Conquering Candida: The Hidden Health Crisis

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TalkToMeGuy: Greetings everyone. This is the Sound Health Radio Show where we talk about the crossroads of the environment, our health and longevity, with Richard TalkToMeGuy and Sherry Edwards is off working on the Sound Health Portal. I would suggest going to the SoundHealthPortal.com, scrolling down just a bit and clicking on the Watch How button. You'll see a short video explaining how to record and submit your first recording. Then go back to SoundHealthPortal.com, scroll down to current active campaigns such as cellular inflammation, bio-diet, neuroplasticity, or memory.

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If you'd like to leave me a voice message with a question for a guest or a guest idea for a show, you can do that directly from the site and I will be notified. With that, Dr. Dean Mitchell is a board certified allergist, immunologist and integrative medicine specialist. He's been practicing for over 30 years in New York City where he founded the Mitchell Medical Group.

Dr. Mitchell is a national leader in sublingual immunotherapy, which is a safer, more natural treatment for allergies. He's not just writing prescriptions. He's a pioneer in holistic immunology who combines conventional and integrative care to address root causes. He's the author of Dr. Dean Mitchell's Allergy and Asthma Solution and hosts the Smart Medicine podcast where he explores cutting edge strategies for treating chronic illness. His newest book, Conquering Candida, is what has my attention. Dr. David Perlmutter calls it a deeply empowering lifeline, giving patients validation and a practical science-based solution for something that's been ignored for way too long. We're going to talk about Candida Overgrowth, his 30-day program to restore balance to your microbiome and why healing is not only possible, but in your hands. Conquering Candida puts his condition at the forefront of today's immune health crisis. Welcome, Dr. Mitchell.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

TalkToMeGuy: I have to say that this wonderful thing that you have on your website, right in the old days, it would be called a byline on a headline, where you say a real doctor can write a prescription, but a really good, holistic doctor doesn't need to. Bravo for being brave enough to actually say that.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah, I did see that line somewhere once I was reading it, but I think it was from, you know, it was a quote somewhere, you know, I mean, nothing against people with PhDs that brilliant and that allow them to do amazing work. But, you know, when you throw that doctor in front of your name, you know, sometimes a little bit confusing to the public.

So, and I kind of get a little play on that. And, you know, I deal with a lot of patients that see holistic providers that don't have a medical degree. And while some of them are very good, they sometimes also are working blindly.

They can't do the diagnostic testing that I can do. And again, also I see patients that come through from around the country that who've been taking herbs and followed it died and we'll discuss this about in the book, but they've only gotten a little better. And, you know, being able to write that prescription at times can be helpful if I need to.

TalkToMeGuy: It comes in handy. Yes, I would phrase it like.

Dean Mitchell, MD: So you like to have a Swiss army knife. Yes, what tools you have the toolbox. The more it's great. Exactly.

TalkToMeGuy: Exactly. And I will say about Candida that I years ago when I was doing terrestrial radio around 1983 insert flashback sound effect. I interviewed Dr. Ryan Truss, who wrote the book missing diagnosis.

Yeah, yeah. And that was about Candida. And he was the first doctor I at that time I'd got my degree as a master herbalist and I had an herb store and a retail catalog and national catalog. Okay, so I was just I've always been a wonk. And so I would go this is this is so long ago you had to go to the library and do research. And it was an amazing thing to hear when I saw your book. It made me flashback to thinking about Orion trust who wrote, you know, he wrote a series of papers that turned into a book in 83.

Dean Mitchell, MD: He was he was really one of the original I think even before Dr. Crook. Yes, you know, that's why I update my I felt the book really needed to update me. I mean, Orion trust, I believe he wrote a book I bought it once that I found it on Amazon. I think it was called like the mysterious diagnosis or something and you know again, you know him and Dr. Crook relied a lot on their clinical acumen, which was quite excellent. Yeah, they didn't have the benefit that I have today of the understanding of the microbiome and our understanding of immunology.

So yeah, they were really the pioneers and they also as I wrote my book I, you know, the pioneers always the guy with the arrows sticking out of his back like in the movies. Always a lot of heat. Yeah, a lot of heat. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: And that's what I remember talking to him. Unfortunately, those shows weren't recorded because that was way back then. But I do remember that at the time he was pretty persecuted. I'll use that word intentionally. I mean really for what he was saying in 1983 was pretty radical. I mean you're radical today, but the sense of back in 83 that was whatever 100 years ago.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah, in a different time in medicine, you know, things change very slowly. I also have my other little picture in one of my chapters, you know, medicine advances one funeral at a time. And I take it funny actually I let you to the medical students and I was teaching the things and I use that line, you know, medicine advances one funeral at a time. Yeah.

And what are the students to some key effect. Oh, oh, is that like when somebody dies. We learn more about them. I said no, I can say what it means is that unfortunately that medicine sometimes doesn't move as fast as we like and sometimes it takes, you know, literally that older generation to die off and let the new young thinkers come in and approach it in a new way. So yeah, yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: And you say Candida related illness has reached an epidemic proportion, which shocks me because of Orion Trust and other work you're doing. But it's been disregarded by mainstream media for decades. Why has this condition been so overlooked?

Dean Mitchell, MD: That's a really good question. That was like the central question that I have to address right off the front, you know, that first chapter. So a couple of things. Where your medicine has evolved as we know with all these specialists, you know, gastroenterologists, dermatologists, you know, you go to your gastroenterologist and, you know, you're having stomach pain and you have to also mention brain fog and I have fatigue. It's not that interested in your fatigue or your brain fog. And it may start to think you're a little bit, you know, psychosomatic, you know, but they'll deal with your stomach, you know, and the same thing to, you know, you go to your skin doctor and you have some rashes and say, oh, you know, besides my rashes, you know, I just am really fatigued.

