Is Candida Causing Your Brain Issues Discover the Signs and symptoms with Evan Brand | Podcast #441

Candida overgrowth may lead to brain issues like fog, anxiety, and depression, affecting cognitive functions and overall health.

Highlights

🦠 Candida can invade the central nervous system, causing brain fog and cognitive issues.

💊 Antifungal treatments are increasingly necessary due to rising fungal infections, especially in immunocompromised individuals.

🧠 Toxins like gliotoxin produced by Candida can damage nerve cells and contribute to mood alterations.

⚠️ Symptoms of Candida include chronic fatigue, anxiety, migraines, and hormonal imbalances.

👶 Candida affects children, with symptoms like behavioral and speech issues requiring careful investigation.

📉 Nutrient absorption issues due to Candida can lead to deficiencies, exacerbating health problems.

🔍 Testing for Candida through urine and stool analysis is crucial for proper diagnosis and treatment.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Hey guys, it's Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Welcome to the Beyond Wellness Radio podcast. Feel free and head over to justinhealth. com. We have all of our podcast transcriptions there, as well as video series on different health topics ranging from thyroid to hormones, ketogenic diets, and gluten. While you're there, you can also schedule a consult with myself, Dr.

J, and or our colleagues and staff to help dive into any pressing health issues you really want to get to the root cause on. Again, if you enjoy the podcast, feel free and share the information with friends or family. Dr. Justin Marchegiani, Market Johnny Institute, in the house with Evan Brand. Today, we're gonna be talking about Candida.

Is Candida causing your brain fog? Is it impacting your brain? Is it causing potential spectrum issues? We're gonna dive into this topic today with Evan Brand. Evan, my friend, how we doing today? Hey man,

Evan Brand: I'm doing great. Let's jump straight in to the nitty gritty. This is some crazy stuff here. This is a paper 2020 it's titled.

It's all in your head and the subtitle here is antifungal immunity in the brain and this paper Goes on to discuss how, in recent decades, invasive fungal infections, they call these IFIs, have increased, and this is happening due to the immune suppressed population. So you've got a population now that has poor immunity due to mold, due to potential viral issues and other things that have kept their immune system.

Not healthy. And so now we're seeing in this paper discusses how These different fungal infections so candida albicans which you and I test for and we see every single day clinically This is the most common fungal infection and how these can gain direct access to by invading the central nervous system.

This is scary stuff. They show the image here about how candida and all types of molds, but aspergillus was in the paper and how it actually tears apart the blood brain barrier. And this is going to drive up all sorts of potential brain fog, anxiety, depression, dizziness, chronic fatigue, temperature regulation issues.

I've seen it affect the hypothalamus in people. I've seen it affect the thyroid in people. So This is pretty wild. Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, there's a handful of different mechanisms on how Candida can negatively impact the brain, cognitively creating all kinds of neurological issues. The first thing is toxin production, right?

Candida overgrowth produces acid aldehyde, right? And it also can produce glial toxin. And again, the acid aldehyde let's say mycotoxin or let's say toxin produced by the Candida it actually can damage nerve cells, right? And then it can also alter mood, it can cause brain fog, cognitive issues, and it can also suppress the immune system and the body's ability to heal and recover, cells that are damaged, and also the integrity of the astrocytes.

That's the blood brain barrier. So that's the toxin production component. And again, most of the nutrients and the protective. compounds we need to protect our brain. Glutathione, N acetylcysteine, right? People forget glutathione's a master antioxidant, but it can't really cross the blood brain barrier that well.

N acetylcysteine can, and then it can convert to glutathione in the brain. But guess what? If we have nutrient absorption issues due to the Candida, that's gonna impact B vitamins, that's gonna impact like magnesium and fatty acids, and it can create other deficiencies, lowering stomach acid, lowering enzymes and bile, so you're not breaking down the building blocks that actually help you detoxify.

from the toxins, the glial toxin, or the acid alehide from

Evan Brand: the Candida. microglia for a long time. It's probably been a decade. You've been ranting about microglia cells, which I love when you talk about this. It's in that paper as well. It's saying here that microglia play a central role in the Candida central nervous system response.

