Clear for Life

Confused about fruits? Think fruits cause acne?

Some people say it’s the devil’s incarnation and nature’s candy, which others say it’s the healthiest food you can eat. In this post I explain, in detail, why most fears about fruit and unfounded and why eating fruits fixes the underlying cause of acne and many other health problems.

This is an answer to Krystal’s question at Clear Skin Space forums. She asked:

Okay, seriously, what is the deal? Everywhere I look someone is saying eat fruit, don’t eat fruit, limit your fruit, fruit should be unlimited?

So my question is this..
Does fruit cause people to break-out?

Welcome to the wonderful world of diet and nutrition. Want to get even more confused? Surf to Amazon.com and search books with ‘diet’ in title. You’ll get about 300′000 results - all with different conclusions and recommendations.

But generally the most intense battles in these diet wars are fought on the high-fat vs. high-carb front.

This is important for acne victims because blood sugar problems cause hormonal reaction that can lead to more acne. Some doctors even call acne ’skin diabetes’.

As a disclaimer I live on a high-carb, high-fiber, high-fiber diet and eat very little fat. I don’t have anything against low-carb diets. I just don’t see them as very smart thing to do. But if you are currently on one and it’s working for you then keep up with it. In the end of this post I’ll add some good points about them.

PROBLEMS WITH LOW-CARB THEORY

If you listen to the high-fat, also called low-carb, guys and gals you should shun away from fruits and carbs. Their theory goes that since carbs raise blood sugar levels, which raises insulin levels, which are linked to many diseases (acne included) one should avoid carbs.

The problem is that it’s all baloney. That theory has been proven wrong so many times, both in lab and in real life. Before writing this I again researched the issue a bit. I really loved this comment on a review study:

The purveyors of these diets [low-carb] portray them to be scientifically sound. Although there is some scientific rationale, two common devices used to support contentions include the overinterpretation of data and weaving together of unconnected scientific observations, and these processes often border on sophistry. Nevertheless, driven by the increased prevalence of overweight and obesity, these diets are increasingly popular despite a relative lack of rigorous scientific data. These diets present an attractive alternative to challenging lifestyle modifications (i.e. intentional calorie reduction and increased physical activity).

Diet, Insulin Resistance, and Obesity: Zoning in on Data for Atkins Dieters Living in South Beach by Cristina Lara-Castro and W. Timothy Garvey

Here’s another aspect of low-carb theory that’s wrong.

The entire theoretical framework of low carb diets, like Atkins and The Zone, hang upon the notion that insulin is the root of all evil and so to limit insulin release one needs to limit carbohydrate intake. Dr. Atkins, for example, has a chapter entitled “Insulin–The Hormone That Makes You Fat,”[71] Protein Power calls it the “monster hormone,”[487] and the author of the Zone Diet calls insulin “the single most significant determinant of your weight.”[72]

What they overlook is that “protein- and fat-rich foods may induce substantial insulin secretion” as well.[73] Research in which study subjects served as their own controls, for example, has shown that under fasting conditions a quarter pound of beef raises insulin levels in diabetics as much as a quarter pound of straight sugar.[74]

Atkins’ featured foods like cheese and beef elevated insulin levels higher than “dreaded” high-carbohydrate foods like pasta. A single burger’s worth of beef, or three slices of cheddar, boosts insulin levels more than almost 2 cups of cooked pasta.[75] In fact a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that meat, compared to the amount of blood sugar it releases, seems to cause the most insulin secretion of any food tested.[76]

Low carb advocates like Atkins seem to completely ignore these facts. Recent medical reviews have called Atkins’ feel-good theories “factually flawed”[77] and “at best half-truths.”[78] “In the scientific world, books like the Zone Diet are generally regarded as fiction,” one reviewer wrote in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. “The scientific literature is in opposition…”[79] In a medical journal article entitled “Food Fads and Fallacies,” the Atkins Diet is referred to as a “‘New wives’ tale” with a “sprinkling of fallacies.”[80]

According to a 2003 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Dr. Atkins and his colleagues selectively recite the literature” to support their claims.[81] When researchers take the time to actually measure insulin levels, for instance, instead of just talking about them like Atkins does, they often find the opposite of what Atkins asserted.

