Keeping a toddler on an elimination diet was easier than I thought it would be, but still, it has been hard. He’s a quick little sneak, and the few foods that I kept in our pantry that I hoped would soon be added back in but were not, yet, were a temptation too great to ignore for a 2 year old.
So, one day, I caught him on the counters, digging in to a box of raisins. And another day he snuck a few swallows of the Geek’s coffee (decaf!).
Then, the other day at the grocery store he was screaming for a snack and we had already eaten everything I had brought with us. So, I headed to the health food section to see if I could find a snack acceptable for Mr. Charm.
Larabars! He loves those! And they’re pretty darn healthy. So I got him a few.
And right after he ate the first one my brain snapped into gear and I realized – uh-oh! Almonds, dates and bananas are not YET back in his diet!
Well, too late then!
So Mr. Charm has had a bit of a food explosion here, lately.
After the Larabar incident, I bought and dried a bunch of bananas. He ate an entire pint jar of banana chips in TWO DAYS.
That’s probably 8 bananas, y’all! Think he was craving a little something different?
So all this ‘new’ food in his diet got me really thinking and investigating.
The 5 perfect elimination diet weeks for him brought about only very minor changes.
His behavior was pretty much the same. Fewer tantrums, but he didn’t have a lot of those, anyway. He was a bit more cooperative, but not much. (He is TWO, after all!)
His poop firmed up a bit, but not as much as we’d hoped for. We were starting to wonder if he needed a fiber supplement.
In the last week, though, since bananas, dates and almonds were added back in to his diet, he’s had sleep disturbances, fought every nap HARD, been a little more belligerent than normal, and thrown a few more tantrums than we were used to.
So after consulting Dr. Google, I learned that there is a wide range of ‘normal’ for poop, and his loose stools seem to fit in that range. But with the undigested food in his poop, and his other behavioral symptoms, one thing kept popping up in my searches: fructose intolerance.
He doesn’t have every symptom, but he has several of them (flatulence, loose stool, sudden slowed growth pattern when solid foods were introduced, under-eye circles, undigested food in stools, slightly poochy tummy). This has me wondering…could he have a mild case of fructose malabsorption?
If so, it could explain why the elimination diet didn’t make much of a difference for him, and why he seemed to be a little worse after the Larabars. Onions and garlic are two sources of fructose, and we – literally – put those on everything we cook. (They’re delicious!) And dates are another source of fructose, which could have been just enough too much for him.
So, there is a simple test to determine if you have fructose malabsorption, and I’m now determined to have myself and Mr. Charm tested, just to see.
If he IS mildly fructose intolerant, I will be doing a happy dance of joy joy joy! Finally the mystery of Mr. Charm would be solved!
He absolutely has MPI, and possibly MSPI. (That’s Milk Protein Intolerance, and Milk/Soy Protein Intolerance.) But eliminating those things from my, and later, his diet didn’t seem to solve everything. Except, the little problems he continued to have were random, weird, mild, and could easily be explained away by normal growth patterns.
My Mama Gut kept telling me there was something more, but I didn’t know where to look. So maybe this elimination diet WILL help solve his mystery…even if not in quite the way I expected!
Fingers crossed! I’ll let you know what I learn.
Does anyone else have a fructose intolerance? How did you figure it out?
