Why Candida and Aspergillus are Your Two Best Friends: and how to end the friendships diplomatically

For decades now, there has been talk of white mould (candida) and black mould (aspergillus) being the root causes of illness. It’s time to set the record straight: mould is literally your best friend. If you have it, it’s keeping you alive. So why does it have such a bad reputation? Understand what causes it, why you need it and at the same time how to be free of the symptoms once and for all.

This matter becomes most clear when we take a lesson from nature. The Congo jungle is one of the deepest, most impenetrable, unexplored forests in the world. There are over 1000 species of trees (I don’t know about you but I can only name about 50 species of tree, this makes me feel like I need to brush up on my arborology…) The sheer quantity of vegetation in the Congo rainforest actually produces it’s own weather. Apparently the humidity released from the trees gives rise to spectacular thunderstorms. But the trees also shed leaves, which fall in such numbers that unchecked, they would soon choke the forest floor and rise to submerge the top level of the canopy itself.

To break down this massive accumulation of bio-waste, great fungal mats spread across the rainforest floor, quickly decomposing the dead vegetation. The most beautiful is a fascinating, fluorescent fungus which the locals call ‘chimpanzee fire’ (image at the top of this post). Perhaps it releases light as a means of dispersing the overabundance of energy that comes from digesting so much plant matter. Chimpanzee fire is one of a small number of bioluminscent fungi around the world, and was probably the inspiration for James Cameron’s vision of the night forests of Pandora in his movie Avatar (image below).

Understanding that the role of fungi in nature is to keep a forest healthy by breaking down dead vegetation, we can place candida and aspergillus in perspective. The role of fungi in the human body is to help the lymphatic and circulatory systems break down and eliminate excessive waste. Without them, the buildup of waste would create a lethal backup of dead cells and tissue, quickly killing the host. Fungi are your friend, they keep you alive.

So where is the waste coming from? We can work backwards if we combine an understanding of biology, organic chemistry, bacteriology and parasite microbiology.

Fungal Biology

The two main fungi that are recognized to be pathogenic to humans are white and black mould. White mould is the most common, we call it candida. Here’s what it looks like:

Candida can grow anywhere in the body but tends to localize in the digestive tract, skin and scalp.

Black mould is the more toxic of the two, we call it aspergillus. The full name is aspergillus flavus, and since in biology, moulds are labeled with the first letter of the first name and the first three letters of the second name, Aspergillus FLAvus is also called an afla-toxin. In the ’90’s it was popular to blame aflatoxin exposure on apples, whereas in these more enlightened times it is blamed on mould in the ceilings of workplaces and gym shower rooms. We’re still playing the blame game after all these years.

But fungi need food and contrary to popular belief they don’t feed on us, they feed on metals.

Organic Chemistry

The main thing you need to know about the elements is that fungi can only grow in the presence of metal toxicity, and metals are elements, so fungi can only grow in the presence of element toxicity. The most popular two are mercury (element #80), which is a food source for candida, or white mould, and cadmium (element #48), which is a food source for aspergillus, or black mould.

Every now and then someone tells me with a serious tone in their voice that they’ve been poisoning by black mould from their shower or a toxic worksite, or that they’ve finally found the reason for their lifelong health problems and got on the candida bandwagon.

Aspergillus is pathogenic to humans, so it’s not a great idea to go around breathing it in, but a healthy body can easily bounce back from exposure. A body full of cadmium however will not bounce back, the aspergillus will start feeding on the cadmium. By the same token, candida can only build up if there is ongoing mercury toxicity. And no, you don’t get mercury from fish, that’s almost as big a misconception as blaming candida for your health issues. At this level of understanding, heavy metals are the reason your fungi develop in your body.

But why are the elements/heavy metals sticking to you?

Bacteriology

Bacteria soak up heavy metals to help them digest things. We are comfortable with the idea that we humans need magnesium and calcium to help digest foods, so it makes sense that bacteria need metals too. The difference is that bacteria soak up the elemental forms of these metals, which are not in the form humans can metabolize. For example a bacterium will feed on magnesium, element #12, while a human body needs magnesium citrate, the digestible form. If you want a better explanation, this issue is explored in more detail in my article titled The Alkaline Water Problem.

