Does Drinking Beer with an Oral Piercing Cause a Yeast Infection?
One of the most pervasive body piercing myths is the idea that if you drink a brewed alcoholic beverage, you will get “yeast” into the piercing, thus getting a “yeast infection”. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Why is this? In the same way there are lots of different cars, there are also a lot of different yeasts. Some are good for baking bread, some are good for brewing beer, and some are pathogenic. Beer brewers and bread bakers do not use pathogenic yeast to brew beer or bake bread. In the same way that you cannot change a Chevy Malibu to a Nissan Altima, you can’t change edible yeast to pathogenic yeast. An example of a pathogenic yeast strain is Cryptococcus neoformans (which usually causes a disease called Cryptococcosis in people with compromised immune systems). [1] An oral yeast infection in an otherwise healthy person is known as Candidiasis. “Candida is commonly found as a commensal yeast in the mucus membranes of humans and other warm-blooded animals.
