Stay Off My Operating Table

Candida and Thyroid: The Surprising Connection - Dr. Michael Biamonte 151

• Dr. Philip Ovadia • Episode 151

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Learn about the hidden dangers of Candida overgrowth and its surprising connection to thyroid health in this eye-opening episode of the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. Dr. Philip Ovadia interviews naturopathic doctor and clinical nutritionist Michael Biamonte, revealing crucial insights into functional nutrition and holistic health.

In this comprehensive discussion, you'll learn:
- The history of naturopathic medicine and clinical nutrition
- Common symptoms and causes of Candida overgrowth
- How to test for and treat Candida effectively
- The unexpected link between Candida and thyroid function
- Why conventional thyroid treatments may fall short

Key timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
5:30 History of naturopathic medicine
15:45 Understanding Candida overgrowth
27:30 Testing for Candida
35:20 Candida and thyroid connection
45:00 Impact of COVID-19 on Candida relapse

Michael Biamonte shares his expertise gained from decades of clinical practice and research. Learn why the Atkins diet may not work for some people and how Candida could be the underlying cause of various health issues.

For more information, check out Michael Biamonte's book "The Candida Chronicles" on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Candida-Chronicles-Mannual-Yeast-infections/dp/0692756191

Visit Michael Biamonte's websites:
http://health-truth.com
http://newyorkcitycandidadoctor.com
http://newyorkcitythyroiddoctor.com

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Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings

Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Dr. Philip Ovadia.

Jack Heald:

Welcome back, folks. It's the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast with Dr Philip Ovedia. Today we have a guest who, as best as I can guess, is not an expert in the works of Voltaire or the operas of Leonard Bernstein, but that's literally all I know about anything remotely resembling what we're supposed to be talking about today. I think I just revealed both the breadth and the depth of my ignorance. So, Phil, take it away, man.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Sounds good. I too am not an expert in either Voltaire or Leonard Bernstein, but so hopefully the guests and I will be on the same page.

Michael Biamonte:

then Let me interject something about my background Before I became a health practitioner, I was a professional musician.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

All right, so you got Bernstein down, at least A little Bernstein going on a little.

Michael Biamonte:

Not Votere, but a little Bernstein.

Jack Heald:

I guess we should say to the folks who are saying to themselves what the hell is going on here. We really are going to talk about health-related issues here. We'll get there.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

We'll work our way around to it, but excited today to have Michael Biamonte on with us. What Michael is an expert in at least one of the things he's an expert in is really what I would call functional nutrition, really what I would call functional nutrition, and he's written a book on candida and we'll get into what that is and how it relates but just helping people figure out how their health might be related to what they're eating, and so I'm excited to have him on. And with that, I am excited to have him on. And with that, Michael, why don't you give a little bit of your background to our audience and we can?

Michael Biamonte:

go from there. Sure, I'm a naturopathic doctor and I'm also a certified clinical nutritionist in New York State. I was actually one of the first certified clinical nutritionists in New York State. I think my number is three or somewhere about that. I'm on the scientific council of the International and American Association of Clinical Nutritionists. I'm one of the people who writes the test questions when nutritionists want to get licensed in whatever state they want to get in, I'm one of the people who actually writes the test and writes the questions and answers.

Michael Biamonte:

So I have a pretty deep background into clinical nutrition and actually before functional medicine was termed, we were practicing like a pseudo form of it because there was no licensing, there was no certification for anything like that back then. So I consider myself one of the pioneers in this whole field of functional medicine and clinical nutrition. I was very good friends with Colton Fredericks and Bob Atkins and they both of those gentlemen also Ronald Hoffman. They were the nurturers of this field in New York City back in the very early 80s. Without them we wouldn't have University of Bridgeport and so many of the other schools that we have now.

Jack Heald:

Now, atkins, of course I know, but the other two names Now, I'm not a medical professional, so the other two names mean nothing to me.

Michael Biamonte:

I'm not a medical professional, so the other two names mean nothing to me. Carlton Fredericks had a PhD in public health and he was a very popular author back in the 60s and 70s. He was the first proponent of the low-carb diet and he was the first one to bring out the data from Dr Feingold about children who would eat chemical additives in the food and have behavioral problems. But truly he was an associate of Dr Roger Williams who in the early nutrition field was the person who coined the term bio-individuality. Roger Williams was the man who discovered pentothenic acid, which is vitamin B5. And they worked together a lot and they were known for doing a low-carb approach. They were the first ones who did the low-carb approach and Dr Atkins picked up from Dr Fredericks this idea of the low-carb approach and he started researching. And of course Bob Atkins is synonymous now with low-carbohydrate diets.

Jack Heald:

Okay, I'm looking here at Carlton Frederickson. Wow, yeah.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Okay.

Jack Heald:

Thank you.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

I admit that I've heard Dr Frederick's name but haven't really looked into him, and of course Dr Atkins is known by all, but maybe go into that history a little bit more. So talk about you know what naturopathic doctors do and how that kind of developed as a you know specialty, let's say, and then how that ties in with clinical nutrition and really differentiate you know clinical nutrition from. I guess you know what people now know as nutritionists and dieticians, where there might be some differences there.

Michael Biamonte:

You're asking the right person, because I was in the thick of it back then. Back in the 80s, when I first got out of school with a degree in naturopathy, there was no licensing for naturopaths in New York and I'm pretty sure there still isn't. Licensing is still limited. However, naturopaths we are the original physician on this planet. Hippocrates was the one who coined the term naturopath nature heal, so it's, the naturopaths were the original doctors. And in the 40s and the 50s, when John D Rockefeller discovered that he can synthesize the active ingredients in herbs utilizing his leftover coal tar dye wastes, this is where allopathic medicine really began. This is where allopathic medicine really began.