I don't feel well, you know, other things and they're like, well, I'm just here to look at your skin. So medicine became very compartmentalized. You know, Canada, back in Dr. Trust's day and has not changed today, has a very complex presentation in a lot of the patients.

So I think that was one thing that sort of turned doctors off and left patients feeling not cared for. The second thing, which was a really big deal, you know, you talk about the 1980s, I actually trained my internal medicine before I specialized in immunology, allergy and sex disease. I trained in the late 1980s, early 1990s at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

And then I was working in the New York City hospital that happened to be a referral center for that at the time. And, you know, doctors did understand, I mean, if you're severely immunocompromised, you are going to get candlelight symptoms like what we call oral thrush, like a white tongue or certain kind of rashes. And so I think for a long time after that doctors, if a patient came to them and said, you know, doctor, I think I have candida, because I have all these different symptoms and maybe they read Dr. Crook's book.

And the doctor would kind of give this look like, no, you can't have candida and that can't be causing your problems because you're not immune deficient. So that was another problem. And I think what got overlooked, and I try to really point out in my book, what was happening, unfortunately, slowly, and then gradually and then suddenly was that antibiotics were being used very frequently and for longer and longer courses. And this was changing the microbiome. And this is what was leading to candida overgrowth.

TalkToMeGuy: And I was going to save this for later, but I have to ask now. You're not a fan of probiotics. And with everything trending and so much stuff out about probiotics, what is your thinking about probiotics?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah, you know, for a long time, I was on the fence about probiotics. I mean, logically, it sounds like it should be a good thing, right? We want to put back the quote, good bacteria. From my experience with patients, it was really 50-50 a lot of times. Some people got better, some didn't. I personally didn't tolerate probiotics. I had a sense of stomach and I didn't understand why, but it bothered me.

So I was kind of, you know, not sure. And then, fortunately, on my own podcast, the smartest doctor in the room, you know, for the last five years, I've got to interview top medical specialists around the country. And one of those who I interviewed was Dr. Mark Pimentel, who is the head of Pimentel Labs at UCLA. He is really one of the pioneers in what's called Irvabelle syndrome, IVF. And he's written books on this and he's published numerous papers.

And then my interviews with Dr. Pimentel was really interesting and I actually adapted this into my book. He basically explained why, in general, probiotics are not helpful to patients and possibly harmful. And one of the things he made a really interesting point was, you know, Lactobacillus, which is one of the common bacteria put into probiotics, he calls it the bully.

And it crowds out the other bacteria. And one of the main themes of my book and his work is that a very healthy gut microbiome and immune system should have a very diverse set of bacteria and viruses. So the probiotics are not really doing their job.

And then he cited studies that, you know, big studies that have shown where the probiotics were found not to really be beneficial and in some cases harmful. So that was, you know, surprising to me, but I thought important to put in the book.

TalkToMeGuy: I remember when I did a show of the people who did the research for the Blue Zone book. I don't think that was necessarily its title, but that study. And one of the things that they observed was that people who traveled a lot had better microbiome. And that always stuck in my research mind craw in the sense of that's an interesting thing to observe. So they're saying what that tells me is that the more diverse our microbiome is, the better. Absolutely.

Dean Mitchell, MD: That is the one really key thing. And you know, again, you know, somebody I interviewed on my podcast Moses Velasquez, who's actually a journalist, he's not a doctor. He wrote a very interesting book called An Absence of an Epidemic. And what he did, because he also had personal interest, he had an autoimmune condition. But what he cited in the book was very interesting. Like he cited studies that were done back in the day of East Germany versus West Germany before they were reunited.

And surprisingly, in East Germany, those people had better, healthier microbiomes than the people in West Germany, where there was supposedly better care and it was more affluent. And it really had to do with a couple of numerous factors. But one of them was that they, you know, they tended to eat more unprocessed foods. They worked a lot of them, you know, in on the soil so they inhaled probably good microbiome bacteria. So it was just really interesting how, you know, as great as it is to live in our Western cultures and to allow the advantages we have. But there are some things we have to be careful about that don't hurt our microbiome and our immunity. And unfortunately, long courses of antibiotics is one of them.

TalkToMeGuy: And back to the herb store days, I remember when women in particular, that's a whole separate question that I'll put aside for later men versus women with kidney. And I think that's what you do. That the ones that, well, I'll just say it, I had women who would come in and talk to me about their cycle or some kind of thing and they had, you know, they would have some sort of long conversation about the thing and the stuff and the why and the how. And then slowly as I would talk to them, I'd find out that they were on something like maybe they were vegetarian. So to me, the flag on the being a vegetarian is how are you getting your protein? Where are you getting your protein? What kind of protein? How it's the quality of the protein that you're eating. And so that's really hard. Being a vegetarian, I think, and I've had this conversation with serious vegans is really hard to get all the nutrients.

This is my view, micronutrients you need because we need some of those things that we get from fish or from grass, red, grass, finished beef or, you know, take your choices. And they would have, you know, some sort of thing like they'd come in. It was very popular for years to have the chronic fatigue syndrome, like that banner of whatever the heck that meant.

And I think that was my early, I think was one of the things that tipped me into stumbling into our Ryan Truss's work, which is your work of look, Candida is a thing. It just blows my mind that in this day and age, in the where we were 21st century, I think we are, but it still is.

Dean Mitchell, MD: I'd like to say one thing that's important. I think it's interesting because you brought that up. I've explored a lot of things over the years. I actually, back in the 1990s, flew out to the West Coast and went through Dean, Dr. Dean Ornish's program of reversing heart disease. I didn't have heart disease. I was just very interested in holistic medicine. So I went out there and I really became a believer.

