The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode - #359 - Dr. Michael Biamonte

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Candida serves two purposes. One, it serves to constantly stimulate your intestinal immunity to be on its guard.

The second purpose it has is when your body dies, Candida decomposes your body. You could talk to a hillbilly in the mountains of Ozark and talk to him about brewing moonshine. And he probably knows more about Candida than some of these people on YouTube talking about their Candida diets.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein. So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this.

Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Friends, I am so excited about today's conversation. I can't believe I have done hundreds and hundreds of episodes and have not had an entire conversation dedicated to candida. And before I tell you more details, quick note, little bit of a sad news, I accidentally didn't record the first couple minutes of this interview. So I'm going to tell you what you missed there. I cannot recommend Dr. Michael Biamonti's incredible book The Candida Chronicles Enough. It finally answers all the questions I have had for so long about this organism. Because yes, I've been there and there are a lot of candida myths out there, especially when it comes to things like candida diets, you're going to learn why that is and how you can actually combat candida overgrowth if it's a problem for you. We talked about so many things in this episode, including the uber importance of rotating antifungals, why you need to implement a very specific order of phases when it comes to combating candida, which is not just about candida. It's also about things like parasites, mold, heavy metals. We also talk about some shocking things you might not know, like how antioxidants and vitamins can actually feed candida, the difference between supplements versus pharmaceuticals in your anti candida journey, what it means if you get a vaginal yeast infection, and so much more. As for what you missed in the first few minutes, I'm very sad because it was truly riveting and fascinating. Dr. Biamonti told the story of how he became a candida expert. And long story short, what you missed is that he started working with a partner to co create bio cybernetics. And this was like way back, I think in the 80s. And the guy that he partnered with who was developing it was actually working on it for the aerospace program, because it's basically computer software that looks at your blood work, mineral tests and other lab tests to determine imbalances in the body. So they were creating this for NASA in order to monitor the nutrients of the astronauts. So he was working on that software. And then he realized that there was about 30% of people who had these really unusual results. And he realized the common thread was candida. I'm pretty sure that's everything you guys missed. So when this episode starts, it will be picking up with him talking about that story. But that's basically the beginning that was sadly lost. These show notes for today's episode will be at Melanie Avalon.com slash candida. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out.

Melanie Avalon
I can't wait to hear you guys think definitely let me know in my Facebook group, I have biohackers intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life comments something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love and then check out my Instagram finally Friday announcement post and again comments there to enter to win something that I love. All right, I think that's all the things as a brief reminder, this episode is going to start kind of abruptly because I accidentally did not record the first few minutes.

So I recap those earlier in this intro, you can rewind and listen to that if you missed that. And now without further ado, please enjoy this fascinating conversation with Dr. Michael Biamonti.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
So the only thing I knew to do at the time was to refer these people to some doctors who I knew had an idea I knew about this. And the only two doctors I knew at that time were Dr. Robert Atkins, whose office in Manhattan was close to mine, and then Dr. Ronald Hoffman. They were probably the first two functional doctors in history. So my patients went to Dr. Hoffman, Dr. Atkins. They got Dr. Atkins to autograph his book. And they told me, well, you know, this was much better because they knew what you were talking about. They said, you were right.

And they put me on this drug. And I stand and they gave me a diet. And I felt better for a few months. And then everything came back or just returned. And regardless of what they did, I couldn't get rid of it. So I said, I'm going to have to figure this out. So what I started doing is getting all these patients with Candida, and I sat them down, I interviewed them, I got all their symptoms, I looked at all their labs, and I started reverse engineering everything that was going on with them. And luckily, I got a couple of really good textbooks on Candida and Mycology, which is a study of fungus. And I studied these, and I looked at what the patients were doing. And I eventually had a clue as to how to treat this. And I started looking at all the treatments that they had been through with other doctors, and what all the other doctors were doing, and what the vitamin companies were telling me I should give the patients. So I immediately knew that was all wrong, because it wasn't working. So I got ahold of this fellow who was a Oriental medical doctor, who had written a book called The Holistic Protocol for the Immune System. And we then started corresponding, and we became friendly. And he gave me this concept, where you had to rotate antifungals, because Candida was very sensitive, and it would easily become mutative, and it would mutate against whatever the drug was, or the herb. And that was the first major breakthrough that I had, because that made sense.

And when I applied it, it worked. So what I started doing was giving people four different antifungals, had them take the four different antifungals four days each, they would rotate them every four days, and before you know what, their Candida levels dropped, and were stable. And I kept going on like this, and kept taking other datums, like probiotics, the next date in my head. So I got ahold of a fellow, you probably never heard of him, his name is Steve Barry. And he was the head person at that time at Great Smokies Laboratories, who you probably also never heard of. So Great Smokies Laboratories, now today is Genova Laboratory. They evolved into a much bigger outfit. But at that time, they were just starting out, is when they were just starting, and they were nice enough to allow me to work with their head of science in the lab.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
And they allowed me to do free stool tests on my patients, in order to see how they would respond to probiotics and antifungals. And the first thing I found out was is that Candida wouldn't always show in the stool test, but would show would be a pattern of certain pathogenic bacteria like Klebsiella and Citrobacter. And you would also see very low levels of friendly bacteria. And when I gave these people the rotated antifungals, all of a sudden, the probiotics started to rise on the test, even though I wasn't giving them any. I also found out in working with them that when I gave the patient probiotics, the probiotics would not really stick very well, and you wouldn't see them come up on the test. And especially with Bifidus bacteria. So from this, I learned that you this way, you've heard the term remove, replace. That's where this all started.