Michael Biamonte:

Originally, allopathic medicine was. They were called quacks. That's where the term quack comes from, because in the early days, allopaths used a lot of quinine for everything and somehow from quinine they developed the word quack. I don't remember how that occurred exactly, but allopaths were originally thought of as being quacks. Naturopaths were the bulk of the doctors and homeopaths made up a small amount of the, the leftover seen there. So in the moving, everything forward as allopathic medicine became more predominant when, when, when was this?

Jack Heald:

when was this rockefeller thing? When did that happen?

Michael Biamonte:

it was, it was back in the 40s, I believe back in the 40s, I believe Back in the 40s, 30s, somewhere in there.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

One of the seminal events, there was what's called the Flexner Report. Yes, so beautiful, if I remember correctly, that was in the 30s.

Michael Biamonte:

Yeah, and of course we know who paid for that. It was John D Rockefeller paid for that, and the Flexner Report basically said that all medicine was quackery except for allopathy. That was the end result of it. So with that you had a Flexner report. So with this report there was a PR move also. So people were being told to stay away from naturopaths and go to allopathic medicine because that's more scientific. So as that progressed, naturopathic schools started to close and with that the availability of getting a license as a naturopath in a lot of different states started to shut down and allopathic medicine really popped in there. Now they also had the chiropractors, who were now becoming popular. So that became another division. So you eventually had naturopaths, chiropractors, homeopaths, allopaths, and everybody sort of was scuttling for positioning and the allopaths became more predominant because they had all the money backed by John D Rockefeller. Rockefeller paid and put together schools for allopathic medicine and hospitals that would predominantly use allopathic medicine, because at one time, believe it or not, there were hospitals that used mostly homeopathy, but they don't really exist anymore.

Michael Biamonte:

So, coming into where I enter into the picture, I get out of school in the 80s with a degree in naturopathy. I find out. There's no licensing in New York, which is where I was from. So I found out. I had a practice then as a certified clinical nutritionist. Now there was no certification for that then, but the New York state was allowing for this. It was sort of something you could do under the table and as long as you didn't bother anybody, you were fine.

Michael Biamonte:

But the dieticians came along and this is what caused what I call now the dietician wars of the 80s. All of the clinical nutritionists and the chiropractors and people that were using functional nutrition at that time, including people like Gary Null, who was a very prominent radio talk show host. He had a show called Natural Healing. All of these people were unofficially organized at that point and what happened is the dieticians decided that they wanted exclusive rights to the term clinical nutritionists and we've later found out the reason why. It was common sense and it never occurred to me at the time.

Michael Biamonte:

But when you say to somebody dietitian and you say, what do you think of? When I say dietitian person, go you know, they'll say jello. They'll say hospitals, hospital food. Oh yeah, hospital food, jello. That's what you think of when you hear the word dietitian, because dieticians are the nutritionists who operate in large, I guess, institutions like nursing homes, hospitals, and they're the guys who make up the menus there.

Michael Biamonte:

So this was kind of a bad PR image they had. So they decided they wanted a change from the dietitian to being clinical nutritionists and they were putting together a legislature in New York City New York State rather that would basically make it illegal for anybody like me who was a functional nutritionist, to practice, because they want that sole title. Well, these wars went on for years and what would happen would be the dietitians would have all this money. They would go to the legislature in New York and they would say we're the only ones who really should be practicing nutrition and they wanted legislature. That would stop and anybody in a health food store Repeat that, michael, your signal broke up.

Jack Heald:

They wanted anybody.

Michael Biamonte:

They only wanted to be the ones who could give any kind of nutritional advice, including chiropractors. They wanted chiropractors out. They wanted illegal be illegal for anyone at a health food store to give you any kind of nutritional advice and, as you know, that's a big thing. You go into a health food store, you start talking to the people there that own it and they're always recommending this vitamin, that supplement. So they wanted all that to be illegal.

Michael Biamonte:

And these wars went back and forth and what would happen is my side would hear about these meetings. They were having these covert meetings that they weren't announcing. We would get wind of it and then we would suddenly rush up to Albany and barge into the meetings they were having and we would then give our side of the story, which made it impossible for them to actually clamp down, legislation that would make it illegal for people like me to practice. Well, eventually Governor Cuomo got involved with this and Governor Cuomo decided that this was very sane of him. He decided that there were two disciplines here and he understood.

Michael Biamonte:

Dieticians did what they did and we did what we did, and we were a new and upcoming science. So he said we're going to have certification in New York State for nutritionists, but on their certification diplomas, if you want to call it that, one is going to have a C and the other is going to have a D. So all the dieticians who got certified had a D to differentiate, and the clinical nutritionists had a C, and that's what ended all the wars and all the fights.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Very interesting.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

And of course you know, the other background that's going on at this time is, you know, the US dietary guidelines get released in 1980 and the dietitians essentially became beholden to, you know, promoting and I guess you could even say enforcing the guidelines, I guess you could even say enforcing the guidelines and of course you know you've already given a little bit of insight that the recommendations that at least you were making and maybe this is more broadly applied to the clinical nutrition is what governor cuomo eventually saw was the difference when we made our case in albany, about what we did, we explained is that we are um rely on laboratory testing to come up with individualized scientific programs for the patient.

