1001: Gut Check: The Surprising Signs of Yeast Overgrowth (And What to Do About It) With Carolyn Dean

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I am back today with highly requested repeat guest Carolyn Dean, who is an absolute wealth of knowledge. I’ve had her on before to talk about minerals, magnesium and so much more. She is so well educated, an absolute wealth of knowledge. And in this episode we go into the science of gut check, and especially the surprising signs of yeast overgrowth and what to do about it. And as she explains in this episode, yeast overgrowth, not yeast itself is a problem. But overgrowth can be related very strongly to things like autoimmune disease to parasites, to skin issues, to hormone issues, to all kinds of problems in the body.

And that when we support the body in addressing yeast overgrowth, we actually help the body get all of those other things into balance as well, including thyroid. She makes a strong connection with autoimmune disease, with SIBO, with gut problems and why those things are all so related. And she’s so fascinating. She’s both a medical doctor and a naturopath. And an author with over 35 books, including bestsellers like the Magnesium Miracle, Total Body ReSet and more. And she, as you will hear, has such depth of experience and research as well as very practical solutions for these problems, and she has been working to really educate and bring help to people around these topics for such a long time. It’s an absolute honor to have her here. Let’s jump in and learn.

Carolyn, welcome back and thank you for being here again.

Carolyn: Oh, thank you. It’s great to be back. It was only three months ago. This is pretty awesome.

Katie: I’m so excited to get to chat again so soon, and you’re back because I learned so much from you and we ran out of time of all of the many things we could have covered and we didn’t even get into something that you are a deep expert on, which is the science of yeast overgrowth.

And I know this could be multi-episode topic just by itself but you’ve said before that yeast is normal, yeast overgrowth is not. So can you kind of give us a background explanation of what that means and what we need to know about yeast?

Carolyn: Right? Yes. Yeast is normal in the large intestine. So what happened, back in the, I guess the late forties, when penicillin was created and then it started to be used, within one year the doctors were saying, oh, we’re getting Candida albicans growth with the coated tongue, itching in women, vaginitis. They were describing external features of yeast overgrowth. Even back then, they knew there was a problem. And over the years it just, it got put aside. It wasn’t until the mid eighties when Dr. William Crook and Dr. Orian Truss started writing In popular books for the public on this problem that they were seeing in their practices. Which is give people antibiotics.

And what we know now is it kills off all the good and bad bacteria. And when the small intestine does not have the balance of bacteria, it’ll be a vacuum into which the candida yeast from the large intestine can just sort of crawl up looking for food. And if your diet happens to have a lot of simple carbs like sugars, then they’re being fed. And the other crazy thing about this migration is that a budding yeast will turn into a thread like Mycelia yeast. Which then these yeast researchers are saying, it’s gonna be poking holes in the small intestine. Which will allow yeast, toxins, undigested food, chemicals, whatever, to be absorbed. And then if you think of yeast itself and alone, it’s got 78 different toxins just produced by its metabolism.

And they’re going to be absorbed. So, if these 78 toxins, the ones that are really dangerous, I would say is acid aldehyde. Acid aldehyde will damage any tissue in the body. And the other things that produce acid aldehyde are cigarette smoking and gas car exhaust. Really toxic things that we try to avoid. It’ll produce excess alcohol. You can get to this, a state where you have so much yeast overgrowth and so much of this metabolic end products that you can fail a breathalyzer test. This alcohol is so extreme and so that people act like they’re kind of drunk and they get pulled over. They have a positive breathalyzer. Now it’s rare, but the fact that it can happen, you know, kind of proves the alcohol side effect.

