Learn True Health with Ashley James 486 Is There A Fungal Jungal In Your Belly? A Yeast Beast Brewing In Your Body? Worlds Leading Expert In Candida Recovery and Elimination, Dr. Michael Biamonte, Author of The Candida Chronicles
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486: Learn From The Expert, Dr. Michael Biamonte on Candida Elimination and RecoveryDo you ever wonder if you're suffering from candida? Maybe you hear about it in media and don't even know what it is. Or maybe you’re struggling with candida, but that doesn’t mean you have to give in and let it take over. Candida is a fungal infection that could affect your digestive, urinary, and reproductive systems. It can be tricky if you don’t know what it is and how to treat it. Check it out on this podcast as Dr. Michael Biamonte and I discuss candida, its effects on your body, and how to eliminate it.
Highlights:
- What you see in bloodwork when you have candida
- Causes of candida overgrowth
- Candida as a possible etiology of autism
- Vitamins that aggravate candida
- Toxic elements that suppress your intestinal immunity
- Biofilm
Intro:
Hello, true health seekers, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. I'm so excited for you to hear today’s interview. If you’ve been struggling with candida, if you think maybe you have candida, or if you know you have some kind of gut dysbiosis, then this is the interview for you. This is only going to be part 1 because, unfortunately, my guest was short on time, but he’s coming back in a few days and we’re going to finish this interview. Listening to part 1 though is going to lay the foundation. I learned so many new things about candida and this has been a very important topic to me. So, the fact that I learned so many new things, I know you’re going to learn so many new things. Your eyes are going to be wide open, you’re going to be on the edge of your seat, then you’re going to, just like me, can’t wait for part 2. I’m so excited to have him back. In a few days, we’re going to finish this interview, so that’ll be part 2, so just watch for that. But in the meantime, strap yourselves in, enjoy today’s interview. And if you have any questions for him, this is actually really exciting. We’ve got a great opportunity.
You can listen to part 1 today right now and then come to the Learn True Health Facebook group and type in any questions you have for him and I’ll be sure to include those in my interview that’s happening in a few days. So, join the Learn True Health Facebook group. Come on down. Come on down to the Learn True Health Facebook group. We’re all friends there. The water’s nice. Come on in, jump in, and ask your gut healing questions, especially about combatting and completely eliminating and resolving candida. I’m so excited to be diving deep into this topic because so many people are suffering from candida that don’t have to be. And it’s so fascinating that we get to pick the brain of the world’s leading expert on resolving and healing candida infections. So, enjoy today’s interview. Please share it with all your friends and family and loved ones and coworkers. Just everyone who you know might be interested in gaining better gut health. Have yourselves a fantastic rest of your day and I’ll see you in the Learn True Health Facebook group.
[00:02:10] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 486.
I am so excited for today’s guest. This is a very interesting topic, and in almost 500 episodes, I cannot believe that we have not covered this topic yet. Dr. Biamonte is an expert in several areas, but one which we’re going to talk about today is candida. I am really interested in learning about diving into this subject, and I’m so excited to have you on the show. Welcome.
[00:02:49] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Thank you. I’m very happy to be with you. I’ve heard some of your work, and I’m very pleased that you’ve chosen me to speak to today.
[00:02:58] Ashley James: Absolutely. So, the reason why candida, to me, is so fascinating is I was six years old, this was back in the ‘80s, my mom ran her own business, so she was gone 10 to 12 hours a day easily 5 days a week and she had a cold one day, and she went to the MD, and the MD put her on antibiotics probably for something that was like a virus, who knows. But she was on antibiotics and then the cold wouldn’t go away and looking at it now from the holistic lens, she was running herself ragged. Of course, her body was worn down and her body was trying to tell her to rest. But she wouldn’t take one day off work. So, six months later, she was on non-stop antibiotics for six months to handle basically a little cold that wouldn’t go away, which we know now of course is crazy, but back then, I guess they were playing it real loosey-goosey with the antibiotics and, as a result, it totally wiped out all her good bacteria and she developed a horrible candida inside her gut and outside. And I just remember her going and finding a naturopathic doctor, and he got her on the anti-candida diet, this is 1986. And subsequently, I was also very sick, but not with candida. I didn’t know; we didn’t know I had a dairy allergy. She took me to the same doctor, and he said stop doing dairy, stop doing sugar, stop eating processed food, and basically told us to eat the anti-candida diet that was close to what we would consider paleo today.
