After I read up on magnesium deficiency and found out I was way low, my doctor just mentioned - Zinc is the second most important mineral. She also mentioned I probably had a gut infection if I was deficient in more than one nutrient. I check up on symptoms of zinc deficiency. I clearly had some signs including hair fallout, lack of gene transcription (inability to make new enzymes and proteins), poor wound healing especially when trying to build collagen. I started with 100 mg of zinc in the morning. I was timing it to avoid taking it with some other multivitamins. Zinc can interfere with the absorption of a few other nutrients. It's been almost two months but it's still to early to report on healing with collagen, but on other fronts, it's been quite reasonable - my hair loss is reduced. Still more than a few years ago, but it's greatly improved. My hairdresser has remarked on the greater density of my hair too. I'm quite the mess of cowlicks right now. Also, I'm stopped losing muscle mysteriously. I'll assume that my body has stopped cannibalizing muscle because it's unable to make proteins and enzyme. And, yes, I do have a gut infection. Presumably, the invaders were dining on my zinc, magnesium and other delicacies while leaving me the nutritionless calories. How do you fight a gut infection? Your best bet is a naturepath or allopath or doctor of functional medicine. Gut infections aren't well taught in conventional medical schools.My conventional doctors just kept repeating - Just take a probiotic. There's a lot more to a gut infection than "just a probiotic". As I discovered. What are the signs of a gut infection? Unfortunately, the most reliable symptoms are two or more nutritional deficiencies. Are gut infections common? Unfortunately, the *majority* of people have gut infections. Your odds climb if you've taken antibiotics (who hasn't). And they tend to be silent except for diarrhea. Until the bacteria strip you and your body begins to fail. Update: Jan. 2018 I've been taking zinc for some time now. Once my hair stopped falling out quite so fast, I dropped the zinc down to 25 mg daily since my multivite has plenty of zinc. Then, my blood tests showed the zinc is in the normal range. Finally, I've been trying really hard to follow my doctor's advice and to eat extra protein. It seems to be really working because at my last haircut my hairdresser and I were both shocked to find I'd grown twice as much hair as normal. Finally, I have some thinning discs in my back that used to cause constant pain. It's down to little twinges every now and then. And, yes, I've spent the bulk of the intervening time clobbering my gut infection. That's most likely, the real reason for progress. Update: How to kill candida Albicans - I've posted this in multiple places since the information is too important to scatter everywhere. I've finally figured out that I've had an infestation of candida that dates back to my earliest childhood. It was there when I hit puberty at age 12 and developed the most shocking candida body odor. I was sadly disappointed that I'd turned out so... stinky. It seems to run in the family, I have it. My Dad had it. With bipolar or ADHD, there are redeeming moments when you are grateful for the condition. Bipolar gifts you with flashes of insight, ADHD softly draws a veil over memories of pain and despair. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about candida. It is a disgusting intestinal parasite and I have found nothing, nothing at all advantageous about hosting candida. I'm posting this hoping, someone, finds it useful. I will outline below the steps I took to eliminate my lifetime plague of candida. But, some science first. candida albicans is a yeast. It is commensal in your probiotics. Meaning, it's native to your gut. You can never eliminate it entirely, that would be unhealthy and pretty much impossible since it is present just about everywhere. However, the yeast can morph into the fungal form when conditions are ripe. When, it changes, the fungus puts down hypae (basically, tentacles) which can reach straight down into the walls of your gut and start ripping them apart. At this point, you've got all sorts of GI problems including leaky gut. What are the conditions that cause candida to morph? Opportunity - taking sex hormones, diabetes, a diet rich in refined carbohydrates and/or sugar, taking one course of antibiotics too many, taking proton pump inhibitors for too long, .... in a