An Autism Mom with Cancer Needs Our Help

An Autism Mom with Cancer Needs Our HelpBeing an autism mom is extremely stressful.  It’s like having PTSD:  Perpetual Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Unfortunately, all that stress can really do a number on mom’s health.

One of our own, Melanie Baldwin, aka “Booty Kicker” from The Thinking Moms’ Revolution, now suffers liver, spine, and bone cancer in her other hip after already surviving breast and bone cancer.

She and her profoundly autistic son need our help.  As she struggles to overcome her current issues, her severely affected son, Luke, still requires 24/7 care and attention.  He is self-injurious and quite ill, suffering the lingering effects of severe autism.

Click here to donate: http://tinyurl.com/njeq66s

All funds raised will go directly to assist Melanie and her family.

Turmeric and Ginger: Two South Asian Power Foods

Turmeric and Ginger:  Two South Asian Power FoodsOne of the great discoveries I made in my health-recovery journey was learning that food can be medicine. Ann Wigmore said it best, I think: “The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.”

You’re either eating foods that are health-supportive or health-destructive. The Standard American Diet (SAD)’s processed foods are not only virtually void of any nutrients, but they are also typically full of harmful ingredients like artificial colors, artificial flavors, high fructose corn syrup, preservatives and additives like MSG, hydrolyzed vegetable protein and other neurotoxins.

If you’ve read my blogs before, you know that I believe that whole foods are health-supportive. Whole foods are ones that look very much like what they did when they were alive and growing.

For example, instead of thinking that whole-wheat bread is a whole food (it’s not), think instead about where the flour came from: the wheat berry.

For a health-supportive diet, a whole-foods diet is the basis for feeling better. I recommend that, in addition to this, you look at foods that are anti-inflammatory in nature. These are typically herbs and spices, as well as brightly colored fruits and vegetables.

Traditional Diets

In my love of cooking and search for health for myself and my family, I have also discovered that traditional diets are very health-promoting. Think about it: before people had refrigeration and preservatives, how did they eat?

They ate foods that had been preserved with salt, fermentation or by drying. They also ate foods that were only in season, which is a core tenet of the macrobiotic diet. And they also prized herbs and spices not only for their strong flavors, but also for their medicinal properties.

In fact, most, if not all, ancient medicinal traditions use herbal medicine. Some of these herbs and spices are ones that are eaten daily, and some are used for medicinal purposes only.

Anti-Inflammatory Spices

South Asian foods from India are examples of foods that contain a lot of two of my favorite anti-inflammatory spices, turmeric and ginger.

Turmeric is not only anti-inflammatory, but it’s also anti-fungal, anti-aging, anti-cancer (anti-mutagenic), anti-diabetic and lowers symptoms of dementia. It’s great for the pains of arthritis and headaches, protects against damaging effects of radiation, protects against heavy-metal toxicity.

What’s not to love about turmeric besides the fact that it’ll stain your hands and clothes yellow if you’re not careful?

Ginger is another powerhouse food that has been used in both Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine for thousands of years. In Western cultures, we typically think of ginger as a nausea reliever, but ginger is a powerful anti-inflammatory spice as well.

Ginger also reduces symptoms of dementia seen in Alzheimer’s (likely because of its anti-inflammatory properties), and it’s also anti-cancer, anti-microbial, anti-diabetic and anti-viral. In addition, it decreases the pain from working out too hard as well as from migraines. Consumption of ginger has been proven to lower blood pressure, too.

You don’t have to eat South Asian foods to get these spices into your diet, although I will say I love Indian and Asian food! To get you started in incorporating turmeric and ginger into your diet, I’ve provided a couple of my favorite recipes:

Recovery from Autism, ADHD, Asthma and Other Chronic Illnesses

Recovery from Autism, ADHD, Asthma and Other Chronic IllnessesI want to let you know what the Documenting Hope Project means to me:  hope.

By making this film in which we will document the potential recovery of 14 children from autism, ADHD, asthma, atopic dermatitis, mood disorders, juvenile RA and type 2 diabetes, I believe people will come to know what I do:  that recovery is possible.

