Eric Bakker, the Naturopath from New Zealand. Thanks for coming back.
Many people asked me what are some of the best types of foods I can eat
that act as an anti-mitotic, something that actually helps to clean up the body,
gets rid of unwanted bacteria. If it's parasite, inhibits the reproduction and growth of those,
something that works on culling yeast that really sort of bloom or take off in the body.
Well, the good news is there are many different types of foods or substances you can eat
that actually have good anti-actions, anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, anti-parasitic. You don't need to
always eat pharmaceutical drugs to get rid of something, like we're led to believe. So having
a bacterial problem, overgrowth doesn't mean that you lack antibiotics, that you need those,
like some doctors would like you to believe.
But eating these kinds of foods we're going to talk about can have a big difference in
shaping your gut, especially if you eat these on a daily basis,
like I do. Eat these foods all the time and you won't need to go and get drugs, all right? Foods
are drugs, drugs are foods. That's what they should be, all right? Hippocrates,
excuse me, said something like that to that effect, didn't he, a long time ago?
Well, of course, top of the tree is garlic, the food that many people still comment on YouTube
saying it's toxic, you shouldn't need it. It's bad for your health. Are you stupid? Garlic hurts
you and makes you wonder what planet some people live on. It really does. You only have to spend 10
minutes online and look at the research on garlic to see that even scientists are amazed at how good
garlic really is. If we put it up against drugs, like ketoconazole, fluconazole, this drug or
allicin, one of the active ingredients in garlic, beats a lot of these antifungal drugs, hands down.
We know the research on cardio, cardiovascular, and cholesterol. There's tons of research now that
validates the use of this in a circulatory sense, but also research now, University of Arizona in
the '70s did studies on garlic and found that it matched or actually exceeded the potency of many
pharmaceuticals that were used for similar kind of actions to anti-microbial and it worked, so
garlic. Of course, when you heat it or cook it, you destroy some of the properties on it. So,
excuse me, just get a small clove, cut it fine. Mix it with a bit of lemon juice and a bit of
olive oil and just throw that on top of your food. It's a great way to have garlic into your diet.
This is a par excellence antibiotic. Works really, really well. It's powerful. So that's the top.
Another, of course, food that belongs to the allium family or the garlic family are onions,
also shown to be antibiotic, have a cleansing action in the body. Raw onions like raw red
onion is even better. You've got all the flavonoids in them, different types of phenols and
flavonoids, which help to really curb the growth of E. coli and food-borne pathogens. So people
who tend to get food-borne diseases or get sick when they eat certain meals, it could be a chicken
sandwich or whatever, these are the sort of foods you want to include in your diet like garlic,
onions, shallots, spring onions. Excellent. Try and get used to eating more and more of them raw,
all right, because it will make a big difference for your gut. There are also starches in these
foods that really feed up the good bacteria of the bowel, boosting your immune system even more.
Citrus, very good food, particularly citrus, like grapefruit. Grapefruits are excellent. They
really work to inhibit a lot of different types of parasites. And, of course, grapefruit seed extract
comes from grapefruit. But grapefruits are a great liver detoxifier and a liver immune booster.
Grapefruit has many different actions on the body. There are flavonoids in it that have
powerful effects on certain aspects of your immune system that can really boost it up.
So try and get used to eating a little bit of citrus, at least once or twice a week. We've got
30 citrus trees in the yard, so we tend to like citrus in our place. I've got lots of lemon trees,
oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, tangelos, all those sort of things. They're just
wonderful to grow. If you don't eat them yourself, just hand them out to people.
Honey. I didn't call you honey. Honey is the next food, all right? Being a beekeeper, you don't have
to convince me on the merits of honey. Honey is amazing. It contains hydrogen peroxide, stops
bacteria growing in them. It's good also for your gut because it stops bacteria growing in your gut.
You can't compare honey like candy or ice cream. It's a completely different sugar.
If you look at honey like Manuka honey, you've got this stuff in it called methylglyoxal.
