Today on the Gut Health Reset Podcast, we are discussing candida and the issues an overgrowth of candida can cause in your gut! Candida is a type of yeast that, in small amounts, is actually an important piece of your gut microbiome, but in the past few years, more and more people are experiencing issues with candida overgrowth, where it grows wildly out of control.   

 

In today’s episode, we will answer these questions:

– What candida actually is, and why it’s important

– What is the COVID/candida connection?

– How can you get a balanced microbiome?

– Can you use probiotics to fight candida?

– How long does it take to heal from candida overgrowth?

– And more!

 

Still want to learn more? Schedule with Dr. Barter today!

 

Recommended Products From Today’s Show

https://drannmariebarter.com/product/heavy-metals-detox/

https://drannmariebarter.com/product/environmental-toxins-support/

 

About Dr. Michael Biamonte:

Dr. Michael Biamonte is one of the leading health experts in candida – a fungal infection caused by yeast. Dr. Biamonte can read blood tests more accurately and thoroughly than most, and was even recruited by NASA to work on an astronaut health project. He took his knowledge from that project and has translated it into private practice, allowing patients with candida to be more easily diagnosed and treated. As a practitioner for over 30 years, he is dedicated to improving the lives of his patients and helping them get back to living. 

Dr. Biamonte is the founder of the Biamonte Center for Clinical Nutrition and the co-creator of BioCybernetics, an unprecedented computer software program that is able to study blood work, mineral tests and many other lab tests to determine exactly where your body is imbalanced initially designed for aerospace purposes. He is the author of The Candida Chronicles, which details candida’s history, causes, symptoms, its effect on human health and treatments. Through his unique combination of laboratory testing, candida diet plans, vitamins and supplements, he has the solution to remove candida from people’s systems and helps them achieve a full-body overhaul. 

 

He holds a Doctorate of Nutripathy and is a New York State certified Clinical Nutritionist. He is a professional member of the International and American Association of Clinical Nutritionists, The American College of Nutrition and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Clinical Nutrition Certification Board.

Website: https://health-truth.com/ 

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Dr. Ann-Marie Barter is a Functional Medicine and Chiropractic Doctor at Alternative Family Medicine & Chiropractic. She is the clinic founder of Alternative Family Medicine & Chiropractic that has two offices: one in Longmont and one in Denver. They treat an array of health conditions overlooked or under-treated by conventional medicine, called the “grey zone”. https://altfammed.com/

https://drannmariebarter.com/

 

Transcription:

Dr. Michael Biamonte: You could be minding your own business and get hit with a couple of waves of antibiotics and your immune system might have been okay, but now the antibiotics wipe out your flora and the candida that grows and essentially can’t eat it all as it goes into an overgrowth. When anything happens that wipes out your friendly bacteria.

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Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Well, thank you so much for joining us here today on the Gut Health Reset Podcast. It’s awesome to have you.

Dr. Michael Biamonte: Oh, you’re welcome. My pleasure.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Awesome. So we are going to talk about candida. It seems like there is a lot of chatter about candida online or people are constantly doing candida to cleanses and protocols, etc.. And so I think let’s just start with what is candida.

