Greetings. New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of Canxida, the Candida dietary supplements of choice. Thanks for tuning into my video. We’re going to talk about probiotics again today. What makes them thrive? What really encourages probiotics to grow well?
Some people love gardening. I’m one of those people who loves to garden. It’s interesting when I get friends over; they have a look at the vegetable garden and the flower garden. They say, “Wow, you guys are lucky you can grow these things. We can’t grow anything. Every time I plant something in the garden, it dies. It goes all brown and it just doesn’t look good.”
Basically, the difference is the person who loves gardening is going to water the garden, maintain it, give it food, make sure it’s got the right environment, and the vegetables flourish. They take off. And then you get the other gardener who will put something in the ground, water it once, and then not look at it again. That’s called neglect. And then they turn around and say, “Well, I haven’t got a green thumb.” You can see the difference between the two people.
Probiotics can really thrive in a person’s digestive system, particularly if the person allows a probiotic to have the right kind of environment that’s conducive toward its well-being. Just like that broccoli plant that’s in the vegetable garden or those bell peppers that you’re growing. They’ve got certain types of requirements. If you look after the needs of something that’s living and growing, you can make it thrive, you can maintain it, or you can neglect it and let it die. So it’s really your call.
The best way to make probiotics thrive is to make sure that implantation occurs. Just like a fetus has to implant into the wall of the endometrium in a woman before it can grow and really flourish as a baby, beneficial bacteria have to implant themselves into the wall of the digestive system. They don’t just float around like a whole big bowl of pea soup or something. It doesn’t work like that. They actually have to attach themselves onto a wall surface and then grow colonies, and that’s what you call implantation. It’s very similar to what happens with biofilms. I’m going to talk about biofilms on other videos.
Biofilms occur in about four or five stages just like how beneficial bacteria really take off. You get a first few bacteria in one particular area that will find an area quite suitable and move in. But it’s not until more and more come along, the colonies can become established, and they can get a firm foothold in that area where they’re trying to implant. When more and more come along, particularly the foods for those beneficial bacteria come along, and the pH, the acid/alkaline environment is good, the colonies will grow faster. Implantation takes more of a foothold. And before you know it, a very small town has developed of say several hundred bacteria. And then if the conditions are even more conducive, the person is eating the right kind of food, and there is enzyme power there to break that food down into small components to give these bacteria food, then the colonies will grow even faster. And before you know it, you’ve got a mini city on your hands.
Same with biofilms. You can have an environment that’s really hostile for beneficial bacteria and very conducive for these bad buggers. Drinking lots of booze, eating pizzas, eating at weird times, and having a high stress lifestyle. These are the things that contribute a lot, particularly if you’re starting to take antibiotics and different kinds of medications, skipping meals, having lots of sugar in your coffee, lots of chocolate bars or lots of candy bars and junk food all the time. Then before you know it, your digestive system is more like a minefield. It’s toxic. It’s a terrible environment. Because it’s going to be conducive toward Candida, you’re going to get the bloating and gas to go with it.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the opposite of good is bad. Having the good digestive system with plenty of beneficial bacteria, eating the right kind of food, and making sure implantation occurs and then is maintained for a long period of time. Some people think they can take probiotics for two weeks and stop and then it’s all good. It doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to take probiotics for months. Trust me. I’ve worked with patients for a long time. You need to work with probiotics sometimes for three to six months, even 12 months. If you want a very successful implantation, you do that.
If you want a beautiful vegetable garden, you make sure you go out there regularly and you till the soil, you put in good fertilizer, compost in there, whatever fertilizer you use, keep replacing the plants all the time when they die out, make sure they’re getting adequate rainfall and things like that. If you look after the garden, it’s going to look beautiful. It’s the same with your gut.
Taking probiotics for a long period of time makes a lot of sense because you’ll get good implantation. And once you’ve got a strong foothold with billions and billions of beneficial bacteria, think about the quantity of lactobacillus and bifida bacteria in the intestine. They make up between 30 to 50 percent of the whole bacteria. So it pays for you to take a supplement containing lots of lactobacillus and lots of bifida bacteria.
Check out Canxida Restore. I made it for that reason. I made a supremely high quality product that you need to take small amounts long term to get fantastic effects, and I put the enzymes with it. Because a good probiotic needs a really good enzyme blend that’s going to allow you to break down the food that you eat properly and to give the bacteria further downstream in the GI tract lots and lots of good food to eat, so you’ll feel better faster.