Dean's a very convincing, charismatic position. And I came back and I was a vegetarian for about four or five years. And actually my health went down. Initially, you kind of feel good.

I think some of it's mental. But over time, because I was not being able to gain the protein and some of the vitamins, I started to get sicker. I had more anxiety. I was fatigued. And I had to make that big change because once you kind of go vegetarian, it's a little bit harder sometimes coming back.

But I realized I needed it. And I found over the years, honestly, my hardest patients sometimes to treat, especially with Candida, on my vegetarian patients, their diet is very skewed to a very high carbohydrate diet. And so it's challenging. And this also, again, carbs feed the Candida, unfortunately. So that's why balance is so important.

TalkToMeGuy: I always have, in my mind, I have a graphic. And the graphic is something like out of Mickey Mouse because we both have that as a visual and common. Of, you know, fueling, I feel like carbohydrates are the thing that stokes the engine of a train. And that's what I tried to get vegetarians to understand. You're just stoking the fire of how you're conditioned by eating carbohydrates only. How do you, you know, we need the facts.

Dean Mitchell, MD: It's very challenging. I mean, I look, I respect somebody philosophically or religiously wants to do it. I'll work the best I can with them. But if people come into me and they're always seeking what's the healthiest diet, and you mentioned about the blue zone. I'm fascinated by that. And I read the book and, you know, it's very interesting because in a lot of those cultures where people live to be 100 and are relatively healthy. I think there were a lot of factors. I think what people are taking into account in a lot of those places, the air quality is excellent. It's outstanding and which I think is a big factor in your health.

I think that's way overlooked. And also a lot of them, they do eat some protein. They eat a lot of beans. That's always been emphasized by Dan Butner. And they do eat meat and fish too. But, you know, again, in reasonable portions. So it's really all about balance.

TalkToMeGuy: Well, I think also from back to the blue zone for a moment that I think it was ultimately it was the men of Sardinia who seemed to live the longest, as I recall. And as you say, a couple of factors, you know, Sardinia is a small island off of Italy. So it's isolated.

That's good. So you're outside breathing clean air. You're probably drinking really clean water because you're isolated again. You don't have toxins from cars driving all around. Because then there's the whole, Stephanie Seneff who wrote Toxic Legacy about glyphosate talks about how one of the areas where you can't breathe is the water. And one of the issues with biofuels is that biofuels means that it's mixed with ethanol.

And it's not the issue of that. It's the fact that the ethanol is probably derived from GMO corn. And so when you make the ethanol, you don't remove the glyphosate. So what we have is now delivery systems of glyphosate being vaporized into the airs. So we're getting more of a toxic load. Yeah.

And so we're dealing with a lot of people who are in a place with wind blowing across them hiking up and down hills all day long, and they live a really long time. In a certain way, it doesn't seem like rocket science to me that there's a combination of, as you say, you know, what you, well, yeah, all that, everything you're saying. Yeah. Yeah.

Dean Mitchell, MD: You know, really, look, what challenge, like I said, we're really challenged, unfortunately, living in modern societies. And, you know, look, there's so many advantages and, you know, it does bring a lot of, you know, richness to our lives. But, you know, people are correct at being concerned. They're not crazy.

You know, I mean, we could sometimes laugh and smile. You know, I call my patients these days too, you know, following the Canada diet while it is restricted. Especially in the beginning, you're not looking as crazy anymore. I mean, all these athletes and actors and actresses, people I even see my practice in New York, you know, they're all following some version of this.

And now going to restaurants, you know, they don't give you a funny look or say, no, we don't have a, you know, gluten free options or anything like that. Yeah. They're accommodating everybody. Yeah. And people are doing this for a variety of smart reasons. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: And I'm going to back up here. What are some of the key signs of Canada overgrowth that people should be looking for? And because I suspect that they're, well, exactly what you're writing about, that there are, I don't know how many, I'll say thousands, thousands, probably tens of thousands of people who have what I will call and you'll say, well, I'm going to re-qualify low level Candida, which is just enough to cause some sort of irritation in their system, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what are some of the signs that people can be on alert for or aware of with Candida in the early days at least?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah. So what I did in one of the chapters in the book, because I've seen so many cases, and I hadn't seen this before, not even in Dr. Crook's book, which as I said, is a classic or was that I actually came up with a diagnostic staging of Candida. And I'll explain to you in a moment why. Because, you know, it's funny. Even my mother, when I sent her a copy of my book, you know, mother make my mom proud. She said, oh, I love this, you know, but she goes, I can't believe you can write a whole book about, you know, Candida yeast, you know, like vaginal yeast infections. I said, well, it's really not only about that.

Yeah. So what I found, and this was the big breakthrough, which again, I think even Dr. Crook, as good as he was, didn't really, they didn't have that information yet. But what I found out was that what I call stage one is the gastrointestinal stage and people can present with different kinds of symptoms. So again, somebody who's been on long term antibiotics or acid blockers like the next to him some prilosex, you know, some of the women have been on birth control pill for a lot of years, or somebody's been on steroids or any kind of immune suppression.

It changes the microbiome. And initially, since a lot of these obviously are orally ingested, the patients can present with GI symptoms such as they're getting bloating constipation, diarrhea, a lot of things that look similar to what we call IBS. But then what happens, and this is what again, Dr. Crook didn't really, they didn't know that again, this is something again I borrowed from Dr. Alessio Pesano at Harvard who did all the major work on ciliac disease. With that one, there's a lot of inflammation going on the gut. You can get what's called leaky gut. And that happens because the cells in the intestine are only one cell thick. So it's not a very thick layer.

