Greetings.
Eric Bakker, naturopath from New Zealand, author of Candida Crusher, formulator of the
Canxida range of products.
It's good to be back.
Thanks for tuning in.
We're going to talk about pumpkin today, so those big, orange things that people like
to carve faces in at Halloween.
Pumpkin soup is awesome.
We're in winter now in New Zealand and I really like pumpkin soup.
But should you have it on the Candida diet or not?
If so, when can you have it?
When should you avoid it?
Pumpkin is a starchy carbohydrate, not unlike squash.
Not unlike things like sweet corn.
There are many different kinds of starchy carbohydrate like this.
Sweet potato, you could consider a bit like that.
They're quite sweet.
People like them.
When they cut out a lot of sugars from their diet, they're drawn to starchy carbs.
When should you have them?
When should you avoid them?
Well, it really depends on you.
If you're a bloaty or farty person, if you've got lots of gut issues, you need to be careful
with these sweet carbs, especially when you start to make diet changes and you want to
eradicate a yeast infection or clear up SIBO or parasites.
I recommend that initially you do an assessment, like a stool test to assess what's going on
in your gut.
I also recommend that you clean your diet up in general.
So if you currently are eating pumpkin and you want to get rid of Candida, first get
rid of the general crap out of the diet, the stuff that you know you need to avoid like
chocolate, like alcohol, like sugars, junk food, take away foods in general.
Start cooking at home meals from scratch.
Make home cooked meals like your grandparents probably made.
These are basic things that you need to start doing before you just chop and change things
out of your diet.
When you do all these kind of things, let's see what your digestion is like then because
you may not need to take pumpkin out of your diet right up front.
Be careful about anyone who tells you to make dramatic lifestyle and diet changes very quick,
so you can quickly recover.
You need to avoid people like that.
It's almost like they're trying to convert you or something like brainwash you religiously
or something, so be careful.
You need to make change slowly.
The bacteria in your gut will not like it when you make massive changes very quickly.
Any more than your muscles won't like it when you start going on a massive exercise program.
If your doctor tells you to lose a few pounds and exercise, you're not going to join the
gym the following week and then start training three hours a day and then do half marathons
within a month.
Only idiots do stuff like that.
To my mind, only idiots are the ones who make massive overnight diet changes.
You don't do it.
You make slow change.
I've said this a hundred times on my videos before.
Never make very quick changes with your diet.
Some people have too much pumpkin in their diet.
In those cases, they may need to cut pumpkin consumption back.
But in my mind, most people don't consume large amounts of pumpkin every day all the
time.
Pumpkin is a wonderful food.
I really like the butternut pumpkins like the long ones that have go the nice female
shape about them.
The tall ones, they got that creamy colored skin.
I peel them and cook those in a pan with a bit of butter, with a bit of pepper in there
and then just basically cream that up.
You can actually put rice milk with it, oat milk with it.
You can put cow's milk with it and then blend that up.
It's very, very nice.
It makes a beautiful soup.
If you've got a lot of gut issues and you are eating pumpkin, it may pay for you to
cut back on squash or pumpkin or sweet corn right up front.
Just halve the amount that you're having and see if that makes a difference in your life.
If you've got major gut issues, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel, done a
stool test and found that you've got loads of Candida that cultured, you've got low levels
of beneficial bacteria or if you've got just a serious gut problem in general, work toward
over about a six-week period to eliminate the starchy vegetables completely from your
diet.
All the starchy vegetables, potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, squash, sometimes even
zucchini.
Just be careful.
If you're very much drawn to one particular starchy vegetable or even starchy carb like
rice and you've got major gut issues, just slowly wind this back over a period of four
to six weeks until you've stopped that.
And then substitute that sweet starchy maybe for a green leafy vegetable and that can make
a big difference by putting spinach in there or broccoli in there or beans in there or
cauliflower or things like that.
That should make a difference.
If you've noticed a relationship with cutting back on pumpkin and gas and bloating and flatulence,
that's a good sign that it was not really conducive toward good gut health.
You can always introduce it down the track as your health improves and see how you feel.
I've said this also previously, but I'm modifying by changing how you prepare that food, it
can have a big effect on the gut, too.
For example, baking pumpkin as opposed to making a pumpkin soup, can have a big difference
in terms of how it affects your gut.
Maybe if you have pumpkin soup, you're bloating and farting more.
But if you bake the pumpkin, you notice that that drops off.
That means that you can modify that starch with a cooking method and it may have a different
outcome in terms of the effects on the gut.
Worth thinking about.
Just to recap.
Should you avoid pumpkin?
Can you have it on the Candida diet?
In many cases, you can, but you need to just seriously reduce the amount.
For best effects, probably better to really cut right back or even stop as you're introducing
the Candida diet.
Pull these things right back and focus on other kinds of vegetables because they do
have quite a lot of sugar in them.
For some people, this form of sugar is not too bad, as opposed to white sugar or bread.
For other people, it's not so good.
But only you will be able to know that by cutting back and watching the relationship
between cause and effect.
I hope this video has been of use to you today.
Thanks for tuning in.
Don't forget to click on the link below for my Candida report if you haven't already got
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Thanks for tuning in.