But they had all these weird rules like you're not allowed to eat leftovers and it has to be fresh. And you can’t have anything with vinegar in it and no condiments. The list went on and on. Well, sure enough, she got better and so did I. The rest of my childhood was eating super clean, no sugar was allowed in the house, no flour was allowed in the house. It was a totally different life after that until I rebelled in my teenage years. I went back to eating junk food because I was as a teenager and I had to rebel with something. And I watched my health from bad to good to bad to good every time I chose to eat what I was told by this naturopath was good versus what everyone else around me was eating.
But I watched my mom diligently stick with that anti-candida diet for years and the candida never returned. And it stuck in my brain how amazing is that, that she went to a medical doctor which gave her candida, and the medical doctors could not help her solve the problem, but a naturopath who told her about how healing food can be if you choose the right foods. Eventually, she’s able to overcome it.
So, when I saw your work and how much advanced are we now in the last 36 years, so much more has been discovered and understood. That's why I’m really excited for you to teach us today about candida now in 2022 as opposed to 1986. So much has happened. And you’ve been a practitioner for over 30 years, so you’ve really seen the science in how we can really understand how to heal the body using food and, in some cases, nutraceuticals, and to support the body’s ability to heal itself and to stave off candida. So, that's why I’m excited about the work that you do and I’m really, really excited for my listeners to hear how they can heal their body and prevent candida and remove it from their body should they have it.
[00:06:44] Dr. Michael Biamonte: I started practicing in 1984.
[00:06:47] Ashley James: Oh! There you go.
[00:06:49] Dr. Michael Biamonte: In those days, things were very limited. People asked me what college I went to and I said I went to the College of Hard Knocks because I learned a lot of things the hard way. We didn’t have tests back then.
So, when I first encountered candida, I had been out of naturopathic school for a few years, and I was working with some aerospace engineers at Grumman on Long Island because that's where I was from. I was from Long Island. And I ran into those aerospace engineers who were working at Grumman. They were working on a computer model of the human body that NASA approached them to design. They wanted this computer software so that they could use it to analyze or interpret the astronaut’s bloodwork when they were in the space station for long periods of time because they were concerned about negative calcium balance and nitrogen balance. When you're in space and you're weightless for that amount of time, you can start having muscle loss, and you can start having bone loss.
Fortunately, one of the people who was the head of the project that I was working with and I became very close with was the same man who designed the life support systems on the lunar module, Dr. Robert Santoro, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago. I worked with him on constructing this model for about 3 or 4 years. And unfortunately, Grumman cancelled when NASA cancelled the project on us because it was getting a bit expensive, and they weren’t anticipating that they were going to get back the amount of investment that they were putting in. That was partially our fault because we had an expense budget, and we were flying doctors into Long Island from all over the world, all famous nutritionists who were all adding to the model. Everyone had their own data and research that was sort of privy to them.
So, we asked them at this point because we almost had the model complete. Now what this model could do, this was computer software that was designed in they called it table-driven. Table-driven software allows you to take up datum and insert it a different spot, so that you don’t have to rewrite the whole program. So, we were almost finished with this and we asked them, “Well, what are we going to do this? I mean, this project is almost done but you're not going to complete it.” They said, “We don’t care what you do, you can keep it.”
