Greetings. It’s New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker. Thanks for checking out my video. I’m the author of a book called Candida Crusher and the formulator of a range of supplements called Canxida. Thanks for checking out the video.
A question I get asked all the time from patients and I’ve just noticed on YouTube, I’ve had quite a few people coming in there asking me the same question. “Eric, why don’t you recommend raw kale? What’s the problem with kale? Why can’t I have kale in my smoothies? What’s the issue with it?”
Think about kale and think about the cruciferous family in general, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, Chinese vegetables, kale, and I think there’s kohlrabi. There are very many other kinds of vegetables that belong to the cruciferous family. I grow a lot of broccoli. I love eating fresh broccoli. We grow large cauliflowers. We grow Brussel sprouts. We grow lots of kale. In our garden, we grow the Russian red curly kale and we grow the green kale. Coming from Holland, Dutch like me eat a lot of kale. When I grew up, my mom would often have mashed potatoes and then meat with gravy and a lot of kale with it. This is a typical winter dish in Holland that we eat.
Raw kale is not good and I’ll tell you why. The cruciferous family of vegetables contain many different beneficial to your health compounds. We know, for example, kale is very high in protein. But it also contains a compound called isothiocyanate.
That’s a bit of a tongue twister isn’t it. Isothiocyanate. These are called thiols and these are actually very beneficial anti-oxidant compounds. They have very powerful health building properties to the body. But the isothiocyanates, unfortunately, also attack an enzyme in your body called TPO or thyroperoxydase. The TPO enzyme is very important because it allows iodine molecules to attach to tyrosine. We’ve got two main thyroid hormones. We’ve got T3 and T4. T3 is called triiodothyronine, so it’s actually three iodine molecules attached to the amino acid tyrosine. T4 is called thyroxine, so that’s four molecules of iodine bound to a thyroxine backbone.
The body splits off one iodine molecule to turn T4 into T3, the active thyroid hormone. There are other thyroid hormones as well. We’ve got T2. We’ve got reverse T3, and we’ve got many other kinds of thyroid hormones. But the basic ones that our body will utilize are T3 and T4. T3 is the active form of the thyroid hormone. It’s the one that all the cells of body use to activate.
T3 they reckon is about 80 percent active and about 20 percent not so active. T4 on the other hand is about 20 percent active and 80 percent not so active. It needs to be converted. The body’s quite clever. It can utilize T3 and T4, but T3 is what it really wants to power up all the cells of the body. All of your cells of your body apart from your cells in the nail and hair contain receptor sites for the T hormones. This is why when a person has a thyroid condition, just about any part of the body can play up, the heart, the eyes, the skin can play up, all the organs, your joints, the muscles, the nerves, they can all play up because they all have receptor sites for the T hormones.
Raw kale, in particular, has a very powerful effect on the thyroperoxydase enzyme, particularly when it’s raw. When you heat kale up, you destroy the ability of the isothiocyanate to react to TPO. Cooking kale, no problem. Steaming kale, no problem.
Eating it raw, problem. Go to Google and type in “raw kale and thyroid” and you’ll find over a million pages that will come up. There are lot of really good science pages you can read on the ability of the cruciferous family to affect thyroid function. This is why we call them goitrogens. They can promote the thyroid to develop a goiter or become enlarged, so goitrogen. Now you know what the word “goitrogen” means. Goiter means enlarged thyroid. The thyroid can become enlarged if it doesn’t get enough iodine. It doesn’t get enough iodine if the thyroperoxydase enzyme is going to be affected by isothiocyanate. Now, you understand why kale, especially raw, is not really good.
Any raw cruciferous vegetables are not the best, but apparently kale is the worst. I’ve got a good friend in Australia who is an expert in cruciferous vegetables. She’s done quite a lot of research and studies into these cruciferous vegetables and has always said to me, “Eric, raw broccoli’s fine. You’re not going to eat a whole bathtub full of raw broccoli because that’s how much you would need to affect the TPO enzyme. But if you’re going to eat raw kale, you need a lot less of it to create the same effect.” Raw kale is not a good food. I don’t care what these darn vegans tell me. The research shows that raw kale can create thyroid dysfunction. Please avoid any kind of raw kale.
