Can I eat sourdough bread if I have a Candida yeast infection? Is it okay for me eat sourdough bread? I’ve been told to avoid all sourdough bread by my naturopath or my doctor or my nutritionist or chiropractor or whoever.

Well, after working with Candida patients for a long time now, we can tell you with confidence that in most cases, sourdough bread is, in fact, quite okay to eat when you have a candida infection.

You might think this is a bit of a silly statement, but it’s based really on clinical experience. Sourdough bread is not made the way commercial bread is made. It’s made with a starter. A starter which is basically flour and water which attracts wild yeasts and bacteria over a period of several days up to a week. It’s a very sour flavored starter that you use to mix in with the flour and make a dough with.

Bread’s been made like this for a long, long, long time. And the more commercial breads use the Baker’s yeast, which is an entirely different thing. But the sourdough starter will attract various kinds of saccharomyces or wild yeasts into it. Like saccharomyces exiguus, for example, which is like a wild kind of a yeast. The saccharomyces yeast does not affect Candida, so you’re not going to get rampant yeast infection from eating sourdough bread.

In fact, several strains of beneficial lactobacilli like lactobacillus plantarum and salivarius and even lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, which was discovered in San Francisco in 1969 back in the “flower power” hippie days when I was a young guy. Sourdough bread was all the rage. And lots of people in San Francisco made sourdough bread. The hippies made it. It was a common food to eat. A very “cool” food to eat back then. It’s still cool today. It’s a very, very good bread to eat.

But what about gluten, Should I avoid gluten when I’ve got a yeast infection? I don’t really buy into the whole anti-gluten theory with most people.

With some people, we certainly agree gluten’s not a beneficial protein to have. But for the majority of people with normal reasonably functioning digestive systems will not have a problem with the gluten. In fact, we don’t really believe that you should take gluten entirely out of the diet of a patient with a yeast infection because they lose too much weight. They lose a lot of interest in their diet and they’re going to quickly revert back to all the crap foods that they were eating prior. So it’s not a great idea in a physical sense or psychological sense to avoid all breads from the diet. We really don’t believe it.

Sourdough bread is okay to eat on the Candida diet. Maybe initially a bit of caution there if you’ve got serious Candida that you might want to really pull back on all kinds of wheat grains. But we’ve never been a fan of taking all grains out of the diet. These modified or starch modified diets where we take every kind of grain out of the diet. We think they’re a lot of crap. We really can’t buy into them. Brown rice, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, many grains suit people, and you’ll find that one grain may suit you better than another. It’s experimenting. It’s trial and error. But sourdough bread we’re quite happy with if it’s a quality sourdough bread and you eat small to moderate amounts per day, we really don’t see it being a problem with a yeast infection.