Category: Candida Crusher FAQ Videos

Good day, Eric Bakker, naturopath and author of Candida Crusher.

I’m going to talk to you today about another Candida crushing food. This is the sixth food. You may have seen my other videos outlining the other foods. This food is the cruciferous vegetables. So what are cruciferous vegetables?

Well, cruciferous vegetables incorporate a group of leafy greens in particular. You may be familiar with some of these: bok choy, brussel sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, rutabagas, turnips, kale, radishes, there may be a few more; cabbages, I think, are another one. So these are very nutrient dense foods, very powerful nutrient laden foods, and good to eat and incorporate into your diet. They’re often popular with people who get more experience with juices. They may juice kale and these sorts of things. Many people don’t like the taste of these foods, particularly brussel sprouts is not really a favorite food of a lot of people, but I love brussel sprouts. I like them steamed up, grated with a bit of nutmeg on top. They taste quite nice.

There is some controversy about these particular foods in that they block the production of thyroid hormones. And there is certainly some truth in this, but eating them raw is not a very good idea for this reason. In research I did, I found that if you cook them or steam them or just cook them partially, you’re going to help reduce this goitrogenic ability by up to three quarters. So juicing kale, for example, or eating raw broccoli all the time is perhaps not a really good idea if you suffer from hypothyroidism.

So if you do have thyroid tendencies to have low thyroid activity, (A) make sure that your iodine is checked and in the correct range, that you’re consuming sufficient selenium and zinc and all the cofactors required for thyroid hormone production, (B) make sure that you cook or steam the cruciferous vegetables properly, and (C) have seaweed in your diet. Clever, because by having seaweed in your diet, you’re ensuring you’ve got sufficient iodine to allow the thyroid to make these thyroid hormones.

We’re getting off the beaten track here. We’ve talked a bit more about thyroid today, but so be it. So the thyroid hormones, when you think about it – like thyroidiodine and thyroxin – are very iodine dependent, so you need to have iodine in the diet. But when it comes to Candida, however, it’s very clever to incorporate these foods into the diet, as well, because they’re nutrient dense and also they contain a lot of fiber. And Dr. William Crook in the Yeast Connection spoke a lot about these particular foods as well, the cruciferous vegetables.

So these foods allow your digestive system to contain the correct kind of fibers to allow the beneficial bacteria to grow. These are prebiotic foods. I’ve noticed there’s a whole range of new supplements coming out with all these new fandangle prebiotics in them with all these trademarks and patents and all this nonsense, but this is all rubbish. Why don’t you just eat these kind of foods because then you’re going to incorporate the prebiotic tendencies of food naturally in your diet instead of again supplementing with stuff.

Remember what I said before. Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food. So eat more of these foods. I grow a lot of broccoli and kale in my vegetable garden. They’re wonderful foods to eat on a regular basis. But just bear those three points in mind I mentioned previously about the cruciferous vegetables. And if you do that and incorporate them, even with thyroid, you should be fine.

So I hope that answers any questions about cruciferous vegetables. And this now completes my six-part series on Candida crushing foods. So thanks for your time.

Hi there, Eric Bakker, naturopath, author of Candida Crusher.

I’m here to talk to you today about the fifth Candida crushing food, the allium family, in particular, brown onion. Brown onions or red onions are quite similar. Brown onions are a bit stronger. So brown onions we call Allium cepa and garlic we call Allium sativum.

So I’m going to talk a little bit about a study that was conducted at the University of Tehran in 2006 where they compared water extractions of allium cepa and allium sativum, so onion and garlic, against 19 different strains of Candida albicans and about 12 different Candida species in general, including 35 different types of dairy defined species. So these are various species of yeast that infect hair, nails and skin, different parts of the body.

So what they did is they prepared these little agar dishes of these little, you know, growing medium in a laboratory. And they would have all these different species of yeast growing there on these plates and then introducing to those plates water solutions of garlic and onion to see what the activity was like. And they were stunned to see how powerful both onion and garlic were when it came to reducing the populations of yeasts. And, in fact, what they found in some respects the activity was even more powerful against strains which are resistant to Fluconazole and particular pharmaceutical drugs.

So the point I’m making here is it makes a heck of a lot of sense for you to incorporate onion into your diet, very small amounts of raw onion, raw red onions, raw brown onions, spring onions, you know, the shallots or scallions, the green things. Cut them up and add them to your salad. Get some red onions and cut it really fine and add it to salads. Add it to different types of dishes. So raw onions are extremely powerful and have been used for thousands of years by many different people around the world.