I hope this really answers your question about raw kale, why it’s not so good for your health.
Greetings. New Zealand naturopath, Eric Bakker, author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my videos. I really appreciate it out there. I’m getting lots of subscribers. I’m getting good comments. I really appreciate your support. And it’s for people like you that I do these videos. I’ve seen patients for a long time now, and I’m really enjoying sharing some of my knowledge and information with you folks out there. This is going to be quite a different video. Quite an unusual one in that it doesn’t fit the mold. It doesn’t really fit what you would normally expect someone to talk about with health.
I read quite a lot of different books. Different books on various aspects on health and motivation, and I’m always trying to find new ways to break through to people. We had a meet and greet day the other afternoon, actually. We caught up with the neighbors and I met some new neighbors that have moved in our street and a very cool guy. I asked him what kind of a job he had and he said, “I was a parole officer for 20 years.” And I said, “Well, what’s that all about? That’s working with prisoners and stuff like that, isn’t it? And working with offenders, rapists and murderers and robbers and all sorts of weird people.”
And he said, “Yeah.” And then he said, “I really like my job because it gives me a chance to help reform people. It gives me a chance to get people back on the right track.” He said, “I love my job because I really like helping people out.” I said, “That’s quite interesting because I quite like my job and I think there are a few parallels here between my kind of work and your kind of work.” And he said, “Well, what do you mean by that?” I said, “Well, actually a lot of people I see need to go on probation or on parole, too, with the kind of work I do.” And he said, “Well, how is that?” And I said, “Well, sick people often need the time to readjust and get back into society again because they’ve been unwell for some time.”
So I consider my work a little bit almost like what he does. Not that I’m calling you guys criminals out there. Please don’t take that the wrong way. I often see people who’ve been sick or have developed an illness almost like a crime scene. You could almost say that you’ve developed some kind of problem and a part of my role is being like a kind of health detective to try to find out all the facts surrounding that crime scene for want of a better word. If we put that whole criminal aspect together with disease, we could almost think about it that people who’ve been sick for a long, long time almost need to go on parole. And people who’ve been sick for not such a long time or haven’t got like seriously chronic Candida or gut problems need to go on probation.
Let’s explain a little bit about the difference between parole and probation. Probation and parole are both alternatives to incarceration or a prison term. However, probation occurs prior to and often instead of jail or prison time, while parole is an early release from prison. In both probation and parole, the party is supervised and expected to follow certain rules and guidelines. Did you like that? Expected to follow certain rules and guidelines.
When you’re trying to recover from chronic Candida and you’ve got an early release from prison time, i.e., many people in my business I think are what I call the “food police” or the “Candida Nazis” as I call them. “This is forbidden. You can’t do this and you can’t eat oats for breakfast. You can’t eat gluten.” It’s almost like they’re the sergeant major and you’re in jail and you’re told what to do. That’s not how I work with people. I would prefer for patients to find their own way and to find out what works for them and what doesn’t work for them. Because you’re not in jail in the terms of “incarceration,” but sometimes when you’re chronically sick, you almost feel like you’re in prison. You’re alienated from society. You will become smaller. You develop more anxiety and depression. You cut yourself off from a lot of people around you. That’s almost like a kind of jail term, wouldn’t you agree.
The chronically sick people, I think, who’ve been sick a long time and who are starting to slowly improve, need to have some sort of a release back into society, as they improve. I think I would work more with probation with patients than I would with parole. Because parole is quite a touchy one, isn’t it? But probation is, I think, a good alternative to incarceration.
And also, did you note how I said here, “Expected to follow certain guidelines and rules and supervision?” Supervision, a big part of the work I do is consultations with patients, so I supervise patients. I watch what they do. I like to look at their lifestyles. I like to look at their jobs, occupations, their mode of living, how they sleep, how they eat, how they relate to people. I look at all that kind of stuff. What works them up? What stresses them out? It’s not just all about what you eat. I’m getting sick and tired of all these videos that I look at that’s all about food and food and food. I can tell you guys out there that food only forms a small part of well-being.
