Carolyn Dean: Well let's go into a little more serious topic here yeast and depression. I hope you don't mind my smiling on the slide as we go through but I think by the end you will be smiling because there are so many ways that we can turn depression around. Let's start by looking at what is depression in the World English Dictionary Encarta, they say the state upon happiness and hopelessness, a psychiatric disorder showing symptoms, just persistent feelings of hopelessness, dejects a poor concentration, lack of energy, and inability to fleet. It does affect almost 20 million American and two-thirds of those are women. Now my question first is what comes first? Hopelessness and dejection or does it begins with the inability to sleep, lack of energy, and poor concentration? Because in many cases, sleep deprivation and a lack of energy begins first and develops into symptoms that we then define as depression.
Sleep deprivation, women on the webinar will certainly realize that having had children and going through the years of sleep deprivation there, it changes your perception of your day and it changes your energy capacity and it's certainly the women who are working full time and have children are overworked. Stress and worry is another reason for causing this sort of sleep deprivation on losing sleep. Underline infection and inflammation are also part of the inability to get good night's rest and of course a poor diet can affect a person. We'll go into some of these things but especially the underline infection and inflammation. Lack of energy here, it can be created simply from a lack of proper nutrients, magnesium and the B complex vitamins are the most important. Of course lack of sleep contributes lack of energy. Then underline infection and inflammation, which will be focusing on today underlying yeast infection.
We had known for many decades that there is an association, a strong association between yeast overgrowth and depression and people with a history of the following, use of antibiotics, especially long course of the antibiotics, use of birth control pills, persistent digestive distress and recurring vaginal yeast infections. What I'll say before going into what is yeast defects, when you give yourself the diagnosis almost of depression and when you go to a doctor and say, I am tired, I can't sleep, I am fatigued, I am irritable, I am angry and especially if you say the word that I feel depressed, then that becomes an opportunity for the doctor to give you a prescription an antidepressant. It's the trigger that a doctor thought of is to into because it's what we learned in medical school.
If someone has these symptoms, you know not sleeping properly, not eating properly, fatigued all the time, then that indicates depression. And now that there are so many antidepressant drugs on the market, it's fairly easy for a doctor to write a prescription. When I went to medical school 30 years ago, we sent people with depression to a psychiatrist because of their specialty. It was more talk therapy back then and less medications. So now it's become very easy for people to be diagnosed with depression when may be it is symptoms of low energy and feeling over well and then fatigue. In the naturopathic sense, what we look at more the picture of what's going on in a person's life and their diet and what's going on with possible yeast overgrowth.
So in this slide, what is yeast? It's cousin to mold and fungus and it grows normally in our GI tracks from our nose to our anus and on our skin but it's there in small amounts. The nose is the most important place in small amounts. The job of yeast to chew up debris in our intestines and completely digest the food particles et cetera. When yeast overgrows under the influence of debris and dermis, the antibiotics cortisone, high sugar in the diets, yeast will take this food and kind of run with it, take the sugar and the carbs, it will run into the vacuum created by antibiotics when that kill off good bacteria. And it changes from a budding stage to a tissue invasive mycelial stage, little red like particles. These red like mycelia actually cause microscopic holes in the GI track and that's called Leaky Gut. The chemical byproducts of yeast metabolism can then be absorbed through a Leaky Gut. I know I am in a very short amount of time, I am trying to define a very complex condition but basically yeast grows in the intestines. If the competitive bacteria that keep the yeast in check are killed off by antibiotics, the yeast has a place to grow into. If you are eating sugar, wheat and dairy, then you will feed the yeast and it can invade your intestinal tracks and create these microscopic holes and create a Leaky Gut. Then the chemical byproducts can be absorbed into the blood stream and cause a variety of symptoms.
Dr. William Crook, the author of the Original Yeast Connection book and I co-authored with him The Yeast Connection and Women's Health. Dr. Crook discovered that 85% of depressed women having a history of antibiotics, birth control pill, digestive complaint to vaginitis found relief from depression and a host of other symptoms by following an anti-Candida treatment plan. So that's where we'll be going into. So as I said, it seems kind of easy to me to say this happens when you take antibiotics cortisone, you kill off the bacteria but not a lot of doctors think this way. So especially if you go to your doctor and you say, I think I have a yeast overgrowth, we didn't learn about this in medical school, we didn't learn that even mercury fillings or the mercury in flu shots, which have the ability to act -- the mercury has the ability to act like an antibiotic and kill off the good bacteria just like real antibiotics do and then allow the yeast overgrowth.
The birth control pill taking them, hormones on a daily basis, the estrogen hormones think to stimulate yeast growth, changes the PH vaginally cause yeast vaginitis. Then eating a diet high in sugar and simple carbs will grow the yeast. Even been stressed out can help to grow yeast because you are making cortisol, which is your body's own cortisone.
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