Egyptians used onions going back a long time ago. It is said even when the pyramids were built, garlic and onions were actually traded for labor. And these foods also are very high in sulphur, which is an important compound required for detoxification. So your liver, in particular, has got a high infinity for sulphur for cleansing and purifying the body. Sulphur has been used for a long time. And here in New Zealand, we’ve got these sulphur baths, you know, the hot water that comes out of the ground in thermal activity is high in sulphur, which has a very deeply purifying and cleansing effect on the body.

So now why should you incorporate the allium family into your diet? Well, think about it. Antifungal activity, cleansing activity, purification, cheap, it’s something you should really consider doing. So instead of rushing off and buying the latest, greatest pill or taking drugs which can develop resistance against fungi, you can eat foods which are grown and available at your grocery store or supermarket, which have an anti-fungal activity. Make sense? Makes a lot of sense to me.

So I hope that answers your questions about the allium family and anti-fungal activity. Thank you.

Hi there, Eric Bakker, naturopath.

Going to talk to you today about another Candida crushing food. This is number four, coconut. Coconut has really become very popular in the last several years as an anti-fungal, even as a weight loss aid. Let’s just talk a little bit about coconut and some of the health benefits you can derive from this amazing food.

The coconut tree has been called the “tree of life”, and we can see why because just about every part of the coconut is really being used. The leaves, when we look at the nut, the copra or the meat inside, the cream, the oil, the husk, everything’s used. Coconut is an incredibly nutritious food. And when we look at the oil or the cream, the fat of it, a lot of people seem to think it’s bad for the heart; that it contains saturated fats that go hard at room temperature and I’m going to get heart attacks from this. A lot of my doctor friends think it’s stupid to have coconut products because of heart disease.

What a line of bologna! It’s all ignorance. Coconut’s been consumed for thousands of years by many, many people around the world, particularly the tropical peoples who never had heart disease until white men came with cigarettes and alcohol and deep-fried chips and crap like that.

What makes coconut so beneficial and why should you incorporate it into your diet if you’ve got a yeast infection? Coconut contains a lot of what we call MCT or medium chain triglycerides. These are particular fats with particular elongated fatty acid chains. They’re not polyunsaturated. They’re what we call medium chained. These are, in fact, not bad for the heart at all. And, in fact, if you look at cardiovascular, they’re actually going to decrease your risk of heart disease, but they’re anti-fungal. And they’re anti-fungal because of the three principle medium chains, Lauric acid, Caprylic acid and Capric acid. They help to work and weaken and slowly erode the cell wall of the yeast exposing the cytoplasm or the internal part of the yeast, which the immune system can then attack. They weaken the cell.

I like people to incorporate particularly coconut oil into their diet. Coconut oil contains up to seven times more Caprylic acid than coconut cream does. It makes a lot of sense to add this to the diet. Coconut oil and fresh garlic are my two favorite Candida crushing foods to incorporate into the diet. I’d like you to seriously consider having this in your diet on a regular basis. Start with small amounts. Don’t obviously drink a half a cup of coconut oil every day and get sick on it. Start with small amounts like a teaspoon and then build up gradually to a tablespoon per day. You can incorporate it in cooking. You can incorporate it in all sorts of different foods like drinks and smoothies and things like that.

The other thing I like about coconut oil is it doesn’t have to be digested by way of pancreatic enzymes like animal fats do. Once it gets into the small intestine, it can be easily incorporated into the lymph tissue and go into the circulation and bypass regular digestion, which is really good for people who’ve got liver issues and they’ve lost their gall bladder, things like that. I’ve known women in my clinic who’ve come back and said, “Eric, I can tolerate coconut oil. I’ve had my gall bladder out and I’ve got liver problems, but coconut’s not a problem.”

Be careful with die off. I do get reports of people when I recommend to take coconut that they go out and have a cupful of coconut oil a day. Start slowly and like any yeast-inhibiting food, just gradually build up. Let’s see how you go on that.

I hope you take that recommendation onboard and incorporate some coconut oil into your diet. Make sure that you’re going to get a cold pressed, high grade, organic coconut oil, too, not something that’s been heated up. A health food shop will help you out there.

And also if you’re going to get a dietary supplement, anti-fungal again, get one with Caprylic acid in it. And as we spoke about, an oregano supplement, which has got the carvacrol in it, a clove supplement that’s got the Eugenol in it, and a garlic supplement, which has got the allicin in it. These are all clever things to have incorporated into an anti-fungal product. These are all the best things you can include.

Next video we’ll be talking about the allium containing foods. Thank you.