Greetings. New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher. I’m going to talk about probiotics again today. What constitutes a good probiotic? How do you know you’re buying a good quality product?
The thing is you have to place a lot of trust and integrity in your supplier. What I would like to tell you, particularly, if you take any kind of dietary supplement on a long-term basis, you’ve got to know what kind of people made this product. Where did it come from? Where did they get the raw materials? What kind of research has gone into this product? Is it just a sales product? Is it full of hype? You can get a good feel for the product by looking at the person behind the product, and this is why I chose Nebraska Biocultures for my probiotics.
I’ve had a very special probiotic made specifically for Candida patients in conjunction with very nice people at Nebraska Biocultures. The legacy of the probiotic that I particularly like to recommend is an amazing legacy. Dr. Khem Shahani who was a microbiologist and whose son, Michael, has now taken over. Khem worked with lactobacillus for a long time and developed the lactobacillus DDS1, the Department of Dairy Science 1, so it’s probably the most researched of any lactobacillus ever. Khem has published over 200 scientific articles on various kinds of probiotics, and particularly, his beloved acidophilus DDS1, which many now in the world regard as the Cadillac or the Rolls Royce of lactobacillus.
There are hundreds of different strains of lactobacillus acidophilus you can use, but the DDS1 is the only human strain that’s ever been used. Khem worked on this for a long, long time. There are many patents on this particular product. There is even a patent on it that shows that it’s actually antibiotic or penicillin resistant as well. It’s a remarkable product. In my opinion, any kind of dietary supplement you take with probiotics should contain the lactobacillus DDS1. It’s exactly why I’ve put it in the Canxida Restore. I’ve put other probiotics from Dr. Shahan in there as well, also made with the same extremely high stringent quality.
Several years ago before GMP, good manufacturing procedures, were enforced in the dietary supplement industry in the US, I spoke with many experts in America and in Europe regarding probiotic cultivation and manufacturing formulations and marketing because this is my industry. And I was quite amazed to discover that when a survey was done on US probiotics just before GMP was enforced that over half the probiotics surveyed were, in fact, useless and were dead. There were no viable bacteria in them at all, so people were getting ripped off. They had no idea.
I can tell you now if you’re watching this video, chances are if you’re buying some kind of el-cheapo product, you could still be getting ripped off or scammed. Check out and make sure that the factory or the supplier has a GMP certification. I think just about all manufacturers are GMP today. The companies I deal with have been GMP for years even before GMP was enforced.
Dr. Shahani’s probiotics are packed usually 10 to 15 percent over the quantity of the bacteria that it states on the label just to ensure that you’re getting plenty in there. A good daily dose is between 1 and 15 billion, that’s usually all you need. If the product is manufactured properly by a reputable supplier, it’s going to last quite a long time, too. The product you’re looking for should have been very carefully formulated, cultivated, and manufactured by a top quality supplier. A person who has spent a long time working with probiotics. You really have to understand probiotics. It can’t just be another product that a company is making. That’s why I like to work with highly specialized people like Dr. Shahani’s company. They’ve worked with probiotics now for many, many decades, so you’re getting a big pedigree there.
These products are made; the bacteria are grown in very special medium cultures that often don’t even involve dairy. Like garbanzo beans or chickpeas form a growing medium for some of the most potent probiotics on the planet. A chickpea or a garbanzo bean, would you believe it? These products are grown and then they’re harvested. They’re concentrated and then a cryo protective agent has been added, so this is a proprietary process where an agent has been added to the bacteria to stop it from deteriorating, to allow it to have all kinds of swings of temperature. It’s going to be remarkably stable. Then it’s freeze dried. And then certain other kinds of natural stabilizers are added in with the packaging to give this a very long shelf life.
The product you take ideally should be kept cool. It doesn’t have to be kept in the refrigerator, but it will do better long term in the refrigerator. But probiotics like a stability of temperature. They don’t like humidity and they don’t like wide fluctuations of temperature. If you keep it quite cool as you would in your pantry or in your cupboard, it’s going to perform a lot better. If you keep it in your fridge, it’ll perform even better. If you’re only going to take one here or there long term, probably keep it in the refrigerator. You can even freeze this particular probiotic with no problem at all, with no loss of viability. And you can even take the frozen probiotic capsule and swallow it. It can go from a 40-50 degree temperature fluctuation. Remember, these products are freeze-dried. They’re very, very high quality. And they only get activated in the environment where it’s dark, it’s moist, and it’s warm. As soon as those three factors come into play, it will thrive.