They're lucky that they're usually protected by mucus and other things in our lining, but it's only one cell thick. So the yeast in Kansas, what we call can sneak out and go to other areas. That's why in stage two, women can present with the vaginal yeast infections. And that's why it will commonly happen to them after they've had a course of antibiotics. But just as common, which is a little bit unnoticed in stage two is chronic sinusitis. I see a lot of women and men who present with chronic sinus conditions that are seen by specialists like ENTs and they're treated with antibiotics and steroids and some of their surgeries, and they get better, they get worse, they get better, they get worse, but ultimately they don't really get better. And I help them. Also the skin, I consider stage two.

You know, sometimes I get people that get fungal rashes and they're growing or toenail fungus, you know, things that we say, they're a little bit of a nuisance. No, this is what I would call stage two of Canada. Stage three of Canada is when it actually, there's a lot of yeast in the system and even what happens in the brain, the yeast converts when you eat carbohydrates into, believe it or not, alcohol and the Cedal aldehyde, which give you that brain fog.

I actually, there's a very dramatic case in the book, which is the most extreme form of Canada, something called auto brewery syndrome. And this was a case, I just had a patient with this in my office last week, but there are cases documented in the medical literature of, for example, a patient, let's say a woman in her 40s or 50s, who has been on antibiotics for multiple courses and maybe also acid blockers and finds that she can't drink alcohol, even a little bit, because she gets drunk very easily. But what's even more dramatic and I tell the story in the book is that there was this woman, Jane, who realized she didn't feel good from drinking alcohol, so she stayed away from it. So she was at an office party around Christmas time one year, and she was at the party, and she didn't have any alcohol, but she had a bunch of carbs.

She had like a bunch of cake they had there and bread and enjoyed herself. And all of a sudden she gets her car and she feels kind of like a little bit off. She's not really sure what's going on. And she's driving and she must have gone through a stop sign and lo behold the police come over there and pull her over. And they say, man, you went through a stop sign.

She goes, oh, I'm sorry. And then the officer says, you know what, you smell like you're drunk. I like to do a breathalyzer. And the woman's like, I don't drink anymore. And they did the breathalyzer and she failed.

And she got a ticket and whatever. And then on valuation, she was like perplexed. And so her doctors, a lot of them didn't believe her. They thought that she was surreptitiously drinking, but she wasn't.

And it wasn't until she was referred to a specialist, like a GI specialist who did the breath testing with her and found that when she ate the simple carbohydrates, literally her breathalyzer kept on registering higher and higher levels of alcohol. And the last stage, stage four, which I put in the book is the chronic fatigue, which again has mystified doctors like why, you know, why these patients have chronic fatigue. I think I'm not saying all patients with chronic fatigue have candid, of course not, but a reasonable portion of them do.

And again, what I see, it's not always perfect, but they sort of go through these different stages. You know, it's like somebody with candid doesn't just start with chronic fatigue. If I get a really good history, typically they've had the history of constipation or some GI issues. They've had some history of like fungal skin rashes, you know, and, you know, etc. So that's what helps build my case when I'm just, you know, diagnosing them and eventually treating them.

TalkToMeGuy: And so we have all so all this comes together. So how long can somebody have, let's say just stage two rashes, maybe some vaginitis.

Dean Mitchell, MD: And they can go on for years.

TalkToMeGuy: And they can go from doctor to doctor or from practitioner to practitioner. Yeah, they're just everybody's poking at them with a stick, maybe doing some testing trying to figure that out. But they still have it. They go away going, well, you know, take this antibiotic, take this smear on this cream, and it's just palliative and it goes nowhere.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Well, not like something that only palliative. Sometimes it's actually has a negative factor. I don't give you an example. I'll give you two quick examples. You know, again, the patient goes to an ENT or the primary doctor and say, I have a sinus problem. I still feel terrible. So what does the doctor do? Okay, let's try some antibiotics again. And the patient feels slightly better for a day or two or a few days, because the antibiotics actually anti-inflammatory.

But ultimately it's like one step forward, three steps backwards. Another quick example is against the gerolitis patient goes to them, my stomach's hurting them. You know, getting all this bloating or reflux, and they put them on a stronger acid blocker, which makes their intestinal system more alkaline. And that lets the candidate grow because you really need your stomach acidity to kill organisms.

So those are two situations that I commonly again hear the story repeatedly that these patients are battling with and would ultimately lead them to see me or some other doctor that's experienced in diagnosing this.

TalkToMeGuy: You would think, I would think, I'll say this and this is in a kind way. I'm surprised there isn't a cult around you. And I mean that great way. Like you seem like you're a magical healer because you're taking in well known. I'm joshing mostly.

Dean Mitchell, MD: No, I appreciate what you're saying. I do get patients from all over the country though that it's really interesting today with telehealth. Like I'll do what's called an informational telehealth meeting with them because I say if somebody's in California or Texas, and they've heard about the work I'm doing. And unfortunately I do hear stories like them. I can't find a medical doctor that's doing your type of work. So we'll do a telehealth meeting.

TalkToMeGuy: nd nd also trained in Chinese medicine, not medicine, but Chinese herbs, which is a slightly different angle. And they would get to a certain level of feeling better, and their immune system was actually better, and the skin was clearing up, and things were working. But they'd keep coming back with it, but yet another effect of the rash would come back, or something would happen. Particularly when they'd go into what I would call a stress cycle of some kind.

There seems to be, at least in my world, there seems to be a stress can occur, a semi-healthy active person would have some sort of stressor event, and then things would happen. The stressor would be the trigger that would tip them over into like, oh, my rash is back, or I'm having vaginitis again, right? And now that the more I talk to you, the more I realize it's something is stressing out their immune system probably in their gut, and it's the candida. And the candida is an opportunistic nairduel, just waiting for a chance to bloom. And that's stress.

Speaker 3: Three points because, yeah.

