For many people, restricting their caffeine intake is an excellent idea while they’re on the Candida diet. Giving up caffeine completely is not always necessary, but it really depends on your own health situation.
Caffeinated drinks like tea and coffee have some undoubted, well-researched health benefits, and for most people drinking a small amount of caffeine will not be a problem.
However, if your Candida overgrowth has made you tired and burned out, it might be better to minimize your caffeine intake.
Here are three ways in which caffeine can make it more difficult to recover from a Candida overgrowth:
1. It weakens your immunity
One of the worst things about drinking too much caffeine is that it impairs your immune system’s ability to fight off harmful invaders. This can result in you being more susceptible to illness and infection.
Regular caffeine use triggers a chronic fight-or-flight response from your body. That means that it releases stress hormones like cortisol, slows down your digestion, and diverts resources away from your immune system.
A chronically weakened immune system leaves you more vulnerable to gut imbalances like Candida, yeast infections, and more.
2. It messes with your sleep
Studies consistently show that caffeinated drinks reduce the total time and quality of sleep, even if consumed several hours before.
If you continue to drink coffee or other caffeinated drinks, you should consider stopping them completely at noon. That should ensure a restful sleep.
Drinking coffee stimulates your adrenal glands to produce the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol too.
If you do this several times a day for a few years, your body adjusts to the levels of stress hormones, so your adrenal glands have to work harder to produce enough for the same effect.
This can disrupt the feedback loop between your hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenals (the HPA axis), impairing your body’s ability to regulate hormone levels, and leading to symptoms like weight gain, mood disorders, and disrupted sleep.
The more caffeine you drink, the more likely you are to suffer from anxiety, restlessness, nervousness, insomnia, stomach upset and irritability.
3. It raises your blood sugar
That same fight-or-flight response can lead to a long-term, consistent increase in your blood sugar. Sugar is, of course, the food for yeast like Candida albicans.
Recent research has found that caffeine may lower the sensitivity of your cells to insulin.
When your cells become less sensitive to insulin, they don’t react the way they should when it’s released into your bloodstream – that is, they don’t absorb as much sugar from your blood after you eat or drink.
As a result, your pancreas thinks it has to make more insulin, pushing your levels even higher after you’ve eaten a meal. Because your blood sugar rises after eating, you may and up with chronically high blood sugar levels.
Higher blood sugar makes Candida infections in the gut and elsewhere much more likely.
For more on healthy alternatives for energy contact Linda at info@bestbody4life.ca
