Author: Eric Bakker

Hi there. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. I’m author of a book called Candida Crusher and formulator of the range of supplements called Canxida. Thanks for checking out my video. A question I get asked from time to time from patients all around the world is “Eric, is the Paleo diet any good for Candida? What do you think of the Paleo diet?”

You may know by now if you’ve seen some of my videos, the views I have on diets. Diet to me is not really a word I like to use too much because I believe that we’re all individuals and we all need to really work out what foods best suit our needs. If you’ve looked at my book, Candida Crusher, you’ll realize that I give you a lot of suggestions and guidelines, but I don’t say, “You need to do this and you need to have to do that.” I’m very open for people to experiment on different kinds of diets and I’ve always believed that no one size fits all. That’s for sure.

I went out clothes shopping yesterday. My wife took me out because I don’t really like buying clothes. I hate it, so she takes me out. And I go to have a look at the rack with T-shirts in it and there’s a million T-shirts with all different designs and colors and there is a really nice one I liked, a purple one with all flowers on it. And my wife said, “You can’t have that. You’ll look crazy in that.” And then I picked up another one and she said, “No. You’ll look even weirder in this one.” It’s a perfect analogy to show you that everyone has got different tastes. There are many different designs, shapes and colors out there. And why do you think they’ve got a rack with a zillion different designs and colors? Because not one size fits all. That’s why.

It’s the same with Paleo diets and SCD diets and jelly bean diets and South Beach diets, Atkins diets. Whatever diet you want. There are a million diets. You can see the books I’ve got on my bookcases. I’ve got a huge big bookcase the full length of this wall here. They’re all diet books. I’ve looked at lots of diet books over the years and I can tell you now, I’ve applied lots of different kinds of diets to people and I’ve found that many people would agree with parts of the diet, but not agree with other parts of the diet. They would incorporate some foods they weren’t supposed to do and yet, they felt okay on it. I’ve particularly found that with the blood type diet. Remember the blood type diet? The A, the O type, AB type. If you’re an O type, eats lots of meat. If you’re an A type, you’re more the vegetarian type. What a load of crap. I don’t really believe in these sort of diets.

When I went to the States in 2003, I can remember a doctor at a seminar saying, “I’ve got a new diet. Eat according to your social security number diet.” Don’t fall for diets. The Paleo, though, is not new. It’s been around a long time. I’ve been reading books like this for a long time. Paleolithic Prescription, this is back in the 80s. This is a good book. Native Nutrition. Quite a nice book. These books have been around 20, 30 or 40 years. I was recommending Paleolithic kind of eating habits to people back in 1986, a long time ago now, telling people that they need to cut back on a lot of different kinds of foods in their diet. Cut back a bit on bread. Cut back a bit on grains in general. Eat more of the lean meats and eat lots of vegetables, which is basically a Paleo diet. That’s the way I eat.

But I can tell you now, the research I’ve done, I’m not a fan of red meat. Small amounts of red meat from time to time are okay. One day red meat will be seen to be very, very toxic to the body like alcohol is. I think red meat is fine. Don’t get me wrong. But I think people in this country where I live eat red meat nearly every day. And I know in the States, a lot of people eat big steaks three or four times a week. It’s too much. Meats are a very powerful concentrated food. If you are going to eat red meat like I do, you have a very small piece of red meat. You don’t have like a big 16-ounce steak. It’s not good for your digestive system to do that. Not at all. It’s a very heavy, strong food.

I’m more of a fan of fish. Fresh fish that I catch myself or fresh fish that’s been caught on the day. I love eating fresh fish at least three times per week and free range eggs. Those are my two preferred proteins. I also like to eat a lot of different kinds of things like chickpeas or garbanzos, broad beans that I grow myself. Different kinds of grains. Brown rice I find is quite a good food for most people on the Candida diet approach. And again, this flies in the face of the Paleo diet. Paleo adherents who are strict say no rice. Preferably no grains, all meats, all vegetables, some fruits, some legumes, nuts and seeds and things like that. I think that’s all okay. But I think you need to work out the protein that suits you best. It’s probably like going shopping. What color do you like to wear? Do you like light colors? Do you like dark colors? What are you attracted to? What makes you feel good when you wear it?

