250 Diet Wise
remarkable drugs come with a price-tag few doctors take into their
reckoning: for every unfriendly bacterium killed there are also friendly ones
destroyed. This can have far-reaching and unpleasant consequences for the
host organism. As a result the pathogenic species may gain a footing and
cause unwanted symptoms and disease.
Food allergy and intolerance is just one of the complications of
these opportunistic infections. The intestinal lining becomes damaged and
too many foreign substances are absorbed, setting up allergy overload and
food chemical reactions, all of which can make the task of tracking down
your bad foods and creating a personal safe diet much more difficult.
One such opportunistic organism is Candida albicans, the thrush
germ, and it is a good starting place for understanding this general upheaval
in bowel flora that we call dysbiosis (literally, messed up organisms). You
may have read about this infection or heard the term Candidiasis; health
magazines and web pages are full of it. But the story is not nearly as simple
as untrained or inexperienced writers like to portray.
Let me share with you some real knowledge, acquired over twenty-
five years. You will need to know this to be really Diet Wise ...
The Candida hypothesis
Dr. Orion Truss of Birmingham, Alabama first brought the candida
hypothesis forward in 1978. Dr. Truss is a psychiatrist with a special interest
in clinical ecology; his seminal papers in the Journal of Orthomolecular
Psychiatry [“Tissue Injury Induced by Candida Albicans,” vol. 7, no 1, 1978,
pp 17-37 and “Restoration of Immune Competence to Candida Albicans,”
vol. 9, no 4, 1980, pp 287-301] certainly revealed an extensive and fascinating
area of personal investigation. His work was taken up enthusiastically by
the late Dr. William Crook, who did more than any single individual to
popularize the candida hypotheses, or what has now become known as ‘the
yeast connection,’ taken from the title of his book. [The Yeast Connection,
Professional Books, 1983].
Since that time, the whole theory seems to have gripped the public’s
imagination and clinical ecologists have been keen to extol the existence
of the problem and the enormous benefits to be gained from tackling it
vigorously. The fact is there are health gains to be made by following a so-
called anti-Candida program, taking antifungal drugs and excluding sugar
and yeast foods from one’s diet. Yet Truss’s idea is no more than a theory.
Please remember that.