We are often quizzed by guests before they arrive regarding consumption of fruit juices where they have heard, read or been advised by a health care professional about Candida. Usually some time in the company of our nutritional genius Ed helps them to come to a more informed understanding, that it's not quite the universal 'bad' guy it's often painted out to be. 

As an evidenced based nutritionist Ed is always keen to present the science, and the passage below is taken from an excellent article from Nutrition Facts which can help to clarify some of the evidence based understanding from what can be quite heavy rumour and innuendo.

"Candida is a normal constituent of our gut flora. Get some Candida in your bloodstream, though, and it can cause a life-threatening infection. But it is normal to have some Candida in your mouth or colon—what’s important is location! location! location! It’s similar to how having stool bacteria in our colon is normal, but stool bacteria in our blood or a wound would be bad. Because of the ability of Candida to cause problems in the wrong location or in people who are immunocompromised, a Candida-syndrome theory arose, linking the presence of Candida to all sorts of health problems. This led to “mycophobia”—or fungalphobia—“spreading due to the false interpretation” that the finding of Candida in your mouth or stool is evidence of some kind of infection, rather than just being totally normal. (If you think the authors of that paper were being a little overdramatic with their phobia talk, just google “Candida” and you’ll see.)

Not only is it normal to have Candida in your gut, you apparently can’t get rid of it even if you wanted to. Give people powerful antifungal drugs, and you can drop levels down, but they pop right back up again as soon as you stop the antifungals. What about the concept that sugar feeds yeast, so you should go on a low sugar diet? It doesn’t make much sense because sugars should get absorbed high up in the small intestine and never even make it down into the colon unless you’re lactose intolerant. Indeed, there appears to be no correlation between Candida counts and sugar consumption. You can put people on a high-sugar diet by adding an additional 14 spoonfuls of sugar to their diets and still not see an effect. Of course, there are lots of science-based reasons to cut sugar from your diet, but Candida does not appear to be one of them"

Find out more from Ed via his own site at fooded.nl