I was doing a week long water and lemon juce fast the last time I posted.  It’s time to get up-to-date on my eating plans.

After that fast, I switched back to the “single item” eating plan.  I ate as much of a single fruit as I wanted for breakfast, a single vegetable for lunch and a single meat (or fish or poultry) for dinner.

That continued for a week while I continued the Oregano oil to kill off most of the microbials in my digestive tract.  Toward the end, I would sometimes have stomache cramps and of course my excrement wasn’t very pleasant without the aid of the microbials for digestion.

This week has been building up those healthy flora again.  The ideal was to kill off just about everything and then build it back up with known healthy microbials.  So the eating plan included several refrigerated pro-biotic supplements from the local health food store and a lot of pro-biotic foods including:

Yogurt (live culture)
Kefir
Cheese
Sour Cream
Cottage Cheese
Sour Kraut (real live culture stuff… not in vinegar)
Pickles (real live culture stuff… no vinegar)
Buttermilk
Raw goat milk

The idea was to include as many pro-biotics in each meal as possible with a minimum of other stuff to make them palatable.  One can eat sour kraut, pickles or cheese alone, but most would prefer to put sour cream on something.  The same goes for plain yogurt and kefir.

Some pre-biotics were also included such as blueberries, raspberries and bananas.  Other than those, sugars were avoided.

I’m pretty cranky without meat at least once a day, so a lot of the meals included meat of some kind (often hamburger or buffalo burger) to have something to put the other stuff on.  Dipping hamburger or chunks of roasted chicken into plain yogurt reminds me of greek souvlaki.

A chicken sausage became a great host for more sour kraut.  Even fish got a dollup of sour cream which turned out to be quite good.

Cheese slices with dill pickles turned out to be a great snack.

Obviously weight loss wasn’t optimum this week, but it wasn’t an immediate goal.  The goal was to replenish bacteria that were destroyed during the prior two weeks with oil of oregano.

There are various natural cures folks who focus on a problem called candiosis or an infection or overgrowth of Candida.  They talk about it leaking through the intestinal walls and getting into your blood stream and causing all kinds of problems… including weight gain.

I was even more skeptical (and still am) about these claims than I was about the mucoid plaque claims.  Well… I was wrong about the mucoid plaque claims and it is often the same groups who talk about mucoid plaque problems and candida yeast overgrowth.

My skepticism is based on an actual background in microbiology.  I happen to know that if you have a bacterial infection in your blood stream that one of the following is generally true:

1) You just brushed your teeth… Not a problem; your blood system is very good at eliminating bacteria from that system and they will all be dead in a few minutes.

2) You’ll be dead soon.  An out-of-control infection that is systemic to your blood system is fatal in a very short period of time.

Those are facts as known by the entire microbiology community.

As I pondered that though, I also realized that mucoid plaque doesn’t exist according to the proctology community.  They routinely put cameras into the colon and don’t see it.  I was skeptical about that, and… yet I saw the sausage casings expelled during month #2 of a three month program designed for that purpose.

What if Candida does enter a “leaky gut” (which is an established ailmet) and is destroyed routinely by your immune system, but still causes problems by the constant attack?  Just like the nearly invisible mucoid plaque, microbiologist could be correct that bacteria simply can’t live for more than a few minutes in a healthy person’s blood stream… AND the folks talking about Candida overgrowth constantly leaking into the blood system IS causing cronic, but low-level health problems… including weight gain.

Hmm…

I considered the negatives of doing the so-called “candida cleanse.”  It involved killing off the flora in my gut.  That has negative health consequences, but is actually done fairly routinely medically.  When a women gets an e-coli (or other anerobic) infection in her vaginal canal (usually from wiping the wrong way), a strong anti-microbial is prescribed that is known to wipe out just about all types of colonies from the colon.  It is uncomfortable and results in excrement that doesn’t stick together, but is not life threatening in any known way.

In fact, most antibiotics are fairly broad spectrum and end up killing off a large portion of your colon bacteria.  Antibiotics are prescribed fairly regularly without cultures being taken, grown and isolated to even understand the source of the bacterial infection.  I worked on medical devices that specialized in identifying and even testing the drug susceptibility of that individial infection, but the reality is that clinical doctors rarely even take a culture before prescribing an antibiotic.

In both of the above medical scenarios, doctors rarely even prescribe something to help rebuild the healthy flora after killing it off.  They just assume the body can handle re-establishing a healthy mixture of bacteria after the antibiotic therapy is concluded.

In fact, the Candida overgrowth community blames what they perceive to be an epidemic of candida overgrowth on the practice of prescribing antibiotics.

To be fair, some doctors are now advising patients to eat yogurt as a way of replenishing one of the healthy flora during and after antibiotic therapy.  Of course, that is evidence that doctors at least partially recognize a potential problem.

So, what would be the harm of me giving it a try?

I would feel uncomfortable and not have a very healthy digestive system during the intentional kill-off phase while using oil of oregano as a natural antibiotic.  I would then have a week of a diet plan that was unlikely to result in weight loss and would fairly likely result in weight gain.

That was the only down-side.

On the up-side, if the candida overgrowth community was right, I would end up feeling much better (perhaps as dramatic of a difference as the switch to organic foods) and would have a much healthier digestive system after the four week plan (two weeks of kill off with oregano; two weeks of rebuilding with probiotics).  It would then be easier to continue to lose weight because my digestive system would be healthier… and I would eliminate cravings for sugar which the candida overgrowth community claims are caused by the candida overgrowth.

I decided to give it a try.

I did feel uncomfortable during the last three days of the 2nd week.

I already feel a dramatic difference after only four days on the probiotic build up eating plan.

Weight gain hasn’t been dramatic.  I generally rebound five to eight pounds after a fast and then see that slowly drifting back down to the end of the fast weight (check my prior fasts for examples of this effect).   In general, I seem to be doing almost exactly the same on the probiotic diet.  There might be a two pound difference, but at that level it is pretty hard to detect an effect at all without repeating the same diet several times (which doesn’t make sense since it is a cleanse that should have relatively permanent results) or repeating it with lots of people (which we will do in the future).

So, I’m pleased so far.  I’ll update you at the end of the rebuilding phase.

-James D. Brausch