Dean Mitchell, MD: That's a great point. Actually, I'm going to put that up because it was, you know, we deal with all the science and people say stress, everybody's got stress, well, they do. But sometimes we all know there's chronic stress, and there's very intense stress. But I do tell patients, I said, you know, when you're under a lot of chronic stress, it's like eating 10 cookies every day.

And they go, 10 cookies. I said, yeah, think of all the sugar in that, because what the stress does, we know, you know, physiologically, it raises something called your cortisol levels. That's your stress hormone. And cortisol raises your blood sugar level. And sugar is what candida feeds on. And that's why we've known also for years, I mean, doctors won't dispute this. You know, patients that are diabetics, they're not well controlled, are very prone, you know, to like the women's candida vaginal yeast infections and, you know, the women and the men to fungal skin infections. So stress is a real pathway of having candida flourish in your system.

TalkToMeGuy: And I'm going to jump slightly here. Is it 50-50 between men and women with candida issues? I know from my own world, and from mostly what I've read, most of the information seems to be directed toward women.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Right. Now, you're 100% right. I mean, look, when I first started doing this work, I actually learned from my wife about this, because, you know, she's my wife, she's a great physician, Dr. Ricky Mitchell. And when we started practice together, we went to medical school together and everything. And she was seeing a lot of the women with chronic vaginitis. So I just also assumed early in my career, when I was doing a little bit more conventional allergy, that, you know, candida also was only with women and vaginitis. And then as we were working closely together and researching together and seeing more patients, I realized it is 50-50. It's just that, unfortunately, for the men, that 50%, they're totally unrecognized, because people don't think men can get candida overgrowth, but they absolutely do. It just manifests, you know, again, in the general area, the men sometimes have rashes on the penile area or in the groin, but it doesn't have to be that too. It could be the gastrointestinal response. It could be the brain response. So it's, yeah, it's way overlooked in guys, for sure.

TalkToMeGuy: I mean, this is a whole different show. I was a working chef for 20 years. I'll just sort that in. I was a working chef for 20 years. So I've been around a lot of people eating and doing all sorts of stuff. And men, I don't know what's wrong with us. Men just don't like to cop. Men do not like to cop to feeling not well. And I don't mean like actually sick. I just mean bloated.

I know a lot of guys who've been like, I'm really bloated. And it's like, I'm a big fan of hydrochloric acid because many years ago I interviewed Jonathan Wright, who wrote this wonderful book, Stomach Acid is Good for You. And so I've been a fan of taking hydrochloric acid with meals for a long time. And I've always had them with me and I'm with people that are going to, you know, so I was a chef when I go to your house, we're going to eat because I can't help but cook. And the guys will like try to, you know, do too much and they'll, you know, yeah, really bloated. And I'll give them a couple of hydrochloric acid and they'll call them the next day and they'll act like it's a miracle. Right.

Just in the reduction of, so guys are not willing to say, yeah, I've got some itchiness or scratchiness doc down there. I don't know what to do. So it amazes me how it really is 50-50 because I don't know, we're just wallheads. I don't have a question there.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah, the guys definitely don't, it's, you know, it's a sociological type of thing, you know, you know, you have to be macho, you don't complain. Yeah. You know, but yeah, that's why I give women a lot of credit. They're very smart. They're very in tune with their bodies.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, I always thought that I didn't know that much. Well, I started the Yerb store, but by the time I'd done five years later, I was like, women are really much more observant of their bodies.

Dean Mitchell, MD: And they get the credit too. They take, they take control of the family also, the health. You know, a lot of times feel like, even if they're family members, they're, even they're, you know, they're adult children or whatever, the moms are still involved, you know, which is, it's a good thing. It's a good thing to have your mom.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, yeah. The tricky part about that, I will back to the vegan yoga moms, is that then that means if the mom has gone vegan, that means the entire family, including the kids are vegan. And then I think you're setting up the kids, and I've gotten into fights with vegan yoga moms about this, that, you know, you're setting up the kids to not have all the full vital nutrients that they really need to grow and have great brains on. You're setting them up to be veganized, which I'm not opposed to being a vegan, but you really have to work at it.

Dean Mitchell, MD: It's not just- Well, that's the point, like you're making is just really important. You know, diet is not a benign thing. You know, again, one of the things I really emphasize in the book a lot in the diet chapter, you know, because we don't want the candidate diet itself also to be so onerous or punishment. They always tell people, I'm not the food police, I'm not going to come to your house and put in handcuffs because you had some carbs. But I am very careful in saying, look, this is a lifestyle thing, but we want you to have a good life.

I mean, I want you to be social, I want you to be able to go out with your friends. So we provide a lot of choices. You know, one of the things I really actually learned once a long time ago, I had a wonderful health food store in one of my offices, and there were some really bright, interesting people that worked in there. And one of the things that they did, they used to have a lot of these dishes, I would sometimes go there for lunch, and they would have like these different, you know, this is one of strict vegetarian, but they had a lot of like vegetarian meals that were like kind of mimics of like meatballs and spaghetti, you know, like it's with topo balls and certain things.

And I realized, you know, we all love our comfort foods. But if we make something similar that's healthier, then why not? Like, you know, for example, to what I try to do at home, you know, just to be a little healthier, I like always low pasta. So I buy, you know, the chickpea pasta or lentil pasta. And, you know, I get used to it, you know, and I throw in my veggies and my special kind of lentil soup sauce. And, you know, it's, to me, it's delicious, you know, I mean, you know, I wouldn't feel good for me personally, if I were to go to a place and eat one of those heavy tomato sauces, they put all the stuff in it, and that I would feel bloated, I would feel lousy and have reflux. But this way I found a solution that kind of reminds me of what's like eating pasta.