And apparently, what's happening is this is crossing the blood brain barrier, and it sounds like it's actually amyloid beta peptides are binding to the candida. And that's like double worsening the issue. And as soon as I read that, I start thinking about neurodegenerative disease. I'm sure we could pull up some papers about dementia, Alzheimer's, etc.,

and candida. But you and I've seen people, we've worked with elderly clients, and almost all of them have candida overgrowth, especially the ones that are describing having cognitive issues. And it talks about the mold in this too, like Aspergillus is in this same paper. And it's saying here, Aspergillus and mucor and some of these other molds, they can cause central nervous system infections associated with mortality rates between 50 and 100 percent.

That doesn't sound good. Dr.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Justin Marchegiani Yeah, also right here, you can see, this is adhesion and colonization. These are the um, Candida adheres to parts of the skin that may be normal microbiota, and the phagocytes that are present in the blood vessels and other body tissues. These gobble up, the immune cells that gobble up the Candida or gobble up the bacteria.

You can see right here, immune suppression or tissue injury favor Candida. Some Candida species invade and disseminate in the host tissue using yeast hyphae, and they dive in and they create an immune response. Now, this could happen in your skin, this could happen in your brain. If we have systemic Candida issues, this could easily be stressing out your nervous system and putting an additional undue stress on your body.

Evan Brand: Evan Brand Yeah. It could be topical, Issues like you could have Candida on the skin kids, you'll see like fungal issues on the scalp. You'll see it in the ears. You'll see fungal toenails. You'll see jock itch. There's a lot of these external manifestations, but what we're talking about here is more of some of the brain impacts and we can measure this.

I don't know how They're specifically measuring the brain, but what you and I do is we do organic acids, which is a urine sample, and then we do the stool testing. We can measure it two ways without blood. I don't know how they're measuring this brain level though.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Another study here, right?

This is microglial and amyloid precursors. This may be the same one you just talked about in the in the journal Nature Communications, but they talk about, essentially, in a mouse study, they injected intravenous injection of 25, 000 compounds of candida albican cells. And what they found here, if we keep on diving in, they found Candida albicans further activates the transcription of nuclear factor cap beta, that's an inflammatory compound, and induces interleukin, so interleukin IL 6, tumor necrosis factor, and both phagocytic and antifungal activity from these micelles infected in a displayed memory impairment that resolves with fungal activity.

Clearance. Our results warrant additional studies to understand the effect of chronic candida, chronic cerebritis, that's the cerebellum inflammation, and cognitive immune function. Looking at candida and how it's impacting mild memory and impairment. Pretty cool. So we know this is a mouse study, right?

But We see it with patients in our practice. We see how these kind of stressors can be an issue. And it's alright, is there any literature that supports some of this? And yes, it does. And we know, it's just, it's one thing on our checklist that we make sure we rule out with patients that have chronic brain fog, mood issues, and there are people that are potentially on the spectrum, too.

Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah. This affects kids as well. So if your kids having speech issues, behavioral issues, it's something that we're going to have to look at. Check this out too. I just found this real quick. Genetic engineering, biotechnology news says here Candida albicans produces Alzheimer's like changes in the brain.

This was in October of 23. And they're talking about here. Researchers uncover how Candida enters the brain and the mechanisms that promote these amyloid beta like peptides, these toxic protein fragments. Yeah. And these are considered to be at the center of development of Alzheimer's. More specifically, they're talking about the two mechanisms of how Candida activates.

I'm guessing that's Toll like receptor 4? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yes. Evan Brand Okay.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And by the way, Toll like receptors, those are the first domino to fall that activates leaky gut. So when you look at leaky gut the Toll like receptors are the centurion guards that essentially guards those tight junctions.

