We’ve been giving Logan a children’s chewable multi-vitamin for a while. Yesterday some reading pointed out that multi-vitamins for children on the autism spectrum should not contain copper. Excessive copper can be neurotoxic, and ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) children typically have already-elevated levels of copper for the same reasons that they’re bodies cannot detoxify the other heavy metals (mercury, lead, etc.). So giving him a supplemental daily dose of copper to keep adding to the accumulation is clearly a bad idea.
On to shopping for a replacement multi-vitamin.
RDA/RDI
We’ve all seen the Recommended Dietary Allowance charts on nutrition labels. You can also call it Recommended Daily Allowance since conveniently the unit of time measure for RDA is one day.
They (the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences) set the RDA at the level meeting the needs of 97-98% of healthy people. They further break it out according to age, sex, pregnant, lactating, etc.
It’s odd, though. The chart calls for 1.1mg of vitamin B6 for children four to six years old. And then at age seven, it jumps to 1.4mg. Really?
Clearly this is not meant to be exact, and my need for precision may be blinding me to the bigger picture here.
Speculation
I would think that since B6 is water-soluble and carried by the blood, that a more informative dosage would take that into account. If weight were a good proxy for blood-volume (and I don’t know that it is or isn’t—yet—help appreciated), then it seems you could say you need a daily B6 quantity of x mgs per pound of body weight.
So at this point I just need to dig further to understand what this is all about.
