Author: Eric Bakker

Greetings! Eric Bakker, naturopath back again to talk about Dientamoeba Fragilis parasite. This time we’re going to talk about the best diet, or the best foods to eat when you’ve got parasites. I’ve just had a look around the internet, like I normally do when I make videos to see what kind of ideas people have got. I’ve looked at some YouTube videos. I’ve seen some crazy stuff out there in recommendations.

One of my more memorable ones was a guy saying that you need to drink vodka once or twice per day with these different kinds of herbs soaked in it for parasites. What a beauty! What a great suggestion. If you don’t fall over and get injured from drunkenness, at least you’re not going to worry too much about parasites are you if you get drunk, I suppose. I want you to be careful with the kind of advice that you follow on the internet when it comes to health. Not just the parasites that we’re talking about, but in general.

There’s so many wacky people out there. There’s so much crazy advice. It’s very easy if you haven’t got training or a good understanding of medicine to follow some of these people. The vodka suggestion is a bit over the top and stupid, but there are a lot of other suggestions out there that may seem plausible or quite credible. When you really think about them, they’re actually quite crazy. A good diet for parasites is the same dietary approach I recommend for a Candida yeast infection.

Generally, I find that meat’s not to be an issue with parasites. If you’re a vegetarian or vegan kind of person, you may need to look more at plant based proteins. You don’t need to eat meat necessarily. I find that meat generally is quite okay if you’ve got parasites. You don’t have too much of an issue. The green vegetables tend to be quite okay as well. You need to be very cautious of fruits and sweet foods just like you do with Candida. Be careful of the allergy kind of foods-foods that may react with you in terms of an allergic sense. Because many people with parasites can have quite a compromised leaky gut, and can really react strongly to different kinds of foods.

Dairy products-cow dairy products-if it’s sheep or goat, you’re generally not too bad, but if it’s cow, you need to be very cautious of those kinds of foods. They can really play up on the digestive system of a person with a parasite. Fruits-very cautious with fruits, because of the sugar content. Even more so with parasites than with Candida. I’d recommend you’d be very careful with fruits. Most fruits need to be stopped. Sometimes even apples aren’t tolerated by people with Dientamoeba-even green apples, even avocados can play up. The diet needs to be tailored or changed to suit your specific needs.

Sometimes the infestations are so bad, it doesn’t really matter what people eat. They just have to eat what they can eat and avoid what aggravates them. That’s all the good advice I can give you. If you can, focus on the garlic. Garlic tends to be one of the better foods for people with parasites. Raw garlic. Very small amounts are only necessary. You don’t need to eat large amounts of raw garlic. Even one or two fine slices of a clove mixed in with food can be quite suitable.

One of my favorite foods for people with a parasite problem is, when summertime comes along, is to put a lot more of the fresh herbs into the diet. Pretty hard to do in wintertime, but in spring and summer plant lots of different fresh herbs.

I’ve spoken about this before with the Candida video. Oregano, basil, rosemary, thyme, marjoram-all these kinds of herbs are quite good when it comes to parasites, because they contain a lot of different compounds like phenols. Oregano, for example, with the high carvacrol content. This is very, very good for parasites indeed. I noticed you can get different types of oreganos. If you go to a plant nursery, you can get the hot and spicy ones and the mild ones. Have a good look around and try to grow different types of oregano. Oregano mixes very well with many different types of salads, meat dishes, savory dishes. It’s a very good herb to grow and incorporate into your diet if you’ve got a yeast infection.

As I mentioned, be careful of the potential allergy foods. Chocolate is definitely on the allergy list. Bananas, oranges, a lot of fruits are. Dairy products. Sugar, of course. You can even have allergies against sugar. Just be cautious. You should be fine to have fermented or cultured food in your diet if you’ve got an issue with a parasite. Again, you really need to experiment here, because one food may really aggravate you and another food may be quite okay to try.

