Category Archives: nutrition

Tips for eating healthy on a budget

food preservation, Homemaking, Intentional Spending

There is a commonly expressed frustration about how expensive it is to eat healthy on a budget. And it’s true that specialty products and organics tend to be quite pricey.

While in the US I had different shopping techniques and resources that dramatically cut my cost on even those specialty foods, there are some basic tips that apply wherever you live.

  • Eat simply.  Stay away from specialty ingredients, and stick to the basics. I don’t try to serve meals that will grace magazine pages – I want food that will be filling and nutritious for my family.

For example, for breakfast I mostly make hot cereal (oatmeal, polenta, rice pudding) or eggs. There was a long period during which I made quick breads, muffins and breakfast casseroles but I don’t have the energy or additional kitchen helpers for that now.

For Shabbos breakfast I make granola, yogurt (for 23 shekels I can make close to four liters with minimal time and effort( or buy cornflakes (I get 1.5 kilos of cornflakes for 20 shekels – this is enough for two or three weeks for our family.) Nothing exciting but it’s affordable, filling and tastes good.

Sample costs: for oats and rice I pay 10 shekels for 1.4 kilos, polenta is 10.90 a kilo. I use up to half a kilo to make enough for a generous breakfast when everyone is home (a third of a kilo is plenty otherwise). This is a maximum of 5.50 shekels for my biggest batch, which is enough for 8 kids, four of whom eat adult quantities.  I pay 24 shekels for 30 eggs (80 agurot per egg) – the younger kids eat two, the older kids have three each.

  • Know what prices are so you can recognize a good deal. Over the holiday season, chicken prices went through the roof. A couple of weeks later, my husband bought some whole chickens that he thought were a good price. They were a very good price – for the holiday season. The price was only okay two weeks later.

Many years ago I created a price book to get a clear idea of how much I was paying for each ingredient that I cooked with per pound. It was super helpful to get this kind of clarity. While I don’t have the need to do that now, I have a pretty good sense of what a good price is for most of the items I regularly buy.

If you don’t have any idea what a good price is, take some time to create a price book. It’s basically a listing of how much you pay per unit for each item that you regularly purchase. It’s really worth it – it will give you the confidence to know when something is a really good price or just an average price.

  • Buy on sale. Many stores have weekly loss leader sales. Right before the holiday season I bought about 20 whole chickens because the price was so good. The butcher told me that the store owner was selling the chicken for four shekels a kilo less than the price he paid for it!

Why would he do that, you might wonder? To get people into the store, since most people will buy other things not on sale once they’re already there. I have saved so, so much money like this. It’s always interesting to me that I shop in the same stores as everyone else but I spend much less – this is one reason why.

Here’s an old post of mine on tips for saving on food – they are still useful!

  • Buy seasonal. Whatever is grown in that season will be less expensive. 

If you pay attention, you’ll start to notice seasonal trends – for example, cabbage and avocados are getting very cheap right now, at the same time that tomatoes and cucumbers are going up.

That means that for example, though in the summer months I make lots of tomato salad, in the winter I shift to other vegetables.  in the winter tomatoes are out of season and the price goes up, so I shift away from tomatoes. I hardly use avocados once the weather is warm but use loads in the cool weather! This is one reason I don’t have a yearly menu plan – because that would necessitate buying ingredients regardless of the pricing.

  • Stock up when the prices are low. It’s worth finding some extra pantry space so you’ll have a place to store things so you can stock up when the prices are low. There are things you know you’ll need week after week – why spend more than you have to?

Don’t think that means that your budget will go wild – it won’t. Some weeks you’ll buy more of one thing, other weeks you’ll buy more of something else. It all balances out.

Stocking up also applies to perishables. While it’s not practical to buy massive amounts of fresh produce if you’re not going to be able to use it before it goes bad, consider preserving it in some way (freezing, drying, canning). This week I saw ripe bananas marked down to 2.50 shekels a kilo – I bought two cartons full. As soon as I got home, they were peeled, mashed and frozen in two cup portions for future use in baked goods and shakes.

Here are some examples of things that can be preserved and how to do them – if this interests you, I have separate categories in the archives with many posts on specific food preservation projects I did.

Making strawberry jam and canning cherries bought on sale

My first canning experience – turkey bought on sale

Canning to the rescue – preserving produce before it goes bad

Explaining food dehydration

  • Buy in bulk. There are some items that are much cheaper when bought in bulk. For me these are mostly specialty ingredients – things like raisins, peanuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, shredded coconut, coconut flour, almond flour, coconut oil.

But make sure you know what a good price is – don’t assume that because it’s being sold in bulk it’s cheaper. Often it is, but sometimes the savings is so small that it’s not worth the extra storage space or the large initial financial outlay.

How to buy in bulk

Buying in bulk through supermarkets

Add legumes. Beans are super affordable and versatile. There are many, many ways to serve them and they can extend your food budget considerably. That makes more room for the pricier foods that you’d like to include.

How to get kids to eat beans

Trehalose – supplement that melts brain plaque and improves cognitive function

Healthy Living, nutrition, Trisomy 21,

I’m a proponent of biomedical healing, which very simply means, identifying the imbalance inside the body and then treating it with appropriate foods and nutritional supplementation. This can lead to significant health improvements or even complete restoration of one’s health.

Today I want to share about trehalose.

Trehalose is a supplement that dissolves beta amyloid plaque, the plaque found in the brains of those with Alzheimers.  It’s well-established that most adults with T21 who have not had preventative supplementation will develop Alzheimers.

When your child is young, thinking about cognitive decline in adulthood seems far away. As the parents of several children in their twenties, I can tell you that the years go by much faster than you would believe when your children are young.

Not only that – I’ve seen first hand reports from parents of children with T21 beginning this cognitive decline  in their first and second decades of life.  In the video below, Dr. Skowron shows the audience a slide of a brain scan from a four month old with Down syndrome that already has these plaques on it. That is downright terrifying.

So if you’re a parent of a young child with Trisomy 21 (or autism), this isn’t information that is applicable in the distant future. It’s relevant right now.

Here’s an excellent talk by Dr. Jared Skowron – Dissolving Amyloid Plaques in Autism and Down syndrome. He makes what are usually dry and complex topics easily understandable and interesting.

In a Facebook group that I’m on, I also see parents of young adults with T21 seeking help for their cognitive decline. Reading their descriptions of how much their child’s function has changed for the worse is heartbreaking. But what is incredibly heartening is to watch these same parents posting improvements and reversals of the decline as they add the appropriate biomedical supplements to their child’s diet. Trehalose is an important (though not the only) addition.

Trehalose is a white powder that is half as sweet as sugar that is easily added to food or drinks. I add trehalose to Rafael’s bottle along with his other supplements; I add it to a serving of unsweetened applesauce for Yirmi every morning before he goes to school, together with his supplements. I give it to them to prevent the plaque forming and causing damage in the first place.

