This week on our Video Diary you are invited to watch Leo play as I give the weekly update and highlight a couple of parents to support. Their websites are added to the link list on the right banner under the title: Please Support Each Other.
I will be spending most of week #12 looking into Sensory processing disorder, a condition in which the brain has trouble receiving and responding to information that comes in through the senses and is common in most children on the spectrum.
I am currently corresponding with several parents who can offer insight into this condition. So you won't want to miss next weeks updates!
Below is a recent addition to our Dietary Challenges section on the blog, but I thought I would add it here this week, as this was an interesting discovery.
I have become a bit of a mad scientist with juicing experimenting, I'll admit. We started juicing just 3 months ago and I would be willing to bet Leo has not had the same juice twice.
Always adding and removing, his fresh super veggie juice has been red, blue, green, brown, orange..etc.. you get the idea.
And to date- he has accepted each and every one!
So recently I was given two eggplants.
Me personally, I have never even tried eggplant, so I had no idea what the flavor would produce or if it was even "juiceable".
Needless to say, I didn't just toss it in with the kale and carrots in the juicer. I had to know what I was dealing with.
Turns out, eggplant belongs to the "Night Shade" family. While the vast majority of people have no problems with nightshades, they can cause serious problems for anyone struggling with an autoimmune disease, as well as some people who simply have a digestive sensitivity to them.
Healthy guts can deal with these the Alkaloids found in Night Shades just fine, but people whose digestive system is already compromised have trouble with them.
One danger of alkaloids is gut irritation: their job in the plant is to kill things, and when they start killing things in your intestine as well, the cells lining the intestinal tract are their first victims. This irritation of the gut contributes to intestinal permeability (“leaky gut”), which can set off an autoimmune reaction when various proteins that should stay inside the digestive tract instead make their way out into the bloodstream, and the body attacks them in response.
On top of the alkaloids, there’s also the lectin issue. All foods contain lectins; many of those lectins are completely harmless, but others are gut irritants – the hard part is figuring out which is which. We know that the lectins in peanuts, for example, are dangerous. The lectins in nightshades may also be gut irritants in sensitive individuals, setting off the same leaky gut response as the alkaloids.
This was enough information to tell me what I needed to know. We are in the process of healing Leo's gut and digestive problems. Just because something is organic, does not necessarily mean it moves in the right direction for us.
A learning experience this journey has been! We will continue moving onward and forward with only the best of the best of everything for Leo!
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