So, we took the model and we started to offer it to physicians, and what a physician would do, they drew some blood on their patients, have an SMA-24 or 26 which is pretty standard bloodwork done. Then we’d ask them to do a tissue mineral analysis on their patients which was typically hair or nails, but it’s commercially hair nowadays. And then whatever other test they wanted to do. If it was a chiropractor, they could tell us what particular subluxations their patient usually had, so we gave them a diagram of the spine and they would circle like L1, T4, C2, or whatever typically came up and then we would input this data in the computer, and the computer would actually run a simulated version of their body and it would look for errors. Then from the product module we had that was loaded with different supplements like from standard process or Metagenics or Nutri-West, all these different companies, the computer would then select supplements that it would recommend to fix whatever was wrong, and it would then recommend the diet based on their blood type and other things. And we had a lot of doctors using it back in those days. A lot of people were getting really good results. But there was this certain population of people and I estimated it was about 30 to 35 percent of the people who would run through the model that got crazy results like they would take the vitamins and get worse. Or they would take the supplements and have crazy reactions.
So, I volunteered to figure out what was going on with that group of people. And it took a while. I studied all their folders. When my wife tells the story, she always talks about walking into the room and seeing this big stack of folders on the desk that were higher than I was. And here I am going through this and what I eventually found out was that all these people had some kind of disturbance in their digestive system. I found that their intestinal tract was fighting something. There was some type of immune response going on there. And they were also having a lot of allergies to the supplements they were taking.
Eventually, I found out that what it was, was candida. Now, I didn’t know really much about candida. I thought it was some fad from California for all I know. And I remember the pop song Candida, that was really all I knew. So, I hit the textbooks and I studied and I understood what it was. And I told the people, “You have candida. Go to your medical doctor. Tell them you have this. Let him clear it up and then come back and we’ll put you back on the program, and it should work.” That's how stupid I was. The people came back and they said the doctor says he doesn’t know what candida is, or he doesn’t know how to treat it, or some doctors were saying, “We don’t know anything about it at all.” So, I told them, what you have to do then is find a doctor who knows about this. And then so I looked it up, and I found Dr. Atkins at the time and Ronald Hoffman and Dr. Teplitsky and these different alternative functional doctors in New York City. And I said, “Well, go to those guys. They know about this.”
So, they went and then they came back to me, and they said, “Well, yeah, they said you were right. I did have candida, and they put me on a treatment and I got better for a while, then I kept relapsing.” So then I said, “Jeez, I got to figure this out.”
So, I spent the next 30 years studying candida and unraveling all its tricks. Then eventually, I wrote my book The Candida Chronicles, which we took the name from our newsletter that we had for many years, which was giving out information on all my discoveries about candida. And it was very interesting because, sure enough, when we cleared these people up of candida and put them back on the programs, they did fine. That experience was empirical to a degree. I mean, there was a lot that I’ve learned from the textbooks, but I essentially reverse-engineered the whole thing in order to figure it out.
So, I would listen to the patients and I would listen to what they said worked and didn’t work, and then I would go and look in the textbooks to figure out why that was. And that's essentially how I developed my candida treatment. I didn’t do it based on dogmatic laws that I thought had to be followed or data that was old or whatnot or insisting on certain things had to be a certain way. It was more by listening to people figuring out why something would work and wouldn’t work and then understanding through the existing knowledge that we had.
One of the first datums I came across was in The Merck Manual, which is a book that most doctors have in their offices. And The Merck Manual regarding candidiasis said that candida is caused by the indiscriminate use of broad-spectrum antibiotics and that if you continue to treat candida only vaginally, you will not get a result, the patient will not recover. You would need to treat it concurrently also in the intestinal tract. When I read that, it all made sense. That’s when I understood what it was I was seeing in their lab work. Because in the lab work of these people, there was a pattern in their white blood cells that was indicating an intestinal infection.
So, that's where a lot of it started for me. Then I just began to continue to deconstruct and reconstruct it and reverse engineer it until I got the program correct, and then at that point, I wrote the book several years ago. Once I felt I had enough of the secrets and the tricks that it plays, where someone could read the book and then have a workable solution, that's when I decided I was actually going to write the book. So, that's from when I first started studying candida in 1987 to like let’s say 2016. So, there you go, that's a little bit of time. But that's how confusing candida can be.
