A few days after my son was born, I noticed that his tongue was looking rather white. I figured that it was just some leftover milk…but it didn’t seem to go away. As the weeks went on, the white coating seemed to thicken. At his well-checks, the doctor wavered, wondering if it was thrush or just milk tongue. Then we got the diagnosis – thrush.
My son was prescribed Nystatin, and I was sent home with instructions to swab it on his tongue multiple times a day.
I’m not gonna lie, it just felt wrong. Here was my perfect little baby, pure and lovely and unadulturated, and I was dousing his mouth with an anti-fungal medicine multiple times a day. But I did it. Because that’s what you do. I was hopeful to see results in a few days, but a whole round of treatment went by without any change. I took him back in and the doctor said to up the dosage and see if that helped. If not, we’d just let it go and hopefully it wouldn’t still be around when he was 10 months old. I’m sorry, what?!?! So my son was prescribed a higher dose and we did another round of treatment. Again, we saw no results.
I felt embarrassed to have this baby with a white tongue because it was so obvious. All he had to do was open his mouth and people noticed that something was different. At one point there seemed to be a small blueish greenish spot in the center of his tongue and I felt like my baby’s tongue was molding. It was disgusting.
As luck would have it, shortly after the failed Nystatin treatments, I happened to attend a lecture on the effect of food additives and dyes on the body. I was fascinated by the connection between food and health, and I approached the lecturer afterward to inquire if perhaps my son’s thrush was related to my diet (I was exclusively nursing at the time).
She thought there was definitely a correlation. She is a Certified Health Education Specialist and offered Nutrition Response Testing at her office. I decided to book an appointment with her and see if she could pinpoint anything in my diet that I could change to help my son.
From the testing, I learned that I had a candida overgrowth. Candida is fungus that at appropriate levels helps the body to digest food and absorb nutrients. But if the candida is out of control, it can have negative effects on the body and cause a variety of problems.
I was instructed to go on a diet that would starve the candida of sugar, what it needed to grow, and this would in turn allow much of the candida to die off and restore my body’s candida to appropriate levels.
Then she explained the diet to me. No milk, cheese, or dairy of any kind. No grain. No sugar of any kind, even maple syrup and honey. And the hardest one for me – no fruit.
I was devastated and wondered what I was supposed to eat for the foreseeable future with so many items on the “no” list. But I wanted to give this thing an honest go to see if it could help my son. It’s amazing how we will literally do anything for the good of our children.
My superhero husband did the diet with me, and together we learned a new way of cooking and eating. I desperately wanted to see results in a few days so I could get off this challenging diet and back to normal life. However, it took me 30+ years to get to this intense candida overgrowth, so I figured it may take a little time to restore my body back to healthy candida levels.
After a few weeks I started to notice a change in my body. My tongue, which had been somewhat white, especially at the back, started to turn more pink. And finally, FINALLY after six to eight weeks, my son’s thrush started to disappear and then vanished completely. It took longer to see results in him because my body was detoxing the candida and some of it went through my milk to him, therefore delaying his results.
I can’t tell you what a joy it was to finally see that cute pink baby tongue! All my efforts, hard work and food sacrifice were worth it knowing I helped him.