A really nice side benefit of adding trehalose for us has been that they no longer resist taking their supplements, some of which have an unpleasant flavor. You know the saying, “Just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down”? 🙂

Where can you buy trehalose?  I got my first order of trehalose from Amazon; it was $16.49 for a pound. Someone brought that to Israel for me when she came. Then I had the opportunity to buy lift space and I made a purchase of 25 kg from bulksupplements.com.  That was $149 for 55 pounds of trehalose, so obviously it’s significantly less expensive to buy it in larger amounts. Since I don’t know of anywhere in Israel to buy trehalose I was glad to have an opportunity to stock up. (In case you’re wondering, I don’t benefit financially if you click on these links.)

Though I’m sharing about trehalose in the context of supporting the health of a child with Trisomy 21, this has obvious application to those who are suffering from dementia.

Trehalose is inexpensive, tastes good and has major benefits….pretty amazing stuff!

Avivah

Dsicussing palate expansion for Yirmi with orthodontist

dental health, Healthy Living, Trisomy 21

When Yirmi was born and we were told his Trisomy 21 diagnosis, my mind was flooded with thoughts. It was in the first couple of hours that I thought about a study I had read about regarding Weston Price who did a palate expansion with a teen who had Down syndrome. This teen was very cognitively limited, and the expansion created dramatic changes for him.

How could something that seems so minor make such a big difference? Since the center third of the face of those with T21 doesn’t grow properly, it compresses all the major head glands. This specifically can prevent the proper functioning of the pituitary gland and all its hormones, which has many, many consequences.

Yirmi was also born with a very high and narrow palate. I addressed my concerns about this holistically from the time he was four months old, taking him for weekly cranial sacral adjustments and requesting work specifically on his face and inside his mouth. I stopped those appointments about the time he was three, around the time we moved to RBS, since I didn’t find someone I was comfortable continuing treatment with.

For almost six years, from that first night I was sitting in the waiting room processing our surprise birth diagnosis, I’ve been thinking about palate expansion. But I’ve delayed a visit with an orthodontist because frankly, not only is it a significant expense, it’s very tiring to have to advocate and explain all the time. I learned of one orthotropist in Tel Aviv and considered making an appointment with him, but decided to try my luck with local orthodontists first.

For several weeks, my to-do list included calling to schedule a consultation. Every single day, for weeks. And every day, I’d push it off. I finally made the call a few weeks ago and the night before our consultation, I emailed a list of links to studies and research that had been done regarding palate expansion and children with T21, with a request for the orthodontist to look at it so we could discuss it when we came in.

I had this funny feeling when I walked in to the office that everyone knew who I was, and not because they read my blog! I was definitely wondering if my email had been discussed among the staff. When I left, one secretary commented to me, “Good job with that email!”

I was impressed with the orthodontist, who told me he had read everything I sent him, and was ready and willing to discuss it all with me. He wanted to ascertain that I understood that not every child is going to experience every single benefit, which I know. I told him my specific hopes for Yirmi having the expansion, and he said that all of those were reasonable.

The good news is he’s agreed that Yirmi is a good candidate for palate expansion, despite his young age. (Palate expansion is usually recommended for a later age, but for the above reasons I feel he’d benefit by having it done as soon as possible). We’ll need to wait a little  longer until his molars are a bit bigger, so the device will be able to be anchored to them.

I was reflecting afterwards about how I created tension for myself, just by telling myself how difficult it was going to be to find an orthodontist to agree to work with us. Don’t we all do that, so often? It really couldn’t have been a more pleasant and positive meeting. I hope that when we’re ready to do the molds that everything continues to go well. But for now, the first big step forward in this direction has been taken, and I’m so relieved and grateful!

Avivah

Edited to add: I linked to this in the comments but am linking here so you can easily access this summary of the benefits and some other information put together by Dr. Erica Peirson.

Q & A – Don’t Turn Mealtimes into a Battleground

nutrition, Parenting

I received a number of questions and comments to my last post about not making meal time a battleground, so I’ll respond to those here.

“In regards to what you just wrote about healthy mealtime – But what do you say  if they want to put croutons in every soup you make – you let or you don’t (  that’s just one example)?Or snacks in the morning, for a long time I was sending them off with my own health cookies and popcorn…but they want what all their friends have – pretzels  and who knows what…I dont  want to fight but I do care…so how would your no fighting approach fit in..”

If you let them put croutons in the soup depends on if this is something you’re comfortable or not. If you’re comfortable with it, go ahead and let them have it. If you’re not, then that is your boundary that you’ll share with your child of what to expect at meal time in your home. Your expectations don’t have to be a big discussion – put it on the table and when asked about it, let your child know that croutons are for special days and tonight there won’t be croutons. Same approach with whatever else may come up.

Don’t be afraid to have boundaries! So often parents cringe when I explain my position on this; they tell me it sounds harsh. I don’t see it as mean or unkind to serve your child appetizing food and let them to eat the amount they’re comfortable with, thereby allowing dinner to be a time of connection rather than conflict. Why do parents feel it’s ‘nicer’ to be ambivalent about their position is, which results in ongoing conflicts about what to eat, how much to eat, how fast to eat, why to eat it….??

Today my child had a friend over who asked if I had honey. When I told him we did, he asked me for a spoonful. I asked him if he wanted it with tea or something like that. He said no, he just likes to eat it off the spoon. I told him that would make it a treat, and in our house we save treats for Shabbos. He asked again for it, and I smiled and repeated that on Shabbos we have treats. He asked why and I told him – again, with a smile – that’s how we do it. It’s not productive to be drawn into a discussion in which I feel the need to explain or rationalize to his satisfaction why I do what I do (kids love these situations, because as long as they can keep arguing, they have hope we’ll give in).

About snacks in a peer setting – again, you get to decide what your boundaries will be! There’s no right and wrong, just what is right for you. There’s always a range of choices when it comes to a child fitting in – does he get the basic backpack or the designer backpack/ shoes/ snacks, or something in between? Someone is going to be holding the bar down and someone is going to be raising the bar of expectations. Where do you want to be?

Personally, I like to be on the lower side but not on the bottom. So I’d send my kids with snacks that were similar to their peers but within my comfort zone regarding cost, nutrition or whatever else was concerning me. It’s reasonable to support your child so he is within normal range for his peer group.

If this was something that really mattered to my kids, I’d have a discussion with them and listen to their concerns, and share my concerns with them. With all of that in mind, I’d try together with them to come up with some options we could all feed good about.

“Would you mind sharing if you serve dessert on a regular basis? Most nights? Not often? I watch my daughter and her constant battles with food with her children and it almost always revolves around eating to be rewarded with dessert. I served regular meals, 3 times a day to my 7 and they ate what I served and most nights received a cookie of some kind after dinner. I didn’t pay close attention to what they ate and just assumed it all would work out, as all of the food I served was healthy and homemade. I cringe at the mealtime battleground and we eat together often!”

