Artificial Sugars on Candida Diet Yes or No?
Greetings. It’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher, formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. Today, we’re going to talk about artificial sugars. Particularly artificial sugars and their relevance to Candida yeast infections. But also artificial sugars and their relevance to any kind of digestive problems or metabolic issues like obesity, weight gain, heart disease, many other conditions.
Contrary to what you may be fed by the media or by Wikipedia or sites like that, artificial sugars do create health problems and there are many, many different studies that actually substantiate these claims. If you’re a person who likes diet drinks or consume sucralose or there’s various names for these different types of chemical concoction that they put in food today. I recently saw a program where they had quite a large tub of water. I think it was like 5,000 liters of water and they literally put five buckets of sugar in there, mixed it up, and then had someone taste it and they went, “Wow, this is really sweet.” And then the lady in the lab said, “Yeah, this is how much sugar goes in Coca Cola. Now, we’re going to show you how much artificial sugar goes into diet drinks.” So she had a 5,000-liter tub of water and she only put like that much in a cup, just a tiny little bit of I think it was sucralose went into that 5,000 liters. And that was stirred around and the lady tasted it and went, “Wow, this tastes even sweeter. This is very sweet.”
These things can really, really make you feel like you’re having a lot of sugar when, in fact, you’re not, but they do create chemical changes inside your gut inside the body. They’re a very, very powerful sweet compound. One thing I don’t like about them is they actually make you think like you’re having a lot of sugar. Some studies have shown they actually increase the desire for more and more sweet stuff. You think about it. If something tastes really sweet, it means that you’re going to say, “Wow, that tastes good.” I’ve said in previous videos that when people tell me that they like the taste of something, it usually means it’s sweet. Usually, if someone likes the taste of something, it’s not because it’s very salty or high in fat or high in chili. It’s because it’s sweet and manufacturers know that.
What they’ve done very cleverly, certain companies that make soft drinks, for example, they’ve actually moved into these artificial sugars. And you’ll find it in chewing gum. You’ll find it in all kinds of diet products. You’ll find it in a lot of foods. I read a survey where it said something like up to three quarters of foods in the US contain some type of artificial sugar or high fructose corn syrup. Be very careful when you consume these sugars on a daily basis. They create a whole raft of different problems.
A study in 2014 looked at the effects of these artificial sugars on mice and humans and various other animals, but particularly mice and human beings. They found that blood sugars are actually raised more with the consumption of artificial sugar than with plain sugar. Blood sugar can be affected. How does it happen?
What we think happens and what science has proven through research. You can read it in the 2014 study. Just go Google artificial sugars and research and you’ll actually find this study on the internet. It actually changes the gut flora composition, so the bowel flora changes under the presence of artificial sugars. That’s really bad when you start altering your own microbiota. You’re leaving yourself wide open for a whole bunch of different problems. You’ve got your own gut flora.
What experts believe is the gut flora is determined at a very young age and it doesn’t really change that much over a person’s life. So when you start drinking diet drinks every day, you can actually manipulate the gut flora and create big health problems for yourself. Gut flora are responsible for a whole lot of different reactions in the body. We know that there’s a link between the gut and the brain through neurotransmitters or hormones. We know the gut flora are responsible for making folic acid and B vitamins. There are many, many different reasons why you need to keep a very healthy, stable gut microflora and these artificial sugars can alter that. A good reason not to have them.
What happens higher blood glucose actually occurs under the presence of this as I was saying. When you get more blood sugar in your bloodstream, it can make problems. It can certainly increase the risk of infections and particularly yeast infections that like to eat sugar. The other problem when you’re starting to change or manipulate the glucose levels in the blood artificially, you’re going to put a big stress on your endocrine system, on the adrenal glands, on the pancreas. Glands like that get affected. And we all know what happens when you start playing around with adrenals, especially playing around with cortisol and insulin with the pancreas. We’re going to get fatigue. We’re going to get obesity. We’re going to get metabolic syndrome. We’re going to get inappropriate inflammatory responses in the body that can lead to autoimmune diseases, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. It goes on and on.
