Author: Eric Bakker

Good day, Eric Bakker, naturopath, author of Candida Crusher. Doing a video today on sugar and yeast infections on why Candida like sugar, want sugar, and need sugar, and what you need to do about this if you want to beat this thing permanently.

So let’s get one thing clear, Candida needs sugar to thrive and survive and multiply. It loves glucose, fructose, and sucrose. It loves those sugars. And, in fact, those sugars are indispensable to allow the yeast to form into its filamentous form. We call yeast a dimorphic organism. It can change. You’ve probably read this in my book, Candida Crusher. It can change quite easily from a cellular form into a filamentous form with hyphae on it, like lots of little strands on them.

A lot of people falsely believe that these strands actually cause leaky gut syndrome. I don’t believe that to be the case. Leaky gut syndrome – I’ll do on other videos – is caused by many other mechanisms and lifestyle habits that the person has. However, when a person has leaky gut, it’s very easy for this yeast to translocate and get outside of the gut into various parts of the body.

So yeast really needs sugars. And when you look at your diet, your diet’s loaded with sugar. Everybody eats sugar. The typical American now, we believe to have 30 teaspoons of sugar a day. Thirty teaspoons, that’s a lot of sugar! Sugar is in just about everything. A couple of common foods and drinks which contain sugar you may not be aware of are sports drinks, yogurts, and pasta sauces. Of course, all ice creams contain sugar. Chewing gum, toothpaste, lots of things now that you take into a diet contain sugar. And the big, big, big enemy today is high fructose corn syrup, which is about a third of the price of white sugar. It’s crazy, but people put this stuff into everything these days. You want to carefully look at your diet and take out these forms of sugar. In particular, are those foods and beverages I mentioned because these are the things that allow Candida to take off.

So when you restrict sugars in your diet, you’re restricting the ability of yeast to grow, proliferate, and change into its more virulent form. So it’s very important for you, therefore, to restrict as many forms of sugar as you can. Alcohol, full of sugar. And you look at a lot of carbohydrate foods, which contain quite an amazing amount of sugar as well. And for this reason, for the first few weeks, I restrict the high starchy carbohydrates from people’s diets. Sweet potatoes, potatoes, beets, these sorts of foods; they contain quite a bit of sugar. Pumpkin, squash, you think about them. When people are restricted in their diet with carbohydrates, they generally jump onto the high starchy carbohydrates. And a lot of people love French fries, for example, and chips and potatoes, and these are very starchy, sweet foods. So these need to be restricted. So it’s very important for you to restrict sugars in your diet, particularly for the first three months, four months, if you really want to reduce the growth and spread of Candida through the body. After that, we can liberalize it a bit more and slowly add some more natural sugars back into the diet. But we first need to get the population under control and stop the spread, and we need to stop the translocation and particularly the changing from the normal cellular form into the fungal or the more virulent form of Candida we spoke about.

So I hope this video is of benefit for you. Come back and check out my other video clips on high fructose corn syrup and other particular vegetable starches I’ll be speaking about. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and please have a look at yeastinfection.org, a website I helped to set up which contains the internet’s best information you can find on yeast infections.

Thanks for your time.

A question I get asked from time to time is Eric, can I have peanuts in my diet? I’ve got a yeast infection and I’m trying to overcome this yeast infection and I love peanut butter, I love peanuts, are these okay to eat? And why can’t I eat peanuts?

Peanuts are actually listed as one of the most allergenic of all foods. There’s actually a tendency to get an allergy against a peanut quite easily being a hyperallergenic food. The key allergenic foods with rank would be cow’s milk, peanuts, certain types of citrus like oranges and mandarins, you can get allergies toward these quite easily as well. Some people have extreme allergies to shell fish or crustaceans. There are many other foods you can get allergies against, but peanuts and cow’s milk all would rank among the highest.

If you’re trying to get on top of your yeast infection problem, then I recommend that you probably try to avoid peanuts and peanut butter as much as you can. Peanuts, actually, are not really nuts. They grow underground. They’re legumes. They’re very prone to various molds, and they produce this particular mycotoxin called aflatoxin. It’s a toxin produced by the mold that actually can live on peanuts. Aflatoxins cause a huge amount of liver cancer in many countries like China and Kenya where large amounts of peanuts are consumed. If you’re trying to get a strong immune system going and fight this Candida, you really want to avoid peanuts and peanut butter.