And so when the Toll like receptors get activated, that's the first domino that allows the gut permeability to open up the gut lining. So that's the first shoe to fall, so

Evan Brand: to speak. Evan Brand Okay. Symptom wise, what could you be experiencing? We'll start with the kids. We could see topical issues like cradle cap.

You could see a coated tongue, white coated tongue. These kids may, they want to snack a lot. They're going for sugar. They want to go for starch. They want to go for grains, processed foods. If you've got it in the house, they're seeking out that sucker. They're climbing on the countertop and finding the hidden Halloween stash of candy, that sort of thing.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. Evan Brand we got to look. Yeah, we got to look. So we're going to do urine and stool on these kids and we can help kids. We can do liquids. We can do chewable. So if you do have children, we can adopt the children protocols. We can change the method that we use to administer these compounds to help work on it.

So there's going to be antifungal herbs, maybe some liver, kidney support, adrenal support, immune support for these kids because a lot of Candida is opportunistic, meaning that it's taken advantage of the opportunity of you being down and out. So if you had Epstein Barr, you had mold exposure, you had some viral issues.

Candida is likely going to do better, meaning it's going to knock you down more if you have these other pre existing factors. And we have to factor all that into the protocol. This Candida diet, you and I talked about that when I interviewed you. It's almost eight years ago for the Candida Summit.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr.

Justin Marchegiani Yeah.

Evan Brand: Wow. Evan Brand 2017 was Candida Summit. And you and I talked on there about Candida diet. And it can be helpful, but really, it's often going much deeper than just nutritional changes. Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100%. So we talked about some symptoms, right? We talked about brain fog, we can add headaches and migraine to some of the signs and symptoms mood swings and irritability.

So if you're a female and you already have PMS and already have fluctuating hormones, and then we add in Candida, that makes everything worse. And then let's say now we're overeating. Processed carbs, processed starch, maybe extra gluten. So now we're supercharging everything. So you can see how one thing can amplify the next, can amplify the next, right?

And then depression and anxiety is another big one. And then God forbid you add an SSRI on there, we know that an SSRI is not fixing this underlying problem here. Now it may be palliative short term, I'm not gonna fix it. Talked about the memory impairments. We talked about the inflammation. We talked about the, the interleukins and the the TNF, the tumor necrosis factor and all the different inflammatory things.

Fatigue is a big one. We can also see chronic fatigue issues in Candida as well. And then dizziness, right? Dizziness, whether it's vertigo, maybe even tinnitus, especially it can impact hydration, it can impact electrolyte levels, and so that can throw off a lot of the the balance and equilibrium issues, too.

A lot of big kind of signs and symptoms that we would take from Candida imbalances,

Evan Brand: too. Evan Brand Now, here's the crazy part, too. It's how did you get up in this situation? Let's just say you had bloating, right? That's gonna be pretty common with Candida as well. What if you go to your doc, Maybe he puts you on antibiotics right away, or maybe he refers you to the gastro.

You go through the whole endoscopy, colonoscopy, barium swallow, who knows, you go into all this crazy investigation, and then you get put on antibiotics, which is only going to weaken your beneficial microbes, allowing Candida to grow more. So I just want to highlight here that people could go in for gut symptoms, the bloating, the depression, the anxiety, get put on antibiotics and an antidepressant, and the Candida's Only going to be worse.

And you compound that with either living in mold previously, having water damage in your building, your home, your office, all of that's going to contribute to more Candida. So you see how quickly people could end up on this slippery slope. And this is not like necessarily just the guy down the street eating a bunch of French fries and milkshakes.

It has Candida. Okay. You and I test, we've looked at. Athletes and fighters and all sorts of different people from all walks of life. And some of these people are eating great organic whole foods diets and they still have candida. So we want to make it clear. You can't just magically eat well and have no candida problems.

In fact, years ago when my diet was perfect and I felt good. I still had Candida overgrowth probably because I had mold.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And also, too, people don't understand as well we know Candida diets, which tend to be a lower carb, Paleo ish template, right? We like Paleo because it's focusing on whole foods that are more anti inflammatory, nutrient dense, foods that have been you know, we'll call them more like longer term foods, right?

