acidic, but the areas where fungal candida thrives will be less acidic. Antacids raise the PH (less acidic) of the entire digestive tract. This can cause candida to infect the stomach, which is normally far too acidic for it.

All Pharmaceuticals

Virtually all pharmaceuticals, from vaccines to Aspirin, have toxic properties which cause cellular damage that pathogens including candida will feed off of.

Smoking

Sugar is added to tobacco products. We’re not sure if inhaling the smoke from burning sugar can feed Candida or other pathogens, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it does. Regardless, the toxicity of tobacco products causes other problems that promote Candida overgrowth (and other pathogenic activity).

Smoking adds a plethora of toxic heavy metals into the body, and yeast, as mentioned above, likes toxic heavy metals. Smoking and the use of other tobacco products also affect liver function.

Every time you light a cigarette, nicotine triggers the liver to dump a large amount of glycogen into the blood stream. The blood sugar level is brought up too high, so the body calls on the pancreas to bring it back down.” – Cynthia Perkins, Holstic Help

Smoking affects the entire body, not just the liver and lungs. Smoking damages cells and causes inflammation and constriction everywhere. It also inflames and constricts the intestinal tract (if you smoke, you may notice the need to have a bowel movement after smoking). Some confuse this with “relaxing the bowels” but the truth is there is less room for digestion and so the stool is evacuated before digestion is complete. Smoking also causes rectal discharge. And smoking constricts and inflames the kidneys as well, which has the opposite effect compared to the intestinal tract. Kidneys process fluid at a slower rate and fluids can become rancid and infectious.

Juicing

Juicing has lots of benefits, but that carrot, beet, apple juice can do more harm than good for some people with an abundance of Candida in their gut. Juicing removes the fiber and other nutrients from the fruits and vegetables, and these nutrients are needed to feed a healthy gut microbiome. What’s left are sugars. If you’re just juicing kale, turmeric, lemons, collards, and garlic, or something like that, feel free to keep on juicing. But if you’re sweetening your juices with sweet fruits or carrots or beets, it doesn’t take much to make candida happy.

Fruit

We’re not saying that fruit is bad, but anyone who is suffering from an over-abundance of candida needs to lay off the fruit (not including lemons, limes, cranberries, granny smith apples, and other non-sweet fruits). Fruit is much sweeter than it used to be. Even on an all-natural, unrefined, raw food diet, we have way more access to sugar than our paleolithic ancestors did. Google wild bananas and check out what watermelon used to look like. Not only was fruit seasonal and harder to come by, but it was also much more fibrous and mealy, and much less “fruity.”

Condiments

Many condiments including salad dressings, mustards, ketchup, and hot sauces have sweeteners in them. Even without sweeteners, they are typically refined and processed with the addition of too many unnecessary ingredients. Read the ingredient labels. Better yet, make your own condiments, and use more herbs and better cooking methods to add flavor to your meals.

Organic Junk Food

Refind and processed foods fed pathogens including candida. Let’s take chips for instance. Chips often have sugar in them, including the organic varieties, but even those sugar-free brown rice and bean chips can still feed candida. Brown rice is ok for most people who aren’t very ill. When digesting brown rice, provided the gut has enough bacterial activity to do the job properly, fiber-loving gut microbes get to eat and proliferate first, before the sugar and starch molecules are exposed. But if you grind brown rice into a flour to make chips or pasta with it, you’re exposing the sugars and starches. The digestive process is altered. This is why it’s better to eat, cook with, and chew your own whole foods. Looking at those same chips as an example, the bean flour used is laden with enzyme inhibitors (unless the corporation making the food soaked and sprouted those beans properly, which is doubtful!) Enzyme inhibitors disrupt healthy gut microbiome, inhibit nutrient assimilation, and damage the digestive system. Similar examples exist for almost every single pre-packaged, processed food item in your organic health-food store.

Conclusion

When you’re chronically ill, forget the store-bought cereal, boxed nut milk, nut butters, chips, “healthy” chocolates, and food bars. To build up healthy bacterial colonies in the gut, you a variety of need whole foods. Nothing helps to grow a healthy microbiome like huge, diverse salads. Check out this article, Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting for a recipe for gut-healing salads and be sure to read How To Heal Your Gut.

