Author: Eric Bakker

Greetings. It’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker. I’m the author of a book called Candida Crusher and also the creator of this YouTube channel called Candida Crusher. Thanks so much for checking out my video. I’ve done quite a lot of videos on different types of seeds, grains and nuts on this channel. Although I don’t think I’ve spoken much about quinoa.

Quinoa is a kind of a seed. It’s not really a grain. About 90 percent plus of the world’s production of this really nice seed comes from Bolivia and Peru in South America. In fact, an incredible amount of tonnage is coming out of those two countries. There is an increasing awareness of this particular type of a seed that many people are starting to eat in the western world.

This isn’t a new food at all. It’s been around in South America probably for a couple thousand years. Many people have eaten this kind of a seed for a long, long period of time. They’ve made flours and breads out of it. They’ve cooked in different kinds of savory and sweet dishes. There are many different ways you can eat it. There is no doubt it is a really good food to eat whether you have a yeast infection or not. It’s gluten free. Not that I really think that that makes a big difference when you’ve got a yeast infection. I quite like it cooked in chicken stock, so I’ll often make up a very nice beef or chicken stock and then drain some of that out and then use that stock to actually cook grains like brown rice or quinoa.

Quinoa is very nice cooked in a chicken stock and I often have it as a side serve or cook it and then mix it in with a salad with different greens and put some walnuts or some other kind of seeds like pumpkin or sunflower seeds through that. You can bake it. You can make a bread out of the flour. There are a lot of different things you can do with quinoa. You can even make little patties or cakes out of it or croquette things out of it. There are lots and lots of recipes on the internet on what to do with this beautiful seed.

You can get black quinoa. You can get a golden colored one. You can get a red one. There are different types you can get. When I went to Anaheim this year to Expo West, a very big nutritional expo, I couldn’t believe how many people I saw there from South America that were selling different types of quinoa. So it’s becoming a very big popular food in the western world. And so it should be.

It’s a very healthy food to eat. It’s also got traces of Omega 3 in it, I just discovered, alpha linoleic acid, so small amounts of Omega 3. It is very high in lysine, which is great, because that inhibits the viral replication of herpes viruses, so for cold sores and genital herpes. It’s very good for inhibition of those kinds of viral problems. It’s actually very good for the immune system because there are different studies that are showing it’s got a good anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant aspects about it. It’s high in manganese and zinc and copper and potassium and molybdenum and a lot of the trace elements that are hard to get from certain types of foods.

I totally endorse quinoa. I think it’s a great food to eat. And I think you should just buy a small amount and just try to add it into your diet. Try to cook it in the chicken stock. It’s quite a good tip. One of my patients told me about that a few years ago. Since I’ve done that, I found it to have a delicious flavor about it. Of course, you can just cook it in plain water.

Quinoa does contain stuff called saponins that can give it a foamy, soapy, bitter kind of a taste. Some people say rinse it under water and rub the grains a bit together under cold water and rinse them to clear a bit of the bitterness off of them. I’ve not really found it to be a problem, but again it could depend on the type of quinoa that you buy. Definitely get a good quality one from your health food store. Look out for some good recipes on the internet and experiment with it. It’s a great food for a Candida yeast infection. I highly recommend that you include a little bit of this into your diet. Start small. If you haven’t eaten it before, don’t start with large amounts every day. Just include it in your diet alongside other kinds of grains and seeds. I think you’ll go quite well.

Thanks for tuning in. Don’t forget to click on the link below if you haven’t got my Candida report. Quite a good report there on what foods you can eat and a shopping list for you and subscribe. Thanks for tuning in.

Hi there. Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. Author of Candida Crusher. Formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. I appreciate you guys giving me support and looking at my videos and for people like you out there that I make these videos.