I don’t give my kids dessert after dinner other than on Shabbos (and then I have a nice selection), but there’s no reason not to give dessert if it’s something you want to do! My grandparents and aunt used to serve dessert after dinner and it never affected how much I ate of the main meal. It was understood that it was a nice extra.

I don’t think dessert is the pivotal issue. The more relevant factor is if it’s an inherent part of the meal or a reward the kids have finagled for eating the food that they were served as part of the main meal. My children aren’t doing me a favor by eating their dinner, and incentives create that attitude. Incentives basically show kids that there’s something we care much more about than they do, giving them something to resist and negotiate on.

Since I assume they’ll eat if they’re hungry, there’s not something for the kids to resist!  They have responsibility for if they eat, and they bear the consequences of not eating – this is an issue between the child and himself, not me and him.

Giving incentives to children concerns me because it decreases their own internal motivation to do what it is they’re being incentivized to do; it’s not effective in the long term and even in the short term is just managing the symptoms of the issue rather than getting to the root of it.

“I agree with this overall, however I think peer pressure, peer culture, and school make a huge impression. Many kids are surrounded by sugar from 8 AM until late afternoon. The schools are using candy and junk food for prizes and behavior modification and the peers compete who can bring in the junkiest junk food. My youngest finished elementary school last year, but this was a huge problem the entire 25+ years I had kids in elementary schools. Once in high school the girls switched to competing diets, which can bring a whole other variety of issues.I think the most important thing is sitting together and having real meals together as a family. I would guess many (most?) families don’t even do that most days. (Myself included-it’s a real struggle!)”

Yes, I agree with you that the school culture and the pressures it creates are real. When my kids go to camp and when they’ve been in school, I’ve encountered this same issue.

I look at this as a question of looking at what is in your circle of influence and what is in your circle of concern. It concerns you what happens in school, but you can’t control it. You can influence and impact what happens in your own home, so that’s where you put your effort.  The more you invest energy into where you can make an impact, the greater your ability to affect things that were previously outside of your influence will be.

So practically, that means serving meals that align with what you believe to be appropriate in your home. Make each meal pack a nutritional punch and are as appealing as possible, knowing that your kids are tanked up on sugar and may not be so interested in the food you serve.  There are meals that my kids will eat and not complain about, and then there are the meals that they really, really appreciate.

So I would make more of the meals they really appreciate in the situation you described, knowing that they wouldn’t be hungry enough to eat food that they were kind of blah about.  These foods would still be those that I decided were appropriate nutritionally.

And yes, it’s hard to make family mealtime a regular sit down event. Especially as kids get older and everyone is going in a different direction at different times, it can feel like herding cats! I decided to make this a priority as it came up for me in my personal mission statement work as a strong value. If someone isn’t home, they obviously can’t be there, but whoever is home participates and it’s a nice grounding way to connect everyone at the end of the day.

 “this would work for parents who have kids who are not picky. my boys won’t eat anything other than string cheese and canned peaches or pineapple. and that is a struggle. I’ve had to insert incentives to get them to eat. if I had them only choose from my meal that i made for the rest of the family they would not eat. you may say that they would eventually eat if they were hungry enough, but they are stubborn enough to perhaps forego dinner and wait for their cereal in the morning!”

Actually, this is the approach that works best to help kids move beyond their picky tendencies! This is WHY my kids aren’t picky eaters.

To clarify a couple of things: firstly, I only offer my children choices of foods that I would be happy for them to eat. So if they chose to wait for breakfast, that would be fine for me because the breakfast choice would be one I would know would meet their nutritional needs. I’m saying that I really don’t have an attachment to them having to eat dinner if they don’t want to.

Until a child feels the space inside himself of his own wanting something, they’re not going to be internally motivated (this is true in all areas). If we keep them from feeling that space because we’re so busy filling it for them, we deny them the opportunity to expand themselves. A parent has to be really careful about using incentives because it can create a dynamic that will backfire on the parent.

Interestingly, parents always tell me their kids will only eat dairy and carbs (fruits are also carbs); I don’t think anyone has ever complained to me that their kids prefer protein and don’t want to eat noodles! Many people have a higher sensitivity to these foods since they quickly convert to sugar in the body, thereby inducing very strong cravings.

Some kids have an actual allergy to certain foods and it’s the allergy that creates the craving for those foods.  If your child are extremely set in their eating habits, I would consider if there is a deeper physiological issue that needs to be addressed (eg candida overgrowth and other gut related issues can create very strong cravings).

“You’ve obviously never dealt with a chronically picky eater. I call DD “The Starch Beast.” She will live on carbs if I let her.”

Yes, I believe you. Note my comment above regarding cravings for starches.

“I’ve learned to serve the protein and veggies first, and only after those are gone will I serve her a starch. Otherwise, she’ll fill up on rice or potatoes, and not want to have anything else. She’s 14 now, and will still live on potato chips and popcorn if she could have her own way. Even with pizza, she only wants to eat the crust!”

What I hear you saying is that you’ve clarified the boundaries that work in your home and in your situation! Wonderful! As I said above, the parent has to set boundaries that she is comfortable with based on her specific concerns, and serve foods that honor those boundaries.

“what about a child who will forgo dinner and then wake up in the night crying from hunger and demand milk and a snack?”

I don’t suggest starving any child!

I would let the child know that now is dinner time, and until the morning, there will only be xyz foods/drinks (whatever is okay with you). You as the parent draw the boundaries around this. I would encourage him to have something now, explaining that if he wake up in the middle of the night he may be hungry and at that point since dinner is over, I’m only going to be able to offer him xyz (again, whatever you decide in advance but it should be minimal and not compelling).

If he wakes up, empathize and let him know you know how hard it is to be hungry, and he’s welcome to have whatever it is you previously agreed to with him. (And that wouldn’t be milk and a snack, which would keep the cycle going! :))

Recognize that you’re not forcing your child to go without food. It’s your child who is making the choice not to eat.  (By the way, notice once again that the child is asking for dairy and a carb – the more cravings for simple carbs are given in to, the more the child will crave them.)

By the way, the use of the word ‘demand’ implies that it’s the child who has the power to determine what he is served, and that the parent have no choice but to passively respond. I very, very strongly believe in a parent proactively taking action according to the guidelines that she has determined will best meet the needs of her child.

——————-

Food brings up so many strong feelings for parents! Whenever this topic comes up in my parenting workshops, there are always a flood of specific questions. I hope that I’ve addressed some of the underlying issues here!

Avivah

Stop making meal time a battle ground!

nutrition, Parenting

Some people think I’m really into nutrition, but that’s not true.  Yes, I feed my family a diet that is considered healthy. But I’m not into it.  Good nutrition is important in a number of ways, but it’s not something that is a central topic of discussion with my family much at all.

