Seriously adorable!

Clod, I was inpressed with how fast he leaned over to put an arm around minifob when she made motions to get off the chair.

Been reading your blog. Really good! Y'know, when my mum was trying to cook for me on weird and wonderful diets, a site like this would have rocked her world. Well done.

Gorgeous kiddies btw. :)

Thanks!

And the emotional roller coaster, it just keeps going...

Minifob's still having constant, terrible diarrhea. It got briefly better right after we started the diet, but then slowly eased back into the horror it's always been. On the one hand, his massive cognitive and behavioral improvements do confirm that we're taking good steps overall, but on the other hand, I know he can't really get better until his digestion is functioning properly. I've been living and breathing his food diary for weeks now, experimenting with one thing after another... and I think I've got it narrowed down to the most horrible possibility. I think it's the rice. (Yes, it is possible to have an intolerance for rice, for the record.)

So that's lined up as my next experiment, removing one of only two major substitute grains left in his diet. I technically started already tonight, because he refused to eat any kind of dinner--either because he's getting sick, or because he loaded way the hell up on rice-flour birthday cake this afternoon. :) Happy birthday, kiddo. Maybe next year you can have a cake made of quinoa flour or some crazy thing.

rice? oh fuck! But happy birthday, minifob!

Gotta hand it to you Clod. There is no quit in you.

I remember when this discussion first started. Boy did I not get it. I think I get it now.

I'll say it again. You are one good Mommy.

And I plan on making your shepherd's pie this week!

Clod, I just gotta say I am constantly amazed at what you are doing.

Rice? I guess that leaves lard, whiskey and cigars. :rolleyes:

One for the desperate: you can make flour from acacia seeds / wattle seeds. Australian Aborigines used to make a kind of bread from it. I have no idea if it is suitable for minifob, but certainly, it MUST be cooked: in the raw state it contains anti-nutritional components. You MIGHT be able to get it at health food stores.

Just FYI, FWIW, which might not be much.

Best of luck.

Whiskey is a grain alcohol, it's full of gluten... ;)

Oh honey. I feel for you on the Birthday stuff. I don't know, but I may have already mentioned some of Ma's heroic birthday efforts over the years. My personal favourite (for giggle value...it tasted awful :P) was the jelly (jello) made from green seaweed.

Also, word of warning: arrowroot is not a good baking substitute for flour.



[eta] I haven't followed all the details of diet, so forgive me if this has already cropped up, but how is he with oats? If they're ok for him, you can make some great oat based party snacks.

Pure, wild oats are technically gluten-free. However, there is basically no such thing in this country as harvested oats that have not been contaminated with gluten as part of the processing. I could grow them in my own backyard, or buy them from very specific expensive retailers, but that's about it. Most oat recipes still require finer-ground flours to fill out the texture, so it's just a nutrition additive at that point.

You're... you're gonna sow your wild oats?

Can we watch?

:lol: I don't have many left, I'm sorry to report. That was called college.

And actually, I may be able to use oats as a substitute for small amounts of breadcrumbs, which could be very helpful if I can no longer use crushed up Rice Chex. It just won't help me bake a loaf of bread.

I am in awe, clod. Great Praise to you indeed.

We had our first appointment at Thoughtful House today. I couldn't be happier with the way things went.

First off, the office is nothing like a doctor's office. The "waiting room" is like a living room full of toys, including a Wii, and the "exam rooms" are carpeted, with bookcases and couches and more toys. No tables with rolled paper, no scales, no fluorescents. The doctors are automatically familiar with such practices as casually blocking the door with their chair, so there is no need to constantly pull the child away from it.

Then we got over an hour of dedicated face time with the nutritionist. I had been a little unhappy at the idea that we would supposedly be having all these tests ordered at this appointment, but then the followup appointment to discuss results and act on them wasn't for another six weeks. But it turns out the tests really do take that long, and I will be anything but idle in the meantime. Aside from a huge packet of information regarding a variety of dietary things, this is what we walked away with:

--Immediately discontinue his vitamin/mineral supplements and his probiotics for two weeks, to prep for the lab testing. (They will confound the results otherwise.) This has the added benefit of finding out if the coconut contained in them is giving him problems--a likely possibility, because we had to stop the coconut yogurt after it made his diarrhea even worse (I wouldn't have thought that was possible, but it turns out it was.) In addition, don't let him eat any fruits or nuts for two days prior to collecting the samples.