Michael Biamonte:

we don't recommend that the patient just eat his USDA amount of jello or instant potato buds every day. We recommend that the person take very specific diet based on his condition and based on the laboratory work, and supplements based on the laboratory work, and that's what really made the whole difference.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Yeah, that's some fascinating history that I didn't realize all the details of, and very interesting. Secondarily interesting to me because I was growing up in New York at the time. But very interesting to hear what was going on behind the scenes. So, okay, that was, you know, 40-ish years ago. Kind of tell us today what the state of the union might be, and you know this kind of still friction or interaction between clinical nutritionists and dieticians.

Michael Biamonte:

No, there really isn't any. They've basically gone in their cave and they know, you know, they do what they do and we do what we do. And because health food, the health food industry, has taken off and turned into a multi-billion dollar industry now many people can relate what I do to the health food store. So from that viewpoint, from a PR standpoint, those things align and people now have an understanding. A lot of the work that we did back in those days, both politically and technically, led the university of Bridgeport and many other universities that now offer functional medicine and clinical nutrition and naturopathy programs, where it would have never happened if we didn't keep the thing, keep the fire burning in New York, because if New York would have gone down, a lot of other states would have followed. That happens to be the way it was While we were fighting in New York.

Jack Heald:

Texas some great, great breakthroughs as far as legislation for clinical nutritionists, some other stuff and now, michael, you're um, let me suggest that you pull the mic away from your, your mouth, just a little bit you're clipping fairly frequently.

Michael Biamonte:

Okay, so where do you want me to go back to?

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

You were talking about Texas.

Michael Biamonte:

Yeah, so Texas became prominent as far as the amount of licensed clinical nutritionists that are there. And, as I was saying, if we didn't keep things going in New York, you wouldn't have what you have available today for people to go to school, go to college and then learn clinical nutrition from a real scientific viewpoint. And now it's kind of an expected thing that you go to a nutritionist and people are now expecting they're going to run lab work on me and they're going to tell me what vitamins to take or what diet to take. We've definitely established that. That is the protocol. Now there isn't a standardization yet for this.

Michael Biamonte:

That's something that I'm hoping to do and my organization, the IAACN we're still hoping to get a standardization, but it's hard to do because you have different approaches that people have. But the real plus point is there are many colleges now that you can go to and you can study all this and get a real degree. There are many professional associations which you can belong to. I happen to belong to the IACN. We were one of the first. We originally came from an organization that was called the Florida Organization of Nutritionists and that then became international became international phil, I I would, if you don't mind, I want to ask a a.

Jack Heald:

I want to go down a rabbit trail just a minute and michael may not know anything about this, so I want to go back to the flexner report. I did some research. Uh, I have a friend, who's an inventor actually, who got involved in, uh, um, like I can't remember the name of it, but it's uh, pulsed frequency, magnetism or something like that yeah, yeah there we go emf, yeah, um.

Jack Heald:

and that led me down a rabbit trail that took me all the way back to Nikola Tesla in the early 1900s with his work with electricity and he was. What I found was that he was apparently doing work with for lack of a better word energy medicine Um, and apparently he he had some relatively famous people um coming to him for all kinds of EMF types of treatments, and it looks like the Flexner report also wiped out that branch of of medicine, the the. The story that I read and again, you may not know anything about this, but I'd love to hear independent third party verification was that uh, uh, the Carnegie foundation, which funded the Flexner report, um told the medical schools that they would not get any of the money that they were used to getting if they allowed any kind of teaching uh in the direction that tesla was was going, and so all the medical schools said, okay, we won't, and that's why that branch went away and that's where Dr Reif comes in.

Michael Biamonte:

Right, right, dr Reif, dr Reif comes in. And when I was in school because my school was more geared towards clinical nutrition than it was these other naturopathic modalities I didn't really learn all that much about that, but I do know enough to tell you, yes, that's correct, and that's where Dr Reif came in with them. And that's where this whole technology of frequency diagnosis and frequency healing comes in. Dr Reif was a pioneer. There are many people since then who've come up with similar gadgets that you could use to try to perform this type of technology.

Jack Heald:

Okay, all right, so same deal. It all happened at the same. Okay, all right, so same same deal. It all happened at the same time, but all right.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Yeah, and, and you know it's interesting, you know, as I look back, you know, as it was taught to me, going down the allopathic pathway, obviously was that what the Flexner report did, is it? Basically, you know, prior to the Flexner report, there were thousands of what could be broadly called medical schools that were training practitioners of some sort across the US, and the Flexner report basically, again, as it was told to me, weeded out, you know, the ones that were not scientifically based, let's say, and left behind. You know that all medical schools needed to be certified, and you know, along the lines of this allopathic pathway, and that those were the only legitimate medical schools and kind of cleaned up the landscape, let's say. And you know, that's how I understood it.

Michael Biamonte:

And that's true. That's true, but add the one proviso is that whoever pays the piper calls the tune Exactly. We know who that was.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

That's what I have later come to recognize and realize, and you know, I think again.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

I think all of these areas allopathy, naturopathy, homeopathy they all have some legitimacy to them and quite frankly, within each of those see to them and, quite frankly, within each of those there are illegitimate practices. Let's call them that. Go on and you know, maybe it's not as simple as Rockefeller and Carnegie and the ones you know behind the Flexner Report wanted us, wanted everyone to believe at the time. So it's an interesting history and you know again, I appreciate Michael bringing some more of this to us. This isn't actually a topic that we were planning on focusing on, but I think this will be very interesting for people to understand. So talk a little bit from a practical standpoint. You, as a clinical nutritionist and naturopath, maybe what some of the common conditions that patients might come to you with and how you might evaluate and treat them in maybe a different way than the allopathic system might.

