Hello and welcome to Nutrition Facts. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Today we're going to explore smart nutrition choices based naturally on facts.

Whenever there's a new drug or surgical procedure, you can be assured that you and your doctor will probably hear about it because there's a corporate budget driving its promotion.

But what about advances in the field of nutrition? That's what this podcast is all about.

You know the feeling, your energy is sinking, you have to will your eyes to stay open. And this energy ebb keeps returning day after day, is it your diet?

And lifestyle, genetics? Is there anything you can do about it? On today's show we look at the problem of fatigue.

Fatigue may be a symptom of a variety of illnesses including celiac disease, multiple sclerosis, PMS, depression, fibromyalgia, diabetes, hypertension and dehydration.

What about Candida? Candida hypersensitivity symptoms supposedly include tiredness. You don't know though unless you put it to the test.

What happens when people are placed on a high sugar diet?

Despite its extensive use in the brewing and baking industry, only about 5%, 120 healthy people have anti yeast antibodies in their bloodstream.

Whereas in people with Crohn's disease, that number is more like 60 or 70%. Most people with Crohn's have antibodies that react to regular bakers, brewers or nutritional yeast, which are all just different forms of a yeast known as Saccharomyces cerevasia.

But that bakers brewers nutritional yeast had never been directly implicated in Crohn's. Maybe the antibodies are direct reaction to it or maybe reaction to another yeast altogether.

And the antibodies are just mistakenly cross-reacting with regular yeast. And indeed, 5 years later it was discovered that antibodies against Candida, a totally different kind of yeast, the yeast that causes throsh and vaginal yeast infections, can cross-react with Saccharomyces.

So maybe bakers brewers nutritional yeast was just an innocent bystander all along. For nearly 30 years, we've known that antibodies to Saccharomyces are linked to Crohn's disease.

But instead of bread, beer and newtch leading to Crohn's disease, maybe Candida is causing the Crohn's disease and the antibodies.

Or hey, maybe Candida is the innocent bystander and exposure to food and beverage yeast is the real culprit. Yeah, don't know, until you put it to the test.

Take Crohn's patients remove yeast from their diet and see if they get better. If they do, then indeed it was the culprit, but if they don't, then maybe Candida is the real cause.

Before I get to the study, let me first just bust some Candida myths. Candida is a normal constituent of our gut flora.

Get some Candida in your bloodstream, though, and it can cause a life-threatening infection. But it's normal to have some Candida hanging around in your mouth or colon. It's location, location, location.

Just like having stool bacteria in our colon is normal, but stool bacteria in our blood or a wound would be bad.

Because the ability of Candida to cause problems in the wrong location, or in people who are immunocompromised, a Candida syndrome theory arose, linking the presence of Candida to all sorts of health problems, which led to Microphobia,

Fungal phobia, this false interpretation that the finding of Candida in your mouth or stool is evidence of some kind of infection rather than just being totally normal.

And if you think the authors are being a little over-dramatic with their phobia talk, just google Candida, and you'll see.

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