Phony Baloney
Atkinsexposed.org by Dr. Michael Greger

Another problem with the theory behind low-carb diet is that it over simplifies things. In the Blood sugar worries blog post I explained the concept of input and output.

THE REAL REASON BEHIND BLOOD SUGAR PROBLEMS

The main reason you get blood sugar problems is because the output side is not working well. Glucose cannot exit from the bloodstream. A condition called insulin resistance, which means that the insulin receptors in cells don’t work well, or they are down regulated. When insulin receptors don’t work glucose cannot get out of the bloodstream. Here’s how Dr. Mark Jenkins put it:

It is not hyperinsulinemia that is the problem, it is the receptor. It has been repeatedly shown in the medical literature that increasing the sensitivity of peripheral insulin receptors reduces hyperinsulinemia and hypertension. This process is termed insulin sensitization and is accomplished by aerobic exercise, low-fat / high-carbohydrate diet, and reduction of excessive body fat. Conversely, obesity and high fat diets have been shown to induce insulin resistance. It is important that the high carbohydrate diet have predominantly complex carbohydrates and also have a high fiber content.

Insulin, Diet, Disease and Athletes

And if you think I’m just blowing smoke out my a** just Google ‘high-fat diet insulin resistance’. Scientists have known this thing since thirties.

When researchers want to study diabetes they feed mice a high-fat diet to create diabetes. There’s even a term called ‘high-fat diet induces insulin resistance‘.

If you can tolerate more science talk, here’s what happens to mice on a high-fat diet. If not, you can safely skip this quote.

Main Findings

Unsurprisingly, the mice fed the high-fat diet had an increased body weight compared to those maintained on a normal diet. The investigators observed stable hyperglycaemia and progressively increased hyperinsulinaemia in the mice on the high-fat diet. This is indicative of progressively worsening insulin resistance. After only one week on the high-fat diet, blood glucose levels were raised and intravenous glucose tolerance tests showed reduced glucose elimination and impaired insulin secretion. This demonstrates two distinct mechanistic characteristics of impaired glucose tolerance and type 2 diabetes; namely insulin resistance and islet dysfunction. Metabolic efficiency (that is the energy intake per gram body weight gain) was raised in both the mice fed a high-fat diet and those on a normal diet. However, the increase was attenuated in the mice fed the high-fat diet. Thus the weight gain observed in the high-fat group cannot be fully explained by increased energy intake; there was also a concomitant reduction in metabolic rate.

The concentration of glucose in the blood was consistently 1mmol/l higher in the mice maintained on the high-fat diet than in those on the normal diet throughout the 1 year study period. However, insulin levels continued to rise in the mice maintained on the high-fat diet. This suggests that insulin resistance progressively increased but there were compensatory mechanisms which kept the hyperglycaemia stable at 1mmol/l. When challenged with an intravenous glucose tolerance test, there was no compensation for the insulin resistance and there was a marked deterioration of glucose elimination. This, along with similar patterns observed following an oral glucose tolerance test, highlights that insulin secretion is defective in this model. When the DPP-IV inhibitor was administered in the drinking water of both groups of mice, there was an augmentation in insulin secretion resulting in improved glucose tolerance.

Conclusions and Future Directions

This work has demonstrated that the high-fat, diet-fed C57BL/6J mouse is a robust model for studying impaired glucose tolerance and early stage type 2 diabetes, as it exhibits similar metabolic defects as are observed in the human disease.

Winzell MS & Ahren B (2004) The High-Fat Diet-Fed Mouse: A Model for Studying Mechanisms and Treatment of Impaired Glucose Tolerance and Type 2 Diabetes. Diabetes 53 (3) S215-9

DOES FRUIT CAUSE ACNE?

Now that we have paddled through a mountain of science talk we can move on to the question.

Yes, fruit can cause acne if you have insulin resistance. In that case the sugar in fruits causes a hormonal reaction that can lead to acne.

Get fat out of your blood and reduce insulin resistance with other lifestyle factors and fruit shouldn’t be a problem.

Most fruits are low to medium in glycemic index. And your body is perfectly equipped to deal with sugar from fruits. In Candida and acne blog posts I quoted Steve Pavlina who did an experiment with a raw food diet. Steve monitored his blood sugar levels and they remained remarkably stable. He said that he couldn’t spike his blood sugar levels even if he tried - even eating 19 bananas a day has no effect on blood sugar levels.