word, life. How do you diagnose candida? It's incredibly hard. Major symptoms are disguised as other diseases: depression, brain fog, diabetes, metabolic syndrome. What about other symptoms? Cold hands and feet - I mean cold when the room is 72 degrees not 68 deg. A pot belly even when you're thin and at or under your ideal weight. candida causes stress and this is a stress belly plus stress induced cold hands and feet. candida BO is a sharp, pungent BO. The smell has the same pungency as an onion. Another candida symptom, is clear mucus discharged from the bowels. candida produces the clear mucus, not you. These are probably the most direct symptoms unlike the others where many other conditions can cause the same symptoms. What caused me to suspect candida? I had two nutritional deficiencies even thought I was taking one of the most bio-available multi-vitamins ever formulated. I had constant diarrhea. And that was it. Plus candida is one of the most common gut infections period. One of the most mysterious conditions out there is irritable bowel syndrome. A characteristic set of symptoms is gut spasms sometimes so intense that you break into a cold sweat and have to lie down, constant diarrhea, liquid discharge from the bowels. are the usual problems with gas, gurgling, your gut talking to you incessantly. IBS is a bucket list. The medical community created a condition that matches a specific set of symptoms. The causes of IBS are varied and sometimes unknown but one of the causes is a candida infection. Why is your candida different from my candida? Unicellular organisms such as bacteria and yeast have small rings of DNA called plasmids. These plasmids carry a few genes and are passed around ubiquitously. This is how resistance to antibiotics can "jump" from one bacteria to another and even cross species lines. This is why you need to use more than one antifungal agent. Thanks to some naive advice, candida may be resistant to many anti-fungal medications (this is a serious problem in hospitals) even herbal medications may have resistant strains of candida out there. I was given some advice to take to olive leaf extract for the rest of my life in order to control this mysterious bug in my gut. Other people who took this advice are just walking incubators for resistant gut bugs. The Strategy I obtained the information from at least five different books written by M.D.'s (and Ph.D's) on candida and related topics. I recommend you do ALL of the steps outlined below. It wasn't until I did all of the steps simultaneously that the candida finally went away. Josh Axe's book “Eat Dirt” is especially good but he seems to favor a strictly lifestyle/food-based approach. It works but it's slow. 1) Use enzymes that target the cell walls off the fungal form of the yeast - I used Candi-zyme from RenewLife plus Candi-Smart which is an herbal mish-mash of anti-fungal, anti-inflammatories, etc.... Watch out for the berberine in Candi-Smart. Berberine inactivates at least 3 major Cyp enzymes in the liver. Any medication that interacts with those Cyp enzymes will be affected by berberine. NSAIDS won't work during this period. On the other hand, berberine is a major anti-fungal/anti-inflammatory and probably the most effective ingredient in the mix. By, the third day, I noticed the candida was “going silent” in patches. These enzymes are your best bet because the cell walls are conserved in most organisms. 1a) Eat salads with tons of leafy greens (esp. from the cabbage/superfoods category) everyday. First, they have fiber for your probiotics and second they have the enzymes that eat into the fungal form of the yeast. Any green that is bitter (kale, dandelion, endive, etc...) is likely to be rich in compounds that will attack candida. Use apple cider vinegar, the probiotics in the vinegar target the fungal form of the yeast (cell walls again) and eat them alive. The therapeutic dose for the vinegar is 2 tbsps per day. Finally, celery is loaded with those yeast-eating enzymes. If you are having trouble digesting food, try a green smoothie. 2) Olive leaf extract - another major anti-microbial. Excellent against candida, preliminary evidence that it works against E. coli, salmonella, shigella, and some other bad guys. I used Olive Leaf Extract from http://hardynutritionals.com full strength (6 caps) while using everything else. Why? Because I'd tried to taper down after 14 weeks when it seemed OK. Within 3 days, it was as if I'd never done any treatment at all. So the olive leaf is needed to suppress something. 