01/22/2025
A MESSAGE FROM THE YEAST GUY....
Know what cases I love?! Gut issues. Dogs with bad poo scores, food intolerances, leaky gut, all that kind of thing. I always think "I know just what to do here". And the results are invariably pretty good, so you feel great.
The trickier cases are those suffering chronic itch with no known cause (termed idiopathic, by vets).
The vets clearly struggle with this one. Unfortunately, their very pro-drug approach offers no actual SOLUTION to the problem. As most of us know on here, the long-term application of steroids and creams and injections and antibiotics and antihistamines is not only a fruitless focus on symptoms, but as these products negatively impact the gut flora, they make the problem, which is a gut problem, so much worse.
So by the time a chronically itchy dog lands with us, they're in a bad way.
Up until recently, we would do all the usuals with itchy dogs - explore food, single protein diets (looking for food intolerances), supplements, herbs (as best we know, but then you talk to Rita Hogan and realise you know nothing!) - but if and when that fails, and it often does with such cases, we would have nowhere to turn.
I urge anyone who is at this point with their own dog or client, when the gut is healed, the poos are good, food intolerances have been explored and the supplements are not working, to consider an internal yeast dysbiosis.
Yeast is the forgotten part of the biome. Yes, they make up less in number but they are 20-200 times bigger than bacteria. Worse, our old advice of "starve the yeast" actually can make things WORSE, forcing the yeast to the gut membrane for sustenance, penetrating through the gut membrane, causing furious inflammation. Worse, when there, it covers itself with a biofilm to protect itself.
And your vet won't diagnose that as extra numbers of yeast cells in the p**p is NOT expected. Remember it is likely in hyphal form in the gut wall. When it grows it simply grows larger, it's not budding in the digesta for the yeast to see in the poo sample.
In fact, by doing a stool test and seeing the bacterial flora is awry (from the yeast infection!), it can lead you down the wrong path of bacterial pre and probiotics, never focusing on the issue at hand, which is why they work for some (when it's a bacterial issue) and not for others (when it's yeast).
And yes, the damage wrought by yeast at the gut lining can lead to not only mega inflammation but gut membrane damage and eventually leaky gut (with subsequent food intolerances).
THIS is the missing piece of the puzzle for us canine nutritionists.
THIS is why the intolerances keep building, despite our best efforts.
You can work on that diet all you like but in these cases we haven't removed the enemy at the gate that is letting everyone in.
Sounds complicated, but it has a simple, natural solution that involves 5 or 6 ingredients. I put them all together in Yeast Defeat and it's really working well.
This is what it's step 4 on the image below. If the dog is still itchy after those first 3 steps, I use it. If it works, it was yeast. If it doesn't, that's information you needed and it cost you lesss than €30 to get it.
Want to learn more? Come to my talk on "Advancements in Probiotics" in Orlando 13th May with Dr. Judy Morgan's Naturally Healthy Pets, or check out my quick 5-step protocol for itchy dogs (pictured) on drconorbrady. com, that will walk you through the yeast part.
The more you learn about the biome the less you realise you know.