Recently someone who is very concerned about healthy eating asked me some questions about how I feed my kids, specifically wanting to know about snacks.  Honestly, I don’t do much in the way of snacks.

Here are my basic guidelines for meals: Three meals a day, they can eat as much or as little as they want of whatever I serve.  If they get hungry in between, they can have a vegetable or fruit, by itself or with something like chummus or peanut butter (eg carrot sticks with chummus, apple slices with peanut butter). Often one of the kids will pop up a pot of popcorn.

For Shabbos breakfast I usually buy cornflakes (plain, not frosted) or make granola; on a regular day breakfast is usually eggs, oatmeal or polenta.

She asked about other specifics:  I use hardly any processed foods (the main exceptions are mayonnaise and hummus – yes, I know I can make them from scratch and often I have but right now I usually don’t).  I don’t make lots of ‘junk’ foods (except on Shabbos and usually then I’ll use white or brown sugar), and I don’t try to make healthy copycat version of popular snack foods. Meals consist mostly of proteins, grains, legumes and vegetables.

“But how do they comply with that?”  (Or more commonly phrased, “How do you get them to eat that?”) Food and compliance are two words that I don’t want associated with one another in my home. Compliance implies that I’m trying to force healthy foods on them against their will. I don’t see it as my job to force or manipulate my children to eat anything. When they’re hungry, they’ll eat.

If you want to encourage your children to eat more nutritiously, don’t talk so much about it! Don’t make such a big deal! Sure, you can talk a bit about the choices you make and why, but honestly, serving food that tastes good and enjoying your meal times together is much more important than your explanations about how healthy it is.

Know also that when you talk too much about something and how wonderful it is, it can actually create resistance in your children toward the very thing you’re trying to encourage! Ironic but true.

I’m not invested emotionally in what my children eat. I serve what I serve and I trust that they’ll listen to their bodies and eat the quantity that is appropriate to them. I choose what to serve, they choose if they want to eat it or not. That’s a fair division of meal time responsibility, I think!

This relaxed approach has served us well over the years. Our children aren’t picky eaters, are for the most part appreciative of what they get, and most importantly, the dinner table isn’t a battleground.

Avivah

Healing yourself with vitamins – That Vitamin Movie documentary

nutrition

This summer I attended a talk given by an orthomolecular physician for parents of children with Trisomy 21 and afterwards spoke with him one on one.  It came up in discussion that a family member of his had cancer and was healed using high dosage intravenous vitamin C.

Knowing how effective this is in healing cancer since I’ve done quite a bit of reading on this topic in the past, the good results were predictable.  My big question was, how was he able to have this protocol used with his relative!

He told me that it helps being a physician.  🙂  Unfortunately I’m not a physician but at least I now know someone in Israel who has used this tool!

In a new documentary titled That Vitamin Movie, the message is about the efficacy of vitamins in maintaining health and healing illness.  (It’s free to view for about another week and a half.)

The person who made this documentary began his journey of exploration of this topic when a friend of his was helped with depression by changing his diet and getting supplements.  As he researched, he found more and more stories of those recovering with help of large doses of vitamins much larger than the daily recommended amounts.

The approach of conventional medicine is to treat the symptoms, not to get to the root of what is causing the problem. I regularly ask the doctors or dentists that I take my children to why they are having the issue we are there for, and I’ve consistently been told: “That’s the way it is.  Sometimes this happens.”

The response is to prescribe medication, surgery, dental work. But the question remains, why is the problem happening?  If you don’t address the root issue that the symptoms are stemming from, you’ll continue to see health issues coming up.  And if you go the route of medication, often the side effects of one medication lead to the need for the prescription of another, and so on.

It was to explore some of these questions that this man said he set out to interview some of the world’s vitamin experts.

Dr. Andrew Saul commented in the beginning of his film that he raised his children to college without antibiotics and says very few people can say that – but I can!  I only have three children of college age, but 2 of the 3 haven’t had any antibiotics.  The third had them twice.   Ds16 was treated with antibiotics when he had a hip infection (I wished at the time I had access to high potency intravenous vitamin C because we weren’t able to give high enough doses orally of vitamin C to counter the infection), and other than ds3, the others haven’t had any.  Bli ayin hara.

By the way, this was an issue for a potential shidduch once.  The other side found out that we prefer to use natural antibiotics rather than prescription drugs to deal with illness and this was problematic for them.  I had to explain to the shadchan that we’re not dogmatic about this, and that although we have used medications at time, we’ve found this approach most effective to help our family stay healthy.

I think if people understood how much research there was on the use of vitamin C alone and read even a fraction of this, they wouldn’t see the use of it as extreme but rather as logical and self-apparent why it would be the preferred approach.

(While vitamin C is repeatedly mentioned in this film, it’s not the only supplement recommended.  However, almost six years ago I wrote a detailed post with specifics of how to dose vitamin C and if you’re interested you can read it here.)

This film is a consciousness raising of the benefits of using vitamins for the average person. Vitamins can be amazingly effective in treating a huge spectrum of issues: some of those referenced by the experts in this film include depression, cancer, heart disease and ADHD.  Though I’m familiar with all the information shared, I’m feeling prompted to mentally dust off that knowledge and be more conscientious about applying it.

Wishing you all abundant health – enjoy the film!

Avivah

Tips for supporting a child with Down syndrome

nutrition, Parenting, Trisomy 21

Now that Yirmiyahu is two and in my last post I shared the assessment from the professionals at the Feuerstein Institute that he’s doing unusually well, I thought I’d update on what we’re doing to be supportive of him.  Hopefully this will be of some help to someone else wondering what steps can be taken to help a child with Trisomy 21.

With a long standing passion for nutrition and alternative health, it’s my conviction that what you eat really, really matters.  It affects many more things in the body than we can imagine, and scientists are constantly discovering more and more connections.  I also believe that children with T21 need more specific support than the neurotypical child, and will continue to need more support throughout their lives.

Diet – what we do is very basic.  Yirmiyahu eats a whole food diet that includes proteins, fruits, vegetable and fats (mostly coconut oil and olive oil, some butter) and limited grains.  This is the same as everyone else in the family though we’re more careful with the fats he gets.

We use very minimal amounts of processed foods and don’t give him foods with gluten (wheat protein) or casein (milk protein), both of which are very difficult to digest and can affect the body in negative ways.  We limit these with our other kids but are more careful with Yirmiyahu.

For the first two years he didn’t get any sugar;  now he gets a Shabbos treat along with the other kids if he answers a parsha question (the question we start with for all of our kids when they are little is, “What day is today?” “Shabbos!”  Yes, he knows the sign for Shabbos.  :))  Again, this is similar to our other kids.

Nutritional supplementation – I have a strong preference for supplements that are as close to how they were created in nature but we live in an imperfect world and that’s not always possible.  Our experience has been that the symptoms associated with T21 require more targeted treatment than what food based supplements offer.