So I determined at that time that in order for this to work, you have to first remove the Candida before you give them the probiotic. And I also found that that Bifidus bacteria at the time was not surviving the oral trip down to the colon. So what I started doing is having people take Bifidus bacteria and implanting it directly under colon, and then it would show up on the test. So I went through about 15 years of this type of research with the patients constantly reverse engineering, and assuming that whatever they were doing was wrong and coming up with alternative ways that actually worked that I could prove working based on the tests. And that's eventually how I wrote my book, the Candida Chronicles. And the reason I call it the Candida Chronicles is because it really chronicled my journey in learning about Candida, which became kind of like the mountaintop to me.

It's like to handle this because it has so many tricks at place. And there's so many different things to know about it. Like for instance, another clinical pearl that I learned was that if you give your patients antioxidant vitamins while you're treating them for Candida, you're negating the whole treatment. Because the antioxidants, most antifungals are really classified as chemotherapy, and anything that's chemotherapeutic works by creating oxidative stress on the membrane of either a cancer cell or the microbial cell. So if you're flooding the person with antioxidants, you stop that and you're now inhibiting the action of the antifungal. So I learned not to give people vitamins while they were on a Candida treatment, or especially antioxidants.

Then I also learned that there was a group of nutrients that actually fed the Candida and made it worse. And I was shocked when I found out what nutrients that they were, because it wasn't what you would expect. It was things like vitamin D, things like coenzyme Q10, copper as an iron. And many Candida patients are anemic. So there's a desire to give them iron, because their iron levels are low. They're low in their tissues. Their red blood count can be down. But the problem is the Candida is absorbing the iron. As a matter of fact, one of the ways nystatin, the very popular antifungal drug, works is by blocking the Candida's uptake of iron.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
So now if you have a drug that's going to work to kill something by stopping its ability to Would it make any sense at all to give that person that nutrient while you're trying to treat them? No, of course not.

So this went on for quite some time, as I was saying, until I got this whole protocol together and I got all the axioms and logics of it together enough to get it in a book form where it would make sense.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, so many things. Okay, I think listeners can see now why I'm obsessed with all of this. Yeah, that the section in the book that talks about, you know, the different nutrients and things that you can take that either, you know, feed candida or neutral or protective was really mind blowing. I was like, this makes me rethink everything I'm doing.

Quick question. So that software, the bio cybernetics, did they end up using that for astronauts?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
To be honest, what happened was we ended up spending so much money on the project that they dropped it.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, really?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Yeah, they ended up dropping and they told us to keep the software. Well, it was, but, but it was true.

We were flying nutritionists and from all over the world, putting them up in hotels and we just really exceeded the budget. So unfortunately that's what the software still exists and it's being used by doctors privately.

Melanie Avalon
So like the knowledge that's in that software and you mentioned like it kind of being foreshadowing AI and such like if you were to use AI today, could you just give it your blood work and ask it questions and it would give similar answers to what that software was accomplishing?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Yes. Actually, I've tried that out of curiosity, and that is what will happen. The only thing about it is, there is some of the interpretation of the blood work was done by some doctors, one particularly very interesting fellow named Ken Brockman, who was a chiropractor back then, and he was the guru of this alternative blood interpretation. He was followed by a fellow named Jim Seema, who is still on the internet now, and he was still pretty prevalent. These fellows have a very expansive viewpoint on the interpretation.

They'll look at a blood chemistry, let's say, for instance, alkaline phosphatase. They don't look at alkaline phosphatase in the same way that most doctors would. If it suddenly goes high, you might have broken a bone, or if the enzyme is high, you may have cancer or something. They look at it from the viewpoint of what activates the enzyme. So alkaline phosphatase is a zinc-activated enzyme, and it's very heavily tied to your adrenal function. So when they look at alkaline phosphatase, they're actually looking at a measurement of your adrenal function. The same thing would be true as another example of BUN, blood urea nitrogen. Blood urea nitrogen is formed in your liver, but it's formed in your liver at the command of your anterior pituitary gland. So when they look at BUN, they're not looking at your kidney function the way most doctors would. They're thinking in terms of your anterior pituitary. So it's a whole different scope of interpretation. And some of that data, you're not going to find in the AI that's available today, because it's not that broadly known, is what I would have to say.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Fascinating. I love that you... It's like I would have been like a kid in the candy shop. Like you got the software, you got the stool testing for free, like getting to do all this stuff.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Marty Feldman from Great Smokies Labs was very, very, very gracious in helping. I have to really acknowledge him because if it wasn't for his foresight and his he knew, he said, you know, you're really, you're on the break of something because you're getting all this data together and you're organizing it, organizing it.

Well, he says, you're really going to find out what the deal is here with this. So he says, I have no choice, but to let your patients do these tests on, it's totally no charge. He said, because I want to see what you come up with.

Melanie Avalon
So here's a foundational question, and you've danced a lot around it. So you're mentioning how candida is so multifaceted, and it shows up in all these different ways.