As I mentioned before, if you modify the food (the starch particularly) with the heat, you may be able to tolerate it a lot more. Your gut may tolerate it more without suffering the consequences. The end result could be gas or bloating. If you look at sweet potatoes, for example, they may be fine baked, but again not good if they’re just boiled or mashed. Same with chickpeas, same with rice. You need to just try and experiment yourself and see how you go. It should work out quite okay for you. As you get a handle on the parasites and the numbers diminish, you’ll find the digestion improves, and the tolerability for many different foods will increase significantly.

Remember, many parasites have got this ability to come back-a bit like a politician who’s been knocked down and they come back again in the long run. That will give you a bit of an indication on how you have to taper your treatment. You may need to go more severe at certain stages, and back off at other stages. Don’t be fooled by parasites, because it’s easy for them to go dormant for a while or have low level of activity and then come back again. I’ve seen this in many different cases. You’ll need to keep the diet quite tidy for six months, if not twelve months. Especially if you’ve been sick for a long time. That gives you a bit of an indication on the diet.

Salt is another additive I want you to have in your diet. Pepper and salt seem to be quite good as well, especially a good sea salt. Let’s have a look now at another video we’re going to do after this: “The Best Natural Treatment for Dientamoeba Fragilis.” Thanks for tuning in.

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Hi there. Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand back again to talk to you about Dientamoeba Fragilis, a parasite. Let’s have a look at causes. How do you get this infection? Why would you pick up a parasite? It’s not something that you would normally like to get from somebody, but it’s generally something you picked up from somebody – a little bit like an STD. Not a nice present to have, but you can get it. You can also get it often while traveling, in my opinion. This interesting little bug has not so much been found in domestic animals, it’s been found in non-human primates and it’s certainly been found more recently in pigs. Pigs can have large colonies of this bug.

In the first video I did in the series when I spoke about what Dientamoeba Fragilis is, I mentioned that this very interesting little parasite doesn’t really have a cyst stage. It’s got basically more of a mature stage straight up. So it’s not going to live for very long outside of the host, unlike Blastocystis or other parasites that can go into more of a dormant phase. Generally, I think how it will be picked up will be hand-to-hand contact, oral/fecal route or not proper hand washing. This is a big thing that I have spoken about in previous videos. It only takes a few minutes to wash hands. I think this is where one of the biggest transmissions of many different sicknesses come from, even influenza, colds and flus. It’s just from washing the hands.

I remember when I was at medical college; we were studying and I could remember one of the teachers saying, “Look, if you want to prevent disease, one of the easiest ways to do it is just to wash the hands.” He, in fact, went to the sink and showed us how to wash the hands and how long it took to wash the hands properly. It wasn’t just a quick sort of like this you know, it was actually a proper hand washing. Not that I’m very anal when it comes to hand washing, but I’ve certainly made a practice to really look after hygiene. Especially when I go traveling a lot. I go to airports, in taxis and hotels and things like that. When I did a lot of traveling a few years ago, I was very conscious of getting off an airplane and washing the hands, for example. Very important thing to do if you go to a third-world country is to be careful about hygiene.

Also, utensil sharing. Look at different places where you eat. Just keep an eye on your hygiene in general for the next few days and you might be surprised how often you will go somewhere or touch something, and before you know it, the hand goes up to the eye, or to the mouth, and you’re not even thinking about hand washing. This is how bugs get from one place to another.

A common cause of Dientamoeba Fragilis infection is poor hygiene. No one is going to stand there and tell you to put this bug inside your mouth, you’re the one who gets it into your system. It’s basically your responsibility to keep your hygiene first-rate if you want to avoid transmission of many different diseases; not just parasites, but sexually transmitted diseases as well. We all know that. A lot of us don’t know about parasites. Some people actually think that you get it for some unknown reason. Well, you don’t. You get an infection for a specific reason. So you need to be very cautious.

Many parasites in general are unfortunately not taken seriously by the medical profession. It’s amazing how many patients I’ve seen over the years that had one or several parasites that were never investigated properly. That’s what we’re going to talk about coming up very soon in another video. We’re going to talk about tests and diagnosis for Dientamoeba Fragilis. So is there a cause for this bug? It is. It could be from travel, but generally I think it comes from poor hygiene. Thanks for tuning in – catch you in the next video where we’re going to talk about testing.