The third one that I, well, there’s so many, symo, zymosan, Z-Y-M-O-S-A-N, it causes rashes that look like psoriasis. And the last one I’ll mention is candidalysin. And that was named because it was, it was discovered in… in… hmm… Japanese laboratories, I think it was. And they injected this candidalysin substance into rats and they just fell over dead it was so toxic. So we’ve got a problem that, I mean, we’d have to say it’s iatrogenic, which means doctor induced, to a certain extent with the drugs, with steroids, antibiotics. And then we look at dentistry. Mercury, that’s a strong antibiotic. It’s gonna kill off intestinal flora. We’ve got chlorine and fluoride in the water and that, those are strong antibiotics.

And then we look at the cross reactivity of some of these yeast toxins with body organs, especially hormonal organs. Thyroid is a big one. I worked with Dr. Ari Vojdani, and he’s quite a famous immunologist. He helped me set up my lab in Toronto where I wanted to, you know, where are the yeast antibodies? And I also did food antibody testing. And it really didn’t work to look for yeast antibodies because everybody has yeast. So everybody you test is gonna have yeast. And then we never knew what the high threshold of serious yeast overgrowth was. So what I did was just work with Dr. William Crook’s questionnaire. He wrote the yeast connection. He’s the most famous yeast researcher.

And his questionnaire though was 70 questions, seven, zero. And there was a Dr. Heidelman in Norway, I think it was, who reduced it to seven questions and that seemed to correlate with people who’ve had, who have yeast overgrowth. And that would, the questions would be like, do you react in a moldy environment? Have you had antibiotics? And there’s three questions about antibiotics. You know, how long you’ve had it. Have you been pregnant? Do you suffer from vaginitis, prostatitis? And do you always feel unwell? So people who answer those questions, we do have to look at yeast overgrowth. Unfortunately, allopathic medicine, it will, it doesn’t look there.

And what I’ve seen in even alternative medicine over the past number of years is they’re looking at the small intestinal microbiome as if it’s SIBO, SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So they think the bacteria the problem. I don’t know if they just don’t look for yeast, but any small intestinal imbalance is gonna be driven by yeast overgrowth. So what do they do for SIBO is they give antibiotics, which makes the problem worse. So, I have set the stage.

Katie: Yeah. That’s super fascinating and as you’re explaining that, I’m thinking of like the holes in the small intestine and leaky gut and all the implications we know downstream of that make sense to me. You mentioned antibiotics as a potential correlate to these yeast overgrowth, too many sugary carbs and sugars in general. That also makes complete sense to me. Then stress hormones. And you mentioned a little bit the hormone connection and even pregnancy being on that questionnaire.

I’m curious if things like hormone replacement therapy, birth control, other stages of life where hormones change, like how these come into play with the potential for yeast to get out of balance?

Coralyn: Oh yeah, definitely. This is where I bring in magnesium. You know I am the, what did someone call me late… the mother of magnesium. So what would be happening in my customer population, and we have a robust customer service staff, and what would happen when people start taking my picometer stabilized magnesium ions. Because with the ion, you can take enough to make a difference. You don’t get the laxative effects. So, after a couple of months on my magnesium, we were getting reports that people would say, oh my gosh, I felt so much better. You know, my sleep was better, my migraines went away, my heart palpitations went away.

But then they said, oh man, I’m getting a coated tongue and, and I’m getting gas and bloating and I’m getting kind of itchy orifices. And because I’ve known about yeast forever, I had my own yeast, that I realized immediately that these… Rashes as well. Rashes were, that was a big thing. The bodies detoxing through the skin and creating these rashes. So we wouldn’t say to them, oh my gosh, that’s terrible. And they, I guess a part of it would be people sort of blaming the magnesium for not working anymore and we just say. Great. You’re in a place now where your immune system has jumped up and is willing to work with this overgrowth of yeast. Because it, a weakened immune system from the yeast will actually kind of ignore the yeast because it’s natural.