All these blog sites you look at. All the social media stuff. Everything online is targeted towards food, but what about eating in front of the TV, watching murders, and all this ISIS stuff, bombings, planes getting shot down and stuff like that as you’re eating your food. Should you be doing that? Should you be eating food over a computer? This to me is part of the supervision I have as being a responsible practitioner to help integrate you back away from a life of crime or Candida, back into a life of a healthy, functioning normal person like me.
That’s what I try to do is to assist with this probation process. Is to get you away from this disease mode. Is to get you away from thinking about sickness, talking about sickness, researching sickness, going onto Facebook, community groups, going onto Twitter, buying into all this stuff. The more you become sickness focused, the harder it will become for you to become wellness oriented. That’s one of the important points I want to bring across with this video.
Part of my handholding approach as a practitioner is to guide you away from a lot of this Dr. Google. I can see so many people making the same mistakes, calling me up, “Oh, my god. I saw some white specks in my stool. Have I got liver flukes?” Or people start panicking and they freak out. One lady started to take a B vitamin complex and then emailed me saying that she was dying of kidney cancer. I said, “Why is that?” And she said, “Well, my urine is coming out all yellow and green. I must be dying of some kind of kidney cancer. Went onto Symptom Finder on the internet and I went right through the whole symptoms thing and it said I could have kidney cancer.” Be careful.
Certain rules and guidelines. Certain rules and guidelines you can read about at yeastinfection.org. You can read about the different guidelines, which I like patients to follow on their step to recovery. Parole, the provisional release of a prisoner who agrees to certain conditions prior to the completion of the sentence period. Some practitioners you see like chiropractors or acupuncturists or people like me may give you a sentence and say, “It’s going to take you one to two years to get well.” Let’s look at that metaphorically. That could be almost like a sentence.
A provisional lease for you if you are on parole is to abide by certain terms and conditions on that release. Let’s just say you’ve been very sick and you’ve seen a few practitioners, a couple of good people have given you some good advice on your recovery. If you are a prisoner and you repeat offend, you’ll go back to jail. If you’re on parole from Candida or a seriously bad illness and you’re improving and you start doing some dumb things, you’re not going to go back to jail, obviously, but you could plunge back into a severe Candida problem again. And that’s going to put you into a tailspin and create a lot of anxiety and a lot of problems.
This is the trap lots of patients fall into whether they’re on probation or parole. They recover. They partially recover. Events occur in their life. Could be weddings. Could be birthdays. Could be Thanksgiving. And they go crazy. They go crazy. They’ll have 10 beers and they’ll have three pieces of cake and they’ll stay up late and they’ll do that one or two nights and then they’ll plunge back again and they’ll get very sick and very depressed. Be very careful because this is big flaw that many people make, and I think people make this in the criminal world and they make it in the real world without talking about crimes. They actually do that as well when they’re noncriminal like me, and they’re recovering, they commit these partial offenses. They don’t stay clean long enough to really fully recover. That’s the point I want to make in this crazy video about parole and probation.
You need to prove to yourself and to the community around you and your friends and family that you can stay good, inadvertent offenses. Get plenty of rest. Drink plenty of water. Keep away from people that pull you down or the negative people, the energy suckers. Make sure that your job doesn’t piss you off too much. That you’ve got a job that you enjoy. Make sure that you don’t push yourself too hard. That you don’t have these crazy expectations of yourself to do so many things in one day. Make sure you follow a good healthy diet. Don’t eat to excess. Make sure you avoid alcohol and avoid stupid things like smoking tobacco or taking drugs.
Be careful of the friendships you cultivate. Because you may hang around with some people that have committed crimes, bad crimes, again, inadvertent offenses. People who drink a bottle of wine three or four times a week, committing these offenses around you, which drag you back down into that pool of crime again. And that’s why probation is a good thing. That’s why parole is a good thing. Supervision. You can supervise yourself or have a close friend supervise you. And say, “Hey, come on. You’re slipping off the track her. You need to tidy things up again.”
