Hi Kristen,
This myth that carbohydrate in the diet feeds yeast has proven to be a hard one to crack. While I have found certain people state that it is true I’ve never found a reference in the published scientific literature to support that idea. If you have a link to such a publication I’d love to see it.
As PitLove said, Mallassezia is a fat loving yeast. With some strains, you can offer it all the sugar it could possible want but if you don’t give it fat it simply won’t grow well or dies off, offer it fat and the growth takes off.
Besides the fact that Mallassezia prefers fat to grow there is simply no mechanism through which higher dietary levels of carbohydrate would lead to higher levels of carbohydrate on the surface of the skin to “feed” the yeast as they live outside the body. If you have an explanation I’d love to hear it.
Read through Masuda et al 2000 Study of Lipid in the ear canal in Canine Otitis Externa with Mallassezia pachydermatis. Some interesting findings are the difference in the amount of fatty acids in the ear wax between breed and the correlation with yeast.
