Author: Eric Bakker

Hi there. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video today. Today, I’m going to teach you how to really do a proper Candida diet. We’re going to go through different steps of my Candida Crusher dietary approach.

I’ve got a question here from a man called Joel in Chicago, in the United States, and Joel is asking me if I can do a good, comprehensive video on the Candida diet. Joel wants to know about the anti-Candida diet. He wants to know some Candida recipes. He wants to know Candida foods to eat, Candida foods to avoid and all those sorts of things.

But before you check out my video, please click on the link in the description box below this video to download your 13-page free report. It’s a report that I normally use for my new clients who come and see me with yeast infections. They will get this free report. It’s also a part of my book. This report is worth at least $20, if not more. It’s yours for free. Just click on the link below and it will take you to a page where you can download that free report. I think you’ll find it quite handy.

Joel, let’s go into this Candida Crusher dietary approach. My Candida diet approach really involves three stages. Before I put people through the three stages, I generally like them to go through a big cleanup. So we’ll tidy up the diet first.

Generally, the lifestyle and diet need a bit of a tidy up when people get serious about revitalizing their digestive function. If they really want to get well, they need to make some changes, but I’m not about making changes very quick with people. I prefer that they slowly make change. Slow changes and generally over a period of many, many weeks will usually mean that new habits become formed. New lifestyle and dietary habits become formed.

Then when these become formed, slowly they become permanent in your life. And when these habits become permanent, it means that these healthy habits will ensure that you don’t get a repeat of the old symptoms and that you stay well for life. That, to me, is what it’s all about. Not just eradicating symptoms with pills or eradicating symptoms with a diet, but building incredible health and wellness through making life long permanent changes. That’s what we’re all about. The big cleanup is something you can read about at yeastinfection.org, so be sure to check out yeastinfection.org. That’s got about a thousand of my articles on that site.

Let’s look at stage one first. Stage one of the Candida Crusher diet approach is called the MEVY diet, meat, eggs, vegetables and yogurt. Let’s look at that. Let’s look at what the MEVY diet or the stage one approach really encompasses. The first thing we’ve got to do, of course, on the MEVY, which you should have already done on the big cleanup, is to get rid of all the processed and junk foods out of your diet. If I go to your refrigerator and open it up, am I going to find lots of jars and bottles there with all sorts of sweet sauces or foods that have been in there for many days or even weeks, they all need to go into the garbage can. You need to get rid of all of those. Have a good look at your pantry and your kitchen bench and your freezer and start making some changes there. All of these things could do with a big cleanup themselves.

Cut back on the amount of foods that you buy when you go out in terms of takeaway food. Stopping off somewhere and buying a pizza or getting donuts or getting foods that are highly processed, you need to stop these habits. Because these are the habits that are not going to be really good if you want to recover from a yeast infection or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, what we call SIBO. SIBO and Candida often go hand in hand. Avoid white sugar, white flour, soda drinks, takeaway foods, beer, alcohol, wine, and all these sorts of things in general. Any kind of candies or chocolates. These things all need to go. They just don’t form any place in the digestive system if you want to recover from Candida.

Include liberal amounts of fresh, unprocessed, and nutritional foods. A good thing to do is to go to the farmer’s market. Often you’ll have sort of markets around you, and people will grow fresh produce and take them to these markets. This is a good opportunity for you to get really nice produce, rather than the supermarket. You might have a green grocer around you that sells good quality produce. You can end up making good friends with these people and getting some really nice fresh stuff off them. Or if you wish, do what I do, grow a lot of your own food. And that way, you’ve got really nice fresh food to eat all the time. That’s fantastic to do and at least you know it’s chemical and spray free. There are no pesticides on it and things like that.

When you do buy at the supermarket, as you’ve heard before, buy around the perimeter of the supermarket where the fresh foods are, the meats and the vegetables, rather than the processed foods internally in the supermarket in all the aisles. Because these foods are designed to last for days and weeks and even months in your pantry. They’re not really good for your digestion.

Avoid sugar and sugar-containing foods. Lots of sauces you get, sweet chili sauce, shrimp sauce, oyster sauce, barbecue sauce, and tomato sauce, they all contain sugar. And this is why people like these things. They contain sugar and salt. Lots of people also eat way too much salt in their diet. Salt does play a good role in our diet, but many people eat way too much salt. Watch out for salted foods and crappy foods containing salt like potato chips and pretzels. Salt is often craved by people with adrenal fatigue because they end up losing a lot of their sodium through the urine. They pee it out, so they need to eat a lot of sodium.

People under stress often like foods full of sugar, salt and fat. When you start understanding the connection between stress and health and you learn to relax a lot more, you’ll find that your sodium and sugar drop right off in your diet and you can rely a lot more on fresh healthy wholesome foods. The fresher the foods in terms of like nice green vegetables and good quality lean meats, the better your gut is going to be. These foods spoil quickly. They need to be cooked up and eaten. Don’t store foods in the fridge.