[00:15:29] Ashley James: I’m fascinated you said that when you looked at their bloodwork you could tell that the white blood cells, there was like a storm going on inside the intestines. You could see that based on blood work? Can you talk a bit about that?
[00:15:41] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Oh yes, it’s very simple. When your neutrophils are low, approaching below normal and your lymphocytes are high approaching above normal, that pattern of low neutrophils and high lymphocytes is the pattern for an intestinal infection.
[00:15:58] Ashley James: Whoa! Do all doctors know that?
[00:16:02] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, they don’t.
[00:16:05] Ashley James: This drives me crazy. And so, how did you know that?
[00:16:09] Dr. Michael Biamonte: There were some additives you can put on that. Also, very commonly elevated monocytes in eosinophils at the same time.
[00:16:19] Ashley James: So, did you learn that through this trial and error, like listening to the patient then going back and looking into textbooks? Is that how you discovered this?
[00:16:26] Dr. Michael Biamonte: No, that actual pattern I learned from Dr. Ken Brockman who was a barnstorming chiropractor back in the ‘80s, who was working on interpreting bloodwork using a combination of kinesiology in the bloodwork. So, what he would do is Brockman would take a guy, he would use kinesiology to figure out what was wrong and then he would look in the bloodwork to spot it in the bloodwork, and then he would duplicate this in enough people where he knew that that pattern in the bloodwork meant whatever it was.
[00:17:00] Ashley James: That is fascinating. From an outsider’s perspective, someone who’s raised in the mainstream medical system to believe that you wait to get sick and then go to an MD and get put on a drug, like that mentality, that lens that they see health through which is actually disease management, not health, you look at kinesiology and you think this is total witchcraft. It’s quackery, it’s snake oil. But then, if you go and have a session and do kinesiology several times with many different practitioners and then you can see it. Whatever they find in the kinesiology, they can then back up by looking in other places like you said lab work, and they can find it. It is absolutely fascinating. But from a quantum perspective, we are more energy than we are matter. Right? So, of course, there’s a way to communicate with the body other than physical, other than what we see is what we get. I love that. That is so fascinating.
[00:18:05] Dr. Michael Biamonte: And this is where you’re going to find the validity in Vega testing or the Rife machine, and so many of these other tests have existed that have advanced over the years that are based on frequencies in the body. I’ve used them all including kinesiology. They all have validity and they all work and they all helped me to understand what I understand today. The problem is, they’re not exacting. In the field of engineering which I heavily rely on because when I was growing up as a little baby doctor, all the people that I was surrounded by were all engineers. When I worked at Grumman Aerospace on that project, I worked with a group of doctors who were all systems analysis engineers, and they all had degrees in physiology.
So, I learned to view the body as an engineer, which is the way all health practitioners should be studying. And this is where holistic medicine tries to come in. But because they don’t follow engineering doctrines, let’s say, they can fall short. But this is where it comes from. The body as a system, a large collection of systems and subsystems, which all work back and forth. And where we got the name actually “biocybernetics”, biocybernetics refers to the study of self-regulating mechanisms, biological self-regulating mechanisms. This is also where the word “homeostasis” would come from. This is the body’s ability to try to maintain a balance. But when the body gets off balance, it then seeks to hold on to a balance which may not be correct because that’s what it knows. Many times, what chiropractors and doctors are doing is they're trying to reeducate the system, sort of like rebooting your computer to come back to a normal maintenance level, a normal balance. This is where candida comes in because candida, like many other infections or illnesses, continues to throw that balance off. The body continues to try to compensate for the presence of this organism. This is what makes it so interesting.
[00:20:21] Ashley James: So, when you say the body keeps adjusting, what kind of symptoms?
[00:20:27] Dr. Michael Biamonte: First off, the first thing to establish is that candida is normal in the body. Candida is a fungus or a yeast. It’s a chameleon-like organism. It’s sometimes called dimorphic. Dimorphic means to live in two different states. So, candida can be in your body as a yeast which women experience vaginally or it can be in your intestinal tract as a fungus which is part of your normal flora. It’s part of the normal aggregate of all the microbes in your intestinal, your biome which has become a popular term nowadays.