If you know that recovery is possible, then you have hope.

In this film, we’ll be rigorously documenting the therapies, lab work, diets, healing modalities and biomedical approaches that are used in each child’s healing protocol.

I wish something like this had been around when my boys were younger.  Back then, it was enough for me to figure out finally that they had Sensory Processing Disorder, which I call “almost autism”.

It took loads of research on my end to understand that their developmental delays, hypotonia, asthma, allergies, eczema, failure to thrive, projectile vomiting and acid reflux were all related.

It took even more researching and networking to discover that recovery from autism is possible.  If kids can be recovered from autism, and Sensory Processing Disorder is like a subset of autism, then my boys could be recovered from SPD.

I discovered a hidden world of what’s called the “biomedical” approach to healing, which is what functional medicine is:  Getting to the root cause of a symptom, illness or disorder.

The problem was, and is, that most doctors just don’t know about this type of approach.  Thankfully, functional medicine doctors like Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Susan Blum and Dr. Frank Lipman are showing us that food is medicine and that toxicity, gut dysbiosis, hormonal imbalances and nutritional deficiencies are the ultimate causes of just about any kind of chronic disease or disorder.

The New Nutrition Label

The New Nutrition LabelThe Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just announced proposed changes to the nutrition label.  Overall, I think these changes might make a positive and meaningful difference to our country’s health, at least to those who pay attention to food labels.  Here’s a breakdown of what I think are the positive changes:

  • More accurate serving size.  This is the big winner here because it reflects what people currently eat in one sitting.  Most people don’t carefully measure out ½ cup of ice cream for a serving; they eat half the pint instead, so the new label will reflect that reality.
  • Big emphasis on “Total Calories”.  This will be in a much-larger font size so that it really grabs your attention.  It’s kind of like the angel on your shoulder saying, “Do you REALLY want to eat that many calories?”
  • The addition of “Added Sugars” to the label.  Now people will know exactly how much sugar that food manufacturers have been adding to our food.  The problem with our misguided focus on eating low-fat foods is that it comes with the added cost of nasty chemicals to achieve the same “mouth-feel” as well as added sugar.  Fat and sugar both make food taste better.  If you’re taking out one (fat), you’re likely replacing it with more of the other (sugar).Rhetorical question:  Is it coincidental that at the same time we’ve been eating low-fat foods (remember, saturated fats were supposed to have been causing cardiovascular disease), there has been a skyrocketing epidemic of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity?  I think not!  It’s the sugar, folks!  And many times, it’s not listed as “sugar” on the ingredient label, so it can be tricky to figure out just where those calories are coming from.
  • Elimination of “Calories from Fat”.  Unfortunately, we’ve become fat-phobic in this country, as I explained above.  I wish we could become sugar-phobic instead, but sugar causes a dopamine rush, meaning that eating it is addictive and makes you (temporarily) feel good, so that’s probably not going to happen!
  • The addition of “Vitamin D” RDA percentage.  This country is in the midst of a vitamin-D epidemic deficiency, and it’s a factor that plays a large part in the epidemics of autism, allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases, so having people pay attention to vitamin-D rich foods is a plus.  I’m betting, however, that most of them will be supplemented with synthetic vitamin D (vitamin D2) instead of the natural form (vitamin D3), so this is going to create another game for food manufacturers:  they will probably just add a lot of synthetic vitamin D so they can claim that it’s “rich in vitamin D”.
  • The addition of “Potassium” RDA percentage.  Potassium lowers blood pressure, so it’s a good idea to put this on the label, especially since so many people (young ones, too!) have hypertension these days.

The problem is that some people just don’t pay attention to food labels and portion sizes.  They’re going to eat whatever portion is set in front of them, which is why ex-mayor Bloomberg of New York tried to tax soft drinks over 8 ounces – do we really need to drink a Big Gulp?  The documentary “Super Size Me” did a great job of showing us how this kind of portion creep is making us fatter.

Nutrition-label improvements are mostly a moot point for me, personally, as I don’t buy very many foods that come with a food label on them.  I recommend you do the same.

