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Candida and The Human Microbiome

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inally, a topic that is worth a whole book in itself! You may have
heard the saying that “death begins in the colon.” That may just be a
subject for debate, but there is no question that a great deal of bad
feeling and ill-health begins in the gut. I say “bad feelings” advisedly because
it is evident that our emotions also impact the gut. We have expressions like
“gut feeling” for an emotional response, and “I felt a knot in my stomach”
or “I nearly crapped my pants” for fear. It works the other way too: if we
have bad feelings in the belly we say, “I feel sick.”
The fact is that the state of our intestines has a great impact on
our general health and well-being. Yet it happens to be one of the most
unhealthy terrains in most people.
Food allergy and genetic food intolerance is part of that picture, as
we have seen throughout these pages. But there is another big issue which
complicates matters a great deal: intestinal infections. We all know there
are supposed to be certain bacteria or “germs” in our gut that are friendly
and help out with digestion. We call these allies gut “flora,” which is really
a botanical term. An analogy would be weeds and flowers in the garden:
if the beds are crowded with healthy plants, these will choke off weeds
before they can become established. But the plants, or “flora,” of the gut
are supposed to be non-pathogenic, meaning they should not provoke
symptoms of disease. Or at least they only do so in special situations, where
the body’s defenses are weakened, as with AIDs or cancer.
Then a normally harmless organism can run riot and become
troublesome, even dangerous. We call this an “opportunistic infection.”
One common reason for opportunistic infections is bad diet and
bad lifestyle, leading to compromised immunity. An even more important
cause is the abuse of antibiotics over the last fifty years. These admittedly