Hello,
You probably know by now that when you start to enter the allergy world or the world of nutritional supplements, dietary intervention and so on that everyone around you is probably going to be offering you different advice. At a particularly low point when my daughter had gotten so sick that she had lost 20 pounds, and seemed to be loosing language or struggling to find words that had come easily only days before, a friend recommended the book Gut and Psychology Syndrome: Natural Treatment for Dyspraxia, Autism, ADD, Dyslexia, ADHD, Depression, Schizophrenia by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, MD. I watched all of the videos on-line and then started searching for the book. Now if your child only has food allergies, this may not be an avenue that you will even need to pursue, but since my daughter had always spoken, interacted and performed better in school every time she got sick and stopped eating (or only ate fruit), we knew that all of our food testing, blood testing and food avoidance was just the first step. We needed to try something more to help her succeed. Right around that time I decided to call a DAN doctor because the more I learned about the gut symptoms, severe cramping, and night wakings due to extreme pain that my daughter was experiencing the more it seemed that a new diet and supplement protocol would help. At the same time we were able to make an appointment with a DAN doctor, Dr. Mary Megson of Richmond, VA. When it came down to it we decided that it would be easier to take wheat, gluten, oat, and soy out of her diet (we are already eliminating dairy due to severe food allergies) and add the supplements that her body was lacking. This decision was easy for us because at one time my daughter had been anaphylactic to wheat and soy and we had only been back on wheat for 5 years and soy for 9 months. It was during this time that we had noticed the increase in word slurring, severe cramping, increased break outs, eczema, etc. Within six weeks of this diet change my daughter's health began to improve dramatically. She began to gain weight again, the severe stomach cramps were gone, and her conversation and reading skills increased dramatically. We have been following this protocol for 19 months, and now that it has become part of our routine, we are ready to try a few more dietary changes to make our family more healthy. For one, I am going to pull out the book I mentioned above and try to implement what we can to help with some digestive problems that I am having myself and see if it can help my family become more healthy. For so long our focus has been on just finding foods that my daughter can eat on a daily basis or at parties, and now I want to work on seeing if we can continue this gut healing process and maybe in the process make some of her lesser food allergies or intolerances less severe (if this is even possible).
I will add the links for the videos in the near future.
