“The Body Ecology Diet: Recovering Your Health and Rebuilding Your Immunity” offers a road map for getting candidiasis under control.

If you are Lyme patient being treated with long-term antibiotics, you may already know about candidiasis. This is a condition that can happen when antibiotics kill off the “good flora” in your gut. Then, a kind of yeast that’s normally present in small amounts—candida albicans—can grow out of control and start causing problems throughout your whole body.

Candidiasis has been linked to many symptoms—food allergies, digestive disorders, headaches, chronic vaginitis, and brain fog, to name a few.

People starting antibiotic treatment are typically advised to take probiotics to help keep the flora in the gut properly balanced, which keeps the yeast in check. Once yeast has spread throughout your system, it can be extremely difficult to get rid of.

If candida is a problem for you, you should take a look at the newly revised edition of “The Body Ecology Diet” (Hay House, 2011) by Donna Gates. It offers a strict but apparently effective way to restore balance to the body and repair the immune system for those challenged by candidiasis.

It frankly sounds a bit difficult. Changing one’s eating habits usually is. But I’ve heard good reports from people who have tried it. A typical comment: “I got so fed up with my symptoms, I was willing to try anything.”

The book offers a 4-page questionnaire to help determine if your symptoms are yeast-connected. But the author suggests, “The best way to figure out whether you have candidiasis is to try the Body Ecology Diet for 10 days and observe whether your symptoms begin clearing up.”

The diet has some advice Lyme patients have come across before, such as no alcohol, sugar or gluten-containing foods. But it veers into new territory after that: lists of foods that should or shouldn’t be eaten together (eat fruits alone and on an empty stomach, eat protein with non-starchy vegetables); recommendations to cook with coconut oil or ghee; the inclusion of ocean vegetables, like agar, kelp, and dulse; and fermented foods like kefir and apple cider vinegar.

To help you along the new path, the author includes a chapter on menu suggestions and recipes, and a “Body Ecology Diet” shopping list.

The author reminds us that completely eliminating yeast from the body is impossible, but you can tame the problem. “The goal is to conquer the runaway, pathogenic candida infection and bring the body back to a state of health where a strong immune system prevails.”

TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland, LymeDisease.org’s VP for Education and Outreach. Contact her at dleland@lymedisease.org.