Fermented cod liver oil – okay, this stuff is awesome!  It has vitamin D, DHA,  essential fatty acids (and a host of other stuff I’m not mentioning), it strengthens bones, teeth and the immune system.  It’s a superfood that everyone could benefit from.

Probiotics – probiotics are great for everyone, but for someone with a less optimized digestive system, these are critical.  We switched from lactose base probiotics to soil based probiotics several months ago.  I now use Prescript Assist; a little bit goes a long way.  I give him about a 1/4 – 1/2 of a capsule daily.  Homemade lactofermented veggies are another  wonderful source of probiotics but Yirmiyahu isn’t yet a fan of them.

Saccharomyces boulardii – I love this stuff!  Remember Pac Man, the arcade game of the 80s? That’s what this reminds me of.  This probiotic yeast gobbles up the bad yeast and isn’t killed by antibiotics.  This isn’t something I’ve read of anyone else using in the T21 or natural foods world but it’s very valuable for us.

Blood tests when he was in the intensive care unit as an eight month old showed Yirmiyahu had candida.  Since I had researched candida extensively several years before I knew exactly what this was, but asked the doctor for his thoughts on what it was and what the consequences were.  He told  me not to worry about it, it didn’t matter.  Well, it mattered to me since this overgrowth of fungal yeast will manifest itself in many ways as it increasingly breaks down the body.

Yirmiyahu had a good diet but he constantly had loose stools that seemed to burn his skin – his bottom would be bright red and often bleeding after he had a dirty diaper no matter how quickly we changed him.  I tried different things to improve this but the best I could do was slather on a thick layer of zinc oxide cream, which didn’t do anything to improve the underlying problem.

When I added saccharomyces boulardii to his bottles, within a very short time his stools normalized and his rash disappeared.  Since I changed his probiotic to Prescript Assist at the same time, it took me a while to be sure which of the two was responsible for the improvement.  I began leaving out the probiotic and it became clear this was what was making the difference for him.  Since I began giving this to him at the beginning of the summer, he’s had only one bad rash.  What used to be a regular sight has thankfully become unusual and I hope this continues.  I love this stuff.

This is especially helpful for us since Yirmiyahu gets antibiotics twice a day and I can put it into his bottle together with the antibiotics, unlike probiotics which are neutralized by the antibiotics and have to be given at a different time for them to be beneficial.  I ‘m unhappy about these antibiotics but have some peace of mind that I can minimize some of the negative side effects by using this.

PQQ – this is a relatively new kid on the block in the scientific community and is Yirmiyahu’s newest addition.  Every person with T21 has neurons that are constantly dying – you understand this is a big concern, right?  That means you can’t assume that your child as he is now, will have the same mental capacity in twenty years.  It’s well-known that Alzheimers is a huge issue for people with Down syndrome as they age.  That’s bad, bad, bad but thankfully there are steps we can take at this young age to counteract this.

PQQ is one of them.  PQQ not only slows mitochondrial decline, it helps grow new mitochondria.  This is a big part of why I supplement – not to see immediate results, but to help Yirmiyahu maintain his cognition now and avoid the inevitable cellular damage later down the road.  He’s on a starter dose of .5 mg per kilo daily.

A very nice bonus is that within a couple of weeks of beginning PQQ, Yirmiyahu became noticeably more verbal.

Multivitamin – we used to give him a multivitamin formulated specifically for people with T21, but switched when he was about 14 months to a different multi that was recommended based on his specific bloodwork (actually it’s an autism multi – GI Pro for anyone who may be wondering).

I’m doing a thorough blood work up later this week and will likely make some changes to his current protocol based on the results that come back.  I suspect something is going on with his thyroid because the soles of his feet are dry; he had this symptom in the past (it took a long time until I learned it was a symptom of hypothyroidism) and it cleared up with supplementation.  I’m not sure what I’ve changed that his feet are dry again; I suspect it may be because I stopped the additional methylfolate, selenium and B12 I was giving but I don’t know if it’s a combination of all three or one particular supplement that is responsible for this.  (All of these are in his multi and I thought he was getting enough through this. )

His thyroid testing when he was about a year old showed elevated TSH and by the time he was eighteen months, we got into a much better range thanks to supplementation.  We also corrected his hypothyroid symptoms; he had become very weak and lethargic.  The doctor said it was normal for T21 and his blood work was normal; I sent his blood work to two people in the US for feedback and made adjustments to his supplements based on their feedback.  He wasn’t properly absorbing nutrients because of his extra chromosome and it was thanks to the addition of supplements that this was corrected and very soon he was back to his energetic and active self.

Ideally his thyroid should be tested every six months (this is a typical recommendation for someone with T21) but this time it’s been somewhat delayed since I wanted growth hormone testing done along with monitoring his blood cell count (we keep an eye on signs of leukemia because of his history), and needed to get that referral from the endocrinologist; I had to wait three months to get the appointment with the endocrinologist that I wanted.  This week when we do the blood tests, hopefully he’ll only need to get pricked one time.  I wish these tests weren’t  necessary but since they are, I try to minimize the discomfort to him by combining as much as possible at one time.

For us, supplements have been very important in helping Yirmiyahu stay healthy.

Hanging exercises – when Yirmiyahu was an infant, we began encouraging him to bear weight by putting his fists around our thumbs as we lifted him a tiny bit.  Now every time we pick him up (unless we’re in public, since people will tell us we’re doing something dangerous), we let him grasp our thumbs and pull himself up.  This little habit has brought big benefits to Yirmiyahu.

It’s strengthened the muscles in his hands, which is critical for fine motor function.  it’s also strengthened his abdominal muscles.  He climbs up ladders, slides – he’s totally independent in the playground; despite being so small he manages to climb things intended for children taller and older than him.  Recently he shocked and amazed the pediatric endocrinologist when he grasped the edge of the wall mounted sink in her office and began swinging from it.  I didn’t think anything of it, but she told me to turn around and watch what he was doing, exclaiming, “Look at him!!  Look at him!  Look what he’s doing!”  She couldn’t believe a child with T21 could have so much muscle strength at such a young age.  Ideally I would have him using the monkey bars daily to further develop this but I don’t have them available and so for now, our thumbs it remains! 🙂

Early literacy program – we use a computer program called Brillkids for early reading that Yirmiyahu really enjoys.  When he sees me sitting at the computer, he signs ‘words!’ and tries to climb up onto my lap!  This program includes categories of commonly used words – transportation, foods, colors, toys, actions, people, animals, etc – and it gives him regular familiarity with concepts and this translates to better understanding the world around him in addition to hopefully setting a foundation for reading.  I try to do the computer program twice a day with him and more when possible but five times a day is my max (this is at his initiation).  We’re up to lesson 70.

