We have an email here from a patient from Japan. We get a few emails from Japan from time to time and from Korea and different places. Here’s a lady asking is popcorn okay to have on the Candida diet?

Popcorn is perfectly fine to eat on the Candida diet, and we’ll tell you why. Because it satisfies a desire. It’s very important to bear that in mind. We read so much crap on the internet about you can’t eat this and you can’t eat that. These are the diet police out there saying, “Don’t eat this. Don’t eat that. You can eat that. This will cause Candida to grow.” There’s so much garbage on the internet. All this stupid advice by people who’ve never seen patients with Candida. They might have had a bad experience themselves eating rancid popcorn from those stupid packages you put in the microwave, which is a dumb thing to do.

Air popped corn or if you get a nice saucepan, put a bit of olive oil in it like we do, good quality non-GMO corn, pop it, Keltic sea salt, not that Himalayan stuff, which we think is toxic. Keltic sea salt, a little bit of natural butter; you’ve got a perfect snack for Candida.

It’s important to snack on foods that you like to eat that give you some enjoyment because we believe that people with bad Candida need to do something that brings them a bit of enjoyment every day. When you start eliminating every possible carbohydrate out of the diet because it may cause a flare up, we think you’ve got a problem on your hands emotionally and psychologically more than you have physically.

Most of my patients can eat good popcorn that’s popped in the correct way with no problem at all. I’m saying that you’re not going to eat a two-pound bag of popcorn in a day. Don’t get those huge big bags and sit in front of your widescreen and gobble it all down and think you’re going to be okay. It’s all about moderation of snacks. There are many different snacks you can eat, but you need to understand it’s about moderating the snacks you eat. And also, when you take a new food on your snack food entry diet, you start with small amounts. You may want to start with a small cup of popcorn and just have that with a little bit of salt and butter and see how that feels. Of course, you’re not going to put sugar on it. And of course, you’re not going to be silly and buy from Trader Joe’s or those sort of places those packets that you pop into the microwave with rancid fats. That is if you use microwaves, which I don’t really think are right to use anyway.

We just read some interesting posts on the Candida forum that someone said that her naturopath said they’re not good because they leave husks in the bowel and they form little pockets that the Candida can grow and multiply. WAbsolutely nonsense! That’s like saying you can’t have seeds in your diet because they get caught in bowel pockets like diverticula. Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. They don’t get caught in the bowel. You pass these things out.

So other advice we’ve read is they’re carbohydrates and Candida will eat any kind of carbohydrates, so don’t eat it because they’ll multiply. Well, that’s going to exclude a lot of foods out of your diet if you’re going to eliminate all carbohydrates from your diet and just eat fats and proteins because vegetable contain carbohydrates. A lot of them do. So what are you going to do? Stop all vegetables, all fruits? Boring. If you like popcorn, eat popcorn when you’ve got Candida, but in moderation. That’s my take on it.

We hope that explains your email and gives you a bit of an understanding of our take on popcorn. We think it’s perfectly fine.