The problem is, is if you take antibiotics or if you take different medications, it kills the friendly bacteria which balance the candida out in the food chain. There is a food chain in your intestinal tract when it comes to microbes, and the food chain basically is that the friendly gram-negative E. coli bacteria act as a neutral area and the gram-positive bacteria which is the Lactobacillus bifidus and Lactobacillus acidophilus species are the more aggressive bacteria that actually use candida as a food and stimulate your immune system, help your body manufacture vitamins, help you absorb nutrients, etc. When you take something, an antibiotic for instance, or a steroid drug, or chemotherapy, or even antacid pills like Tums, they can kill your friendly bacteria and that allows candida then to go unchecked. The candida no longer has a governor there to balance it. So, it grows and it becomes dominant where it’s not supposed to become dominant, that grows out of control. And once candida grows to a population more than it should be or as a dominant part of your flora, now it’s excreting alcohols into your body because it’s a yeast.
So, what does yeast do? When you give yeast sugar, it ferments and produces alcohol. So, now you have alcohol levels in your body rising where they shouldn’t be. You have mycotoxins which are toxins that are formed by yeast and fungus going into your nervous system. You have all types of other … I think total there's over 50 different toxins we can identify that can releases into your body and they affect you neurologically which is why you find so many children with autism have candida. And children with autism, the prerequisites for a child to be autistic, as far as I’m concerned, are number one, he’s got to be born with a set of genes that make him a really bad detoxifier and then he happens to get an overload of toxins from the old vaccines that have thimerosal or from the mercury in his fillings, and that affects him neurologically.
But back to the person here, the person now has this candida overgrown in his body and it’s releasing all these toxins. The toxins are causing multiple problems. They're causing him to have brain fog, he loses his memory, he gets rashes, he gets asthma, he gets digestive problems, he’s bloating, he’s burping, he’s farting, he’s doing all these things. And the guy is saying, “Where did all this come from?” Because it’s the symptoms you wouldn’t necessarily associate having lower gas with brain fog, you see. So, the symptoms that candida can produce are of such a spectrum that it can be very confusing and you would never think that this was all coming from the same place. Then, when you have the fact that diet changes, so if the guy eats sugar or too many carbs that feeds the candida, and now you have more toxins forming, he goes into a toxic environment where his body absorbs mercury or copper or a lead or something, well then that further makes the candida worse, you see. He goes up to a hot humid environment, well think about fungus and molds and hot humid environments, well, that’s going to make it worse. See, so all these things are going on around him and he can’t quite put his finger on what’s happening but he knows that all of these different changes—changes in his diet, changes when he takes medicines or vitamins, because vitamins aggravate candida. It’s one of the things a lot of people don’t know.
B-Complex vitamins taken in the presence of sugar or carbohydrate would drive candida crazy. Because what do B-Complex do? B-Complex break down carbs into simpler forms of sugar for your body to absorb. Well, guess who’s standing right there waiting to absorb those sugars? It’s the candida.
Vitamin CoQ10 is going to aggravate candida. Vitamin D and iron can spread candida. In fact, some of the pharmaceuticals, the common ones like ketoconazole and nystatin, how they actually work is by blocking the candida’s ability to absorb iron and vitamin D so you can kill the candida.
So, you have all these things going on and this is what makes it such a mystery. This is why this mystery of candida probably could have only been solved by someone like myself who was looking at it from the viewpoint of an engineer.
[00:25:43] Ashley James: And you're not looking to wipe candida out because again, that's more of the medical doctor; the MD system is let’s throw a nuclear bomb at the body and wipe something out. But that is also just leaving the body susceptible to whatever is going to kind of grow in its place. And we need candida, like you said, it’s food for those good bacteria.
[00:26:05] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Right. You need a certain amount of it and you couldn’t knock it out totally even if you tried. I’ve never found that to be even possible because it’s so intrinsic to the gut, that you got to have some, so it’s not even possible to do that. But yeah, that would be a more allopathic viewpoint. But it doesn’t work if you're trying to do that.