I don’t really need to go into all the detail on all the different kinds of vegetables you can eat and all the different kinds of fruits you can eat. You can read about that on yeastinfection.org. I’ve written many articles on these. Let’s just do a brief look at the best kind of vegetables you can eat with Candida. In my opinion, these are the deep green colored vegetables, beans, celery, broccoli, and cabbage, many of these sorts of foods. There are a lot of them you can get a hold of. Be careful, initially, of the high starch carbohydrate foods like pumpkin, squash, peas, sweet corn, carrots to a lesser extent, but those foods I just mentioned, the sweet potato, the pumpkin.

If you’re in fall going into winter, you may tend to eat a lot of pumpkin and squash. These foods do have quite a high sugar content. So for the first three or four weeks going into the MEVY diet, you want to cut out the high starch carbohydrate foods only if you’ve got bad Candida. If you’ve got minor Candida, you may not need to cut them out. Sweet corn in spring/summer can be favored by a lot of people, too, and sweet corn can be a bit on the sugary side. The deep leafy green colored vegetables to a lesser extent don’t tend to have so much of these sugars that Candida can thrive on. This is only a consideration if you’ve got serious Candida. Bear that in mind.

Avoid most fresh fruits, avoid all fruit juices, and avoid all dried fruits, including sultanas, figs, raisins, dates, those sorts of things. Fresh fruits are okay, but let’s just stick with fruits like blueberries, pomegranates, avocados, kiwi fruit is not too bad, and a green apple. I find green apple to be okay with most people with yeast infections. Watch out for red apples. The fruits to particularly avoid are the very sweet fruits like melons, bananas, pineapple, grapes especially, so they’re a very high sugar content. You need to avoid those for a considerable period of time.

Try not to eat the same foods every day. Try to rotate the kind of foods that you eat. Try to rotate the kind of proteins that you eat. Don’t eat beef every day or eat chicken every single day. Rotate them. It’s really good for your digestion to do that. It’s also going to be less challenging for your immune system. So when we take sugars out and rotate healthy foods, your immune system will certainly pick up.

Let’s look at the kind of meats you can eat. You may be a meat eater like me or you may be a vegetarian, so we’ll have a look at both of these kind of approaches. Meats generally are not favored at all by Candida. You’re not going to have a problem with fresh fish, lean beef, lamb, a very good protein source, and also free range eggs. Free-range eggs and free-range chicken are certainly preferable over commercial because they don’t contain antibiotics, arsenic, or chemicals like that. Arsenic is a metal that is actually used as an antifungal on poultry food. If you’re going to get commercial poultry, you could have all sorts of heavy metals or antifungals mixed in with the food or antibiotics sprayed on the food. You won’t get that with free range.

Free-range eggs are a very good source of protein. I think biologically they’re probably the best protein you can eat in terms of their amino acid content. Fresh fish is exceptional, too, but try to avoid farm fish. Canned sardines and canned tuna are not too bad if they’re packed in spring water. Don’t get too worried about the mercury content of tuna and fish like that. Albacore tuna is quite safe to eat. Have a look at some interesting information on the internet about fish that contains mercury also containing high selenium levels in general. Unless you’re eating shark, you should be okay with a lot of different ocean caught species.

We spoke about the different vegetables. We’ve talked about the fruits, so avoid the high sugar fruits. Avoid fruit juices. Avoid dried fruits. Avoid high fat meats. I don’t find pork or bacon to be particularly good meats to eat. So foods to avoid when it comes to meat are processed meats, meats from the delicatessen, pastrami, salami, ham, those sorts of meats are sort of crappy meats to eat. They’re not really good. It’s like those bits of cheese with plastic around them. Those plastic cheeses are junk.

Fermented foods and cultured foods, if you can incorporate them, are fantastic in the MEVY approach. Sauerkraut, Kim Chee, kefir, kumis, there are many different kinds. You need to find one of these foods that you like and then try to incorporate small amounts into your diet.

This stage is very important; stage one, because what we’re doing is we’re setting the stage for a diet that’s going to start building up your health to a very high level. And also, educating you on good foods to eat and hopefully this will be something you’re not going to do just for a month or two, but lifelong. That’s what I’d like you to do. This really, the induction phase is the MEVY, getting you into eating properly. This phase lasts anywhere from two to three weeks, up to three months. There are no time lines here. Nothing is set in stone. Be prepared in case you aggravate.

If you aggravate on a healthy diet approach, you need to back off a little bit. You could be eating too much of one particular food. You may not be chewing properly. You may be eating too much in general. You may not be relaxing enough. You may still be including some foods into your diet that are not really good. So just try to check out what you’re doing. You could be taking antifungal dietary supplements, too much of it and killing too quick when your gut is in a transition state going from bad bacteria to good bacteria. So be patient and kind on yourself. Don’t push yourself too hard.

Let’s talk about grains, breads, and things like that to eat. There is a lot of talk that bread is no good on an anti-Candida diet. This is not true. This is simply not true. I’ve worked with now close to 20,000 patients with gut problems and I can tell you now that gluten is an issue with some people, but not the majority. Most people can tolerate some wheat in their diet, but we’re not talking about five or six slices of commercially baked bread with peanut butter or jam on them. If you want to have wheat in your diet, take out the commercial bread first and go for flat bread. Just plain whole meal flour or water and a bit of salt made into a dough, rolled flat, and then baked on a griddle, a bit like a chipati. You can put nice salad on there. You can put shredded chicken on there or some beef. This is a very healthy lunch to have.