And even in your protocol, which we can talk about later, but you have multiphases, and in some phases you address parasites, and in some phases you address heavy metals. And it's all, there's all these different components. And then even when you're talking about how the probiotic or the bacteria composition changes based on the situation with the candida, because there are a lot of people out there who think like everything is mold, or everything is parasites, or everything is heavy metals. It's sequenced.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Sequence, sequence. It's sequence is the key. Because if you do the wrong sequence, you make the person worse. Give you an example. There's a very well-known alternative doctor who's in the Midwest. I'm not gonna say his name. I got so many of his patients come to me because he absolutely, it's his religion that Candida is caused by Mercury. And if you're a Candida patient and you go to him, he tests you for Mercury. And the first thing he's gonna tell you is the Candida will never go away until I get this Mercury out of you. So he starts kelating the patient. Well, what happens is the Mercury comes out of the person's tissues, it re-enters their bloodstream, it goes to the liver, it gets sequentiated in the bile. The bile goes into your colon and now you're supposed to poop the Mercury out. But there's the Candida sitting right there in your intestinal tract. So the Candida ends up getting dumped with this huge load of Mercury. And so naturally what happens, the Candida flares up. And nine out of 10 patients who came to me from this doctor, they couldn't do his protocol because it made their Candida so worse, so much worse.

They just couldn't deal with it. So that was another piece to the puzzle in terms of understanding how you deal with these things. The other issue is that when you don't have proper Bifidus bacteria in your colon, your body can't detoxify properly. The Bifidus bacteria interacts with phase one and phase two in your detox pathways to help your body clear things out. So naturally then, the correct time to address toxic metals is after you've reduced the Candida and after you've gotten your flora back in some kind of semblance so that your detoxification pathways work better.

Melanie Avalon
So is the key that... Because again, going back to this idea where people are in the incorrect sequence often addressing these other things, is the key that like mercury, not everybody technically... Not everybody has mercury overload parasites. I mean, I'm sure most of us have parasites, but it's not necessarily problematic in everybody.

Is the key that Candida is a natural part of our flora anyway, so it's always there. So there's always the potential for it to flare up.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
100%. It's a normal part of your biome.

Candida serves two purposes. One, it serves to constantly stimulate your intestinal immunity to be on its guard. The second purpose it has is when your body dies, Candida decomposes your body. Embalming fluid is nothing more than a major shot of antifungal.

Melanie Avalon
Whoa! Whoa! That's fascinating!

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Those are the two purposes of Candida.

Melanie Avalon
Okay

Dr. Michael Biamonte
So sequences, everything and handling it. But it says, I said, if you do something wrong, you get Candida patient comes to you, he says, Oh, I'm so deficient in all these vitamins. You test him, you find out, yeah, he has a heart problem. He, this guy needs a lot of coq 10. I need to give him DHEA also to strengthen his muscles, especially his heart muscle, you'd go through all of this. You give him all these vitamins and he feels worse.

Why does he feel worse? Cause all these vitamins are feeding his Candida, making his Candida worse. So to make a long story short, give you a synopsis, the proper sequences. First thing you do with the Candida patient is you give him a mild bowel cleanse that's going to be able to take, get rid of the top layers of harmful bacteria of Candida and especially parasites because parasites will ignite Candida, a person will get Candida just by having parasites. He's automatically going to have it. Cause the parasites release lots of ammonia in your intestine and the ammonia kills your friendly bacteria. So there's really no difference in having parasites than someone who takes an antibiotic and gets Candida. So you give him this mild bowel cleanse first, then you put him on the rotation of the antifungals. You, the, the, the first phase of our program, when you're rotating the antifungals will destroy about 70% of the Candida overgrowth in the body. Second step is you put him on special intestinal antifungals, which have the ability to go deep in the intestinal tract and kill the Candida really in the deep recesses, because you see, this is the Candida, which ends up coming back to a full blown relapse. And this is also the Candida, which inhibits the growth of probiotics. It goes back to the old, the old concept of remove first and then replace. So you get rid of that Candida that's blocking the probiotics from coming back. Now, once that's done, now you can give the person a probiotic program.

You can give them different prebiotics and probiotics. You give them fiber, you give them Saccharomyces, you give them FOS, you give them Inulin, you give them Clostridium, you give them all of these different things with the different probiotics, and now you have a chance that the probiotics are actually going to grow back and stick. Okay. That's done good. We've handled their biome. Now it's time to look at their toxicity because chemical and metal toxicity will flare Candida up.

So if this person has toxicity, you're going to get eventually a relapse of the Candida, so now we have to detoxify them. We always pay attention to the toxic metal first, because the toxic metal is what interferes with the body's ability to get rid of the toxic chemical. So we detox the person. Now we look at their deficiencies. So what do they, very often Candida patients are deficient in iron, they're deficient in molybdenum and magnesium, et cetera. So now we correct their deficiencies. Now we look at their hormones, but we looked at their deficiencies first because deficiencies of vitamins and minerals will affect hormones.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
See, so everything is done in a sequence where what you're doing now is automatically going to make the next step easier. So we get their vitamins and their minerals in a better balance. And now we look at the hormones because hormones can trigger Candida problems, especially estrogens will trigger Candida. So we get their hormones in a good balance.

