Until recently, I had come to the conclusion that beating candida required a hard hitting comprehensive program using many different supplements. Alternative clinics specializing in candida found that comprehensive programs produced the best results.
I knew that, at best, if you used a very good candida fighter like CandiClear5, which reduced candida mechanically, you might be able, over the course of a year or so, get to the point where the candida was well under control. Adding other supplements sped up the process, but still seemed to require a minimum time frame of around 6 months.
Then we combined and supercharged a couple of our top supplements, and made the hardest-hitting candida fighting supplement I have tested — one that would work on spores as well as attacking candida everywhere in the body.
Ten years ago, as part of dealing with autoimmune diseases, I started recommending the use of Soil Based Organisms to knock out candida. These soil based organisms not only killed candida directly, they also stimulated the immune system response and were more aggressive than probiotics. Unfortunately, SBO’s did not work quickly, and required a very large number of capsules to get good results.
When ThreeLac was first introduced to the USA, it proved to be wildly popular and was helping people better than the usual candida-fighting herbs and probiotics. I began recommending it, and thus began my real education into the nature of candida.
At that point I still had no idea how tough candida was to eliminate. There was a testimony of someone getting over candida in 11 days, or so they claimed, so it was being marketed as a product that would eliminate candida fast.
As it turned out, this person with the fast results had been using many other supplements and drugs to hit the candida — ThreeLac had helped to finish it off. And as usual, this person found that she needed to continue using ThreeLac to keep the candida under control. The overgrowth hadn’t been eliminated from the body, but was there ready to come back at the first opportunity.
ThreeLac has also been marketed as something that can be used without having to go on a strict diet. As usual, if something sounds too good to be true, it most likely is not as good as it made out to be.
Being on an anti-candida diet is always a help because you are not feeding the candida as much of their favorite foods, so they don’t grow as fast. If you are overwhelming the candida with a host of good candida fighters, then you may be able to get away without being on a strict diet, but your progress will be slower.
At the time, ThreeLac did work better than other anti-candida supplements, and was my main candida product for years. It is still extensively marketed for candida. While it helped many people improve, it was incapable of knocking out candida.
And no wonder. Probiotic supplements work primarily in the intestinal tract. ThreeLac does have some lemon juice powder that does help alkalize the body — but that is a very minor action, probably equivalent to drinking the juice of less than half a lemon a day. Naturally probiotics can, if they are formulated correctly, fight off candida that have overgrown in the intestinal tract. They can also help the immune system become stronger.
Working and living in the intestinal tract, they can’t deal effectively with the candida fungus that are living elsewhere in the body. They certainly can’t deal with candida that are hiding in your body — out of the circulatory system. Nor does ThreeLac or any probiotic have the ability to handle candida spores.
We had short term success with ThreeLac, though we also had many returns. (Now I get very few returns.) More importantly, candida, yeast, thrush symptoms would come back all too soon once ThreeLac was stopped.
How could this not happen when you are using a probiotic as the main weapon to fight candida. It has a limited area of effectiveness — in your intestinal tract — while candida can be living throughout your body.
Another limitation ThreeLac has is its inability to actually recolonize the intestinal tract. The friendly bacteria it uses are not meant to colonize and grow in your GI tract. They are meant to fight candida there, and die after a few days.
ThreeLac’s sister product FiveLac contains a couple of strains of probiotics that do colonize the intestinal tract, but their quantities are not significant enough to be effective. You need many more strains, and more of each strain, to have an effective probiotic.
Our experience is that FiveLac is not even as effective as ThreeLac is.
ThreeLac has had enough marketing success that competing products have been developed that are marketed online as being better than ThreeLac.
TheraLac — Does a better job of recolonizing the intestinal tract than ThreeLac, or FiveLac, but does not contain near as good candida fighters as ThreeLac does. So overall, they are about equal in overall effectiveness but are focused on different actions. ThreeLac for fighting candida, TheraLac for recolonizing. With only 5 strains of friendly bacteria, it is also a bit too limited in what gets colonized.
