How does Candida make you sick? How does it cause pathogenesis?
The word pathogenesis means basically the beginning of sickness. There are multiple ways Candida can make you sick, how it can make us unwell, how it can keep us sick, and how it can keep us unwell for many, many years, in fact, decades. Some people never recover from a yeast infection.
In this video, I’m going to explain some of the key concepts behind how Candida can make you sick. One of the key ways, I say the first way, is it’s going to compete with a lot of the other bacteria in your body. Candida is not a bacteria; it’s a fungus. But when it overgrows, it starts to compete with a lot of beneficial bacteria.
I find, in my experience, that people with multiple Candida strains in their body and large amounts of Candida tend to also have dysbiotic bacteria; they have a lot of bad bacteria in their gut as well. They also tend to have lower amounts of beneficial bacteria. So it’s really like too many criminals, not enough police. You get the point. You’re going to get a big imbalance there. You’re going to get a lot of problems, a lot of crime committed internally, including a lot of bloating, a lot of gas, and a lot of other associated problems.
The other big issue you’re going to find with Candida is it helps to promote leaky gut syndrome. You can read about leaky gut on my site, yeastinfection.org. Leaky gut means more intestinal permeability, particularly of the small intestine, which is going to allow the immune system to set up an antibody/antigen challenge response potentially with foods that are coming through the digestive system, challenging the immune system on the other side without being digested. Candida tends to be present with people often who have leaky gut. I’m not sure whether it’s the chicken or the egg, whether one causes the other, but there’s certainly an association there with them both. People with lots of Candida and major overgrowth often have multiple food allergies as a result, too, from the leaky gut.
The third aspect is when Candida dies or it gets attacked in the body and it tends to break up and release these particular types of chemicals in the system. This one particular type of glycoprotein is called mannan, the cell wall fraction. I’ve spoken about this before in some videos. Mannan, it’s a bit like dropping a champagne glass, you get millions of shards of glass all around the place, and that’s what happens to Candida. And each shard will attract the attention of the immune system, which will go after that and try to mop it up. So the immune system, again, will try to produce antibodies to clean up the mannan and produce antibody/antigen complexes, a bit like something floating around in the body. We call these things circulating immune complexes. CICs or circulating immune complexes, again, attract more attention from other particular white cells that secrete chemicals with weird names like dermonecrosis factor and interleukin 1 and interleukin 8. These chemicals are sent after things to fully eradicate them from the body. These things will produce inflammation and pain and redness and swelling and all sorts of symptoms.
As you can see, it’s a bit of a nightmare what Candida can potentially do. Candida can move into parts of the body that bacteria, for example, have a hard time going into. Parasites and various other products in the body that may have difficulty moving around; Candida doesn’t seem to have too much of a problem moving around freely through the body. And part of this mechanism is a chemical it secretes to evade capture by the immune system. It’s Gliotoxin.
Candida is a very smart organism that knows how to evade capture. It knows how to clog up the immune system. It knows how to compete. It knows how to thrive off the human organism, and it’s been around for a long time.
Check out my other videos on how to eradicate this thing and get it back into balance again. Unfortunately, the medical profession doesn’t even view Candida as being a real problem. But I can tell you now; it certainly is a problem. And if you don’t get on top of the imbalance, it can make you very, very sick.
I hope that answers the question about the pathogenic aspect of Candida. Thank you for tuning in.