The body thinks, oh, that’s natural. I don’t have time for that. I have to deal with other things. But then. Magnesium, which is responsible for 80% of known metabolic functions and 6 to 800 different enzyme processes in the body. The body is going to wake up and be able to deal with this yeast overgrowth. So, I mean, you can imagine, Katie, the people, they’re walking into their doctor’s office, and I didn’t say this, but in Dr. Crook’s questionnaire, there are 23 major symptoms and 33 minor symptoms of yeast overgrowth. Brain fog, fatigue, poor concentration, anxiety, depression. I mean, you go throughout the whole body and it’s fair… It’s very symptomatic. Because of all the toxins and the way that the immune system has to deal with those toxins. So. Anyway, back to you.

Katie: That’s so fascinating to me, and I think you just filled in a piece that puzzled me for a long time. So years ago when I was still working through Hashimoto’s, before I had reversed that and when I had like a lot of other health stuff going on, and noticed that if I took magnesium enough to actually get my levels up to a range where I started feeling better, I would start itching. And so I would always discontinue magnesium. And I would like, am I allergic to this? Why is it, why am I having this reaction? And now that I’ve done so much also to like reverse other aspects of health problems and I feel like I’m in a really good place, healthwise, I can take magnesium in the right doses, I feel amazing and I don’t have that anymore.

But I think you just explained why back then I was noticing that reaction. And you also touched on thyroid issues. Which I think that was obviously a part of my story and might be for a lot of people listening as well. So I would love for you to delve a little deeper in the connection here with yeast and thyroid problems, because I’ve never heard this talked about by anyone else.

Carolyn: Perfect. Dr. Vojdani, who I worked with, one of his papers was on the cross reactivity of yeast toxins with thyroid receptors. They get blocked. So there is definitely a correlation between yeast overgrowth and hypothyroidism. And I mean, chlorine can be in that mix too, fluoride, they can block thyroid. So it, and is that just directly the chlorine and the fluoride, or are, is it chlorine and fluoride creating yeast overgrowth and then those toxins block the thyroid? And I don’t know if we talked about this in our first discussion, but after I worked on the stabilized ion of magnesium I said to my chemist, I’m going to give you 12 trace minerals and I want them all as stabilized ions.

And in the midst of the research I realized that 9 of the 12 minerals I was working with support thyroid hormone production. So when, when I got the first samples of this multiple mineral and I took them myself, within six weeks, my hypothyroidism was gone. I was on 60 milligrams of Armour thyroid, and all of a sudden my hands and feet, which were still always cold, even on the Armour thyroid, they went warm and toasty, and I started to get even more hyperactive. So I, well, I should have weaned off my Armour thyroid. I know that. But I quit my Armour thyroid, and I’ve never looked back. So with my magnesium being up and my immune system being supported against the yeast, I was able to rectify my low thyroid that had been blocked.

I didn’t mention it, but you sort of, you mentioned hormones, birth control pill will stimulate yeast overgrowth as well. And what happens in hormone replacement therapy, just the natural menstrual cycle in pregnancy, when you have elevated estrogens, you are depleted of magnesium. From 20 to 30%. And that’s pretty amazing. Because when you think about it, when I used to menstruate many decades ago, when you were premenstrual would be the time when you felt the worst and had various symptoms. So magnesium plays a role in the thyroid and your hormone balance. Yeast plays a role and I mean, maybe it sounds a bit complicated, but for me it’s like, okay, deal with your yeast.

Now in dealing with yeast, because I know this is gonna be your next question, you know, how do you diagnose it? How do you treat it? So we’re talking about diagnosing it with just seven questions about antibiotics, getting worse in a moldy, like a moldy basement, pregnancy, just feeling fuzzy headed and not well, and fatigue. And then you look at treatment. And it used to be, I mean, when I first learned after my medical training, I studied my naturopath naturopathy and got my degree in that. And I learned about yeast. And I decided to treat it, which is a horribly strict diet. I say to people, you know, for 10 years I didn’t eat a speck of sugar, wheat, and dairy. Now we say sugar, gluten, and dairy. I didn’t eat a speck of it. I would be taking oregano oil or… I mean, I tried everything and it never really clicked until I created my own formulas.

