Month: May 2012

As these posts roll on you may notice the frequent mention of bananas. We buy a lot of bananas. I think we eat about two per day, per person. The people at the produce market probably think I have five kids since I buy about 3 bunches at a time. If you haven’t yet joined the banana bandwagon…you will. What I love about bananas is that they are inexpensive, single serving, pre-packaged food that requires no washing (even of my child’s hands) and is completely gluten, dairy, nut, soy etc. free. They don’t need refrigeration and they are sold everywhere. My son and his friends will all eat them. They do not single you out as a person with a lot of food intolerances. They are low in fat and high in potassium. They are almost perfect. Except of course that they go from green to nasty in under 10 days. Not an issue in my house where they barely get past the green stage before being eaten, but even here, every so often I overbuy bananas. But here is something I never considered until my Aunt Phyllis showed me what to do. When they get really spotted and are starting to turn…freeze them. Just as they are. Just stick them in the freezer. The skins will turn black, but the banana will stay perfect inside. Then, when you...

Although the causes of autism and sensory issues are not known, one area that is consistently getting researched is insecticides. Many insecticides are neurotoxic. While a fatal dose for a bug is way smaller than the fatal dose for a human, they don’t always have the studies for what happens when humans get tiny doses over and over and over or when they get exposed prenatally. Here is the new study http://epa.gov/ncer/events/news/2012/05_03_12_feature.html Note that Dursban or Chrlorpyrifos is a very popular insecticide on soybeans which is yet another reason to avoid non-organic soy. It gets heavy use in agriculture and on golf courses. One of the cluster oddities in autism is how high the rates are in Minnesota. The Minneapolis / St.Paul area has a large number of immigrants from places like Somalia. These immigrants had zero family history of autism in Somalia but then in Minnesota they suddenly started getting autism at a scary rate, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUf4L6UQhbk&feature=related Now think of the three states where you would most want bug repellent. Then look at the graphic. http://graphics.latimes.com/usmap-autism-rates-state/ As Buddy on Dinosaur Train likes to say…I have a hypothesis. The greater Minneapolis area gets its water from the Mississippi river. According to a 1995 study by the USGS 2/3 of all pesticides used for agriculture in the US are in the Mississippi river basin. What do you think happens if you...

One of the reasons I have the information about Enterolab is for people who can’t get their doctor to run a decent blood test. They get tested for wheat allergy, or are told that the risk is small. If nothing else, a positive Enterolab test should annoy them enough so that they will test you just to shut you up. Which is fine with me. Just run the test already. If you have an autoimmune condition you are supposed to be tested for celiac disease regularly. The most common autoimmune disorder which is associated with celiac disease is Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism. Not my words, as you will see below. In a Dutch study 21% of people with celiac disease had some level of Hashimoto’s hypothyroid. A full 12% had full blown Hashimoto’s. That is one in five people with some level of thyroid dysfunction and about one in 8 with full blown disease. In addition 15% of people with Hashimoto’s had some level of reaction to gluten (one in six) with a full 5% of all tested (one in 20) having full villus atrophy. The abstract for the study can be accessed here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17461476 And the full article from the World Journal of Gastroenterology can be found here http://www.wjgnet.com/1007-9327/full/v13/i11/1715.htm There are several other articles at PubMed demonstrating the same link. It is especially concerning if the person with Hashimoto’s also...

One of the things I am passionate about is finding the evidence about what works and what research has been done. I do not like reading a story written by a reporter about a study that I cannot even find which now seems to have “definitive proof” that the cure for cancer is eating lots of jellybeans and aloe vera. And that cancer is caused by aspartame and radio waves. That is why I always embed the PubMed articles where I got the information in each post. This way you can read the actual study and decide for yourself what you think. House Resolution 3699 intends to restrict this flow of information by not publishing studies on PubMed without the author and publisher’s consents EVEN IF YOUR TAX DOLLARS PAID FOR THE RESEARCH. Sure we could buy the articles from the journals that publish them but if you have ever done that you know that it gets expensive very quickly. I understand that print media is struggling right now, but this is not the answer. These are potential lifesavers. The public paid for the research so that they could use the information to improve their own lives. If there is a funding problem perhaps we could actually tax Apple and GE instead of taking lifesaving information away from parents and doctors. Just an idea. I have written to my...