What is yeast?
Yeast is a fungus, so it is a close cousin of mushrooms, toadstools, truffles and puffballs. According to current scientific research, over 100,000 different types of fungus have already been identified, but some estimates suggest that as many as 1.5 million different strains of fungi could exist.
Fungi are not plants, because they lack the chlorophyll that is a primary characteristic of plants. Another factor that distinguishes fungi from plants is their inability to make their own food.
They inhabit climates that range anywhere from cool to tropical, and can be found even in the air that we breathe every day. Fungi will most commonly be found in moist environs, so that they thrive in leftover foods and fruit materials, damp, windfall leafs, soil, manure, brackish water and any other similar environment where nourishment is readily available.
Many fungi are ‘good’ as far as man is concerned. For example, in addition to mushrooms and truffles, without fungus we would have no bread or beer, because it is the yeast that is added to the bread or beer making process that turns it into what it eventually becomes. Without fungus, the world would be one enormous landfill site, because it is fungus that breaks down trash and thereby returns it to the constituent parts that are eventually returned to the soil.
So, fungi have many characteristics for which we should be grateful. That is not however always true…
You are covered in (and full of) fungus….
Whilst it may sound a bit unpleasant, almost from the moment we are born, every person on the face of the earth is living in their own personal primordial soup of micro-organisms such as bacteria, fungi and yeast. These microbes live on your skin, in your mouth, nose and digestive tract so that every part of you both externally and internally is awash with microbes from the moment you are born until you take your very last breath.
It is estimated that among these micro-organisms that live on and in you throughout your life, there are several hundred different types of yeasts. Fortunately, only a very small handful of these yeast cultures are potentially harmful, with the primary cause of yeast infections being one particular strain known as Candida albicans.
This is a yeast that lives in the mouth, throat, nose, intestines and all over the skin of most normal human being. It is also considered to be a normal part of the internal lining of the bowel, and in its normal state actually helps to ensure that regular, normal bowel movements are maintained.
Candida albicans first attaches itself to newborn babies either during or very shortly after birth, but it remains essentially harmless even to a baby as long as that baby has an immune system that is strong enough to keep the growth of the yeast culture in check.
By the age of six months, around 90% of babies will test positive for the presence of Candida albicans. This is why babies whose immune systems are somehow weakened are often prone to oral thrush in the first few months of their life, as this is a yeast infection caused by Candida.
By the time we are adults, almost every person plays host to Candida albicans. However, for the vast majority of the time, this is not going to cause any kind of problem at all, any more than any other of the millions of microbes on your body will do.
This is because for most of the time, there is a balance between all of these different strains of microbes, and as long as this balance is maintained, you will remain healthy and infection free. For example, there are other bacteria on your skin that fight against Candida albicans for the same food sources, and consequently this keeps the Candida cell growth in check.
It is only when this balance is somehow upset that the conditions will prevail whereby a yeast infection can begin to set in.
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