And I enjoy it. And that's what we encourage our patients, find and substitute in the good alternatives that they exist. And try and eat organic. Of course, if you can.

TalkToMeGuy: As much as possible. That's that's another tricky arena of like, I will use the term the dreaded soy. You know, how soy is so invasive. And I'm not anti soy, I'm anti not organic soy. Because soy is another one of those products, it's, you know, they're using glyphosate now as a defoliant to get everything off the plant before they harvest. And soy can be great, you know, when it's organic, the idea, I went through my phase of being a vegan, even post chef, I did it. And I was making my own, I was making my own tempeh, which is a fermented soy cake, which is really easy to make and pretty darn delicious.

I mean, breaded and slightly pan fried, it's as close as you're eating it to a chicken sandwich as possible. And it's, you know, very beneficial. You know, good clean soy is great. Dirty soy is bad news.

And there's so many protein drinks and so many products made out of soy, because it is a good source, but it has to be organic. Yeah, I'm that's the one thing I'm a sticker.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Well, we need, you know, which is it's going to be a huge challenge. It's out of our hands. You know, you only you only convo with your with your pocketbooks is that, you know, we just need healthier, safer food, you know, and just it is hard being your own policeman. Oh, yeah. In situations where you can't control what's available. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: I think we need more farmers markets. Because I think they're also really beneficial to society in the fact that we get together and talk. I think talking is beneficial, even if we disagree in certain areas we don't need to bother with at all, that we can still get together as communities or people anytime I go to the farmers market, there are people that I know that I'm talking with that we do not agree politically, but we can still talk.

We can still talk about all the thing, wonderful food and the, you know, the great produce and, you know, the things that they have there. And I will also say that having made my body weight and pasta, well, several times over in my life, I've never cooked in Italian kitchen, but I've certainly done enough with pasta that there are wonderful ways to make faux pasta, even if it is using a different kind of grain, a different noodle or different kind of pasta, like you say, these other kinds of pastas and making not necessarily tomato sauce. You know, like you say, a lentil sauce or any, you know, even a vegetable based sauce and a slight broth.

There are a whole world of, you know, stealing from the Udon noodle world of wonderful brothy soupy, delicious, flavorful things that can be quite filling and beneficial. But more, well, I will say I'm on a rant recently about grass fed, grass finished beef, because there are a lot of restaurants that are serving what is called, on the menu, it's called grass fed beef. But all the restaurants I have go, I go into where I know the chef, I ask them to come out and we have a conversation about the trick is they can advertise grass fed beef.

The real clincher is you have to look for grass fed, grass finished, because under the rules of grass fed, grass fed can mean grass fed grain finished, because they've given grains to cows right before they go to auction because it fattens them up and they get paid by the pound.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Well, that was the thing too, which I think they hopefully stopped to some degree of my mature. You know, I remember reading about this in the, I think it was in the New Yorker magazine, I was like, what are they talking about where they were feeding the animals, antibiotics, you know, because to fatten them up, I mean, what does that tell us about our society? Again, why is it a weight issue? Because again, the microbiome gets thrown off. And of course, it's got into our systems from eating the meat. Yeah, it's just, yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah, it's tricky. You have to pay attention to what you're putting into your face. It is the fuel that keeps us moving forward. And so back up to the gut and affecting, you know, it affects, it can affect our joints, it can affect our brains.

I think that's one of the tricky areas of Candida is it can have so many down spiral effects on the areas where you would never, a standard rheumatologist would not think of joint pain as related to a gut issue. Right.

Dean Mitchell, MD: And I think, I mean, look, it works both ways. You know, I, again, when I see a patient, I mean, I just want to, you know, I think a lot of times, if I get their history that, you know, Candida can be a factor, but of course, working with their rheumatologist or ordering to test myself to make sure there's not some other autoimmune condition going on that I should be aware of, at least give them options. But I think, I think, again, that was also really the groundbreaking work of Dr. Fasano, originally at Maryland, and he's now at Harvard. You know, you wrote a book called Gluten Freedom.

Yeah. And he's just a tremendous clinician and researcher. But again, he is really the one that proved this whole concept of leaky gut. You know, because again, we got used to hit leaky gut to go, gut doesn't leak, it's not a faucet.

But it essentially, things get through that barrier. And with proteins or certain things that leave the gut that are not supposed to leave the gut, go to other areas and they can go to joints, you know, you're going to get inflammation there. And that's what causes that arthritic pain.

So that's why, you know, it's so fascinating. I mean, you know, when I, back in the 1980s, when I went to medical school, there was like two little paragraphs in my pediatric textbook on celiac disease. And again, in those days, we were taught celiac disease only happened in children. And you had these pictures of these like little skinny kids, because they were really malnourished, and they had big bellies. You know, it was like, it was really quite dramatic.

And then all of a sudden, you know, dialed back, dialed forward, you know, 15, 20 years later, I'm in private practice. And the gluten craze is happening. And I'm starting to diagnose patients with celiac. And some of them have even minimal or no GI symptoms. Some of them had arthritis, some of them have an asthma. And by eliminating the gluten, those symptoms outside of the GI tract resolved. So that's, you know, that was, that was a big contribution to medicine.

TalkToMeGuy: Wow. That's a contribution. That's amazing.

Dean Mitchell, MD: It really is. It legitimized that you can have a condition that emanates or begins in the gut that has symptoms outside of the gut.

TalkToMeGuy: And how did we in traditional Western medicine, how did we ever separate? Oh, this is such a philosophical question of sorts. How did we start separating out? Well, no, let me reverse this by saying, I think the mistake for the, until I was in my, let's see, high school, graduated from high school, I had the same family doctor forever. And he was a family doctor. He was a GP. He didn't know, I mean, he was the same doctor who brought me into the world.

