Good morning, readers!
As I sat here staring at the box of chocolates I certainly don't need to eat for breakfast, I began to wonder about food and autistic children.
I have food allergies. If I eat foods with high fructose corn syrup in the ingredients, I get a bad rash somewhere on my body. I never know where the rash will appear or how bad it will be. It took me years to figure out what was causing the rash. The doctors thought it was from nerves. I couldn't afford the testing for allergies, and the few I had done did not reveal the allergy I discovered on my own.
I am a chocoholic. I have to have the chocolate in the house at all times. It is my one huge weakness. It is also a source of mental and emotional strength. I can tell the difference between cheap chocolate and good chocolate. My family laughs at this. True chocoholics know I'm not crazy.
On another note, when my son was young, he would get hung up on certain foods for a period of time before finally moving on to others. At one point, Sesame Street introduced a fun sandwich for kids to try. It was one of those "get your kids to eat healthier" days. My kid caught on to this recipe and got stuck on it for weeks. It consisted of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, to which was added cream cheese and raisins. Sounds weird, but it was good to my son......so he had that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until he finally (thank you, Lord) tired of that type of food.
My topic today, food for thought, is to help me learn about autistic children and your experiences with their foods as moms. Do you have a funny memory, food quirk, food allergy, and so on....that you would like to share to help broaden my education to learning autism?
Thanks for joining us here at Tammy's place!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Food is a sore subject when it comes to my 8 year old son with autism. He's gotten a lot better about trying new foods. When he was a toddler though he would go on the one item food jags. For example, he'd eat nothing but yogurt for days even weeks. Then, finally, it would get changed to something else. I think to this day he'd be happy with just the one item if I let him do it....
I think Gannon defies odds when it comes to food and autism. When he was a baby, he would eat anything and everything(except peaches). Up until this year when we put Gannon on the restricted diet...he would literally eat anything we put in front of him. I remember he would eat whole sandwichs, steak, shrimp...you name it he ate it.
Saying that...he was always VERY small and never seems to grow much at all. Gannon would fall off the chart completely then get back on it but stay in the bottom 5%. He wasn't absorbing any of the nutrients from the foods he was eating. Only if I would have researched stuff more back then....things might look very different now. Gannon's food allergies started at 13 months of age, but sadly i didn't pay attention and drs quickly said it was "something" else. So for 4 years I fed my kid stuff that was making him sick, I just didn't put it all together. Now saying that, Gannon was allergic to my breastmilk. A true allergy. So after nursing him for 3 months, and multiple trips to the ER, we finally figured it out. So why did it take me this long to figure out the food allergy deal...I will never know. Basically when my milk hit his system, it went into anaphalitc shock. So....he has always been a sensative guy.
I know the GFCF diet doesnt work for everyone, and its alot of work. But within 3 weeks of Gannon being on the diet, he started to feel much better. Starting sleeping, finally learned how to drink from a straw, stopped having constant runny noses....etc....now saying that....we have done a ton of tests on Gannon and have gotten no where. So now I did it the regular medical way, and its now time to do it my way. We are ordering a whole battery of tests on Gannon to figure out what is going on.
In my personal opinion, I feel kids who are on the spectrum all have lower immune systems. So they are much more susciptable than the "average" kid. Between that and the different chemical make up, I think it all areas just pile up and compounds everything. Between, enviornment, metals in the systems(and not only from vaccines), food, and their natural make up...it all adds up and these kids just have it harder. THeir bodies are doing one thing, and their brains are doing another...so naturally I can see why wires get crossed. I have done alot of research on food allergies and I have figured out that I am a carrier. I have the same exzema patches as Gannon does. So, I also think genetics plays into this too. At what point is to much for our kids?
I do not have first-hand experience with autism, but I wanted to tell you that I really enjoy and appreciate your blog, and I am a kindred chocoholic spirit, here, too. Thanks for the research and sharing you do. I am going to pass on your site's info to a friend of mine, or two or three.
Post a Comment