Spices and the Candida Diet
Can you imagine eating a hamburger, hot dog, or a loaf or without ketchup? Well, even if ketchup isn’t your thing, most of us enjoy our favorite foods with some kind of condiment. I’ve seen hot dogs piled high with mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, soy sauce, and relish. A bit silly to me, but I’m sure very tasty to many. It can be very difficult not to use spices but many of us who are trying to stick to a candida diet are tasked with this very challenge.
The Candida Diet is a diet used to treat candidiasis, which is an overgrowth of yeast (Candida) in the intestinal tract. The diet suggests eliminating or reducing a variety of foods and ingredients that aggravate this condition. Seasonings are eliminated in this diet because they typically contain a variety of ingredients that are prohibited in the Candida diet. The biggest harm is vinegar, but corn syrup, sugar, salt, citric acid, monosodium glutamate, and artificial flavors are all very common ingredients in seasonings. All of these ingredients help exacerbate candidiasis by nourishing the candida. Sugar and additives are common food sources of candida. This is why commercially available spices are not allowed in the Candida diet. While we wouldn’t indulge in any hot dogs on the candida diet because they are also off limits, there are meals we can make like unleavened meatloaf for which we might want to use a condiment. So are there any commercially available spices that we can use on the candida diet? To be honest I didn’t find much but I came up with the following ideas for spices.
I’m a big fan of Chinese food so I had to find one soy sauce An alternative to use with the unleavened Chinese food you made. Traditional soy sauce contains salt and corn syrup, both of which are problematic ingredients in the diet. Fortunately, Bragg Liquid Aminos is an excellent substitute for yeast-free soy sauce. Contains only soybeans and purified water. Plus, it’s gluten-free and contains no preservatives.
It is difficult to find free yeast ketchup substitute. Ketchup contains a variety of ingredients and seasonings and once you get used to the taste of Heinz, it can be very difficult to get used to something else. I create my own ketchup substitute using tomato paste and lemon juice. This seems to work for me. I looked for a commercially available vinegar-free alternative but could not find one, even the organic variety of store ketchup contains vinegar.
mayonnaise It’s another condiment that I haven’t found available without vinegar. However, it is very easy to make mayonnaise at home and homemade mayonnaise tastes much better than store-bought.
Although I haven’t done that before mustard It can be made at home too and I’m sure it can be adapted to make a candida diet friendly. It requires mustard seeds and their powder and you can replace the vinegar with lemon juice.