Dean Mitchell, MD: He was, you know, Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, they were kind of amazing back then.

TalkToMeGuy: Yes. Yeah. They were like, you know, a horse doctor. They like fixed everything. It was amazing. Yeah. And yet we started to do this thing where everybody is such a specialist, right, that they don't see the body as a system.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Right. Well, that's, that's, yeah. And that is my work because exactly what you said, it became like organ by organ, you know, actually, it was really funny one day, my, the chief of my department came in and he was talking about infectious disease and allergies.

I don't know. He looked a little dismayed that day. He said, you know, the problem with our specialty is that we don't have an organ to call our own. You know, it's like the cardiologists have the heart.

Gastroenterologists have the stomach and intestines, you know, the neurologists have the brain. And I remember thinking to myself, wow, but that's what's great about what I'm doing. You know, we're like these medical detectors, it doesn't have to be isolated to one organ. And, you know, even just as a quick jump to like things like Parkinson's disease, I was reading the paper that day. I mean, and I interviewed somebody, a really great researcher on my podcast about Parkinson's and they believe 50% of the cases are coming from the gut. And I think the other 40% or so are coming from, it was just in the paper the other day, you can't remember the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, was coming from the environmental toxins. Like they found like people that, that either live near a golf course, you know, where they use all the pesticides or people who live like near a major highway have like 120% higher incidence of Parkinson's disease.

I mean, so, you know, these are telling us that when you're breathing into the air, when you're swallowing through your food or your medicines, this all has a very real impact on your immune health.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah. I have so many bad words about what they do at golf courses. Just the amount of, you know, one of my favorite hashtags.

Dean Mitchell, MD: I'm lucky I don't like golf.

TalkToMeGuy: Yeah. I'm a tennis player. Okay, that's a congratulations. One of my favorite hashtags is Total Toxic Load. And I say favorite in the dark of humorous side, just because it is really, you know, every time we turn around, we're doing something else, we're spraying something else. We're trying to trend kind of away from that. I think we've begun to pay attention like, you know, all the stuff we spray on from golf courses to I live in Northern California in wine country, where when the season, when the fines have been at a bud, the grapes have been in a form, pre sunrise, and they say because the air is really still at that time of day, you'll see people on tractors in full hazmat suits spraying the vines.

And now really full hazmat suit. So what you're applying is that bad that that person shouldn't be exposed to it at all. Really not kidding. And I'm constantly yelling about that. Just, you know, that's something that's, so you're waking up in the morning and there's a mist in the air. Oh, what's in that air? And it's, you can actually smell it. It's quite fun.

Dean Mitchell, MD: You see like wine country times pictures of it. They look so beautiful and natural and like, you know, there's a business like everything else. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: We're going to jump ever so slightly because we're going to run out of time any moment now. Okay. You're also a leading expert on toxic mold and chronic inflammatory response syndrome. How does mold exposure tie into this whole picture?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Yeah, that's interesting too. Yeah. You know, something like more than 10 years ago, I knew nothing about mold. I mean, I knew a little bit of actually, I shouldn't say that. I knew it has applied to allergies. I had patients that were allergic to mold and they were sneezing or they were wheezing.

They were, they were kind of like rare cases, but it was interesting. But then I started getting these people calling me up, prospective patients, they said, I think I have toxic mold. Can you help me? And I said, I don't really know anything about this. And I would try to refer them to somebody else, but they didn't really exist. And then I had read about the work of Dr. Richie Schumacher in Maryland, who had really been sort of the pioneer in diagnosing this condition of toxic mold. So it got my interest. And I did some work with him for a while. And then I ended up really working more closely with Dr. Neil Nathan. This really been my mentor. And, you know, I guess, you know, it's kind of like that Kevin Costin movie, you know, Bullderm.

Like, is it that one way where you build it, they will come? I, you know, I started to see more and more of these patients presenting with exposure to toxic mold. And unfortunately, through my working with Dr. Nathan, I got really good at diagnosing and treating these patients. And one of the other things I found just in connection to my work with Candida is that, you know, mold is, is a type of fungus, you know, obviously it's external, you know, you can breathe it in. And Candida is an internal one that we get from things like in our diet and medicines.

But what I wrote in my book and one of the chapters, because I wrote there is a connection, it could seems to me that patients who can't, they're overgrowth or even more susceptible to mold exposure. Because I call it like the frat party. It's like, you know, when these two guys get together, sometimes they, you know, yeah.

So, so that's what I see. And you know, it's a real problem. I mean, unfortunately, because of climate change and the flooding that's going on around the country. And, and people aren't even really aware how in their home residences or sometimes they work, how their exposure to mold can really have debilitating effects. That's a whole other show.

TalkToMeGuy: Mold is. Mold is. It's so, well, I believe, I believe you're right, you know, that Candida and mold are kissing cousins in a certain way, in that they're both really silent and stealthy and may look like something else. But I've worked in situations with people in with mold. And it's amazing how it's just so again, it's back to being immunosuppressive or immuno altering. Because it's just this low level chronic thing that's just in the air. And it's, it's bad news. I have somebody in chat. I want to get this in before we go. Who's asking about, have you seen any correlations with Candida and parasites?

Dean Mitchell, MD: I really haven't. Parasitic testing is very challenging. Because parasites can hide in the like in the liver and some other places. And, you know, we tend to really typically worry about people getting parasites when they've traveled to like third world countries.

So I can't really say that I see a very close connection between Candida and parasites, although, you know, obviously, parasite, you know, parasitic infections can cause a whole host of symptoms that might be similar to Candida.