Protein is the same. What makes you feel good when you eat it? I feel great on fish. I feel really good when I eat fish, and I know it. I sleep better. I feel better, so I’ve learned that over the years. I stay with fish. Now, you may feel better eating lamb or eating pork or eating beef. You need to try this out. See how your gut feels. Literally, what kind of gut feelings do you get from eating this kind of protein. Because protein forms the basis of the diet. It’s a very important thing to eat is a good quality protein in your diet.

Once you’ve worked out the good quality protein you eat, then you need to work out what quantity of protein you need to eat. And that all depends on how much work you do. If you’re very physically active, you can usually eat more protein. My 20-year-old son is working out, getting into the weights, building up muscles. He’s eating three times more protein than I am. That’s because he’s training a couple of hours a day. Training hard and he’s walking twice a day. He’s looking quite all pumped up. I think when you’ve got that kind of life style, and I had that in my 20s, you need to increase your protein intake.

However, when you’ve got your face in a laptop like I have and you’re not really lifting a lot of heavy weights anymore, you don’t need to eat that quantity of red meat or any kind of protein for that matter. I tend to do a lot of gardening and walking, so lighter duties. But still quite a bit of digging. I find that the protein load I eat is quite sufficient. I like to eat protein at least twice per day. I usually have rolled oats in the morning, so porridge that is cooked with water, and I’ll have a green apple with that. For lunch most days, I’ll make up a kind of vegetable dish maybe with a bit of eggs and spinach in it is quite a normal combination we have. But it could be a piece of fish. It could be a stir fry dinner or something like that. In the middle of the day and at the end of the day, I have something similar. And then I’ll often have one or two pieces of fruit between the meals.

And again, if you are picking Paleo, a good diet will give you good energy, good sleep patterns, and it will help you to maintain your weight. You shouldn’t gain excess weight or lose excess weight. That’s a good barometer also of your diet is your weight. Energy and weight are two good barometers. Diets should make you look good, feel good, satisfied, not looking for lots of sweet food all the time.

Yes, I am a fan of the Paleo approach. But I would say modify the Paleo approach to suit yourself. Maybe get some books out on Paleo and read them. Get a feel for it. Or go online, there are some good websites on Paleo diets. It’s my preferred form of diet. Specific carbohydrate diets are quite good, too, but again, you need to modify the specificity to suit yourself. The body ecology diet is another good diet, but again, you need to modify it to suit yourself. I’m sure that’s what most people do. When they look at these diets, they look at it and they initially go quite strict on what that person recommends, but then they modify that diet to suit themselves. That’s what it’s all about.

I hope that’s given you a bit of insight on the Paleo approach to Candida. It’s a good one. You call the shots.

Hi there. Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand. Thanks for tuning into my video. I’m an author of a book called, Candida Crusher and I’m also the formulator of a range of products called Canxida. Thanks for checking out my video.

I’ve got an interesting question here from a patient that I’ve seen now for some time and wants to remain anonymous. Doesn’t really want to give out any details. That’s fine. I respect that. The patient wants to know if sauna is good for Candida. This lady is kind of incredible. She’s very much into fitness, into exercise, she’s eating quite a healthy diet, and she wants to know the best ways to detoxification including sauna therapy. If I find it valid or not.

I love saunas. In fact, I think they’re a fantastic adjunct to cleansing in general. If you look at people in many countries, Scandinavian countries for example, have been doing sauna now for generations. It’s a really good way to clean up the body. It heats the body up. Your skin is your largest organ. And when you can eliminate toxins through the skin, 15 or 20 percent of all toxins get cleared through the skin, so by warming up the body to no more than about 100 degrees, say 43 Celsius, is a good way to eliminate a lot of garbage out of the body. Candida produces many different kinds of toxins and so do bacteria. By doing this sauna therapy, heating up, you’ve got a good ability to flush toxins from the body.