You can do a similar thing with corn. You can do a similar thing with buckwheat, quinoa, these sorts of flours and grains are good to incorporate into your diet. But again, small amounts. You don’t need large amounts to start. Don’t really load your diet up top heavy with grains. But the same goes for loading up your diet top heavy on any food, too much protein, red meat, too much beans or legumes, too much vegetables. I see these YouTube videos of people going like hard-core raw vegan and other people go hard-core red meat. Anything hard core is going to give you hard-core problems. It’s all about moderation and balance. I prefer to have small amounts of protein in the diet, a quality, balanced diet and larger amounts of vegetables. I think that, to me, is a more sensible approach.

An Asian doctor friend of mine once said that people in the western world have got it completely the wrong way around. He said, “You people have large pieces of meat on the plate, small vegetable.” He said, “In Japan, we have small meat, large vegetable.” Clever idea.

Let’s talk about rice. Rice is good. Brown rice in small amounts to start with. Try brown basmati. Try wild rice, the black stuff, it’s quite good. Try to avoid the white rice. If you’re eating a lot of white rice at the moment, mix it with brown, 60 brown, 40 white and slowly move to the brown. Brown is a much better option. More B vitamins. More fiber. It’s a better grain for the gut, in general, to eat. So try to move away from the white rice in general, but small amounts of rice are quite okay to have in your diet. Not a problem. Quinoa also when cooked properly. It’s nice cooked in chicken stock. It’s very good to incorporate with the Candida diet approach. And again, small amounts, common sense.

Did you get constipated? Did you get bowel problems on the MEVY approach? If you did, you may want to eat less meat in your diet. If you load up too much on protein, that could block you up. A long time ago when I worked with patients on the Atkins diet, I found in the induction phase, the first two weeks, many would get constipated. And that’s because they ate too much fat and protein straight away, and they didn’t balance it with enough of the vegetables.

The other thing I forgot to tell you is sprouts are fantastic to eat. In fact, I’m sprouting about four different kinds of grains at the moment in my kitchen downstairs. I’ve got mung beans, alfalfa beans, I’ve got these New Zealand organic kind of beans, I’m not sure of the name of them, and I sprout them all in these jars just with the lids with some stainless steel mesh in them, and it’s fantastic to incorporate into the diet because they’re full of nutrition. I sprout them away from the sunlight, and then for the last day or two, I finish them off in the light where they green up. These contain lots of folic acid and a huge amount of minerals and vitamins that really help to build up your health. You can put sprouts into your diet, too. Another good addition.

So stick with this MEVY approach for a few weeks. Generally, the first three or four weeks, you start to pick up and you’ll feel better. After you’ve been on the MEVY approach for a little while, we’re going to put you into the low allergy phase.

The hyperallergenic phase is very clever is what we’re doing now is we’ve improved your gut. We’ve removed the junk. We’ve put more enzymes, vitamins, and minerals into your diet. You’re learning to chew properly. You’re relaxing more. You’re sleeping well. Now, we’re going to improve your immune function to a higher level by being more selective with the foods that could potentially challenge your immune system. We’re going to take them out. This is very important because many people with SIBO and Candida have leaky gut or they have food allergies and food intolerances.

If you haven’t already done so, stage two of the Candida Crusher approach, we’re going to take out cow’s milk. We’re going to take out most dairy products. Butter is always fine. Unsalted, good quality butter is fine to have. Small amounts of mozzarella cheese aren’t too bad. Parmesan and mozzarella, small amounts are okay, but try to keep away from all the other cheeses if you can. Don’t grate cheese on everything. It’s no good for your gut.

Take the cream out. Yogurt is fine if it’s a good quality sour acidophilus organic yogurt, preferably from a health food shop or make your own. A small bowl every night after dinner is good to have. Kefir, small amounts of kefir, again, made from coconut milk is fine to have. In the low allergy phase, dairy generally be cautious. Take cow’s milk out. Take out bananas, pineapple, and oranges. Those three fruits are very strongly allergenic with many people. Limes and lemons are fine, but take out mandarins, tangelos, cumquats, and that sort of citrus category, take them out. Chocolate gone. You’ve got to get rid of chocolate. Don’t argue with me. Just take chocolate out of your diet. Take raw cacao out of your diet for at least three or four weeks. Take stevia out if you’ve got serious Candida, take stevia and xylitol out as well for the first month and then slowly incorporate them back in.

The low allergy phase also means no sugar even more so. Now, you’ve got to be even tougher on yourself and really drill down that sugar because sugar can really affect your immune system. Research at Cornell University years ago found that within five minutes of consuming small amounts of white refined sugar, the neutrophil or the white blood cell count dropped right off. We don’t want for you to get any kind of infection. We don’t want you to set up any allergies or hypersensitivities. And you’ll achieve that by just cleaning up your diet even more in stage two.

When you’ve gone through stage two, after three or four weeks, you should be starting to feel pretty darn good. And most of my patients come back and say, “I’m feeling fantastic.” When you’re feeling great at this stage, then you’re starting to think about the re-implementation or phase three, the food introduction diet. Stage one and two together in I’d say 75 percent of cases is anywhere between four weeks to about six to eight weeks, but there is no time limit. I’ve got some patients that stay on the MEVY diet for a year before they go into the re-implementation.

