Candida, diet, and the gut mycobiome: a 2023 study

This small feeding study tracked stool fungi during short high- and low-carbohydrate periods. It did not test whether either diet treats Candida-related symptoms or disease.

It is a controlled feeding study that measured fecal fungi and reported Candida detection, but it answers a microbiome question rather than whether diet affects candidiasis.

Thirty adults aged 22–34 enrolled at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China. Twenty-eight completed and were analyzed; the study reported 317 fecal samples.

Participants received isocaloric high-carbohydrate (HC) diets providing 65–75% of energy from carbohydrate or low-carbohydrate (LC) diets providing 15–25%; both provided 15% protein. The remainder of energy came from fat. Participants followed six-day periods of each diet in randomized order, with six-day washouts across three cycles over 72 days. Grain intake was the main adjusted component, so this was not a sugar-only experiment.

The Results section reports increased group-level fecal alpha diversity after HC periods (p<0.05) and a significant pre/post beta-diversity difference after the HC intervention (p<0.05). The Discussion and Conclusion state more broadly that both HC and LC may affect fungal community structure, without a direct HC-versus-LC comparison. The paper did not list Candida among genera with a significant pre/post relative-abundance change within either diet period. Supplementary Table S4 reports Candida detection in 96.4% of participants and 52.4% of samples, while the main text says 16 participants; the source does not resolve this inconsistency. This omission from the reported list does not establish no effect.

The results apply to stool fungal-community measures during these specific short, provided diets among young adults in one Chinese university study. They do not diagnose Candida infection, measure symptoms, or show that changing carbohydrate intake benefits a person.

Only 28 young adults completed the study, and the diet periods lasted six days. Fecal ITS2 profiles and relative abundance do not measure absolute fungal load or candidiasis. Participant-level Candida prevalence is inconsistent between the text (16 people) and Supplementary Table S4 (96.4%); the sample-level figure is 52.4%. No Candida-specific result by diet, clinical follow-up, or adverse-outcome results were reported.

Contextual. The study shows that some fecal fungal-community measures can differ during short macronutrient-pattern changes. It does not establish a Candida response, disease effect, or treatment benefit.

No practical change. The study does not show that a high- or low-carbohydrate diet treats Candida or should guide an individual's care.

Funders included Zhejiang Province, China's National Key R&D Program and National Natural Science Foundation, the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation, Westlake Laboratory of Life Sciences and Biomedicine, and Zhejiang's Pioneer and Leading Goose R&D Program. The authors declared no conflict of interest.

Read the original publication at PubMed Central (published 29 April 2023; DOI: 10.3390/nu15092152).