The Herpes Diet: Food to Avoid

Arginine
Many believe that to cause a herpes outbreak and for cold sores to replicate, herpes requires the amino acid arginine. Therefore, to minimize the possibility of a cold sore or a herpes outbreak, making a point to avoid arginine rich food can dramatically decrease how frequently herpes becomes a serious issue. Unfortunately, some of the best food and beverages contain high amounts of arginine. Specifically, a diet that restricts herpes the best would have a low amount of chocolate, oats (including oatmeal and protein shakes), and nuts in general. While it may be impossible to cut the listed food from your diet, keeping them from your diet while a herpes outbreak heals may speed recovery. Furthermore, taking a lysine supplement before eating the listed food may prevent the arginine from making your herpes outbreak worse, so you may keep food like peanutbutter in your diet without suffering from a cold sore if you're also eating a lot of cheese or are taking a lysine supplement.

Specific Kinds of Sugar
Some kinds of sugar may provoke herpes or keep herpes outbreaks from healing as quickly as they can. Therefore, you may want to minimize or completely cut artificial sweeteners, as well as refined or white sugar from your diet. For the best herpes minimizing diet, make sure you aren't using a lot of sugar in your beverages and be sure to check the list of ingredients in other products incorporated in your diet. It would be a shame to research a proper herpes minimizing diet just to later discover you had been eating food and drinking beverages with products which make herpes worse or increase the chance of a herpes outbreak. This may also mean cutting fatty or sugary foods from your diet.

Coffee
Probably the most difficult thing to cut from anyone's diet is coffee, whether it makes herpes worse or not. The good news is that occasionally drinking coffee won't make herpes especially worse or make herpes more likely to cause cold sores, because drinking coffee in excess probably isn't helping you very much anyway. The best advice to keeping coffee in your diet but simultaneously reducing your likelihood of developing a herpes caused cold sore is to weaken your coffee tolerance by skipping a few days and then making sure you drink in moderation. This may be a difficult diet change, but being addicted to coffee probably wasn't helping you anyway, and it definitely won't help your herpes.

WORKS CITED
Picozzi, Michele. Controlling Herpes Naturally: a Holistic Approach to Prevention and Treatment . Colorado Springs, CO: Southpaw, 1998. Print.