With the third stage, it’s mandatory, just like the first stage. You have to do these stages. The second stage is not mandatory, but it’s clever to do if you’ve been sick for a long time. We’re now returning your diet back to normal. That’s why I call the yeastinfection.org site getting you back to normal because we want you to have a normal healthy gut, so you can have a normal healthy life.

Now what I want you to do is carefully test the foods. I want you to get a piece of paper and write down all the foods that you eat. The foods that you may have taken out previous, including candy, ice cream, beer, wine, pretzels, whatever you’ve had, any kind of crap that you’ve had in your diet. Write everything down on a piece of paper. And then behind each food selection or drink selection, you’re going to write 1, 2 or 3, so you’ve got another small column you make down the right side of that food.

Three are the foods you love the most. Two are the foods that you really enjoy eating. Three, obviously, is the stuff that you really love. And one is the foods you can give or take. Let’s say put one with broccoli. Let’s put two with something like chicken, and let’s put three with ice cream or beer or pretzels or whatever it is that you love to eat.

Now, the foods that you’re going to introduce – if you’re not already eating them – are the foods with one. So the foods that you can give or take go first into your diet. And then you incorporate one or two foods at a time for a period of three days, four days or up to a week. And then once you’ve implemented most of those foods, you can move to the grade two foods. Implement those again very gently and slowly. And the foods you bring last into your diet are the third grade.

These are the foods you love the most, so don’t be in a hurry to bring the beer back. Don’t be in a hurry to bring the wine back. If you start immediately introducing these foods again, you could set up a leaky gut, burping, bloating, gut problems. And before you know it, the Candida grows back again and you’ve got big problems. You’ll get anxiety or disappointed and then you’ll email me saying, “This is a crap approach. It doesn’t work.” This approach does work. I can guarantee it works because I’ve used this program now for over 20 years with thousands and thousands of patients. It’s a sound protocol. If you follow it properly, it works.

The big thing we haven’t discussed because we’re talking about the Candida diet is the lifestyle. Now, we can’t spend 20 minutes in this video talking about lifestyle. But I can tell you now; lifestyle is 75 percent of recovery. So this video is really about 25 percent of recovery. So if you haven’t got the lifestyle right, all of the advice I’ve given you is all a waste of time. Getting to bed on time as soon as you’re fatigued or tired, you need to get to bed. Relaxing when you eat your meals. Chewing properly. Learning to laugh a lot more about life and not take things seriously. Keeping away from pharmaceutical medications. Keeping away from negative people. Going for walks once or twice per day or actively engaging in exercise. Avoiding toxic or negative people. Doing something you love to do. I mean I love my job. I love making videos. I love seeing patients. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. So enjoying your life is going to really mean that your brain is talking well with your gut and your gut is talking well with your brain. The patients I see with the best digestive systems are usually happy people. They’re happy with their life. They’re happy with their partners or their job. You’ve got to be happy, otherwise, it’s just not going to work for you.

Now, we’re coming to an end with this video, so I want you to check out yeastinfection.org and please do my quiz. Be sure to do my Candida quiz if you haven’t already done that. Just to remind you to click on the link down below in the description box to get your free 13-page report on the Candida foods. It’s a really good summary and more on what we spoke about in this video. Also, don’t forget to check out Canxida, my line of Candida dietary supplements, which I think are a perfect compliment to the diet and the lifestyle.

After working with so many thousands of patients, I’ve worked out that people need the best kind of foods, they need the ultimate kind of lifestyle, and they need the best kind of supplements. And that’s why I created the Canxida range for people like you to compliment this kind of dietary approach. You can often do this at home and get yourself well without going to see a doctor. It’s quite simple. Just follow the protocol as I’ve outlined at yeastinfection.org. And I think with the right food, the right attitude, the right lifestyle, the right supplement; you’re going to get a perfect outcome.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my channel and keep giving me some feedback on the kind of videos that you want. I hope that was a good reply for you, Joel from Chicago. It was a long-winded reply, but I hope you’ve really gained some good information out of this video. Thanks for tuning in.

Greetings. It’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for tuning in today.

I’ve been asked by many people in several countries to do a video on how to do a Candida cleanse. What’s the best way to rid my body of a yeast infection? How can I clean up my system? How can I get rid of bacteria and parasites? How can I get rid of Candida? That’s what we’re going to talk about today. I’m going to put quite a few elements together for this video, and I think you’re going to find it quite informative. It will be a video you may want to watch once or twice because there will be quite a lot of information here for you to take in.

There are essentially three elements to a Candida cleanse. If you want to do it properly, there are three main categories that we’re going to talk about. Category 1 is the diet, what to eat, what to avoid and special foods. Category 2 is the lifestyle, and Category 3 is what are the best kind of supplements to take. Let’s just go through that step by step and explain to you a little bit about what I think is the best kind of Candida cleanse to do.

You may be familiar with my website, yeastinfection.org. If not, please go and have a look at that website. And if you haven’t already done my online questionnaire, I would urge you to do that to see what kind of level of Candida you’ve got. If you’ve got mild, moderate or severe. Thousands of people have already completed this online quiz, and I could easily say it’s the world’s best online quiz for yeast infection. It cost me a hell of a lot of time and investment to create this quiz, and I think it’s the best one around. So if you haven’t already completed it, please go to yeastinfection.org and complete that quiz.

