Author: Eric Bakker

Greetings, Eric Bakker, naturopath, author of Candida Crusher.

Today I’d like to talk to you about Miso, which is a fermented soy product. There seems to be confusion about Miso, whether it is an acceptable food if you have a yeast infection or not. Some people I talk to say it’s totally unacceptable. It contains yeasts and molds, which can stimulate a Candida proliferation. Other people say it’s a fantastic food and it should be consumed.

So people out there will be very confused about these varying stories. So my take on it is Miso is a perfectly acceptable food if you have a Candida infection, providing you buy a good quality Miso that’s unpasteurized, unhomogenized, and is at least two years old. You’ll be buying a very good quality food and a small amount of Miso each day is acceptable. I believe Miso is a more beneficial food in the cooler weather, as it’s a warming food, than it would be to have in summer. But you may have other ideas on that.

In this video, I’m not going to talk about the soy debate, that’s quite political. You can read about that in my book. I believe that soy products are okay for some people and, particularly, they’re problematic when infants have them or menopausal women consume too much soy that is unfermented. But myself and many patients I have have been eating soy for 30, 40 years. I believe as part of a balanced diet, soy is a perfectly acceptable food where it’s unfermented.

Like anything, if you’re going to eat red meat three to four times per day, it’s going to be a problem. If you’re going to have 12 eggs a day, that’s going to be a problem. If you’re going to consume tofu three times per day as your main form of protein, it’s going to be a problem. Everything in balance and in moderation is the key to a healthy body and a healthy life.

So coming back to Miso, Miso is a good food and it’s particularly good if you make it in a nice warm broth and put some Benito flakes in there and perhaps some onions and some other C vegetables like wasabi, it’s a very good food to eat. High in essential minerals, high in iodine and many other minerals, so it’s a fantastic food, and it’s a food I encourage you to have quite regularly during the fall or the autumn or the cooler months, in particular. Having one to two cups of Miso soup per day is a great food.

So I hope this dispels a few myths and answers a few questions. Thank you.

Greetings, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher. Thank you for tuning into my video today. Today I’d like to talk to you a little bit about wheat and yeast infections.

Can I eat wheat if I have a Candida yeast infection?

This is a question I hear quite often from patients. Many people seem to have confusion in this area. There’s a common belief that if you have a Candida infection, you can eat no wheat at all. No gluten, no wheat products, no bread or anything containing wheat or gluten.

Well, I completely disagree with this belief. And it’s based on my experience of seeing many patients who can tolerate wheat and gluten products when they have a yeast infection. Please don’t compare gluten allergies or wheat allergies with a yeast infection. Many patients with Candida can tolerate wheat and gluten products. I believe there’s a lot of unnecessary hype about these so-called gluten allergies that so many patients have today.

While I don’t dispute the fact that people have digestive problems, I do not believe that all of a sudden in the last 5 to 10 years, gluten seems to be the big problem. We’ve always known that gluten allergies exist, but when you really do thorough testing with patients, particularly when they have small biopsies or thorough blood investigations, this is not really found to be the case. What is found to be the case is many people suffer from SEBO or small intestinal bowel overgrowth, lack of beneficial bacteria, various pathogens in the gastrointestinal tract; these are things we’re finding. People are eating too much sugar, they’re eating under high stress, they’re eating the wrong kind of foods, they’re drinking too much alcohol and caffeine, and then they blame gluten.

So can I eat bread? You can eat bread, but I do recommend that if you’re going to have bread and you have a yeast infection that you don’t have the risen bread or the bread that’s been puffed up and made with yeast. Now why would I say that? I would say that after speaking with many people in the baking industry who believe that today commercial bread still contains active live yeast in it. So I would be quite cautious about recommending a patient to have a wheat product with active yeast in it. So for that reason, I would recommend you have flat bread, you know, bread that’s actually flat like wraps and bread that you can roll up. You’ve probably seen it. These sort of wrap type breads. Those sort of breads are just made basically with a good quality of whole grain, stone ground flour, and salt and water. I believe that those breads are acceptable. And, again, you don’t want an excessive amount of wheat. It wouldn’t be a good idea to have wheat three or four times per day. But if you wanted to have lunch with a flat bread with some chicken on it and salad, I’ve got no problem with that if you have a yeast infection.

So if we consider this an FAQ, can I have wheat or gluten if I have a yeast infection? Yes, you can. Unless proven otherwise, you can. So I hope that dispels a few myths of so-called gluten allergies and Candida.

Thank you.

Good day, Eric Bakker, naturopath, here again.

Today, I’d like to do a video on how people think they get well and how they actually get well.

In my book, Candida Crusher, I’ve written a bit about this. If you go to Chapter 7 in the introductory section of this chapter, you can read about this. I call how people think they get well, fantasyland. Because a lot of people are used to taking a pill, a drug, for headache or arthritic pain or a digestive problem, and the problem goes away. They will automatically infer this is probably how you treat diabetes or heart disease or cancer. We’ll just get chemotherapy and it will go away. High blood pressure; we’ll take a pill. We’ll be cured instantly. We live in a society that expects instant gratification. They buy something sweet; they have a good time, they enjoy it. They have pain; they’ll take a pill. The pain goes away; they enjoy the fact that the pain is gone. This is really fantasyland. This is not really how the body works.