Michael Biamonte:

When I was in naturopathic school, my focus was on the interpretation of lab tests. When I was in naturopathic school, my focus was on the interpretation of lab tests, particularly blood work, and then using the blood work from a nutritional angle. As an example, I can look at an SMA-24, and I can interpret it completely from a nutritional standpoint where the person's status is, you're going to have to interpret.

Michael Biamonte:

For me, an SMA-24 is pretty much a standard blood workup that most doctors will do on a patient. Okay, and I can look at that and I can reinterpret each test to what vitamins or minerals or amino acids or what nutrients that chemistry relates to. For instance, an alkaline phosphatase is a good example. That's a standard chemistry. In a blood test, an alkaline phosphatase is normally looked at as an enzyme which, if it's elevating, you could have cancer or you could have a broken bone or something like that. When I look at that, I look at that and I'm saying, well, this is the person's zinc status, because alkaline phosphatase, as an enzyme, is activated by zinc and it's also highly associated with your adrenal glands. So I would have a different take on these things.

Michael Biamonte:

When I was getting out of school I wanted to have a computer that would have all my knowledge in it and all the knowledge of everybody else I could find, and I would enter in a blood test, press a button and have this thing do this entire report for me. That was my goal. And in having that goal and going around telling people about it, a woman in a health food store told me that you have to talk to this man, dr Santoro, who's out in Massapequa. He already has this going on and she gave me his card. To make a long story short, I called him up and I met with him and I found out that he was the man who developed the life support systems on the lunar module, but he was also an aerospace physiologist and a naturopath and he was developing he had all these this whole team of people that were working on this project with NASA to develop a computer that could look at the astronauts' blood work and then come up with exactly what vitamins they needed, and they were going to use this for the space station, because when an astronaut is in space for a long period of time, you have problems with muscle loss and calcium loss due to the weightlessness. So, to make a long story short, I worked with these guys for 10 years and not only did I learn a lot and I advanced my knowledge of nutrition tremendously, but I got a very important discipline from working with them. I learned to look at things from the viewpoint of a systems analysis engineer. So when I look at the body, I don't look at the body the way a health practitioner does. I look at the body like an engineer would, and I'm interested in systems and subsystems. This is the key thing. That in systems analysis and engineering you're looking at are systems that have subsystems that relate to other systems, and how the feedback loops all work so that everything is harmonized and it all works together.

Michael Biamonte:

In medicine or health sometimes we call this homeostasis, which is the body's attempt to keep everything in one stream and everything balanced. So the computer system is what I used for many years and I became known for the use of this computer. This computer, the system, is called bio-cybernetics. Bio-cybernetics means the biological mechanisms that continue to regulate things and keep things balanced. So patients would come to me and I would run their blood work through the computer and we would come up with programs for them and we put the person on the program and by God they'd get better. Their arthritis would get better, their asthma, whatever the problem was, would get a lot better and we would follow the chemistries and watch the chemistries improve and watch their symptoms improve.

Michael Biamonte:

And then one day somebody said you know, about 30% of all the patients using this system are having weird results when they take vitamins. They're having toxic reactions to the vitamins, they can't tolerate the vitamins and it doesn't make any sense. So I volunteered to find out what was wrong with these people and when my wife tells the story, she said she walked into this room and saw this pile of folders on my desk that was higher than I was, and I was going through all these until three in the morning trying to find a common denominator in all these patients, and one day I finally found it, and what it was is they all had candida. Now, I didn't know what candida was at that point. What I could identify is that they had some kind of intestinal infection.

Michael Biamonte:

But then I had them do stool testing microbiology testing of their stool and they all came back having candida. So that's when I set out and trying to figure out what candida was and how do you handle it. Because I told the patients I said you know, we know why you're reacting to the vitamins. You have candida. You have to go to your doctor and have him cure you and then come back. And I was so naive. People were coming back saying the doctor said there's no such thing as candida. Or the doctor says everybody has candida, everybody has candida, it doesn't make any difference.

Jack Heald:

Candida is an overgrowth of bacteria.

Michael Biamonte:

Candida is an overgrowth of a fungal organism, fungus, which also can become a yeast. Candida is a very chameleon-like organism. It's called the dimorphic organism. Meaning dimorphic means live in two states, so candida can flip from a fungus to a yeast in a heartbeat, just back and forth, and I didn't know what to do at this point. So the only people I knew who would have a grip on this was Bob Atkins, who I was becoming very friendly with, and Ronald Hoffman in Manhattan. These were the two functional doctors, probably the first two functional doctors in Manhattan. So I recommended the patients go there and they came back and they told me well, you know, this was much better. They knew what I was talking about and they said, yeah, I did have it, but the treatment they gave me didn't work. They said I got better for a while and then it all came back again and that's that was it.

Michael Biamonte:

That's where I then got on the path of trying to unravel how you handle candida, because even now, patients get very inconsistent results when they see other doctors for it, and there were reasons that I found out how I found it out was by reverse engineering everything I had patients come to me and tell me everything they were doing and how everything went wrong or went right. And then I would listen to what they said and everything they were doing and how everything went wrong or went right. And then I would listen to what they said and I'd go back and I'd hit the medical textbooks to reverse engineer and find out what was going on. And I remember the first discovery that I made, which I discussed with Dr Atkins. I told him you know, these people are the Candida species they're having, they have a flipping, they're jumping from Candida albicans to candida tropicalis.