3) Food based anti-fungals - It is important to try as many as possible. Because, foods often have many compounds that act as antifungals, candida is less likely to develop resistance: cinnamon, cloves, coconut (very powerful - use MCT/ medium chain triglycerides from coconut oil for concentrated effect), ginger, raw garlic cloves (for the sulfur compounds - limit to two per day) or the garlic oil in capsules, curcurmin, spirulina. Also, herbs like parsley, thyme, rosemary, sage. Smoothies made with coconut milk with curcumin and spices are shockingly effective. Olives are good. These foods seem to provoke the herxheimer effect 2-5 times, then settle down. It is important to use at least 4 major anti-fungals. candida can and has developed resistance to many drugs. By using at least four, you're trapping it. If you find more than four, then rotate them. Keep using them even if it seems like there isn't anymore effect. It may be suppressing something. 3a) Coconuts: coconut has 3 anti-microbials, lauric acid, caprylic acid and capric acid. They are so strong that coconut oil won't go bad for a year. I can testify to that. Lauric acid is converted into monolaurin in the body and is found in colostrum, the clear part of breast milk that is produced before the actual milk. It is strongly anti-microbial. However, producing monolaurin is pretty difficult using coconut oil because of all the calories AND the conversion rate is low. You can 1) buy bovine colostrum, or 2) buy monolaurin or Lauricidin from Med-chem labs. I am convinced colostrum lands in the gut and starts to clean the place up directly. The monolaurin seemed to take 10-15 days to act and my skin turned from an ashy color to an apricot hue. But no overt sign that the candida was dying. 4) Anti-fungals or pro-probiotics - peppermint oil and oil of oregano - either alters the environment in the gut to favor probiotics or directly kills candida - depends on who you talk to and probably effective only against a limited number of strains. I found the peppermint was helpful but the oregano seemed to have limited impact. However, because of the different strains of candida out there, you may react very differently. BTW, peppermint oil is a great digestive aid - does double duty. 5) Marshmallow root (as a tea) - seals the gut and prevents some of the active ingredients from being digested or leaking away. Works for about 3 hours. Some of you out there with leaky gut may need this to get many of the anti-fungals to work. Also, anti-inflammatory and works directly on the gut. Works well if you can avoid eating for at least 6-8 hours and load up on anti-fungals and marshmallow tea during that time. I did this unwittingly using marshmallow tea and a coconut milk smoothie with cucurmin added to knock gut inflammation and as an anti-candida agent. I alternated the two for about 9-10 hours and knocked myself out with the herximer reaction for 2 days (herximer is the reaction you get when you kill bacteria in your gut in large numbers, diarrhia, gas, bloating, belly noises, gut clenching/spasms, sore muscles, fatigue and many other flu-like symptoms. It's a good sign that the anti-candida medications are working but severe symptoms can damage your health. Better to moderate the dose). However, I recovered and kept on recovering. A week later I had doubled my capacity to work. It was up from about 2-3 hour cyles of work/rest/work to being about to work from about 10 AM to about 8 PM. This was the single most impressive improvement in five years of medical disability. 6) Starve'em out: Yeast LOVE CARBS. An anti-candida diet is about 60-80 gms of carbs per day. No sugar. No refined grains, peas, sweet/potatoes, parsnips, beans. No sweet corn, Even carrots are off the list. NO ALCOHOL! No, No, NO! Even leafy green veggies have some carbs. These are OK. I was able to maintain about 15-20 gms of carbs for 3-4 days in a row. After that every time, I went above 20 gms of carbs, the candida were agitated (made noise - by tearing my gut around). Clearly, they were starving and any carb was now a good carb. Which is how I know, the enzymes and anti-fungals were working. I'd hit'me with it and suddenly a patch of gut would stop honking at me forever (they sound like young piggies in full cry when they are starving). You cannot just jump into a diet with 60-80gms of carbs unprepared. It's pretty much down to meat and green