They’re part of my “no-go” foods in my low allergy component of my Candida Crusher diet. Do avoid peanuts whether you think you’re allergic to them or not. There could well be a link between them and lowered immune response, which is the last thing you want if you’ve got a yeast infection. You want a strong immune response. Try to avoid peanuts and peanut butter for that reason.

Hope that answers that frequently asked question. Thank you.

Good day, Eric Bakker again, naturopath, author of Candida Crusher.

A question I get asked all the time is I’ve been on XYZ Candida diet. I’ve tried this diet. I’ve tried that diet. I’ve tried the Paleo diet. I’ve tried whatever type of diet. I’ve still got this yeast infection. Why don’t these diets work? Do I need to go vegan? Do I need to do this or do I need to go that? There’s a lot of confusion out there.

There are a lot of good dietary approaches when it comes to a yeast infection, but I don’t think they are really properly put together in terms of a program, and they’re particularly not followed through with patients. While I have seen some good programs out there and some good dietary recommendations, I’ve seen quite a lot of silly recommendations as well, stupid recommendations. Recommendations that don’t make sense.

Many practitioners, unfortunately, only pay lip service to Candida. Meaning they don’t take this yeast seriously enough to really follow on through and make sure that their patient will stay on the program long enough to get the kind of results they’re looking for.

If you look at my approach, for example, the Candida Crusher diet, I like people to have a bit of a cleanse usually before they go into the diet and to slowly wind their conventional diet down. And then to go on a basic diet where we’re going to recommend ample amounts of protein in the diet, certainly carbohydrates and fats. We avoid the allergy foods, which I’ve covered in other video clips. And we certainly aren’t going to starve people or take a lot of foods out of their diet that they love to eat. But the foods that we tend to take out are the foods which challenge the immune system the most and also the foods which help to proliferate Candida, allow it to really grow in the body. These have to go and go temporarily. People often pick up considerably on this dietary approach with Candida, but they may go through an aggravation stage initially. That’s quite common, so I’m very cautious with patients with supplements in the first few months. I slowly put them in there and then slowly build them up.

Is it possible for you to get a good result the Candida diet? It is. It’s actually possible to get an outstanding result. But the thing is to stick with clearly defined principles and maintain on track with the diet for it to be long enough to give you the benefit that you’re looking for. And then the two danger times with the Candida diet are when people start them and as they pick up, that’s another danger period.

Let’s just analyze this in detail and have a look at what I mean by this. Once they start a diet, often they’ll be a period of aggravation within the first 7 to 10 days. And this is often misconstrued as “Well, it’s not working for me. I’m going to throw it in. I’m going to go back onto what I was eating or I’ll go back onto the Atkins diet or the South Beach diet,” or the Jelly Bean diet or whatever diet’s in vogue at that time. These people usually fall by the wayside, and they maintain a yeast infection for years on end because they’re not good at sticking with one thing.

The second period of danger is when I get a patient through that stage and they pick up and they start to improve. They’re actually getting better. And this is a time where they think “Ah, great, I’ve got to go to my sister’s wedding or I’ve got whatever, though, I’ve got a celebration coming up. It’s New Year’s Eve and I’ll have a few drinks and maybe some cake, maybe some sweet foods”, and then they crash. They go down. Because they weren’t quite ready really to start incorporating these foods back into their diet again. This is a danger period.

It’s very common for people to go through this. And you can read all about this in some of the introductory chapters in my book. I talk about this quite a lot. I’m going to do another video clip on how people think they get well, which I call fantasyland, and how people actually recover, which I call reality check. Those are concepts that I really want you to try to understand.

The point I’m making is Candida diets do work, if you find a good one and you find other people that have a good result with it. If anything is worth sticking to, it’s worth sticking through until you get a desired result. And maybe make some changes along the way. Everybody is different. Everybody will need to refine and change and fine-tune their diet to suit themselves. And that’s what practitioners are all about. We help you to fine-tune those results.

Go and find a good Candida practitioner who can help you get on track and stay on track until you get the results that you’re looking for. If you’re interested in a good program, have a look at my book, Candida Crusher. I spent three years working on this book. It’s helped many people just like you overcome a chronic yeast infection. And also if you want to get more information, please subscribe to my YouTube clips because you’re going to learn a lot more over the following few years.

Thanks for your time.