Meat, vegetables, not a lot of the processed stuff. The problem with that is, is that Candida can go in these spore like states, right? Because a lot of the antifungal medications or herbals, they target the actively growing and metabolized cells, not the dormant ones. And when these anti, when the Candida goes in the cyst or spore like states, it's harder to actually kill them with our antifungals.

And that's why people saying, oh yeah, go on a anti candida, very low carb diet may actually be the opposite of what you want to do when we're killing candida. This is a big common misconception. Now, don't get me wrong, you don't want to be eating lots of processed sugar and processed carbs, but maybe adding in some safe starch, maybe adding in some additional fruit.

to keep the Candida out of that sister spore like state while we come in there and kill it. That's a big thing that I see lots of doctors make mistakes on. Also, second big mistake, odds are it's probably not just Candida. We see Candida come alongside other Microbes like H. pylori, like SIBO, right? And some people will call candida SIFO or small intestinal fungal overgrowth.

We can call it candida as well. A lot of these things are just used interchangeably. We have SIBO or generalized dysbiosis under that same umbrella. We have other parasites. I think when Evan had his big infection, we called it the three amigos. He had H. pylori, I want to say Giardia Crypto.

Marchegiani Is that correct, Evan? Evan Brand Yep. And and then I think it was also some fungus or we saw D arabinose or D arabinitol with that as well. And sometimes a lot of the really good stool tests we run may not even pick up Candida. It's hard to pick up. It's nice to use an organic acid test where we can see some of the D arabinose or the tartaric acid or the three, the oxyglutaric, the different the potentially colonized molds is too.

Evan, just talk about, if someone comes back with D arabinose, which is maybe a Candida fungal marker, how does that differentiate with the orange markers on the oat that look at colonized mold and colonized Candida? Talk more about the, you being your own Candida

Evan Brand: factory, if you will. Sure. Sure. Yeah. I'll pull a note test up here so people can look at this.

And this is something we do all day, every day. You can do this at home. So folks listening, if you're tuning in and you're like, Hey, how do I get this done? You can reach out justinhealth. com. You can get ahold of Dr. J and you can get access to the testing or myself at evanbrain. com. We're happy to help you guys.

We just love doing this stuff, but I'm going to pull up one and we'll look at it together. And this is actually in a little boy here and it's, yeah. It's quite shocking because you would think that two, three, four, five year olds, you just, you blow off their issues, right? You think, Oh, they're just grumpy.

Oh, they're just a kid, right? You'll hear your, you'll hear your parents or your grandparents saying, Oh, they're just kids. Let kids be kids. Kids are just crazy. But that's not the case. And a lot of times the parents are actually, I don't want to say ignoring, but they just don't know. You don't know what you don't know.

So let me. Yeah. Let me show you this. Oh, can you pull that one up?

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yep.

Evan Brand: Okay. So this is a five year old. Five year old boy here. His mother had known mold exposure. They had an issue in their foundation. So when it rained, they had water come into their basement. And so she has five or six children. I forget how many, I don't know how she does it.

But anyway, she's got all these kids and they all have mold colonization, but they also have candida. You briefly mentioned earlier. Hey, like Candida is not in isolation. And so that's very true. So here, you'll look at number seven, arabinose. You'll see here that it's double. So the candida is sky high already.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr.

Evan Brand: Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And it would already be a problem. Let's say it was just like 40 or 50, but like still beneath 50, it would still, I think, be a problem. So the fact that this person is like two and a half X is a big deal.

Evan Brand: Evan Brand Yep. And then when you compound that with elevated tartaric acid here, that's aspergillus is going to spit that off.

And then you have this other one, dicarbolic, that's more aspergillus markers. You have this number two up here that's sky high. Look at that one. You want less than 28, he's a 207. Wow. Wow. Evan Brand So that's ridiculously high. And the problem is Dr. Justin Marchegiani Apron X. She was in this house during pregnancy for all these kids, and unfortunately, the entire family is colonized, meaning they're actually appearing to grow mold.

