Author: Eric Bakker

Greetings. 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 part two of the video today. This video series on what to eat and what to avoid with Candida. I’ve produced these two videos for a person called Tom Rutherford from Texas, who has actually emailed me. Eric, what can I eat? What should I avoid? So Tom, I hope you’ve checked out my first video and had a good look at that. This is really part two, the foods to avoid with Candida.

Well, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out what you need to avoid with Candida. You know what to avoid with Candida. It’s the foods that you look around and you see other people eat, other people that complain about bad health, people that complain about bloating and gas and fatigue, bowel problems. People who go to the doctor looking for different kinds of medications for relief. Most people I see say the same thing to me. “I thought you were going to say that. I had a feeling you were going to tell me to stop drinking. I had a feeling you were going to tell me that I can’t have three candy bars every day.” Every patient I see with a chronic health problem has got some kind of habit underpinning that health problem, and often there will be a dietary indiscretion and there will be a lifestyle indiscretion. And when you peel those layers back, there will be some kind of stress underpinning that.

I’ve spoken enough now in my videos about the relationship with stress and chronic Candida. There is no doubt about it. Every single case of ongoing Candida I see there is usually some kind of unresolved issue underlying that. I had three patients from the U.S. yesterday, and one patient, in particular, I saw has got a public service job. I said, “Do you like it?” He said, “I hate it. I hate my job.” And I said, “Well, why would you stay in a job that you hate?” “I don’t know. I haven’t decided to get out of it yet.” Now, he’s had Candida for a long time. This guy is on an amazingly good diet and he’s been on it for some time, and he can’t understand why after three or four naturopaths and two doctors, no one has helped him to resolve this problem. And basically, when I told him that the job’s got to go, the diet doesn’t. I think he understood what I was alluding to.

Maybe you’re a person looking at this right now who’s on a perfect diet. You’ve been to a really good naturopath or the best doctor in town who’s given you an incredible diet. You’ve been to maybe a psychotherapist or a counselor. You’ve been to a chiropractor. You’ve been to all these kinds of people and yet you’re still not right and you’re still eating the best foods. Try to understand that it’s a lot more than just food that you need to eat and to avoid to get rid of Candida. That’s the secret.

Let’s delve into the foods you need to avoid now. I’ve written quite extensively on this in my book, but I’m going to go through a list of different things that I think you’ll know when I read these out or mention these. These are the foods that can affect you quite badly, and it’s not necessarily the quantity of these foods that you eat or the frequency of foods that you eat. It’s how much you’re enjoying these foods, so you’ve got to stop the relationship that you’ve got with that food. You’ve got to stop it. We have relationships with foods. I don’t know if you realize that. Just like we have relationships with people. And sometimes people can really piss us off. We can have bad relationships with people. We can have good relationships with people. And sometimes when we sever those relationships or change them, it’s like a breath of fresh air.

What food do you really enjoy eating that’s a naughty food, that’s a bad food, a food that you shouldn’t be eating? Is it a chocolate bar? Is it peanut butter? Is it going to the cupboard and getting a slice of bread and putting peanut butter and jam on it? Is it going to the refrigerator and having a glass of milk two or three times a day? Is it really wanting that beer or wine at the end of the day? That’s what I want you to think about right now. What food immediately comes to your mind that you’re having on a regular basis that you know in the back of your mind you shouldn’t be having, but you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, a little bit here or there is not going to hurt me. One or two drinks a week, I’ll be fine.”

Well, you won’t be fine. Because the top of the tree on the “no” foods is alcohol. If you’re not prepared to stop alcohol, even one drink per week, then just turn this video off now and go and look at one of those funny cat videos or something. Because it’s not really going to make any difference to me. You’re not going to get well. You’ve got to stop that relationship. It’s not just a matter of saying to you “Here are all the foods you avoid.” Because if I gave you a list now of 25 foods to avoid, I can guarantee if you went down the column, you could put a circle around one food that you find hard to avoid and that’s the problem.