Okay. Now at that point, there's not much left to do with them really, if, if they're pretty nutritionally sound. So at this point, you can now look at their immune status and make sure their immune system is okay. You look at all their, their white blood counts. You look at their immunoglobulins. You just, you can look at, do a whole, uh, whole major panel on their immune status to make sure everything is okay. Cause once in a while you'll find somebody who's so exhausted from having Candida that his thymus gland, his lymphoid tissue is not producing the proper immunoglobulins and what also can make this worse is most people when you, when you handle their biome and their Candida is gone, the complaints you're going to get from them that are still there is they're going to talk about their energy and their fatigue, which is better, but not fully gone. And that's because Candida drains the devil out of your adrenal gland and your thyroid gland.

In fact, Candida, I will go far as saying Candida directly attacks the thyroid gland in many ways. Many people with Hashimoto's have Candida problems. The immune system essentially has several parts to it, but one of the major parts to your, your immune system is your sympathetic nervous systems, innervation of the immune system. And a lot of that stems from your adrenal and thyroid function. So if you're, that's why people with chronic chronic fatigue who are so low adrenal are always getting sick. It's because that people don't think of the adrenal glands as being related to your immune system, but they're, it's a, they're actually majorly involved with your immune system.

So at this point, if you get all this straightened out, the odds of the Candida coming back are nil because you've handled just about every aspect of. of what Candida is and why it grows and what keeps it there and how we could relapse.

Melanie Avalon
And did you figure that out from trial and error of trying things in different orders with so many people?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Yes, to a degree, but the more you look into this and the more you research it, the more it becomes apparent. Some things you don't have to do trial and error, some things are just obvious.

Like when you get the person who every time they chelate mercury out of them, their yeast infection explodes. I mean, at that point, you can say, hey, I think we got it.

Melanie Avalon
Do most people have need to do every one of these levels? Or do some people skip through them pretty quickly?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Never had anybody skip a level, but I've had people go through levels faster than others for sure.

Melanie Avalon
Really quick question about the candida. Because we established that it's a normal part of the flora, it has important roles, but it is a problem when it's in the overgrowth state.

I've also read, and you mentioned this, that there's like, does it transform into a different actually type? What is the difference between the yeast form versus the fungus form? Like the hyphae? Doesn't it get like little legs or something? Yes.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Candida is like a chameleon. It's technically called a dimorphic organism. Dymorphic means life in two different states. So it's able to live as a yeast and as a fungus. So Candida can be in a fungal form or a yeast form.

When it's in the fungal form, that's when it's developing more of a plant-like growth. And then from there, that's only part one, from there, it then can mutate into other strains of Candida. When I was in Manhattan, we had an office in Manhattan for many, many years. We had a lab in the office for research purposes. And when I was there, people who would come in, we'd get a stool culture from everybody and we would see what type of Candida they had. And what was absolutely amazing is every single patient who came in who had the story of, Dr. Biamanti, you have never seen someone with such bad Candida as me. I've been to 10 doctors. I've spent $10,000, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of those people had Candida tropicalis. And the people who came in who never heard of Candida, they were coming to me because they heard that I was a nutritionist, that I could help them with their arthritis or some story. They all had Candida albicans. So right off the bat, all the people who were being treated for Candida, either self-treating or treating with other doctors, all had advanced species of Candida because they were treated incorrectly so long that they caused the Candida to mutate into more advanced species. That the people who didn't know anything about Candida, who were never treated, have the original basic species, which is Candida albicans.

Melanie Avalon
So that reminds me of something I would often read in the low-carbon ketosphere and fasting world, which was this concern that if you went on, for example, a low-carb diet for a long time or a keto diet, that it would just go dormant and then get worse.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Well, there's a reason for that is because fasting, for instance, if you went to an extreme, cannot get rid of candida. You cannot get rid of candida by a diet. There's no diet that's gonna get rid of candida. There's no amount of fasting that will. Because when candida advances and it starts to really evolve in your intestinal tract, it grows roots just like a plant. And what the roots are looking for is sugar. And these roots will literally break into the tiny blood vessels in your intestinal tract to tap glucose out of your blood vessels. This is one of the ways you develop leaky gut. So if you were to go on a keto diet or a low carb diet or even fast, your candida would wilt just like a weed and it would become ineffectual. But the moment you start to eat food again and you give it a little more glucose, it's gonna pop right back up like a weed getting water or getting rain. So this is why you cannot get rid of candida by just a diet or a starvation manner.