The DDS1, a good quality product, will survive the stomach acid. It really will. This is why again I chose lactobacillus rhamnosus in this formula because it thrives in a very high acid environment. So even if only a small amount of the DDS1 gets through – which it won’t – let’s just say a tiny amount went through. The rhamnosus will almost certainly gets through because it loves high acid. Those two will thrive together. There are a lot of factors for you to consider when you buy a probiotic. But as I say, you need to look at the company, the raw material supplier; they’ve got to have a lot of research backing them. There has got to be a lot of trust and integrity, and don’t get scammed by probiotics because there is a lot of rubbish out there on the market. That’s why I designed my own product; I have for many years now because I know the people who make, and I know the supplier where the raw materials come from. Therefore, I can guarantee to my patients it’s going to be a top-notch product.
Greetings. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand and author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for checking out my video today. As you can imagine, I get an incredible amount of emails from patients from all around the world from many different countries, particularly from the United States of America. I get lots of frequently asked questions. I’ve got a question here from a guy called Tom Rutherford in Texas, and Tom is asking me, Eric, what are the best foods to eat if I have a yeast infection? The best foods to eat with Candida.
Well, Tom, this is going to be quite an interesting reply to your question because it’s not just about what foods are the best foods to eat with Candida. There are many different ways we can answer the question and, unfortunately, many Candida diet websites, base a lot of their information around foods. Foods do form a very important consideration with yeast infections. But unfortunately, a lot of these websites and sources of information don’t contain the full picture. In fact, I’m absolutely stunned the longer I see patients, the more I realize that so many people can, in fact eat fruit, can eat gluten, and can eat lots of bread. Even some patients can drink alcohol and still recover from a yeast infection. So there is no one law that comes down like a hammer that says, “You shall not eat this. You shall not eat that.” But the guidelines I’m going to give you now, Tom, will be based on my experiences on many thousands of different patients. What I think works best for the general population. And I’ll throw some more information in along the line as we speak on situations other than foods.
Let’s just start by explaining a little bit about what is currently the whole idea with the Candida diet. Most people will be quick to tell you that you’ve got to avoid anything containing sugar or refined carbohydrates. That you’ve got to eat a diet that is quite high in proteins, preferably lean sources of protein and focus more on the green leafy vegetables. The general consensus is to avoid all forms of fruit and most forms of grain. In fact, it almost sounds a bit like a specific carbohydrate kind of diet, doesn’t it? It’s a paleo/SCD diet combined. That’s almost what this sounds like. There are no hard and fast rules, and I wrote about this extensively in Candida Crusher.
However, when you’re starting off with a Candida diet approach, the first thing I always get people to do is to do what I call a big clean up. So a big clean up means an assessment of what you’re currently eating, particularly if you haven’t already made the changes toward these types of foods, is to slowly wind down all your eating over a 14-day period. By that, I mean cut out all forms of alcohol over a 14-day period. Stop eating takeaway or refined foods, and start incorporating good foods into the diet.
What are the good foods? What are the best foods to eat when you’ve got a Candida yeast infection? Well, the best foods are foods that support good digestion, that support good immune function, and that support the proliferation of beneficial bacteria in the digestive system. They discourage dysbiotic bacteria and Candida, and they also discourage the ability to the challenge the immune system. Because nearly all people with Candida have leaky gut syndrome. They have intestinal permeability. Nearly all people I see with Candida have SIBO or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and all patients I see with Candida have got stress, which increases permeability umpteen times.
Focus on high quality proteins in your diet. Proteins are important to eat, particularly if you chew them really well. Chew them well. And also, I believe it’s important at this stage to recommend that you take a good digestive enzyme/probiotic supplement at least twice, if not three times per day. When you’ve gone through the big clean up and you’re going into the initial stages of a good Candida diet is to support your digestion with a very good quality enzyme dietary supplement. Because the enzyme is going to help your stomach, the pancreas, and the small intestine. It’s going to facilitate proper breakdown. It’s going to supply the body with some enzymes that it might be lacking.