Confectionary, particularly, so we look at alcohol. Then we’re going to look at things like lollies or candies or confectionary, chocolates, biscuits, any kind of sweet foods like that that are really full of sugar. I’m no fan of chewing gum either. I tend to avoid chewing gum. I think it’s a bad habit chewing, chewing, chewing all the time. You see people at airports. I see a lot of employees for companies sitting there chewing, taxi drivers, bus drivers, bored people, frustrated people; they sit there chewing. Very bad. You’re giving your stomach all these bad signals that food is coming. You’re swallowing saliva laden with artificial sugars. These are neurotoxins. Avoid chewing gum. You don’t need it. And it’s the same with that candy bar. If you go shopping, you don’t need to buy that candy bar when you’re sitting there waiting at the checkout. A lot of things are just habits that you’ve accumulated. Again, you need to make some changes with these relationships, with these habits. Cut them out of your life.

We’ve talked about candy. We’ve talked about chocolate. We’ve talked about biscuits, cookies, cakes, slices, all these kinds of foods, again, full of creams and colors and sugars with trans saturated fats, all these things with margarine in them. All this crap you don’t really need. Lots of refined sugar and flour, processed peanuts in there and grains and junk. When you buy a packet of cookies and keep it in the cupboard for six months, it’s probably still okay to eat. Chewing gum will keep for years. It shows you how processed this food is. As they say, all the food in the middle of the supermarket is a highly processed food. That’s the stuff you want to avoid. You’ve probably heard it before. You only buy what’s on the perimeter, the perishables; the food that goes off quick because that’s the food that’s healthy for the body.

Foods to avoid in the first few weeks of Candida include, if you’ve got a “bad” yeast infection, you need to be careful of grains. Too much wheat. Too much rye. Any kind of grain too much of, it could upset your digestion when you’re trying to switch into a tighter dietary approach, especially if you eat too much of it. Avoid those sort of foods. In the previous video, I said avoid pumpkin, squash, sweet potato, carrot, and sweet corn. These foods in the first two or three weeks when you’re switching from a non-Candida to a Candida diet, just slowly cut these things out and focus more on the greens, leafy greens. Just be careful with your grains.

When you’re switching into a Candida diet, I want you to focus on chewing food properly, getting to bed on time, taking plenty of enzymes, learning how to relax more, and improving your gut function, improving the digestive capabilities of your gut, so it can handle a better quality diet. Because digesting food is quite hard and tough on the body.

The focus also is on really improving the bowel tone and having really good bowel motions. Because most American and European patients I see, as well as Australia and New Zealand, have a bowel motion maybe every day, maybe every second day.

Constipation is endemic, so you want to have two bowel motions per day as a minimum if you’ve got a very good gut function.

Takeaway food. Do you often go to the shop and buy takeaway chicken, deep fried chicken, for example, or pizzas? Even these greasy Asian meals or things like that. Be careful of takeaway foods. They are convenient, but they’re not convenient for your digestive system. Tin foods, packet foods, anything in boxes, packets, or tins. I do use occasionally tin food, but it may be sardines or salmon, but most of the food that I cook and consume is all fresh and raw foods that I’ll turn into meals.

The fresher and cleaner you eat and the more you avoid the processed foods, the more you’re going to increase your digestive capacity, the better the enzymes will work and you’ll also produce more enzymes, and the better the bowel function will be because you’ll also produce better or more of the beneficial bacteria. Remember, you’ve got anywhere from 500 to 1,000 species of bacteria in the gut, and they shape and form themselves depending on the stresses and also the diet. When you improve your diet, you can slowly improve the bowel flora. When you can improve the bowel flora, you can crowd out the Candida, the SIBO infections, and your health will really improve in a seriously big way. Because all health starts from the inside out of the gut.

I think you know by now what foods you want to avoid. You want to avoid the foods that you know you shouldn’t eat, and most people know that by now. You can read a lot more in my book, Candida Crusher. I’ve written over 100 pages on these sorts of foods. I prefer to talk more about what you can eat rather than what you can’t eat. That’s more important to me.

Another heads up for you on what you shouldn’t be doing is cooking meals and then covering them with saran wrap or cling film when they’re cold, placing them in the refrigerator, and then microwaving them the following day to heat them up. I think that is a no-no because bacteria, molds, and fungi will grow on that food overnight. It’s not a fresh meal anymore. Cook a meal, consume it, and eat it. If you don’t do that, then deep freeze it straight away, and I prefer oven warming rather than microwave. I don’t really like microwaves at all.

Sauces, that’s another thing that I didn’t mention is watch out for tomato sauce, chili sauce, ketchup, any of these kind of sauces. If I went into your house now and opened your refrigerator, how many bottles or jars would I see that have been sitting in there for weeks, if not months. I guarantee there will be a few, if you know what I mean. There will be lots of different jars in there. Lots of people have got these jars lying all around the place. These things are mold traps. They’re fungal traps. They’re bacterial traps. Try not to do that. Use something and then throw it away.