leafy vegetables. It's impossible. First, you need an alternate diet. I always recommend the "Eat Fat, Get Thin" book by Mark Hyman because...it worked for me. Pick your calorie source, it's fat vs. proteins. You can live off proteins for a short while but it's dangerous to your cholesterol (unless you eat nothing but egg whites and chicken/turkey breast) and your kidneys. All that nitrogen from the protein will eventually cause your kidneys to fail. If you do go this route, drink ONE GALLON or more of PURE water every single day. It will protect your kidneys...for a while. Which leaves fats. Switching to a fat-based diet is a pain especially if you keep eating carbs. But mitochondria burn fats really well and they burn medium chain triglycerides especially well (MCT oil). L-carnitine is found in organ meats and helps you burn fat (including your own). Your heart is loaded with L-carnitine so it can convert fat into energy easily. If you're having trouble switching, try supplementing with L-carnitine. Acetyl-l-carnitine (ALCAR) is targeted for the brain and gives you energy operate your brain when you suddenly cut off all it's glucose. Don't worry the brain operates well on ketones, but first you have to burn some fat to get those ketones. If you are experiencing brain fog, ALCAR may be helpful. ALCAR has also been found to be neuroprotective and some small trials have shown improvement in patients with brain conditions like trauma. The therapeutic dose to heal brain trauma is 1.5 gm. Nutritional depletion I've been trying to figure out what candida will consume and the information is limited. It definitely drains glucose, magnesium, zinc, potassium and phospate. It goes after all proline, primarily found in collegen. If you're having problems healing collagen, this is a smoking gun that you may have candida. When my candida infection became really bad about four years ago, the disks in my spine started to deteriorate, my skin started to wrinkle rapidly (unhealed sun damage to the collagen). Supplement with collagen powder or just chicken/bone broth. Make sure you get about 4-6 gms of vitamin C (needed for collegen to heal). The gut needs collagen to heal. And you can reverse the damage to skin and tendon as well. Glutamine- required to heal the gut. Deficit results in inability to form new muscle. At the height of the candida infection, my muscle was wasting away even though I maintained my usual activity. Also, reduces GABA levels in the brain resulting in mood inbalances, like depression. Required for immune activity. Could be the reason why this is depleted with candida infestations, since your immune system is trying to kill it 100% of the time. Therapeutic dose to heal the gut is 2-3 gms/day Tyrosine - deficit reduces dopamine and norepheneprine in the brain. Also, causes hypothyroidism. Shows up as "lack of willpower", ahedonia, lack of energy. I'm up to 2.5 gms per day and I still have trouble moving around but much, much less. The therapeutic dose for ADHD is 1 gm per day. If you suffer from extreme morning grogginess and find tyrosine helps but it take 5-6 hours to take effect, then consider N-acetyl-l-tyrosine (NALT). This is just tyrosine that has been tagged with an acetyl group which sends it straight to the brain. It should cut the response time down to 2-3 hours. Tryptophan - tryph is the amino acid precursor to thyroid hormone. Also, it gets converted to serotonin in the gut and brain. I haven't discussed it much because it's very hard to supplement with tryptophan. Your best bet is to eat something like chickpeas with NO MEAT (a veggie meal) plus some carbs. Somehow the insulin helps the brain absorb the tryptophan. The problem with tryptophan is it is the slowest passenger on the train ride to the brain. All the other amino acids out-compete the tryph for seats and guess who never makes it to the brain. If you do want to supplement, then you need LOTS of tryptophan, it has to be the most concentrated amino acid in the food source (chickpeas) so it crowds out all the other aminos. Since the gut was way off, I was very low on inositol (required to produce serotonin & produced by probiotics in the gut). Therapeutic dose is anywhere from 1 tsp to 2 tbsps. Inositol *might* fix panic attacks, anxiety and depression. I'm sold on the stuff because it fixed my panic attacks in about 15-20 minutes (clearly a gut-based problem). If the bottleneck is further along in your chemistry then it's about 5 hours