--To keep up the "you must take your medicine every night" routine, and to anticipate the high probability that the lab results will show a massive yeast overgrowth among other things, we will instead be giving him apple cider vinegar in his little med syringe instead. This does not kill yeast directly, but it breaks down the mucousy housing material, so to speak, thus making the anti-fungal more effective if/when it is eventually prescribed. Good for the digestive tract even if it turns out he has no fungus after all.

--It's likely he doesn't have a problem with rice itself, because if it were a food sensitivity we should have seen the improvement within a day or two. Instead what we saw was sudden, massive black poop after five rice-free days. This is indicative of a change in the bowel's general equilibrium, which makes it likely that it was the yeast in the rice bread that he was specifically craving. So he can have rice back, but not his rice bread sandwiches for now. No problem, I've already gotten him to accept the idea of a sandwich made with his waffles instead.

--After two weeks, we take the poop and pee samples and FedEx them off to the labs. Then begins the real fun: a full bowel clean-out. Variable doses of magnesium citrate until he has reached his target of pooping at least once an hour, for as many days as it takes. I have been warned that terrible, horrible things may come out of him at this time, of a size that I could never, ever have imagined could be contained in his tiny body. He is not done until what is coming out is basically clear liquid.

--General examination of his diet shows that he needs more protein than he's getting, especially early in the day. If I can't get him to eat bacon and eggs in the morning, I need to start putting protein powder in his waffles. And, if I'm up for it at some point before the next appointment, I should really do a trial of removing corn--as in, the tostadas and tortilla chips he eats every day. Yeah, uh, we'll see about that one. Not right now, that's for sure.

Wow.

Crikey! Good luck, Clod!

How are you going to get him to take the magnesium citrate?

Pin him down and squirt it in the back of his throat with a syringe, just like his nightly vitamins. It's easier if I have Mr. Clod to hold his arms while I sit on his midsection, but I have on several occasions successfully done it by myself. I basically straddle his chest with his arms pinned inside, and hold his head still between my knees. It's quite a workout for me--first off, I'm working the hamstrings like crazy because I'm too heavy to actually sit on him, so I'm basically holding myself in a squat a few inches off the ground, and then second, with nothing to pin his hips behind me he can kick the crap out of my back and occasionally lands a good one to the back of my head--but it's surprisingly effective for him. He doesn't fight the nightly vitamins at all anymore, though he makes it clear that he still wants Mr. Clod to hold his arms, even if he's applying no pressure. If the magnesium citrate doesn't taste bad, he shouldn't fight me on those after the first few times either.

Pico: have you ever given a cat a pill? :lol:

Did anything come of your concern that they might want to put him on expensive proprietary supplements... or is that down the road a ways still?

I just saw something about apple cider vinegar... here. May or may not be anything useful there. Pretty potent stuff though. My dad used it to (over) treat a toe nail fungus... figured if a little was a good a lot was better... his nail fell off.

Oh, and have you tried gram/chick pea flour yet? Supposed to be very high in protein but gluten free...

Stay strong.

Clod, if gram flour ends up being approved, I have a variety of recipes that might be useful.

Hell, Clod. Try getting him to sip it with a straw and tell him its pop. It is fizzy. Put ice in it.

I shudder just thinking about it. I had to to drink a whole bottle once. I was nauseaus at the time. It was pretty hard to keep down.

Nothing so far--they have some of the GFCF magnesium citrate, and she showed me the exact product I was supposed to use, but she told me it was stocked at standard health food stores and it would be cheaper there.

The All-Purpose gluten-free flour blend I use is primarily chickpea flour, plus some tapioca flour and I think a little potato starch. It's what I make his waffles out of, but apparently it's not high enough in protein for what he needs. I found hemp protein powder at the store, which she said was the best choice if I could find it. Pie, I would imagine my flour blend would work in any recipes calling for gram flour. I'm always willing to take recipe suggestions. I did try to make dosas, but they didn't come out so pretty. :)

This is the kid who basically won't drink anything except water. The highest concentration of juice he'll stand is about 2-3 Tablespoons in a full glass of water (and that's exactly one flavor of juice, mind you.) Telling him it's a soda will fall on deaf ears, I assure you. :) Plus, we're supposed to keep the doses very small but steady throughout the day. An adult might take the whole bottle, sit on the toilet all night and be done, but that's too extreme for a kid so small--hence the once-an-hour rule, no more no less.

Wow. At least it's a short term regimen. :eek:

Keep grinding it out Clod. You are a brilliant Mom.

So say we all.

:2cents:

We are trained to disregard anecdotal evidence.