Signing – I’ve taught Yirmi a number of signs and this has been very helpful for him to be able to express himself since his cognition is way beyond his verbal expression, as is true of all young children.  The words I’ve taught him are those that are useful for him day to day – for example, when I noticed how frightened he became when he heard fighter jets roaring overhead, I taught him ‘airplane’, ‘loud’ and ‘scared’.  Now he has a way to tell us what he notices and what he’s feeling – when he hears them from a distance, he will tell us he hears an airplane, or that it’s loud, but only tells us it’s scary when they’re very close.  He also can tells us when something else scares him.  I need to spend some time thinking about what vocabulary would be helpful for him now, so I can look up those signs and teach them to him.  Signing is a wonderful tool.

Communication – I talk to Yirmiyahu a lot and explain what we’re doing as we go along, and have been doing this since he was young.  Most of this is intuitive.  I have one of the books by Dr. James McDonald called Play to Talk, and this helped me tweak what I was doing to be more effective.  He writes a lot about how a parent or sibling is the best play partner for a child and it’s through play that a child learns the most.  He gives clear guidelines for how to make interactions with your child a meaningful opportunity for communication and connection.

Craniosacral work – I take Yirmiyahu about once every 5  – 6 weeks to a wonderful osteopath who does craniosacral work on him.  She works on different specifics each time depending on what area of the body she sees needs the most balancing.  She almost always works on his respiratory system since this is a part of his body that has always been weaker.  This week she did a lot of improve circulation and to help flush out his system (important since people with T21 are less able to get rid of toxins on their own).   When he was an infant, one eye would periodically get goopy, but after she began working with him to release the underlying block in his facial structure, this disappeared.

I’ve asked her to work on his palate since it remains high and narrow even though it’s improved quite a bit since he was born.  This is important since the pituitary gland is above the palate and I want that to function as well as possible.  It was easier for her to work on this when he was younger since now when he bites down, he has teeth!  She does most of the facial work externally and very quickly; most of her time is spent on the rest of his body.

Siblings – my kids are crazy about Yirmiyahu and I can’t overstate how important they are in his life.  He has constant playmates and plenty of opportunities to see and model typical behavior, which is no doubt why his social skills are so good.  He doesn’t have to be taught to take a turn or throw a ball to someone – it’s part of his daily life!

**Disability Is Natural** – The mindset that underlines everything I do and how I do it is based on accepting Yirmiyahu exactly as he is right now and believing in his abilities.  I was gifted with the book Disability Is Natural when Yirmiyahu was very young.  Quite some time ago I commented to my husband that over the years, my paradigm of what I assumed to be true and what I now believe had shifted in several key areas that changed my life – pregnancy/birth, education and health/nutrition.  With all of these I grew up accepting what everyone did as the norm until something prompted me to explore an alternative viewpoint, and each paradigm shift dramatically changed my life.   I commented to him rhetorically, “I wonder what the next life-changing paradigm shift will be?”

This book was it.  This prompted my next huge shift in thinking about a topic I had never given much thought to.  It is so powerful and I think it should be required reading for everyone on the planet. 🙂  Seriously.  This will give you so much food for thought and affect your parenting of all of your children and others you interact with in a positive way.  Fortunately, the author has a website with a free newsletter so you don’t have to spend a penny to read more – http://disabilityisnatural.com/.

When I read this book, I kept thinking, this woman thinks like me!  (I did keep wondering how with her personality she dealt with the constraints of the school system and the necessary advocacy – and then in the end she wrote about discovering homeschooling and stated that she wished she had done that from the beginning!)   This paradigm has helped me to find the inner balance of being proactive in addressing Yirmiyahu’s needs and fully accepting who he is.

Avivah

Helping kids deal with rocket attacks on Israel

food preservation

rocketrange[1]I got a worried email from my sister a couple of days ago, who has been following the latest news in Israel.

The latest news is that the internationally recognized terrorist group, Hamas, has been shooting hundreds of long-range rockets into Israel.  As I write this morning, 365 rockets were shot into Israel in the last 72 hours.

This began with southern Israel and is spreading throughout the country, to the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv area.  As of yesterday the first warning sirens were sounded in the northern part of the country as missiles reached the Haifa area; in the past missiles to this part of the country came from Lebanon further north of us, but for the first time these are being shot from the south.   We’re seeing  rockets with a very far range.

Miraculously, no one has been killed.  Truly a miracle.  However, there have been people who were seriously injured.

Hamas terrorists are using their citizens as human shields, deliberately encouraging people to flock to buildings that the Israeli army has warned them in advance to evacuate (this link is to a video in Arabic by terrorist leader clearly saying this is their strategy); the Israeli army aborted the planned strike as a result of the presence of civilians.  This article in Slate details Israel’s effort to spare Gaza civilians and calls it ‘exemplary’.  Meanwhile, the social media is being flooded with images of Arabs who were killed in Syria with claims that these are current pictures of the work of the Israeli army in Gaza; the notoriously anti-Israel BBC has said these are fake.

As for the millions of Israeli citizens who are being targeted…you won’t hear much about them in the media outside of Israel.

I’ve been thinking about how to present the rocket attacks to my kids – which I didn’t do an especially good job about so far – and now how to prepare them in case rockets are shot into our area.  It’s a balance to give them information but not to unnecessarily frighten them.

Here’s a song that was created by someone who saw that thousands of children in southern Israel (which has been targeted with rocket attacks for years) were very traumatized.

I’m impressed with the simple genius of this song, to turn a terrifying situation into something a child can deal with, and to help them release the fear and anxiety.  If you’ve ever heard one of these warning sirens, you know that just hearing one of them makes your stomach drop and your heart begins pounding.  That’s aside from waiting to hear the ‘boom’ of the rocket when it hits and then the all clear.

I’ve practiced drills with our kids a couple of times and hope that going to the bomb shelter won’t be necessary.  But for those in different parts of the country, this is already a reality and particularly for those who are experiencing rockets landing in their close vicinity, it’s terrifying.

This morning I saw this list of 7 positive group bomb shelter activities.  (Some people have homes with specially built safe rooms but our apartment was built a couple of years before this became standard building practice.)  These can just effectively be used with your children as with a group of strangers in the bomb shelter; they are all activities that encourage a positive energy and focus on something good.

I think the best thing for kids to have is a calm parent or teacher since they take their cues from us.  Easier said than done, right?  So helping our kids deal with this means finding a way to deal with it ourselves.

I like the above song because it gives a parent a concrete tool to help a child deal with the situation.  I decided that telling or reading a story would be most centering and grounding for me and my kids, after saying some tehillim (Psalms) together.  If we had to stay there for longer, then games would be helpful in spending time together in a relaxed way.

Our kids need us to help them stay calm, to give them the message that they’re safe and we’re there for them.  Listen to them talk, encourage them to draw or write down their feelings.  Don’t minimize this because you’re uncomfortable or so afraid yourself that you think that letting them share their feelings will make them more afraid.  Remember, they’ll take their cues from you.  The message you want them to get is, it’s scary but they are safe, that whatever happens it will all be okay.  You’re taking care of them.  This is our job especially at times like this, to be the emotional rock for our kids to lean on.