However, bacteria are very old on the chain of life. They are from the taxonomic domain ‘bacteria’ which developed around 4 billion years ago. Back then there wasn’t much to eat, so bacteria developed ways of using the base elements that were available at the time. For this reason, bacteria can use elements that are toxic to humans, such as mercury and cadmium. If you have a mercury loving bacteria in you, that’s a really old bacteria: billions of years older than the dinosaurs.

The attached image of haematite tubes are thought to be a fossil of the oldest bacteria ever discovered and the oldest evidence of life on earth but this would have been iron-loving bacteria.

An example of mercury loving bacteria is found in this link to an article in Nature Magazine, and would be the cause of fish being high in mercury, for the same reason you are: the bacteria allows it to stick to you like glue.

But where are the bacteria coming from? Not your gut flora, those are good bacteria. These are so-called bad bacteria and they really are bad for you.

Parasite Microbiology

Humans can and do host about 20 common species of parasite from various roundworms, tapeworms and flukes to protozoa like giardia and entamoeba histolytica.

Bacteriae come from parasite poop. This makes sense, since faeces is full of bacteria which help it break down. But not only your faeces has bacteria, parasite faeces also has them.

If a fish is high in mercury, that means it has a parasite that is pooping out mercury-loving bacteria. That’s why mercury sticks to the fish. If you are high in mercury, it probably means you got the parasite from the fish and now that parasite is filling you up with mercury-loving bacteria.

It’s a big circle of life and like it or not we’re a part of it. Vegans are not immune since they eat food grown in soil which is fertilized by manure that comes from animals who have parasites. That’s probably why I keep finding hookworm eggs in ketchup and tapeworm eggs in mayo and various salad dressings, as outlined in this article.

The problem with parasites is that we can’t easily identify which ones we host, as I outline in this survey of stool testing called The Parasite Problem. In the absence of knowing that we are hosting a parasite (or 10 to 20 different species, which is the average for someone who feels like they’re sick all the time), it is easier to become aware of the side effect of having a parasite, which is inflammation. Parasite poop is inflammatory, being full of bad bacteria

Connections

So it’s very simple.

  1. Parasites excrete waste, which is full of bacteria.
  2. The bacteria that come from a parasite don’t belong in you, they’re pathogenic.
  3. Over time, the bacteria soak up metals in their elemental form, which are  in turn toxic to humans. We call these heavy metals. The metal-bacteria complex creates toxicity in our tissues, which we think of as mercury poisoning, aluminum poisoning, lead poisoning, etc. We blame fish, pop cans and tap water respectively, never realizing these elements are only sticking to us because we have a parasite.
  4. When so much Parasite>Bacteria>Element toxicity accumulates that our bodies can’t handle the detox, the fungal mat creeps up to help break down the waste and keep us alive. This is the explanation for all skin conditions, by the way: rosacea, eczema and psoriasis are all examples of fungus keeping us alive.

It’s too bad human fungi aren’t bioluminescent or we could see who has parasites in the dark. But then everybody would glow in the dark, and that would be weird…

Fungi are Friends, not Fiends

Fungus is your best friend, its keeping you alive so you can spend your time and money going on candida cleanses and worrying if you have black mould.

If you have candida, aspergillus or some other fungal infection, you have a parasite. If the fungal infection is localized to a certain body area, you have a tissue or skin parasite in that area.

The question that remains is why, then, are candida cleanses effective? They’re effective because they involve avoiding sugar, which is feeding your parasites and making things worse. Sugar cravings are not evidence of candida, they’re evidence of a parasite that is eating up all your glucose and leaving you glucose-depleted, so you eat more sugar. Then it eats more, then you eat more, then it poops more, then you detox more parasite poop, then things back up and finally fungus steps in to keep you alive.

If you want to do something productive about your candida and aspergillus, get rid of your parasites.

3 thoughts on “Why Candida and Aspergillus are Your Two Best Friends: and how to end the friendships diplomatically”

  1. If parasites abound in the environment, why are they problematic for some people and not in others? Are the problem cases of parasites becoming more common in modern times?

