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UnitedHealthcare Ask the Expert Elson Haas Integrative Medicine Expert This viewer asks,
"what is the gut biome and can taking probiotics help with that? And, how does this tie into
candida? It's all kind of confusing." Well, yes, it's kind of confusing in the medical
world as well because it's not really as easily defined as we would like. Basically, the gut
biome is a whole new field of understanding in health care that ties into the immunity
in the gut and it's basically the trillions of microbes we have in our intestinal tract
that help support digestion and do and protect us from general problems. Probiotics help
support this, the biome or the micro biome and that's lactobacillus and bifido primarily,
but other organisms as well. And that helps also support digestion and protect us. When
people are sick and they take antibiotics often, or when they need to steroid medicines,
or women who take birth control pills, this can alter the gut biome and reduce reduce
the protective bacteria and allow, when yeasts are present, it allows the yeast to overgrow
because the antibiotics don't really suppress that yeast. And then what happens is the yeast
is a fermenting organism. If you want to make an alcohol beverage, you put yeast in with
grains or grapes, and you've got a fermentation. So this happens in the gut, and people can
produce toxins that get into the blood stream and affect everything from brain and thinking
to energy levels as well. So this is part of this issue, and then there's also a potential
allergy because many of the yeasts people have allergies. And candida albicans is the
most common one and that's the one that women experience when they get vaginitis or other
kinds of problems, but they also can have overgrowth, all of us can, in our intestinal
tract. There's a lot of natural approaches to treating yeast, as well as pharmaceutical.
We want basically 3 things if you have an overgrowth of yeast and that can be checked
by your practitioner through different stool tests and actually culturing the different
microbes that live in you. But, if you have yeast overgrowth, or you think you do, take
a good probiotic 'cause that will help rebuild you biome and support the healthy bacteria
there. You don't want to feed the yeast what it likes to, which is sugars and alcohol and
a lot of yeast in products, so breads and baked goods and all that. So the diet is more
vegetables and proteins and nuts and seeds and the like. And there's very strict anti-candida
diets, they're called, and there's more liberal ones. I tend to have people make sure they're
getting a good balance and a variety of food. And then there's also medicines. There's Nystatin
and Nizoral or Ketoconazole, Fluconazole or Diflucan, those are commonly used to treat
yeast. There's also a number of natural things. Oregano oil, plant tannins, which are an herbal
extract, and caprylic acid is and there's other fatty acids that, one comes from coconut,
that helps inhibit the growth of the yeast. So those are some important things to understand,
you know, if you have candida, and also how to support the gut health and micro biome
which is all the healthy bacteria that live inside of you. UnitedHealthcare