I had a very good friend of mine pass away two years ago, Paul. Paul was 58 when he died. Paul was a Type 1 diabetic, so he was relying on insulin shots. Taking insulin in the morning. His slow release insulin, Avandia and then taking a couple of other shots during the day. Paul had a Masters in chemistry. He was a very clever man. He was a teacher, but Paul passed away. Paul was obese. Paul didn’t understand the link with obesity and health. Science doesn’t equate to common sense.
Paul always said to me, “There’s nothing wrong with Diet Coke, Eric. I’m perfectly fine with drinking two liters a day. I’m happy with it. My doctor told me that it would have no risk to my diabetes or heart disease.” And I said, “Paul, look at you. You look like a beach ball. You’ve got a round gut. Your face is all flushed and red. You can’t continue on like this. You’re going to have a heart attack.” Well, that’s what happened. Paul passed away of a heart attack. On one Sunday morning, he woke up and he passed away. And I was gutted. I felt so upset for his wife and his daughter that his happened at 58 years of age. Ignorance is bliss. Did Diet Coke contribute to Paul’s passing? Hard to say. The funny thing is Paul kept drinking two liters of it every day, if not more. And not only that, Paul loved sweet stuff. Paul loved food. He also liked to have deep fried chips. He liked take away food. And I believe that continually drinking these diet kind of drinks or artificial sugars, it fuels the desire for more and more. It’s almost an addiction. It fuels the addiction.
The other thing with artificial sugars is they increase digestive permeability. This has also been found through research that your gut becomes more permeable under the presence of Splenda, Sucralose, NutraSweet, Aspartame, all of these kinds of sweetening agents. Don’t chew chewing gum with this junk in it people. Keep away from this crap. You’re being deluded here that this sugar is okay for your health. Everyone will tell you that.
We were told for years that smoking was okay for your health. Go to YouTube and have a look at the 1960s ads. More doctors smoke Camel than any other cigarette. All this sort of junk. There’s even an ad on YouTube you can find on Coca Cola that I’ve pasted on my own Facebook page, my Eric Bakker, MD Facebook page and it’s showing you an attractive lady in her 20s drinking Coca Cola saying, “It’s good for me because it keeps the weight off. It helps to suppress my appetite.” People were actually fed this kind of junk back then, and now we know Coke contains about 17 teaspoons of sugar per can. It can’t be good. Back then, they peddled these kind of lies. Many people now believe artificial sugars are safe for them. The truth will come out eventually, so I just want you to be careful consuming any kind of artificial sugar. In my mind, it’s poison. It’s toxic. I wouldn’t even consider it.
Other reasons you want to avoid these kind of toxins in your diet. As I mentioned, increased risk for different autoimmune diseases, cancers, increased appetite as in Paul’s case, especially for sugar carbs. Paul loved Dunkin donuts. Paul loved all kinds of those box cereals, probably like Cheerios like you guys have in the States. Paul loved Kentucky Fried Chicken. Paul loved pizzas. He just loved carbohydrates. He couldn’t get enough. I believe he kept right away from the soda drinks and drank water more, maybe flavored with lemon juice or some minted orange floating in it. If Paul started to consume more berries and changed his eating habits, actually lost a bit of weight, Paul would’ve still been with us today.
Brain fog likely from intestinal permeability, so you can actually get brain fog. It has been associated with these artificial sugars. I had a lady contact me here in New Zealand about four or five years ago who was in the media, who was actually going to look for a law suit against a chewing gum manufacturer because after chewing one packet of a particular gum every day, she started to develop serious brain fog with major headaches. I’ve had several patients I’ve treated over the years with headaches that they thought they were going to die and they were consuming diet soda drinks. One patient drunk between two to four liters of diet drinks per day and she actually thought she had a brain tumor, so she went to about 20 doctors. She had brain scans. She even brought a bottle of diet drink into her doctor who said, “It’s perfectly fine. You can drink this stuff. It’s not linked to headaches.” The funny thing is, once we got her off the diet drinks, what do you think happened to the headaches? Food for thought.
I hope you’ve learned something from this video to please avoid artificial sugars for the sake of your brain health, for the sake of your endocrine health, for the sake of your gut health, for the sake of overall health, for the sake of not really maintaining problems like a yeast infection, for the sake of not pushing yourself into diabetes, into obesity. Don’t believe the hype. Just because experts say something is good, it doesn’t mean to say it’s good. Think about it. Food for thought.
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