Fungal Supplement Stack – Knock Out Yeast, Candida, Mold, Fungus

The first three should be plenty for most people, but for really prominent fungal issues or for impatient people with a bigger budget I’d recommend all of these:

Sources:

Antibiotics Delete Gut Diversity

It can take six months to regain a normal microbiome after using antibiotics, and chances are good that not all of the microbes present before the antibiotics were administered will return. Researchers in Copenhagen conducted a small study (12 men) that examined gut diversity after a single course of antibiotics. They used 3 drugs considered antibiotics of last resort: meropenem, gentamicin, and vancomycin. While the gut microbes of the subjects recovered, 9 common species of gut bacteria could no longer be detected in their microbiome. Oluf Pedersen is the lead scientist of the study.

In this case, it is good that we can regenerate our gut microbiota which is important for our general health…The concern, however, relates to the potentially permanent loss of beneficial bacteria after multiple exposures to antibiotics during our lifetime.”

Related: How To Heal Your Gut

Only One

This is what happens after a single course of antibiotics. What happens in the U.S., where outpatient healthcare providers prescribed more than 266 million courses of antibiotics in 2014, a third of which the CDC says are unnecessary? The same year saw an average of 835 antibiotic prescriptions for every 1,000 people. People who suffer from recurrent urinary tract infections (UTI) or chronic respiratory infections are likely given multiple courses of antibiotics in a single year. If it takes six months to mostly recover from a single course of antibiotics, those who take multiple courses are losing their chance to have a healthy, balanced microbiome.

It’s common to see articles comparing the gut bacteria of indigenous tribes with that of your average American. The indigenous microbiome is always more diverse. M. Gloria Dominguez-Bello is a microbiologist at the New York University School of Medicine and one of the authors of a study of the Yanomami tribe, first visited by the modern world in 2009. While Dominguez-Bello mentions diet, she also notes the difference in antibiotic use. The 2009 visit to the Yanomami in the Amazon is the first time the tribe was exposed to antibiotics, which can have a serious effect on gut health. Domingues-Bello says,

Antibiotics kill bacteria in the gut, and sometimes species don’t come back…This is especially true with children, whose microbiomes are in the process of getting assembled. Impacts on the microbiome at a young age can have long-lasting consequences.”

Recommended: Best Supplements To Kill Candida and Everything Else You Ever Wanted To Know About Fungal Infections

More and Different and Better

Is it possible to replenish your gut bacteria after a course of antibiotics? The answer is both yes and no. You can bring your microbes back, but they will no longer be the same. Each time the microbiome is mowed down and resurrected, diversity and the immune system’s ability to adapt are reduced. Combine that news with the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and you should want to be as far away from antibiotics as well. It pays to take a look at the other likely reason for indigenous peoples microbiome diversity: diet.

Sources:

New Health Insurance Policies May Have You Paying For Your Emergency Room Visits

Imagine you have a pain in your chest and fear it might be a heart attack. When you get to the emergency room they run their incredibly expensive tests and then, to your great relief, they tell you that your heart is just fine. It was just indigestion. If you need another reason to stay as healthy as possible, now insurance companies may not pay for your emergency room visit. Some insurance companies are telling you that you need to properly diagnose yourself before heading to the emergency room.

With the price of emergency care skyrocketing, a new report says that some insurance companies won’t pay the claim if it is deemed that the patient did not have an emergency after all.

The new analysis shows that the criteria used by one large insurer, if expanded nationally, could result in denial of payment for nearly 16 percent of ER visits, even though these patients may have the same symptoms when they get to the ER as actual emergency cases, researchers report in JAMA Network Open.” – Reuters

Anthem Inc. insures one in eight people in the U.S. They started a policy of denying coverage for ER visits the company decides are unnecessary. The policy started in three states in 2017 and has expanded to a total of six states in 2018.