So, here you have the person now, they have all these symptoms going on and there all these different causation points and they're utterly confused as to what it’s all about, what’s happening. Now if they go on the internet, I don’t know if that's good or bad, they're going to learn something about it, but then there's the old adage that a little knowledge can be dangerous when it’s incomplete. And you're going to get people who start self-treating. I’ve heard of a few people but I’ve never actually met anybody who actually self-treated and got rid of their candida. The best I’ve been able to ascertain that people have done is by staying forever on a very strict diet—a diet so strict that most people wouldn’t want to do it, they’ve managed to maintain their symptoms. See, because candida is literally a plant and as a plant, it grows roots, and these roots permeate your tiny blood vessels and your intestinal tract to draw glucose, to draw sugar out so that candida can stay alive.
So, if you go on a very strict diet, an anti-candida diet, you can starve the candida down to the point where like a wilted plant, it has not so much activity, but those roots are still there. So once you go off the diet, within a few weeks the candida grows right back and blooms to its former glory and it’s going to spew out all kinds of toxins once again, and you're right back in the same boat.
[00:28:04] Ashley James: So, in order to bring it back into balance, you must bring what eats candida back into balance.
[00:28:10] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, that is the goal. I preach this to my patients. The whole goal of my treatment plan is to reduce the candida enough to where we can get the friendly bacteria to take over again. And that sounds easy, but it’s not as simple as just giving the person a probiotic. On the step of my program where we reintroduce probiotics, in order to get to that step, the person has to have reduced their amount of candida, their total amount, by at least like 90 percent. And we have ways of measuring that with the urine test that we do.
[00:28:44] Ashley James: Really?
[00:28:45] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah. They’ve got to have it down by at least 90 percent, and they need to take a series of prebiotics. Now, a probiotic is the actual good bacteria like the acidophilus or the bifidus. The prebiotic, theoretically, could be any substance that aids the probiotic in returning or in multiplying or attaching itself back to the lining of the intestine. And while candida does not do permanent damage to people, there is something that candida does to the intestinal tract. And we never figured out exactly what that is, but it does do something that makes it harder for the bacteria to come back. I speculated that something to alter the collagen in the intestinal lining, it makes it a little harder for the friendly bacteria to reattach or reinoculate, as we would say.
[00:29:36] Ashley James: Wow!
[00:29:37] Dr. Michael Biamonte: But nonetheless, that’s the whole game. The whole game is get your candida low enough to where the probiotics will come back. And very rarely does anybody accomplish that because you have to handle the candida like peeling an onion that's layers. The step that we do right before we put the person on the probiotics is we give them antifungals which are fatty acid-based because those fatty acid-based antifungals are the only thing that can kill the candida deep enough in its roots to then allow the space for the probiotics to come back where the candida won’t repel. Because the average person with candida who takes probiotics, the probiotics will lower the pH of their intestines, which is a good thing. The candida loves the pH of your intestinal tract to be like over 7.4. Your body wants it to be between 6 to 7.2. When you take the probiotics, the probiotics acidify your intestinal tract. That's where we get the word “acidophilus” from. Acidophilus. Because the acidophilus releases acids, hydrogen peroxides and different things which lower the pH. So, when your pH lowers in your intestinal tract, a lot of the candida symptoms stop. But once you stop taking the acidophilus or the probiotic, the pH comes right back up again and then you have the same story.
But that is the goal. The goal is to take the probiotics and the prebiotics and get that re-established. Then, once that’s reestablished, then you can go and look at other aspects of what’s going on like does the candida produce different vitamin deficiencies or candida as a causative agent might be involved with mercury toxicity. Once you’ve reestablished your prebiotics, then you're free and clear to go and handle all those other issues.
