What you eat affects almost every single part of your body.
Foods rich in carbs, sugars and processed foods that are loaded with artificial sugars dramatically change your microbial balance. Basically, when you eat excessive processed sugars and fats, your blood sugar level spikes up.
Bad bacteria and yeasts feed on this excessive sugar and grow uncontrollably. Secondly, high blood sugar levels also suppress your immunity.
With suppressed immunity and increased disease-causing microorganisms, your chances of getting vaginal infections are doubled.
How can your diet impact your vagina’s health?
Eating high amounts of sugars, especially artificial sugars, fats or eating high energy diets puts you at risk of developing health problems. Most importantly, such foods provide feeding grounds to bad disease-causing bacteria and yeasts. When bad bacteria and yeasts content increases it leads to an imbalance in the vaginal flora.
The way it works in the body is that when bad bacteria outgrow the naturally dominant lactobacilli, this ultimately causes bacterial vaginosis or BV and vaginal yeasts infections such as Candidiasis Albicans to appear.
What happens to your vagina when you eat too much sugar?
- Vaginal yeast infections
Eating too much sugar can cause vaginal yeast infections.
This is because when you eat sugar-containing foods, excess sugars end up in your blood. When this blood flows through the body, especially the vagina, bad yeasts feed on it. They grow in significant numbers causing vaginal yeast infections. However, there are other causes too but if your yeast infection is recurring then sugar is one of the major culprits.
- Eating too much sugar causes Bacterial vaginosis (BV)
Researchers have evaluated that a high intake of carbs, sugar and fats are associated with an increased risk of BV (a condition that happens when there is too much of certain bacteria in the vagina).
Secondly, eating too much sugar suppresses your immune system. Bad bacteria find it as an opportunity and feed on sugars to outnumber good ones. Therefore, we can conclude that eating too much sugar puts your natural defence down. Once your defence goes down, your risk of getting BV increases significantly.
- Other vaginal infections?
Yes, eating too much sugar can increase the chances of you contracting sexually transmitted diseases (STIs) like chlamydia and gonorrhoea. Chlamydia is the most commonly reported STD among women of reproductive age. Gonorrhoea, on the other hand, affects both men and women. It can affect your genitals, rectum and throat too.
Just how one thing leads to another if these STIs go untreated for a long period of time, they can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease or PID. It is an infection in a woman’s reproductive organs often characterized by pain in the abdomen, pain while having sex and fever.