Which is antifungal, a saccharomyces boulardii, which is a very gentle antifungal and a probiotic. And humic fulvic, which is a, like a soil based probiotic and minerals. It’s made from humus that’s been buried for centuries. You know, all the leaves and trees and everything that die and get crushed, well, they, they’re just so healthy with minerals. There’re whole companies, Katie, who just sell humic fulvic products. But, so I put that in my antifungal. And the real antifungal is silver picometer stabilized silver. Silver is so safe. It, people will think, oh, colloidal silver. This is not a colloidal silver com… mineral compound. It’s stabilized silver and it gets right into the cells. We use it for, in a nebulizer. You inhale it for sinus infections.

I’ll be taking it on a plane trip I’m gonna be doing in a couple of weeks. And I’ll either use it on the plane or when I get off to clear my nasal passages of any viruses that jumped into the mix. And when I’m mentioning that I should say. The immune system is so affected by yeast that you can develop other infections. I am quite convinced from my patient, previous patient population, and now my customer population, that when you have yeast overgrowth, that… I’m talking about it intestinally, but I’m talking about it in your sinuses, in your ear canals, in your mouth. In vaginally for women, prostatitis and penile infections in men. And what happens when your immune system is low and you have a lot of yeast, it’ll harbor viruses,  bacteria, and parasites.

And I know in my customer population, we do not have people who complain to us about parasites. When I start, I had yeast, I didn’t know it when I was going through med school. As soon as we got into the hospitals doing, you know, rotations, taking patient histories, et cetera, and that was a year two, I developed bacterial staphylococcal nasal boils. Be… which I realized later when I studied yeast overgrowth, that that was, that was yeast weakening or irritating, or creating mucus that harbored the bacteria. So. If I just go crazy on desserts or a lot of fruit, I might start to get an inkling of a nasal boil and I’d say, okay, quit that. I live in Maui I have to eat fruit. So anyway, I’m running around the block here, but maybe you can pull me back in line and ask me a question.

Katie:  That was so many good tips. I was taking notes the whole time, as I always do when I get to chat with you. And I would love to really like delve into the practical now because it blew my mind. We touched on this even briefly in our other episodes, but how much seems to be connected to yeast. And seemingly how this is kind of like the cornerstone that if we understand it and address it in a way that supports the body so we’re not further stressing the body out. But it can give the immune system, like you explained, kind of a leg up to battle all these other things that people are trying to sort of like tackle and spot treat, without having to sort of tackle everything differently.

Like you tied this into the thyroid, how it’s connected to hormones, even parasites, leaky guts, skin issues, like so much seems to fall under this umbrella. And it sounds like there’s some really important general guidelines, like minimizing antibiotics when we can, minimizing excess carbs and sugar when we can. Keeping hormones in the right balance, including our stress hormones. And then on the positive, making sure we have minerals in balance, and making sure we’re hydrated. Things like getting enough natural light so our cells are functioning properly. And I know you have whole protocols for this that I’ll link to, but can you kind of walk us through like what to do about it. Because I would guess a lot of people listening are hearing things you’re saying and going, oh my gosh, I wonder if I have yeast overgrowth.

Carolyn: Right. Again, it can sound complex, but the way I work it with people which are now my customers, I have, you know, several hundred thousand customers who use my product, so I, we get feedback. And what I say to people is don’t think that you have to deprive yourself on day one with whatever you’re doing that you think you’re doing wrong. Because if you give yourself a whole list of, oh, I can’t do that. I can’t do that. And you’re already feeling fatigued, you’re already on the edge of, I can’t take it. You’re on the edge of too toxic to detox. Then I say to people, and I’ve written this in my, I have a yeast book, I think it’s still available, Reset the Yeast Connection.