A certain proportion of emergency room visits are unnecessary and there are people who use the emergency room as if it were their primary care or only doctor. And there is a certain amount of resentment as this creates crowding in the emergency room and slows things down for people who have true emergencies. But this situation reflects a constellation of underlying problems for which neither the patients nor the emergency rooms are to blame.” – Albert Wu of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore (Reuters)

It’s increasingly important to keep yourself healthy. We recommend starting with the following:

Chemotherapy Detox

Chemotherapy drugs kill pathogens and beneficial bacteria, and they add a heavy toxic burden to the body. The circulatory system, endocrine system, lymphatic system, and every other system will be overwhelmed with toxins after using chemotherapy drugs, and soon the body will be inundated with pathogenic fungi. While chemotherapy will likely kill fungus, the fungal spores survive. And when there is nothing left to keep them in check, the spores will turn fungal and flourish. We recommend healing the gut and detoxifying the liver to recover from chemotherapy. Diet is crucial to this program, and we recommend continuing on with this diet to avoid another cancer diagnosis.

Gut Health 102

Gut bacteria defines your health. Science is in the process of figuring this out. One big reason gut bacteria is paramount to good health is that your gut bacteria do not stay in your gut. Our microbes that proliferate in our gut reside throughout our whole body. A healthy gut pushes healthy microbes into the bloodstream. It follows that an unhealthy gut ecosystem will leak unhealthy (pathogenic) microbes into the body.

They say that your gut comprises 80% of your immune system. That’s sort of true. A healthy gut has thousands of different bacteria that live in harmony. A less healthy gut has fewer kinds of bacteria inside. Fungi and other pathogens will easily flourish in such a gut. When there is an injury in the body pathogens and beneficial bacteria do the same thing; they feed off of the sugars and starches of the dead and decaying cells. Pathogens cause more damage to the area, beneficial bacteria do not. Because of how beneficial bacteria works, they make it difficult for pathogens to flourish. A healthy gut feeds the body a colony of beneficial microbes that help keep pathogenic activity from proliferating.

Diet

Beneficial bacteria like healthy food. Pathogens like unhealthy food. Your diet should primarily consist of the healthiest foods, lots of raw vegetables and herbs. We recommend 80% raw vegetables and 20% cooked vegetables and healthy whole grains like quinoa, brown rice, amaranth, and millet. Raw produce is high in fiber, which is essential for gut health. Fiber not only moves toxins through the bowels, but it also provides the perfect environment for healthy bacteria to thrive. Buy organic whenever possible, but small farms at your local farmer’s market may have organic food that they don’t certify (certification can be expensive).

Choose a wide variety of nutrient-dense foods. Eat huge salads every day with at least 12 different vegetables and a few fresh herbs. Pack your gut with raw vegetables and herbs every day and your gut will produce a variety of beneficial bacteria. There is no shortcut to this!

If you eat meat, make sure you choose organic meat. You do not want to eat meat from diseased animals fed hormones and antibiotics. Avoid processed foods, and do not eat any foods with artificial flavorings, colorings, preservatives, MSG, or trans fats. Avoid all GMOs. And do not let anyone cook your food for you. No rice cakes, no organic chips, no restaurant food, get completely well before you splurge. We also recommend cranberry lemonade made with stevia to help detoxify the kidneys and the liver. Check out Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting – Recipes Included and Start Eating Like That and Start Eating Like This – Your Guide to Homeostasis Through Diet for more on diet.

Supplements To Kill and Prevent Yeast, Candida, Mold, Fungus

Chemotherapy will leave a body ripe for fungal infections, but a body with cancer was a body that was probably already dealing with fungal issues. The supplements below will help properly balance the gut’s ecosystem. SF722 kills all fungi, and it works amazingly well. Berberine is a potent antimicrobial. The Candida Complex and the Microdefense are two good supplement complexes that eliminate pathogens as well. Syntol and Abzorb are probiotics. In the past doctors have warned against using probiotics during chemo treatments but now well-informed doctors are recommending that probiotics should be taken a few hours after chemotherapy drug administrations for better treatment outcomes. Abzorb also has a systemic enzyme that will help break down Candida along with many other benefits.

Related: How To Heal Your Gut

Liver Cleanse

The cranberry lemonade recipe mentioned in Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting is very beneficial for the liver and kidneys. If money is tight, put the money towards food first, and just get the SF722 and the Abzorb, above. But if it’s affordable, we also recommend a liver detox with Shillington’s Blood Detox Tea, (and/or formula) Shillington’s Liver & Gallbladder Tea (and/or formula), and Mother Earth Organic Root Cider – Barrier Island Organics.