Michael Biamonte:

And that's when I learned that candida was very mutative. It was very drug-resistive. So if you keep giving the same drug every day to the person with candida, after 21 days it mutates and it becomes a different species and the drug stops working. That was one of the first major discoveries I made. Then I discovered that vitamins there's two columns of vitamins. One column actually feeds candida and makes it worse, and the other column of vitamins blocks the antifungals from working. So I kept going along making all these discoveries. So I, just I kept going along making all these discoveries and that's how I, how I tweaked and developed my own protocol for candida, which is discussed in my book, the candida chronicles. Why I call it the candida chronicles is because it really it chronicled my particular journey in discovering what candida was and how you outwit it and why a lot of the standard treatments just don't work.

Jack Heald:

So I'm hearing two different problems. Problem one an awful lot of primary care physicians don't recognize it, or at least didn't recognize it as a real thing, Right. And then secondly, if it actually was recognized, incredibly difficult to treat. So let's start with the second problem first. No, let's back up one problem what would be the signs that somebody's dealing with candida?

Michael Biamonte:

To give you a very accurate Reader's Digest version. The person would recognize that since having a major accident or a major illness where they had to take antibiotics, that since that time they have cognitive loss, their memory is poor, they forget things. They now have GI problems. They're having gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation. They're starting to become chemically sensitive. They can't be around people with perfume or cigarette smoke and then they could be developing a lot of fatigue. They could have rashes. Now all of a sudden, fungal rashes. They could be asthmatic. They. These are the typical symptoms when a person develops candida, although it can go way beyond that. You can get rheumatoid arthritis from having candida. You can get a lot of mast cell activation when you have candida. There's all types that you can have fibromyalgia from having candida. The candida can be an underlying reason for many other ailments that you would go to the doctor to be treated for.

Jack Heald:

Sure Okay. So then let's back up to my initial second question, which was let's talk about treating it.

Michael Biamonte:

What most doctors do wrong and nutritionists is they give the person some kind of antifungal product or a drug, they give them probiotics and they put them on a low-carb diet and then they give them a host of other vitamins which are supposed to enhance their immune system to try to shake the candida. So what goes wrong with that and that's the standard treatment? What goes wrong with that is the drug or modality of antifungal defense after 21 days is eliminated because the candida mutates so that no longer works. Whether you're taking nystatin or caprylic acid or paldarco or whatever the substance is, 21 days boop, the candida starts to mutate. Second thing is the probiotic. If you imagine this like a game of musical chairs. The probiotic is repelled by the candida. So as long as candida is there, it pushes the probiotic away and it stops the probiotics from being able to re-inoculate in the intestinal tract. It doesn't allow them to stick. So the probiotic is going in the person's mouth and out into the toilet where it's supposed to be populating to crowd the candida out and reduce the population. That's not working. Then all the vitamins they're giving the person well, vitamin B complex, coenzyme Q10, vitamin D, iron all of these nutrients spread candida like crazy. They make it grow more.

Michael Biamonte:

How I learned this was really simple. I started to look at the mechanisms of actions on the standard antifungal drugs. I looked at niastatin, which is a very common antifungal drug. How niastatin works is it blocks the candida's ability to absorb iron. Now I said to myself now if a drug kills candida by stopping it from absorbing iron, why the hell would I ever want to give a patient with candida iron? I went to the next drug, ketoconazole. How does it work? It blocks the candida's ability to absorb vitamin D. Vitamin D is important for the structure of the candida. So again, why would I want to give the patient vitamin D if he has candida?

Michael Biamonte:

Okay, I met a doctor named Herman Bueno up in the Bronx in New York and Bueno taught me that when you use an antiparasitic or an antifungal, you must not have the patient take antioxidants. And he explained to me that, technically, antiparasitic drugs or antifungals are chemotherapy. Chemotherapy works by producing oxidative stress against the membrane of an organism Chemotherapy how chemotherapy kills cancer is it floods the cancer cell with free radicals and that's how it kills it. So he explained if you have a person on an antiparasitic or an antifungal medication and you're giving them antioxidants. You're just stopping the whole process.

Jack Heald:

You're just neutralizing the whole treatment, exactly.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Very interesting. So you know. Circling back to how might someone have an indication that they have candida? You know, of course, some of the common ways that at least we perceive that candida presents is can be with vaginal infections in women. You can get toenail, you know fungus you know, under armpits some of those fungal infections. So talk about how that plays into that. It sounds like what you're saying is candida can be a lot more. It is a lot broader than that.

Michael Biamonte:

The analogy would be. The tip of the iceberg would be the analogy, because those are obvious, well-recognized symptoms of candida, but they represent only a small amount of symptoms. My own personal thing I have that I take umbrage of is when a doctor will have a patient come. The patient has chronic vaginal yeast infections and they go test them for HIV or they insinuate that you must have HIV because it's thought of in mainstream that in order to have chronic candida you have to have HIV or be in end stage of cancer or something like this, which is completely not true. There is so and they scare the hell out of the patient when they do this. There are so many more patients who have chronic candidiasis that have HIV. So that's the first thing I just want to put out there. So just in case a listener gets stuck in that maze it's completely not true. They shouldn't get scared about that, that's just. That's just a practitioner with no experience, but typically yes.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Oh no, go on.

Michael Biamonte:

Typically, candida comes about after the person has either been in an accident where there's been a strong trauma to the body and that trauma has destroyed their biome, or they've taken a medication that's destroyed their biome.

