Starve Candida – Feed the Flora

My sister-in-law sent me an email the other day asking me a question.

Q: Have I heard of Threelac?

One of my work colleagues has suffered with candida and finds this is the only thing that works for her – without having to cut out the sugar in her diet. I’d be interested to see what you think?

A: In short the answer is yes I have heard of Threelac. The next part of the question deserves a bit more explanation.

I used threelac for my daughter as it was the only probiotic I could get into her. This was a few years ago, she was about 8, had a candida infection and couldn’t swallow tablets. The convenience of Threelac is that it comes in individual sized portion packs in a powder form.  Easy to swallow with a glass of water and pleasant tasting.  Highly recommend it for children as well as adults.

Now to answer the next part of the question. In my opinion and from my experience – no one particular product whether it is a probiotic, apple cider vinegar or coconut oil will kill a Candida infection on it’s own.  You still need to add other fermented foods as well as cut out sugars. I tried doing this for so many years, but the fact is it doesn’t work long term. By this I mean I would take stand alone products, supplements, remedies etc with a slight improvement here and there. Basically I wanted to take short cuts. I didn’t want to have to eliminate sugars from my diet.  I wanted to get well but keep eating the way I was eating.  The end result – it didn’t work. Once you have had a Candida infection or overgrowth the chances of it coming back are very high!  It often takes 6-12 months on a very clean diet to hit Candida on the head and then to watch very carefully as you reintroduce foods and watch what your stools present or if symptoms return.

Sugar unfortunately is the one food that will continue to feed the Candida.  The threelac may be providing some relief but eventually whether your friend decides to go off threelac or not the Candida will build an immunity to it and the underlying problem will still be festering away.

Think of it like this – we have cockroaches in our house.  Cockroaches are a part of society we can’t really exterminate them and I’m sure they have a place in the food chain that’s important in the insect world.  In order to eradicate them from our house we decide to use a bug spray to kill them.  So we set baits and spray wherever we think they live and when we see them.  All is good for awhile.  We are not seeing as many, so we are not spraying.  A turn in the weather hits us, we have a few really mega hot days or summer comes with a blast and next thing we know there are cockroaches crawling everywhere.  But this time they are bigger, grown somewhat mutated and developed a resistance to the bug spray!!

So it is with candida!  These guys live in our eco system as part of our make-up.  They are mean’t to be there.  However if the environment of our gut gets “too hot” or out of balance, or we hit a curve ball in our diet or our health, these guys start to grow and breed.  Regardless of the “bug spray” we might be using on them, if we are still feeding them the diet that they thrive on it will only look like we are dealing with the situation.

By all means use threelac as it’s one of the easiest probiotic to take especially for kids.  Just remember that Candida feeds on all sugar.  Sugars from milk, dairy (lactose) sugars from grains, sugars from fruit(fructose) and sucrose.

Here’s another picture to ponder