Saturday, July 10, 2010

Good for guts

A little over a month ago, my then 15-month old son had a bad case of gastroenteritis. After spending two days at the hospital, he was allowed to go home armed with some antibiotics. However, our pediatrician (as much as we like him, we wished he's not a man of so few words!), failed to warn us that the little guy's gut will take weeks to fully recover from the infection and that we should continue to give him probiotics supplement even though his runs have stopped. Soon the damage caused by our cherub's infection resulted in his temporary lactose intolerance and yeast infection. To make things worse, a mere ten days later, he had another bout of diarrhea. The probiotics that we have been giving him did not seem to help much.

Then, I was let in on a secret by a fellow mom who is a nurse (I later discovered that this was really a public secret as many parents already knew about this. So this post is for the benefit of those who, like me, have somehow missed that boat!) The secret was a highly effective and beneficial strain of probiotics called Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (ATCC 53103) found in a product called LactoGG. Click here to the site. Though slightly more expensive than other OTC probiotics, I have found that the relief it brings to my little boy's gut (and mine, from the anxiety of parenting a sick child!) far outweighs the extra cost.

A day after we started the little guy on it, his condition began to improve and by the second day, his yeast infection was gone and his runs got more infrequent. Soon, he was back to his normal self. Informed now that it takes a while for his gut to heal completely, we plan to continue to give him a capsule of LactoGG a day by adding it into his yogurt at snack time. It has been a while since I last rave about anything this way but I would recommend LactoGG even as a regular supplement. Great thing about it is that it works for adults, too.
We found it at a neighborhood pharmacy retailing around S$68 for a box of 30 capsules:

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