Now, the problem with that is, if you just come in and try to just do an anti candida diet, you're not gonna just, you're not gonna beat this, you're not gonna fix all this with just that. Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, and when we see this tells us that the mold is actually in our gut growing.

And then, just to be clear because it's really easy. To get everything confused. And so how I talk about this is we have fungus is like the big umbrella, right? And then mold sits under that umbrella and it's more multicellular where candida or yeast is more single cellular, right?

So more single ovid shaped cells where the mold is now multi multicellular and they grow in phe, right? So a little bit different. And again, again, when I look at these things, like Candida can go on pets, it can be outside too. We can see it on some of the immunolytics playtesting that we run, but we look at these things differently.

If I see mold, I'm very concerned with water leaks, damage what kind of fuel source with the hardwood or the drywall. When I see Candida, I'm more looking at small intestinal fungal overgrowth of these items as well. How do you differentiate these, Evan, when you look at them?

Evan Brand When you're talking on the OAT test? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, but just in general, because it's really easy, like Candida, mold, fungus, people, it's hard to differentiate them. Fungus is the big umbrella, Candida is a type of fungus and mold, type of fungus. Mold is multicellular, right?

And then mold, multi, Candida is gonna be single cell. That's really

Evan Brand: the big difference. Evan Brand I, I lump them all together just clinically because All the herbs that we're going to use are pretty broad spectrum. So some of the antifungals we're going to use to hit the candida are actually going to hit the aspergillus as well.

And that's really exciting to see because when I interviewed, I did a podcast with Dr. Neil Nathan a couple of years ago. I did one on his new book too. It was pretty good. But anyway, we did this interview a couple of years ago and I don't know if he said it on air or not, but as a conventional MD, his opinion was something like.

You cannot fix these big fungal problems, these big mold problems without something like it's reconnaissance, fluconn is all nice stat and some of these like conventional doctor prescribed antifungals. He was speaking like it's impossible and I've seen it to be extremely possible. In fact, I've got his, I've got his after test result that I can show real quick and I'll show you that you can actually fix it.

So this took about a year to do, but just to answer your question. I just focus on all of it the same. So here's the, after this is about one year. Wow. After creating a protocol, all this is totally normalized, meaning he's no longer a mold factory. So you were asking about, okay. Mold factory versus like storage facility.

This kid was storing the mold, but he was also growing it as well. Meaning, even if he got outside of that home and he was in a clean environment, he would likely still bring that mold with him. Not only the toxicity, but the growing of it. And that's why we've really gotta get the antifungals in the nose and in the gut.

But this protocol that we did on him was completely herbal and natural. There was no pharmaceuticals involved. Now, if you get nitpicky, you'll see down here, number 13 was still elevated. He did still have some dysbiosis. bacteria though. Yeah. But that's not too

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: bad though. Evan Brand

Evan Brand: Yeah.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. When you look at, and again, just to be clear, the ones in orange, right? Number 2, 5 hydroxymethyl 2 ferroic, number 4, 5, 6, and then number 9. These are gonna be your colonized mold marker. And then how, why I differentiate it is when I see more colonized mold marker, I start to become more focused on the environment.

Colonized mold requires a good environment to heal it. So that means good air filtration. And that means potentially looking at, do you have elevations in mold? In, we're in that living environment, and if there is, we may have to do a dry fog to knock it down. We may also have to work on dehumidification.

If we have chronic humidity above 50, that could be enough to keep mold growing, especially if we have a basement with no dehumidifier in there, that could be a problem. And then, if we are in a hot environment, humid environment, we need a dehumidifier because an air conditioner HVAC will not be enough most times.

You can have it down in low 70 degrees, but in the summer months, it's still going to be 55, 60 percent humidity, it's not enough.

