By Michael Biamonte

For candida sufferers, the Candida Diet is a necessary evil. It is feared, despised, and misunderstood—and often makes the difference between success and failure in eliminating the yeasty beast. The purpose of this article isn’t to explain what the Candida Diet is. (That’s what the internet is for.) The purpose is to explain why it’s important, and how it’s healthier than most diets being followed in the 21st century.

Candida is a yeast or fungus; it can be considered a vegetation. The Candida Diet is low in carbohydrates; sugar (even in healthy foods, like fruit); and fermented foods like vinegar and alcohol. That’s because all these foods feed candida and make it worse. They also make it harder for medicines to kill it.

Sugar and alcohol are the most important foods to avoid. Starches come next; they convert to sugars in the body. When eating starches (carbs), choose foods that are lower on the glycemic index—a scale that rates how fast a food converts to sugar in the bloodstream. It’s important to avoid fermented foods, like soy sauce and vinegar, because they can produce an allergic reaction in the candida sufferer’s intestinal tract. Foods from the fungus family, like mushrooms, and foods high in baker’s yeast can have the same effect.

Though the Candida Diet is restrictive, it’s more nutritious than the average American diet. It’s similar to the South Beach Diet and the Hunter-Gatherer (Paleo) Diet. If you want to see its benefits, look no further than the last 84 tribes of hunter-gatherers in the world. They’re slimmer, stronger, and faster than we are. They have straight teeth and perfect eyesight. Arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, schizophrenia, and cancer are rarities to them. 

Why? They share a 2-million-year-old: the diet that we humans evolved on, the diet that’s coded for in our genes. It’s very different from the diet of “civilization.” 

An ‘Uncivil’ Diet

For millions of years, humans and their relatives have eaten meat, fish, fowl, and the leaves, roots, and fruits of plants. One big obstacle to getting more calories from the environment is the fact that many plants are inedible. Grains, beans, and potatoes are full of energy but in their raw state contain toxins. So 10,000 years ago, when humans learned to cook these foods to make them edible, we probably doubled the number of calories we could get from the plant foods in our environment.

Unfortunately, grains, beans, and potatoes—which form a large proportion of the modern diet—share important nutritional characteristics: They’re high on the glycemic index. They’re a poor source of many important nutrients. They contain small amounts of toxins. They cause problems by displacing more nutritious foods.

That’s why the Paleo Diet eliminates grains, beans, and potatoes. It also eliminates dairy and sugar. It includes meat, chicken, and fish; eggs; fruits and vegetables (especially root vegetables); nuts (but not peanuts or cashews); berries; and organ meats.

It strongly resembles the typical Candida Diet.

Diet rarely causes candida, which is usually triggered by antibiotics, steroids, birth control pills or other drugs. However, a diet high in sugar, starch, and alcohol, consumed during a period of extreme stress, can bring candida about, just as if one had taken these medications.

Diet also rarely eliminates candida; there’s always enough blood glucose to keep it alive. But a low-carb diet weakens it so that medicines can totally destroy it.

In Part Two of this article, next month, I’ll offer tips for those struggling to stick with the Candida Diet.

Michael Biamonte owns the Biamonte Center for Clinical Nutrition, in Astoria. For more information, visit Health-Truth.com.