Candida Diet: Foods To Avoid
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.