Evan Brand: Yeah. And luckily my kids, their school teachers are pretty cool with me. They know what I do. They know what I talk about. So they actually let me come in and we did a dry fog before the school season started.

We did set off the smoke detectors this year. They upgraded the smoke detectors. And so the fire truck came roaring. We couldn't shut it off. It was all like this crazy complex system. And they're like, Hey, if y'all do that again, if you get us out here twice, false alarm, you're going to get a bill.

We just. We did as much as we could. So how did

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: that conversation go? How did you bring this conversation up? Did you get him an air filter as well? But how did you say, Hey, by the way, can we do this dry fog thing?

Evan Brand: So I just come in like with a compliment first. So it's Hey, I really love the school.

The kids love it here. We love the playground. We love all the trees, the nature. But I noticed, these rooms smell a little funky. It's Florida. I know there's mold everywhere, but I think I could probably help improve the air quality a little bit. Would you be open to that? Oh yeah, for sure. What do you got?

I'm like, Oh, by the way, it's natural. I go, okay, great. Yeah, come on. And so I'm like, okay, great. I'll be here Saturday morning. And so I just roll in and. Do what I need to do. And even the teachers were like, Hey, after you did that, I didn't have to take as much allergy medication. And I'm like, yeah, because your allergies, not allergies, you were reacting to the mold or whatever was in here.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Justin Marchegiani Yeah. And then at my old school too, is we we bought like a really big Austin air filter, one of the big daddies and put that thing on and that thing is just going to cover two, 3000 square feet. So we did that at my kids old school. That was a good one too. Also, when you go in, And when you dry fog, are you wearing any glasses or any breathing apparatus?

Are you just breathing through the fog?

Evan Brand: So it depends on my mood. Sometimes I'll get like glad I'll at least do sunglasses or I'll wear like a t shirt over my head or I'll put an in 95 on. But, I feel like my throat's bothering me or my sinuses are messed up at all. I'll just breathe it and it seems to be fine.

Long term, you're not, you don't want to be in there for hours, but it will dry you out a little bit. So you'll be parched. You'll feel weird after, but a lot of people report feeling pretty good in it. Dr. Justin

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Marchegiani Yeah, exactly. And now when we deal with chronic mold and Candida too.

We may be looking at the sinuses too. So we'll be doing good sinus flushing. We'll be doing some Exlear or Exlear Rescue that has grapefruit plus six other essential oils. We'll be doing the sinus saline flushing with iodine, maybe a little bit of silver or hydrogen peroxide or or iodine in there and as a medium, as antimicrobial to flush junk out.

So these are all important things because sometimes these can be, this area can be a big reservoir for mold and fungus to grow.

Evan Brand: Yeah, so here's foreshadowing for our next episode. The new paper came out last week about the olfactory bulb. And how microplastics are actually getting into the brain through the olfactory bulb.

And so that's probably the same mechanism for Candida and for mold mycotoxins as well. You're getting up through the sinus cavity up through the olfactory bulb and then boom direct access to the brain. It's pretty wild, but we could talk about that next time because there's some crazy papers.

They're looking at Alzheimer's patients, and they're finding that they take like non dementia patients, every single one that has dementia, they all find microplastics in their brain when they do the cadaver study on them. Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, microplastics are a big thing.

Something like we're consuming about a credit card a week or so of microplastics. It's nuts. That's why I always tell patients, get Pyrex for your Tupperware, store your water, either in glass bottles or in the good stainless steel kind of yeti or clean canteen. And definitely do not heat anything up in plastic.

That's key. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. Let's do a microplastic episode soon. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. That sounds great. And again, that's gonna really antagonize the hormones. It's gonna either further create estrogen dominance or if you're a female and also high levels of estrogen or exogenous estrogen can lower LH.

in men, which can easily impact lower internal testosterone. So it's going to impact our ability to make more testosterone by the feedback loops. And just one last thing I wanted to highlight. We talked about some of the big underlying let's say, dominoes that Candida can cause. I told you about Brain fog.