This is a guest-blog post I wrote for Dr. Henri Roca, MD.

Inflammation

What’s so important about inflammation?

Discover 12 Powerful Ways to Reduce Inflammation - small3Inflammation causes pain, swelling, heat, redness and loss of function. Left untreated, it can lead to bodily tissue destruction, fibrosis and necrosis. Remember, pain is a signal that something’s wrong.

Who has inflammation?

Inflammation is a root cause of many chronic illnesses such as autism, ADHD, allergies, asthma, eczema, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune diseases, heart disease, type II diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Help!  How do I reduce it?

Sign up for this free report!  In it, I’ll show you many simple things you can do with the foods that you’re eating to reduce inflammation.  And when that happens, you may not have as much pain, stiffness and swelling.

 

Formaldehyde in Johnson and Johnson Products

Formaldehyde in Johnson and Johnson ProductsFormaldehyde in Johnson and Johnson products? For decades, Americans have come to believe that Johnson and Johnson’s products are perhaps the best choice for their babies.  I know that when my boys were little, I was given lots of little samples of their shampoos, body washes and powders for babies.

Now, Johnson and Johnson is finally yielding to pressure and changing the formulas of their personal-care products to remove known carcinogens:  formaldehyde (released by the ubiquitous quaternium-15) and 1,4-dioxane.  WHY WERE THESE ALLOWED TO BE IN THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

I think it’s because we’ve collectively fallen asleep at the wheel.  I think most Americans assume, as I used to, that if it’s sold in a store, it must be safe because surely the FDA has tested it for safety.  NOT TRUE.

Most people don’t know that ingredients applied to your skin bypass the liver, meaning that those toxins are free to float around your baby’s body and inflict harm.

The sad thing is that we’ve placed our trust in this and other companies because we’ve been led to believe, by millions of dollars spent on marketing and advertising, that their products are safe.

The really sad thing is that our children are being born pre-polluted, and adding known carcinogens to their personal-care products is only hastening the time that they reach toxic overload.  This is one of the, if not THE, main reason why there is an epidemic of children’s chronic illnesses today, such as autism, ADHD, allergies, asthma and autoimmune.  As Jon Stewart said, “And that’s just the A’s”.

Sugar and Health: Cut Out the Sugar!

Sugar and HealthI’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:  Sugar is as addictive as drugs!  Sugar activates the same pleasure centers in your brain that hard drugs like morphine and heroin do, and you get a dopamine rush from consuming it.  No wonder it’s so hard to give up!

Sugar is pushed on us by an agricultural policy that subsidizes corn and sugar, making it a cheap and addictive additive to processed foods.  Fifty years ago, the average American consumed about 20 pounds of sugar per year; these days, it’s around 130 pounds.  No wonder we’re an obese nation!

I think by now, we all know that sugar and processed foods can lead to diabetes and obesity, but here are some other reasons why you’ll want to cut out the sugar if you’re looking to improve your health.

Sugar and Health

  • Sugar feeds cancer.  Sugar in all of its forms, including high-fructose corn syrup, maple syrup, agave, etc., feeds cancer because it causes angiogenesis, the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor.
  • Sugar suppresses the immune system.  Glucose, fructose, sucrose and other simple sugars cause a 50% reduction in the number of white blood cells that engulf pathogenic bacteria.
  • Sugar feeds Candida and other intestinal pathogens.  Candidiasis is a systemic, whole-body infection with the Candida albicans yeast.  Sugar feeds Candida and other intestinal pathogens, which in turn suppress the immune system.
  • Sugar causes inflammation.  Sugary foods cause an increase of inflammatory cytokines. An overproduction or inappropriate production of certain cytokines by the body can result in diseases like heart disease, cancer and autoimmune diseases.
  • Sugar ages your skin faster.  Wanna know why I look 15 years younger than I am?  I don’t eat much sugar.  The free radicals caused by its inflammatory actions age the skin (as well as what you don’t see on the inside).
  • Sugar uses up valuable nutrients to process it.  For example, it takes a LOT of magnesium to process sugar, and magnesium is both woefully deficient in the Standard American Diet and necessary to calm the central nervous system.
  • Sugar causes adrenal fatigue.  Cortisol, made by your adrenal glands, controls blood-sugar swings. Too much sugar can cause excess cortisol production, leading eventually to adrenal fatigue, where your adrenals can’t make enough cortisol to get you through the day with enough energy.
  • Sugar decreases your ability to concentrate.  A high-sugar diet leads to a lack of attention in children (and adults, too!) as well as an increase in adrenaline.
  • Sugar increases your appetite.  Sugar doesn’t tell your brain that you’re full and that you should stop eating, which is why you can scarf down a whole box of crackers or cookies and still be hungry.