And I have to update all my books, Kate, because the FDA doesn’t like me talking about my products. You’ll notice I don’t say the names of my products. So it’s really quite crazy how we can’t educate the public. But what I say in my, in my protocols, is if you feel very toxic, then you start with psyllium seed powder. And psyllium seed is a bulker. It will pull out toxins. It will kinda stop some of the Herxheimer that a person is feeling. Herxheimers is when you have an infection and the die off products are making you feel miserable. Bacteria have toxins that give you a Herxheimer. So if a person is feeling miserable, they’re releasing all these yeast toxins and it’s affecting the body. So psyllium seed, one teaspoon to a tablespoon.

You put it in just a couple of ounces of water, shake it up real quick and drink it real quick because it turns into a jelly mass. And then you drink another eight or 10 ounces of water after that and it kinda brooms through the intestines. You don’t want to eat your, or… you don’t want to eat or take your supplements for an hour, at least an hour after that, to let it go through. And what I’m convinced that the psyllium seed, and bentonite clay that I’ll mention in a second, I’m convinced that they are going to help pull out plastics and, you know, maybe even the dying cells that have spike protein in them. Because our cells are always transitioning.

You know, we cannot put it in our mind that if we have poisons, heavy metals or toxins or even spike protein, that they’re always going to be there. Our cells are rotating anywhere from 10 days to maybe a month or so. And what my overall protocol is, make new healthy cells. You’re going to be making new cells, so don’t make them with sugar or omega-6 seed oils or any of the negative things that you hear about. We all know what we should avoid. But sometimes we just don’t have the willpower because we’re either addicted or just so fatigued. You know, we’ll drink all the coffee we can. Coffee drains your minerals. So you start with psyllium seed and pull out toxins. Bentonite clay, you can get edible clay, put a teaspoon to a tablespoon.

You can mix it in with a psyllium. It tastes, it feels kind of gritty, but it’s because it’s dirt. So you’re doing that to clean out the toxins. And then you’re starting to take the mineral support nutrients to make your new perfect cells. And in my world, it’s not esoteric herbs and crazy, crazy things that are now being sold. Our, the natural supplement industry has been so commercialized and flooded with all these, oh… I mean, alpha lipoic good if you have liver problems, it, everything has a place. But you have to start with the basics. Basics are magnesium and vitamin C,  vitamin C’s huge. It is so huge with yeast overgrowth because vitamin C and glucose compete for transport on insulin. So think of that. You, if you’re eating a lot of sugar the insulin’s, okay, I gotta push this sugar into the cell so it won’t damage other areas.

But if there’s also vitamin C involved and there’s more, kind of relatively more, sugar than there, glucose sugar, than there is vitamin C, the sugar jams into the cell. The vitamin C is not getting in. Vitamin C has to be in the cells to clear as an antioxidant to clear the waste products in the cells and to make collagen. So you really need to be taking food-based vitamin C and ascorbic acid. I’m telling people now, I’m looking at like 8,000, 5 to 8,000 milligrams of vitamin C. And you have people say, oh, it’s going to cause kidney stones. No, it won’t. Oh, it’s going to do this and that. I used to be just a proponent of food-based vitamin C because it has tyrosine, which is a building block of thyroid hormones.

So the vitamin C whole, and we talk about fruit for that. But you know, if you eat too much fruit, you will get elevated triglycerides. So everything has to be in balance. Okay. I know I sidebar a lot. So, I’m saying make perfect cells. You’ve got your bentonite and psyllium going, you’re taking your picometer stabilized magnesium ions. You’re taking your multiple mineral. And that’s supportive of the immune system and your thyroid. And you could add the, my antifungal and the picometer silver in amongst all that. And the picometer silver is amazing because it’s… hmm… Neutralizes toxins. So if you have herxheimers, this silver is going to make you feel like you can deal with a yeast treatment that won’t cause a lot of waste products.

