Are cruciferous vegetables good for candida diet?

Good day, Eric Bakker, naturopath and author of Candida Crusher.

I’m going to talk to you today about another Candida crushing food. This is the sixth food. You may have seen my other videos outlining the other foods. This food is the cruciferous vegetables. So what are cruciferous vegetables?

Well, cruciferous vegetables incorporate a group of leafy greens in particular. You may be familiar with some of these: bok choy, brussel sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, rutabagas, turnips, kale, radishes, there may be a few more; cabbages, I think, are another one. So these are very nutrient dense foods, very powerful nutrient laden foods, and good to eat and incorporate into your diet. They’re often popular with people who get more experience with juices. They may juice kale and these sorts of things. Many people don’t like the taste of these foods, particularly brussel sprouts is not really a favorite food of a lot of people, but I love brussel sprouts. I like them steamed up, grated with a bit of nutmeg on top. They taste quite nice.

There is some controversy about these particular foods in that they block the production of thyroid hormones. And there is certainly some truth in this, but eating them raw is not a very good idea for this reason. In research I did, I found that if you cook them or steam them or just cook them partially, you’re going to help reduce this goitrogenic ability by up to three quarters. So juicing kale, for example, or eating raw broccoli all the time is perhaps not a really good idea if you suffer from hypothyroidism.

So if you do have thyroid tendencies to have low thyroid activity, (A) make sure that your iodine is checked and in the correct range, that you’re consuming sufficient selenium and zinc and all the cofactors required for thyroid hormone production, (B) make sure that you cook or steam the cruciferous vegetables properly, and (C) have seaweed in your diet. Clever, because by having seaweed in your diet, you’re ensuring you’ve got sufficient iodine to allow the thyroid to make these thyroid hormones.

We’re getting off the beaten track here. We’ve talked a bit more about thyroid today, but so be it. So the thyroid hormones, when you think about it – like thyroidiodine and thyroxin – are very iodine dependent, so you need to have iodine in the diet. But when it comes to Candida, however, it’s very clever to incorporate these foods into the diet, as well, because they’re nutrient dense and also they contain a lot of fiber. And Dr. William Crook in the Yeast Connection spoke a lot about these particular foods as well, the cruciferous vegetables.

So these foods allow your digestive system to contain the correct kind of fibers to allow the beneficial bacteria to grow. These are prebiotic foods. I’ve noticed there’s a whole range of new supplements coming out with all these new fandangle prebiotics in them with all these trademarks and patents and all this nonsense, but this is all rubbish. Why don’t you just eat these kind of foods because then you’re going to incorporate the prebiotic tendencies of food naturally in your diet instead of again supplementing with stuff.

Remember what I said before. Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food. So eat more of these foods. I grow a lot of broccoli and kale in my vegetable garden. They’re wonderful foods to eat on a regular basis. But just bear those three points in mind I mentioned previously about the cruciferous vegetables. And if you do that and incorporate them, even with thyroid, you should be fine.

So I hope that answers any questions about cruciferous vegetables. And this now completes my six-part series on Candida crushing foods. So thanks for your time.