It helps tremendously to starve the candida. It makes it much more amenable to dying when you're starving it. But if you do that as your main treatment, you're never gonna get rid of it because that's not gonna kill the root system. To kill the root system, you have to use fatty acid antifungals, things like lorescedin, undecylenic acid, caprylic acid, different forms of butyrate, the new forms of butyric acid. These items can get down into the gut and they can absorb right into your tissues because they are fatty acids and they can destroy the candida at the roots. If you don't do that, the candida structure will still remain and once you start to raise your blood sugar a little and you start to throw more food down to your intestinal tract, it's gonna be right back where it was.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, to that point, and now I'm getting all the flashbacks of when I was convinced I had candida and all the things I did, and I don't think I went in this correct order at all, but I took all those things you mentioned, and so two questions there. One is, are all of the things people take things like what you just mentioned, which are supplements you can get, or do you also use pharmaceutical antifungals?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
No, pharmaceutical antifungals, we tried in many different ways. I've had no use for them for a few reasons. Yeah. The major reason, pharmaceutical antifungals are not as powerful as the botanical ones. And the reason why they're not is because they're not broad spectrum enough. They also don't destroy the bacterial dysbiosis or any parasitic dysbiosis. And they tend to be prescribed week after week after week, which automatically violates my rule of rotating antifungals. But it's their limitation in terms of their spectrums. Nyostatin, for instance, only really kills fungus in yeast. It's not going to kill klebsiella, which you'll find with Candida very often. Or H. hillicobacter pylori is often found with Candida. And when they're together, it makes them very difficult to get rid of. So they're just a complete waste of time, not to man it, not to forget the damage, possibly.

When you take ketoconazole or any of these types of drugs for long periods of time, they contain warnings in the label. And your doctor is going to want to check your blood to make sure your liver and kidney function is not being destroyed by those drugs. So it's just not really not worth it. The natural ones, you can actually take long enough to get the job done without killing yourself.

Melanie Avalon
My two memories related to that is with the nyostatin. It was interesting because at one point I was working with a functional doctor and I remember he was saying that nyostatin was like one of the few pharmaceuticals he thought you could just perpetually be on. Like it was good and benign and just stayed in the GI tract, so why not be on it? That was like his perspective.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
he's right from that point. Yes, it has been nine in that in that way. But the problem is, he's not looking at mutations.

Melanie Avalon
Right. Okay. And I remember, I remember anytime I would be prescribed like fluconazole or something, because it's often like a three day dose. And I'm like, I don't think I should have been like, I've been sick for so long. I don't think this is gonna like fix me in three days. I don't see that happening.

So when people okay, because you mentioned that when okay, people are fasting or starving or keto, that it can go dormant and then it can come back. But it's also, it also does weaken it. Like, okay, so the question is, if you are on these antifungals, should you have something that the Candida would eat so it wakes up and then you kill it? No. Okay. Because people talk about that.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
No, that's all, that's all, that's all, that's not how it really works in your gut.

Melanie Avalon
Okay. That's like word on the street sometimes.

And then also you're talking about all these vitamins and nutrients feeding or supporting candida. Is that only if you take them in a supplemental form or can candida also pull it from food?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
No, food usually doesn't cause the problem because the dose is not high enough in food for it to have that huge of an impact. That's more in the supplemental form where you're using something which compared to food is a mega dose. That's where it really becomes outstandingly obvious. Luckily, we haven't had that problem with food because that would be Candida diets are strict enough as it is.

If there was a problem where you'd have to eliminate certain foods because of their nutrient content and then into reaction with Candida, that would make this a nightmare. Luckily, it's not.

Melanie Avalon
So what is the role of the diet somebody follows during this protocol?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
The role of the diet is very simple. It's to reduce the amount of sugar or food energy available to the candida so that it weakens and it's easier to kill using the herbs or whatever the medicine is going to be.

Melanie Avalon
So it could be like low carb keto.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
And when you talked before about diets, there's so many different candida diets. This is true, there are. There are some which are crazy.

When you study mycology, basic study of mycology, you learn that fungus, mold, yeasts, all these things, they want carbohydrates. I mean, you could talk to a hillbilly in the mountains of Ozark and talk to him about brewing moonshine. And he probably knows more about candida than some of these people on YouTube talking about their candida diets, because it's a very simple thing. The yeast needs carbohydrate in order to ferment alcohol. It's a very simple chemical process. It's existed as long as this planet's existed. Yeast cells get a hold of starches and sugars, and they ferment those things, and they release alcohol as a byproduct. So a candida diet, the one thing that all of them will have in common, all of the same ones, they're all low in carbs and sugars. People could argue about specific foods. You'll get some people argue about certain nuts that might have mold and various things. But the one thing that you have to be wary of, if any candida diet where a person's telling you, you could eat all this fruit, and I've seen some of these people on the internet, and sometimes with self-styled nutritionists, and I've been in this field since like about 1982 or something like that. So I've known so many of the original, I've met Cardinal Fredericks, Robert Atkins, so many of the original nutritionists, and they can sometimes get a thing in their head, and then most of their work is to prove themselves right, as opposed to just looking at what the facts are. When you see these people on YouTube talking about how you can get rid of candida with a fruitarian diet, I really wanna see statistics from them of how many people have actually done this and have been candida-free for five years or longer, because if you're not gonna find it possible, it's crazy. Occasionally, a person will do something fluky, and it will work for them, and then therefore, they think now it should work for everybody. This becomes the problem with diets in general. As a person who's like, let's say, a blood type O, and he's a sympathetic dominant, he'll come across the carnivore diet or the paleo diet. He'll do this, he'll feel fantastic, he'll have his high blood pressure go away, he'll have all these things clear up on him, and now he's convinced this is, he's on a crusade. He's convinced this is a diet everybody should do until he comes across the blood type A, who's a parasympathetic dominant, and he tries to give that person his diet and that person was falling asleep at the wheel. He's developing acne and all kinds of skin problems. The problem is you pull science out of it and you get into opinion, and it's almost becoming like a cult. So for everything out there, there is a scientific answer.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
If you look for the scientific answer, you can map it out and you can see how that answer works or doesn't work for other people. And when I go back to my blood type O person here, when this blood type O person realizes finally that his blood type O diet doesn't work for the blood type A, now he can, now he, you see, goes before you can know, you have to not know.

