Diet

Diet, yes, I am going to talk about this. Autism diet for our son includes no gluten, dairy, soy, sugar, corn or grains. We also just recently found out that he is in a small sub-set of kids who has high oxalates and would benefit from a low oxalate diet. Why him I ask?

Sounds simple right? Just google low oxalate foods and your on your way. But that’s not the way it works. I swear as an autism parent, you also have to be a good researcher and a scientist as well.

In addition to his current dietary restrictions we now have to reduce the oxalates. This is not an easy task. I already have to make most things especially bread and baked goods from scratch because it is extremely hard to find things that contain all of his dietary requirements. Now I have to add more thing to the mix.

To eat low oxalates you have to go slow in making switches otherwise you can go into what they call a “dumping” phase which can make you sick. Well to be honest, I think I already made him sick because I am trying to catch up on all the research for this diet.

So I joined a facebook group to try to gain more knowledge and information on this diet. There is a 269 speadsheet list of all the different foods that were tested for oxalate levels. In these sheets it tells you whether the oxalates are low, medium, high or extremely high. Then it gives you the amounts in numbers that these foods contain and you have to add up all of these amounts to come to a number for the foods that you will be eating that day and you have to stay under a certain level.

I was literally crying when I read this spreadsheet. So what I have done so far is make my own list of the foods that our son actually eats that are high in oxalates along with all of the numbers and now I have to try to figure out how much he is eating each day. I have this list beside me right now and I just want to cry looking at it because my brain is ready to explode. Now I have to look at all my recipes in which I make all these things and the ingredients and figure out how much he is eating per serving. But I also can’t just make a complete switchover as that will cause dumping.

So this is my task today to at least try to come up with a list of oxalate numbers that he is eating today so I have some concrete data to follow. Then I will be scouring the internet for more recipes.

Being an autism parent can be hard!!!!