Talked about the symptoms. Okay. Let's talk about other ways Candida can negatively impact the health. We talked about the toxins, talked about inflammation, also the gut brain axis. This is the HPG axis, right? Hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis. The more stress and inflammation we have in the gut, that's gonna impact gut permeability, that's gonna impact our brain being able to communicate to our gut and our gut back to the brain.

Because remember, if there's inflammation in the gut, inflammation in the brain is gonna be next. Like I mentioned earlier, it's an impact the immune system. Why? Because 80 percent of the immune response in the gut. Plus when we activate all these interleukins and cytokines and TNF alpha nuclear factor cap, beta guess what that does?

It's going to increase potentials on to in and cause more gut permeability and thus allow more of the. outside world into the gut. So that's really interesting. I already mentioned some of the nutrient absorption stuff, B vitamins, certain fatty acids certain proteins, which are really important for detoxification and for energy production.

It's part of the reason why Candida creates lots of chronic fatigue, especially with the B vitamins. And then blood sugar dysregulation because Candida thrives on sugar. If we're eating too much sugar and processed carbs, it's going to create all these blood sugar fluctuations, which then stress out the progesterone, stress out the female hormones, cause lots of insulin surges.

and women that can predispose them to PCOS, right? Ovarian cyst and then any guys that can also increase the aromatase enzyme and cause more estrogen, more conversion of T to E, testosterone, estrogen, because we're surging that insulin, and that can create more issues there. So you can see just like this little thing called Candida can cause and spiral out more issues down the road.

But those are some of the big systems that are impacted. And then we already talked about all the symptoms and signs that can. Evan Brand

Evan Brand: Yeah, said. Said. And we do this all day every day in regards to testing. And I would say in the ballpark of seven out of ten people that we test show up with elevated Candida.

So this is not a rare problem at all. In some cases, these are people that have been eating carnivore, paleo, animal based, organic, whole foods for years before reaching out to Dr. J and I to get help. And they still have these problems. I just want to make it clear. You cannot just be perfect on your diet and not have this happen.

And this can happen to the best. Nutrition person ever and we can help you fix it. So just reach out. Dr. J is available for consultations worldwide That's at justinhealth. com and myself evanbrand at evanbrand. com. We love the opportunity to help you guys We encourage you to just get the test don't guess because you don't need to go on a candida diet right now You might not need a candida cleanse.

I hear that's a corny term too because it's okay You just target candida. What about all the other stuff we just hit? you're not going to fully get better. Let us help you build a comprehensive protocol that makes sense. It's laser focused. You're not going to take 20 supplements.

We're probably actually going to whittle your supplement list down because it's going to be based on labs. It's not going to be 25 things you heard about on podcast. It's going to be all laser focused based on what we've done clinically thousands of times. Feel free to reach out Dr. J, JustinHealth.

com, EvanBrand. com. Dr. Justin Marchegiani

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Absolutely, especially because most of these issues can create other hormone issues. Other energy issues, other cognitive issues. And so a lot of times we wanna work on fixing the hormones because sometimes going after the candida can liberate lots of acid aldehyde and different mycotoxins, gliotoxins that can be actually more stressful on the body.

So we want to get the hormonal system bumped up so we can handle the toxic debris that may. Evan Brand

Evan Brand: Oh, man, you're gonna get me on a rant now. We're gonna have to go part two here. But we gotta get to these calls. So I'll say one last thing because I actually forgot to mention Gliotoxin. So when we look at a mycotoxin urine screen, we can measure Gliotoxin.

It can be produced from Aspergillus, but it can also be produced from Aspergillus. produce from Candida as well. And gliotoxin is going to cause a lot of impact on the brain specifically. So once again, this is where your brain fog is coming from. So if we get your mycotoxin run, you test positive for gliotoxin.

Maybe you test negative for the others. We may be able to point the finger at Candida, but we're going to use specific. Binder specific things to grab onto that gliotoxin and pull it out in a safe way. We've seen way too many people go into hardcore. Their doctor says, Hey, we're going to get you better in a week.