Jack Heald:

Oh, so it doesn't have to be antibiotic that's destroyed the.

Michael Biamonte:

Anything that destroys your biome oh, so it doesn't have to be antibiotic. That's destroyed the Anything that destroys your biome. I've had candida patients who were swimmers like professional athlete swimmers who were just in the pool all the time swallowing chlorinated water and they developed candida. The rule is anything that destroys your biome is going to allow candida to grow. That's the rule of thumb. So that can be quite a lot of things.

Michael Biamonte:

You could be going for oral surgery. You can be going to the dentist and taking antibiotics. You could be having to take an antibiotic for whatever. You may get Lyme disease. Here's some of the biggest influx of patients we get who have candida are Lyme patients, because the Lyme disease is treated by antibiotics which may be successful against the Lyme, but then it gives them candida. And the stories are all the same. They come in and they said they had the Lyme disease. Lyme disease is driving me crazy. The doctor put me on the course of antibiotics and I got better to a degree, but it's still there. It won't go away. And when I test them I find that the Lyme went away. Now they have Candida as a side effect. They're still thinking they have Lyme because they have now developed candidiasis.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

And you mentioned low-carb diets being part of the protocol. Talk about what role that plays in helping to overcome this.

Michael Biamonte:

Well, candida essentially eats sugar. Candida feeds on sugar, just like any other yeast that you're going to use to brew. Right, when you brew something, you add the yeast, you add the carbohydrate mixture, and then you go ahead and you get the replication of the yeast, and candida has to have carbs and sugars to survive. So one of the ways of making it more amenable to dying is to starve it, just like this is a war and you're cutting the enemy's supply lines off. If you continue to feed candida while you're using medications to kill it, it just keeps coming back. So you have to have a combination approach of starving it and then using effective antifungals to destroy it.

Jack Heald:

And I'm guessing that in the absence of starving it, whatever the effective antifungals are, grow less effective over time.

Michael Biamonte:

It becomes like a roller coaster because what happens is the patient gets caught in this swing of. He takes the antifungal, the candida starts to die, die, he starts to feel bad from it, dying which is called a herxheimer reaction oh herxheimer was a doctor who discovered this that when you killed microbes, they would die. They would decompose, they would release toxins. Your immune system would react. You'd feel like you have the flu or you feel sick.

Jack Heald:

That we call it getting well, right, but the symptom of of getting well is your you feel worse. We call it getting well, but the symptom of getting well is you feel worse. For a while, temporarily, it's called die-off.

Michael Biamonte:

When doctors get together in the bar, we call it die-off. When we're being official, we call it Herxheimer reaction. So what happens is the person takes the medication, starts to feel sick. The candida is dying. They cheat on the diet. They feed the candida. The candida grows back. They go back and take the medication again. Now there's more candida there. Now they feel sick again because they're killing the new candida that they just fed, that just grew and it becomes a vicious cycle. That makes sense. This is why the diet. This is why when you have a person who's getting perpetual die off, you know they're cheating on diet and they've got to get a grip on the diet. Otherwise they just keep feeding it and it just keeps coming back.

Jack Heald:

How long does it take if somebody's actually following orders?

Michael Biamonte:

It takes about eight months to a year to remove the candida and get your biome to come back. And a lot of that time is spent getting your biome to come back because when you have candida it causes damage to the mucosal lining and it destroys some of the collagen that's there. So part of the candida program is you have to heal the gut, heal the collagen, so that the friendly bacteria can reestablish and stick again to the lining of the intestinal tract.

Michael Biamonte:

Just getting rid of the candida is not that hard. Getting rid of candida is not that hard if you follow the basic rules of rotating the antifungals and whatnot. It's getting the biome back. That's hard.

Jack Heald:

Now is candida just. Is it just a round? Is it something that everybody's got floating around in our intestines? But it doesn't get a foothold for most people because it's not.

Michael Biamonte:

That's correct. Candida is a normal organism that you find in all mammals. Certain mammals have more propensity for it, like birds, for instance, can have so much candida that you can see the white stuff coming out of them, but candida is normal in the intestinal tract of all mammals. It's a matter of having the biome there to control it and stop it from going out of control. But a funny, if you want, if you think this is funny, it's a here's, a side thought on this. When you die you, your body is injected with formaldehyde to preserve you. Do you know what formaldehyde does? Formaldehyde is nothing more than a massive dose of antifungal. The idea of formaldehyde is it stops the candida that's in your body from decomposing. When the body dies, it's candida that decomposes the body and the whole mechanism here of the undertaker trying to preserve you is to give you formaldehyde, which tries to neutralize that candida that's in your system to preserve your body.

Jack Heald:

So the candida's job, appropriate job in our bodies it doesn't really have one until we're dead, and then, once we're dead, its job is to turn us back into dirt.

Michael Biamonte:

Yes, from dust to dust.

Jack Heald:

That's correct, phil, I did not see this one coming. I really, really didn't.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Neither did I, but this is real fascinating to sort of. You mentioned earlier this you know, early adoption of computer-aided diagnosis, let's call it. You know an early adoption of technology, and one of the things we were talking about before we hit the record button is sort of you were one of the first to use telemedicine as it is, so I'd like to hear a little bit more about how you started doing that, and maybe that leads into what you're doing today, because certainly patients, people listening to this are going to want to know how might I work with you?