Symbion is a copy of ThreeLac, using the same stains of friendly bacteria as ThreeLac. It may or may not have as good a delivery system as the delivery system is not even discussed on the website, though you have to assume it is not as good as ThreeLac in this matter or they’d be talking it up. Symbion also make a claim to alkalize the body, but ThreeLac does a better job with its added lemon juice powder which Symbion does not have. Their claim that Symbion causes less die off may be true. It is likely that Symbion doesn’t work near as well as ThreeLac so doesn’t cause as much die off. As with ThreeLac, the friendly bacteria in it do a poor job of colonizing the intestinal tract.
XtraLac is another copy of ThreeLac that looks very good — until you look more closely. ThreeLac’s most important candida fighting bacteria is enterococcus faecalis. What XtraLac did was to use a similarly named but not near as powerful or expensive bacteria, enterococcus faecium. So while XtraLac has a number of good points, turns out that it is not near as good overall at fighting candida as the company would like you to think. And not near as good as ThreeLac.
Syntol is another probiotic who manufacturer makes a claim of it being highly effective for candida. It also contains enzymes to kill candida. So it does work on candida throughout the body.
Its micro-encapsulated, acid resistant capsules, are not as important as the marketers of those types of probiotics would like you to believe. If you take unprotected probiotics on an empty stomach, half an hour or so before a meal, maybe 20% is lost to the stomach environment. If the probiotic has ingredients and energetic instructions telling the bacteria in it to colonize faster and to cooperate better, as only TotalFlora15 does, that 20% is easily made up.
Being a combination product, with limited capsule size, Syntol cannot contain as many friendly bacteria or enzymes as separate products would. For example, it only supplies 3 billion colonizing units per capsule. Much less than TotalFlora15’s 15 billion units per capsule. And it doesn’t contain near as many enzymes as strictly enzyme products do. How could it? The claim that Syntol is particularly effective because the bloodstream was clear of candida after 45 days is meaningless as any good enzyme formulation taken to fight candida can do the same thing. An enzyme formulation with even more enzymes should work even faster.
The bloodstream is the first part of the body, after the intestines, that enzymes work on. Cleaning the bloodstream has no bearing on how much candida there is throughout the body, in organs, spaces between organs, and so on. But the study certainly sounds good.
What may seem like small changes can make a big difference. Years ago when I decided to offer more effective products to fight candida than what I had been offering with ThreeLac, I asked my suppliers to make a better probiotic. They came up with TotalFlora15. It works better than similar high dosage, multiple strain probiotic formulas because of just a few improvements.
In our experience it fights candida as effectively in the intestinal tract as ThreeLac does, and recolonizes much much better as it supplies billions and billions more recolonizing bacteria than FiveLac. ThreeLac supplies no colonizing bacteria at all. And now TotalFlora15 is energized to work even better.
However, we never suggest using TotalFlora15 or any other probiotic as the primary supplement to deal with candida because probiotics don’t deal with candida throughout the body. They work in the intestinal tract only, and while they can help the immune system get on top of the candida residing all over your body, which it is doing when you have had the overgrowth for even a few years, It doesn’t do an effective job at dealing with this systemic candida overgrowth. Probiotics certainly can’t handle candida hiding out in the body outside the circulatory system, and they don’t deal with candida spores.
What amazes me is the number of internet websites promoting one product for fighting candida. I suppose there are plenty of people looking for a quick fix who haven’t yet understood how hard it is to eliminate candida overgrowth who can be fooled into believing that a not so great product that wouldn’t even make my list of the top 3 or 4 supplements for fighting candida, would knock out their candida. Quickly.
I had no idea at first as to how difficult a task it is to eliminate candida overgrowth, but after having talked to thousands of sufferers over those years, I eventually came to understand just how tough candida was to eliminate.
This led me to..