My ds15 heard a rocket land near where he was at the time and he told me he can’t believe how Israelis go on with their lives as if everything is normal.  Well, unfortunately for our beleaguered little country, being attacked by hostile Arabs is normal.  Israelis have developed the attitude that we have to go on with our lives, that to live in fear is letting terrorists win.

If you’re in Israel:

  • Do NOT share details of where you hear a rocket land.  We don’t want them to know where they are landing because this helps Hamas shoot more accurately.
  • Do NOT mention hearing planes going overhead.
  • Do NOT talk about where our soldiers are being deployed.

You know the saying from WWII, “Loose lips sink ships”?  It’s like that.  PLEASE – I know it’s scary and you want to share with your friends, but tell them in person, not on FB or other social media.  They are being monitored for this information and we don’t want to give information to people who will use it to hurt us.

Friends of ours in Baltimore began the Shmira project, where people around the world are paired with active combat soldiers in the Israeli army to pray, do good deeds or learn Torah as a merit for safety for that soldier.  Sign up here.

If you  have a smartphone there’s an app called Red Alert: Israel that you can download.  It will notify you when a rocket is being shot, giving people in communities closest to the danger zone just 15 seconds to get to safety.  For those of you not in Israel, you can use these seconds to pray for the safety of those being targeted that no one is harmed.

The Israeli army has just called up 40,000 reservists, which means that many, many young children are saying goodbye to their fathers right now.  So much courage from so many people in such a tiny country – our men, their wives and mothers and their children – we’re all one big family.

It’s hard to talk about this conflict without feeling frustrated and confused that regardless of how much terror is inflicted on the Jewish state, it is painted as the aggressor.  Why would people support evil when the facts are so clear, my older kids want to know (and what most adults are trying to wrap their heads around)?  To be very simplistic, it’s hard to deal with bullies when they control the world’s oil and everyone is dependent on it.  Better to look the other way so you don’t see what they’re doing, so you don’t have to take action.  Because ignoring evil makes it go away, don’t you know?

When I begin to feel upset or fearful about the injustice of the world, I take a deep breath and remind myself Who is running the world, and remember what we’ve seen time and time again – and I pray that we continue to merit this protection in this latest wave of attacks on Israelis.

Hodu laHashem for being our iron dome and protecting us constantly from the incessant life threatening rockets that continually rain down us. We are aware of your constant guidance and thank You with all our heart! Please continue to be for us a shield from harm and forever protect us from evil. Aliza Gable Lipkin

 

Please pray for peace, for safety and for a quick end to this most recent war of terror on Israel.

Avivah

Update on Yirmiyahu’s growth – good news!

nutrition, Parenting, Trisomy 21

From the time Yirmiyahu was eight months until he was fifteen months, his weight and head circumference hardly budged.  He wasn’t big to start with and I, the mother who has never paid any attention to growth charts, was getting increasingly concerned that his numbers just weren’t moving up.   The nutritionist and pediatric allergist said he wasn’t growing because I didn’t feed him enough, though after his caloric intake was counted up, the nutritionist admitted that he was getting plenty of calories.  When I asked his pediatrician about it, she told me not to worry: “Kids with Downs’ are all small.”

That irritated me even though it was supposed to be reassuring and I know it was well-intended, because if a baby who didn’t have T21 came into the doctor with the symptoms I was describing, believe me, they wouldn’t be telling the parent not to worry about it. They would have been running all kinds of tests to figure out what was wrong.  But for Yirmiyahu, it was acceptable for him to be small and weak because he has T21.

So the last two months have been very empowering.  At that time, after extensive research and a lot of anxiety, I decided to begin a protocol for cerebral folate deficiency (CFD) – this is treated by taking your child off of dairy and supplementing with high doses of folate.  I took him off dairy formula when he was eight months old, and started supplementing for CFD when he was 15 months old.  Currently he’s taking 5 mg of folate daily (a mix of folinic acid and 5MTHF, see the info at the site linked for an explanation of why we’re using both if you’re wondering); when he’s eighteen months this will be increasing.  Results?

Increase in head circumference – 2 weeks after starting the protocol, Yirmiyahu’s head circumference had increased to the -3% for infants his age, a huge jump from from a percentage that was very far down off the charts, suitable for a baby many months younger than him.  This was very important for me because if the head isn’t growing the growth of the brain is limited, too.  Two months into the protocol, his head circumference now measures 2% on the typical growth chart!  That might not sound impressive but it’s a huge leap and it means he’s finally in the range of age appropriate.

Weight increase – after 7 months of no weight gain, Yirmiyahu has gained 1.1 kg in the last two months.  Within two or three weeks after we began supplementing, people consistently started commenting on how much older and bigger he seemed and this has continued until now.  That was anecdotal, but after so many months of people telling me how petite and tiny he was, it was a noticeable change.

Energy – when he was younger, we all thought of Yirmiyahu as an active baby.  As he got older, he became more passive (but supposedly ‘babies with Downs’ are slower” so this worried no one but me and my older kids).  By the time we started supplementing, he was frequently laying his head on our shoulders to rest even at times it seemed he shouldn’t be tired; he wasn’t crawling much even though he had the physical ability.  It was worrisome when we contrasted what he had been like months before to how he was at 15 months.  Now?    He’s like the Energizer bunny – he just keeps going and going!  He’s crawling all over the house, cruising holding on to things, loves to bounce when held on a lap and is so energetic!   He still loves to snuggle into the person holding him, but it feels different – you can tell it’s because it feels cozy for him, not because he’s so tired that he needs to rest.  He’s sleeping much less and is much more awake when he’s awake.  This isn’t something you can track scientifically but it’s a relief and a joy for me to see his true personality being able to be expressed again, not being held back by nutritional deficiencies that supposedly didn’t exist.

Jaw structure – when Yirmiyahu’s bottom front teeth came in, they came in vertically rather than horizontally.  Over the last month, they’ve been getting straighter.  He was born with an extremely high palate, and his osteopath last week told me it’s coming down (ie expanding).  I asked her why she thinks this is, and she said perhaps it was due to specifically this supplementing.  (She hasn’t worked on his palate in the last couple of months so she didn’t think it was connected to craniosacral work she’s done with him.)  It makes sense to me that if his head circumference is increasing it might be affecting his jaw.

I’d like to get some follow-up bloodwork done so I can track his lab values.  I don’t anticipate continuing with therapeutic doses of folate long term; this is to address his serious deficiencies and as his numbers improve, I’ll be cutting down on this.  So I need to see the lab values so I can cut down appropriately.  I also am hoping I can get more thyroid bloodwork done (this is much more easily said than done!) to see how flooding his system with folate has affected these numbers – the hypothyroid symptoms I was concerned about have dramatically improved and I’m anticipating big improvements in his lab values.

