Can a baby have a fungal infection? Yes – and undiagnosed, untreated fungal (yeast, thrush) infections could be one of one biggest failures of pediatrics today. How could this be?

I have often seen untreated thrush/fungal/yeast infections in babies, toddlers, and kids persist, then shift, into deeper, entrenched problems. Then the prescription drug parade ensues, usually in this order, with only limited or modest success: Prilosec (or other reflux medicine); Pediasure; Miralax; Ritalin, Concerta, or other stimulant, followed by something for anxiety or depression, like Straterra, Zoloft or Seroquel. Is this health care, or drug dependency? And are the kids feeling great, or lousy?

Most children who come to me for nutrition intervention only get to me as a last resort. They’ve been to gastroenterologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, feeding therapists, occupational therapists, behavior therapists, speech therapists. The last thing their parents want to do is change up the food in the house – especially when specialists don’t help them do that, and they tell parents it won’t do any good anyway (as most of them have told my patients). Too much work, right?

But eventually parents are at wits’ end. They have a picky child who eats poorly, grows weakly, or has reflux. Or they have an enthusiastic but still picky eater (read: stuffs food in mouth to choking) who loves starchy, sugary food like bread, chips, cheese crackers, candy, carbs, dairy junk (yogurt tubes or sugary milk substitutes). Their kids have big behavior problems: Tantrums well past toddler years. They can easily melt down, overstimulated, in public places, like restaurants, supermakets, or malls. They struggle at school, for being aggressive, combative, inattentive, or oppositional. All before they are five or six years old…. Uncle! Time to try that crazy nutrition stuff.

You’ve probably heard of Candida, or yeast infections, or thrush. And we’ve all heard a lot about gut biome, and how crucial it is for many aspects of health. This burgeoning area of research may not make the pharmaceutical industry very happy. Turns out that nearly any chronic condition – from Alzheimer’s, asthma, and autism to anxiety, depression, rheumatoid arthritis, and much more – may be treatable through improving the microflora (bacteria) in your gut.

How do you do that?

Easy. You change what you eat. You use the right probiotics, tailored to your stool testing or your history. You clear out nasty gut microbes that don’t help you, and there are many fabulous herbs that can do that. You do this as a lifestyle, not as a ten day course of a drug. And, your body begins to restore itself from the inside out. That is the “crazy nutrition stuff” in a nutshell – and it’s not what your pediatrician is primarily trained to offer.

Recent reports indicate that you can even improve conditions like these through a fecal transplant – using a healthy donor’s poo to reboot your own colon with microbes that know how to run a clean shop in there. Good gut bugs communicate intimately with the immune system, and help it “learn” – learn what is friend, what is foe, what to react to, what to ignore, what to kill and pull apart, what to leave alone.

The pharmaceutical industry only makes hay when they can sell a patented product (as in for example, hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year from just one vaccine). But they can’t get far with … your poo. That stuff is yours. It’s definitely not patentable. Pharma also can’t get far with food, which is not patentable either. If you eat better, they lose money. Food isn’t patentable unless it’s processed beyond recognition or engineered genetically by Monsanto (patenting everything you eat is their business model, which is why they really don’t want you to learn about how bad GMO foods are for your gut, or to even know they’re in your food – hence the labeling battles). Probiotics are naturally occurring organisms. Not patentable, because they simply already exist. But food, probiotics, and even someone else’s poo may be better for kids than many of the drugs they are routinely given.

I digress a little here, but to a point: These addled kids tend to have really disrupted gut biomes. And, they are very often full of yeast. This can be like thrush throughout the GI tract, whether or not it’s visible in the mouth. That means there is too much Candida, Saccharomyces or other fungal strains in charge of the gut biome – and hence, your child’s digestion, absorption, and eliminations.

We find this out with stool testing that looks beyond the basic horrible microbes your insurance company pays a gastroenterologist to check for. We look for beneficial species like Lactobacillus strains, Bifido strains, and others. We also screen for annoying microbes like Klebsiella or Citrobacter species that may well be usual enough to find in a human gut, but not to excess. They shouldn’t be in charge of the conversation in there, so to speak. And if a child is underweight or in weak nutrition status, these microbes can have a pervasive negative impact.