for the "fix". Much longer than that and the problem isn't really inositol. If you have symptoms of “brain fog” - poor memory, lack of concentration, confusion â€" try phosphotidylserine (buy directly) and phosphatidylcholine, abundant in eggs and lecithin. The FDA has changed it's ruling on eggs. Eggs are encouraged. If you buy free-range eggs, they are unlimited. My local Costco sells free range, organic eggs. Stress: candida triggers stress and you may want to try an adaptogen to control your cortisol levels. Stress will reduce your working memory â€" the easiest test is to hold single digits in your head. The average person can hold 7-8 digits. I was down to 1 digit. I have tried rhodiola rosea (great for working memory & cortisol control â€" too energizing for late night use), American gingseng ( excellent for cortisol control, not as energizing as rhodiola), ashwagandha (will control cortisol levels and convert your sleep patterns from night owl to morning lark â€" yes, it converted me), holy basil (controls cortisol), Relora (controls cortisol). I have found all of these adaptogens control stress eating. And yes, my working memory is up to about 16 digits. BTW, your working memory is directly linked to your IQ. You cannot just keep taking adaptogens until it reaches infinity and beyond. Healing the gut Damaged Digestion-If you have those gut-wrenching experiences with candida yanking on your gut, then I'm afraid you have damaged digestion. If the gut is damaged, very likely, you need something to “activate” the gut. The taste of bitter greens does this automatically. You can eat bitter greens (dandelion greens, hops tea, not the beer, and more) or drink bitters. Iberogast is the medical grade bitter (no alcohol). If digestion itself is damaged, you probably need digestive enzymes. Daily stomach/gut troubles is damaged. Many of these recommended foods had increased effect on candida after I started using a digestive enzyme. Clearly, the food wasn't even fully broken down in my stomach and I wasn't getting full benefit. HCL â€" damaged digestion often shows up as inability to produce enough HCL to digest your food. This can result in stomach aches, gas, bloating and more. Insufficient HCL can also lead to increased infections because your stomach acid is the first line of defense. Immune System Pau D'arco tea - Not sure if it helps yet since I just started but comes highly recommended - anti-candida & anti-inflammatory & stimulates the immune system. Vitamin C - boost to 4-6 gms to help heal collagen or to fight depression. Or just to help heal. Helps reduce excess histamine in the body if you've got that. Take 1 gm per hour, the body cannot assimilate more per hour. The optimal dose is 8 gms (which is what Dr. Pauling took in his latter years). Reduce inflammation for healing â€" eat anti-inflammatories like ginger powder, cinnamon, cucurmin, garlic, spirulina. I've found anti-inflammatories replaces ibuprufen. Ginger is especially good for pain (and will lower cholesterol and help control blood sugar). About ¼ teaspoon or 2 “00” capsules or more as needed daily. Some of these are also anti-candida: fresh garlic, cinnamon, cucurmin, cloves, spirulina Take Care of your Probiotics Split the day into "probiotics" and "kill the fungus" time. There was a huge difference once I stopped taking antifungal foods/chemicals along with my probiotics. Buy fresh probiotics with many strains and a super high organism count. Eat many probiotic foods - homemade really does make a huge difference but variety is crucial. I will recommend the instant pot just for the homemade yogurt function. Also, kefir and kombucha . Good kefir tastes like liquid yogurt. Kombucha has a tart/sweet flavor. If they overferment, it will taste unpleasantly like drinking vinegar. But once you drink real vinegar straight, Kombucha is quite refreshing. Eat prebiotic foods for fiber- avocados, asparugus, green bananas, popcorn. Glucomannin, derived from Konjac, a wild yam from Asia, is just about the best quality fiber (longest strands) you can buy. You can also buy Shirataki noodles (Japanese grocery stores or Amazon) which are nothing but glucomannin. No carbs, no calories, no gluten just fiber. A crazy good diet food and excellent in any ramen noodle recipe. Keeps you full for hours unlike regular noodles. Supplement with fiber. Right before bed is especially encouraged. I wish you all the best in your fight against candida. To your good health. - Lindy