Month: February 2014

The Experiment – Part 6 – The First Food Challenge

When deciding on a food for the first challenge, we chose soy. Soy had never been a big part of our life and given the symptoms and patterns, soy seemed unlikely to be a problem. Boy was I ever wrong. He had his first dose of soy at the end of the school day on Friday. By Friday evening he was positively loopy. I won’t go into all of the problems, but they included falling asleep in public and acting strangely. On Saturday he had a second dose and could barely read anything and was having meltdowns once again. Ah yes those meltdowns. In two weeks I had forgotten how much fun they were. His bathroom habits became erratic. Fortunately he had no heavy social commitments that weekend. He was OK at his friend’s birthday party on Sunday and was mostly functional at school the following week, but he was definitely not quite right for five days after eating soy. As the studies had said was true of the children who were initially tested, once the offending food was reintroduced the repercussions were swift. By Sunday he never wanted to eat the stuff again. Many people think that their children will never willingly give up a food. My experience has been the opposite. I can still remember when we first pulled gluten four years ago and he needed to...

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The Experiment – Part 5 – The First Week

To be perfectly clear although I was interested in trying the diet I did so under the theory that a lot of special needs kids seem to have undiagnosed or underdiagnosed food sensitivities that make them feel unwell, achy, or congested, so if we were to remove the offending foods the absence of headaches and stomachaches would make them more attentive, less crabby, and more cooperative. Of course I was wrong. What happened was what the medical journals in the earlier post said would happen most of the time. I just don’t think I was prepared for how drastic or fast the change would be. My first clue that this would work started within 48 hours of the new diet when he got up and asked me what he needed to do. Normally sequencing getting dressed, brushing teeth and putting away the hangers is too much. We break it down into steps like “take off pajamas” “put on shirt” “put on socks” “put on pants” “put hangers in closet” and “brush teeth”. Each step would take between two and ten reminders to complete. That morning he found me in the shower and asked what he needed to do before he could play on the iPad so I said he needed to get dressed and brush his teeth. And he did. All of it. No steps and no reminders. I...

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Gluten-Free Soy-Free Vegan Easy Banana Breakfast Bars

A friend posted this breakfast / snack bar recipe on my facebook wall. The original used cinnamon, almond milk, applesauce and raisins…none of which are safe for us. So I changed it…a lot. This is NOT the taste treat of the ages. Its a healthy snack bar and it tastes like a healthy snack bar. It has potassium, dark chocolate, fiber, protein…etc. The banana flavor is pretty overwhelming and while the oats add a coconutty flair…they are not coconut. That said, everybody ate them. And for a snack bar that is nut-free, seed-free, gluten-free, soy-free, corn-free, dairy-free, coconut-free, citrus-free, egg-free, vegan, nightshade-free, bean-free, low in salicylates and phenols is GMO and additive-free and contains virtually no added sugar (there is some in the dark chocolate mini-chips) they are pretty darn good. I mean really when you exclude all those foods and try to make a dessert, you end up with chocolate covered bananas, and mango sorbet. This, at least, is not frozen. Ingredients 3 ripe mashed bananas (medium sized) 2 cups gluten free old fashioned oats 1/2 tsp salt 1/2 tsp allspice 1 tsp vanilla 1/2 cup hemp milk 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips (enjoy life brand) Safe oil – preferably a solid shortening like palm or coconut oil – for oiling baking dish Equipment 9 x 9 glass baking dish (a shiny metal one will also work but...

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The Experiment Part 4 – What is a Salicylate?

My high school chemistry teacher, while a lovely person, often appeared to be channeling Ben Stein’s economics teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Between that and teenage rebellion against chemist parents, my understanding of chemistry is surprisingly limited. So before I eliminated salicylates I needed to figure out what they were (besides that they were acids) and who had a reputable list. So I called the chemists in the family. They told me that finding the salicylates in food should be relatively simple and that somewhere there should be a list of them done by some sort of pureeing and adding other chemicals and titration and other things that I didn’t understand because I spent too much of my high school chemistry class doodling. What I did figure out however was that decent results would look like the following: 1) The way that they knew how much salicylate was in each food would be explained and actual measurements would be provided by food. 2) The method that they used would be explained. 3) They would have taken more than one sample of each food since organic materials vary in their chemical composition (at least to some extent). 4) An actual medical or nutritional journal would have published the results. They might be available on a blog, but they would not be available only on a blog. 5) Ideally they...

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The Experiment – Part 3 – Designing the Experiment

So here was my hypothesis Some of the experiments pulled all the major allergens but left in all veggies. I knew from my own research that there were several veggies that were high in salicylates. Some of the experiments which showed great response left in gluten or did not insist on gluten free or left in some dairy (dairy has no salicylates) buy pulled every salicylate known. The level of reaction improvement seemed (eyeballing it) to be related to how many of these foods were pulled from the diet. The more foods pulled the better the result. So what if, in most cases, the kids were having an autoimmune reaction of some sort that was poorly defined and hard to test? Well, if I pulled the top ten allergens (gluten, dairy, corn, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, citrus, eggs, fish and shellfish) and put the child on a low salicylate additive and preservative free diet using only organic food then if that hypothesis was true, I should, theoretically see a big improvemen more than 60% of the time. Also I should see a sudden relapse when an offending food was re-introduced. I would love to say that I carefully crafted the experiment, but I did not. I pull the top 12 all the time to design recipes for this blog. I then pulled salicylates in addition. What was left was...

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The Experiment Part 2 – Making Sense of Data

As I mentioned in the first post we were stuck at home during a pledge drive weekend because it was Chicago, it was cold and we had the flu. So I watched a series of episodes about the brain and diet…on the heels of the articles I had already read which were included in the prior post. Now for a bit of backstory… In college, due to my own allergies, I took a premedical microbiology sequence of classes. Technically I wasn’t allowed to take them, but this is back in the day before everything was on computers and cross checked so as a result I was able to scam my way in. As a result, I actually studied cell biology, genetics, and immunology despite majoring in economics and math and blowing off the prerequisite classes. Yes, that is indeed the kind of person I am. So I knew that the way that the immune system works (to grossly oversimplify) is that it recognizes foreign proteins and mounts an attack. This is why a list of the most allergenic foods is pretty much the same as a list of the highest protein foods (with the exception of the meat of warm blooded animals). Pollen is high in protein, dander is shed animal skin (protein!), you get the general idea. Autoimmune disease occurs when the body mistakes a protein that has...

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The Experiment – Part 1 – Evidence That Diet Causes ADD and ADHD

I have not gone into our personal journey on this blog because it wasn’t really intended to be about me, but rather about cooking for a child with multiple intolerances. But something has happened recently that I feel that I must share. It is why there have been no posts this month until today. It is something amazing and overwhelming and just plain awesome. My family are all scientists. Not just my parents and sibling, but extended family too like aunts and uncles. As a result when someone says something or when a study hits the news we immediately examine the structure of the experiment to see if it actually proves anything or if its buggy. There are a lot of experiments that get published that would get you a C- in a 7th grade science class. Then they get picked up by the media and twisted and then suddenly people think that there is evidence of something when there isn’t. Sometimes the people designing the study do a bad job and sometimes the study is fine and it is just that the reporting on the study is atrocious. Over the years of writing this blog I have read literally hundreds and hundreds of studies on the way that food affects the brain. Many could be used to teach children how NOT to design an experiment (twelve people is...

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