Your body is designed to run on sugar and it’s perfectly equipped to deal with it. All your cell run on sugar. The only time your body starts running on fat is if you severely restrict carbohydrate intake. This mechanism is a survival tool, allowing you to survive times of famine or when carbs might not be available. Practically the entire medical community agrees that this ketonic state is not healthy.

Even for people who say they breakout from fruits this is often not the whole truth. When they remove fat out of their diet fruits usually cause no problems. Here’s what on happy Clear for Life customer wrote to me.

Just got to say, you da man! I’m into my 4th week post paleo and my skin is doing very well. I haven’t kept to your diet and detox plan stringently, but am eating an abundance of organic fruits, greens, grains, tubers, and legumes while being very careful about my fat intake. Also maintaining a regular exercise and meditation routine while getting as much sunlight as I can manage working an office job during the rainy season in Seattle.

The first week on my diet I was quite amazed to eat levels of carbs that would have caused a carpet bombing of my face while on paleo. No such result.

After so many years of suffering from acne and then months of being chained to paleo, I’m still quite incredulous to the fact that I can have clear skin and live a normal life.

So you have my sincerest thanks for leading me to a diet and lifestyle that’s providing a long sought-after freedom.

Paleo, or Paleolithic diet, is often high in meat, healthy fats and vegetables with some fruits thrown in. Overall it’s a pretty healthy diet, but the high-fat content can lead to carb sensitivity.

NO ONE DIET FOR ALL PEOPLE

I don’t believe into blood type diet and metabolic type diet theories. These basically say that depending on genetic, or who knows what, make up some people are designed to run on carbs while some are designed to run on fat or protein. So far I haven’t found a single piece of credible evidence to support these theories. And they run against common sense, rationality and real life experience.

That said, I also don’t believe that one diet fits everybody. Yes, I believe that fruits and vegetables are the ideal food for humans. But because we have abused our bodies for decades some people have develped allergies, sensitivities and other conditions that can make eating fruits bad for them, at least some fruits. So we always have to look at the individual and not stick to a dogma.

GOOD POINTS WITH LOW-CARB DIETS

Now that you know why I choose not to eat a low-carb diet and wouldn’t recommend it let’s look at some of the good points in them.

People on low-carb diets tend to eat less processed and junk food they used to. Most junk food is carb-based. Just eliminating soft drinks, candies, pastries (trans fats anyone?) and fast foods can create miracles. I think that simply eating a diet of natural, whole foods is 80% of the solution.

Today people just eat too much of everything. We eat far too many calories. Low-carb diets often get people to eat less. That’s another huge step in reducing insulin resistance and creating health.

Low-carb diets often recommend eating more vegetables. Any diet that gets you to eat less junk and more vegetables is a step to the right direction. Points for low-carb on that.

Creates health awareness. Often when people go on a diet they also become more health conscious. So they might start exercising more and pay attention to their sleep. Diet is just one part of the solution, and in Clear for Life I explained the six elements of health you need to pay attention to. You could eat the perfect diet, but if you ignore the other elements you probably won’t make much progress in terms of health or curing acne.

Finally low-carb diets may get you clear. I know of several people who have gotten clear with a low-carb diet. Since acne is linked to blood sugar response removing carbs somehow short-circuits this mechanisms.

Still, I think high-fruit, low-fat diets are far better at allowing your body to heal itself and removing the root cause of acne. You can actually get to a point where you can eat several days in a row at McDonals and not have it affect your skin at all (unfortunately I speak from experience). Whereas on low-carbs diets such cheats lead to breakouts far more frequently.

CONCLUSION

I hope that by taking you through this long and perhaps a bit science filled journey I managed to shake off some fears you may have concerning fruits. The majority of the scientific community support the idea of high-carb, high-fiber diet in creating health. And fruit gives you both. Plus it’s filled with vitamins, antioxidants and other nutrients.

For all these reason I believe fruits is the ideal food for creating health and curing acne.

Recommended reading:

Fruit Controversy - A free, 30-page report from Frederic Patenaude dispelling the myths about fruits. You have to give your email-address, but Fred sends out good material and doesn’t spam you. And if you really don’t want his emails you can just not confirm your subscription, that way you won’t get any emails from him but still get access to the report.

Atkins exposed.org - A thorough review of science for and against Atkins and other low-carb diets.