Methylglyoxal, I think it's called and this really helps to heal wounds. It's a wound
healer so some honeys are quite special like that. But you don't need to have, excuse me,
Manuka honey to get the benefits of honey. Any honey is going to be better for you than
any kind of man-made sugar. So honey does have antibiotic effects and immune-boosting effects.
But we're not talking a cup of day of honey, like tablespoons, but we talk small amounts.
Cinnamon. Cinnamon's definitely been implicated also,
excuse me, dry throat. Cinnamon has also been implicated with many different types
of infections. It works for bladder problems or throat problems or coughs or colds. It's been
used as an anti-microbial in Sri Lanka, in India for a long, long time so it's part of Ayurvedic
medicine. It's a wonderful plant to use for blood sugar correction. It works quite well for that.
I quite like it in porridge. I quite like it with oats. It's really tasty. It goes well with baking,
but you can put cinnamon in many dishes. But it's also anti-microbial. Don't forget that.
Wine. Why would you believe that wine is antibiotic because of the polyphenol content?
Red wine is supremely good, small amounts. We're not talking bottles a day. Again, for food-borne
pathogens, for someone with Helicobacter pylori, stomach infection, if you get salmonella easily,
all those infections, a bit of wine here and there will help to stop that kind of process.
Klebsiella also responds positively. Klebsiella pneumoniae doesn't like the polyphenols in red
wine. So tiny amounts of red wine in the diet actually quite good for you.
The next one is yogurt. Yogurt's been long known
to have a great immune-boosting potential. People who eat yogurt are
proven through studies. You can go to Google and look at this. People who eat yogurt regularly
tend to have a lesser incidence of colds or flus than people who don't eat yogurt at all.
Water-soluble peptide extracts, WSPEs. These actually come from dairy and they stimulate
really the production of different cytokines in the body, so chemicals that the immune system
makes to attack bacteria, for example. Yogurt is actually quite an effective anti-microbial when
you eat it regularly. But one of the biggest thing it does, of course, because of its high lactic
acid content, it stimulates like the bacillus in the gut and lactobacillus create antibiotics.
Acidofilin, for example, is an antibiotic created by these bacteria. So when you eat yogurt,
you're going to get better immune health. That's proven through studies now many times over.
Turmeric, Curcuma longa, or curcumin found in turmeric. Very, very good again. Similar
to ginger, same family, anti-inflammatory, reduces aspects of inflammation in the body,
but boosts up the immune function again. Turmeric is a good liver detoxification and blood purifier.
It's been used for fevers, colds and flus and sore throats and earaches and many different things.
So turmeric is also certainly on this list of anti-microbial foods. It's one that you
want to think about. I quite like it in tea. You can drink turmeric tea. It's interesting.
Ginger, one of my favorite anti-inflammatories. I particularly like ginger when it comes to like
bruises, bumps, painful knees or things like. But ginger I've been told also works really
as an anti-microbial. Works on parasites quite well, too, so quite effective.
The last one is clove. Syzygium, I think they call it, or clove. Close is
excellent for parasites. It's been used a lot in India, again, for this reason, for bugs in
the tummy or things like that. Clove, if you think about it, was used back in the plague days
to stop really infection. So when people did wear those masks, they put clove in the masks to stop
an infection. Could be another COVID angle. Who knows?
So clove has being long known and long used now for hundreds of years as an effective
anti-microbial and to boost the immune system up and to fortify the body against colds or flus.
That's the list of what I would call my 10 top, or my favorite anti-microbial foods. I'll just
read them out to you again. Garlic, onions or the allium family, citrus, particularly grapefruit,
but lemons also, again vitamin C for the immune system,
honey, particularly the Manuka, but any honey is usually quite good to have, small amount.
A really nice thing for wintertime for you guys in the States is a glass of filtered warm water,
bit of honey in it, juice of a lemon in there, maybe a pinch of turmeric in
there. It works quite well for flus and colds. Cinnamon's on the list, wine, red wine, yogurt,
especially sour Greek homemade yogurt with culture in it, good culture level,
turmeric, ginger and clove. Thanks for tuning in.