mothy poop!

[eliza23]

hi mamas!! i am new to this forum thang!! i am so happy to have all of you as a resource. so here it is, i have a 3 year old daughter, mariela, and she has a bowel movement every day and has a wonderful diet (thank goodness!). the problem is her poops smell like mothballs!!! i have NEVER used mothballs in the house and dont use any kind of chemicals in the house to clean, only baking soda n vinegar so i am freakin out!!! i consider mothballs to smell nasty so i guess i am just assuming that her poops smelling like that cant be a good thing! i have been researching the internet and there are not many possibilities, or at least none that make sense. any help is sooooo appreciated thank you all!!

[pianojazzgirl]

Welcome to MDC!

I'm sorry to say I'm not sure what might be causing the moth-ball smelling poops. Strange! I hope another wise mama will chime in with some helpful info!

[eliza23]

thank you!

thank you for replying!! i hope so too!! i am keeping a food journal and i have some guesses so i will be eliminating some things to see what happens! the advice nurse at the ped office had never heard of it either, so maybe that's good!!?? maybe she's just a mystery pooper!!

[JessicaS]

I wouldn't eliminate anything without having a test to check for deficiencies.

What is your diet like?

Is it possible she got a hold of mothballs? The same chemicals are used to deodorize diaper pails

[JaneS]

What is her birth, food and health history?

Antibiotics?

When did this start, just recently?

[eliza23]

this is so great!!

wow!! this is wonderful!! i feel so blessed to have you all helping me, thank you. so, first off, i wish i was a better typer!!! the only reason i was thinking of eliminating some things is because her poops are not mothy every time, most of the time, but not every time. so i was thinking maybe it's a certain food that maybe she is eating in excess or a way her body is metabolizing a certain food. our diet would best be described as WAPFy!! my doula for mariela's birth is also a WAPF chapter leader so she gifted us with all her knowledge and since then our health and vitality has been wonderful. so, birth history- my diet during my pregnancy was just sort of average whole foods diet but i wasnt educated on where my food was coming from so i definitely ate some meat from unhappy animals but before then i was veg/vegan for a long time. my pregnancy was flawless except for the delivery!! my labor and actually birthing mari was all beautiful, natural, no meds, no epidural but they diagnosed me with pre-eclampsia after i delivered mari and i was GBS pos so i had antibiotics(very late in the labor) and luckily mari was born very quickly so i dont think she had the chance to really feel any of those antis they gave me. her infancy was without any issues, no rashes no diaper rash, no allergies, nothing. i never have given her any OTC medicine. around 8 months i gave her pastured chicken yolks and around 1 yr started giving her salmon and veggies and fats i breastfed her for 2 years and as i got closer with my doula, holly, my diet rapidly improved. mariela has eaten only organic food, only pastured meats, and lots of coconut oil, soups, all veggies, eggs every day, raw milk, raw milk cheese, kombucha, kefir water,raw milk yogurt, saurkraut, beans, you name it, she eats it papa isnt as hardcore as i am about food and he gives mari too much fruit in my opinion, especially bananas. bananas are 1 of the foods i was thinking of eliminating cuz over the past 6 months she has eaten waaaay too many. o , so, i think this mothy thing has been happening for at least 3 months maybe 4 or 5. i dont know why it has taken me this long to question it but anyway, here we are! eggs are the other thing she eats a lot of i make them scrambled, over easy or soft boiled she only eats the whites when the eggs are scrambled she picks the yolks out and just eats those, kids know where the good stuff is!!! ok so that's our diet, and her birth history and her med history. and her mouth smells very pure i often smell it to see if there is any sort of rotting sort of smell in there too but it still smells great, like when she was a baby she has no cavities what else? o ya we dont use a diaper pail and def no moth balls and no chemicals in the house what do y'all think now??? thank you again for giving me some of your precious time (:

[eliza23]

hey i didnt put that sad face in there!!!!!!!!!!!! i put smileys!!! please disregard frown!!!

[kittynurse]

You're not alone! My son had mothball poops for ages and I Googled the heck out of it but could never find an answer. He doesn't have the problem now so sadly I can't tell you what caused it.

But just wanted to let you know that you didn't imagine it!

[eliza23]

awesome, thank u for helping me not feel alone in my mothy poop mystery!! i have been keeping a food journal and laying off the red meat and bacon for a while and we are 2 days in a row, non mothy poops!!!! i think she wsa just eating too much meat and u know they dont chew things all the way so it was rotting in her lil system!! ): i dont really know, the investigation is still wide open!!! i dont like a bodily mystery!!!!

