An Autism Recovery

Making A Painless Shot of Vitamins

Here's the current vitamin mix lineup.

As mentioned before, we're using the children's liquid multi from the Vitamin Shoppe. That's it on the left there.

Next is the Added Attention, followed by the Cal/Mag/Zinc formulation from Trace Minerals Research.

I take 1.5 teaspoons of the multi. 1.5 teaspoons of the Cal/Mag/Zinc. And then 1 tablespoon of Added Attention. Stir and serve.

All these need to be refrigerated after opening, so it's a cold shot of vitamins. Logan takes one shot in the morning and another in the early evening (usually before dinner, sometimes with).

Vitamin Content

For your (and my) reference, here are shots of the labels of each.

Multi

• Front
• Back, part 1 (very large) (extremely large)
• Back, part 2 (very large) (extremely large)

Cal/Mag/Zinc

• Front
• Back, part 1 (very large) (extremely large)
• Back, part 2 (very large) (extremely large)

Added Attention

• Front
• Back, part 1 (very large) (extremely large)
• Back, part 2 (very large) (extremely large)

A Painless Shot of Vitamins

Giving liquid vitamins with a spoon can be challenging and messy. If you fill the spoon, you’re more likely to spill. If you don’t fill the spoon, then you have to give more spoonfuls. Lose/lose.

So at the point where we had two different liquid vitamins going, I hit upon the idea of using a shot glass and asking Logan to simply drink his vitamins.
No muss. No fuss.It works very well.

A bit later I started using the coffee stir/straw to mix it all up as the liquid calcium/magnesium supplement tended to settle to the bottom.

Now Logan drinks his vitamins from the shot glass, sometimes through the little stir/straw, sometimes straight up. Twice a day, no problem.

More to come on what I actually put in the shot...

Calcium

So Corinne reminded me again to figure out our calcium supplementation plan for Logan. Since moving to the GF/CF diet, obviously his calcium intake has dropped. We want to supplement it before it begins to be a problem.

Generally

I started with reading the general guideline that we want to get at least one gram daily, divided through the day since the body can't absorb all that at once.

Magnesium

And I knew that proper calcium absorption requires the presence of magnesium. I found some support for that thought here, but to be honest I haven't read it yet.

I also had in my notes that a good safe daily amount of magnesium was 3-4mg per pound of body weight. By the way, I love that kind of guideline because it makes a lot more sense than those that say something like "Give two drops daily until the child's fifth birthday, and give three tablespoons daily after that."

I mean, what's the big deal with the age of the child? What if he's almost at the age where you increase the dosage? Do you almost give him the new dose?

I just prefer the body weight ratio for a sense of precision. It may not matter a bit once the dosage is more than a certain threshold anyway, but it makes me feel more confident about the dosage at least.

Liquid?

So I knew I wanted a calcium supplement, preferably containing magnesium, and since Logan is taking the liquid vitamins twice daily very well (which is going to be a fun subject for another post soon), I would love to find these simple qualities in a liquid form.

The Pace of Change

We decided to introduce any diet/supplement changes on the weekends so Logan could get used to whatever effects were happening before the week started and he was in school and we weren’t with him 24/7.

The first week was diet. Corinne is doing a great job making further refinements to that and is totally going through a new-Mommy phase again: cooking, organizing, nesting, etc. Anyway, despite the fact that both of us have rather bland tastes in food, I think she is going to end up being quite the versatile and competent cook.

So that’s really the second week as well. I’m working on what to do for week three at this point, and the options that work well for many autistic families are all on the table. I’m just having trouble choosing the one that will give us the best effect.

Probiotics
I have a good probiotic (Kirkman Threelac) on hand now. And everything I read says there isn’t much of a downside to introducing it, unless he has a lot of yeast overgrowth in his gut, in which case it’s going to be a rough few days until he expels it all (details omitted for the sake of the author’s appetite).

I know that we’ll have to do the probiotic as a step along the way to recovery, but just not sure it’s the best next step.

Enzymes
This is also commonly recommended and would seem to be a good step at some point. But delivery is complicated: drink this before you eat, at every meal, every day? Could be tough to be consistent with that one. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

B-6/Magnesium
This is where I’m leaning as I write this. Why? Well, this step got highest marks on a survey of 3500 parents. I think chelation has surpassed it on more recent surveys as most effective, but chelation is not an introductory step at all, so we’re a long way from that.

Also the more I think about it, the more urgent this seems. The brain and body are likely not getting the nutrition from food that a normal system would be getting. Probiotics help fix the system, but it can be a while before all the nutrition is flowing through normally as the GI system is fixed.

So if we just directly introduce the nutrients, then they can get into the bloodstream and to where they are needed. And we shortcut the rest of the processes that may have other problems we don’t even know about yet. Stop the mal-nutrition that may be happening while we repair the gastrointestinal system.

Plus, we already have a regular twice daily vitamin routine, and at this point I don’t think one more spoonful of something will be difficult to administer.

You can teach a hungry man to fish. But you better get the starving man a snack first.

I think this is where we’ll start. Now I just need to figure out if I have the right product already (Super Nu-Thera), and what the right dosage will be.