Greetings. It’s Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand and author of Candida Crusher, also formulator of the Canxida range of dietary supplements. Thanks for checking out my video. Let’s look at some dietary recommendations for dysbiosis. What you can do to help your gut restore function. This could be literally an hour-long video, but we haven’t got that much time. So we’re going to talk about some of the most important foods to eat and also some – not so much the foods to avoid – you probably already know that from some of my other videos.
There has been a lot of work completed in the last several years and research on the right kind of foods that you should really eat when it comes to improving your gut. A lot of people believe that the best way to do that is to stop sugars, yeasts, processed food, and to eat a lot of fermented and cultured foods. That’s what I used to think. In fact, it’s a load of crap because research I’ve done recently in the last few months of people who eat lots of kefir, yogurt, kumis, kimchee and Kombucha and all that sort of stuff, it’s only very temporary colonization of the gut. Putting these foods into your diet even on a regular basis is no guarantee that you’re going to get high levels of beneficial bacteria and also to colonize those high levels for long periods of time. There was plenty of research in 2013 and 2014 that has shown that to be a fact. So I’m not really pushing these high levels of cultured and fermented foods anymore in people’s diets.
I’m much more interested in how you consume these foods, how you chew them, how you eat them. Do you have one of these iPhones in your hand and are you liking people on Facebook when you’re eating food? That’s more important to me than drinking a pint of kefir every day. Are you sitting there in bed with your iPad watching stupid home videos or something at 10 o’clock at night when you should be resting? The use of electronic devices, not chewing food properly, eating too quick, to me are very, very important factors when it comes to eating and dysbiosis.
I want you to understand that you need to separate yourself from technology a lot more. Spend less time checking emails. Spend more time sitting there relaxing, taking your time to eat food, making the right kind of choices when it comes to the greens, the leafy greens. Let’s talk also more importantly, about the right kinds of oligosaccharides or beneficial sugars I want you to have in your diet when it comes to dysbiosis and SIBO.
When we use the word “sugar,” people are horrified. “I don’t want any sugar. Yeast infection; can’t eat that.” When in fact, there are a lot of sugars that are very beneficial for your gut health. Look at breast milk. Breast milk is full of oligosaccharides. Would you dare tell a mother not to feed her baby breast milk because its high in sugar and it could cause a yeast infection? No. It’s a very, very beneficial food. There are lots of popular studies now that actually show that babies who are breast fed very sweet milk have got much better immune health than kids that are put onto formula feeding.
Oligosaccharides are a particular type of sugar that is found in different kinds of fruits and vegetables. If we took a look at the FOS and GOS foods, they’re made up of oligosaccharides, Fructooligosaccharides, galactooligosaccharides, and inulin. Inulin is found a lot in foods like Jerusalem artichokes and gum Arabic. Jerusalem artichoke contains up to 65 percent inulin in its dry weight. It’s a very, very beneficial little tuber that grows into like a tall small sunflower, exceptionally good for gastrointestinal health.
These are the foods I’m going to encourage you to eat now are the FOS and GOS foods. These foods are colored, often quite dark, dark sort of purple, black sort of red colored foods. If we look at things like red onions, red cabbage, dark grapes like the black grapes, dark red, the blood red plums, for example, these are quite high in these kind of fibers. Also legumes, adzuki beans, lentils in making these Indian dahl dishes up, quite good to do. These foods are beneficial for gut health. Potatoes are okay if you have the dark purple colored potato and just have a small amount in your diet and boil them, cool them, and add them to salads. Red carrots, purple carrots, even better. Very good to eat. Green tea, another food very beneficial. It contains the polyphenols that are good for gut health.
There are tons of different kinds of foods you can eat that improve your digestive health. But just make sure that you’re eating a large arrangement of these colored vegetables in your diet and incorporate them slowly into your diet. Don’t put large amounts in at once because that’s going to upset you again and it could potentially cause a lot of gas and pain, so go slow to start with. Sprouted grains are a very good addition to your diet.
I like eating lots of leafy greens in spring, in particular, when they’re coming out of winter. In New Zealand here, we’re now in August. September we’re coming into springtime, which will probably be fall for you guys in the States. That’s when I start eating a larger amount of rocket, Mizuna, beetroot leaves, spinach, broccoli greens, all those things really go into a big salad. I put large amounts of lemon juice and olive oil on that, some black olives, and I usually have a big salad like that every day. And it’s a great way also to cleanse the gut from the kind of heavy casserole foods that we’ve eaten over the wintertime.
Look at the different foods that are growing in your region at that time of the year. It’s crazy here in New Zealand, people are going to eat mangos in the middle of wintertime, or pineapples bought in Ecuador right when it’s freezing cold. It doesn’t make sense to do that. I prefer to eat the kind of foods grown in our region at that particular time of year. They’re going to be much higher in vitamins and minerals and minimally processed, and they haven’t been stored or ripened with gases or things like that.
I’ve got no problem with you eating cultured or fermented foods, but just don’t think that they’re the be all end all. Because I’ve had too many patients on kefir for years with minimal outcomes. But when I started moving patients into the FOS and GOS foods, I was noticing big changes in people. And that was also the time I started encouraging people to eat sourdough bread. I’ve gotten a lot of flak for that on the internet that I should be going 100 percent gluten free. But I’ve never believed that going 100 percent gluten free for everyone is going to save the world. I would rather people seek out alcohol free than gluten free. But most people aren’t prepared to do that.
Sourdough rye bread is a very beneficial food for the gut. It contains these particular sugars that feed the gut up. And another food you might like to try is dark cacao or the raw cacao powder is a good food as well. Green plantain bananas excellent for the gut. Yellow bananas are too high in sugar, cause bloating and gas, especially bad for SIBO and dysbiosis. But green bananas, especially the plantain ones that the people in the islands eat, cook them in coconut milk, very beneficial for the gut health. Are you getting the picture now on the right kind of foods to eat? Grapes, no problem, because you only have a small amount and you have the dark purple grapes. Very good to eat.
I hope that gives you some insight. Send me some feedback on YouTube if you want and watch my other videos. There are plenty of videos for you to watch on the Candida Crusher channel. Thanks for tuning in.