Natural Antacid for 6 year old??

[quiero a mi bebe]

My dd is 6 and she has had bad stomach aches for about 2 years now. They used to be really bad and now not as severe. We have done blood allergy tests, negative for celiac and dairy, but I still don't give her much dairy anymore. Almost every day she says her stomach hurts, I'm pretty she is telling the truth because it's not always before we go and do things  that she may not want to.  But today she told me it hurts from her stomach to her throat, which sounds like acid reflux or something to me. Does anyone have any good foods or anything that I could give to reduce the acid? We did try a prescription acid reducer months ago because the doc thought that might be it, but I'd rather stick with natural. Thanks!

[Imakcerka]

Could she try papaya chewables?  You take them when you eat and they're pretty tasty. 

[cristeen]

Well, firstly, she's reacting to something.  Treating the symptom is not a long-term solution.  And blood tests will only show the severest of responses.  I would suggest trying muscle response testing to find what she's reacting to.  In the meantime, a food log may be helpful, but if it's fairly constant, it may be several things (which is difficult to track from a food log). 

For the interim though, I keep candied ginger and ginger chews on hand.  I get them both at TJs, and it's by far the cheapest place to find the ginger (with the dried fruit - NOT crystallized).  It is spicy/sweet, and it is made with sugar, but the ginger calms the stomach, and whether I'm just nauseous or I'm refluxing, it knocks it back to a tolerable level.  Depending on her preferences though, you can get ginger teabags and steep some tea, you can get ginger juice and add a little bit to a cup of apple juice, you can even get it in pill form at the HFS. 

If she doesn't care for the ginger, you can try mint/peppermint, which is available in many forms.  I don't find it to be as effective myself, but she may prefer the taste.

If you need to hide the taste of ginger, spiced apple cider and chai are two good places to hide it in drink format. 

[kjbrown92]

Food intolerances won't show up on a food allergy test, nor will gluten intolerance show up on a celiac test. The most common food intolerances are dairy, gluten, soy, and corn. And if she's having stomachaches every day, it's probably one (or more) of those since they're in about 80% of the food chain. And yes, there's still plenty to eat without those. We did without all 4 of those (and more) for 3 years. All the recipes on my blog are made without those 4 items. And I believe that a lot of times reflux is from too little acid, not too much.

[SundayCrepes]

Our daughter had diarrhea 4 times a day from the time she was an infant. She also has a speech delay. At 2 the pediatric GI said she had toddler diarrhea and would outgrow it by 4 or so. She did a blood test for celiacs, but said it had a 50% chance of a false answer. Because our daughter was growing and doing well, no one wanted to put her under anesthesia to do a biopsy.

When she was 2.5, I asked a friend when her son started talking. (He'd been in speech therapy, but had graduated out.) She said his speech improved when she took him off gluten. We figured we'd give it a shot. Three weeks later our daughter's language took off. We didn't know if it was a coincidence or not, but decided to keep her on it.

I read in a forum somewhere about a mom whose son had had toddler diarrhea and a speech delay. She eliminated the allergenic foods and both conditions got better.

I asked our pediatrician for a blood allergy test. It tests for 96 foods. She came back with 4 that were rated 0.05. Anything lower than that is considered negative. Also cane sugar at .18 and tomatoes at 0.09. We took her off all 6 foods for 6 weeks and nothing happened. Then people convinced me to take her off dairy. In three days she had solid poops for the first time in her life. In time we were able to reintroduce the 0.05 foods with no problems. Cane sugar gave her nasty diarrhea. Our attempt to introduce tomatoes got hijacked when someone gave her pizza crust made with cane sugar. We opted to just keep her off tomatoes for awhile. 

We still don't know if gluten is an actual problem for her, though I'm guessing it is. We love a gluten free diet so it's not a big deal to us.

So my recommendation is to take her off gluten and dairy plus have an allergy blood test done. They're not always accurate for everyone, but for us they were. Take her off whatever she is sensitive to, even if it's just a little bit sensitive. Keep her off the gluten and dairy plus the sensitive foods. See what happens. If it works, you can slowly try reintroducing foods, one at a time, and see if she tolerates it or not.