Clear for Life - Well, of course you need to read my book : )

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

The comments for this post are moved to Clear Skin Space forums: Fruit… what’s the deal??

In my earlier posts about Candida I’ve often referred to Dr. Graham and what I’ve learned from him. Now you have an opportunity to hear it from the man himself. Naturalnews published an excerpt of Kevin Gianni’s interview with Dr. Graham.

Dr. Graham explains the blood sugar issue and how fat affects it perfectly. I really recommend you read this. This is reprinted with permission from naturalnews.com, and the title of the interview links to the original article at naturalnews.com.

Author Dr. Doug Graham (Part II):
Fats, Sugars and Your Body

by Kevin Gianni, citizen journalist

 

(NaturalNews) This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Dr. Doug Graham shares on fats, sugars and the body.

Renegade Roundtable with Dr. Doug Graham is a lifetime athlete and 27-year raw fooder. He’s been an advisor to top performers including tennis legend Martina Navratilova. He’s also the author of the lifestyle book 80/10/10.

Kevin That was a great answer to that question. I want to move into fat, because there’s a lot of talk in the raw food community where there’s more than one camp. One will say high fruit, low fat, low protein. Another one will say no fruit, greens and high fat. What are some of the challenges with eating a high fat diet?

Dr. Graham: Well from a medical standpoint we know that high fat diets have been linked to cancer and heart disease, diabetes and chronic fatigue. Even candida and most digestive disorders are all linked to the over consumption of fat. I agree, too much fruit is bad for you. People ask me all the time, “Isn’t too much fruit bad for you?” Yes, of course it is. Too much of anything is bad for you. That’s what the phrase means, is that you have a problem. As does the phrase, “Too little.” Part of the problem with too much fat is that you invariably also get two few carbohydrates, so you end up with a double whammy. As soon as you end up in that ‘too’ category, meaning too much or too little, you’ve got both sides of that seesaw swinging out of control. When you don’t eat enough carbohydrates you invariably end up with cravings. This is why over 70% of all of the eating disorders in the United States are associated with binging on complex carbohydrate foods. Because when you try to reduce your carbohydrate intake below that from which we are designed as a species, which is 80 plus, you invariably start to crave that for which we are designed. It would be like holding your breath. If you try to hold your breath you’re going to invariably really start wanting to breathe, a lot, soon.

So in the Standard American Diet where we’re eating about 40% of our calories from carbohydrates, we still see a tremendous number of people with disordered eating. But when we go to the standard raw approach, when the carbohydrate intake is halved again down to 20%, then we see massive challenges with binging, people going to refined sugars, relentlessly going to candy and alcohol and dried fruits and chocolates and anything that’s a refined sugar source, in order to make up for the lack of carbohydrates that they’re not eating through fruit.

Kevin You mentioned candida, let’s talk about that. There’s all sorts of approaches for this. One is to starve the candida with no sugar and the other is eliminate the fat.

Dr. Graham: Well, I think there’s a variety of approaches. We have to understand enough about candida to at least make some sense. Candida is a microorganism that has a very short lifespan. We’re talking hours, days is not even common. We’re talking hours. If you have a candida problem and you’re trying to get rid of it and you’re trying for more than a couple of days, you’re not trying an approach that’s working because it shouldn’t take more than a couple of days. You’re still feeding the candida.

What you have to look at is what does it do, what does it feed? It feeds on sugar, no question. It feeds on sugar and fats. All the cells of the human body are fueled by sugar. All the healthy cells, all the sick cells, all the cancer cells, all the damaged cells, all cells of the human body are fueled by sugar. Which means that there has to be a fuel delivery system to all the cells and that fuel delivery system is the blood stream. This is why doctors can measure what is known as your ‘blood sugar.’ All humans carry blood sugar. If your blood sugar level was zero, you would be dead. Therefore it is actually impossible to starve the candida of sugar by not eating sugar. If you’re on a diet of strictly olive oil, if you’re on a diet of strictly protein powder, or if you’re on a diet of strictly powdered sugar, if your pancreas is healthy and the rest of your system is healthy, the doctors should be able to measure your blood sugar and find out that it is within normal limits, in the normal ranges. It’s going to be the same whether you’re on a fast, not eating anything, or whether you’re on the Standard American Diet. It’s going to run, in American numbers, somewhere around 90-100. What we see is that everyone always carries blood sugar, that’s always there.

