Skip to main content

A Sound Mind in a Sound Body

I was a full-time homemaker and homeschooling mom, so I cooked a lot and nutrition and health was a big part of raising my kids. I was trying to make sure they had a sound mind in a sound body and everything I understand about life says that's an important part of what parents do.

But people have often reacted really negatively and really strongly to me talking about nutrition and health, as if that's somehow not the responsibility of the parents and amounts to me trying to "practice medicine without a license."

Even if your kid is on prescription medication under the care of a physician, there are pieces of the puzzle you can and should handle yourself without calling the doctor every five minutes for permission to feed your kid. Staying Legal should help you figure out where to draw that line.

I have two blogs that are health focused:

I recommend reading both in their entirety while you start a health journal recording your diet and symptoms (or that of your child as the case may be). And make no changes to your routine until you have a baseline idea of your normal and have read a substantial portion of my health writing.
Study after study after study says "Diet and lifestyle are significant factors in all known deadly diseases." Planet Earth: You cannot make a meaningful difference in your dire medical issue via diet and lifestyle.

Please do NOT promptly discontinue your drugs. IF nutrition helps, it will help "drugs or no drugs". If you get better, THEN you can look into dropping the drugs.

See also Withdrawal.

Once you feel you have a baseline normal of a week or two of journal entries and some understanding of this approach: 
It's best to start with supplements, not dietary changes per se, because it is the only way to add a nutrient in isolation. Dietary changes always involve multiple factors and it's harder to track and figure out what caused X if you don't already have some experience with adding nutrients in isolation.
The primary point of starting with supplements is to learn firsthand what specific nutrients do to you. Over time, you may get to the point of going "I am having X for lunch because I have thus and such going on, so I need more of a specific nutrient and that's a rich source." 

But you cannot easily learn how to use food to treat symptoms by tweaking your diet. There are too many confounding factors. It's always as clear as mud.

If it involves the brain, B vitamins are the place to start and they are a relatively low risk supplement to work with. I recommend you start with B vitamins if possible because they are water soluble, so it's tough to poison yourself with them because you will urinate out excess. 

If you have a kid with ADHD or ASD and:

1. You live someplace hot.
2. The kid is involved with sports.
3. The kid is a vegetarian.
4. The kid has a medical condition and frequently runs a fever.
5. There are any other factors where they sweat a lot.

Then the way to bet is they have a vitamin B deficiency. Why? Because B vitamins are water soluble and you can sweat them out and people underestimate the dramatic impact this has on nutritional status.

If the kid spends time in the care of some health nut who thinks thin is in and fats are evil, please be aware that the brain is the highest cholesterol organ in the body and small children require extra dietary fat for brain development. Kids under age five absolutely should be allowed to eat any "fatty garbage" like hot dogs that they want.

See also Fried Veggies.

For an adult, the brain typically builds 95 percent of its cholesterol in house starting with B vitamins. I don't know what percentage children build in house versus getting from dietary sources, plus medical conditions will impact how this works for specific individuals.

Last, electrolytes are critical to brain function. This includes another dietary "bad guy": Salt. 

And salt is another thing you sweat out. 

I always encouraged my kids to eat as much salty snacks -- like pretzels, Cheetos and potato chips -- as they wanted and go easier on the sweets. Beyond that, I tried to keep food on hand they liked and I approved of and as much as possible let them eat what they wanted.

Popular posts from this blog

The Hand Licking Incident

When my oldest son was seven and in second grade, we were living in Kansas. Some time after the school year started, he began licking his hands. He soon was doing so all day, every day. His teacher wanted it to stop. So did his dad, my husband. I was a young homemaker, financially dependent on my husband, and I was feeling enormously pressured by both of these people. I also felt they both had real careers and didn't genuinely respect me. They both felt it was my job and mine alone to somehow make my son stop licking his hands entirely. I caved to the pressure. I tried telling my child to stop. I tried spanking him. I tried putting unpleasant spices on his hands to deter him. I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution. He couldn't explain it and the terror in his eyes was disturbing. None of it made any difference whatsoever. He continued to lick his hands all day, every day. He just tried to hide it a little better. Meanwhile, our rela...
Read more

Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood

From my last post on this site: One recurring theme: Bright kids of a certain age are just smart enough to jump to crazy conclusions rooted in lots of knowledge for their age but little real world experience. This seems common in the roughly toddler to preschool age range. I can readily think of a few examples of this from my oldest son's early years. The easiest one to tell is his ladybug freak out. He was about four years old and we were living in a third-floor walk-up in Germany. There were some really tall trees outside his bedroom window and one day there was a small ladybug invasion in his bedroom. He was inexplicably just terrified of the handful of yellow-and-black ladybugs on his bedroom wall. I actually laughed out loud because it seemed comical, but then I took him out of the room and closed the door and made sure he was protected from being around these bugs even though they were harmless. I kept the door shut to his room for a few days and he slept in my room u...
Read more

The Chaos AKA English is Tough Stuff

I recently tripped across this clip of I love Lucy  where Ricky reads a children's book and keeps running into different pronunciations of ough . It reminds me of the much longer poem called The Chaos which sometimes gets called English is Tough Stuff. Wikipedia describes it as a poem demonstrating the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation . Ricky goes on a rant about in Spanish, the same letters are always pronounced the same way. I have read that they don't have spelling bees in Spanish. That's a peculiarity of English education because of the extreme irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation. àMy ex-husband and oldest son are both not very social and they read a LOT. They both are prone to quirky interpretations of the pronunciation of words they learned from reading. As much as possible, I tried to make learning fun while homeschooling my kids. We spent a week on The Chaos while they objected to my pronunciation and looked it up only to find I w...
Read more