Potatoes and Candida: Should I Be Concerned?

People will tell you that starchy foods turn into sugar and feed Candida. Yet, so many of my clients have no problems eating potatoes or sweet potatoes without experiencing dysbiosis or gut issues.

I have many patients who do perfectly fine on a diet that includes potatoes and rice. These are people who have stool tests positive for Candida, and yet they tolerate starchy foods just fine.

If it was true that all starchy foods feed Candida, a lot of people couldn’t eat a potato without suffering the consequences. Probably one in four people globally could never eat spuds because their baseline gut flora includes Candida. If potatoes really did feed yeast, the Candida would bloom, and make the person sick. It’s just not true.

Potatoes affect some people with Candida, but they also affect some people who haven’t got Candida. I’ve had clients who had terrible GI symptoms in response to eating potatoes, and yet they didn’t have any significant harmful microorganisms in their digestive tract.

Potato is a high starch food. Many people can’t break starches down because they got poor digestive health. That doesn’t always mean there’s a harmful gut organism feeding on the potato.

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People often have the crazy assumption that there are two camps of food: foods you can eat, the foods you can’t eat. Then you have the food police with big signs pointing “Don’t eat, don’t eat” to these foods. Yet, a lot of people tolerate those foods with no problems.

Don’t listen to what someone else says about any one food. Listen to what your digestive system says. Doesn’t it make sense? Think about it. Have you tried potatoes to see if they cause a reaction? Have you tried them boiled? Have you tried them mashed? Have you tried to modify that starch in different ways to see how your tummy reacts? Have you tried to eat at different times of the day? Have you tried the potato in conjunction with some digestive enzymes? Have you tried to eat potato when you eliminated all alcohol from your diet for three to six months? Probably not.

Many people seem to think I’ve got a rather simplistic approach towards healing the gut, but I haven’t. It’s quite a sophisticated approach because it involves trying to get people to understand that it’s a simple approach. Play that back one more time and have a listen to it. It makes sense. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29568082 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30986463

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