When you’re going into a transition stage with a healthy diet, try not to use any kind of sauces at all. I’ve got only one sauce in my house and that’s tamari. I use quite a bit of tamari, which is a Japanese kind of a soy sauce, and I use sea salt and I use cracked pepper and I use a lot of different dried herbs and fresh herbs. But I prefer not to use tomato sauce, chili sauce, shrimp sauce, oyster sauce, and all these sort of sauces. They’re not really good. We only tend to have a little bit of them and we keep the bottles accumulating for too long.

We’ve spoken about confectionary. We spoke about things like ice cream, chocolate, all this sort of junk, cakes, biscuits, slices. We spoke about alcohol, which is the first thing I mentioned. We spoke about not reheating food. We spoke about sauces, bottles, and little things like that. What the hell does it leave you with? Well, it leaves you with a diet that your great grandparents probably had. It leaves you with a diet that’s fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, and fresh proteins, meats, all legumes, all nuts or seeds. There are plenty of foods you can eat and combinations of these foods.

I’m just going to give you a little plug here about my new product I developed called Canxida Restore. Canxida Restore took me a long time to make. I had to really have a good think about the different combinations that were going to be most beneficial for patients. The best enzymes to facilitate digestive recovery and improvement, and the best probiotics. I selected seven enzymes and six probiotics, and I’ve kept the fructooligosaccharides and inulin out. There is no prebiotics in this. And I call that product Canxida Restore. It partners up beautifully with Candida Remove, which is antifungal/anti-bacterial/anti-parasite product, so that’s in a tablet.

It’s a really difficult product to make, the Canxida Remove. I’ve had to work with several manufacturers now to find someone who can really do the job properly because it’s not an easy product. Anything new, a new formulation, particularly herbal, is very difficult to make if it’s never been made before. And I can tell you, it’s super effective. We’ve had so much good feedback from Canxida Remove. But when you partner that tablet now with a capsule, Canxida Restore, you’re going to get an even better effect because they work perfectly together.

Check out my site, Canxida.com, and also be sure to have another good look at yeastinfection.org. There are over 1,000 articles on that site now. Have you done my quiz yet, my Candida Crusher quiz? You can do that through yeastinfection.org. If you like this kind of information, please subscribe to this channel because I’m very keen to build the channel more and give you some videos. I’ve got some more topics to do from people just like Tom. So if you send me a message through YouTube, comment on the kind of videos you would like, I’d be glad to accommodate you with that. Because the channel is all about helping people out.

Greetings. It’s Eric Bakker, New Zealand naturopath, author of Candida Crusher. Thanks for tuning into my video today. Today I’m going to talk about factors that actually damage your intestinal microflora. Let’s get into it.

We’ve spoken previously about antibiotics, so you’re probably quite aware that when you take an “anti” biotic, you’re going to affect the “pro” biotics, so antibiosis means anti-life. Probiotics mean pro-life or for life or what will generate life. We’re not going to go into it in this video today. But there are other medications apart from antibiotics that adversely affect the beneficial flora in the gut.

A typical one that I see is called PPIs or proton pump inhibitors. These drugs are really designed to treat GERD, gastroesophageal reflux disease. Many people in America, New Zealand, Australia, and many countries get heartburn, so they go to the doctor. And the doctor will prescribe a drug that basically works on the enzyme where it blocks the enzymatic production of hydrochloric acid in the stomach. Pretty stupid thing to do when you think about it, blocking the production of acid. Because you need acid to help break down food properly in the stomach. And not only that, when you start playing around with the pH of the gut, you’re going to adversely affect the pH of the whole digestive system, which means that taking anything up here is going to affect everything further downstream. Even though you’re working on a symptom by reducing the discomfort of GERD and heartburn, you’re actually destroying your gut in the process, so it’s a crazy thing to do.

Another drug, chemotherapy drugs. These are very powerful drugs that help to kill off a lot of cells in the body. Not only cancer cells, but also beneficial cells. So people on chemotherapy also end up destroying their gut function to a big degree. Radiotherapy, chemotherapy, NSAIDs, or non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs. You may have taken one of these for a headache or arthritic pain like Advil, which contains ibuprofen. Tylenol, drugs like that that contain paracetamol. These are non-steroidal drugs that reduce inflammation and pain in the body. These things have a very powerful effect on toxifying the body, particularly the liver, but they also destroy the beneficial bacteria in the gut. NSAIDs aren’t really a good idea.