I mean, people who try to go on strict diets for weight loss or strict diet for yeast overgrowth, they often just can’t take it because they have so many toxins they feel so bad. So then, I, vitamin C for sure, and then I work with D3 K2. I work with Omega-3 fatty acids, but from algae. I’m very concerned about the way fish oils, to make vitamin D, are cleaned with hexanes and gases and all kinds of things because they have so much mercury and toxicity in fish liver. So I go algae are, that’s the food that fish eat to make their own Omega-3 fatty acids. So I just go to the Omega-3 fatty acids of algae. And algae can be grown safely, organically, and it doesn’t have potential toxins of the fish oils. And fish oils, they always made me burp.

That was another reason. And the third reason is I live in Maui and the whales that come here every season eat krill. And krill tends to be the biggest source of Omega-3 fish oils. And I’m not going to starve the whales. So I think I’ve covered everything. I also work with a protein… we, I don’t think we’re allowed to call it a meal replacement, a protein powder, which is New Zealand whey. Which is negative casein and very low lactose. So it suits people who, like in my case, I can take it every day, but I, perhaps the lactose sugar would bother someone who’s very severely yeast overgrown.

So that’s, that’s the basics. I find that if someone has a stable amount of yeast, that saturate… Sorry, stable amount of magnesium that saturates the cells and leads the immune system to work on yeast, that’s a starting point. And then adding just the other nutrients, you don’t get a lot of symptoms that are misdiagnosed. See what happens if you don’t have enough magnesium and you have migraines? Okay, you go to the doctor and you get horrendously toxic drugs for migraines because there’s such severe pain. If you don’t have enough magnesium, you’ll get heart palpitations, which is what I suffered from. And we probably said this in our first interview.

The reason why I got so focused on finding a non-laxative magnesium is I can’t take magnesium compounds more than 50 milligrams because they give me the laxative effect. And for doctors, even to this day, you know, famous doctors, on their worldwide blogs, are saying, oh yeah, just take magnesium until you get the laxative effect and then cut back and, and that shows you’re saturated and that is not true.

So we’ve got people with high blood pressure from magnesium deficiency. They’re given drugs. Those drugs deplete more minerals, and then their blood pressure continues to be elevated and they’re put on three more drugs. And then those drugs affect the magnesium again. And then they’re developing diabetes and cholesterol from magnesium deficiency. So that’s probably a repeat of our last conversation, but that’s where we can solve so many problems just by becoming saturated with magnesium.

Katie: Yeah. That’s so fascinating to me, and you certainly made a really strong case for that in our other episodes that I’ll link to of course in the show notes. And I was taking copious notes while you were explaining that even on little things like that distinction of both food-based and ascorbic acid form vitamin C. Because I know that’s a controversial, hotly debated topic. And what I think what really stands out to me about your approach as well is that all highlights working in harmony with the body supporting what the body already knows how to do. It’s not overriding anything. It’s not wiping out the yeast, it’s not attacking the parasites. It’s supporting the body and doing what the body already knows how to do.

just getting the things out of its way that are keeping it from being able to function optimally. And so I love that that’s been woven into every topic that we’ve gotten to talk about in every podcast we’ve had. And I feel like you’ve walked us through such a helpful protocol for if someone has yeast overgrowth already. What to do about it as well as some potentially things we can do to be protective and hopefully not get yeast out of balance in the first place. I wanna make sure we just briefly touch on as well, are there any other uncommon signs of yeast overgrowth that people might miss or not associate with yeast and or any other protective things that we can all do that are just generally supportive of the body and its resilience in keeping yeast in the proper balance to begin with?

Carolyn: Yeah, that’s a good intro to looking at the environmental associations with yeast. And what do you think that is? Mold. So if you’ve had a leak in your house and you know there’s black mold on the wall or hidden in a cupboard, and you are walking around feeling irritated. Your nasal membranes are irritated. You’ve got headaches, you feel foggy. And you don’t even recognize the mold. I mean, one of the things that a doctor should be asking when a person has those symptoms is have you had a flood recently? I just feel so badly for all the people who’ve been in, in these horrible floods and tornadoes and hurricanes they get wiped out with the water and they’re going to get moldy.

