Best Diet for H.pylori Infection

Greetings. Welcome back. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. This is another video in this series of helicobacter. We just did one previously on helicobacter treatment. How to treat naturally. We’ve done other videos on how to prevent getting it, risk factors, testing, diagnosing, the causes, all that sort of stuff, so this is a whole series on H. pylori. If you just come in and watch the video, please be sure to watch the other videos as well.

We spoke briefly about the diet in the previous video, natural treatment. I’ve just spent a good half an hour looking at different blog sites on helicobacter treatment, the best diet, and some of the information I’ve seen is just crap. It’s just absolute junk. I don’t know how people can put this stuff up on the internet. One website actually said it’s perfectly okay to drink a little bit of beer if you’ve got helicobacter. Another website said that you can eat copious amounts of fruits. Is it any wonder people get all screwed up and they come to me and they read all this ridiculous advice? There are so many people out there who think they know about helicobacter, but how many patients have they actually treated with this condition. How many people have they spoken to who actually treat this condition for 30/40 years, a long time?

Some of the colleagues I have, have been treating helicobacter since the moment it was discovered, right back in the ‘80s and they’ve been looking at the best ways of eradicating it. The information I’m going to share with you on this video is quite important and it’s based on my experience with helicobacter for over 20 years. But also experiences that I have learned and knowledge I’ve gained from people that have been in the business a lot longer than me.

There is no clearly defined diet for helicobacter pylori. Let’s just get that right at the start. There is no like magic diet that’s going to cure it. As I mentioned over and again in my previous videos, you will not cure helicobacter with a pill alone. You need to work with a diet plan, so you need to eat certain kinds of foods that are conducive towards building you up. The most important thing that I explain at the beginning is with helicobacter food or choices. You need to obviously avoid the foods that are aggravating you the most. The foods that make you feel sick in any way, you need to push them aside, and I want you to be intelligent about this. In fact, get a piece of paper and write all the foods you like to eat on a list.

A pad like this, you write down all the foods here. Write them all down. And then what you do—all the foods, cucumber, Budweiser beer, Hersey’s chocolate, Xanax pills, I’m being facetious here, Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you do like treats or naughty foods or take away or anything like that, just write that all down, too. Every single thing that you eat. It’s good if you can break down into different vegetables as well. You should only come up maybe with one or two pieces of paper. What you do then is a column on the right, you draw a line down it. And then what you need to do is write 1, 2 or 3 in that column by each food. For example, 1 means you’re fine with that food; 2 means it might give you a little bit of trouble; 3 means that “Wow, I can’t touch this. I’m getting a lot of problems with this food.”

Garlic, for example, could make you feel like a 3 and feel terrible. Cucumber could make you feel like a 3. Bell peppers or capsaicin could make you feel like a 3. Potatoes could make you feel like a 1, no problem. This is a very smart thing to do. Very smart. Because if you put the date on this and put all the foods down and grade them on severity on how they make you feel from 1 to 3, any way you want to grade, 1 through 10. I don’t care how you grade it. This is smart because now you’ve got a baseline. Now you know how your diet or the foods that you’re eating are affecting you. Because what you’re going to find out in 6 or 12 months from now with treatment is it won’t be the same. Some of the foods that are making you feel like crap, in six months, may not be so bad. In one year, you may be perfectly fine to eat them.

I’m always keen for people to test and measure their treatment. It’s an intelligent approach. If someone gives you advice on a diet, there should be some way for them or for you to measure the response if that diet is going to work or not. So please try to grade the foods that you’re currently eating. And in time, you can check that again. Either monthly, weekly or six months, whatever you determine is the right thing for you.