Melanie Avalon
You are completely speaking my language. That's the main reason with this show.

I like to bring on people of all different perspectives because like if I can say one thing, there's not one diet for everybody because I think we would have found it by now. Like I really do.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Because Everett, because can you imagine taking an Eskimo? And you bring this Eskimo down to the equator, to the tropics, and you put him on, yeah, you put him on this tropical diet. He's not gonna know which way is which, because since hundreds of years, this man is up there in the cold having this incredible thermogenesis taking place all the time, eating blubber. And then if you take the opposite, if you take somebody from the equator and you send them up there and you start having him eat blubber and raw fish, that's not gonna work out.

So people have evolved, and this isn't my, this is not my invention or revelation. All you have to do is pick up Eat Right For Your Blood Type, the book by Dr. Diodamo. Peter Diodamo, his father was one of my teachers in college. Not Peter, but his father. His father is the one who did most of the work. And Peter got the work and he packaged it and he wrote the books. But as I said, this is, it's very simple because before you can know, you have to not know. You have to look at a field or an endeavor or a subject area and first say, I don't know. Because if you don't say, I don't know, then you can't know. So when the type O person figures out this diet's not working for him, for his type A friends, he can say, well, I don't know what a type A diet person should eat. I don't know what that is, but now I can figure it out because I know it certainly isn't what I'm doing as a type O. It's gotta be something more or less the opposite or very different.

Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm. It was interesting reading that book because I I actually am type O and the diet Prescribed in there fits me pretty well, but I just thought maybe it was like a genetic correlation with stomach acid production

Dr. Michael Biamonte
That's part of it, but it's your genetics because you have to look at the whole line of typos, where they come from, and what they're used to eating, and how they evolve. Your basic understanding is a typo is a carnivore. They originated from Africa, and they moved here eventually, and their carnivore diet, more nuts, seeds, vegetables, things like that, nut grain. Grain is the big missing link in there.

When you look at blood type A's, they originated in Asia, and that's where farming was huge. If you look at the traditional diets of type A's, typos, type B's, and now the type AA that we have, it all makes sense. But the AA is interesting. The AA is interesting because that's a very recent genetic...

Melanie Avalon
When did it develop?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
I don't remember, but it's relatively recent. It's so recent that it's recent enough where you can't really pin it down to an exact area, which is interesting.

You can do that with A, O, and B. B is Mediterranean type.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, it's really, really, really interesting to me. Saccharomyces boulardii, people will say, is like a beneficial use that combats Candida. Is that accurate?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Yeah, Saccharomyces is a yeast. Now some people have bad reactions to it. It's rare.

I happen to come in contact with it in the last couple of years. A few people who really couldn't tolerate it, but it's actually, that's actually rare. Most people tolerate it fine. And what Saccharomyces essentially does is it crowds around pathogenic organisms and it basically neutralizes them. But at the same time, it stimulates fecal IgE and IgA. So it's also boosting your immune system at the same time.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome. Okay.

And then, and just speaking of the evolution of all of this, since we're talking about that, do you think this is, has Candida overgrowth historically always been a problem or is it more a artifact of modern lifestyles?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
I will say that there's a parallel that I'm gonna draw in this. Someone doesn't have to necessarily draw this parallel, but I'm gonna draw it. There's a difference in what happens over time in your environment. And an example of this, you have people who have bad genes, let's say, as the Italian people would say in my family. They have, their genes aren't so great when it comes to detoxifying. Here you have the autistic child. The autistic child, the difference between him and a non-autistic child is the child with autism is a bad detoxifier. And because he's a bad detoxifier, he doesn't really, he's more susceptible to environmental toxins and being affected by them. So in this manner, when he's exposed to plastics and estrogens, when he's exposed to mercury, when he's exposed to thimerosal, the fillings, the amalgam fillings in your mouth, which are copper, mercury, zinc alloy, essentially, he doesn't detoxify these things very well. And that affects him then neurologically where with somebody else, it may not affect them neurologically. They might be able to detoxify these things or at the very least, they're just not affected by them as well. This is the difference.

When you have candida, candida is now more prevalent because you have broad spectrum antibiotics. Before we had broad spectrum antibiotics, we didn't have so much to worry about candida because people weren't getting hit with this. So it's similar. There's a parallel. This is why 200, maybe 200 years ago, kids with autism maybe didn't exist the way they do now because they weren't being environmentally challenged. I personally consider myself not really a nutritionist. I consider myself more of a clinical ecologist. I actually think that what I do in my practice and in my practice of healing, I'm more a clinical ecologist than I am anything else because I'm looking at how environment affects the person. I'm looking at how toxic metals, toxic chemicals, pathogens that they're surrounded with is affecting the person's health.

Melanie Avalon
I was gonna say, it's kind of like a detective.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
That's true, too. Yeah, there was always a joke that we had that we had because we weren't going to just give people pills to cover up their symptoms.

We had actually figure out what was really wrong with them.