And there’s a cross reactivity of symptoms with people who have yeast overgrowth and who are exposed to mold. And that is evidenced by one of the seven questions, do you react negatively in a moldy damp environment? Are you worse in the fall when there’s rain and the leaves are falling and they smell moldy? Do you react when you’re walking down certain aisles in the grocery store? The laundry products are the worst because they start irritating the mucus membranes. But I think that’s a huge problem when someone has sort of…  If a mold expert comes in or and says, oh, it’s kind of mild, we can do this, or that, people don’t, can get away with just putting an ozone machine in their house putting it in a room where you shut the door, letting it run for half an hour, it can start clearing out the mold.

I have one, kind of a just in case, or to lend out to people. You can actually get rid of mold once you sort of clean up the area or even cut out the gyprock or the base board that is molded. But that is huge. I never really got into mold restoration or anything like that with my patients or customers, but I start with the ozone machine. What is your experience with mold and treating it?

Katie: Thankfully, as far as I know, I’ve never had a direct mold exposure other than in travel environments where I noticed my body react to it. But I haven’t lived in a moldy environment. But several of my close friends have, and I’ve seen the drastic process of remediation and then the like, kind of follow up on the health and how long it can take for the body to come back into balance especially after a long-term exposure. And I know that that’s also a thing that often gets missed for people because it’s not like there’s an easy, simple test to just to for sure know, yes or no if you have mold in your home. It’s a little bit complicated to even find out sometimes. And then remediation can seem overwhelming to a lot of people.

Carolyn: Right? I think there are services where you can order agar plates that you can open the top of an agar plate, place them around your house and see what grows. Something is gonna grow. And then you send those plates back to a lab and they’ll tell you if you have, you know, something horrible that you should be concerned about. So there’s that. And if someone is in a molding environment, you put them on a yeast protocol. Because you know that they’re cross reacting.

Katie: Yeah, that makes complete sense that almost nothing is ever a single cause. It’s like multifaceted. And I love that we got to do a whole other episode on this because we only briefly got to touch on it in our past interviews. And I feel like this of course deserved its own episode and probably could be many follow-up episodes as well. But is there anything related to this topic that we haven’t covered yet or that I haven’t thought to ask you?

Carolyn: I think, I’m just thinking now because I just visited a young friend who had a baby and I’m thinking how after you… Well, during a pregnancy and especially after delivery your thyroid can be really affected. Your hormones are elevated, so you can have yeast. I have had patients in my practice, way back in Toronto in the eighties, that the child would have chronic ear infections. I had this, a nurse who brought her son in, 18 months old, he’d been on antibiotics 10 times for ear infections, and she said, I just don’t buy it anymore. He’s, she said the discharge from his ear smells kind of moldy. And then I asked her, and yes, she had candida vaginitis during the birth time.

So we treated, she was, I think she was still breastfeeding, so we treated her with what I knew back then for yeast overgrowth and it stopped the whole process of these yeast infections. So yeast is big around pregnancy. As is thyroid. What happens with the thyroid with the pregnancy is you have to help grow your baby’s thyroid, so it does drain the nutrients that are working on your thyroid. And if you don’t have the nine minerals to make thyroid hormones, then you’re gonna be deficient and perhaps the baby will as well. And the way the, I don’t know if I talked about this before, but the way the minerals work, it, I don’t think it’s like an assembly line. I think everything’s going on at once.