But is it mandatory? No, it’s not. It’s not something that I recommend everybody do because some people find it very uncomfortable to get into an environment called a sauna. There are different methods of sauna. I prefer the older method of hopping into one of those nice pine rooms with some hot coals and then pouring a scoop of water on them, preferably with a bit of pine essential oil in there, and that gives a beautiful ambient atmosphere, a lot of steam, a lot of heat. Some people find that uncomfortable, but this is traditionally how saunas have always been conducted.

The newer method is infrared sauna using bulbs or tubes that emit an infrared light into your body, so the room doesn’t really get hot, a small room. You can actually buy these small mobile devices. They’re quite handy. So they put this infrared light into the body. It heats up the body internally. Tissues get warmed up and you perspire quite promptly. Either way, the old method or the new method, whatever turns you on, but yes, I think sauna therapy when conducted properly is fantastic for cleansing the body in general.

This is how I do sauna. I don’t have a shower first. Some people say have a shower first. I don’t find it necessary myself. Obviously take your clothes off, go down maybe to your underclothing, your briefs or panties or whatever you want to wear you in there, put a towel around you. You hop into the sauna and with the steam on the ambient one I was telling you about, I will normally sit in there for about 5 or 10 minutes and get quite warm, get very hot, and start perspiring. When I start perspiring reasonably well, I hop out. I go straight out of there. I usually drink a glass of water and then I’ll towel dry myself for a moment or two and relax, then I’ll hop back in for the second time. And I found the second time is when the pores of the skin open right up. This is when you perspire very, very heavily. Perspiration seems to come out of places you didn’t even know that you could perspire from. It’s remarkable how much sweat you can lose with a sauna. And then I’ll put another scoop of water on the hot coals and I’ll just sit there for a good 10 or 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and I’ll really take it in. It’s my time to relax. I love this warm, humid, moist environment.

Steam rooms are another thing you can try out, a room called a steam room. You need to be careful with sauna therapy if you’ve got blood pressure issues or on certain medications. You might want to check with your health care professional before you say, “Yes, Eric, I’m going to do sauna.” Get yourself checked out before and particularly if you’re over 50 like me. If you’re an old guy or an old person because I’m considered old these days, get yourself checked out. You should have a medical at least once per year anyway. So find out that everything is okay.

The second tip I’ll give you is make sure you drink plenty of water. You’ll be surprised how much perspiration comes out of the body, so you need to put a lot of water back. I will easily drink two pints of water after a sauna.

The third tip I’ll give you when you’ve finished your sauna is make sure that you have a nice relaxing shower and have tepid showers. Have it a little bit warm and then cool it down, then don’t finish off with a cold shower. I don’t find that to be a really good idea. I find a tepid shower to be good. Not hot, not cold. And then gently turn it down and turn it down until it’s reasonably cool and stay under there for a good three or four minutes and really cool the core down. If you don’t cool the core down, when you are driving home or you’re at home with the sauna, you can be perspiring for some time after. So make sure that you cool the body down properly and make sure you’re well hydrated. Those are good tips for a sauna and you’re going to feel fantastic. You’ll have a good night’s sleep as a result.

How often to do saunas? Usually twice a week is sufficient and you can do it in six week blocks, I find, works quite well. Just make sure you drink that water.

Greetings. New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher, formulator of the Canxida range of products. Thanks for checking out my video. I’ve got some questions here regarding vegetable juicing. Eric, is vegetable juicing any good for Candida. Let’s talk a little bit about juicing. I’m going to read a little bit out of my book, Candida Crusher. Because I wrote probably about 10 pages on vegetable juicing, the different types of juices, the benefits, and advantages. Let’s talk a bit about that.