But if you try to do it the other way around … like there is a doctor I won’t mention his name. He’s very famous, and he’s in the Midwest. His whole gig that he preaches to people is you’ve got to get rid of the mercury; otherwise, the candida is going to come back, you’ll never get rid of it. So, he takes everybody and he puts one on mercury detox. And over the years, I’ve gotten so many patients from this doctor who have come to me because they couldn’t handle his program that it’s embarrassing. And it doesn’t work because when you start to pull mercury out of somebody who has candida, that mercury comes through your intestinal tract. Your liver dumps it into your intestinal tract as a way to try to get rid of it and wants to put it in your stool. But guess who’s sitting right there with its arms open? The candida’s right there saying “give me the mercury.”
Somebody even came up with this wild theory that your body produced candida as a protective mechanism to help against mercury toxicity. Well, that's total nonsense. Candida absorbs mercury and it uses it as kind of like a nutrient, but mercury depresses fecal IgE and IgA, so no wonder if you have mercury, you get candida, so it dampens your intestinal immune response. It’s not there helping; it’s not what it’s doing. Mercury and copper and other toxic elements, when they're in your intestinal tract will actually lower and suppress your intestinal immunity, and that allows the candida to grow.
[00:32:59] Ashley James: So, if someone has like I have this problem I have been working on detoxing heavy metals and I’m one of those people you mentioned that just is not great at detoxing. I’ve got MTHFR, my liver came in last in the race. And I’m doing everything I can naturally to support my body’s ability to detox heavy metals and it really helps. All the natural stuff I do really helps. But what you're saying is that when our body, our liver removes these heavy metals, puts it in the bile to be placed into the intestine, so we poop it out. We’re not pooping it out because if there's candida overgrowth, which so many people have, it’s really, really common, which is just crazy. Those drugs you mentioned—steroids, antacids, even chemotherapy and antibiotics, everyone’s taking at least an antacid or an antibiotic or a steroid. It’s very, very, very rare that someone’s not had any of those drugs.
So, there's so many people walking around with candida imbalance, and then if they're like me and they are overly toxic with heavy metals, if they start doing some kind of heavy metal detox, then the liver is pumping it into the intestines to be released, and then the candida is right there sucking it up and basically keeping it in your body even though it’s not inside your body, it’s inside your intestines, which is then, like you said, lowering the immune system to support the body in fighting off infection. The candida is almost protecting its own environment by sucking up the heavy metals. It’s like they're wearing a coat of armor protecting themselves against our immune system.
[00:34:48] Dr. Michael Biamonte: And this is what you’ll occasionally hear of doctors who will tell their patients that when you go on this candida elimination program, don’t be surprised if you start re-experiencing symptoms of toxic metals or a toxic metal detox because when the candida dies, it releases the metal. This is why in my Phase 0 program, my Phase 0 program is very specifically designed to be able to absorb toxic metals that come from the candida when we first start to eliminate this.
[00:35:16] Ashley James: I definitely wanted to get into the discussion, but before we do that, I wanted to go back because you had mentioned something. It sounded like biofilm. When you hypothesized that candida creates its own collagen to protect itself, to create its own little environment that not only protects itself but uses up the space so that the other healthy bacteria can kind of get in there and start eating up the candida. Is that biofilm?
[00:35:45] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yes, it is. That is what biofilm does. Biofilm is produced by a particular type of bacteria. It’s not all bacteria but it’s certain bacteria, and these bacteria release this mucus, slimy substance to cover themselves, to cover parasites, to cover candida in order to protect them and to protect itself. Even before we knew about biofilm, we knew that these phenomena existed of cluster bacteria. If you were in a little ship and you could drive through your intestinal tract and look around with cameras and lights whatnot, you would see that candida doesn’t grow in a uniform manner. Candida grows in a splotchy, uneven format. And this is why people will have candida, and you’ll find in those clusters of candida, you will also find harmful bacteria and parasites. They’re all synergistic and symbiotic, so they all tend to cluster together. We knew that before we knew that also biofilm was being produced in those areas.
[00:36:49] Ashley James: Is part of your program to strip away biofilm in the intestine?
[00:36:55] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Yeah, it has to be. Our Phase 0 program addresses that, the biofilm.
