I was asked to write a little blurp about gluten and what it does to some people like my son, so this is what I came up with. I figured I'd share with you guys too:)
My son has been gluten free since he was 2.5 years old. What is gluten? Why did I choose to remove it from my son's diet?
In 2005 I had a beautiful little boy. As he grew older he started sending us red flags. I always imaged myself teaching my son so many things. However he was a difficult baby. Always throwing up, screaming and crying all hours of the night. We tried everything, from Ovol gas drops to chiropractics. They both helped him with the stomach pains but something was still off. He was in and out of the doctors office, he had a chronic cough, runny nose and was on and off anti-biotics. When I first switched my son from breast milk to formula and started to notice the difference in him I ask the doctor if he could be allergic to milk. His response was "No the chances of that were one in a million, Milk allergies are so rare. So I believed him and for months we had these issues. I was a young mom having had Wesley one month after turning 20. I was a straight edge parent, following everything the doctor said to a tee. Things were not right, Wes was not crawling yet, he sat there all the time and stared into space. Finally after one day when Wes was 11 months old I noticed mucous in his diaper. That was it, I called around the city and finally booked an appointment with a pediatrian. He sent my son for allergy testing.
After waiting for 4 months to get into the specialist. I held my little boy down while they marked his chubby arms with little a pen to match a little grid with all the possible allergens on a paper. Then they started scratching those pen marks with little needles. As he screamed they wrapped his arm up in paper towel and taped it. I was instructed that it would take 15mins for the results to be available. He screamed and screamed, finally I opened the door and asked the nurse if this was normal. She told me some kids have a harder time then others. So I tried cuddling and rocking him and nothing seemed to help. My last resort, I reached into my diaper bag and pulled out a sippy cup of milk. This settled him, just in time. The nurse came back and removed the paper towel. She said he seem to have a reaction the one item, the milk. I looked down at my baby’s tear stained face and he sucked back the white poison.
Wesley started developing language well and at 18months had about 15 words he used regularly. Tweo days after he gave up milk he started to walk
Then we went for our 18month check up and that’s when things went down hill. At the visit they gave him his vaccine, and that night he had a terrible fever. From then on his words were gone.
I started thinking about removing gluten from my son's diet after reading Jenny McCarthy's book "Louder Than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism" when he was 2. Gluten is the protein found in wheat. Similar proteins are also found in rye, barley and possibly oats. At this time I was in denial, I knew he was language delayed, but I refused to believe he had autism. But deep down I think I knew.
It wasn’t until that terrible day in January 2008 when Wesley was diagnosis with autism did I revisit the idea of removing the gluten. A month later we visited a naturopathic doctor, who had me remove gluten and soy from his diet on top of the dairy that was removed a while back.
It wasn’t an easy, kids that are sensitive to gluten are sometimes actually addicted to it. Wesley went through a withdraw period, where his behaviours went threw the roof. But after the rough stage things did get better. His speech started to improve. He started adding in little phrases, seemed happier. Another thing is we were able to start potty training him because his digestive system started to work right. Basically what was happening to my son was the gluten was effecting the lining of the intestinal wall and large particles of food were getting into his blood stream and effecting the brain. The body was then sending out antibodies to fight the particles. This was causing my son little body to go into overload.
You can see a MAJOR change in his attention to detail, and if he accidentally has something that has gluten in it he does act up and has trouble with concentrating. One day we will try and re introduce it, but for now he’s doing great.
Digg