Today, we’re going to talk about quercetin. Weird name, quercetin. It sounds like some sort of clothing label or some kind of line of shoes or something. Quercetin. What the hell is it? We give lots of different types of chemicals found in plants strange names. There is a group of them called flavonoids found in plant and flavonoids form a very important role in plants. They help protect the plant against a lot of different types of damage like solar radiation, too much water, insect attacks, all kinds of things. Plants make lots of different types of chemicals. Cornell University in America has done many, many years of research into all types of plant compounds going back for quite a few years. I think they actually led the world at one stage in a lot of this research.

There are many different types of flavonoids. I’m not going to go right into the biochemistry of flavonoids, but there are lots of different types. Some of the more important ones if you don’t know about are quercetin, rutin, and hesperidin. We’re going to talk about quercetin today. Quercetin is a compound found in things like kale, broccoli, tomatoes, green tea. Red wine contains a lot of quercetin. I find that quercetin containing plants have got this taste on the tongue that’s like a stringent dry kind of a taste. Brightly colored vegetables and fruits will contain quercetin.

Why should you eat this stuff in your diet? Why is it important to have a very healthy diet containing high levels of flavonoids? Flavonoids perform very important roles for plants in terms of protective effects, but they also perform very powerful roles when we continually eat those plants ourselves. Those benefits get conferred to us.

Before we jump into quercetin, it’s important to say that it has a very poor absorption rate. Many companies have struggled for years to try to make a very effective dietary supplement as far as quercetin is concerned. But a lot of the research I’ve looked out shows that the absorption rate can be as low as 2 percent. If you’re taking 500 milligrams a few times per day, you may be only getting a smattering of that in your body. You’re way better off getting flavonoids from your diet.

Flavonoids get bound to different proteins in your blood. There is one called albumin that quercetin and rutin and these sort of compounds hook up to. Then they go the liver and the liver has to break this flavonoid off the protein and absorb it through different types of pathways. Some of these pathways are metalation, sulphation, glucoronidation. You need to have a pretty good liver function to absorb good levels of flavonoids and you need to have good amounts of proteins in your diet to create the proteins in your blood to hook these things up to.

As you can see, there is a lot more than meets the eye here than just “I’ll just pop a few of these tablets and get a lot of quercetin in my diet.” It doesn’t work like that. It’s not that easy. This is why I’m always trying to get my patients to eat healthy proteins, first class proteins. Eggs, fish, chicken, lamb, good foods like that. If you want to go vegetarian, of course you can eat different types of legumes, seeds, nuts, and grains. Eating protein is an important part of hesperidin because the uptake is dependent on proteins.

Hesperidin plays a major role in the body as being a very powerful anti-oxidant. Anti-oxidants, what that means in English, is it means it protects out body from damage created internally just through normal metabolic processes. There are hundreds of thousands of enzyme reaction that occur every minute in your body and a lot of damage is created. Not unlike a motor vehicle that’s driving that creates a lot of pollution and damage. In your body, a lot of damage is occurring as of normal bodily processes. Anti-oxidants like quercetin, vitamin E, vitamin C, all these different types of anti-oxidant minerals like selenium and zinc, they confer benefits by stopping those processes from causing accelerated aging and pushing us into high inflammation states, driving us toward cancer and heart disease and diabetes and all those things we don’t even want to talk about.

If you don’t want to get sick – I mean, we’re all going to die. Come on. We’re not going to live forever, but we’ve got to die slowly and very healthily don’t we? That’s how we want to die. We don’t want to die in a hospital bed in some terrible chronic inflamed painful state. Eating a very healthy diet is going to be a bid step in the right direction as far as reducing your risks of developing chronic diseases of the western world prematurely.

Many patients I know will live to 80 or 90 and not even go to see a doctor. Why? Well, part of it’s genetic, but a big part of it also is lifestyle and diet. Eating the right kind of food on a consistent basis containing high levels of flavonoids like quercetin is a very thing for you to do. I’ve got a list up here on my computer I’m going to read out to you. Apples, peppers, red wine, cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage like Chinese vegetables, citrus fruits, grapefruits, lemons, especially raw cacao, whole grains, including buckwheat, capers, raw red onion, black and green tea, beans and legumes, dark cherries and all kinds of colorful berries, egg plants, bell peppers, all of these foods are packed with very healthy compounds including quercetin.