I’m so grateful for the internet and the ability to do research and connect with others who are also looking for answers.  Without this it’s painful to think that Yirmiyahu would be suffering with unaddressed medical issues, and the doctors would continue telling me- and I would believe them! – it was because he has Down syndrome instead of addressing the real issues.

Avivah

How to help your teeth remineralize

dental health, home remedies, nutrition

Did you know that your teeth are a vibrant, living part of your body that reflect the state of your general health?  What is exciting about this is that it means you can do something to improve the state of your dental health – and I’m not referring to brushing two or three times a day.  Teeth can heal – remineralize – when given the opportunity.

Recently I shared about ds5’s many cavities.  I also wrote about my plan to give the kids xylitol water to drink five times a day, after every time they eat, to alkalinize their mouth bacteria.  (By the way, since then ds4 and ds11 have had dental check ups – no cavities for either one.  Ds5 is our outlier!)  Too much oral acid is the cause of all cavities, regardless of any other factors – brushing really isn’t a critical factor in preventing tooth decay.  Bacteria can’t survive in an alkaline environment, so this is the first step – kill the bad bacteria.  Also, teeth can’t remineralize in an acidic mouth, so the ph needs to be changed to alkaline so that your teeth can absorb all the good nutrients you’re eating.

Next I’ll share about some other things that can be done to help teeth heal naturally.

The first thing is some information that was totally new to me!  If you’re familiar with Dr. Weston Price’s work,  Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (post with link to free online copy is here), you know that Activator X is the powerful factor that he identified as being responsible for dental health in traditional societies, and this is what we need to have for dental healing. Usually high vitamin butter oil combined with fermented cod liver oil is recommended for your Activator X fix.  But guess what I just learned?  That Activator X has been identified as Vitamin K2 – Mk4, which is available as a vitamin supplement.  Now, doing a little more research showed that although this is the best form to get in your Activator X from food, it’s not the best form to get it from supplements.  As far as supplements go, K2 – mk7 seems to be a better choice.  (There’s a disagreement on this but I prefer the position found here and you can read up on it if it interests you.)  This is something I can order online and have mailed directly to me in Israel, something I can’t do with the fermented cod liver oil and butter oil, so this is a much more doable option for me.

That doesn’t mean that your child won’t still benefit from cod liver oil and butter oil  – they will!  They both are beneficial in many ways, and if you can afford this, then go for it!  Cod liver oil is a great source of vitamin D, among other things, which is important for strengthening teeth.

The next thing I’d like to do is cut down on our bread intake.  Since the kids took sandwiches to school every day, bread has become an integral part of their daily diet, and I don’t mean homemade sourdough from freshly ground organic wheat kernels!  Far, far from it. For quite some time I’ve been thinking how nice it will be nutritionally once the kids aren’t in school because they can have a higher quality diet than they do now. That begins with dramatically cutting down on bread.  The reason for this is that nutrients are absorbed directly through your teeth, so you want to cut out foods that are high in phytic acid at the same time that you increase your intake of high quality foods.  (For general guidelines on beneficial nutritional changes to make to benefit your teeth, see my post about how to improve dental health.)

Cutting down on other grains isn’t too hard, since we don’t use that many.  We occasionally have pasta, kasha and most often, rice.  But we can use more potatoes and squash in place of these starches.  My goal isn’t to totally go grain free, just to have a better ration of higher nutrient foods. Although it’s recommended to totally cut out all foods with phytic acid, that basically leaves organic vegetables, meat and eggs  and I don’t think that’s financially realistic for most people – definitely not for us at this time.

There are some good nutritional habits that I had for years that I slowly got out of the habit of.  It’s so easy to get out of good habits!  But to be very fair, not just to myself but to all you moms out there, these are things that take head space and conscious thought as well as time, and often none of those factors are in overabundance.  I’ve had way more things that I’ve wanted to do than the physical ability to do them!   Not only that, once we moved overseas everything got harder – I spent years finding sources for all the different foods I used, and suddenly was back to square one, with a different language, no car and different product availability to boot!  But some of the good habits are just as easy to integrate here as in the US, it’s just a matter of making the effort again.

One of these habits to get back to is regularly fermenting vegetables.  I stopped since I don’t have a food processor and when I make a big batch (2 – 4 gallons) of kimchi, it’s a serious time investment.  The easy ferments like pickles stopped turning out well (a couple of weeks ago week they turned out too salty, before that they were too mushy) and until recently I didn’t consider it a priority to take the time to figure out what factors had changed and experiment – the time and energy issue again! This is very important for your digestive health, since pathogenic gut bacteria will affect your mouth bacteria and probiotic foods and supplements are a critical part of building up your healthy gut bacteria.  (Edited to add: a blog reader emailed me to share that K2 is present in lactofermented sauerkraut, and that adequate K2 lessens the need for supplemental calcium – thanks, Iris!)

Another habit is making bone broth.  I stopped with that pretty recently when the weather got hot, but that’s an easy thing to reinstate.  It doesn’t take much time or effort to prepare, but it’s filled with minerals and then you can use the broth in anything you cook that calls for liquid to boost the nutritional value.

Something else I’d like to do is give ds5 specific homeopathic cell salts for dental health.  Though I purchased these while living in the US and they made the move along with us, giving it to the kids never became part of our daily routine.  (Anything that requires me to do something 3 – 5 times a day, and can’t be done at the same time as meals is very challenging to integrate into my daily routine.)  The dosage is two pellets, four times a day.  As with all homeopathics it’s important not to touch the pellets.  Just shake how many you need into the lid and pop them in your mouth.  Here are the  cell salts that are most beneficial for strengthening teeth:

Calcium Phos 6X – bone health, gives solidity to bones and assists in building strong teeth.

Calcium Fluor 6X – assists with improving enamel of teeth and strengthening bones.

Magnesium Phos 6X – bone development & quick pain relief associated with toothaches.

Silica 6X – assists in building strong connective tissue to support deficient assimilation.

For now I’m not making any appointments to have ds5’s cavities filled (I was told he’ll probably need at least six appointments to take care of them all).  It’s possible that it may eventually be necessary to have them filled – I already point blank refused to use amalgam when the dentist brought it up (why in the world are they still using toxic metals to fill cavities when we know so much about how problematic it is???) but there are other reasons that I’d like to avoid fillings if possible.  Fortunately with school over I’ll have much more control over what kind of foods everyone is eating.

My goal is to to alkalanize the saliva in ds5’s mouth so that the cavities can heal while at the same time changing the oral conditions that have previously led to cavities for him.  The main challenge isn’t knowing what to do, but being able to consistently apply what I know!  My life is always very full, but I’m hopeful that I can apply enough of these strategies frequently enough to see positive changes.

(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)

Avivah