TalkToMeGuy: Okay. And I, we have to go a couple of minutes long, because I have to ask, you're a pioneer in sublingual immunotherapy for food allergies. You know, this is very fancy talk for drops under the tongue. How does that connect or I will say lead your integrative approach? Because I think that's another technology that's like, you're not doing homeopathy, you're actually doing sublingual substances.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Right. Right. So just, I guess quickly, like about over 25 years ago, I was trained as a conventional allergist. I gave allergy shots the first five, six years of my practice. And I was getting some people better, but there were occasions people that had anaphylactic reactions from the shots, which surprised me because, you know, my training, I guess I didn't see enough patients to see that happen. But once you start getting very busy, and the numbers go up in your practice, then the odds go up that that could happen. And I was really dismayed, you know, as a young doctor back then. And I was just really fortunate because I was thinking of just like kind of leaving allergy altogether and just focusing on some other areas of medicine. When I read an article in an obscure journal by a doctor who was doing sublingual therapy work drops in the Midwest, and he was working with the Europeans who were like way ahead of us. And I flew out there.

This was before Google or the internet really was 1998, just before. And I trained with him and I came back to New York and I started doing it. And I saw a few things fairly quickly, one that it was very safe. So that was impressive.

I mean, we didn't have any bad reactions. I also saw the patients were doing it, which I at least surprised me because, you know, a lot of times people, you know, are non-compliant with things that they have to do at home, but they were. And then eventually doing more and more, I was like, wow, this is really working. And all of the research and the literature supported that.

So I did that for a good, you know, 20-some-odd years. And the other two things I started to do along the way, were one, I started using it for Canada. Because I also felt that by using the drops and using the same principles, that this was building up the immune system in these patients. And it did two things. It allowed me one to expand their diet, you know, because you can't leave someone on a very restrictive diet for a very long time. And it also decreased the need for antinophenyl medications. So that was a very important thing to me. And just as an aside with the food allergies, I decided a little bit too, that at this stage in my practice, I mean, a little bit was the Holy Grail, you know, especially kids and I have adults that have those dangerous food allergies. Like if they by accident, they eat a peanut or, you know, a walnut, they can go into anaphylaxis. And the literature again, I, you know, I based on some of the work of somebody named Edward Kim in North Carolina, they showed that you could desensitize patients enough so that they could be protected from these dangerous reactions.

So I thought again, with my experience with sublingual, if I'm not going to do it, who will? And I've been offering this to patients, I've been doing with patients and really thank God, the patients are doing really well. Now, we don't tell the patients go out and eat peanut bar jelly sandwiches, but it's enough that they should know by doing the drops that they could go to friends parties or weddings or whatever it is, restaurants and not worry that if they eat by accident, a small amount of something that they're allergic to, that they can end up in the hospital. So that was the goal with that.

TalkToMeGuy: And so you take a substance and reduce it down enough so that it's really giving the body a clue that it can do or you're actually building the immune system.

Dean Mitchell, MD: So the difference between that and homeopathy and I'm not a homeopathy specialist by any means, but it's interesting how treating like is the same principle. But what we do is we start with very dilute doses of what they're allergic to. And what I do is every month with their drops at home, we increase the strength until we get to what's called full concentrates, which a lot of times is equivalent to I'll give you an example.

And it's interesting because the literature keeps on supporting this. So we do this build up and eventually in the drops, they're getting the equivalent to probably a tenth of a peanut, for example. And believe it or not, which is very interesting immunologically, just consuming that amount will actually allow you to tolerate.

They've shown in some cases six or seven peanuts. So again, it's this whole process of desensitization and changing the immune system in a good way so that they're more protected. Yeah, it's kind of fascinating, really. And it's very natural too, because no long term side effects are in it, which is really nice. Wow.

TalkToMeGuy: That's a radical medical thought. No side effects. What? Wow. I'm surprised that I'm at the point where I ask you, where would you like people to find your book? And what is your website for listeners?

Dean Mitchell, MD: Oh, thank you. So yeah, my website is Mitchellmedicalgroup.com. I think you can get a lot of information on some of the different things we do in the practice. And I'm excited, you know, you can get Concurrent Candida on Amazon. We've sort of hit the the best list in a couple of the categories in health. And I hope people will read it and get hopefully a lot of information to get better.

TalkToMeGuy: I highly recommend it, because I've always felt that, you know, Candida is one of those things that's just sort of over there in the corner. And unless you're a doctor such as yourself who gets it and understands the invasiveness of it, or the potentially invasiveness of it, is that, you know, especially with you, you had a dietician co-author your book with you, it really is kind of self-winding. You could go, I mean, there's no harm in going through this diet. That's in the form of a question.

Dean Mitchell, MD: I'm sorry. The diet's very safe. It's good to have support from family members. And maybe I also just to mention to, you know, again, locally, wherever anybody is in the country, I think a lot more functional medicine doctors are aware of Candida. And I think they just need a little bit of, you know, more information to really take their patients to the next level. Yeah. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: Are you training people to do your work yet?

Dean Mitchell, MD: No, I haven't been doing that. I did the patch for the sublingual drops, but I'm hoping that we can do webinars or some kind of education. I love teaching. I love teaching medical students. I love teaching my patients. And I'm very open to teaching other doctors who want to help their patients. Yeah.

TalkToMeGuy: Online, you know, that's the amazing, you know, that's the thank you COVID for the, you

Dean Mitchell, MD: yes, it has changed the world.

TalkToMeGuy: Somebody's better. You know, we can, everybody's happy to get on a Zoom and talk about everything. All right, doctor, that was great. Very.

Dean Mitchell, MD: Thank you. That was a great interview. Appreciate all the points you brought up.

TalkToMeGuy: Thanks very much. All right, everybody, I will hang up now. And I mean that in a kind way. Everybody have a great rest of the weekend. Bye bye.

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