Buffered Vitamin C and more supplements

I feel like I am constantly tweaking my children's diet as if I'm in research dealing with my little lab rats. But with LJ, all things gut relate to his behavior. In November, we started having lots of potty training and behavior regression and I started having to send extra clothes to school again. I realized it was due to switching his probiotics from Culturelle to Therbiotic Complete (see last post). I switched him back to Culturelle, and in 2 days, he was not having any accidents and most behavior issues were obsolete again! I kept EK & JD on Therbiotic, because it seemed like it was helping. I share this, because it shows me that different guts need different probiotics, and it is valuable to try different ones to see what helps you most.

Slowly over the holidays, I started reducing fruit in our home to apples, bananas, and pears (mostly for LJ). EK & JD's dirty diapers went from 3-5 times/day down to 1-2/day. With the exception of Christmas day, when they had candy canes with breakfast, and we changed 10 diapers in 5 hours! Definitely IBS-like symptoms from the sugar...so also limiting sugar now. But it nags at me...what 2 and 3 year olds can't eat fruit?? They don't have true allergic reactions...their gut is just too inflamed and acidic to tolerate fruit. And how do these small children, who have had a relatively healthy diet from birth (and were breastfed), have such acidic guts already???

Last week, I went to see the kids' PA who helps us evaluate supplements. Because if your kids cannot eat most fruits, how do they get any kind of proper diet and vitamins? In a prior post, I asked about how a minimal dose of Vitamin C goes straight through JD. So our family PA CJ, he suggested buffered Vitamin C. There's this stuff called Ester-C, which is for guts that are more acidic and need something more gentle.

http://www.ester-c.com/pages/benefits.aspx

The kids have been on it a week, with no side effect so far! They are also on Juice Plus (whole food based vitamins - fruit, veggies and antioxidant berries) which they seem to tolerate really well, but I want to make sure they're getting all the Vitamin C they can get, especially during the winter sick season.

The other supplements that have really made a big difference in their color and form have been L-Carnitine, Acetyl-L-Carnitine, and CoQ10. JD had an organic acid profile run this fall and it came back that his citric acid (Krebs) cycle is not functioning properly, so he needed these supplements anyway. Then we had our mitochondrial buccal swab study (for complexes I & IV) for all 3 kids come back positive, which means all of them really could benefit from these supplements to help their bodies function more like they are supposed to function. They give their cells more energy. The buccal swab study showed that there is significant decreased activity in our children's mitochondrial functioning. This is why these supplements can be so valuable, and probably why I've seen such great results with JD & EK already.

http://www.lcarnitinebenefits.com/
http://www.lcarnitinebenefits.com/acetyl-l-carnitine-benefits
http://www.preventive-health-guide.com/coq10.html

I am not a doctor, so I can't tell you if you or your children need the carnitines or CoQ10, and I would not recommend trying them without some doctor giving you medical reasons to try them. If you live in Charlotte, you can message me and I can direct you to a family practitioner PA who can help run tests and evaluate whether these would be an option for your family. I can whole-heartedly recommend the buffered Vitamin C if you find fruit and the regular Vitamin C irritable to your gut.

I know this blog is particular to our family's gut challenges. If you have questions, feel free to message me, post comments/?s, etc. If I don't know the answer, I would be glad to do some research and post on it. Hopefully this long gut journey for our family will be beneficial to others and give some new ideas.

It looks like we may be able to have 3 kids with healthier guts in 2011, and for that I'm very thankful!!! :)