Melanie Avalon
one other random supplement question, just because I've had historically so many experiences with trying all these different things on the parasite aspect of things, which I really like that part of the book and talking about, you talk about the difference between poisoning parasites versus mechanically removing them, physically chopping them up with diatomaceous earth or whatever it may be. Have you ever used Mimosa pudica? The reason I want to ask you about this, I'm dying to know because it's the one supplement where there's entire communities online of people taking it and then posting pictures of things that come out of them. And I as well took it and it freaked me out so much, like what came out.

But then people online will say, no, it's actually not taking anything out. It's just creating a gelatinous string. And that's what you're seeing. And I'm just curious your thoughts on it because this question has haunted me for years.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
That's a good, it's a, it's a good question. I can't, I cannot say that I have done any research or had any type of trial or experiment where I could prove one way or another is true. I know I do know for a fact that with psyllium sometimes you've heard, you've heard the stories for years about how there's the, the, the tire, the black tire that coats your intestinal tract. Unfortunately, there are some people who've had this type of material build up in their intestines and when they did colonics, you did get this horrible black stuff come out, but that was a rare, maybe not so rare, but that was not the majority of people that when, when you, when we talk nowadays about doing a colonic for the purposes of cleaning out your intestines, we're more referring to cleaning out any old stagnant material and cleaning out the bad biome because there's, and your intestinal tract is about eight pounds of bacteria that's there.

So when you take psyllium husk and you don't have enough water, psyllium actually will become gelatinized and it actually will take the shape of your intestinal lining and when you pull poop it out, you actually will get this thing that almost looks like a, an inner model of your intestines. That is totally true. I can't say that about this product though. I can't say that I really know. But here's a way to figure this out. When a, when a person has parasites and they're doing a parasite cleanse, there are some key symptoms to look for that would, that would indicate you're actually affecting the parasites. One of them is rectal itching. If, if anyone out there takes an herb that's purportedly to destroy parasites, you take this herb and you start getting rectal itching guarantee that means that that herb is working on your parasites. If you start grinding your teeth or clenching your teeth in the middle of the night, that's another major symptom of parasites. If you break out with a rash or start itching yourself in the middle of the night, that's another major symptom. So if someone was to take any product and have this kind of reaction, whether they're seeing it, the organisms in their stool or not, it's, it's those particular reactions clenching your teeth, grinding your teeth because of how the parasites affect your calcium and magnesium rectal itching because of how the parasites affect the acinophils that are in your intestinal tract where it will cause that, that itching. These are the key symptoms and then just rashes in general.

Melanie Avalon
Okay. Like I said, I mean, listeners, friends, if you want, if you're curious, just Google, there's like a lot of Facebook groups and like, like for rope worms and hookworms and you can find people taking the supplement and I never could get through because they would say you need to go through the whole bottle and like multiple bottles because of the life cycles of the parasites.

And I would chicken out like halfway through every time because I just like I can't, these things are so scary.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Well, one of the things that helps kill the larva faster is clove oil, or just cloves. That goes back to Dr. Hold the Clark's original parasite program. Cloves and also ozonated olive oil. With massive doses of coenzyme Q10, Dr. Clark found would kill the larva and the parasites, the larva and the eggs of the parasites much faster so that he didn't have to endure through many bottles to cut their life cycle then.

I think the best book of hers to read about parasites, because she did phenomenal work with parasites. It's probably A Cure for All Diseases is the name of the book. Cure for All Diseases by Hold the Clark. And another thing you'll gain from this, you'll understand why there are some people who seem to never be able to get rid of parasites. She points it out of the book and it's very obvious in her research. It's because these people are exposed to benzenes and wood alcohols. And what benzenes and wood alcohols do is they break down the fatty membrane of the parasite egg and allows them to hatch prematurely. So it seems like you're just never gonna get rid of the parasites, they keep growing. Before you get rid of a whole slew of them and before you know it, you have a whole new, let's say society of the adult parasites back again. And that's because their eggs, what's supposed to happen when you ingest something that has parasite eggs or parasite larva, the acid in your stomach is supposed to kill them before they ever really get into your system and take up shop. But if your stomach acid is low and your biome is off and the pH is not acid enough, your pH is too alkaline throughout your whole intestinal tract, these larva and eggs are gonna hatch and you're gonna have parasites.

Melanie Avalon
For vaginal yeast infections, which in the book you actually start by talking about the history of like some really interesting listeners get the book some really interesting history and women trying to self-treat things and the legality around that and you know rights and the great yogurt conspiracy etc. But if a woman has a vaginal yeast infection can you have that and not have systemic yeast infection?

Like can that be an isolated incident?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Yes, but that's the minority of the time. This, the criteria would be a woman who goes in the swimming pool and she goes in the pool and then comes out with a yeast infection and that's rare for her.

She's probably just messed up the pH of her vaginal area. The pH has gotten too alkaline and the yeast is growing. If she douches with boric acid, that will probably be the end of it. The person who's chronic, who has a chronic yeast infection, most likely has an overgrowth in the colon. They most likely have your standard chronic candidiasis.

Melanie Avalon
listeners get the Candida Chronicles because we only briefly touched on all the things. There is so much in this book.