But we know T3 and T4 thyroid hormones. The three and the four indicate how many iodine atoms are attached. So we think, okay, give more iodine and then we’ll get better thyroid. But the way the transition works to make the active T3 from T4 is it goes through selenium and cobalt and copper and manganese and molybdenum and zinc and magnesium. Not, I don’t know if I mentioned all nine, but it is quite a process that nobody is paying attention to. I mean, we’ve got these layers of possibilities where, I mean allopathic medicine, they’ll wait till your thyroid is punked out and give you synthetic thyroid hormone. Even in alternative medicine, they’ll wait till your thyroid is punked out and give you a natural thyroid hormone that doesn’t come close to having the minerals you need.

So what everybody is missing is this basic groundwork of the nutrients that make your cells and make it possible to, for you to be healthy. And for me, it obviously started with magnesium. I was in New York doing a clinical study on AIDS back in the early nineties using a herbal homeopathic acupuncture modality. And it was very stressful because Dr. Fauci was trying to stop people doing alternatives because he just wanted people to take his AZT. So major stress, you know, I went through early menopause, that, I was in my mid forties at that time. And I had yeast. I had everything going on. And you’ve mentioned several times about stress and the stress cortisol will also grow yeast.

It’ll also retain belly fat because when you’re under stress, the body thinks you’re going to die or you’re going to go through starvation. So it’s going to, it’s going to store fat. So all these things are mixed together. But I, if we just look at the basics, as I said, avoid sugar and gluten and dairy, maybe, for three weeks and see how you feel. And also maybe avoid fruit. And after three weeks start, maybe an apple, a tangerine. One or two fruits a day. And after that, maybe once a week, have some bread. I’m still not good with bread. If I eat it every day, I start to get gas and bloating. I’m not able to digest it. Maybe there’s an allergy. But you do your own experiment with these things and if certainly after sugar, you will, you can feel the difference.

So you do your diet, you take the nutrients I talked about. And as you get more energy with your magnesium, magnesium is necessary, as I said, for so much in the body, but including making energy molecules your ATP. And researchers, the mitochondria is where we make this energy. There’s so much talk now about, oh, mitochondrial disease and what do we need, and they never say magnesium. Whereas in mitochondrial research, everybody knows that ATP is really ATP dash mg for magnesium. You wouldn’t have that molecule without magnesium. But yeah, and the reason it’s ignored so much is because there’s no good blood test for it. So people ju… we’ve just dismissed it. Doctors think it’s a laxative more than anything.

So I guess I’m beating the drum for people to take more magnesium and if they get the laxative effect from the magnesium that’s in your cupboard, take my magnesium and see how much better you feel. So it can be very basic and very, quote, simple.

Katie:  Yeah. And on the magnesium side, I’ll certainly link to our episode all about that because you are of course one of the leading experts in the world on the topic, and you explained it so well in that episode. We’ve done two episodes together in the past. I’ll link to those. So if you guys haven’t listened, I highly recommend those. And this I feel like has been a masterclass in all things yeast, which I feel like is a topic that’s not as well known. It’s not as much of a buzzword. And from what you explained in this episode is seemingly connected to so many things and might be the missing piece for a lot of people on health, especially when you understand that the working through the yeast overgrowth includes things like getting your minerals in balance and how that impacts so many other areas of the body as well.

I’ll link to the products we talked about to more resources people can find where you talk about this more in depth. But Carolyn as always, such a pleasure. I loved learning from you once again, and thank you so much for all that you’ve shared and for being here.

Carolyn: Thank you. Can I, one more thing, you kept asking me, you knew there was something else. I equate yeast overgrowth and magnesium deficiency to autoimmune disease. When you think of the yeast toxins cross reacting with organs. What happens is the immune system will attack the toxins, but at the same time, they end up attacking the organs like collateral damage. So autoimmune disease, do a yeast protocol and take your magnesium.

Katie: Amazing. Well, like I said, all those links will be in the show notes. I love that we’ve gotten to do a few episodes together. Hopefully we get to do more again at some point in the future. But for today, thank you so much for your time.

Carolyn: Oh, and thank you for your work. It’s very important to get these messages out to people.

Katie: And thank you for your time today for listening. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you’ll join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.