And, we find yeast. Lots of yeast.

This is how untreated thrush can situate itself and make your child miserable

Now, here’s the thing. Fungal microbes are somewhat usual members of our micro biome. But, they are normally kept in check by a healthy immune system. Mostly, they only raise an eyebrow for your doctor if your child has (a) florid thrush, in which white fluffy fungal stuff is literally coming out both ends – mouth and anus; or, (b) very serious immune deficiency problems, like leukemia or AIDS or neutropenia. If a child has a fungal skin rash, usual practice is to give a topical anti fungal cream. Other than that, pediatricians and gastroenterologists are generally unconcerned about yeast overgrowth in the body, because they are trained to only manage it for immune suppressed people.

But thrush can indicate yeast is a player even after an oral medicine like gentamicin clears it from the mouth. It’s easy to find out. Besides checking stool cultures or stool DNA analysis for yeast, I may also request a urine microbial acid test that looks for the “trash” that yeast cells make. Finding loads of this trash in urine means that yeast is present somewhere in body, possibly to a degree that is disruptive for mood, behavior, stooling, appetite, or more. It may even mean that a child’s repeat urinary tract infections are from yeast, not bacteria – in which case, antibiotics will not only do no good but will actually worsen the infection.

You can look at yeast (or mold for that matter) in many other ways with other lab tests, but the bottom line is this: A lot of children seem to be walking around with a lot more fungal and mold microbes in them than is healthy. What does this do? Typical symptoms are:

– Constipation severe enough for kids to be Miralax or enema-dependent, or to have had hospitalizations to clear fecal impactions

– Bedwetting well into school age years or even later

– Aggressive, rageful, violent, or oppositional behavior severe and frequent enough to impede learning, socializing, or ordinary tasking; abates if favorite foods are given, flares when hungry

– Appetite rigid for sweets, starches, dairy foods, and wheat (pizza, bread, pasta, crackers, mac and cheese, cookies)

– Refusal of protein foods (meats, fish, eggs, legumes, nuts, nut butters)

– Extreme pickiness for textures; easily upset by mixed food textures; refusal of fresh foods especially vegetables

– Dependence on reflux medicines (fungal infections can cause reflux, and reflux medicines cause fungal infections!)

– Allergies or sensitivities to many foods (which may be undiagnosed as well)

– Chronic fatigue, frequent malaise, with intermittent hyperactive bursts

The incredibly simple thing is this: Clear these fungal loads out of a child’s gut or body, and you have a different child. Behavior, appetite, everything starts to improve. The constipation ends. Gradually, given the right food and the right tools, the gut will start to heal up too.

But we haven’t even talked about the real problem here. Candida albicans, one of the most common yeast microbes found in our intestines, can shape shift from its initial “bud” form to a more debilitating “mycelial” form (see the pictures above). In this case, it grows little threads called hyphae that penetrate the gut wall tissue. It uses these to suck in nutrients for itself. It literally sends out little fingers that puncture your gut wall, in order to anchor itself there, eat and grow more, and hide better from your immune system. Watch the video to see what I mean:

Once in this mode, yeast and thrush infections are harder to clear. They create “leaky gut”, which creates more food allergies, more food sensitivities, and more susceptibility to other infections – including yeast infections in other locations. Many children start life susceptible to this scenario from birth. How? By receiving antibiotics directly or indirectly through mom, by getting a hepatitis B shot (made from a yeast strain called Saccharomyces cerevisaie), by arriving via C-section (in which case they miss getting mom’s vaginal flora on the way out), or by getting formula instead of breast milk (which favors undesirable microbes over beneficial ones).

Given that we know all this, we can do better for our kids. Many drugs prescribed for children – from Ritalin to Reglan – may become unnecessary, if underlying Candida infections are cleared, better food is in the mix, and the gut biome gets to work as intended. This can be straightforward to manage with the right non-prescription tools. Click the appointment tab above if you’d like to work with me on strategies to clear problems caused by untreated thrush or yeast infections. I look forward to hearing from you!