Eric Bakker, the naturopath. Thanks for coming back. Let’s talk about sugar addictions, cravings for sweet foods. It’s incredible. This is just out of my book, Candida Crusher, How to Break the Sugar Addiction. So it depends really how bad your sugar cravings are. I mean, for some people that I’ve seen in the clinic over the years, I worked out it takes sort of on average up to eight to 12 weeks to really properly break the sugar addiction cycle. Eight to 12 weeks, that seems like a long time but the first four days are the hardest.
So let’s just say you’re a person who’s had a cup of coffee, or a cup of tea, or some type of beverage with a few spoons of sugar in it. We’ve been having tradespeople over working on our kitchen now for some period of time and the man who did the roof, our roofing guy, [Al Rordy 00:00:50], the old Scotsman, he would drink seven or eight cups of tea a day with two or three teaspoons of white sugar in each cup, which seems crazy to me.
Now, Rordy’s uninterested really in anything but doing roofs, having some cold beer and drinking cups of tea or sugar. I mean, that’s fine. That’s Rory’s life. He enjoys it. But you’re out there and you’ve got a gut problem and you’ve got a sugar addiction, what the hell do you do? Or, you go an immune problem? The guy who did a lot of work on vitamin C, Sir Linus Pauling, who got two Nobel prizes, quite a remarkable guy, he worked out that the biochemical structure of sugar is very similar to the chemical structure of vitamin C. in fact, they compete with each other to get inside the cell of the human body. It’s quite amazing. So people often who love sugar often have vitamin C problems.
Try this tip. Take one to 2,000 milligrams of vitamin C per day for a few weeks. Start maybe slowly. So if you’re eating a lot of sugar, just start maybe with a quarter of a teaspoon of vitamin C powder per day and build it up. Just make sure that your vitamin C powder hasn’t got sugar in it. When I was in L.A. last time walking the health food stores, I was surprised how many vitamin C products I found actually listing sugars as an ingredient just to sweeten it up. That’s not what you want. You want pure vitamin C powder, and you’ll have to go to a company may be like Pure Encapsulations or Thorne Research, but you will get a pure product if you look.
Now, that product will have no sugar in it just vitamin C. Watch what happens when you start taking one to two grams per day ongoing for several weeks. You will notice that the sugar craving drops off. In fact, many people have told me that on three grams a day, it disappeared after 14 days. So there you go. That’s one trick.
The second trick is, which I wrote about also in Candida Crusher, I wrote about a herb called gymnema. Many people have said, “How do you spell that?” So here, now you can freeze it on the computer, gymnema sylvestre. So I’ll just hold it there. Right, did you get your photo? Good. Off to the herb shop or herbalist and try and get yourself some liquid gymnema. Okay? Now you only need a small amount of the gymnema really, just a little bit of that per day. If you get a killer craving or if you really want to have a candy bar or if you go shopping, that’s a good time to take gymnema. You take just a few drops in a glass of water, you drink that. Take some vitamin C if you want, go shopping, you won’t really be looking at candy bars or chocolate bars or things like that.
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So gymnema is extremely bitter and what it does is it suppresses the sweet craving. It really does. It works marvelous. I’ve had gymnema. I’ve used it for so many people with diabetes. I’ve found it to be invaluable for a diabetic because it also helps to improve the sensitivity of insulin in the body. So when you’ve had gymnema for some time, you’ll find that when you do have sweet stuff, it tastes so disgusting that you’ll get sick of just tasting that sweet stuff. That’s how I feel now. If I put a teaspoon of sugar in my mouth, I’d feel like… just like… sick because I just don’t eat sugar. The only sweet stuff I have in my diet is honey because I’m a beekeeper and I love honey.
I’ve had a lot of honey for many years now and in fact, my gut has never been in as good a shape as it has been the last 12 months since I’ve increased my honey intake. So don’t always think that sugars are bad. Some sugars are actually very healthy for the body and good quality, raw, unfiltered, unpasteurized honey is one of those sugars. I use it for basting. I marinated some lamb the other day with the honey, and soy, and garlic. It was fantastic. So not all sugars are Darth Vader. Okay? Not all sugars are evil.
It’s the refined white stuff that’s crap, stuff that we buy from the supermarket. If you get a really high-quality, pure maple syrup without all the junk in it or high-quality honey, small amounts regularly, no problem at all, especially when the tummy’s in good shape. But it’s the refined stuff that really encourages the production of candida in your gut. It’s the refined sugar that encourages the production of the bacteria that you don’t really want like Klebsiella and Citrobacter, bacteria implicated in autoimmune disease.
I don’t need to tell you all the reasons why you don’t need to have sugar. I’m just trying to explain to you that wean yourself off this stuff, you won’t really wanted anymore. You’ll have no need for it, no taste for it. But allow yourself several weeks in that process. Don’t forget the vitamin C powder. Don’t forget the gymnema sylvestre herb. Also, don’t forget the fact that it’s not good to hang around people who drink Sundays all the time and have lots of sweet stuff in their diet. There are other ways that you’re going to get happiness and enjoyment in your life just apart from sugar. Because sugar addictions end up in misery for many people who develop heart disease, autoimmune disease, lots of issues.
I’ve seen this now for so long, the connections there. I saw the connection with sugar very early on in my practice days. So don’t be a sugar addict. Once you’ve understand this principle, you get away from it and your gut turns into a better shape, you’ll find that the sugary foods won’t be calling your name so much anymore. You won’t have those strong desires. The desire will be gone. Why? Because the bacteria have changed? And you will be desiring spinach and healthy food like salmon, and broccoli, and some Brazil nuts. These are the healthy foods to eat. Right? Did we get that right? Good. Watch out for that white stuff.