Enhanced Golden Milk Tea Recipe

This is a new twist on an ancient way of experiencing the benefits of turmeric. Ideally, use all fresh, unadulterated herbs whenever available. This will help detoxify the body, and it feels really good.

1 cup of warm Coconut Milk
1 ounce of turmeric juice, or 1 tablespoon of freshly grated turmeric (both should be with skin)
1 teaspoon ground Cinnamon
1 ounce of ginger juice or 1 tablespoon of freshly grated ginger (both should be with skin)
1 pinch of black pepper
Pinch of cayenne pepper

Mix it all up and drink. For the drink to be warm, warm up the coconut milk only, but be careful not to cook the other ingredients. Add them in when the coconut milk is not too hot to drink so as to preserve enzymes and other fragile micronutrients.

Related: Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones

Conclusion

It all comes down to gut health. We can’t harp on this enough. For healing from chemotherapy to preventing cancer, gut health is paramount. Don’t skip and don’t skimp on the salads. If you do nothing else from this article, we hope you’ll start eating large, diverse salads as often as possible. Salads change the gut ecology for the better. Nothing else makes as big of a difference.

Click here for image credit

GMO Potatoes Are Here – How To Avoid Them

The genetically modified Innate potato was approved by the USDA in 2014. The “Innate” potato is a group of potato varieties that have had the same genetic alterations applied using a new form of genetic engineering known as RNA interference (RNAi). Five different potato varieties have been transformed, including the Ranger Russet, Russet Burbank, and Atlantic potatoes. Simplot also has two proprietary varieties. Simplot has designed the potato to reduce spotting, browning, and bruising by lowering certain enzymes and to reduce the amount of asparagine, a naturally occurring chemical that converts to acrylamide under heat, which is believed to be a cancer-causing carcinogen.

Simplot has also received approval for two other genetically modified (GMO) potato varieties which are resistant to late blight, the disease that caused the Irish potato famine. They also last longer in storage. As far as we know, the only GMO potatoes being sold for consumption are under the label “White Russet.” The Non-GMO Project is now classifying the Russet potato as “high risk.”

The potato has been added to the High-Risk list of the Non-GMO Project Standard because a GMO potato variety is now “widely commercially available” in the United States. To determine when a crop needs to be moved from the Monitored-Risk list to the High-Risk list, the Project uses an established set of criteria related to the likelihood of GMO contamination in the conventional and non-GMO supply chain. As a result of today’s move, products made with potato will now be subject to extra scrutiny before they can become Non-GMO Project Verified.” – The Non-GMO Project

Recommended: How To Heal Your Gut

How To Avoid the White Russet GMO Potato

For starters, avoid any potatoes labeled as “White Russet.” For now, in the produce section, they are being sold in a bag labeled “White Russet Potatoes.” If history has taught us anything, contamination is likely to be an issue soon, so it may be best to avoid russet potatoes altogether unless they are organic or of the red russet variety. Another option is to check for spots. From the outside, these genetically modified potatoes look similar to their russet non-GMO counterpart except the White Russet should not have any of the common spottings you would see on a russet potato. If peeled or cut in half, a non-GMO Russet potato will begin to develop browning and dark spots within a minute or two. See the video below:

Related: How To Avoid GMO Apples

An easy way to avoid GMO potatoes is to make sure they are organic. This also ensures that your potatoes won’t be grown with as many pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. Irradiation techniques are also not allowed with organic crops either.

Avoid processed foods with potato ingredients like frozen dinners with potatoes, powdered potatoes, canned soups with potatoes, and potato chips, unless the foods are labeled non-GMO. Of course, we also recommend avoiding processed foods, but if you must, buy organic or at least non-GMO.

Avoid russet potatoes when eating out unless you can get assurances that the potatoes used are non-GMO. We also recommend eating more sweet potatoes and growing your own potatoes. Also, check out How to Avoid GMOs in 2018 – And Everything Else You Should Know About Genetic Engineering.

Invasive Prostate Cancer Treatments Make Men More Likely to Use Antidepressants

Researchers from the University of Toronto analyzed over 12,000 men with early-stage prostate cancer and found that men who have received invasive or damaging treatments like surgery or radiation are more likely to use antidepressants. 4,952 men who had surgery, 4,994 got radiation and 2,136 men chose to wait and watch their diagnosis. When researchers contrasted each treatment method to a control group, those who were subject to radiation were 33 percent more likely to be on anti-depressants 5 years later. Those who underwent surgery were 49 percent more likely to take anti-depressants. Those who did nothing showed no significant change in anti-depressant use. Dr. Robert Nam is the senior author of the study.