Michael Biamonte:

How do I figure out if this is an issue for me? When I got out of naturopathic school and started to become popular on the East Coast, I had some patients who would come to me and they'd say, gd, you know somebody who does what you do in Texas or wherever. And I said I really don't, because what I was doing was kind of unique at the time. So they asked me if I would call their relative up on the phone and maybe help them somehow make some recommendations. And I think the first phone consultation I did was in 1986. Yeah, actually it was in 86, because I remember the Mets were in the World Series that year and that just boomed, doc Gooden, I remember. Yeah, doc Gooden, that just boomed, I remember.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Yeah, doc Gooden, I remember 1986, by the way, myself included.

Michael Biamonte:

Yeah, keith Hernandez, doc Gooden, darryl Strawberry, who unfortunately just had a heart attack Darryl Strawberry, unfortunately, but he recovered well. But that's where it started. So when I started then the people who I was speaking to by phone in Texas, they said I have an uncle who's in Washington and maybe you can help him. And it just kept rolling and it got to the point where by probably 1998, half of my practice was all by phone. And then when the internet came in and we started getting these platforms like Zoom and these others, we just went completely virtual. So now I see people all over the world virtually and we handle their case. My practice is completely set up to handle people that are in other countries and other states.

Jack Heald:

Oh, other countries as well, other countries.

Michael Biamonte:

Yes, the other countries are a little harder with the lab work. It depends on whether or not they have affiliates here in the US, but in the United States it doesn't make any difference to me. I'll tell you the funniest thing is that we have had patients who physically lived 100 yards away from our office in apartment building complexes and they have done all their consultations over the internet. They have not very rarely ever came into the office.

Michael Biamonte:

Sadly, over the last four years, not leaving your house has become far more common well, even before covid, though, this was still um a matter of convenience, I guess to that degree, for these people so, um speaking of covid, let me sneak something in here sure, let me sneak something in.

Michael Biamonte:

we we during covid we got a lot of people with candida, relapsing patients, whoients, who we hadn't seen in 10 years, eight years, whatever. All of a sudden we're coming in and saying you know, I'm relapsing, the candida is coming back. I don't know why. We found I did find a Japanese study which showed that the COVID vaccine causes candida, and what the COVID vaccine does, among all the other things we're hearing is the COVID vaccine unfortunately kills the bifidus bacteria in your colon and that's one of the major mechanisms of developing candida is having that part of your biome die. Now we've since found out that the COVID infection itself does it. It's not just the vaccine, it's COVID itself that destroys the bifidus biome. So if anybody has had COVID or they've been jabbed a bunch of times and since then they're not feeling well, there's a very high probability they developed candida as a result of COVID and the jab.

Jack Heald:

Well, just the list of symptoms. All by itself, it's kind of diverse and it ranges from it sounds like from mild irritation to debilitating.

Michael Biamonte:

Yes, that's true.

Jack Heald:

You know, one of the things that we try to do here is give people actionable steps they can take.

Michael Biamonte:

Actionable steps they can take, and probably the first actionable step would be deciding whether or not I should get checked for Candida and so I'd like to tell people is try to find, try to make a timeline and try to plot on the timeline when the majority of these strange symptoms all occurred, these symptoms which may be disrelated, but when they occurred.

Michael Biamonte:

And then go earlier and see if you can find a place where you were taking steroid medications, you were taking antibiotics, you took a lot of antacid medications because all of these things disturb your biome. See if there's like in some cases, the person recognizes they had surgery. Another case they'll say well, that's when the doctor started me on all these medications, that's when I got in the car accident. They'll find something they can align. And if you're having especially the key symptoms, which usually are chronic GI complaints, bloating gas, the person will notice that when they eat sugar or carbs they don't feel right. That could make the GI symptoms worse or it makes them spacey. People with Candida are notorious for getting absolutely intoxicated on a very small amount of alcohol and having the worst hangovers in the world.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Very interesting. There is a.

Michael Biamonte:

Japanese strain of Candida, which actually causes so much fermentation in the body that the person could be declared legally intoxicated just by eating a bunch of bread or a bunch of rice.

Jack Heald:

There was a house MD episode about that 20 years ago. Oh my God, what is it? Auto-intoxication or something? Auto-intoxication comes from Candida. I shouldn't laugh, but oh my Lord, okay, well, this is probably the point where we. I'm sorry, Phil, your mic's a little bit low, so I'm having trouble hearing you.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I was just going to say there have been some trials around that and some, certainly, case reports and it's very interesting. I just want to before we wrap up, you know I want to play devil's advocate a little bit Awesome, because I know there'll be a few in the audience thinking this, audience thinking this you know you've kind of described a complex that can be applied to almost any situation. You know the symptoms are so diverse and you know you even mentioned a bunch of diseases and saying, well, all of these could have a relationship, could be potentially. And then you kind of set up with you know very difficult to treat, you know difficult to diagnose properly. So some people you know might be left thinking that, well, this is kind of just. You know out there, you know this is just you know the difference is getting tested.

Michael Biamonte:

You can be tested to confirm whether you have it or not. How do you?

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

nail that down and if someone is there and they have maybe some of these things that you mentioned and they're experiencing some of these symptoms, talk a little bit about how do you nail it down so that then you can figure out do I need to go down this path of treatment, which, quite honestly, is not easy to do?

Michael Biamonte:

it sounds like no, but the testing always dictates the treatment, because in every case the microbiome is different. In some cases the candida exists with parasites of different kinds. In some cases the candida exists with different pathogenic bacteria like Klebsiella or Pseudomonas or other bacteria. And speaking of which, that would be a biome test. That would be a stool test that you do, and the stool test would represent your entire biome. It would show all the bacterial organisms, all the fungal organisms, and the correct stool test to do would be one of the modern ones, which is now a DNA stool test. You give your poop to the lab and the poop, instead of just concentrating on microscopic exams or cultures, they actually run DNA studies on your poop to look to see if you have the DNA of candida in your stool at a high amount. So they look for the quantity of DNA of different microorganisms. That's one test.

