I love food!!!

But, our family has had an on-going love/hate relationship with food for the past two years now.

Our autistic four-year-old son, Isaiah, has not always had autism.

As a baby and toddler, we recall him having great eye-contact, following directions, and having good overall comprehension. Looking back, we can see now, that his diet influenced much of his autistic development from 11 moths on.

There has been much discussion and research on the gut-brain connection. When you drink alcohol in excess, for example, does it not impair your brain function? Food can, much in the same manner, have adverse effects on the brain, and can be particularly harmful during a child’s developmental age. Not just any food… bad foods. But what is a bad food? Well, that is a whole other post on it’s own. Sometimes, however, foods you wouldn’t even consider harmful can cause a lot of damage if you have a damaged gut lining and poor digestion.

Isaiah’s eye contact lessened and he started behaving in a drunk-like manner often times. We’ve tried the gluten-free, diary-free diet, but that didn’t resolve anything and we saw little change. It simply wasn’t enough. We came across a program called the Body Ecology Diet which seems to hold a lot of hope for his condition. It incorporates a lot of organic meats, healthy fats, vegetables, sour fruits, and cultured veggies to help restore good gut flora. We’ve had Isaiah on this diet for the last four months and have already seen improvement in eye-contact, answering questions with “Yes,” articulating prayer during meal time, asking for certain food items, playing more with his sister (he used to not play at all and did a lot of stimming), and sleeping through the night without wetting the bed. These are all amazing feats! I greatly look forward to the upcoming months and the additional improvements he will make.

Dinners for us should contain 20% protein and 80% vegetables of a non-starchy consistency. Costco has Atlantic wild-caught salmon in stock right now, and it is so fresh and delicious.  So, I have been taking advantage of this seasonal item and making salmon about twice a week.

We enjoyed our baked salmon with a luscious onion lemon butter sauce, corn on the cob, and farm fresh steamed green-beans with garlic.

This is such a great improvement to our diet, as take-out foods, restaurant meals, precessed meats, flour products, and sugar used to be too much a part of our lives.

After dinner, we enjoyed a little playtime.