A mother, saying that feeding her kid different food caused a change in behavior in that kid, is NOT anecdotal evidence.

A responsible mother is a researcher performing a 24x7x365 study on that kid. The MD who sees that kid once a month, he cannot offer intelligent opinions on the daily happenings in that house.

The difference might be that a university researcher etc. is bound by legal/professional/ethical constraints to adhere to the scientific method, peer review etc. and that is as it should be. And we don't know what kind of crackpot this kid's mother might be--it could be one of those people who think the Bible will heal your terminal illness or whatever.

But I can tell you that in my household, I trust my childcare researcher (Pooka). When the doctors said our baby was "collicky" we were like "WTF is collicky?! That isn't even a medical concept, it just means they don't know or care to look into it." So Pooka journaled everything baby ate, and every event in baby's life, until we had the DATA to form a conclusion: baby had acid reflux. We had to tell the doctor what the problem was. The medication caused an IMMEDIATE and obvious difference in baby's whole outlook on life. A total PERSONALITY change, as she wasn't IN PAIN constantly anymore.

A doctor wouldn't know that. A doctor isn't with your kid 24/7 to see that.

Here is something else I know: Clodfobble has never done anything that suggests in the slightest that she isn't a supremely logic-driven individual. I know that. And if Clodfobble reports observations made in the laboratory of her domicile, then I have to accept that as legitimate research. In fact, I am bound by my belief in a logic-driven universe to do so--to NOT do so would require me to make an exception to some set of facts that I have already verified as accurate.

Earlier I was thinking about how when my brother was severely hyperactive as a kid, the doctor told my mom "Stop feeding him sugar." That helped. Would any doctor tell you that, today?

To be fair, I think a lot of the pediatricians have just given up because they don't think the parents are going to listen anyway. I mean come on, a "Nachos" flavor Lunchable has more sugar in it than a pile of 20+ gummy bears. It is amazing what utter crap passes for food these days, especially for kids.

I think pediatricians these days know that it's a myth: sugar doesn't actually cause hyperactivity.

It can cause skin irritation though.

I think the bigger culprits for hyper activity are probably the food colourings that tend to be found in a lot of confectionary (hence the term 'kiddi-crack' for smarties :P)

Yes, you just can't take away those things they really like, because, you know, they really like them. Discipline is just mean, y'all. This doctor is a tool.

Well, as long as it only indirectly affects their behavior, that's totally different. Nothing you can do about that. :rolleyes: You know what? When I'm sick, I'm bitchy. The fastest way to stop me being bitchy is to get well. Does the flu have a neurological component? No. Does it still make me bitchy? Yes.


Edit to add: Sorry, I'm more irritated than I thought and have more to say on this subject. So 5% of ADHD kids got better on the Feingold diet--how many got better in the control group? Was it zero? I bet the parents of those 5% don't give a shit that the other 95% need additional things to help them, they're pretty fucking happy that their kid is in the 5% that got better. You know what else has a success rate of anywhere from 2%-7%? Chemotherapy.

Yeah, and meth addicts really like meth.

Yeah, and meth addicts are only knife-fighting with hallucinations of giant spiders because they haven't slept in sixteen days. So, when you think about it, meth isn't actually bad for you. And since they like it so much, can we really tell them they shouldn't be doing it?

My doctor wants me to do something for my heart, but I don't want to give up taste.
Face it, it's hard to be healthy.
Retards.

what's up with your heart?

I was quoting the shit I hear on food commercials... just strikes me as ridiculous things to say, similar to the tool doctor above.

"Our diet has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000"

oh right, sorry. The only commercials I ever hear are on an alternative rock radio station, where the closest they get to food commercials is beer and drinks with more caffiene than Starbucks ....and combinations thereof :lol:

As a bare fact I believe this is true. But I am shouted down by parents who KNOW their children get hyperactive sugar highs.

The article is wrong. It takes an example of one type of food myth and applies it across the board. Children are more hyped up by parties than sugar? Yes. Therefore, no food causes behavioural differences. Err, no.

Lazy, lazy journalism.

It's also part of the underlying attitude that children are bad. They are no longer properly controlled. Our parents would have walloped us if we behaved like that. Damned liberals and their food-based excuses - just bring back the birch.

In this country the right wing press like that line. YMMV.

All other health issues aside, I believe that children do eat too much sugar and mothers have become more lazy about their children's diets. I'm going on what I see day to day, what I know about nutrition from 20 years of dieting. And I mentally applaud the mothers I see who feed their children rice cakes and carrot sticks. But they are in the minority.