Quercetin we know from research is also an antihistamine, so it’s going to help you reduce the effects of allergies in the body. People who take quercetin regularly, you can even get it as nasal spray sometimes, I’ve seen it for sneezing attacks and things like. People who have quercetin regularly in their diet have got a much less chance of developing asthma. I think it’s also very powerful for Candida patients because it improves the gut function. It helps to repair the leaky gut membrane.

It stops the effects of circulating immune complexes, where your immune system is actually attacking the Candida residues and they create damage. The quercetin helps to mop that up and it downplays that inflammation. Quercetin is a very important part of your dietary consideration when it comes to SIBO, small intestinal bacterial issues or Candida or helicobacter or any kind of a gut issues. I’d really like you to consider eating these foods I just mentioned. All those brightly colored vegetables. The berries, the raw cacao, the green tea, a good quality green tea. These things are going to help you immensely improve when it comes to your recovery. Please bear that in mind.

If we look at other flavonoids, one called rutin. That’s quite a good one especially for the small capillaries of the body like the kidneys and the eye. Hesperidin is another type of compound altogether. That can be used even more to your advantage for certain types of immune dysfunction. Bu quercetin is the overall powerful beneficial flavonoid that you’re going to get from these foods. Any cancer, reducing your risk of heart disease, reducing your risk for diabetes, reducing inflammation. It has some ability, especially if you have turmeric in your diet, to reduce pain in the body as well. Important things for you to think about.

I think I mentioned most things. Do your own research. You can take dietary supplements. Usually 500 milligrams two or three times per day with food. But as I said, the uptake is quite poor. I prefer that you get your quercetin from colorful foods. Give that a go. Thanks for checking out my video. Don’t forget to click on the link below if you haven’t already got my free report and subscribe. Keep sending me comments. Thank you. I appreciate the comments. If you’ve got any more questions particularly videos you want me to make, I’ll be glad to help you out when I can. Thanks for tuning in.

Greetings! Greetings! Greetings! It’s New Zealand naturopath Eric Bakker. It’s winter time. It’s wonderful here in New Zealand. We had a very mild winter. I hope you are enjoying your summer in the U.S if you’re watching this right now or in Canada or in Europe or in many countries that we’re getting wonderful feedback from. I really appreciate all the support I’m getting from all my subscribers there on YouTube, and I really enjoy making these videos. I really do. I sincerely mean that. It’s amazing to be in a position to where I can help so many people out, and the feedback I’ve been getting has been absolutely truly wonderful, so I do appreciate it.

Today we’re going to be talking about papaya or pawpaw. It’s one of my favorite fruits, and it’s one of the things I don’t like about New Zealand is we don’t really get papaya here because it’s too bloody cold! It’s freezing down here in-well not freezing but it’s not really the right climate for growing pawpaw. We’re right down the bottom of the planet.

When my wife and I lived in Brisbane, Australia, we grew papayas, we grew bananas, we grew pineapples, we grew passion fruit, we had all the lovely tropical fruits growing in our garden. We had a wonderful garden-a big tropical garden. And here, we’ve got really a more of a temperate garden. I’ve got all my fruit trees, but now I’ve got apples and pears, and I’ve got peaches and plums, and apricots, nectarines, grapes, and all those sorts of things. Wonderful fruits, but I miss the pawpaw. I really miss it. The beautiful, yellow, juicy pawpaw.