At that point we have to look at why does blood sugar rise and how does that affect what’s going on in terms of the candida issue? Essentially it’s like this, we have to bring sugar to the cells of the body. We do so through the delivery system of the blood stream. When we want to get more sugar to the blood through the blood stream, out of the blood stream, to the cells, this is done through a carrier system, essentially a doorman, that we call insulin, produced by the pancreas.

When the pancreas gets tired or when the pancreas isn’t working fast enough, it will receive assistance by a backup system called the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands, for instance, you’re walking up a hill and walking up the hill from the other direction is a bear. You both get to the top of the hill at the same time and whoa! You get a surge of adrenaline because you need fuel like crazy. You don’t actually have to outrun the bear but you have to at least outrun the other people that you’re with. So off you go, a surge of adrenaline. The adrenaline causes the pancreas to squirt out even more insulin and bam, you get an extra dose. What the insulin does is it attaches itself to the sugar in your bloodstream, helps it cross the membrane out of the bloodstream, helps to cross the membrane into the cell and it becomes essentially a doorman that opens the way for sugar to get out of the bloodstream.

When there is excess fat in the bloodstream, we bump into a problem because fat functions as an insulator. That’s what it does. It insulates us from jarring, it insulates us from electricity, it insulates us from hot and cold, it insulates us from bumps and bruises, it insulates in a wide variety of ways. Fat’s primary role is as an insulator. Does it have other purposes? Sure. But it’s primary role is as an insulator. It’s actually what creates the waterproof barrier of each cell that allows the contents of the cell to stay in the cell and the contents of whatever is outside, the extra-cellular fluid, to stay outside the cell. Fat is the essential barrier, an insulator.

If you pour a thimble full of fat, a thimble full of olive oil, onto a swimming pool, it will coat the entire surface of the swimming pool, creating a barrier. It’s a Please really good insulator. If you had a huge tube full of marbles and you poured in a little bit of oil and shook it up just a bit, that oil would coat every single marble, completely. It does the same thing to the cells inside the bloodstream. The fat starts functioning as a barrier as it coats itself around the insulin and coats itself around the sugar molecules, it makes it less effective for the insulin to find the sugar, for them to hook up. Now you’ve got a situation where there’s sugar in the bloodstream but it’s not getting out of the bloodstream. So the body produces a little bit more insulin. But the fat is blocking it. This is what’s referred to as insulin resistance. It’s actually not that the body is insulin resistant it’s that there’s too much fat in the bloodstream. Take away the fat and the insulin resistance goes away instantaneously, 100% of the time.

If the pancreas can’t produce enough insulin then we have a type I diabetes situation. Occasionally what will happen is that the adrenal glands will come in and they’ll kick in and try to help out the pancreas. That works fine except we can’t do that all the time or the adrenals become fatigued, what we refer to as chronic fatigue. Eventually what you end up with pancreas in the hole, adrenals in the hole, everybody falling down on the job and you’re still ending up with blood sugar levels that are too high.

Fortunately, our bodies are redundant in their design and there is a backup system for the backup system. There is a microbe that lives in the blood stream that literally consumes the excess sugar. The beauty of it is that in a one-all situation the microbe consumes the excess sugar and then as all species do when there’s an excess of food, it then blooms. The bloom creates a massive increase in population but there’s no more food supply so they just as quickly a die off. This is referred to in science as the balance of nature.

In this case what we see is that they’ll be a surge candida that eats the excess sugar quickly. It multiplies, it blooms, but now there’s no more excess sugar. The situation is resolved. There is candida in all human blood.

It’s a matter of how much candida. There’s no way to prevent sugar from being in human blood, so you can’t literally starve out the candida in that way. What you can prevent however is blood sugar becoming excessively high.

Since 1959 when the first studies came to light on this issue of ‘what is it that allows sugar into the bloodstream but does not allow it out of the bloodstream,’ it has been taught in science, in medical school and in health class that the problem is one of fat functioning as an insulator, preventing sugar from exiting the bloodstream. By lowering the fat we invariably allow the sugar out of the bloodstream and resolve a potential candida issue.