Once they receive treatment for prostate cancer, whether that is surgery or radiation, they may experience treatment-related side effects, such as erectile dysfunction, incontinence, and bowel dysfunction, which can significantly worsen quality of life…”

Related: Sugar Leads to Depression – World’s First Trial Proves Gut and Brain are Linked (Protocol Included)

The System

The United States is currently engaged in a discussion of what health care should be in this country. Articles and analysis frequently mention how much the U.S. spends in relation to how poor health outcomes are in comparison to other developed nations. More Americans are waking up to the idea that more treatment is not better treatment. Intervention begets more intervention. In this study, those who followed surgery or radiation treatment recommendations were more likely to receive anti-depressant scripts.

Even worse, some of the prostate cancer cases treated with surgery or radiation didn’t need any intervention. One of the ways doctors monitor and diagnose prostate cancer is by measuring levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA). An increase in those levels in a patient with prostate cancer alerts caregivers to disease progression, but studies have found that PSA levels in healthy men aren’t a reliable indicator of prostate cancer. According to the National Cancer Institute,

Most men with an elevated PSA level turn out not to have prostate cancer; only about 25% of men who have a prostate biopsy due to an elevated PSA level actually are found to have prostate cancer when a biopsy is done.”

Prostate Cancer on the Rise

The “wait and see” method of dealing with prostate cancer is only practiced when the cancer is in its earliest stages. For those hoping to avoid radiation or surgery, that could be bad. Prostate cancer is on the rise among younger men and many cases are aggressive. Which means more intervention. How much is too much?

Sources:

Artificial Sweeteners Can Harm Gut Bacteria and May Lead To Diabetes, Obesity, and Cardiovascular Disease

U.S. consumption of artificial sweeteners has risen substantially in the last 20 years. Soda likely comes to mind, but aspartame and sucralose are being put into more and more products from bread to toothpaste. As more studies are being done, artificial sweeteners seem to be connected to more and more negative health consequences. That’s probably because they’re poison.

Artificial Sweeteners May Harm Gut Bacteria

Ariel Kushmaro is a professor of microbial biotechnology at Ben-Gurion University. He told Business Insider, “My recommendation is to not use artificial sweeteners.” Kushmaro and his team performed a study with common artificial sweeteners and E. coli bacteria. Don’t confuse this bacteria with the kind that makes us sick; E. coli is a beneficial bacteria in healthy human intestines.

Factory farming is how we get the “superbug” variety of E. coli. The “superbug” variety of E. Coli can happen when a cow is fed a very acidic, glyphosate-heavy grain diet while being pumped full of antibiotics. Whatever doesn’t kill you…

Researchers exposed the E. coli to six artificial sweeteners including aspartame (Equal, NutraSweet), sucralose (Splenda), and saccharin (Sweet’N Low). They also subjected the bacteria to various protein powders and flavoring packets that use artificial sweeteners.

After dosing the E. coli bacteria with artificial sweeteners ‘hundreds of times,’ Kushmaro concluded the sweeteners had a toxic, stressing effect, making it difficult for gut microbes to grow and reproduce. The researchers think that a couple of artificially sweetened sodas or coffees a day could be enough to have an influence on gut health —and could even make it tougher for the body to process regular sugar and other carbohydrates.” – Business Insider

Obviously, we need more testing. Fortunately, Kushmaro plans to run more of these kinds of experiments to see how artificial sweeteners alter the human gut microbiome.

Related: How To Heal Your Gut

Artificial Sweeteners Won’t Reduce Appetite, or Satisfy Sugar Cravings

Sugar-sweetened foods trigger hormones throughout the body and chemicals in the brain that leaves us feeling satisfied after eating. The phenomenon, how it works, is similar to what happens with addiction to drugs. The satisfaction is short-lived, but it’s there. But artificial sweeteners don’t provide the sugar, or any calories for that matter, so scientists say the “food reward” system is never activated. This is probably why artificial sweeteners are shown to increase appetite, and sugar cravings as well.

