Greetings.
It's New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher.
Thanks for checking out my video.
We're going to talk about testing for SIBO, so small intestinal bowel overgrowth.
How do you test for it?
How do you know you've actually got this bug?
If you know what the signs and symptoms are, you may identify with some of those that we've
spoken about.
But what are some of the medical tests we can do to determine the accuracy of our personal
diagnosis?
There are many tests you can do.
Breath tests have been used traditionally for some time now to measure hydrogen or methane
gas that is produced by these bacteria inside.
So if you breathe that out, we can measure that.
But these are notoriously inaccurate, and I've actually given up on these tests now
because I find many people, in fact, come back with false results.
They can produce methane; they cannot produce methane.
It's not necessarily a 100% iron clad guarantee that they will have these bugs or even know
exactly what bugs we're dealing with.
A more accurate way to test for SIBO is a stool test.
It's a much more accurate way, and we take stool samples on three concurrent days.
We can actually culture the stool and we do a microscopy, so we actually look at the stool
through a microscope, and we can actually culture it in a lab in petri dishes to see
what we can grow out of it.
It's a much more accurate way.
When you do these kinds of tests, you're better off not having any pharmaceutical medications
or dietary supplements that can influence the bowel, generally for about a week prior.
I prefer it to work like that.
And I usually let the patient eat what they feel like eating because that way we're going
to get a more true representation of what is really in the digestive system.
The first page I look at will be the bacterial panel to show me the beneficial, the commensal,
and the dysbiotic, the three types of bacteria there.
You should have high levels of all the healthy bacteria, the E.coli, the lactobacillus, the
bifida bacteria.
The various bacteria there should come back with 3 or 4 plus in a healthy stool in a stool
test.
Many people come back with very low levels.
Enterococcus and other species I see.
There are many species.
We shouldn't really see any dysbiotic bacteria.
We shouldn't be able to culture any bad ones, but with SIBO, we often culture multiple species
of bad ones.
The next thing I look at will be the immunoglobulin circulatory IgA, and that should be at a healthy
level.
And we often see that at rock bottom levels with people with SIBO.
If we want to look further, we can look at many other pages on the stool report to determine
many other factors.
This video is not really about stool testing, but it's about testing for SIBO.
What you want to do also is clearly understand that many people with chronic Candida actually
have chronic SIBO and Candida in combination.
They have both of these infections combined, and that's a real problem with some people.
Particularly people who've had antibiotics recurrently.
This is what I commonly find.
Antibiotics will actually allow Candida to thrive and also kill off the beneficials and
allow the dysbiotic bacteria to come back again along with the Candida, so they'll have
a whole mismatch of different types of bugs in their system.
The worst-case scenario when we do stool testing is multiple Candida species, low beneficial
bacteria cultured, and high amounts of dysbiotic bacteria.
Those are truly difficult cases to work with, and it's taken me years of experience to work
out how to deal with these patients.
One of the reasons why I developed my own range of Canxida products to deal with these
types of patients.
I'm going to do some videos shortly on why I don't agree with prebiotics as part of dietary
supplements.
In fact, I was just listening to a very interesting podcast from Dr. Siebecker, the SIBO specialist
in America, who agrees with me that prebiotics are not a good idea to add in with probiotics.
And when I developed Canxida Restore, I purposely left inulin, FOS, and these other sugars out
unlike other brands like Syntol, ThreeLac, Floracor-GI, all these products; they actually
put prebiotics in.
I've given up using those products now because I've just found that people with SIBO react
too much to these products.
Just be careful what you're taking.
If you've got SIBO, avoid prebiotics.
But testing, have a good think about it.
Do my Candida quiz.
That might give you an idea on Candida and dysbiosis in general.
Generally, you don't need to do a test to determine if you've got SIBO.
A good idea for you is to take a good antifungal product to see what happens.
That will be a good step in the right direction.
If you start getting improvement, you know that you will have wiped out some bad bacteria.
You can do the methane or the hydrogen breath test if you want.
But if you come back with negative, it's not necessarily positive that you've got no bugs.
I think the best way is to treat.
If you've got the gut feeling you've got SIBO, just treat it.
Take a good antifungal like my Canxida Remove product.
Just take that for a week or two and you'll soon know if you've got SIBO or not.
I hope this video was of some use to you today.
Thanks for tuning in.