Giving up sugar is hard, and sheer willpower probably won’t be enough to do it.  I’ve found that cutting out processed foods while adding in foods made from scratch and whole grains helps.

Let me be clear on what I mean by “made from whole grains”.  I mean food made with the whole brown rice, millet, quinoa, oats grain/kernel, not flakes or flour made by grinding up these grains and seeds.  I mean food made with the whole wheat berry, if you eat wheat, not bread or cookies or waffles or pancakes made from whole wheat flour.  I mean whole oat groats, not oatmeal.  Grinding a grain into flour increases its glycemic load, meaning it can raise your blood sugar very quickly.

Looking for some dessert recipes that aren’t too sweet and don’t have too much sugar?  Try out these favorites:

Body Ecology Diet: An Interview with Donna Gates

Body Ecology Diet: An Interview with Donna GatesDonna Gates is the developer of the Body Ecology Diet, a gut-healing diet that can be used to recover symptoms of autism, ADHD, autoimmune diseases, hormonal imbalances and more.

Sign up for the webinar replay below.

In this interview, Donna talks about how she developed the Body Ecology Diet, almost as an offshoot of what she learned studying macrobiotics.

We talk about gut health is important for the immune system and how, if you have gut dysbiosis (an imbalance of bad bacteria, yeast, parasites and pathaogens vs. good), that it leads to ill health.

Gut health also affects brain health, as most (95%) of your neurotransmitters are made in your gut.  Most, if not all, people with neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders have impaired gut function, which is why cleaning up the gut can help recover people from symptoms of these chronic disorders.

Find out how this diet can help those with:

  • Allergies
  • Food allergies
  • ADHD
  • Asthma
  • Autism
  • Neurological disorders
  • Thyroid disorders
  • Autoimmune disorders

 

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBYN O’BRIEN

Robyn O'Brien + bookWhy are there so many food allergies these days?  Sign up below for the webinar replay of my interview of Robyn O’Brien to find out.

Robyn O’Brien is the author of “The Unhealthy Truth:  One Mother’s Shocking Investigation into the Danger’s of America’s Food Supply – and What Every Family Can Do to Protect Itself“, which is her own story of how she investigated the causes of her children’s food allergies and learned how broken our food system is.

She is also the founder of AllergyKids Foundation.

Sign up for the webinar replay to find out how toxins in our food are linked to alarming recent increases in:

  • Allergies
  • Food allergies
  • ADHD
  • Cancer
  • Asthma
  • Autism
  • Neurodevelopmental delays
  • Neurological disorders
  • Autoimmune disorders

 

Listen to Your Gut

Listen to Your GutIn the fall of 2013, I attended “An Evening of Inspiration“, a fabulous benefit put on my non-profit, Epidemic Answers, to benefit our Canary Kids Film Project, a film in which we’ll be documenting the potential recovery of 14 children from autism, ADHD, asthma, atopic dermatitis, juvenile RA, mood disorders and type 2 diabetes as they receive free healing and recovery services for 18 months.

My fellow board member and friend, Patty Lemer, the Executive Director of Developmental Delay Resources, was interviewing people on film at the event about how they got involved in the project.

I told Patty my story of how I originally started blogging for Epidemic Answers four years ago after I heard our Executive Director, Beth Lambert, give a presentation about her just-published book, “A Compromised Generation:  The Epidemic of Chronic Illness in America’s Children” at the Wilton library.