Let’s talk about the diet as being the first step. Before we go into taking you off of all kinds of foods and saying, “You can’t do this and you can’t do that,” the first thing I like to do is to put a person on a really basic Candida cleanse. Usually for the first 14 days, I get people to clean up their act, for want of a better word. And that 14-day period, I call it the “warm turkey” period. Cold turkey means you take everything away from people, but warm turkey means you have a softer approach. For 14 days, we’re going to get you to be aware of everything you’re eating and drinking. And in that 14-day period, I want you to stop all alcohol. I want you to cut caffeine down to one or two cups per day max, and generally, a cup of coffee or tea in the morning is okay, providing you don’t put sugar in it. Those sorts of drinks are usually okay.

In that 14-day period, you’re going to have a good look at what kind of takeaway or junk food you eat. What kind of processed foods you eat. You’re going to look into your refrigerator and try to get rid of all those bottles and jars with different sauces. Often they contain sugars, molds, and all kinds of crap in them. Many people I know have got containers in their cupboard or refrigerator. There could be jars of jam in there or all sorts of sauces, shrimp sauce, chili sauce, tomato sauce. They all need to go. Because on a Candida diet, they’re not really good foods to have. That 14-day period is when you’re going to make the switch from eating the not-so-good foods to eating a better kind of food, and I think it makes a lot of sense. In my experience, it’s not good just to plunge people into an average, standard diet and then into a Candida diet. You need to have a transition period. That’s the two-week period. You’ll be able to read more about that at yeastinfection.org about that transition period that is very important to do.

Once you’ve gone through that transition period, it’s time to look at what I call the MEVY diet. The MEVY diet has been around for a long time now, probably about 40 years. In fact, these sorts of diets have been around before the word “paleo” diet was invented. These are high protein diets. Candida loves sugar, so of course, the big thing that we want to do is take sugar out of the diet. Yeast need sugar to thrive, and the Paleo/MEVY kind of approach doesn’t really have sugar in it. The MEVY diet is an acronym for meat, eggs, vegetables, and yogurt. That’s how you basically form your diet. Lots of good quality lean proteins. My favorite protein is fresh fish, free-range chicken, free-range eggs.

If you’re a vegan, there are plenty of other options you’ve got. There are plenty of legumes you can eat. There are nuts, seeds, beans, and all sorts of things you can eat. If you are, however, a non-vegan or you are a meat eater and want to go more into the legume kind of diet, be aware that the bacteria in your digestive system will not be used to processing those kind of foods yet, and there could be a lot of flatulence going on and bloating, as you have to let your gut get used to these kinds of foods. Making any kind of quick diet switch is not really a good idea because you could get a lot of digestive upsets. Whether you’re a vegetarian going to start eating more meat or whether you’re a meat eater going to start eating more vegetarian, you need to make the approach very slowly and gently over a period of one to two months.

The MEVY approach is very important because it basically starves the Candida. It stops the Candida from feeding on the kind of foods it loves to have. In that MEVY diet approach, I often get asked, “How long do I need to do that? Is it a week? Is it a month?” There are no real guidelines here. I generally like to keep people on the MEVY for anything from one month up to three months, but I mean that’s up to you. You could do it for four, six, or eight weeks if you want. Once you’ve gotten used to eating this kind of diet, and again, you can read more on yeastinfection.org or in my book, Candida Crusher.

Once you’re used to this kind of dietary approach, we start moving you into what we call the low allergy diet. At this stage, we’re going to take out the most allergy forming of all foods like the dairy products, especially cow’s milk. I take out bananas. I take out oranges. I make sure that there is no chocolate in the diet, even dark chocolate, 70 percent cocoa or whatever it is, that’s got to go for a while. We take peanuts out. And then we tidy the diet up even a little bit more. We take out some more foods that potentially could affect your digestive system. My book contains quite a large page on the hypoallergenic diet. The books are available through Candidacrusher.com. I think I’ve written the most comprehensive information anywhere on the internet regarding food and yeast infection.

The low allergy diet is very smart because what we’ve done initially. We’ve cleaned you up, we put you into a protein diet with plenty of fiber in there and starches for the good bacteria to feed on. Now, we’re stripping away the potentially allergenic foods. This is a very smart move because a lot of people with Candida have got food allergies and food intolerances. They will have one or two key foods that are creating immune dysfunction because nearly all patients I see with Candida have got leaky gut. But taking out the potentially allergenic foods are going to stop the immune system from reacting.

After this low allergy approach, and again, that can last anywhere from 4 weeks up to about 12 weeks, depending on how you improve. You’re going to start reintroducing foods. That’s the third stage of the diet. Before we go into the food reintroduction, it’s important to also tell you that you need to eat foods that are going to help fight Candida. And again, I’ve written quite a lot of articles and done YouTube videos on the anti-Candida foods. We’ve talked about garlic extensively, oregano, coconut oil, clove. There are many different kinds of foods you can consume that actually fight Candida that the Candida hates. These foods also discourage bad bacteria like Citrobacter freundii. They get rid of things like Blastocystis, pseudomonas, all these kinds of bacteria and parasites. They don’t really like this kind of diet approach. This diet approach is very favorable toward encouraging the beneficial bacteria.