A lot of doctors at this point will say, “What a load of bologna. You don’t need any supplements. You can get everything in diet alone.” Yes, you can, but you can’t fast track your results and you will not get a swift recovery and a full complete recovery without some kind of supplement aid when taken at the right time. You don’t need a whole bunch of supplements with Candida. You just need to take the right kind of stuff.
Make sure you chew your food. I haven’t even mentioned foods and I’m already talking about chewing food. Unless you chew your food properly, you’re not going to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. Your pancreas – I’ve mentioned this many times before in previous videos – your pancreas only has parasympathetic domination and not sympathetic domination. If you don’t know what that means, go and look up what sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are. So rest and digest is the stress part of the autonomic function. If you really want to digest foods properly, you’ve got to chew them properly. No point in taking pills. I don’t give a toss what kind of food you eat. If you don’t chew it properly, you’re not going to digest it properly. If you don’t relax when you eat, you’re never going to digest it.
Eggs, especially good quality free-range eggs. Chicken, clean fish, if you can get a nice ocean caught fish. We’ve got plenty of beautiful fish down here in New Zealand. A good quality fish. You guys in the States call it “grass fed” beef. We don’t have anything but grass fed beef here in New Zealand. Everything is grass all around us, so all our sheep and cattle all eat beautiful green lush grass. As far as I know, no cattle are fed with grains down here. Grass fed beef. These sorts of proteins are going to help improve your digestion. Try and eat them at least twice per day, if you can.
If you’re a vegetarian watching this, make sure that you incorporate good quality nuts, seeds, and legumes into your diet. There are many different kinds of legumes you can eat, different beans, and peas. I’m also a fan of soy and tofu. I know a lot of people out there think it’s almost like toxic nuclear waste going into the digestive system because it’s so maligned, but a lot of my patients have successfully eaten organic tofu now for as long as I’ve been a practitioner. I’ve eaten tofu for over 30 years and I haven’t grown breasts or become retarded or anything out of it yet. And a lot of my clients do have soy products. That’s your call. I think soy does form an okay part of the diet.
Let’s look at the vegetable sources. I can do a whole video on vegetables alone. There are so many different vegetables that are great with Candida and SIBO, particularly the vegetables that have got plenty of starches in them. We call them resistant starches. Vegetables contain different kinds of oligosaccharides, particularly sugars that they get broken down to and feed up the beneficial bacterial. I think I’ve done some videos on FOS and GOS foods with the SIBO videos that I’ve completed. Fructooligosaccharide and galactooligosaccharide. You’re going to get these out of a lot of foods. Globe artichokes, asparagus, many different foods contain these beneficial sugars.
See, not all sugars are bad with Candida. The sugars that we don’t want you to have are Mars bars or Coca-Cola. These sorts of sugars are not good. Confectionary, candy, chocolate bars, chewing gum with artificial sugar in it, processed foods, a lot of boxed cereals; these are all junk foods. You shouldn’t really be eating these if you want to recover from any kind of illness. Proteins, many different kinds of vegetables. Leafy greens are my favorite. I like broccoli, spinach. Carrots, celery, there are many of them. There is a lot of debate about can I eat carrots, squash, pumpkin, and the cucurbitaceae family with Candida. Yes, you can, but you need to avoid them if you’ve got a seriously bad yeast infection. In the first three to four weeks, you probably want to avoid things like pumpkin and squash. In America now, you guys are going into fall, going into winter, so a lot of people will probably be eating things like sweet potatoes, pumpkins, squash, and those sort of things. Sweet corn also falls into that category. You need to be careful with sweet corn. When it’s first picked, it contains a lot of sugar. But after three days of it being picked, a lot of that sugar converts to starch, so it’s not quite so sweet anymore.
If you look at bananas when they’re green as opposed to yellow, corn when it’s very fresh, just picked versus a day or two or three old, there’s a big difference how that can affect your gut. You may want to experiment with half green/half yellow bananas. If you like bananas and you don’t want to avoid them, don’t eat them yellow. Eat them green or half-green. The safest bananas are the plantain or the deep green bananas because you can cook them in coconut milk, which is very nice. As you can see, you can modify food and it may be okay by looking at the ripening of that food.