The funny thing is that the different approaches that we’re seeing are actually all the same approach. The approach used by some people for candida is to go on a fast, on a water-only fast, consume absolutely nothing for week or two, and give the adrenals a chance to recover, give the pancreas a chance to recover. While the candida issue itself goes away within 48-72 hours anyway and then doesn’t return.

The second approach is to go on a diet of eating almost nothing but greens, in which case blood sugar levels remain the same, the amount of fat in the bloodstream goes down and at the end of the week or two of eating nothing but greens you no longer have a candida problem. Unfortunately, you also don’t
have a healthy eating plan to follow through on.

The third approach is to eat all the fruit you want, eat all the vegetables you care for, but avoid the consumption of overtly fatty foods for a week or two, and allow your body to heal itself because you’re no longer causing the problem.

To read the rest of this transcript for free as well as access a full archive of information by health experts on abundance, optimum health, and longevity just like Dr. Doug Graham, please visit http://www.renegadehealth.com/inner-cir… for a free 30 day trial.

—End of article—

Though this is just an excerpt of the interview it does cover everything there was about Candida. I listened to the interview and after that they went to other topics.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

In this post I want to touch on Candida in bowel, how it affects your acne and health and what I think is the best way to deal with it.

I haven’t talked about Candida in bowels because I don’t think it’s an issue you should concerns yourself with. Not because I dismiss it but because it takes care of itself when you follow the diet and lifestyle guidelines in Clear for Life.

This was probably a mistake because it left some unanswered questions. Here’s one comment I got few days back.

As I wrote on one of your blogs, you dismissed some valid concerns a few candida sufferers have about following the method of upping carbs and reducing fat. In one lesson I was informed that insulin resistance due to high fat diet was really the culprit of candida, however later this was proven to only be applicable to the naturally occurring candida in the bloodstream- the back up plan our body has as you said. In another lesson you discussed the concept of leaky gut syndrome that could arise in individuals whose intestinal flora is unbalanced, increasing harmful parasites and yeast such as candida. The candida (as i have confirmed through extensive research) then morphs into a more invasive fungal form, and compromises the integrity of the intestinal wall allowing toxins (and quite possibly the fungal candida itself) to enter the bloodstream. Your reply to my query was that sugar has no effect on the growth of candida and the only chance of eliminating hostile candida was to go on a low fat diet…which makes absolutely no sense b/c if as you said the insulin is unable to (at the moment) stabilize blood sugar, blood candida will have to do the job and the sugar will also feed the candida in the gut…so really you are asking all of us with Candida infection to give the lil buggers a feast.

 

Two Candidas - one solution

There are two issues here.

• Insulin resistance and other blood sugar problems that allow, or demand, Candida in the bloodstream to multiply.
• Overgrowth of harmful bacteria, Candida and pathogens in the digestive track, also called gut dysbiosis. This can lead to leaky gut syndrome, where toxins from the bowel leak into your body and increase inflammation and overload the elimination organs.

Both of these are important for acne sufferers. If you want to permanently cure your acne you need to deal with both of them. Blood sugar problems lead to constant stream of hormones that increase sebum production. Leaky gut syndrome leads to constant stream of inflammatory toxins into your bloodstream. Both must stop before you can get clear.

I haven’t separated these issues because the same solution works for both problems.

I’ve beaten the issue of blood sugar problems and the role of fat to death, but I’ll touch on it briefly here since she (the person sending the comment) was still concerned about it.

First, high-fat diet is not the only reason behind insulin resistance. Your other lifestyle choices affect it also. Anyway, cutting out fat from your diet is one of the best ways to increase insulin sensitivity. This inevitably means eating more carbohydrates. And since fruits are the healthiest source of carbs, it means upping your fruit intake.

 

Keeping blood sugar levels stable with high-fruit diet

Second, I never said that sugar has no effect on Candida. Obviously it has. But you need to understand that the key is blood sugar levels, not how much sugar you eat. High and erratic blood sugar levels = Candida, stable blood sugar levels = no problems. And as you’ll see eating sugar doesn’t lead to high blood sugar levels, contrary to what 99% of Candida websites tell you.

In her comment she said that upping carb intake makes no sense because insulin cannot transport the glucose to cells. If this were true it eating more fruits wouldn’t make sense. It would be a very stupid idea.

