What to Avoid If You Have Lyme Disease

If you get Lyme disease, it may be necessary to make a change in your lifestyle, particularly your diet, in order to make the treatment time shorter. As you probably already know, lyme disease cannot be cured. What can be done is to treat the symptoms of the disease. To quicken the recovery process, you will have to avoid certain foods.

These are:

• Gluten

As a lyme disease patient, you will need to avoid any foods that contain gluten. This is because gluten causes inflammation. Consuming gluten may cause diarrhea, headaches, abdominal pains, skin conditions and a loss of weight. In less severe cases, the consumption of gluten will cause digestive issues, heart burn, gas, a lack of energy, pains in the joints and muscles and skin rashes. All these are symptoms of inflammation. For people with lyme disease, avoiding inflammation is very important for a faster recovery. This is because lyme disease results in excessive inflammation of the body.

In addition, since the human body was never evolved to digest gluten, it is not always well digested. Besides causing digestive issues, this triggers an immune response in the body. In people with gluten intolerance, the immune system will always respond to gluten. This immune response involves the body attacking its own cells. Since the immune system is already overworked by the lyme disease, it is important to avoid gluten.  

• Sugar and Carbohydrates

When carbohydrates are consumed, the body digests them into sugars. Sugars and carbohydrates consumed therefore provide food for yeast in the body. Doctors specialized in treating lyme disease have found that the growth of yeast, and more specifically candidiasis, contributes to the development of the symptoms of lyme disease.

Even further, the consumption of sugar has been found to directly suppress the immune system. One teaspoon has been discovered to suppress the body’s immunity for up to 16 hours. If you consume sugar regularly, then your immune system will never function optimally to effectively fight the lyme disease bacteria. Lyme disease also lowers the efficiency of the immune system. If you go further and suppress it through your diet, you are sure to spend a much longer time treating the disease.

In many cases, white sugar (the worst of all the sugars) will be found in snacks which also contain gluten, and this only makes it a worse option for taking in carbohydrates.

Fruits are known to be healthy foods, mainly because of their vitamin and mineral content. However, these are also eventually broken down into simple sugars and provide food for yeast in the gut. If you are suffering from lyme disease, you need to consider limiting or even restricting the consumption of fruits and vegetables. Also, cereals and wheat products should be avoided by lyme disease patients as they end up providing food for candidiasis.

To avoid simple sugars, a lyme disease patient should eat vegetables. Apart from providing vitamins and minerals necessary for boosting the immune system, these foods contain fiber. Fiber is important in aiding digestion. Since many lyme disease patients suffer from digestion issues, this will prove helpful.

• Oxalic Acid

Like gluten, oxalic acid causes inflammation in the body. These chemicals are found in many common foods such as spinach, peanuts and black pepper. Similarly, all these should be avoided to reduce the severity of the lyme disease symptoms. Patients often find that they do better if they avoid foods with oxalates.