When we look at the special foods for Candida, we’ve got the anti-Candida special foods. And then we’ve got the prebiotic special foods, so there are two separate categories of foods that I think you should learn to incorporate into your diet as you’re going through a Candida cleanse. Foods that discourage Candida and bad bacteria and foods that encourage the good bacteria. We call those the FOS and GOS foods. I’ve written a whole article on that at EricBakker.com. I think it’s Part 4 of my “Alternatives to Antibiotics,” but I’ll explain a little bit about those FOS and GOS foods right now.

These are special kind of foods that contain sugars called oligosaccharides. Not all sugars are bad for Candida. Oligosaccharides, in fact, are what we call “prebiotic” foods. And these foods encourage the growth of lactobacillus acidophilus and bifida bacteria. It’s very important for you to understand that you need a lot of these beneficial bacteria to fight Candida. These beneficial bacteria themselves produce lots of different types of antibiotics in their own right that counter the bad bacteria. Acidophilus is also responsible for the production, particularly bifida bacteria, for B vitamins and Vitamin K and even folate, folic acid gets produced by these beneficial bacteria. These beneficial bacteria are responsible for powering up your immune system, making you feel very good. I see countless stool reports from Candida patients that show very low levels of beneficial bacteria.

Let’s look at some of the FOS and GOS foods. There are plenty of them. Foods like Jerusalem artichokes, asparagus, sweet potato, particularly the darker colored vegetables, like the red ones and the black ones. You can get these dark potatoes in New Zealand called Mallory potatoes or like purple potatoes. You might be able to get them in your country, purple colored potatoes. Dark colored carrots, red carrots, or even purple carrots. Purple cabbage is quite a good one to have. Purple grapes, all these sorts of foods.

Before you start saying, “Hang on a minute. I can’t eat grapes. I can’t eat sweet potato. I can’t eat this.” You can eat these foods, but they have to be introduced at the right time. Grapes are not a food you’re going to have in the first several months of a yeast infection. But over time, you’ll be able to eat a couple of grapes. And when I say a couple, I’m talking three or four. I’m not talking about handfuls of grapes. Any large amount of food regardless of what kind of sugars they’ve got in them are going to upset your digestive system until you can get used to them. When it comes to the FOS and GOS foods, you have to introduce them slowly. A lot of vegetables contain FOS and GOS. Even the root vegetables like sweet potatoes contain them.

I don’t generally always take out pumpkin and sweet potatoes, squash, sweet corn and peas from somebody’s diet in the MEVY stage. I only do that if they’ve got a seriously bad Candida infection. If they’ve had it for years. They’ve had years of antibiotics. They’ve had years of brain fog. If they’re a Category 3 patient, like a really bad patient, then I may take out these starchy vegetables for the first two or three weeks, but then I slowly reintroduce them. It’s not good to take people off all starches and grains because they get bored with their diet and they lose too much weight, and I’m not a fan of anti-gluten, anti-wheat, anti-rye, anti-oats, anti-everything. I don’t like being the food police to my patients. I was in the first several years of my practice and I found that it pissed off too many people, and a lot of people didn’t come back. A lot of patients will end up gravitating toward their own diet down the track anyway regardless of what you say. Remember the special foods. The FOS and the GOS foods. You can read a bit more about that on EricBakker.com.

That constitutes the diet. The diet is the easy part of the Candida approach. The hard part is the lifestyle, and that’s something you’re not going to read about on a lot of websites. The Candida Diet website, for example, doesn’t talk about how important lifestyle changes are. Most yeast infection sites I’ve seen talk very little about lifestyle. And this is the missing link because three quarters of your recovery from Candida is about lifestyle. Because lifestyle affects your immune system. It affects your endocrine system, your hormone system. It all gets affected by lifestyle. So what’s the point in eating really good foods if you’re going to bed at one o’clock in the morning and looking at your iPad? Waste of time. What good is there in eating a lot of good foods if you’re living in a situation with bad relationships or a lot of stress hanging over your head? High mortgage stress or something like that. Waste of time eating good food.

Let’s look at some lifestyle points here. The work/life balance is very important. Many people today have got blurred boundaries. They work for too long, too many hours. They don’t take enough time out. I’ve spoken about this at length on other videos, too. That people will often go from one screen to another screen. They’ll go from their work computer, they’ll go home, and they’ll spend more time on their mobile phone or on their electronic device or on their computer right up until when they go to bed. When they go to bed, they take the device to bed with them. There is no balance there. You need a clear demarcation between working and not working. You need what’s called “leisure time” or “relaxation time,” and that’s really missing today. Leisure time empowers the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the nervous system that helps to rebuild the body. It helps the body to rest and digest. The activating system or the sympathetic nervous system is a system we use during the day, and this empowers us and gets us up off our feet doing things and thinking about things. That’s the sympathetic nervous system. It activates all our organs. The parasympathetic helps to calm and slow down and rebuild. And as I said, it’s rest and digest. That system activates predominantly when you’re sleeping.