Michael Biamonte:

The next test is an organic acid test which measures organic acids that candida is releasing in your body. The primary metabolite that we look for in that test is called arabinose. Arabinose is the most reliable organic acid to determine if you have a candida overgrowth and then you can get blood work done for candida antibodies. That can be a little funky, because if you have a blood work test which is showing candida antibodies and they're positive, you don't always know if that means the infection is still active because the antibodies can remain active for nine. If that means the infection is still active because the antibodies can remain active for nine months after the actual infection is gone, which is true of other viruses too. So that's a tough one. But one thing for sure is, if you do a blood test for candida antibodies and they're positive, it means that sometime your immune system was fighting an overgrowth of candida. So at least you know that much.

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

That's great information, very, very interesting, and we've touched on a bunch of interesting topics. There were a few that we didn't even get a chance to get to, but, like I said, I think people are going to be very interested in potentially working with you or getting more information on this, so why don't you let them?

Michael Biamonte:

know how to go about doing that. First thing, if the person is interested and this is jarring anything in their psyche here get on Amazon, buy my book, the Candida Chronicles, because if you read through the book you can have so many oh wow moments because it's going to hit on so many symptoms and there's different stories about other patients with Candida and it may just really ring home and that could be your first step in unraveling the whole thing. If they want to contact me directly, I have three websites. I have my first website the main website is called health-truthcom and my two subsidiary websites are the New York City Candida Doctor and the New York City Thyroid Doctor. Now people ask me why thyroid? How does thyroid become a specialty of yours? Answer is very simple.

Michael Biamonte:

The major endocrine gland that's affected by a candida is the thyroid gland. And Dr Atkins and I actually at one point we were I remember this like it was yesterday we were sitting in his office and we were talking and we looked and we said you know, there's two reasons why the Atkins diet won't work on somebody. And he said he told me the first reason is they have low thyroid and they can't properly get into ketosis. And he said the second reason is they have candida and candida is causing their thyroid to malfunction. So he said remember this if you ever have patients who don't do well on my diet, those are the two things you need to look for thyroid problem and candida and they're both interrelated. Those are the two things you need to look for thyroid problem and candida and they're both interrelated.

Jack Heald:

Feels like we should go down that particular rabbit trail a little bit more, but holy smoke, okay. So health-truthcom, the New York city candida doctor and the New York city thyroid doctor. New York city thyroid doctor. Fascinating stuff. And what's the name of the book? Again, it's called the candida chronicles, the candida chronicles by michael biamonte. All right, very good, fascinating stuff, really fascinating. Thanks, phil, I'm I'm glad you brought him on, I really am, it's I know it's practically every time but I'll come on again and we can talk about thyroid.

Jack Heald:

I'd love to hear more about that.

Michael Biamonte:

The data I have between a lot of the people that I've worked with, there's a 50% of understanding how to treat thyroid and thyroid function that the average thyroid expert on Park Avenue has no knowledge of. They know 50%. I have the other 50% and if any listener is interested they can email me and I will email them a copy of an article that I've written which outlines the total knowledge of thyroid, everything you need to know to functionally address thyroid properly.

Jack Heald:

Is there an email address you'd like them to use?

Michael Biamonte:

Yeah, there's two they can use. One is drb at health-truthcom and the other is drmichaelcbiamonte at gmailcom. All right, they can email me and I'll send them a copy of the article.

Jack Heald:

Very good Boy. We just opened another can of worms that I'd love to. Well, I don't like to dig into cans of worms, but, yes, thyroid's fascinating. I would like you, if you don't mind, to repeat that. What Dr? The two reasons that Dr Atkins said for people, people who are on their diet on the atkins diet.

Michael Biamonte:

If someone's on the atkins diet which then reinterprets to a keto or a low carb diet because they're all universal if someone's on that diet and they're not getting success, they either have a thyroid problem or they have candida, which is causing a thyroid problem so it's either directly or indirectly thyroid Yep Fascinating.

Jack Heald:

All right. Well, let's talk about thyroid sometime in the not too distant future. Phil, that should be. I know lots of people who have been diagnosed with thyroid issues. I don't know if it's just because I'm getting older and meeting more people or if there's something going on, but I'd love to hear more about that.

Michael Biamonte:

I'd be more than happy to tell you, but it's a personal soapbox of mine because of how many doctors have incomplete data on thyroid and their treatments are so limited to just giving hormone supplementation, which is covering only a fraction of what's needed.

Jack Heald:

Very good, all right. So if you think you might be dealing with a problem with having success from the Atkins diet a low carb diet, a keto diet and you want more information about, maybe, the thyroid email, michael Biamonte, that information will all be in the show notes. Phil, are we done?

Dr. Philip Ovadia:

I think so, and we'll definitely get Michael back on for part two, but thank you for coming on and for some of the pioneering work that you've done in this field.

Michael Biamonte:

It's been my pleasure. I enjoyed talking about you.

Jack Heald:

Thanks for being with us.

Michael Biamonte:

Michael Biamonte.

Jack Heald:

Thanks For Dr Philip Ovedia. This is the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. Thanks for joining us. We'll talk to you next time.

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Dr. Philip Ovadia

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Jack Heald

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