Other factors that can damage it that are not drug related that I see quite a lot are stress. And I’ve written extensively about stress in my book, Candida Crusher. If you suffer from stress, it can have a very significant impact on reducing the amount of beneficial bacteria that you’ve got in your digestive system. Nobody speaks about stress in the gut. People talk about alcohol. They talk about antibiotics, but they don’t talk about stress. Stress has an interesting way of really crippling a person’s immune system, particularly the alarm phase, or the acute stage of stress that reduces the blood supply to the digestive system. It slows down the movement of stool through the bowel. It has an incredible effect on your circulation, and many aspects of human health are affected by the alarm phase or the acute phase of stress.

You need to be aware that stress also has a significant impact on the gut. Stress also makes us want to drink more alcohol, drink more coffee, take drugs that help us to counter the effects of stress like headaches. Eighty percent of headaches are tension headaches caused by stress. What do we do? We take a pill. We just swallow another pill and that’s going to stop all our pain and we’re going to wreck our gut, which means we’re going to take another pill. Playing right into the hands of big pharma.

I’m not a conspiracy person at all. Medical people are required in our society, and we all benefit from surgery and drugs when applied at the right time. But there is certainly a massive overprescribing of a lot of pharmaceuticals that make people sick and kill a lot of people.

And, of course, there are dietary factors that also affect us. This video is just really about some of the pharmaceutical approaches that have a significant effect, but potentially any one of these drugs in my drug guide, and there’s what 1,200 drugs in my New Zealand drug guide, that if you were in America, you could be looking at 2,000 pharmaceutical medicines. And a lot of these drugs do have an effect on the gut. If you’re taking a medicine long term and you’re suffering from gut problems, bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation, you need to go back to your doctor and ask if this drug is really necessary. Does this drug have side effects? Do a Google search for that drug. Spend a bit of time also looking at stress. You can read more articles on yeastinfection.org. Don’t forget to take my quiz on CandidaCrusher.com because there are a few questions in there relating to stress and the gut and Candida to see what kind of effects you’re potentially experiencing from stress, from drugs, from things like that. And then make some informed decisions.

Think about what you’re doing and what changes you can make to improve this incredible organ that we have here called a microbiome. We want to get the bacteria right in the gut. It’s your main foundation for health. There is no point in taking natural or pharmaceutical drugs for symptoms. It’s about restoring gut function. It’s one of the key tenets of naturopathy. Eat well. Drink well. Live well. Sleep well. Breathe well. All of those things need to be done right before you even look at taking medications.

Greetings. It’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. I really appreciate you looking at my channel. I’m also overwhelmed by the amount of really nice comments I’m receiving from people all around the world now in many countries that are watching my videos. It’s for you that I make these videos so you can get a couple of little gems or nuggets here or there that may help you change your life. How can we protect our microflora? What can we do that’s going to really be of benefit for the beneficial bacteria inside our digestive systems?

What I want you to think of – I’ve spoken about this many times before – is really our digestive system is like a beautiful garden. It’s a very, very big rain forest. So think about what we’re doing in the world today, chopping down rain forests, and spraying poisons all around the place, killing things. Not planting things back in its place. This is exactly what’s happening in a lot of people’s digestive systems. We’re swallowing all kinds of crap. We’re eating junk. We’re not chewing properly. We’re eating at weird hours. We’re embracing technology too much. We’re staying up late. We’re not getting enough sleep.

A big part of what I want to impress on you is eating good food is only a tiny little cogwheel in the whole machine. I’ve seen way too many videos that are just focused, focused, focused on food, food, food. You get all these raw foody people online. All these 18 year old, slim sexy girls, raw vegans. And then you get other people online that claim that you need Paleo and you get other people online, it’s all about body ecology kind of diets. Everyone has got this spin on it. But not enough emphasis or focus is on food that plays a role in good health, a significant role. But I believe what plays an even more significant role is using food along with a very balanced, healthy lifestyle to really improve people’s health.