[00:37:00] Ashley James: Very cool. Yeah, that is such a big deal. I have so many questions for you, and I definitely want to have you back on my show. I know that you are really crunched on time right now, and we have just begun to open up this pandora’s box of candida. I’m going to make sure the links to all your websites and your book is in the show notes of today’s podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com. We’re definitely going to have you back because I’ve got like 10 more questions and then I want to dive into how we can start to fight this. But just letting people know that this exists, they're going to start listening to the symptoms of their body and going, “Wait a second. I really need to read The Candida Chronicles and I really need to look into this further.”
So, you do have at-home tests. Could you please let the listeners know? You have three websites, and you have at-home tests. Please let the listeners know what are the websites and what steps should they take to follow you and start learning from you.
[00:37:53] Dr. Michael Biamonte: The main website is Health-truth.com. The two other websites are The New York City Candida Doctor. It might be The New York City Yeast Doctor. I think they might have changed the domain. But it’s either The New York City Yeast Doctor or Candida Doctor, and The New York City Thyroid Doctor. Why we have the thyroid website is because candida hits your thyroid and your adrenals the hardest, and the one thing you’d be guaranteed is after you handle a candida patient and you got the acute phase of candida, you're going to need to do something to restore thyroid and adrenal function.
Many people treat themselves for candida forever because they still think they have it even though they have it suppressed or in remission. What they’re experiencing now is adrenal and thyroid exhaustion, and they confuse it with still having candida, so that’s why we have to separate those things out.
[00:38:45] Ashley James: Fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We’re definitely going to have you back because we’ve got to dive in. We’ve just sort of opened up pandora’s box and we’re going to dive in with the next episode. And I know you’re crunched on time, so I really appreciate that you took the time today to talk to us and we’ll have you back on soon to continue this discussion.
[00:39:04] Dr. Michael Biamonte: Okay, great.
[00:39:05] Ashley James: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Dr. Biamonte. Wasn’t that amazing? And this is just the beginning. We just have scratched the surface. Come join the Learn True Health Facebook group, ask your questions about candida. I know some questions have bubbled up for you after hearing just this first part. And oh man, I have my list of questions. I am so excited to dig into him next time. I’ve got him on the schedule for early October. So jump in to the Learn True Health Facebook group and let me know what questions you have for him. Let’s tap into the community and to the hive mind, and let’s come up with some really great ones for him. In my next interview with him we’ll just be digging in deep, figuring out all the why’s and the how’s and getting the plan of action that we can take so that we can take each step to resolving candida. But please, ask away. I’m sure you guys have got some great questions as do I. Let’s all join heads and think of what we can say to him. If you don’t have Facebook and you're not able to come on the Learn True Health Facebook group, you can always email me ashley@learntruehealth.com, although you're missing out because the Learn True Health Facebook group is pretty awesome.
Have yourselves a fantastic rest of your day. And stay tuned. Make sure that you subscribe. Wherever you listen, if you listen on iTunes, or Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Podbean, wherever you're listening from or even just LearnTrueHealth.com, you could be listening on my website, whatever app you're using, make sure you subscribe and make sure that you’ve got your notifications. So when I do list part 2, that it will be up there for you. And please, give us a 5-star rating and review. If you love my show, if it’s made a difference for you, I absolutely love it when I hear back from listeners and I see your reviews. It means so much to me. It warms my heart, it motivates me to keep going when I know that I’m helping you guys. So, you can help me in return by leaving a 5-start rating and review. I’d love to see that. And also, if you haven’t already, come check out the LearnTrueHealth.com website. We spent all summer long revamping it and it looks totally different. It’s super cool. There's a Choose Your Own Self-Healing journey on the home page. Just scroll down and you’ll see that. And you’ll find all kinds of really cool content there. So, go to LearnTrueHealth.com, check out our new website. Let me know what you think about. And hopefully, I’ll see you in the Learn True Health Facebook group soon. If you don’t know how to find that, you can go to LearnTrueHealth.com/group, and it’ll take you there. Awesome. Have yourselves a great day and I’ll see you in part two of this interview soon.
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