The above does not apply for children in Minifob's situation - this thread is an eye-opener. It's made me check myself when judging the screaming kid who is ruining the one meal out I've treated myself to in a month. It does not change my mind about the two year old in a buggy eating a "share-size" pack of Wotsits at 11 o' clock in the morning.

I've seen some studies that indicate the flu does directly afect the brain. The investigation started after some apparent sleep-walking-suicides of people (esp children) taking certain antiviral medications; the final results are not yet in.


Thank goodness for all the hardworking fathers that take care of their kid's diets, then. :right:
Sorry, just a pet peeve coming out there. Bad parenting is usually blamed on the mother, but when you look, the father is usually either worse or completely absent. /rant.

Those parents have been tested in blind studies. The parents go away, half the kids get sugar, the other half get sweetener. The parents come back. And they can't tell whether their kid has had the sugar.

OK let me point out that the second quote on that page has turned out to be exactly incorrect since the statement was made (25 years ago), and the third quote directly contradicts the first one... why are they spoon feeding you this bullshit, and why the fuck are you eating it?

I mean, if you believe that, are you buying the shit they're selling, the whole point of the rest of the site? $89.95 colon cleansing powder! Better buy it... a dirty colon is bad for your health! How do they know it works? Not through unreliable "science" -- just try some and see if you don't feel energized! If so be sure to invest $138.95 for their whole-body cleansing kit.

Cancer mortality has been cut right in half in the last 30 years. Life expectancy doubled in the last 150 years. Not through bullshit websites. Science.

SCIENCE!

I dunno, I just wanted to say that.

I have to say that as far as sugar goes, Aden clearly gets 'hypo' when he drinks softdrink. His behaviour changes almost immediately, and then he gets grumpy when he's coming down off that high. Simple solution for us is to water down his softdrink or simply not allow him to have it. We've also been working on getting him to be aware of his changes in behaviour so that he can regulate his own behaviour now that he's getting a bit too old to just say he can't have it (or will be soon anyway).

We pretty much don't have softdrink in the house though, and when we do, the kids mostly are only allowed to have it in the mornings. Never after 4pm or so.

Of course, it could be the preservatives and/or colouring they put in it too, but either way, softdrinks are frowned on here.

As for kids being allowed to get away with bad behaviour simply because they're hypo from sugar (if that's what their parents blame it on), then bring back the birch for the parents. They should a. not allow the child to have the food that they blame, and b. they should still be disciplining their child. Otherwise it's like saying, "Oh he likes playing with fire. We can't stop him even though we know he'll get burnt or possibly burn someone else" Duh! Yes you can stop him. You're his parents! It's your job!!!

Hang on a second. They compared sugar to artificial sweeteners, another substance that is widely suspected to cause behavior problems? Did they ever compare sugar to nothing, or artificial sweeteners to nothing? For crying out loud, when most parents say "sugar" makes their kid hyper they're really talking about artificial sweeteners to begin with. How many shelf products (cake mixes, cans of frosting, sodas, candy bars) are made with real sugar anymore?

Not according to the American Cancer Society, who say that rates didn't even start going down until the early 1990s, and since then they have dropped 18.4% in men and 10.5% in women. And the majority of that drop is due to prevention (i.e. smoking rates are down and breast cancer screenings are becoming more common and more advanced,) not improvements in chemotherapy.

But whatever, cancer is not the point. I only brought it up to illustrate that there are many drugs out there with similar rates that are considered "effective." It was an especially bad choice because there are a wide variety of chemo drugs with varying effectiveness, and most of the time its only goal is to extend life a few more years, not cure the disease.

And yet, the rates of a crapton of other things are inexplicably rising at an alarming rate, including but not limited to autism, Celiac disease, life-threatening allergies, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, type 1 diabetes, and all types of thyroid disease. Science works very hard, no doubt, but it's not the God you want it to be.

I still challenge the notion of these types of diseases actually being on the rise as opposed to them having always been as prevalent but undiagnosed. The problem with this is of course, that it's very difficult to come to a solid conclusion.

I can say though, that in my family, we have a history of gut and digestive problems and it's only recently (over the last ten years or so) that a family tendancy towards Barretts disease is becoming apparent which is also coupled with several members of the family being diagnosed as Celiacs. It could be that because our diet has changed over the last 20 to 30 years and this has caused these family members with a predisposition to exhibit enough symptoms to follow up. Or that they're financial enough to go through the process of finding out instead of just putting up with it. Or it could be that something particular to my family's particular gene set doesn't like something that has been recently introduced to our diets.