There are many spokes to the wheel. And there are many aspects that will make a garden beautiful. It’s not just about sunshine, water, and nutrients. People actually have to care for the garden. If you want to keep the rainforest from dying, we have to look after the planet in general. We have to understand. We’ve got to stop chopping things down and spraying defoliants and being greedy. It’s the same with human health. You have to really nurture and culture the gut. You have to stop putting things in there that kill it and put things in there that benefit it. But also understand that the way we think and stress has a fantastically powerful effect on the gut. And when you can put that lifestyle and diet together properly, you’re going to have an amazing digestive system that’s going to keep you in great health well until your eighth/ninth decade and even beyond that. That’s the key thing in this video today that I want to impress on you.

How can we protect and maintain a healthy gut function? Diet advice is the key thing that people like me as naturopaths give to people. We’ve got to eat the right kind of food. There are over 1,000 articles now on yeastinfection.org, so I’m not going to beat the same drum with each video. You need to read some of my articles to understand how to eat properly and the types of foods you need to eat to maintain good health.

Stress management techniques. I really want you to try to learn how to relax properly. I had a relaxation session today for half an hour. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t incorporate some kind of relaxation technique into my life and some exercise. To me they’re as essential as good daily care of the body when it comes to showering, clean clothes, and sleeping. All those things are important. Learn calmness and stillness. Learn sometimes not to talk but to listen. Learn sometimes to turn the TV off and not be stimulated by all these murder movies.

I recently saw Jurassic World, it freaked the hell out me, and I wondered, my heart rate must have gone up, my blood pressure went up, and in fact, I didn’t sleep well that night. It’s incredible. I don’t watch these films quite often, but my son said, “Come on, dad. We’ve got to watch this film.” It spooked me. You can imagine the people who watch violent movies all the time or play violent video games, what’s going through their mind. How it’s affecting their stress axis that in turn is affecting their gut function. You can’t really meditate or relax when you’re watching people getting trampled on by dinosaurs. It might make $1.5 billion at the box office, but it’s not really doing much for your digestive system.

Supporting your gut with any kind of medical treatment. So if you’re having chemo or radiotherapy, if you’re taking a medication long term, you need to really support the gut and understand that you are going to kill quite a lot of stuff there. Taking a probiotic is a clever idea for you to do. A very clever idea, long term. That’s going to help put some seeds back in that lawn that’s been selectively killed. That’s an important thing I want you to do. Remember, you can take medical treatment, but you need to counter that with something very healthy and beneficial.

Avoid the use of medications, in particular, antibiotics that actually kill the beneficial bacteria. Antibiotics are necessary in a very, very small amount of cases, but they’re used as a cure all by a lot of doctors still. A small cut on the finger, 10 days of penicillin. A sore throat, 10 days of penicillin. My son had a sore throat recently and it was incredible how friends were saying, “Look, he needs antibiotics. He needs antibiotics.” But I put him on a couple of herbs for four or five days, sore throat is completely gone, so antibiotics not required. I’ve never ever used antibiotics on my four children. I haven’t taken them myself for 40 years. You don’t need these kind of drugs in your life. Unless you’ve got a serious illness, you don’t really need them.

Encouraging you to eat the kind of foods that build up the beneficial bacteria. That’s going to be a whole set of videos in its own right. I really believe that taking a probiotic without understanding the need to eat FOS and GOS foods, fructooligosaccharides, or inulin foods, this is FOS. And GOS is galactooligosaccharide. So these are foods that contain particular sugars that have a very powerful effect on building the lactobacillus and the bifida bacteria. These foods are a fantastic fertilizer for your lawn. We can throw this lawn seed in there, which is the probiotics. What about the fertilizer? What about that?

Don’t take a supplement that contains FOS. I’m no fan of that. I found ample research to show that people with SIBO or bad Candida when they take FOS along with a dietary supplement, it can make them quite sick. They can get bad aggravation and brain fog, pain and gas, all sorts of things. So when I developed my probiotic product called Canxida Restore, I basically made sure I put no FOS or inulin in this product. It took me six months to develop my probiotic enzymatic formula called Canxida Restore and it should be on the market any day now.

FOS and GOS. It makes more sense to eat foods that contain these things rather than to take it as a dietary supplement. It makes a lot more sense. And when you start incorporating these particular categories of polyphenol rich colored foods into your diet along with a really good probiotic enzyme formula, you’re going to get fantastic effects. Let’s leave it at for this video and we’ll catch up with you in subsequent videos where I explain FOS and GOS foods.