Causes and Symptoms of Candida Overgrowth

Interviewer: What is Candida and then can you explain some of the symptoms? 

Ann Boroch: Candida is a single-celled yeast organism that is ubiquitous, so it lives in everybody's body and stays balanced until you upset the environment. Predominantly, it lives in the GI tract though. Ideally, you want to have 85% good bacteria to 15% not so good. But what happens is, with antibiotics, and birth control pills, chemotherapy, radiation, sugar, stress, alcohol, these ratios start to tip the other way in the GI tract. And so this single-celled yeast starts to multiply, because as you take just one dose of antibiotics, you start to wipe out more good bacteria, which allows this yeast to multiply. And then it's the sugar that feeds it though a lifetime, coming in through foods and stress. And the it goes into a myceal (sp) root fungal form. And if you took a cross section of the intestine, it should be tight, not porous. 

And what you start to have with poor diet and lifestyle habits, you have this mucous buildup and the fungus starts to burrow and you start to have what's known as leaky gut. And so then you have got fungus that starts to go into the bloodstream and really the damage is the by-products that come off of fungus that do the damage and could be genetics. It could be just where your vulnerabilities are in the body. So, mildly, you would start to feel depression, anxiety. You could have GI symptoms such as gas, bloating, diarrhea. You could have, you know, eczema. 

It can go anywhere and it starts to go multiple places over time. And the thing is that it starts mild so most people just put up with these annoying symptoms. But the reality is, it's the body already talking to you. And the longer this goes on because unless you are aware of it, and there's really no great blood test, and there's really no great stool test. If you ask me, I think it's an epidemic. I think everybody today has yeast overgrowth. It's just whether it's mild, moderate, or severe. Severe would be cancer, auto-immune disease, chronic conditions. 

But it will basically go to any part of the system. So men might find it's more their sinus infections. They have toenail fungus. They have jock itch. You know, and women think, oh, it's just vaginal yeast infection. It's not me. I said no. It could be your eczema. It could be, you know, why you have anxiety, depression, and bad PMS. So it just continues to ravage the body until you literally get this fungus back into single-celled yeast, back into balance. 

Interviewer: If you have a condition, is there a way to trace that back to find out if that is in fact the root cause? 

Ann Boroch: Well, I trace it back through doing client history. You know, when I spend time with people, I'm doing an intake from, you know, what kind of vaccinations did you have as a child? What was your diet like? Did you have a lot of antibiotics? And then right there, and they go, "Yeah, I used to have ear infection and I even had tubes in my ears." And then they go and I love sugar or I love breads. So you start to really easily see where the pieces to that puzzle come together and then before you know it, they've tipped in whether it's their 20s or 30s and going, "Why do I have recurring urinary tract infections? Why am I have chronic bronchitis each season?" And so, to me, I don't need a test for that. I just literally need to sit down with you and ask you about your life and go through the decades and then I put the pieces together.