And it does include the phases and the protocol and so much fascinating information, especially like a deep dive into all the different nutrients, like we mentioned that you know, either feed or neutral or actually are protected with Candida. So yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. This has been amazing. Was there anything else you wanted to draw attention to for listeners?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
No, but I think what would be a good idea is if I came back on the show again and we talked about testing, test, testing, testing for candida, dysbiosis and all these things, because there's a hell of a lot there that people need to know.

Melanie Avalon
That would be excellent, definitely, because yeah, there's just so much more here.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
We'll have your people get one of my people and we'll set it up.

Melanie Avalon
Perfect, perfect, perfect. Again, the book is The Candida Chronicles, a manual for Candida yeast infections, and do you currently take new patients as well?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Yes, we are taking new patients now. People can find us online if they go to the main website, which is health-truth.com. And there are two subsidiary websites. We have the New York City Candida doctor and the New York City Thyroid doctor.

Now, people always ask me, why do you have a thyroid website if you're into all this biome stuff? Well, the reason why is because Candida heavily affects the thyroid. So much that it's worth having a separate website just to go over and explain the relationship between Candida and how it affects the thyroid. And there are also a lot of things about thyroid function that most thyroid experts don't have a clue on because they're not nutritionists and they don't do nutritional testing. Most doctors, if you go, I cringe when my patients tell me, I went to Park Avenue to the biggest thyroid expert in the world. I just cringe because I know that all that person knows is what happens at the point where either the thyroid medication he's taking enters the bloodstream or the thyroid hormone is produced from his gland and goes into the blood. And after that, he knows nothing about thyroid. He doesn't know anything about thyroid receptor sites. He doesn't know that mercury downregulates thyroid hormone in your receptors. He doesn't know that cortisol downregulates thyroid hormones. He doesn't know anything about thyroid metabolism. See, there's a difference between thyroid when you're talking about the gland and the hormone it produces and the hormone entering your bloodstream. That's one thing. When it comes to the hormone entering the receptor sites, going into your electron transport chain and into your Krebs cycle and then actually working, that's a whole different world that these people know nothing about. And a quick book, it's an old book, but you can find a lot of relevant data is in a book called Hypothyroidism, The Unsuspected Illness, written by a Dr. Broda Barnes. Barnes was the first one that pointed out that if your body temperature is low, you are functionally hypothyroid and it doesn't make a damn what your blood test says.

Melanie Avalon
Hmm, wow. Did she originate the like the temperature testing?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Yes, Broda Bornstedt. The person who I consider the current expert on this is Dr. Eric Rind. You can go to his website.

Eric Rind. He is a medical doctor and he is the current expert on using body temperature testing to diagnose thyroid and adrenal function.

Melanie Avalon
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Biamante. This has been absolutely amazing.

So the very last question that I asked guests on the show, and it's just because I realize more and more each day the importance of mindset. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
the ability to find the truth.

Melanie Avalon
I love that.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
And this is, this is still a free country regardless of what's happened here and there. And I, I am, I don't want to tip my hat to RFK Jr. He's one of the bravest people in the world. RFK Jr. Is so far ahead of all these other scientists and politicians and these, these pundits. Th this man knows has more truth on the, on the tip of his nose than these people can conceive of, and if everyone just, if all these people would just listen to him, he spent years and years and years researching all this information. And he, anything he says, I will believe because I have taken his books. I've taken all his data and I've spent hours fact-checking it. It all turns out to be true.

And it's all money. That's all about money. I, I had this, I had to say, I almost split a gut laughing when he was arguing with Bernie Sanders and he, and RFK Jr. pointed out how much Bernie Sanders, how much money he's taken from the drug companies.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, politics aside, everything he's doing is so incredible health-wise for people. I'm like, why are people... Like, where is the controversy here?

Dr. Michael Biamonte
Well, the first the first controversy is that half these politicians are getting so much money from the drug companies to keep vaccines going and keep it. And they're getting so much money for like Michelle Obama, for instance, was a lawyer for big food. Michelle Obama is responsible for a lot of the a lot of the horrible foods that are in these schools, because they're all heavily processed, and she was a lawyer for those companies. So it's part of the power, there's politics there, but it all boils down to greed and money.

These politicians are being paid millions of dollars to keep drugs there, to keep bad food there, because they have they have a neat cycle going on. You eat bad, bad, really bad food, you get sick, then you go to the doctor, you get drugs. So everybody's getting paid off. It's keeping everybody the whole the whole cycle of this business in line. And RFK Junior is trying to break that break that cycle. Because the this country is the most unhealthy country. And compared to the technology and other things we have, we shouldn't be 24th or whatever it is 27th in World Health. That's because of what we're eating and the drugs that we take. People have there's I know people are on five or six or seven different prescription medications, you shouldn't you shouldn't be doing that. That's insane.

Melanie Avalon
Mm-hmm. I could not agree more. So yes, I echo back the gratitude about the ability to find truth. So thank you.

Thank you for all that you're doing. Yes, we'd love to have you back for part two on testing and all the things and yeah, this was wonderful.

So just thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Michael Biamonte
You're welcome. It was my pleasure. I enjoyed speaking to you.

Melanie Avalon
Have a wonderful rest of your day. Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What Win Wine, as well as my supplement line, Avalon X. Please visit MelanieAvalon.com to learn more about today's guest, and always feel free to contact me at contact at MelanieAvalon.com. And always remember, you got this.