When we look at the food approach, there’s a couple of important things that you need to understand with helicobacter. It is a bacteria and it is going to live in competition with many other different kinds of bacteria. It is going to change the function of the stomach. It is going to change the way your whole digestive system works. I found people with H. pylori have even altered ability to taste. Like certain foods don’t taste right for them, and they start eating around this bug. They may eat too quick or too slow. They may be drinking fluid with their food. They may have some bad habits that developed around this bug. They may be popping an antacid into their mouth five minutes before they eat food because they don’t want to get indigestion. You know what I mean, so you need to carefully think about that.

Maybe if you’ve got this problem, you can ask your partner or friend if they notice anything about you around meal times, burping or bloating or medication taking or things like that. Some changes may need to be made. If you’re currently taking an acid blocker like a PPI or some kind of drug that coats the gut, shields it, you may need to be aware that this is affecting you quite a lot. Particularly, if you’ve been doing it a long time. You probably suffer from fatigue. You may suffer from sleeping disturbances and other problems. You may suffer from some anxiety and depression. It is also important to say you need to get off these drugs. You can’t stay on these medications. If you really want to get the tummy well, you need to cut back these medications.

One of the most important foods I like people to take to start with when they’ve got heartburn is some raw cabbage juice. This is something I’ve taught many people over the years. I’ve had really good feedback from. You get two or three green cabbage leaves and you juice them. You do this in the morning. I want you to promise me that you’re going to do it for one or two weeks straight without failure. Get a juicer or blender or some machine that whizzes things up, mash up these two or three leaves and try to come up with one or two tablespoons of cabbage juice. That cabbage juice needs to be consumed on an empty stomach first thing in the morning before any food hits the gut, before you have a cigarette or a coffee, whatever you do, you have that cabbage juice.

What that does is it coats the stomach. It contains different kinds of fibers and sugars that actually feed up the beneficial bacteria. It lines the gut, but it also has a very special healing substance in it, which they don’t really understand what it is. It reduces inflammation. It heals ulceration. I can tell you, I’ve got so many grateful people out there in the United States and many other countries that have come back and told me, “Eric, the best thing you ever told me was the cabbage juice. I can’t believe how much comfort I’ve got in the gut since I took it onboard.” Some patients actually do it twice a day. They do it in the morning and they do it in the afternoon. That’s up to you, but I want you to do it for at least 10 to 14 days straight. And if you get benefit from it, stick with it for a bit longer.

Why is this important? Because eventually it’s going to get you off Nexium. It’s going to get you off Pepto Bismol. It’s going to get you off Tums. It’s going to get you off all those stupid drugs. That’s the whole idea is to reduce your dependency on medication. That is going to be a turning point in your life when you finally reduce the medication. That’s the beginning of you to start getting energized and feeling alive all over again.

We just spoke in the previous video, it’s important to eat foods with antibacterial component about them. Now, a lot of fresh foods have this, but some of my favorite ones are onions, the onion family. Leeks, shallots, scallions, spring onion, chives, garlic, any of that family. There are different ways you can eat those. You can stem it, bake it, boil it, juice it, and stew it, whatever way you can. Try to get some of the allium family into your digestive system once or twice per day. I grow large amounts of these sorts of foods and I consume every day. There’s no surprise why the Greeks ate these foods a long, long time ago because they are very healthy foods. People ate a lot of peas and spinach and allium family going back even three or four thousand years. People knew the health benefits of these foods.

Leeks and onions in particular, brown onions, red onions, very, very well for the stomach. Good tip. Try to have some leek soup or some onions in your diet. If you’re worried about gas and stuff like that, over a period of time, as the beneficial bacteria numbers increase and the pathogenic or the bad bacteria go down, that should disappear. You shouldn’t get so much bloating or gas and things like that. If you notice a lot of gas when you change your diet, it’s often because you’ve put too much food into the gut that the bacteria can’t cope with.

If you’ve ever driven your car up a hill and pushed the accelerator down really hard, jammed it down and the engine went oo-hoo, oo-hoo, your engine was coughing and it was all smoke blowing out of the exhaust pipe. The amount of fuel you put into the engine was way exceeding what the motor could actually do with that fuel. Some people’s digestive systems are like that. They put way too much food in that the body’s not quite ready to handle yet because it hasn’t had experience with that food, for example, or it’s overloaded the stomach or it hasn’t been chewed properly, so just be aware of that.

