Candida Treatment Diet

What is it?
What does it do?
What does it treat?

According to Brent A. Bauer, M.D. Internal Medicine specialist at Mayo Clinic, Some complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners blame common symptoms such as fatigue, headache and poor memory on intestinal overgrowth of the fungus-like organism Candida albicans, or yeast syndrome. To cure the syndrome, they recommend a candida cleanse diet, which includes no sugar, white flour, yeast, and cheese, on the theory that these foods promote candida overgrowth. Unfortunately, there isn't much evidence to support the diagnosis of yeast syndrome.

Consequently, many conventional practitioners doubt its validity. And there are no clinical trials that document the efficacy of a candida cleanse diet for treating any recognized medical condition. Not surprisingly, many people note improvement in various symptoms when following this diet. If you stop eating sugar and white flour, you'll generally wind up cutting out most processed foods, which tend to be high in calorie content and low in nutritive value. Within a few weeks of replacing processed foods with fresh ones and white flour with whole grains, you may start to feel better in general. That, rather than stopping the growth of yeast in the gastrointestinal tract, is the main benefit of a candida cleanse diet.

InSite Digestive HealthCare adviser comment:

We agree with this view from the Mayo Clinic. The diet advised for candida has a lot of similarity to the low FODMAPs diet we advise for irritable bowel. Most patients, who blame candida for their symptoms have IBS symptoms, some have fibromyalgia. Some have a non-specific weakness, malaise, and fatigue or in severe cases, meet the definitions of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. A trial of a low FODMAPs diet (see our brochures on the subject) may be valuable if followed correctly and not carried on too long in too strict a form.