Most vegetables I’m quite happy with you having with Candida, providing you chew them well. I don’t like raw vegetables too much unless we look at salads. Steamed and stir fried are a very good way of eating vegetables. A lunch for me will often mean a small piece of fish or two free-range eggs or a piece of chicken and some vegetables out of the garden, like some steamed broccoli or some steamed spinach, and then there might be a little bit of quinoa with that, a grain like that. I tend to eat very light lunches, light dinners. I tend to eat smaller meals frequently. Vegetables are generally fine. Just be careful of the starchy ones when you start. Leafy greens, proteins are fine.
Fruit. Be careful with fruit with Candida. The permissible fruits are green apple, kiwi – one kiwi fruit per day is usually okay – pomegranate if you can get it is quite a good fruit. Avocados are always fine to eat. Some of the nicest fruits to eat and healthy ones with Candida are blueberries. Any kind of berry is generally acceptable as long as you don’t have too much of it. Blueberries, strawberries, boysenberries, raspberries, huckleberries, any of those kind of things. Don’t buy them in cans with syrup or sugar in them. Make sure they’re fresh and raw. Raw berries put through smoothies are quite nice. I’m not a big fan of processed jams or berries like that. But if you grow them, they’re a fantastic food to eat. Quite a nice adjunct to add to your diet.
Grains, plenty of grains you can eat. It’s up to you to experiment with them. One of my favorites is sourdough rye bread. I’ve discovered that this food contains a lot of wild yeast like sourdough does, and generally, it’s quite acceptable to eat this with Candida. If you’ve got a phobia with gluten, then you want to avoid rye, of course. You can actually get gluten free rice bread. Rice doesn’t contain gluten. That might be a good option for you. Quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, wild rice, I love wild rice, red rice. You can get brown basmati rice. There are about 50 different sorts of rice you can get. Try to avoid white rice, but stick more with the brown rice. For every cup of brown rice, I generally put in one to two teaspoons of the black wild rice. Try the red rice. It’s quite nice, too. How much rice? I just had an email saying Eric, how much rice can I eat per day. You probably want to stick with about half a cup of brown rice per day, but see what the digestive comfort is like, the bowel motions, the gas and the bloating.
Be sure to take a digestive enzyme/probiotic, particularly when you’re changing your diet and when you’re staying on the diet long term. Initially, you may want to take two or three of these enzyme/probiotics per day. As your bowels improve and the bowel motions really improve, you can cut back to one per day maintenance long term.
Check out my Canxida Restore. I worked a long time on this formula. I’ve put in it the best enzymes and probiotics. I’ve taken fructooligosaccharide out of this product. In my opinion, avoid dietary supplements containing prebiotics, inulin, and FOS. I found too many problems with these products with patients long term. I’ve used many of these products like Syntol and ThreeLac and Floracor-gi and the list goes on. There are many of them. Many companies now believe that you need to put a prebiotic with a probiotic. I think it’s a wrong move. I’ve been disappointed using these products time and again because I had too much feedback. That’s why I created my own product. But check it out. Go to Canxida.com and have a look at Canxida Restore. It’s a fantastic product. And it’s a particularly good product when you’re going to look at this kind of dietary approach. And it partners up absolutely perfectly with my Canxida Remove, an antifungal/anti-bacterial product.
Check out my next video. I’m going to do a video right now on foods to avoid with Candida. I hope you got a good picture on what to eat. There are lots you can eat. Now, remember, the diet is modifiable at any stage. I get so many emails from people saying, “Can I eat this? Can I eat that?” Try. See if it works for you. Some people can actually eat bananas, pineapples and apples every day, one or two, and have no problem at all. Other people can’t. How is that so? It’s got to do with the type of bugs that they’ve got in their gut at the time. It’s got to do with how well the pancreas is functioning, how much amylase it produces, for example. How effective their digestive organs are. How relaxed they are when they eat can make a big difference. It’s not just the foods you eat. It’s what your body does with the food you eat that makes all the difference with Candida. And that’s why there is no complete black and white, yes and no list. There never will be. It’s fluid. It’s modifiable. What suits you may not suit another person. And I know that after seeing now thousands of Candida patients. You need to experiment. What works for you, works for you. Make a note of that.
Catch up with me in the next video. Thanks for tuning in.