Antibacterial foods, as I mentioned in a previous video, also include the fresh herbs. Rosemary, marjoram, thyme, basil, mints are also quite good for bacteria, lemon balm, there are many different kinds of fresh herbs that you can grow and put into salads and into your own food. These are going to work quite well. You can also put them in juices. Some of these herbs juice up quite well. I find that basil is quite nice with spinach and apple and ginger and things like that. Very antibacterial. Turmeric, ginger and garlic, three really good things to add to your diet. Cultured and fermented foods we spoke about. You need to pick the one that you like.

I’m not a big fan of kombucha at all with stomach problems, so I push kombucha aside. Kefir, yogurt and sauerkraut are my three favorite ones. Those are the ones I recommend you regularly add to your diet. Seaweed is actually good for the stomach. There are certain types of seaweed like wakame is very good for the stomach. Why is it so? Again, these things contain certain types of carbohydrates in them that really help the stomach. We’ve got a lot of wakame growing here in the south island of New Zealand. It’s considered to be quite good for the gut.

Healthy, fresh foods in general are what we’re talking about. Green foods. And as I mentioned, the neutral grains. I see them as neutral like brown rice, buckwheat, quinoa and amaranth. Those grains I find quite acceptable for the stomach. I don’t believe you should have to avoid gluten when you’ve got a helicobacter infection, but you need to certainly be careful of the allergenic foods in your diet. If you follow my Candida Crusher approach, you’ll find that I’ve put people on the MEVY diet first, meat, eggs, vegetables, yogurt and part two is the low allergy approach. That’s what I’m going to recommend for you quite strongly because of the inflammation and the antibody production in the stomach, you want to avoid cow’s milk strictly with helicobacter pylori. You want to avoid cream. You want to avoid cheese to a high degree. Don’t eat a lot of cheese. All cow products. In fact, be careful of lactose in general, even if it’s goat milk. Just be careful of lactose containing milks. You’re probably okay with almond milk or a nut milk. Eggs, you’ll probably be okay with eggs unless you’ve got allergies. Bananas not too good with helicobacter pylori. Chocolate, definitely not. Alcohol, definitely not good. Sugar in any form definitely not good. You need to try to avoid most sugars.

You can experiment with a little bit of Manuka honey as long as it’s got a very high UMF factor or the unique Manuka factor. If you’ve got a factor range of 20 or higher, which is quite expensive, you can experiment with a little bit of that, like two teaspoons per day. Just take that off the spoon on an empty stomach and see how that makes your tummy feel. I’ve had some quite incredible feedback from some patients who took two to three teaspoons of Manuka honey per day on an empty stomach. If you’ve got SIBO or Candida, probably not a good idea. If you’ve just got an H. pylori infection or an upper digestive issue, try the Manuka honey. That’s going to work quite well for you.

There are many other ways around H. pylori, natural treatment, when it comes to diet. I did mention the vitamin B-12. That’s another important one for you to get checked out. Remember we said that in a previous video? Get the B-12 checked out. Here’s another interesting one you can try is aloe vera. The plant aloe vera, just grow some and use some of the chunky pulp out of the leaves in water because that’s quite soothing for the whole digestive system. It works particularly well in the colon, but it’s also good for the stomach. That can really help to soothe the inflammation.

Follow my Candida Crusher approach when it comes to the diet and I think that’s going to help you to a large degree. That’s probably the diet I’d be looking at. As I mentioned at the beginning of the video, please do a little bit of writing down and measuring the response of the foods you currently have and this will be a good yardstick for you. As you improve, you’ll notice that the severity of the aggravation will reduce more and more over time.

Thanks for tuning in.