Knowing my famly history though, I'm inclined to believe these two particular diseased have always been there. They just weren't diagnosed. That seems to be the concensus among the family also...and there are a lot of us, so it's not a bad study group.

Isn't it true the type 1 diabetes has been attributed to a generally more sedentary lifestyle with a high sugar diet in general?

That's type 2. Type 1 is autoimmune, when the body suddenly begins attacking the pancreas. It is unexpectedly triggered in childhood, and requires immediate and lifelong insulin dependence. Type 2 is when the pancreas is just tired and worn out after years of abuse, and can often be controlled with an improved diet and exercise.

Both types are on the rise, but of course everyone can see why Type 2 is going up--diet and crappy lifestyle, as you said. No one can explain why Type 1 is surging.

Challenge it all you want, there's scientific data to refute you, which even Undertoad acknowledged was convincing. Autism is the only one that's political; the medical community generally agrees about the rest. Type 1 diabetes and life-threatening allergies can't linger undiagnosed for years because they kill you, in ways that make it very obvious what you died from.

I don't have a cite.

Cancer is hard, because if you survive other problems you eventually wind up with it (1 in 2 probability). It's not what you die of, it's what you survive. You have to go by five-year relative survival rates for a close to accurate measure. These statistics have roughly gone from 50% you will die from this thing (in 1975) to 33% you will die from this thing (in 2004). A remarkable achievement in 19 years.

Science has identified them for you. It will take longer to fix the problems. Nevertheless it has a MUCH better success rate than shitty websites selling colon cleansers.

It is of course entirely possible that the website is both promoting a scientifically sound theory on diet and also trying to sell colon cleansers.

Absolutely, and I have faith that in the long run science will prevail. But just like cancer patients who are willing to participate in very experimental trials, I don't personally have the time to wait around, and neither does anyone else with a child diagnosed with autism or ADHD. I will balance unverified information on the internet against what common sense says is safe to try, and if it works for my kid, you better believe I will add my voice to those spouting the unverified information. Think of it as calling science's Tip Line, and giving them leads in the case.

Nyuck nyuck nyuck... :)

It's entirely possible that an ice cream shop could provide you with something actually nutritious, but that doesn't mean you should eat all your meals there.

They go into greater detail on that in this video: The Limits of Science

Clod you are doing science on your child, period. You are using the scientific method: you're investigating to form a hypothesis, you're testing your hypothesis with experiment, you're analyzing the results.

You're only testing with a sample size of one, so your findings only apply to one, but they can provide new questions for new hypotheses for a broader population.

That is true UT, but I think the sample of one is, by far, her top priority. If what she does helps others with their research or ideas...... great.

And while I'll admit I'm probably more rigorous than most (oh, ow, my arm hurts bending all the way around like that to reach my back...) I would submit that many, many parents out there do the same thing with their children, carefully monitoring the results of their day-to-day activities--if for no other reason than to make our own lives easier. Nobody knows a kid like his mom, and if generation after generation of mothers say that sugar makes their kid hyperactive and poorly behaved... well, I know I'm not imagining what I see in my kid, so I'm inclined to take their word for it when it comes to their kids, too.

Mothers take this shit seriously.

It's confirmation bias. Like the vast majority of people, the vast majority of mothers are not critical thinkers or trained scientists, and will make assumptions based on their perception and their understanding of the world.

But it turns out that chocolate doesn't give you acne; it turns out going out in the cold doesn't cause you to catch a cold. There are thousands of beliefs that mothers have, that we all have, that are wrong. There is evidence all around us, that we can't see because we don't allow it in our brains.

Science demands an even more critical view of the child than the mother's view. It will only include unbiased, double-blind, direct observations and will throw out intuition, emotion and previously-held beliefs.

[gathered during a single one-hour snapshot of the kid's life]

[established through hours and hours and hours of direct observation gathered day after day, year after year, 24/7/365 by someone who is absolutely obsessed with finding the answer to that burning question that drives them on past sleep, past any concerns of themself and their own needs, that person who isn't concerned about grant money, or finding an academic bit of trivia, but who actually needs a real-world solution that will actually WORK and produce visible results] But, yeah, sure. Mothers don't know what's going on with their own kids. They're probably just "hysterical" ...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7963081

maybe you can study your own response if you eat a bowl of dicks

UT, you're most certainly correct, but MAN!
:bolt: