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.