I found myself finishing Beth’s sentences and was astounded that someone else was on the same page as me and had also recovered her children.  Of course, I immediately asked to volunteer for them, which is how I started blogging for them.

If you don’t know my story, I’ve recovered my sons from sensory processing disorder (I call it “autism light”), asthma, acid reflux and eczema, and they also have had or continue to have developmental delays, hypotonia, hypothyroidism, mitochondrial dysfunction, immune dysregulation, methylation defects and failure to thrive.

It has been a long row to hoe, but it has very much been worth it.  Along the way, I discovered that many of my own health problems were related to and/or contributed to the health problems of my children.

I would not have achieved this level of success in our health if I had listened to what my western, allopathic doctors were telling me.

I would say, “My son barely eats; he eats 2 spoonfuls of yogurt and 5 Cheerios, and it takes him an hour to eat, and then he throws it all back up”.  They would say, “He’s fine, don’t worry about it”.  They said that all the way from his beginning at the 40th percentile for weight until he fell all the way down to the 3rd percentile at 18 months, when he lost weight.  THEN they said, “There’s a problem.”  Really!?!

I would say, “He has poor motor skills.  His first crawling happened when he was 8 months old, and he slithered backwards.  Then, he army-crawled until he was 19 months old.  He cross-crawled for only a couple of weeks before he began to walk at 20 months.”  All along, they were saying, “He’s fine; don’t worry about it”.  Until he hit 18 months, THEN all of a sudden they said, “There’s a problem.”

I would say, “He projectile vomits, and my clothes, his clothes, his car seat, chairs and rugs are covered with it constantly.  He throws up after every meal.”  They said, “He’s got a weak gag reflex; he’ll grow out of it.”  They said this until he was 2-1/2 years old, and THEN they said, “He has acid reflux.  Give him some Prevacid.”

I would say, “He’s hypersensitive to sounds, lights and motions.  He cries all the time.  Something is wrong.”  They would say, “He’s fine; he’ll grow out of it.”  By this point, my son was 3 years old, and I had had enough of being told that, “He’s fine.  There’s nothing to worry about.  He’ll grow out of it.”

The truth is, there was a gnawing feeling inside of me that “something’s not right, something’s not right”.  I couldn’t put my finger on it.  So, even though my then pediatrician du jour said, “Don’t worry about it; he’ll grow out of it”, I had grown a pair by then and learned to put my foot down for my child.

I badgered her with questions until finally she gave up and said that maybe we should see a developmental psychologist.  We did, and voila, we got the diagnosis (even though it’s not a DSM diagnosis) that my son had sensory processing disorder.

From then on, nothing could stop us.  I began to research WHY he was like this.  Therapy obviously helped, but there was more to it.

Why was he sick all the time?  Why had he had so many ear infections?  Why did he develop asthma?  Why did he have developmental delays and acid reflux?  Why was he so sensitive?

Nobody that I knew really knew, so I had to keep digging and digging until I got to the point where I figured it out.  It’s toxicity, gut dysbiosis, nutritional deficiencies and hormonal imbalances.

Try getting THAT answer from your pediatrician.  Unless you’re one of the lucky few with an integrative pediatrician, you’ll never hear that answer, despite a multitude of peer-reviewed medical research journal studies out there that they just don’t have the time to read.

The system is broken.  If you want health and recovery for yourself and/or your children, you will need to take your health back into your own hands and stop giving away your power to the religion of worshiping men and women in white coats as if they know everything.  They probably don’t.

You need to listen to your gut instinct when it tells you that something is wrong.

It’s so easy to push that knowing down and stuff it aside and listen to the authorities who tell you that nothing is wrong and don’t worry about it.  I’m telling you don’t do it; you’ll regret it if you do.

I teach my clients to become their own and their children’s own advocates.  If you don’t do it, who will?  You can’t expect that someone else will care more about you and your children than you do.

My children and I would not have recovered from our health problems if I had not listened to my intuition, that little voice that said, “Something’s wrong.”