Re: oxypowder/heavy metals/and some comments about diet

[Guest guest]

Hi ,Just wondering...how are you removing those heavy metals? And how did you find out they were there to begin with? I have been wondering about heavy metals with my 3.5-year-old...her pediatrician suspects that her constipation was triggered by her vaccinations (he's not the pediatrician who did the vaccinations). Also, I have a thought about diet I thought I'd share with the list...maybe I've mentioned this before, but we have had better luck with reducing fiber than with increasing it. My DD and I are vegetarians and she has always had tons of fiber in her diet...apparently it was too much for her at her age. By reducing insoluble fiber, and for example, giving her white bread (we're using a good quality white bread made by Natural Ovens of Manitowoc) instead of whole grain bread, we've gotten her to the point where she has three bowel movements a week, instead of one every ten days or so...

We also seem to see improvement if she has no vitamin supplements at all. At first we thought the problem was the iron in her multivitamin. Then I found that even the all-natural fruit/veg vitamins I was giving her (basically just vitamins A and C) seem to bind her up a bit. I am still giving her primadophilus and papaya enzymes, though. I think the problem with the vitamin supplements might be that they're such a highly processed food. I'm starting to think that processed foods are particularly bad, even when they have all-natural ingredients. My DD really seems to do better with homemade stuff--even when the homemade stuff is cookies made with white flour and sugar! Another bizarre thing: we've been allowing her some cheese lately. Previously we banned all dairy products. But adding a bit of cheese hasn't made her constipation worse...at least not so far. (It doesn't make it better, either--just seems to be unrelated.)

I don't know what to conclude from any of this. Maybe it just means that in my DD's case, her constipation is not diet-related. At one point, I read an article in a medical journal that concluded that chronic, functional constipation in children is usually not diet-related. But the article proceeded to recommend that doctors push fiber even though the study they were doing had shown that fiber didn't help. If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll go back and see if I can find the article again.

Finally. This will seem really odd, I know. We've been experimenting with giving my DD some flower essences to help with the emotional turmoil of going through all this. I really encourage all of you to look into this. I don't fully understand how they work, and some of the explanations I've read sound really flaky. But: one day after I started giving her flower essences, she stopped having nightmares. The next day she stopped having separation problems at school. And the next day she stopped wearing diapers and went back to wearing underwear and using the potty, even for bowel movements. It's hard to recommend a particular flower essence, because the appropriate one would depend on the person and the situation. For my daughter, Perelandra's Sweet Pea essence and Bach's Aspen, both of which are supposed to reduce irrational fears, seem to help quite a bit. She had a fear of wearing underwear, which is pretty irrational! If there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that the underwear wasn't making her constipated! Anyway. I think offering some kind of emotional support or stress relief (even if it's not flower essences) is helpful, because constipation and its related woes can be very upsetting for kids. Sorry for the long post! I hope some of this is helpful to someone...Bonnie