I’ve never been to fantasyland. Maybe you’ve been to fantasyland, but I can’t comment on what it’s like there. I think it’s just a big figment of a lot of people’s imaginations. They want to believe this sort of rubbish. And the drug companies make you believe this, too, with their advertisements on TV and all.

When you think about it, there is no such thing. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. There’s always something that’s going to bite you in the butt. There’s always a hook when it comes to an instant result. A pharmaceutical drug that will take a symptom away will have a hook, and that hook will be a side effect. I’ll do another video on the LD50 rating on the lethal dose 50 on how drugs are actually tested against toxicity, and I think you might be quite horrified to hear that video. But I’ll do one of those soon.

Fantasyland is actually how people think they get well. A reality check is how people actually get well. When you’ve got a chronic problem, to get well, we know the best way to get well is to make changes in our lives, is to be accountable for our actions, and to start trying to understand the disease process; the link between cause and effect. This is quite an intelligent approach. And you’ve probably heard me say in other YouTube clips, common sense isn’t very common with a lot of people today. I want you to use common sense. If you’ve got a problem in terms of your health, there is a reason why you’ve got that problem. If you’re intelligent enough to want to get rid of that problem long term without side effects, you will need to make some changes.

I’ve done a couple of drawings here. I hope you can see them. You’ll see a line here going from top to bottom in a linear fashion. A little bit like a slope here. You can see this slope here going up. This is actually how people think they get well. They’re not feeling well down at the bottom here, and then they’re feeling well at the top. At the bottom, they take a drug and at the top, they’re feeling better.

I’ve drawn this other picture here. This is actually what I call a reality check. You can see all these ups and downs here. You can see this little mountain here and then this little valley here. Same thing here. There’s a little elevation and a little trough further up here. What we’ve got here is the patient initially improved, but then if we look further down, the patient aggravated. She made some changes, she improved, and then she aggravated again. Let’s just try to clarify what’s going on here.

When a person comes to me for treatment, they initially improve because they leave my room with some instructions, a diet change, and maybe a dietary supplement. They’ll have some improvements that will occur. They may have a little aggravation along the way, but generally when they come back, they improve. I get them back in say three or four weeks. And I’ll say, “How are you feeling?” and they’ll say, “I’m feeling pretty good.”

Let’s just go a bit further now. We’re going to tighten things up a bit more, and maybe treat you a bit deeper. And then they’ll phone me up or email me or on the follow-up visit, they’ll say, “Oh, I feel terrible, bloody awful. I felt good initially, but now I’m not so good, Eric. What have I done? What is it? I can’t work out what it is. I keep getting these setbacks all the time.” And then my response to that is “Well, let’s just analyze what’s happened over the last three to four weeks. What have you done? At what point where you feeling good and then it all turned pear-shaped?” And the patient will go, “Actually, I went to my sister’s wedding.” Or it’ll be something like “I had an assignment due and I had to finish this assignment up.” Or it could be a lady with a few children saying, “Well, the little one was up crying at night, and I had all these diaper changes, and the baby had a fever. And then my husband was away for two days on business and I was at my wit’s end.”

Usually there will be a stress proceeding the aggravation. It can be emotional stress. It can be physical stress. It can be the fact that someone went to their sister’s wedding and had a couple of glasses of champagne. It could be the fact that somebody got bored, frustrated, and had a half a bar of chocolate, but there will be some type of cause and effect that needs to be worked out. And if you’re intelligent, you’ll work that cause out, and you’ll understand the connection. This is how you learn. As you keep learning – as you advance and improve – you won’t make those mistakes anymore. Or you’ll appreciate the cause and effect and be more careful in the future. This is going to pay big dividends.

Did you notice how both the lines went up? The one with the squiggly bar went up as well. The trend is improvement, but there’s ups and downs along the way. This is how the stock market works. I want you to try to understand this. A lot of people will buy shares. I’m not really into the stock market, but my brother is, and he says you buy shares. So you buy shares and then you hold onto them and they improve, and then you might want to cash them in. But then if you keep shares long enough, you’ll realize there’s a trend. Share value will increase and decrease, increase and decrease. But the trend overall is for those shares over a long period of time just like a house or another big investment is that would generally increase. Many people panic and they will sell those shares when things are getting bad. And then two or three years down the track, they’ll regret it and they’ll think. “Ah, darn, I should have kept a hold of those shares because they’re worth a lot more money now.” But many people make mistakes and they panic on the downturn. There’s opportunity in downturn. And this is opportunity, I’m saying, this is when you need to learn your lessons when you need to not sell these shares but hang onto them. You need to make changes because eventually your health will turn for the better.

I hope this video makes some sense to you. And you can read more about this – certainly a lot more in my book, Candida Crusher. Thanks for your time.