Your Guts are Alive

by Michael Colgan, PhD, CCN

Lovely looking, 30-something, “Jan” came to me with chronic candidiasis of some four years duration that, “began after my last baby”. She had tried everything. Courses of antibiotics and antifungals had helped for a while but it always came back. Colloidal silver and hydrogen peroxide had made her sicker. No kidding !

Her nutrition was the usual SAD. (Standard American Diet). Atrocious ! She was about 30 lbs overweight, and, unsuccessfully, jogged 2-3 times a week for 30-40 minutes to attempt to slim down, essentially a sedentary lifestyle. Although not that big, she was 28% bodyfat and had very little muscle or strength.

I explained to her that bodyfat is mostly burned in muscle, and she did not have enough muscle to succeed, no matter what exercise she did. So the first step is to get on a decent muscle building resistance program to enable her to gain the muscle in order to lose the fat.

“But I’m always so tired and I have trouble sleeping ”. Yes. So the second step is to get on a decent nutrition program to stop feeding her candida, and her fat, and a melatonin complex spray to help with both sleep and muscle growth.

I explained that the third step is trickier. More than 1,000 different bugs live inside you collectively called the microbiome. Most living cells inside us are not human. They belong to bacteria, viruses, yeasts, moulds, and fungi, trillions of microorganisms. The weight of bugs in your gut alone is more than the weight of your brain.(1) The sounds of flatulence are not exactly Rodgers and Hammerstein, but they are the music of your microbiome in action.

You can’t get rid of them. Nor should you try. Use of antibiotics and antifungals mostly annoys your inhabitants. And when they get annoyed they multiply like crazy, and bloat you like a balloon. To do so they need sugar, so you experience a big increase in food cravings, especially for easily digested processed carbohydrates. Guess where that leads.

Medical scientists know well that it’s long past time to stop screwing around with antibiotics, which inevitably disrupt the microbiome. Yet, through ignorance and greed, pharmacies still dispense them for every barf and cramp and stuffy nose, thereby preventing our immune systems from developing the antibodies to deal with those bugs in the future.

Fortunately, most of us get exposed continuously to trillions of bugs every day which keep our immune systems strong. A pet dog or cat for example is a walking cloud of so many bugs it’s impossible to count them. And even the cleanest toilet is awash with bugs. But some folk still think they can get rid of them by spraying their counter tops, all the while breathing millions of new ones everywhere. And, if the puppy licks the baby’s face – disaster.

My three dogs all have their seats on the couch, and are adept at stealing tongue and ear kisses. So by some accounts my family should be sick all the time. Never felt healthier, and we don’t use ANY antibiotics. Controlled studies also show a reduction in illness in hospitals that allow pets to visit.(2)

Certainly, antibiotics are essential in life-threatening illness, and are some of the greatest advances in medicine. After being introduced to Louis Pasteur’s in antibiotics, by Nobel Laureate Rene Dubos in 1981, I became a lifetime student. But many people dealing with antibiotics today don’t have the knowledge to understand the amazing balanced system of microscopic life that lives inside us and all around us. Even Pasteur stated time and again that bacteria are not the cause of illness, but rather a symptom of immune failure. As he said, “Host resistance is the key.” (3)

If you want your immune system to work well, treat your microbiome with respect: Although bugs can multiply to become harmful, the vast majority are easily kept in check by each other and by your immune system. We also house some important body bugs we couldn’t live without Destroy them, and you will get sick, and fat, and quickly old and miserable.

The friendly bugs, now called commensals, regulate the gut community without harming it, and keep more aggressive bugs, such as your lifetime resident, candida albicans, under control. I told Jan she cannot get rid of her candida. They live everywhere in the remotest cracks and crevices of your gut and, with normal immunity, give us no trouble. But, if your immune system is compromised by antibiotics, acidic junk food, poor nutrition, infections, bodyfat, exhaustion, or a sedentary lifestyle, you can easily get a candida overgrowth. It’s not easy to fix.

Antibiotics, antifungals, and myriads of alternative remedies provide only temporary relief. These drugs and potions are indiscriminate in action. They kill some candida, but they also kill a lot of essential bugs. Overall, they tend to make the situation worse by leaving the strongest strains of candida to proliferate and fill all the empty spaces, That’s why runaway candidiasis in the US alone costs the medical system $2.6 billion a year.(4)

I’ll take one example of essential bugs, Bacteroides fragilis, a resident of the human gut for hundreds of thousands of years. It plays several protective roles, but I will mention just one. B fragilis excretes a substance called polysaccharide A, which stimulates the manufacture of a special form of anti-inflammatory T-cells by our immune system. B fragilis needs a high level of these anti-inflammatory T-cells, to prevent our usual defensive T-cells from killing it. We benefit greatly, because polysaccharide A also prevents our T-cells from attacking us and causing autoimmune diseases.(5) You need to nurture these little beauties.

Since we began ridiculously overusing antibiotics, B fragilis has been declining in the human gut. In new and devastating research, Dr Sarkis Masmanian and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology have shown that the recent seven-fold increase in the autoimmune disease, multiple sclerosis, is tied directly to low levels of this essential bug.(6)

I told Jan she should do a 3-month course of a strong multi-strain probiotic that will displace candida but does not damage friendly bugs. She must never miss a day, however, because within 24 hours the runaway candida will multiply right back to where it was the day before, and then you are two days behind in controlling it.

That was two years ago. Jan is now a star, working out in the gym like a demon nearly every day, and sporting the body she had when running track back in college. Only thing is, she refuses to stop taking the probiotic. I tell her I have no idea what happens if you take it forever, and she pats me on the arm and says, “Don’t worry Doc, I’ll let you know”.

To see more from Dr. Colgan visit his website. Click here.

1. Turnbaugh PJ, et al The Human Microbiome Project Nature 2007; 449:804-810.

2. Bulette Coakley, A . Creating a Therapeutic and Healing Environment with a Pet Therapy program. Complement Ther Clin Pract. 2009 15(3):141–146.

3. Rene Dubos, Mirage of Health, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1959, 93-94.

4. Moyes DL, Naglik JR. Mucosal immunity and candida albicans infection. Clin Dev Immunol. 2011; 2011: 346307. PMID: 21776285.

5. Khosravi A, Mazmanian SK. Breathe easy: microbes protect from allergies. Nat Med. 2012 Apr 5;18(4):492-4

6. Chow J, Lee SM, Shen Y, Khosravi A, Mazmanian SK. Host-bacterial symbiosis in health and disease. Adv Immunol. 2010;107:243-74.