Sleep is a big problem. Forty percent of people in my country have got sleeping issues. If you’re in the US, I would say over half of the patients I see have got a sleeping dysfunction. What’s the point in having a premium diet with quinoa and salmon, organically grass fed beef and all this sort of stuff if you’re not sleeping properly? What a load of crap. You just can’t expect a really good health and recovery if there is a poor sleep level. You need to sleep very, very well. If you’ve got a sleeping issue and you’re watching this, that is probably one of the primary things you need to fix up. Work out why you’re not sleeping and fix that up.

Exercise. You’ve heard all about it. You’ve probably seen lots of videos and read lots of blogs and thought, “Yeah, I’ll get around to it one day.” Regular walking or exercise is paramount for recovery from Candida. Everything improves when you exercise regularly. If you’re not doing it now, you need to start doing it. This could be one of reasons why you’re not recovering. If you’ve been sick for years and you’re doing everything right, but you’re not recovering, get off your butt and do some exercise. Join the gym or find an activity that you like, whether it’s cycling or swimming or walking, you need to be active if you want good health. And again, if you can’t understand that concept, you’re probably wasting your time watching this video because you’re not going to cure Candida with supplements and diet alone. In some cases, but in chronic cases, you won’t. You need to look at the whole picture.

Attitudes. Attitudes are very important, too. It’s very important for you to cultivate a positive frame of mind, and always believe in a full recovery. That you’re going to really recover from Candida one day. The patients I see that have been sick for years that recover, they understand that health is in their own hands and they have to make those calls on what they can and can’t eat. If they’re going to get off their butt to go out for a walk, if they say “no” to an alcoholic beverage. They know that it’s all up to them. And the attitude is very important to have a very positive attitude and to watch out for negative people, and to watch out for really negative things on the internet. Because there is a lot of junk on the internet.
I want you to think carefully about the lifestyle. There are many articles I’ve written on yeastinfection.org on lifestyle and attitudes on how to be happy, for example. Understanding the things that predominate the parasympathetic nervous system or the healing part of the nervous system. Laughing a lot more. Chewing food properly. These are very important concepts for you to bear in mind. Sleeping, resting, because this allows digesting. These are important concepts and you need to really get a good grip on those, in my opinion, even more so than the diet to aid a full recovery.

And the last point we’re going to talk about will be the dietary supplements. I’ve created a range of products that you can find on Canxida.com. The Canxida supplements were created because I’ve been using supplements for patients now for over 20 years in my clinic and realize that there are a lot of problems with many of these dietary supplements. They weren’t performing the way I like them to. And many patients were aggravating on all kinds of supplements that I use. So I thought it’s time to make my own products and to make them to my standards. I used the best quality raw materials in the exact proportions. So far, two products have been created. One is called Canxida Remove and the other one is called Canxida Restore. Canxida Remove has proven to be a difficult product to manufacture. It’s not easy. And nothing really good is easy to achieve, I’ve discovered.

Our first batch sold out very, very quickly, and we had incredibly good feedback on it. Our second batch is almost produced now, but we’re waiting for one of the raw materials. Canxida Remove, in my opinion, is the premium antifungal/anti-bacterial/anti-parasite product made yet. You won’t find anything like this anywhere else on the internet. It’s quite a unique product in that I’ve tried to select the best herbal medicines that really target Candida, but also ones that quite specifically target many different kinds of parasites and bacteria. So it’s a very broad-spectrum product that really helps to cleanse the bacteria and fungus from the mouth right through the back passage.

It cleans everything up. It’s also made in a sustained release form, so the tablet takes about three to four hours to breakdown in the gut. What you’re going to find by taking this product two to three times per day is you’re going to have a long kill range, so it’s going to be able to wipe out bugs over a prolonged period of time. And that product should always be taken with food and preferably for anywhere from one up to six months. And it works perfectly fine at any stage of the Candida Crusher protocol. It will work quite well.

The second product I created is called Canxida Restore. Canxida Restore is a probiotic/enzyme combination. It contains seven different enzymes and six probiotics. I didn’t put any fructooligosaccharides or inulin in this product, so there are no prebiotics in there, and I did that for a very specific reason. I’ve used too many products in the past with prebiotics and had aggravations from patients. Spaced out people, sick people, they developed bloating, gas, headaches, all kinds of things. And I can tell you I’ve used every darn product out there for Candida that I could find. All the professional products. All the retail products. I know all the brands. I’ve used them all. And after using so many different products, I started to discover that most of them in these combinations with enzymes and probiotics contain prebiotics. And I thought, “What the hell is that all about? Why don’t I just get people to eat foods that contain prebiotics and then they can eat more or less as they see fit, but keep that separate from the supplement?” So the Canxida Restore was very carefully made to use the best possible enzymes for people going into the MEVY diet. If you’re on a Paleo kind of approach or a high protein diet, this is a perfect supplement for you to eat. If you suffer from food intolerances or food allergies, this is the perfect supplement to take along with that.