[JaneS]

I think you are excellent at listening to your mama intuition... maybe it is the meat!

If it were gut flora I think there would be more likely to have a smell to her mouth, that was a very good observation.

Sometimes low stomach acid can cause improper digestion of meat. But there are also things we drink and eat WITH our meat which naturally dilutes stomach acid: large amounts of liquid, even healthy liquids, and large amounts of carbs.

Low zinc can cause low stomach aicd. Or it could be gut flora. She would have gotten antibx from you thru breastfeeding at the crucial time of acquiring her initial gut flora, after birth. And if you have GBS, your gut flora was compromised. You might try some more probiotics or different kinds. And look into stomach acid a little more.

[swd12422]

You're not alone! We're having the same issue here. One mama suggested it could be dehydration... I'm trying to test that theory w/o force-feeding him more water! ;-)

JaneS - the meat suggestion is probably a viable one, too. He's eating a lot more meat lately than usual. (He never really liked it much before, but now he seems to be enjoying it more.)

Not to hijack, but how would you know if it's gut flora? He has yogurt every day, but it's homemade, so I'm never sure if there's enough cultures in there. Is there such a thing as giving too much probiotics?

[kittynurse]

Originally Posted by eliza23

awesome, thank u for helping me not feel alone in my mothy poop mystery!! i have been keeping a food journal and laying off the red meat and bacon for a while and we are 2 days in a row, non mothy poops!!!! i think she wsa just eating too much meat and u know they dont chew things all the way so it was rotting in her lil system!! ): i dont really know, the investigation is still wide open!!! i dont like a bodily mystery!!!!

My son has always been a total carnivore so for us that wasn't the answer to the mothball poop. We've seen a dietician and it turns out he really needs the protein so he has been naturally helping himself.

Originally Posted by JaneS

Low zinc can cause low stomach aicd...And look into stomach acid a little more.

This is very interesting to me because we do supplement with zinc and I'm guessing that the mothball smell probably did go away around the time we started supplementing. Off to Google stomach acid!

Martha

[JaneS]

Originally Posted by swd12422

Not to hijack, but how would you know if it's gut flora? He has yogurt every day, but it's homemade, so I'm never sure if there's enough cultures in there. Is there such a thing as giving too much probiotics?

Generally the (ahem!) smell of one's poop is controlled by the health of your gut flora. But as we are talking here about sufficient stomach acid to break down proteins, really the entire digestive system is involved. Also food allergies can cause inflammation if the intestinal lining so that regardless of how many probiotics you take, your gut flora will not normalize. And, for example, if you do not have the enzymes on the brush border of the intestinal villi (caused by inflammation mowing them down, often seen in celiac disease but also other food allergies can do this) you won't digest starches or lactose. Then the starches ferment in the gut and change the quality of the stool, encouraging bad bacteria or yeast to grow, as well.

You really cannot OD on probiotics unless you suffer die off symptoms from taking too much. In that case you just back off and go slower. Generally yogurt only contains transient bacteria that provide benefit for the day you eat it, they don't colonize the gut. And generally yogurt is a fairly low bacterial count. Yogurt cultured for 24 hrs is higher, and kefir.

My son didn't respond to fermented foods, yogurt or kefir, he was in fact intolerant of the amines and acids. We needed to do bottled probiotics.

[eliza23]

wow!

thank you thank you so much support and wonderful information. what jane said about the antibiotics passing through my breastmilk- a duh how embarassing!! i never thought about that i was so focused on worrying about her getting antibiotics en utero when she came out into my arms so quickly my fears of that were quelled then i guess i was focusing on my lil miracle and i stopped worrying for a (lil!!) while!!! o boy i should have been taking probiotics(i dont think i did) she was taking probiotics recently but it had maltodextrin in it and so i ordered the flora baby cuz it has no fillers. she would just eat the other one plain, it was powder, and finally i said how can she do that?? and i tasted it, tasted like sugar!!! and then i looked into what maltodextrin really is i understand the probiotics needing the sugar to multiply and continue feeding but this was crazy!!!! so funny she never has sugar so thats why she was scarfin that stuff!!! ha she was saying," mama, i need more medicine please!!" too funny that zinc idea is interesting could you tell me more about your mothy and then subsequent non mothy experiences please??!!!! i have been keeping a food journal for a couple weeks i have to sit down and do a thorough investigation of it and i will post my discoveries!! i gotta go now write more later!! thank you so much you wonderful mamas!!!!

[Summerland]

Hi
I just wanted to jump in here now a reassure you. My daughter had the same thing from about 14-18 months or so, it was very strange, but went away with no changes from diet or anything that I can think of. I remember googling it too.