Dr. Michael Biamonte: The thing I want to say is the reason. And of late, if you’ve noticed, there’s been more talk about candida on the different on Facebook and on different boards, Internet boards. And one of the reasons why that is because we discovered that COVID causes can do, too. We’ve had a lot of people who had completed our candida treatment years ago, who got COVID, who came back, and a lot of people who got vaccinated for COVID also came back because we found the vaccine also prompted a COVID relapse. That’s why there’s more chatter about candida. But to answer your question, Candida is an organism which lives in your intestinal tract. It’s normal for it to live there in small amounts. It’s an organism that’s called dimorphic, which means it can exist in two different states. It can live as a fungus or a yeast. It’s literally like a chameleon that can switch itself back and forth. It also tends to be very easily drug resistant. It genetically slips into different species very easily. Generally, when Candida is exposed to any medication or herb that tries to kill it for 21 days in a row, it will start to mutate after the 21 days and it’s switched to a different species. Many years ago, when we used to do Candida testing right in my office, we used to do stool tests. We found that the majority of the people who came to us said can’t do two tropical tests. They didn’t have candida albicans. It was only the people who came to us who didn’t know what Candida was, who were they weren’t being treated or treating themselves. They had albicans because they hadn’t caused it to mutate. Yes, but candida, as they said, is a normal part of your flora. It generally serves as food for friendly bacteria. Friendly bacteria actually eat candida as food and it acts as a source to stimulate your immune response in your intestines. When we die, candida is basically what decomposes our bodies. That’s the one practical use that candida has. It’s involved in the decomposition of the body and that’s why you’re given. They inject you with formaldehyde because formaldehyde is like one big antifungal that they’re pumping into your body to stop the candidate from decomposing you. It’s a nice thought.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: But so it’s the truth. Do you think that candida is opportunistic in the gut or, you know, why are so many people struggling with candida?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: Well. We used to since I know we used to we used to say that 100% it was an opportunistic infection like EBV or CMB or anything else. EBV is Epstein-Barr virus, C, MVA, cytomegalovirus. Both of those are viruses that generally hit people when they’re immunosuppressed. And we used to have that same viewpoint of Candida, but I can’t quite see it’s so true anymore because there are so many different things now that can cause Candida. You could be minding your own business and get hit with a couple of waves of antibiotics and your immune system might have been okay, but now the antibiotics wipe out your flora and the candidate grows and essentially can’t eat it. Always it goes into an overgrowth when anything happens that wipes out your friendly bacteria. Whether you go in, you can go in a pool with chlorine water and like gulp down a lot of the water and have that upset your bacteria. You could take steroids, corticosteroids, steroids. You can take cortisone, prednisone, estrogen, medications. You can even take too many antacids, anything that disturbs your intestinal flora, even if you went for dental surgery, if that upsets your flora, the trauma to the alimentary canal, it will cause Candida to overgrow. So theoretically and technically, we always thought of Candida as an opportunistic infection. But now there’s an asterisk because there’s all these different things that can cause it. You can get your mercury fillings removed by a well-intended dentist, but if he doesn’t do it right, you leak mercury down your elementary canal, it’s going to cause the can’t eat it overgrow as well.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: So I mean, one other thing. So like, for example, what about stress? I mean, because that’s pretty common.

Dr. Michael Biamonte: Simple mechanism. Stress elevates cortisol, cortisol suppresses fecal IGA. I called it fecal IGE and it also pumps glucose through those tiny capillaries in your bloodstream and the colon. Those are the very capillaries that the candida, candida taps into in order looking for food. Because eat is a plant, it has a root system just like any other plants. So when you increase the glucose going through the little blood vessels in your intestinal tract, can’t do the feeds on that. And that’s the that’s the cortisol mechanism behind it.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: And what are you staying with? You said initially we were starting out the COVID and COVID vaccines can trigger a Candida overgrowth. What exactly are you seeing with that or what do you think the mechanism is behind that?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: We’re still studying that for sure. There’s a there’s a leaked document from Pfizer that I have which a disgruntled employee stole before they left, which is one of the documents that they’re supposed to not release for 75 years. But in there, it goes through a lot of the a lot of the the pharmacology of the vaccine and what the side effects are. And one of the things we know is that it can suppress various immune responses. So I would have to say it’s at least that I don’t know that it’s the spike protein. The spike protein is always a fascinating thing to the study because the spike protein is like a knuckleball. Even not even the pitcher or catcher know where the thing is going to go. It just it just there’s so many weird things. One of the things the spike protein definitely does is it speeds up any kind of genetic tendency you have. So if in your family, your family’s prone to cardiovascular disease and it’s going to hit you at 70, you get the vaccine or get COVID with that spike protein that may happen in a few years. So because of that, it’s unpredictable. We only I only know the occurrence. I only know that people who come to me during the peak of COVID I my practice changed from handling candidate to handling COVID and handling vaccine reactions. We know that people who had gotten rid of their candidate came back with the candidate reoccurring. People who got vaccinated came back and now had Candida. That’s one thing we know for sure. Which may explain long-covid. You’ve heard the term long COVID.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Of course.