I’ve created the Restore to be used as a stand-alone probiotic or a stand-alone digestive enzyme for any kind of gut related problem, constipation, diarrhea, irritable bowel, inflammatory bowel, food allergy, food intolerance, any of those kind of conditions you’re going to get benefit from the Restore. Now, the Restore also contains a systemic enzyme in it called serapeptase. And this enzyme is very expensive. People look at my supplements and say, “Oh, you put a bit of a premium on that product.” I can tell you now, I’ve used the best possible enzymes from the top manufacturer in the world in that product in a very special capsule, a time release capsule, that only opens up in the small intestine. The probiotics are in a spore form, so they take time to really get warm, open up, and activate. And also, there are about 15 to 20 percent more probiotics in that product than is stated on the bottle. You’re going to definitely get these beneficial bugs into the system. The Canxida Restore is best taken one in the morning with breakfast and one before bed at night. Two per day is usually good, so that’s going to give you a whole month on one bottle.

The Canxida Remove, you take one of those with breakfast, one with lunch, one with dinner or you can take one twice per day. Two or three times per day, that’s up to you. Take the Remove with food and take the Restore one with food in the morning and one before bed at night. And that protocol is an amazing protocol and I guarantee that you’re going to get outstanding effect on that. Those products are available through Canxida.com.

Don’t forget to please do my online quiz at yeastinfection.org. It’s important for you to do that to get a feel for where you are right now. And then once you’ve treated yourself with these products, again within a month or two, you can do the quiz again to see where you are, what the ballpark is. A good thing for you to do. Please subscribe to my Candida Crusher channel. I’ve got many subscribers now, and I intend to make many more high quality videos for you to enjoy. Please keep emailing your questions through, so I can respond to those questions as well.

Thank you so much for the comments I’ve been receiving. It’s been fantastic. I hope this has been an informative video today as I’ve covered most of the points. Thank you very much.

Greetings. It’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of Canxida, the Candida dietary supplements. I’m going to talk a little bit about full spectrum probiotics today.

Many people I see with Candida or with SIBO or other gut problems think it’s important to take one particular probiotic, for example, saccharomyces boulardii, and will take that one in quite a high dose saying, ‘Well, I’ve heard it’s good for Candida. It’s good for traveler’s diarrhea. It helps people with quite lose bowels. It’s definitely the one to take.’
Another person will take one specific type of lactobacillus, say lactobacillus rhamnosus or lactobacillus plantarum because they’ve been to sessions such as a seminar from a particular company and they’ve heard that this is the best probiotic to take.

I’ve done quite a bit of research and reading into probiotics in the last 12 months and I can tell you something. The most important probiotic to take is the one you’re going to take in every day and regularly for a long time. Plus on top of that, make sure that you have a diet with at least some cultured or fermented foods in it and make sure that you have a digestive system that allows the bacteria to grow. Because otherwise you’re just going to piss it off. If you’re going to be drinking alcohol every day and take a probiotic once or twice a day thinking that you’re going to counter the other one, it’s pretty dumb. Stupid way of thinking. That’s like earning $100,000 a year, but spending $75,000 a year at the casino or going to Las Vegas. That’s pretty stupid thinking isn’t it. Taking something in on one hand and giving it out on the other to counterbalance it, it’s a stupid idea.

The point I’m going to make is you really want to think about lactobacillus acidophilus, in particular. It’s a very, very important probiotic for the small intestine. It’s probably the most important probiotic to have because it allows so many of the other beneficial bacteria to thrive because it creates that kind of environment. It’s also the most researched lactobacillus, the acidophilus. It’s definitely the one that you want to get in a dietary supplement and preferably a high quality one. So don’t just settle for any kind of probiotic. Be careful.

The bifida bacteria tend to favor the large intestine, so you need to get a balance of lactobacillus and bifida bacteria in a dietary supplement. I also believe that the rhamnosus, in particular, is one of the most important immune boosting of all the lactobacilli and it works very well when combined with lactobacillus acidophilus.

There are many reasons why I’ve chosen to put together the formula I have called Canxida Restore. But the main thing that I wanted to achieve with the formula is to create a full spectrum probiotic. By putting several of the species of the lactobacillus together and a few of the bifida bacteria, I’ve created a full spectrum probiotic with a very, very nice high live count.

We’ve got lactobacillus acidophilus DDS1, lactobacillus casei, lactobacillus plantarum, lactobacillus rhamnosus, so you’ve got four lacto strains in there and then we’ve got the two main bifida strains. A product like that is really, what I’d call full spectrum. And it’s going to be good for people with a wide range of conditions, whether they’ve got heartburn or GERD, whether they’ve got diarrhea or constipation, whether they’ve got inflammatory bowel disease or irritable bowel disease, it doesn’t matter. Candida patients thrive on these kinds of probiotics, particularly when they’re high quality.

Be sure to check out that product, Canxida Restore, if you’re interested in a probiotic. But there’s more. I’ve also put seven enzymes in this product. And I believe that for a full spectrum probiotic to work most effectively, it’s best given with a couple of very high quality enzymes as well. And I chose several there that really work on proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, in particular. I’ve got lots of amylase in there, cellulase, protease, hemicellulase, invertase, glucoamylase, and serrapeptase, so there is a systemic enzyme in there as well.

I’m going to talk a lot more about enzymes on other videos. But when you’re going to consider a probiotic of quality, you want to think, is it best if I take the probiotic with an enzyme or separate. And I always now really try to encourage patients to take a probiotic/enzyme combination formula. It works very, very well, and it’s certainly worth trying.