The question we get asked quite regularly and we recently got asked only a few months ago from a lady in Australia was what kind of cheese can I eat on the Candida diet? Is there any kind of cheese which is better than others?

As we all know, one of the big things which you may have read in our candida cleanse diet is that we are really interested in people taking out as many of the potentially allergenic foods from their diet. This is the second stage of the Candida Crusher diet approach. We take out the potentially allergenic foods and we look at a hypo or low allergenic diet with people.

We know that cow’s milk has the potential to have the highest allergenicity of any kind of food that you can consume, any kind of food. After completing over 350-400 food allergy profiles, these are blood based food allergy profiles, when we worked with a medical doctor in Australia in the 1990s. We worked with the pediatric population, tested 350 children, and we found that in 70 percent of cases, cow’s milk came back as the primary allergen.

Cheese didn’t come back really as a high allergen at all. The small percentage of children, who had a very strong bovine allergy where the beef came back strong, as well as the milk, then the cheese antibody count would come up as well. The point we are making here is cow’s milk is the big one. And, of course, any products associated with cow’s milk have got a potential for allergenicity as well.

Let us explain this a bit more in detail because it sounds a bit confusing to you probably at this stage. Milk has the potential to affect people both from the allergy perspective as well as the lactose perspective. Lactose is a sugar found in milk. We know that Candida can thrive on sugars, so cow’s milk contains lactose, therefore, it can allow Candida to proliferate in the digestive system. But cow’s milk also contains a protein called beta casein, and beta casein is a primary allergen in many people’s bodies.

You’ll find that with many people like you hear us sort of coughing at the moment, we had some cereal this morning with a bit of cow’s milk in it. Now we know we shouldn’t really have cow’s milk, but we enjoy it sometimes, a little bit of cold fresh milk on some cereal or some porridge. And within a few hours, phlegm builds up. Is it Candida? No. In our case, it’s a food allergy. It’s the beta casein. We know we have an allergy toward that. Intolerance and allergies are two separate things.

Allergies involve antigen responses, whereas intolerances usually involve problems with enzymes in the body. For example, a person who doesn’t have sufficient lactase or the enzyme to break lactose down has what we call lactose intolerance, which is not an allergy. we hope that explains the difference between those two.

Anyway, we are off track now. Coming back to the cheeses. Of course, cheese is made from milk. Then the problem arises do we need to look at cheeses with a low lactose content with a low beta casein content. We’ve not generally found cheese to be anywhere near a problem with Candida as we have cow’s milk. Any cheese made, for example, like goat’s feta is one of our favorite cheeses. We make up a nice salad with olives, tomatoes, lettuce; we use all the things out of the garden. We use raw cut spinach, endive, parsley, basil, and all these things. We’ll put them in a big bowl of lemon juice and olive oil on top and then We’ll crumble up some goat’s feta and put some black olives through that, some cucumber. It’s a beautiful salad. We never have a problem with phlegm and coughing with goat’s at all, and you’ll find the same.

Goat’s cheese is usually okay with Candida. Some cheeses that you might want to try with Candida are mozzarella cheese. Some of the Swiss cheeses aren’t too bad. Monterrey jack cheese, for example. But the goat’s cheese, in our opinion, is one of the better ones. We tend to stay away from soy cheeses and don’t even contemplate those fake cheeses in the plastic wrap. That’s just basically plastic. You can actually get a hold of one of those fake pieces of cheese and light it, it’ll actually burn and drip. You want to avoid that kind of junk at all costs in your diet.

Make sure when you start on your Candida diet that you certainly take all cow’s milk out and you probably want to take cheese out and start experimenting with cheese after about six to eight weeks. Start including the goat’s feta and then small amounts of Swiss cheese or the mozzarella. Start small. Don’t ever take large amounts of cheese. And you may find like a lot of our patients that different cheeses are perfectly acceptable with Candida but in small amounts.