They do this crazy killing, crazy glutathione pushes and people crash and burn. And then they become resentful of even natural medicine, functional medicine, because they're like, I got screwed. I spent all this money. This dude tore my health apart. We lay the groundwork first. We've been through our own issues with ourselves, with our kids.

So we know how to walk. The steps one by one, you can't just go all in on killing. I had a lady actually send me a message yesterday. She's Hey, I'm on a parasite and candida cleanse. What do I do next? And I said, what kind of parasites? Oh, I don't know. My, my practitioner just said I had parasites. I'm like, did they do any labs?

No. I'm like, did they do any testing of any kind? She said, no, everybody has parasites. So she put me on the six month cleanse. I'm like, good Lord.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. And also too, with that patient that you just, you saw, right? After round one, they may still be positive. Their levels have dropped 20 percent.

So it may take a few rounds, but if you just said, Hey, let's just do a candida cleanse. You weren't monitoring progress. You may stop too soon, or you may think that you got it, but you didn't get it. Or you may. tested afterwards and think, oh, it didn't even work, right? You wouldn't know, am I going in the right direction or not?

Also, too, people talk about antifungal medications. The big ones you're gonna see are nystatin primarily, and then you're gonna see fluconazole. Those are the more systemic drugs. One, they can be very hard in the liver, and a lot of times, there's a lot of biotoxin or biofilm, let's say, resistance with a lot of these medications where candida can produce its own biofilms and make it for the microbes, actually.

Be killed by the medications. And so when you're using different botanicals, a lot of the botanicals are going to have anti biofilm, let's say, qualities to it. And we may throw in and lace in different herbs to knock out the biofilms. We may add an NAC, or lembrokinase, or ginger, or silver, and then we may layer in a bunch of different antimicrobial herbs.

And we may also be doing herbs on the right order where we're addressing H. pylori and bacterial overgrowth and parasites first, and so we're weakening those biofilms, and if you're just going to a ketoconazole or a fluconazole, more for internal, or a nystatin, you may be missing the biofilms, and you may also be missing the other bugs that Candida is are a part of with the H.

pylori or the SIBO as well. Evan

Evan Brand: Brand Yeah, so if your kids on the spectrum, you're seeing issues with sensory problems, clothing, reading comprehension, behavior, you name it. This is what we need to investigate. I see so many kids that are two, three, four years old. We could do some more kid case studies next time if y'all like this stuff, but I've seen even one year olds off the chart with Candida.

So this is crazy.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani But also those medications very hard in the liver, very hard in glutathione. So if those medications are hard in the liver, they're depleting glutathione. And now we're essentially, they're already low in glutathione to begin with. And now we deplete it even more with the medication.

You can see how now we're making that person's detoxification worse for a longer period of time, where if we get everything fixed first and use things that are going to be more gentle on the detoxification pathways and maybe even throw binders in there. to soak up the toxins. Now, we can lessen the load.

And most conventional people aren't really thinking about it in that way. We're really working on it, months ahead of time. And during, we're thinking about maintaining detox and also binding capacity too. Evan

Evan Brand: Brand Yeah. And this lady, she spent five grand on a six month protocol with no labs at all.

Five grand for this parasite candy to cleanse with no data at all. Has no idea what she's doing. Dr. Justin Marchegiani That's

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: tough. When it's chronic like that lab that you showed me with that kid, that is a really tough. really tough lab and really tough presentation where if you didn't know you're heading in the right direction, you may pull your foot off the gas a little too soon.

Evan Brand

Evan Brand: Yep. Yep. Have some fun with us. We make this stuff fun, you guys. We love help. Please reach out and we'll talk to you soon.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Dr. Justin Marchegiani Evanbrand. com for Evan, Dr. J, JustinHealth. com. And again, please just share with one family or friend that could benefit and I'd love to see your comments down below.

Take care, y'all.