Now here’s a tip: I found pawpaw not to be a real big issue with lots of people with Candida. I don’t know what it is about pawpaw, but even though it’s sweet, it’s got certain types of nutrients in it that don’t seem to flare lots of people up. So if you’ve got a yeast infection and you’re watching this from a tropical country where you’ve got availability for pawpaw, do try pawpaw-one good slice of pawpaw per day to see if it affects your gut. I think pawpaw, in my opinion, has got to be one of the healthiest fruits you can eat for your digestive system. And for your heart and brain, and liver in general. It’s an amazing fruit! It tastes great! You can cook with it, you can bake with it, you can do all kinds of things with it.

Now pawpaw contains an enzyme called papain, which is a proteolytic enzyme. I remember a long time ago I had a patient years and years ago-an elderly man who used to live in the Islands-I think it might’ve been Fiji. And he said to me, “Eric, get a hold of a big, tough piece of steak and then get a couple of big pawpaw leaves.” I don’t know if you grow pawpaw, but the big pawpaw leaves. And he said, “What you do is you just get a couple of leaves, and then you wrap the steak in it and then you crush the leaves up a little bit around the steak and then leave that for several hours.” And he said, “Watch what happens when you cook up that piece of meat.” Well I can tell you now, it was tenderized. It was amazing how tender that old tough piece of beef was. So that shows you the enzymes in the leaf got into the meat and they tenderized it, they softened the meat fibers up. So that’s the proteolytic part.

Now the black seeds of the pawpaw that we call a vermifuge actually kill parasites and worms, would you believe it? In places like Vanuatu, Fiji, Cook Islands, what some people have done for many generations is they dry all those black pawpaw seeds. They look like little pepper kernels. And then what they do is they dry them in the sun for quite a while and they put them in a grinder and actually grind them on top of food. So it’s actually like a medicine. It kills worms. So there you go, another use for pawpaw. The leaves can tenderize tough meat. The seeds are great for parasites like particularly worms because remember they contain an enzyme that helps to break the protein coat down of the worm. And the yellow-the flesh of the fruit is very high in beta-carotene, which is an exceptionally good vitamin to have for many different aspects of your health.

There’s lots of phosphorous in it, there’s potassium, there’s magnesium. There are many trace elements. It’s also high in B5, so pantothenic acid is the most important B vitamin for energy production. It does contain sugar, but I don’t find that this fruit, as I mentioned, really flares up people with candida so I think this is a really good fruit for you to try out. But if you do live in a colder place like me like New Zealand, then you might buy a small, crappy imported pawpaw-it’s disappointing. It’s not really nice. It’s awful. So, to me, papaya is best enjoyed when you’re actually in a tropical country where it’s grown.

That’s like we’ve got some of the really nicest apples in the world here. I grow apples on my tree and if you taste one of those, you’ll be blown away how nice and sweet and juicy and crunchy and beautiful that apple is. It’s a far cry from the crap that you’re gonna buy in supermarkets in countries a long way from where apples are produced. So, good tip here again is to eat what’s grown locally, alright? It’s not good to really buy bananas that are imported from South America if you live in New Zealand and eat them. It’s just not the same.

When I grew bananas in Australia in my own backyard-I mean the taste, the smell, it was just heavenly. When you’re eating produce grown, particularly as close to you as possible and it’s harvested and it’s fresh, if you think about it, common sense, it’s going to have the highest nutrient level. Makes a lot of sense doesn’t it? It’s much better for you eating food that’s grown right under your nose than it is way away from your nose in another country. And shipped on boats and trucks and all that stuff.

So, if you’ve got pawpaw at your disposal, definitely eat it. Anti-inflammatory effects, antioxidant effects, immune modulating effects, improves digestive function, contains lots of fibers. It’s also a great prebiotic food for encouraging the production of beneficial bacteria in the small and large bowel. I cannot speak highly enough of pawpaw.

Pineapples a different kettle of fish. It contains a lot more sugar in it than the papaya, but it does contain bromelain, which is another enzyme. I might do another video on pineapple. Pineapples are wonderful. It’s really good cooked on the barbecue. I love it. So, I hope that gives you a bit of information on pawpaw. So if you can get it, try it out and let me know the feedback on papaya.