Condiments and the Candida Diet
Can you imagine eating a hamburger, hot dog or mom’s meatloaf without ketchup? Okay even if ketchup is not your thing most of us enjoy our favorite foods with some sort of condiment. I have seen hot dogs piled high with mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, soy sauce and relish. A little ridiculous to me, but I am sure very tasty to many. It can be extremely hard not to use condiments but many of us who are trying to adhere to the candida diet are tasked with this very challenge.
The Candida diet is a diet used to treat candidiasis, an overgrowth of yeast (Candida) in the intestinal system. The diet suggests eliminating or reducing a variety of foods and ingredients that exacerbate this condition. Condiments are eliminated on this diet because they usually contain a variety of Candida diet prohibited ingredients. The biggest offender is vinegar but corn syrup, sugar, salt, citric acid, monosodium glutamate and artificial flavors are all very common ingredients in condiments. All of these ingredients help exacerbate candidasis by feeding the Candida. Sugar and additives are common food sources for Candida. This is why commercially available condiments are not allowed on the Candida diet. Although we will not be indulging in any hot dogs on the Candida diet because they are also prohibited there are meals that we can create such as yeast free meatloaf in which we may want to utilize a condiment. So are there any commercially available condiments that we can use on the Candida diet? To be honest, I have not found many but I have come up with the following ideas for condiments.
I am a huge friend of Chinese food so I had to find a Soy Sauce substitute to use with the yeast free Chinese food that I created. Traditional soy sauce contains salt and corn syrup both problematic ingredients for the diet. Fortunately, Bragg Liquid Aminos is an excellent yeast free soy sauce substitute. It is contains only soy beans and purified water. Additionally it is gluten free and contains no preservatives.
It is difficult to find a yeast free Ketchup substitute. Ketchup contains a variety of ingredients and spices and when you are used to the taste of Heinz it can be extremely difficult to get used to something else. I create my own ketchup substitute using lemon juice tomato paste. This seems to work for me. I have looked for a commercially available vinegar free substitute but have not found one, as even the organic variety of ketchup in the store contain vinegar.
Mayonnaise is another condiment that I have not found available without vinegar. Mayonnaise however is very easy to make at home and homemade mayonnaise tastes much better than the store bought ones.
Although I have never done it Mustard can be made at home too and I am sure adapted to make Candida diet friendly. It requires mustard seeds and powder and you can substitute lemon juice for the vinegar.