But it’s not true. As you eat less fat, and fix all the other lifestyle choices that affect insulin sensitivity, insulin starts working again. Yes, you have to go through a transition period, but for most people it’s very short. Like few days. New Clear for Life customers frequently email me telling that the oiliness of their skin reduced almost overnight after switching to Clear for Life diet and lifestyle. A clear indication that their insulin sensitivity improved.

 

19 bananas a day, no effect on blood sugar levels

When your insulin receptors work well glucose won’t stay in the bloodstream long enough to feed Candida overgrowth. You can eat all the fruit you want and your blood sugar levels remain stable. Steve Pavlina commented about this in his raw food diet trial. Here’s what he had to say.

I monitored my blood sugar using a blood sugar testing device, the same kind diabetics may use. It showed no discernible spikes in blood sugar throughout the trial whatsoever — absolutely none. In fact, my blood sugar remained incredibly steady throughout the trial. My highest blood sugar reading of the trial was 94, which is still medium-low. All that sweet fruit in my diet simply did not have any adverse effect on my blood sugar.

Eating this way gave my blood sugar more consistency than ever. I couldn’t spike my blood sugar on this diet if I tried. Even eating 19 bananas in one day made no difference.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/02/raw-food-diet/

19 bananas a day, and no effect on blood sugar levels! All that evil sugar and yet where’s the spike on blood sugar and insulin levels all those Candida websites claim will happen? It flew out the door with the fat.

So you are not giving the lil buggers a feast by eating lots of fruits. And neither are you feeding the Candida in the bowel, as I’ll explain later.

Note, processed sugar is still evil. It has no nutrients and eating it forces the body to dip into its reserves to digest it. So stay away from processed sugar but eat all the fruit you want.

 

Candida in the bowel

Now let’s talk about the other issue of Candida. Candida in the bowel.

The prevailing wisdom is that Candida turns invasive because the harmful bacteria in the gut overwhelmed the probiotic (beneficial) bacteria. The solution to the problem is to help probiotic bacteria grown and ‘rebalance’ the colon micro flora.

Bowel dysbiosis can happen for many reason, such as:

• Frequent use of antibiotics and other drugs
• Pesticides and other chemicals in food and water
• Poor diet and lifestyle

I want to focus on the diet aspect here.

 

Indigestion = leaky gut = Candida

In the Acne 101 lesson where I talked about leaky gut syndrome I explained that indigestion is the main dietary cause for leaky gut syndrome. Undigested food enters the gut where the bacteria ferment and putrefy it, which leads to many toxic compounds. What happens in the gut depends mainly on two things:

• Substances (foods) available for fermentation/putrefaction; for example when bacteria feast on meat they create different toxins than when they feast on vegetable matter. As a rule of thumb, fiber from fruits and vegetables supports the beneficial bacteria, whereas most other foods help the harmful bacteria grow.
• How long the food stays in the gut. Obviously the longer the food stays in the gut the more time the bacteria has to feast on it. Also if the transit time through your digestive system is 48 hours the bacteria have more food than they would if the transit time would be 18 hours.

So your goal is to give the beneficial bacteria as much food as possible and to make sure that the bad stuff doesn’t stay there too long.

 

Raw food diet helps probiotic bacteria

This just screams for increased consumption of plant fiber. More fruits and vegetables.

First because the fiber in fruits and vegetables contains prebiotics, substances that feed the beneficial bacteria. This article has lots more on the topic (I recommend you read it): http://www.jacksongi.com/DIETS/Colon-Gas-Flatus-Prevention/colon_gas.aspx

Second, plant fiber reduces the time food stays in your large intestine and it scrubs your colon clean of any impurities. So there’s less food for the harmful bacteria.

This is another reason why standard Candida diet advice borders idiotic. By reducing carbohydrate consumption you need to eat more meat and fats - the exact substances that feed the harmful bacteria. And the food also stays longer in the gut. On the positive note they often recommend eating more vegetables, which at least partially corrects this.

Finally, raw fruits and vegetables are the easiest foods to digest. Your meal is completely digested before it enters the gut. Sugar and other things the harmful bacteria and Candida could eat are absorbed before they can get their hands on it. The only thing that’s left is the fiber, which feeds the probiotic bacteria.

Compare that to meats and fats the dominate the standard Candida diets. These foods are hard to digest. Digesting them demands lots of time and effort. And when eaten in poor combinations, which almost everybody does, they are never digested fully.