Dr. Michael Biamonte: This may explain what Long-Covid actually is. Long COVID may not be COVID. It may be people who develop Candida as a result of COVID, but nobody’s differentiating.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: So basically, you’re working with a lot of Candida patients. And so you believe that traditional Candida treatments fail. So what are the traditional Candida treatments and why do these treatments fail?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: I first started treating when I first understood about Candida. I didn’t know about Candida until about 1987. And when I first found out about Candida, I was using this very sophisticated computer model that I had helped develop for for Grumman and SCA, which which analyzed patients blood works and told you what supplements they needed and whatnot. And we were using this publicly. And about 30% of the patients had strange reactions to the vitamins. They had, like the opposite effect. So I volunteered to find out what was wrong. And by studying all their bloodwork, I determined they had some kind of infection in the colon. And then by doing stool tests on them, they eventually found that it was Candida. Now, I didn’t know about Candida, so I told them, go to your doctor. Tell him you have candida to get get him to cure you, and then come back and I’ll put you back on the vitamins. Well, the people came back to me and said, the doctor doesn’t know what Candida is. He says there’s no such thing as all these things. So I said, okay. I said, and then I looked in my business in New York City where I was practicing. So I looked around. I saw who the doctors were that knew about Candida. So I had a list of them and I said, Well, go to these guys. Now they know what this is about. They’ll help you. So they went to the doctors and the doctors prescribed. I flew can I stat and all these things. And the people came back to me. They said, well, this was really much better because at least he said that he he knew about it and he knew something and he could help me. But he put me on these drugs and everything was great for a couple of months. And then all the symptoms came back. And then he raised the drug higher and the symptoms came back even harder. So I listened to this and I went. Then I hit. I would listen to how I in my book, a lot of the discoveries that are in my book are from me listening to the patients and reverse engineering what they told me. I would hear what they said and then I would crack the textbooks to figure out why. So what I learned was the reason this was happening is Candida is very easily genetically switchable. It morphs, it switches genetically. The mother cells and the daughter cells of Candido are very smart. They exchange information and they genetically mutate in order to avoid the effects of the medicine. So I think I had figured from reading several books that that that time period was about 21 days, 21 days continually on any herbal pharmaceutical, the Candida starts to mutate. So in knowing that when I started to develop my own Candida protocol, I was very, very astute in making sure I rotated the antifungals. And that’s become one of the hallmarks of my treatment, which makes mine different from everybody else is on our first phase where we use the the medicines or the herbs that kill Candida systemically. We wrote rotate them every four days. We found four days was optimal. When it comes to the second stage where we kill the intestinal candida, that’s the most important candida to kill because that’s the candida that repels the probiotics and stops the probiotics from being able to re inoculate. We found that on that phase, seven days was optimal for those antifungals. So that was one of the first major breakthroughs that I made was understand that you had to rotate the antifungals. Otherwise they would. You’re just going to develop super strains of Candida.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Yeah, absolutely. It makes sense. I mean, you really have to rotate it. So you’re finding that most people are keeping people on the candidate treatments for too long, therefore making a super strange.

Dr. Michael Biamonte: Two or two or three, you know, two or three years on statin and crazy, two like years on a nice roll and you’re lucky to have a liver after that. Your kidneys. And people are always asking me, why don’t you ever use the pharmaceuticals? Well, number one, the pharmaceuticals are not as hot as people think. They’re not broad spectrum at all. The average person who has Candida truly has dysbiosis. They have a combination of harmful bacteria. They have parasites. They have Candida. There’s really you’re not you’re never going to find somebody who only has Candida because the environment Candida likes to grow in and your gut is suitable for parasites and whatnot. So if you could take a flashlight and walk through your intestinal tract, you would see all this like normal flora. Then you would come to this big patch of Candida with biofilm, with parasites and with harmful bacteria. Then you’d walk them that would end. You’d walk a little more, and then you’d come up against another patch of this. So when you’re just using a pharmaceutical that’s only antifungal, you’re not killing the parasites and the bacteria that are symbiotic with the Candida and that keeps your flora disturbed so that you continue to have dysbiosis and the candidate, candida will just continue to come back. That’s kind of the long and the short of what ultimately happens. That’s why when you use the herbs, most of the herbs tend to be broad spectrum that they have antiviral properties, anti-parasitic properties, antibacterial properties. So you’re not just killing the Candida, your clients cohorts.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Absolutely.

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Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: And so you were talking about the patient will probably have dysbiosis, maybe parasites, etc. because the environment. So initially I asked, Do you think candida is opportunistic? And you said no. So do you think that Candida is the root of the dysbiosis? Do you think that dysbiosis is the root of the Candida or what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: It’s different in every case. But you’re but you’re right. Both of those scenarios are true. It’s just different in each case, like you have, your person, I said before, is minding their own business. They end up getting dental work, all this antibiotics, and now boom, they have Candida. And then you have the other person who has cancer or other problems. And Candida develops as a product of that immune system or that environment in his body. So so it would depend that each case is different.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: There have been a lot of comments more recently that our guts are so sterile at this point. Everything is so sanitized and sterile. And that is the big contributor leading to dysbiosis leading to Candida. Do you agree with that said?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: Some cases. Yeah, in some cases that’s true. But on the other hand, you’ll find just as many people whose guts are grossly toxic from eating McDonald’s and taking antibiotics and having dysbiosis and all these other things. So that could go that could go either way. And that’s a case by case thing.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Got it. And then so why is it important? First, how do we get a you talk about a balanced microbiome. How do we get a balanced microbiome?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: From the Candida patients. They have to basically remove the bad organisms and then replace them with the good ones. And that’s easier said than done. But that’s essentially how you get it if you’re already a healthy person. If you my opinion is if you eat per your blood type and you make sure you eat a reasonable amount of fiber in your diet regardless of your blood type, your biome should be okay. But you also have to stay away from excessive use of broad spectrum antibiotics and then other medications that could cause candida. And it becomes a loop. You know, the person develops Candida, they develop leaky gut syndrome, which we can test for. By the way, a lot of people don’t know you can actually test for it. We have three different tests for Leaky Gut that are all FDA approved and accurate. They develop leaky gut from the leaky gut. They get rheumatoid arthritis from the arthritis. They hold up on medications. The medications aggravate the Candida and aggravate the leaky gut and it just becomes a spin. So you’ve got to kind of get out of that loop that the person gets and by handling the underlying cause. And then, as you mentioned before, it could be toxic metals. I’ve been practice I’ve been specializing in toxic metal issues since 1984. When I first got out of school, the first thing I really latched on to that I felt was fascinating because no one knew about it. I had patients come to me with arthritis and all these problems, and I tested them and I found that how could they not have arthritis? They have like 20 times the normal level of cadmium in their joints. And there are so many doctors just don’t know about this. And many of these metals that cause Candida, the key ones are mercury, copper, iron and arsenic. Those are the big ones that you’ll find in Candida overgrowth and sometimes aluminum because of the fact that aluminum cuts your hydrochloric acid production down in your stomach and anything that lessens your hydrochloric acid could lead you towards Candida because the hydrochloric acid in your stomach contributes to a balance in the colon. You want your colon to be somewhere between six and 7.2. When it hits 7.4 and goes higher, that’s when Candida really starts to multiply. So that’s why I take it. That’s why taking antacids, even if it’s tums excessively, can cause Candida.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: So, so big, so heavy metals are definitely a big cause. Leaky gut can be a cause of an imbalance, microbiome or anything else. It really and it sounds like drugs and surgeries and things like that. What else in that food? You kind of mentioned that with eating McDonald’s and toxic gut, we mentioned stress earlier. Is there anything else that really contributes to the imbalance of the microbiome?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: A big thing that the doctors especially don’t pay enough attention to are parasites. It’s generally considered in our country that parasites only occur in third world countries. And that is just so not true. I can I can tell you personally it is so not true. And parasites upset your biome and it’s so easy to get them. You can go to a salad bar. And get get a wave of giardia or amoebas. You can you can get blastocysts this hominids from so many different foods, basically undercooked foods, foods that tend not to be of good quality. But it’s unfortunate that even organic foods because people will tell me why eat organic? I tell you, well, you eat organic. Okay. So the organic food is grown in in soil, right? Instead of the artificial soil. What is the soil that it’s grown in? What’s in that soil? Oh, it’s manure. Yes. And what what’s in manure? Parasite larva. So you’ve got to just make sure you really clean your vegetables, cook your meat. Well done, and be a good boy or girl and you’ll have a good chance of avoiding all these things.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Yeah. So parasites are another piece to the puzzle. Yep. That’s definitely, I think, missed in a lot of screening. It appears it’s the unknown.

