Heartburn and Candida: What is Your Gut Trying to Tell You?

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions. And on this week's episode, we're going to talk about heartburn and yeast overgrowth. Now we've got some great questions. Let's look at the first one. The first question is by Lori. So let's listen to what Lori has to say and what she's wondering about with her Health.

Hi Dr. Hyman and team. I've adopted the EFGT philosophy for nine months now and I've lost 27 of 60 pounds. I need to drop. I'm active again. I want to take my health to the next level, but I've had 24 hour a day heartburn for a year. My question is, should I continue to assimilate the EFGT way of living or not? My naturopathic doctor tried to help me lose the burn naturally, but it persists. I have a tiny hernia above my belly button. In desperation I went back to my MD In July she put me on PPIS and Zantac and says it's for life. I'm not sure if I should believe her, that it's too much acid or is it too little stomach acid. The MD wants to up the dose of PPIs. I want to stop taking chemicals. I take all the supplements you suggest and have even cut out bulletproof coffee, teas, chocolate, citrus, garlic, onions, mint. I drink ginger tea. I chew dgl, licorice to no avail. I value your suggestions on stomach acid and how to lose the burn, but keep using food as medicine. Many, many thanks, Lori.

So Lori's asking some really good questions about reflux and about treating it, about whether she should take acid blocking medication and what's causing it and should she change her diet. And these are all awesome questions. So let's talk about reflux for a minute. You know, one of the biggest selling categories of drugs are what we call PPIs or acid blockers. Now when I was in medical school, these drugs we were told were only to use them for six weeks, that they were highly powerful. They suppress stomach acid. And now we know that these drugs can help people with ulcers, but they should be used for a short time and they're given out like candy. And it's one of the biggest selling drugs ever. And when you take it, what happens is you suppress your stomach acid. You have a harder time absorbing and digesting food. You get B12 deficiency because it suppresses your stomach acid. It causes bad bugs to grow in your gut. We call Bacterial overgrowth, it can cause irritable bowel syndrome and it can cause osteoporosis, it can cause pneumonia. I mean, all sorts of crazy things can happen when you take these drugs, and they should be used very carefully and judiciously. So then the question is, well, if you don't do that, well, what do you do? What do you take? What are the right treatments? Well, we start out with dealing with diet, and clearly Lori has done that. She's gotten rid of a lot of the things that are triggering reflux for many people. Caffeine, sugar, processed food, fried food, spicy food, tomato based foods and so on. These are alcohol. All these drive reflux. Also can nutritional deficiencies like magnesium. So you want to look at the whole picture of what they're eating and then you want to understand, like what could be the actual cause. As in functional medicine, we look at the cause and for her, you know, it's possible that she's actually got bacterial overgrowth or yeast overgrowth in her gut, that she has food sensitivities that haven't been identified, that, that she could even have a bacteria called H. Pylori that needs to be treated. So we gotta go down into the depths to figure out what are the root causes. And if you don't deal with those things, people often won't get better. And I've had so many people on the 10 day detox if I get them, that they eliminate the trigger foods or they eliminate food sensitivities like gluten is a big one, and they get better very quickly. But for those people who need more help, they need to dig down and look at what's going on with their stomach acid. Sometimes we think it's lack of too much stomach acid, but it might be lack of enough stomach acid or even bad digestion, not enough good enzymes. So I really encourage people to look at holistically at all this, and I've actually written a great blog on this. I encourage you to check it out. Just put in hymen reflux, Three steps to get rid of your reflux and heartburn. So good luck with that. And I think if you just follow those instructions, you'll. You'll get rid of your reflux. So the next question is from Jacqueline, and it's a question that is often ignored by most conventional docs. In fact, they think it's nonsense. Now, I've been doing this for over 20 years, but the question of yeast overgrowth and imbalances in your gut flora is really at the core of what we do. And I can't tell you how many patients I've helped by deal. Helping them deal with imbalances in their gut flora, including yeast overgrowth. So the question is from Jacqueline. Let's listen to what she has to say. All right, so why does yeast overgrowth occur? How do we not get it? How do we deal with it? What do we do to resolve it? So when, when I look at a person, I look them holistically, I look at all their body systems, and one of the key systems is the gut. We now know the gut is linked to weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, autism, dementia, autoimmune disease, allergies, eczema, I mean, you name it. The gut flora pretty much drives a lot of those processes. And one of the things that happens in our society is we do a lot of things to cause imbalances, including sugar and our 152 pounds of sugar and our 146 pounds of flour and starch that actually fuels the growth of yeast. Also, antibiotics do as well. When you take antibiotics once or 10 times or more, it all drives the imbalances and leads to yeast overgrowth. That's why women get yeast infections when they take an antibiotic. The pill also does that. Female hormone contraceptive will actually cause yeast overgrowth, and so will other drugs like steroids or even acid blockers. It changes the PH of your gut, just like we just talked about. So there's many drugs that are problems that mess up your gut and then you get this overgrowth of yeast and if stress will also trigger it. So what I do is I look at the whole story. You know, have they had a lot of antibiotics? Have they eaten a diet high in sugar and flour? Have they taken acid blocking medications or hormones or, or take in steroids? And then, then what we do is we unwind that and we say, okay, what are the symptoms? Are they having vaginal yeast infections? Do they have rashes? They have eczema? I mean, there are a lot of reasons that that yeast causes problems that can cause it across a number of different areas of your body. So I really look at the whole picture and then decide what to do. And we get sometimes tests. We can do stool cultures, we can do urinary tests. We can do, you know, just a physical exam. Often we'll pick it up and, and then we, then we treat it. And we often will use diet, cutting out the sugar, getting rid of processed food, getting more probiotics in which help fight with the yeast and kills it, hopefully. So we can do stool tests, we can do urine tests, we can do physical exam and see if there's rashes or areas like eczema, dandruff, fungal growth under your toenails. All these things are clues that you can have yeast issues. And then I recommend a treatment program which is essentially diet and certain supplements like probiotics that help fight with the, with the yeast or also we give them herbs if things like oregano or berberine or other herbs, Loricide, which is actually a from coconut oil, which actually fixes yeast problems. And then sometimes I'll use medication, whether it's Nystatin, diflucan, sporonox. These are medications that sometimes need to be used in severe cases. But it's really about balancing the overall gut flora. And if you want to read more about it, you can check out my blog. Is hidden fungus making you ill? Well, that's all the time we have for today. If you like this video, be sure to share it with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter. And if you have any questions, you can tweet them to me or send your video submissions to Dr.hyman.com and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you. Thanks for watching.