Think about this video carefully if you are a person who is recovering or really wants to recover. Do you need supervision? Can you supervise yourself? Do you need a close friend to help supervise you? That’s the message I want to bring across in this video.
It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher. Formulator of the Canxida range of supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. I’ve got a question here from a guy called Josh in Canada and Josh is a body builder who reckons he’s got a yeast infection. I haven’t really checked his email properly yet, but Josh’s question is “Is whey any good for Candida? If I’ve got Candida, can I have whey protein powder?” Let’s talk a little bit about whey protein powder, Josh.
Whey protein powder is a good powder to take for energy and body building overall in general. It has been for a long, long time, but I’m not a big fan of dairy products in general. Especially these sorts of like filtered whey protein isolate drinks. I just don’t think they’re really good. I think they’re quite refined. It’s almost as bad as really getting a hold of cow’s milk and then heating it up and pasteurizing it and homogenizing it and then giving it to people in a plastic bottle and say, “Here, drink this.” And I just didn’t really know, but I discovered a few years ago that all the milk that we drink is, in fact, reconstituted milk powder, so it’s actually milk that’s been completely dried out and then reconstituted back into a liquid again. Milk’s is not really a good product.
Whey protein is allergenic for quite a few people. Now, whey is a protein and casein is also a protein, and generally, they’re separated when whey protein isolate is made. Particularly like these body building powders. The casein is the highly allergenic component of cow’s milk. Casein allergies, casein intolerances are quite common with a lot of people. It’s very difficult to separate all the casein from the whey, so many people who take a whey protein powder still get allergies. So therefore, I would say don’t have it if you suspect you’ve got a gut problem or a yeast infection.
I’ve written down the four chief things that you need to look out for if you’re taking whey to see if it could be causing your problem. Gassing or bloating, so if you get really gassy inside or bloating, this is a problem. You may want to temporarily stop the whey to see if the gassing or bloating disappears. Farting or gas production, so lots of farts and gas. If you have a lot of this, especially offensive flatulence and lots of it, you could be going through a protein overload or have an allergy towards the casein component of the whey.
Stuffy nose and catarrh, all blocked up in here. Waking up in the morning being blocked up in the nose or coughing up phlegm or catarrh. These are typical signs of a problem with casein intolerance. Excess mucous in head, nose and throat. Doing this and then getting all this mucous back or spitting up mucous all the time, having partially blocked ears, having recurring sinus infections. These are all signs that you need to give whey the flick, so it’s not good.
Dairy contains lactose as well, which is a sugar, and some people have got lactose intolerance. They haven’t got lactase or the enzyme to break the sugar down. Diarrhea is a chief symptom of lactose intolerance. So is whey good for Candida? Give it the flick. And move maybe across to something like a yellow pea protein or a brown rice protein. There are other kinds of protein powders you can have. If you want protein, Josh, just start eating good quality eggs. I’m a big fan of soy, of non-genetically modified soy products. I think tofu is a good source of protein. Very lean cuts of grass fed beef and bison and animals like that are very good. Not so much red meat in your diet. I tend to go more for fish. If you’re looking for protein, you can’t beat fresh fish. Good quality, young white filets. Fish is a superb protein.
Whey does contain quite a lot of cysteine and other good amino acids in it. Cysteine, as we know, is one of the building blocks for a tripeptide called glutathione, which is a very, very powerful combination of three amino acids in the body that has an incredibly powerful effect to help prevent a lot of different kinds of diseases and reverse free radical damage. Glutamine is also part of this tripeptide, but you can get cysteine from eggs and from many other sources as well. You don’t need whey in your diet at all.
As I mentioned, gas, bloating, farting, stuffy nose, catarrh, excess mucous in head and throat. If you’ve got any of those, stop whey to see if there’s a link between them. Again, just to reiterate on the answer. No, I don’t think whey is a good choice if you think you’ve got a gut problem or a yeast infection or this catarrh.