I’ve written here. After having worked with many Candida patients over the years, I’m absolutely convinced that juicing can be one of the most successful nutritional options in giving yeast infection patients a radiant energetic life and a truly optimal digestive system function leading to excellent health. Juicing may not agree, however, with some people with Candida. But with others, it’s perfectly fine. It’s a case of trial and error.

I’m not there to assist you with your particular case, so I recommend you give it a try, particularly as you improve. Here are some of the main reasons why juicing is so good.

1. Juicing is good because you’re taking in all those valuable and essential micronutrients locked up in the fresh foods that become damaged with the cooking process. They even become destroyed. Especially if you cut it out of the garden like I do, just straight out of the garden and put in the juicer, you couldn’t get a much fresher source of vitamins and minerals into the body. Because as soon as you heat up this food, you’re going to destroy a lot of these things.

2. You may have well heard that we all need to eat between five and eight servings of fruits and veggies daily if we want to maintain optimal health. And what an easier way to do it than by juicing.

3. Nutrients are more easily absorbed from juices as opposed to eating cooked. Many reading this will have an impaired digestive system and consuming vegetable and fruit juices allows your body to more easily access all those critical minerals, trace elements and nutritional factors.

4. You’re going to eat a larger variety of vegetables and fruits by juicing them than you normally would by cooking them. It’s a fact that most of us tend to eat the same kind of vegetables all the time. But when we go to juice them, it’s much easier for us to throw everything into the blender and to make juice out of that and to consume that.
Keep an open mind and don’t think that juicing is not for you because you have a yeast infection and because you’ve been told or read online that you should strictly avoid all fruits and limit many vegetables because the yeast will thrive off all the sugars in the juices.

Just imagine one moment when all of those cells in your body that are screaming out for nutrition and how they’re going to feel when they get a lot of this premium nutrient into them. You’ll be absolutely amazed at the difference it can make to any underlying chronic health condition. Regardless of whether it’s diabetes, heart disease or a bad yeast infection.

I want you to avoid 100 percent fruit juices. In fact, I find that when people drop the soda drinks, they move across to drinking straight fresh orange juice. When, in fact, they’re swapping one sugar for another. I’m not suggesting at all that you drink lots of fruit juices. And, in fact, I prefer 80/20 blend, 80 percent vegetable, 20 percent fruit. You’ll also get a faster uptake in your bloodstream by these nutrients than you would – it’s much easier for the digestion process to facilitate the uptake of something in a liquid form than in a cooked form.

There are different categories of juices. I’ve got three main categories I’m going to talk about. The Category One are really for the people just starting to juice. Celery, carrot, fennel, cucumber, green apple, and tomatoes. You don’t need to blend them altogether. Try one on its own to get a feel for the taste and combine what you like. My favorite, for example, is a green granny smith apple, a stalk of celery, and a carrot. It’s a really nice combo. Try that combination of celery, carrots, and green apple. Always buy organic celery. I grow all my own celery. I would never buy any celery. Celery is the most heavily sprayed of all vegetables. Pears, by the way, are the most sprayed of all fruits. If you’re going to get celery, make really sure you’re getting certified organic celery from a proper green grocer where no chemicals are used. What’s the point? You may as well put a bottle of chemicals to your mouth and drink that. All the more reason to grow your own food if you can, grow some veggies. I really would appreciate that you could do that because it will make a big difference.

I’m going to be trying to shoot some footage this summer of my garden with my fruit trees, my vegetables and my beehives to show you what I’ve got here in my front garden here in the little village I live in in New Zealand. I hope it inspires other people to also grow some food for themselves. The difference is incredible.

Category Two juices. Now, you’re moving into the more intermediate phase. You’ve got a bit of experience with Category One. Now, you’re going to want to try something different. Category Two, lettuce, red lettuce, green lettuce, romaine lettuce. Remember the red vegetables or the colored ones are the ones with the more nutrition in them. They contain a lot of phyto protective factors in them, so red lettuce is very good, indeed. Red carrots, you can get them. Endive, spinach, rocket or salad greens, bok choy, Chinese vegetables, peppers, beets, coriander and kiwi fruit. This is Category Two.

