Candida Diet Friendly Canned Tomatoes

Tomatoes are ingredient that I use frequently in my candida diet recipes.  I prefer using fresh tomatoes over canned any day but using fresh tomatoes in every single recipe is very inconvenient.  When I first went on the candida diet I abandoned all use of canned tomato products after I quickly discovered that at least 95% of canned tomatoes in the supermarket contained citric acid.  Citric acid is a preservative that is created by means of fermentation.  Fermentation is a process where yeast and or bacteria is added to a substance.  This is one of the reasons that citric acid is prohibited on the candida diet.  Additionally, citric acid is usually derived from a sugar or carbohydrate sources that are prohibited on the candida diet. 

Many candida diet recipes that I encountered would instruct me to use canned tomatoes without citric acid but this really annoyed because as far as I knew this didn’t exist.  These recipes never mentioned a brand name or gave me a clue of where I could find canned tomato products without citric acid.  I started to study the labels on the different brands in the store to see if canned tomatoes without citric acid did actually exist.  I just knew that I would leave the store defeated and be doomed to order canned tomatoes without citric acid via the Internet for a pretty penny no doubt.  To my delight there were actually a few brands in the store (I usually go to Shoprite) that did not include citric acid.  Many brands such as Hunt’s and RedPack use citric acid in all of their canned tomato products but with a few of the other brands the use of citric acid varies depending on the type of canned tomato product.  So the following is a summary of the canned tomato products that I recommend for the candida diet.   If you have found other canned tomato products without citric acid please feel free to leave a comment.  This is invaluable information for the candida dieter and will make candida diet cooking a bit easier for us all.

Crushed Tomatoes
Cento Crushed Tomatoes
Rienzi Crushed Tomatoes

Diced or Chopped Tomatoes
Pomi Chopped Tomatoes  
Luigi Vitelli

San Marzano
I could not find any brands but I will continue to search. 

Stewed Tomatoes
I could not find any brands but I will continue to search. 

Tomato Paste
Contadina
Shoprite
Luigi Vitelli
Cento
Del Monte Organic

Tomato Puree
Cento Tomato Puree

Tomato Sauce
Pomi Strained Tomatoes (Same consistency as regular tomato sauce)  
Cento Tomato Sauce (This is a maybe as it does not have citric acid but does contain salt, I do use it sometimes)
Goya Tomato Sauce (This is a maybe as it does not have citric acid but does contain salt and Modified Food Starch)

Whole Tomatoes
I could not find any brands but I will continue to search. 

Whole Cherry Tomatoes
Cento (This is a maybe as it does not have citric acid but does contain salt)