Some researchers believe that artificial sweeteners do not satisfy our biological sugar cravings in the same manner as sugar, and could therefore lead to increased food intake. However, the evidence is mixed.” – Healthline

Related: Healthy Sugar Alternative and More

Artificial Sweeteners May Promote Obesity

In addition to promoting overeating, there are other mechanisms with which artificial sweeteners may promote weight gain. Sweet taste receptors are found not just in the mouth, but also in the bladder, the lungs, and our bones. Recent research looked at how artificial sweeteners affect our cells that make up our fat stores.

The new research, results of which were presented at ENDO 2018, the 100th annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in Chicago, looks at the effect that artificial sweeteners have on the cells that make up our fat stores. These cells have a glucose transporter (a protein that helps glucose get into a cell) called GLUT4 on their surface and, when we eat more sugar, the cells take up more glucose, accumulate more fat and become larger. The researchers in this latest study found that the artificial sweetener, sucralose, commonly found in diet foods and drinks, increases GLUT4 in these cells and promotes the accumulation of fat. These changes are associated with an increased risk of becoming obese.” – The Conversation

Artificial Sweeteners May Lead To Diabetes

Dr. Brian Hoffman, George Ronan, and Dhanush Haspula are the authors of a new study that found a link between consuming artificial sweeteners and changes in the blood that increases the prevalence of type 2 diabetes. Researchers found that acesulfame potassium, a sugar substitute, accumulated in the blood of rats tested. This accumulation of potassium harmed the cells that line blood vessels. The study indicates that artificial sweeteners can alter how the body processes fat and how we use energy at a cellular level. According to the authors, this vascular impairment may lead to diabetes (and obesity).

Gut ecology plays a huge role in disease, including diabetes, and medical science is at the forefront of realizing this. A potential new treatment hailed to be a likely medical breakthrough removed the mucous membrane of the small intestine to cure type 2 diabetes. The treatment inserts a balloon into the small intestine and inflates the balloon with hot water, hot enough to kill the gut’s mucous membrane. Within two weeks, if the patients eat well enough, a healthier membrane develops.

By destroying the mucous membrane in the small intestine and causing a new one to develop, scientists stabilized the blood sugar levels of people with type 2 diabetes. The results have been described as ‘spectacular’ – albeit unexpected – by the chief researchers involved. In the hourlong procedure, trialled on 50 patients in Amsterdam, a tube with a small balloon in its end is inserted through the mouth of the patient down to the small intestine.

“Even a year after the treatment, the disease was found to be stable in 90% of those treated. It is believed there is a link between nutrient absorption by the mucous membrane in the small intestine and the development of insulin resistance among people with type 2 diabetes.” – The Guardian

It stands to reason that if foods and chemicals like artificial sweeteners negatively influence our gut ecosystem, this damage may promote diabetes, as well as a host of other chronic illness.

Related: Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones

Artificial Sweeteners May Contribute to Cardiovascular Disease and More

Researchers from the University of Manitoba’s George & Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation reviewed 37 trials that followed a total of more than 400,000 people for an average of 10 years. The study showed a link between artificial sweetener consumption and increased risk of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and other health issues.

Artificial Sweeteners Are Likely To Promote Candida

Modern health loves to compartmentalize everything. Natural health practitioners generally have a more holistic outlook. Our belief is and has been, that toxic chemicals do damage to the body in a myriad of ways, including damage to the gut microbiome. Damaging the gut’s ecosystem has long-lasting, far-reaching consequences to virtually every facet of health.

Damage feeds candida and other pathogens. Cells in the body are made up of sugars and starches. When these cells are damaged they can feed pathogens. A healthy gut feeds the body with healthy, beneficial bacteria (it’s a misnomer that all bacteria is supposed to stay in the gut). An unhealthy gut with pathogens feeds the whole body pathogens.

Toxic chemicals damage the gut’s ecosystem and they also do damage all over the body in various ways. This promotes pathogenic proliferation. Candida is a normal part of a healthy gut colony, but if beneficial bacteria is damaged enough candida is very likely to take over. If not candida, other another fungus is likely there ready and waiting. It’s nearly impossible to kill fungal spores. Once they proliferate it’s a challenge to get them under control, especially with our modern sugar and toxin-laden diets.