Dr. Michael Biamonte: It’s the unknown piece. But the key thing is when you’re listening to a patient for the first time, when he tells you that he went typically out of the country and he had Montezuma’s revenge and he came home. And since he’s home, it’s just never been the same. That’s a real good tip off to checking for parasites.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Absolutely. What do you see about other major pathogens like Cedar or E Coli or other kind of bigger bacteria that is is more associated in that pathogenic realm? Do you see that affect Candida or affect the microbiota at all?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: Really? Again, it’s the rule. Anything that upsets your flora is going to close candida. So if you go to an if you’re in a nursing home or you visit someone in a nursing home and you pick up staph aureus or Klebsiella from a hospital that could disturb your biome. And then next thing you know, you have Candida.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: And so lots of candida, the disturbance. Okay. So just kind of wrapping up, is there anything that we really left out about the microbiome or it’s replaced?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: It’s repairing the biome. Another big discovery I made that I talk about in my book is that probiotics don’t work until you’ve eliminated the Candida. People are always telling me, you know, should I keep taking my probiotics? How should I take them now that I’m doing your treatment? I said, Well, here’s the best thing to do. Take the bottle of probiotics, go to the bathroom, go to the toilet, open the bottle, and directly pour it in the toilet and save yourself some trouble so you don’t have to swallow the pills because they’re not going to. The probiotics will not work until you remove the Candida. When you study when you really study microbiology, you get to see how Candida and other funguses literally repel probiotics. They push them away from the lining of your intestinal tract so they can’t stick again. The other thing, too, sometimes is people don’t take good probiotics. They take cheap, cheap ones. The only ones that really work are the ones that are either called sticky strain. That’s an industry term sticky strain or human strain. And those will actually work because those will stick to your gut lining. If you’re taking stuff that’s not human strain or sticky strain, it’s not going to stick either. Even then, even if you got rid of all your candida, that’s still not going to work. And then there’s also the issue of prebiotics. Prebiotics like fiber and different types of substances that the probiotics feed on are sometimes more important than the probiotic itself. If you think of it as an analogy, if you if you threw grass seeds on the lawn, right, you then want to give the grass seeds food so they can grow. You wouldn’t continually throw seeds on the lawn all the time. You put the seeds down and then you give them things that they’re going to they’re going to feed on, were going to alter the environment in their favor so they can grow. So you’ve got to have a balance of probiotics and prebiotics in order to really work.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Yep. Exactly. All right. So really balancing that out. And then how long do you think it takes to heal 22 infections?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: I’m in my experience with my protocols, it’s generally 6 to 8 months to eliminate all the dysbiosis and then get the probiotics back. And they’re solid. And the 6 to 8 months includes the different, unexpected events that occur. The vacations, the parties.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Yes, right. Life suddenly happens, right? Right.

Dr. Michael Biamonte: So that’s that includes that. But to totally handle the case sometimes could be years because getting rid of the candida is just the tip of the iceberg. Then you want to look beyond that. To see what is allowing does mean if it was a simple case of the person with the antibiotics, okay, that’s something else. But when you’ve got somebody who’s been chronically ill for years, the odds are is they have metal toxicities or they have a lot of toxins in their body, which we often use the the DPL tests from great Great Plains, which measures the DPL tox. So we screen the person for chemical toxicities and metal toxicities, make sure they’re really clean and the candidate is not going to come back again because they’re toxic. That’s an important aspect. If you find something there, it could take months to get rid of it.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: For sure. Yep. Familiar with that test or run it. Run it a fair amount. Awesome. Anything else that we left out? I think we covered it pretty well.

Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, I would say I would say reasonably well.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: And I.

Dr. Michael Biamonte: Would say that generally. Generally, if you read my book, I outlined the five phases and the first one is to is actually a parasite cleanse. The phase zero is a parasite cleanse, but it’s a parasite cleanse also with a colon cleanse for Candida to remove like what we would refer to as the surface layers of Candida. And that that essentially sets the person up in that phase zero program we use is also acting as a challenge for the testing that we do because we found that candidate tests read much better. If you’re doing organic acid test for Candida or whatever, they read better if you first do like a candida to flush, to draw things out and loosen it, then we go to phase one, which is where we rotate stomach antifungals. Then phase two, where we rotate the intestinal antifungals, and then we do the probiotic program. And then after the probiotic program is done, that’s when we screen the person for toxicities. We do tests like the organics test from Great Plains, we do hair analysis, bloodwork, and we look for anything that’s imbalanced in the person, any toxicity, detox them, rebalance them. And when you do that, usually they’re in better health than they were before they ever had Candida.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. And where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you?

Dr. Michael Biamonte: They can find my website, which is health-truth.com, www.health-truth.com and also the New York City candida doctor.

Dr. Ann-Marie Barter: All right. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for everybody that was listening here today. If you want to hear more of something, please let us know. Subscribe and say hello and we look forward to hearing from you. Take care. Ciao Bye.

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