  2. These are both good questions with the same root answer.

    Working back from Candida to the metals/dead bacteria it breaks down, and from there to the parasite that poops out the bacteria, focus rightly moves to the parasite layer and the legitimate question of why parasites affect some people and not others (or at least some more-than others).

    I suspect it has to do with speciation. Most people are happy to have heard of a fluke, and to be able to distinguish it from a tapeworm, a hookworm or a roundworm. But the fact is there are tens of thousands of species of fluke, tens of thousands of species of tapeworm, etc, and you won’t know which ones you have. This is never considered with parasites, they are wrongly taken at face value based on their name.

    What seems the most likely root cause of illness when considering the adverse affect of a parasite on one host versus another is the random and difficult-to-quantify effect of the strain of bacteria the parasite excretes. Just like not all people have the same internal microbiome, neither do all parasites. One person might have tapeworm with species number 46,729 that excretes bacteria combo A-2376 (these are intended to be arbitrary numbers to illustrate a point) while another person might have tapeworm species number 36,264 excreting bacteria combo G-7423. Let’s say bacteria strain A-2376 is highly inflammatory while strain G-7423 causes no inflammation whatsoever. In this scenario, the person with tapeworm species 36,264 will have no symptoms, and will have the luxury of ignoring parasites, while the person with tapeworm species 46,729 will not be able to think about anything else but the question of why for their whole life they have been so sore, bloated, inflamed and so reactive to foods.

    There isn’t a language of parasites so there isn’t a means of being be aware that we are failing to distinguish between different species.

    But if we factor in up to 100,000 potential species of parasite within a single name like tapeworm, factor in up to 10,000 potential bacteria in each parasite, and multiply that by at least 7 main categories of parasite, and then apply this to each person’s own internal microbiome (that is thought to contain up to 1 million unique bacteriae), we have numbers that run away with themselves, and are impossible to calculate or predict.

    It’s easiest to think of the reaction you’ll have to the parasites you’ve got as ‘luck of the draw’ since if there’s rhyme or reason to it, it’s not to be found in simple accounting.

    The answer to the second question (e.g.are problem cases becoming more common in modern times) can now build on the first. With milk and oil products being the two main sources of parasite in the modern diet, and with a global food distribution system being increasingly a factor, we are all exposed to a greater variety of parasites than would have been historically possible, unless you were Marco Polo or some other dedicated traveler. Now we don’t need to travel, the food travels to us.

    And when it travels it has these random, obscure species of parasite (egg) with their random, complex strains of bacteria. The only thing protecting you from picking up everything you’re exposed to on a daily basis is the fact that you are already hosting everything you have room for, in the same way a glass full of sand won’t fit any more sand.

    So the argument could be made to keep the parasites you have and leave well enough alone, except that if randomly, the species of parasite you have and the strains of bacteria they’re excreting are, again randomly interacting negatively with your own microbiome (e.g. hurting you) then you’ve got a choice to make: is it better to keep what species you’ve got (e.g. the devil you know) or more worthwhile to get everything out, start over and hope that the next time around you randomly acquire species that are not so (randomly) detrimental to you.

    There are layers of complexity to this, since it can’t be known with certainty which of the species you’re currently hosting are causing the symptoms you’re currently dealing with, only that certainly one of them is; it can’t be guaranteed they’ll all be eliminated by any treatment you try; and then it can’t be predicted which species you’ll reacquire, or their effect on you (e.g. whether they’ll be better than the last group, the same as or worse than what you had).

    In general though eliminating a host of fully-grown organisms and starting fresh with newly-hatched parasites is going to reduce nutrient loss and lymphatic stress, which are the two main effects of having a parasite, and in this way the body’s fungal levels can be viewed as an indicator of overall progress.

    I’ve never suggested any of this was simple, just that trying to understand is better than pretending it’s not happening.

  3. Thanks for such a thorough answer. I knew there wasn’t a simple answer. I never considered the bacterial composition of the parasites…of course this makes sense however.

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