Are you ready to take the plunge and jump into the deep end now with me and go for Category Three? Category Three is for the more experienced person. Vegans often have got a lot of experience with raw foods and juices and know exactly where I’m coming from. If you’re “green” in juicing and not really experienced, you’re not going to do these straight up because you’re going to gag on them. Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, collards, leeks, garlics, onions, shallots, and radish. Note I didn’t mention kale in there. Kale and collards possibly also are not very good to juice because they can inhibit the TPO of enzymes. They contain a very special compound called isothiocyanate.

I’ve done a video on this recently. Isothiocyanate can inhibit the thyroperoxydase enzyme, block the conversion and the manufacture of thyroid hormones, so please don’t have raw kale or raw collards. Broccoli is fine. Cauliflower is fine. And Brussel sprouts are fine. I’ve been told by some very expert people that you need to literally drink a bathtub of raw broccoli juice to get that same effect on the thyroid that you would with a small amount of kale. Leeks, garlics, onions, excellent to have in raw juicing in your diet.

How can I make my juices taste better? “Eric, they taste like crap. How am I going to make them taste better?” Occasionally, somebody asked me how they can make juices taste better. I’ve heard the odd person over time that juices are unpalatable. This need not be so. As you gain more experience with juices, it will become apparent that this becomes much less of an issue in time. Here are a few things you can do to make juices taste better.

Lemon or lime juices. Citrus juices add a bit of zing to your juices. It might be a really good option for you. I love lemon and lime. We grow a lot of lemon and lime trees and I really like including it in stir fry’s, drinks, all kinds of dishes. Berries. You’d be surprised how a few berries can really jazz up a boring old drink. Pineapple. If you can tolerate pineapple, you’re lucky. I love pineapple, so maybe a couple of pieces of fresh pineapple. Before you start saying, “I can’t have that. I’ve got Candida.” You can have a small piece of pineapple. Remember 80 percent vegetable juice, a small piece of pineapple to make it palatable should be perfectly fine.

Ginger. Try a piece of fresh ginger, very, very zingy and tasty and gives your juice a bit of a bite. I found that ginger can go with just about anything. What about a few drops of organic vanilla extract? Very tasty. Ice cubes. Ice cubes are very important. You can add them to lots of different drinks and they give it a bit of texture and a bit of flavor. It can change the whole experience of having the juice. Many people put ice cubes in by default and then put the other stuff on top.

There are green vegetables. There are red vegetables. Don’t forget the beet roots. Beet roots are a really good blood purifier and they’ve got the ability to improve the oxygenation and the oxygen carrying capacity of red blood cells. They’re fantastic for fighting diseases.

Health tip. Don’t throw away the fiber when you make your juices. Why add fiber? There are four good reasons to add fiber to your juice. Your blood sugar will become more stable. Fiber is your intestinal brew. It improves bowel function. Whole foods are best consumed over just straight juices. Juices containing fiber will make you feel more satisfied and help you to maintain your appetite for longer, so you won’t be wanting to eat food all the time. You want weight loss? Drink one or two juices a day. You’ll feel full and you won’t want to be going to cookies or the refrigerator all the time. You want to lose a lot of weight. Drink one to two juices per day.

I’ve got a really nice email from a guy whose wife lost 40 pounds, which is phenomenal. Juicing can be a really powerful way for you to lose weight, boost your health, and get rid of any kind of gut problem that you’ve got.

I hope that answers a few questions about Candida, fiber, juicing, if juicing is healthy and if it should be a good adjunct to the Candida diet. It should be. A very powerful adjunct. Don’t forget to check out my Canxida.com website for the best Candida supplements on the market, and subscribe to my channel. You’ll get plenty more of these videos.