What Causes Yeast Infections
Different Causes Of Yeast Infections
Before we start with some causes of yeast infections, you should understand what is a yeast infection, you can find a detailed report in the post What Are Yeast Infections to gain an understanding of how the candida albican yeast can spread in some circumstances.
Dealing with stress
It has long been accepted by medical science that increased levels of stress adversely affect people in both a psychological and a physical manner. In particular, when you are under a great deal of stress, your body undergoes subtle chemical changes that make your immune system far less effective at fighting back against invading diseases and infections.
Stress also has a tendency to make your stomach far more acid than it is under normal relaxed circumstances, and this change of balance in this particular area of your body makes internal yeast infections more likely to occur.
When you are handling stressful situations badly, the level of chemical imbalance in your body is going to be heightened. Even when you are handling the situation well, stress can still reduce the effectiveness of your immune system, making you more susceptible to candida albicans infection.
Doing what you can to minimize the amount of stress you have to put up with in your life will reduce your susceptibility to yeast infections as well as other unpleasant and unwelcome medical conditions.
Avoid antibiotics
In the everyday hurly-burly of our modern life, there is no doubt that medical professionals in most Western countries are under ever increasing pressure to perform medical miracles.
Because the pressures on medical systems throughout the world are also increasing at an ever-accelerating rate, most of our doctors and medical attendants do not have the time or resources to give every individual patient the degree of care that they really need.
Sad as it is to say, it is sometimes simpler to give a complaining patient some tablets and to tell them to go home and take them, than it is to try to get to the real root cause of the problem.
This is a common feature of most medical systems in the West. Unlike many systems of treatment that originated in Asia and the east, Western medicine does not as a general rule adopt a holistic ‘whole body’ approach to medical treatment.
In the West, it is far more common to view the human being as a machine made up of many individual ‘components’. As a consequence, Western medical treatments tend to be administered on the basis that if one of the ‘machine parts’ is damaged, it should be repaired or replaced. In other words, if you have a headache, then that is the part of your body that need repairing, so you may well be prescribed painkillers.
The holistic approach adopted by a practice such as acupuncture, however, would view the situation entirely differently, being far more focused on tracing the root cause of the problem rather than simply treating the condition itself.
Because this is not what happens in Western countries, and because medical professionals have less time available for each individual patient that they have to treat, it has become increasingly common over the last 20 years or so for doctors to prescribe antibiotics for a huge and ever expanding range of medical conditions.
This is not always a bad thing. Indeed, in the vast majority of cases when an antibiotic is prescribed, it will do exactly what the medical attendant who prescribed that drug intended. For example, if the patient is suffering from some kind of bacterial infection, the prescribed antibiotic will almost always get rid of that infection.
In doing so, the antibiotic will have killed the bacteria that were causing that particular infection. However, as well as killing the ‘bad’ bacteria that were causing the infection, the antibiotic will also kill many other bacteria, including those that allow your body to resist yeast infections.
These are the bacteria that live in your gut and on your skin that will fight the yeast for whatever nutrients are available, and will generally win their fight when they do so. However, taking antibiotics will kill the bacteria as well as the ones that were causing the infection and that makes you far more susceptible to a yeast infection.
Some antibiotics will also attack the yeast cells that will eventually cause an infection if they are allowed to grow and multiply. However, yeast is a fungus that it is often surprisingly complex, and one aspect of this is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. While the antibiotic might kill a significant proportion of the yeast cells on your skin and in your gut, those that it does not kill will become increasingly resistant to antibiotics over time.
When you suffer a yeast infection, mild over the counter, or even prescribed, antibiotic creams and potions are no longer strong enough to defeat your infection.
Researchers now believe that the ready prescription of broad spectrum antibiotics as a ‘magic bullet’ remedy to an ever increasing panoply of medical complaints is one of the primary reasons why the incidence of yeast infections is also increasing.
The importance of diet
Your diet has a significant effect on increasing or decreasing your likelihood of suffering a yeast infection.
There is one thing that you can put into action right now that will significantly decrease your chances of contracting a yeast infection. Cut down on the sugar that you consume, and you will cut down the chance of suffering a yeast infection at the same time.
Yeast loves sugar, whereas the good bacteria that help combat yeast and your immune system are not at all keen on the stuff! The more sugar you take in your diet, the more you are creating an environment ripe for yeast cells to proliferate.
You can understand how sugar in your diet can affect the yeast and bacteria in your gut, but it may not be quite as clear how sugar can contribute to yeast infections in other parts of the body. In that case, there are two significant factors that you need to consider.
Firstly, it may be a hackneyed old cliché, but you really are what you eat. Every cell of your body including those that make up your skin are nourished by the nutrients and other foodstuffs that you take in every day.
It follows that the more sugar you eat, the more of it there will be in the skin cells on top of which the Candida albicans is sitting. Because of this, all it needs is for the slightest skin abrasion to damage the skin cell wall, and the yeast becomes able to ‘sense’ the sugar on which it is happy to gorge itself.
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