So standard Candida diet gives plenty of food for the harmful bacteria to produce toxins that just prolong leaky gut syndrome and your acne problems.

 

Conventional Candida diet is plainly irrational

Here we have the standard Candida diet that:

• Perpetuates insulin resistance by saturating blood with fat
• Feeds the harmful bacteria in the gut and allows leaky gut syndrome to continue

Then we have the diet that makes sense. A diet that:

• Helps to increase insulin sensitivity and reduce blood sugar problems
• Helps the beneficial bacteria to kick bad bacteria butt

None of this information is in anyway controversial or difficult to understand. All of this is easily available from public sources, makes perfect sense and produces very quick results.

But for some reason people have just been blinded with the fear of sugar and cannot see these glaringly obvious and very rational points. And so we have saturated the Internet with Candida websites that offer advice that is irrational and borderlines idiotic - and keeps recreating the very problem they propose to solve over and over.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Stacy emailed me with another jewel of misinformation about Candida and acne.

She said that she just discovered that she "suffers" from severe Candida infection. I put the word suffer on quotes because Candida is not something you suffer from. In all likelihood it’s saving your life. Anyway, she said that after her "research" she discovered that she shouldn’t eat fruits. The reasoning goes that fruit has sugar and sugar feed Candida. Hence fruit is bad.

I covered this in Candida and acne page on natural-acne-solution.com. Anyway, here it is again in a nutshell.

First, Candida is not caused by eating sugar. It’s caused by problems with blood sugar metabolism. There’s a world of difference there.

In a recent blood sugar post I mentioned that blood sugar metabolism problems are an issue of output. Meaning the glucose can’t get out of the blood stream. That means insulin resistance.

Here’s how the blood sugar thing and Candida works. You eat and the food is converted to glucose. Glucose goes into the bloodstream, and from there insulin escorts it into your cells. Insulin resistance weakens the action of insulin and glucose stays in the bloodstream.

Your body cannot allow too much glucose to remain in the bloodstream. It can cause some serious health problems, and even death.

That’s where Candida comes in. It multiplies and eats away the excess blood sugar and hence saves your live. So instead of cursing Candida, bless it.

Now that you understand Candida let’s see what you can do about it.

The culprit behind insulin resistance and blood sugar problems is excess fat - not carbs.

When you eat too much fat, your blood gets ‘fatty’. All the fat you are is now floating in your blood. Now your red blood cells, sugar molecules, insulin and insulin receptors at cells are all covered in fat. This layer of fat prevents insulin from working effectively; hence causing insulin resistance.

And after a high-fat meal your blood can remain fatty up to 24 hours.

Clear out the fat from your bloodstream and you can go willy-nilly on fruits without any problems. And soon you’ll discover that your Candida infection is gone.

I know that practically all Candida sites tell you the exact opposite thing. They also say that you have to stick to the diet for months. Some people have been on these high-fat, low-carb diets for years without making any progress.

Candida, like all yeasts, is a short-lived organism. It’s life span is measured in hours. If you don’t constantly feed it with glucose it cannot survive in your bloodstream in large numbers. Candida overgrowth dies-off very quickly.

Just to nail the point home I’m going to quote Steve Pavlina. Steve writes one of the most popular self-development blogs in the web. A while ago he did a 30-day trial on low-fat, raw vegan diet. He kept a detailed diary during the whole time.

Here’s his comment about blood sugar levels during the trial:

I monitored my blood sugar using a blood sugar testing device, the same kind diabetics may use. It showed no discernible spikes in blood sugar throughout the trial whatsoever — absolutely none. In fact, my blood sugar remained incredibly steady throughout the trial. My highest blood sugar reading of the trial was 94, which is still medium-low. All that sweet fruit in my diet simply did not have any adverse effect on my blood sugar.

Eating this way gave my blood sugar more consistency than ever. I couldn’t spike my blood sugar on this diet if I tried. Even eating 19 bananas in one day made no difference.

Raw Food Diet

Isn’t that just weird that all that ‘evil sugar’ did nothing to spike his blood sugar levels? Not even 19 bananas.

I recommend you read Steve’s post. It details out what happened to him during 100% raw food diet. It’s going to blow your mind, especially the tidbit about athletic performance and muscle development.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin