Saturday, December 28, 2013

Candida Fungus Immune System & Hormones

What is Candida? innateintegrity.com

‘Candida’ is the popular term for an overgrowth – Candida albicans lives in all our mucus membranes, i.e. intestines, eyes, ears, bladder, stomach, lungs, vagina, etc. It is one of the billions of other friendly organisms that serve a useful purpose in the body. One of candida albicans’ important functions is to recognize and destroy harmful bacteria and toxins.

However, candida is not intended to overgrow and get out of control while the body is still living. When we are healthy, candida lives (in its yeast form) in our intestines where it competes with bacteria for room. Like bacteria, it is aerobic i.e. it needs oxygen to live.

Candida (like all yeast) can survive without oxygen by changing into its fungal, anaerobic form. It spreads rapidly into the area vacated by the dead bacteria, putting down roots into the walls of the intestines, and sporing through the gut wall into the rest of the body. When Candida is allowed to get out of control it changes its shape and starts branching out raising large families called colonies.

Donna Gates writes in her book Body Ecology:
"When the immune system is weak, Candida easily overruns the intestinal tract and the vagina, sinuses, and surfaces of the tongue. It also can burrow deep into various organs. A carpet-like mass will wrap around the spinal cord and the nerves and often accumulates at the base of the brain. It can mass around the heart and liver, and it can affect the reproductive organs, even causing endometriosis in women.”

These Candida colonies excrete over 79 different types of toxins (chemicals) which circulate throughout the body weakening the immune system and causing numerous symptoms and dysfunctions throughout the body. These chemicals cause all of the cells in the body to go rigid, even white and red blood cells.

Flexibility is very important for the functioning of cells, allowing nutrients and hormones to go in, and waste materials to go out, as well as other important activities. When red blood cells become rigid the transport of life-giving oxygen to all the tissues and organs is impaired. This causes the tissues and organs to lose their ability to function.

White blood cells fight infection, their job is also impaired as they are no longer flexible enough to envelop foreign bodies. When cell membranes are damaged insulin will have trouble doing its job – and insulin levels may have to be increased. This causes low blood sugar levels (hypoglycaemia; also called insulin reaction) resulting in low energy. Over manufacture of insulin exhausts the pancreas, causing it to dysfunction as well.

Rigid cells can also result in hormone imbalance, nutrient malabsorbtion and electrolyte imbalance. Basically the entire function of the body is impaired.

The substances that candida releases, decompose cell membranes, providing food for other microbes. That change is only intended to happen when the body dies, to assist decomposition, when candida’s functions and characteristics change for the purpose of breaking the body down.

If its present in large numbers, this means that your immune system has an unremitting battle to keep it under control – a battle which takes a terrible toll on your health.