Einstein Syndrome: Down Syndrome with a Positive Attitude

Most of us have kitchen cupboards full of stuff that our great grandparents wouldn’t recognize as foods.  What is recognizable as food has been treated and processed to the point that much of the health-giving properties are gone.  This is fine for most of us.  We are reasonably healthy, and what ails us can usually be fixed with a medical treatment or two.  We may not feel great, but we feel OK, and we function well enough.  Our bodies are designed with enough of a buffer that even when our foods aren’t great, we aren’t hurting.

It’s not so with our special kids.  A child with that extra chromosome has used up the buffer just staying alive.  Your son will not thrive on the foods found in the cupboards of most American kitchens.

Learn to Cook

In order to thrive, and to avoid the unhealthy processed foods, you gotta learn to cook.  Many years ago I decided that it must be possible to make a casserole without a can of cream of mushroom soup, and I went on a hunt.   If you are saying, “That’s easy, Miriam, just use a can of cream of chicken soup!” then you need to learn to cook.  Get a good basic cookbook and read it–not the recipes, but the chapters in it.   Joy of Cooking, and the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, have introductory articles and explanatory information to simply teach the science of preparing food from scratch.  (Hint:  you make casseroles with a “white sauce.”  Easy, peasy, and much more nutritious. )  If your cookbook tells you to use a can of soup or a box cake mix in the recipes, it is not a good basic cookbook.  You need a cookbook that tells you the technique for making anything from scratch, from ingredients close to the state in which they came from the earth.

The cookbooks mentioned above do not pay much attention to nutrition; they focus on technique.  So, for nutritious food, I love my copy of Adelle Davis’ Let’s Cook it Right. I also recommend Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. These books focus on the nutritional aspects of food.

Fats

Let’s talk about the nutritional aspects of  fat.  The brain is made mostly of fat, and that fat is mostly DHA.  Hydrogenated oils are an unnatural fat that build unnatural cell walls and unnatural brain cells.  You’ve heard of trans fats.  Trans fats are the hydrogenated fats including  margarine, most peanut butters, the fats in most boxed baking mixes and bakery goods.  Healthy fats for cooking include butter, olive oil, grass fed animal fat, coconut oil, and a few others.

There isn’t room here to say what needs to be said about fats.  What you need to know now is that if you are mostly buying chemically extracted corn or safflower oil in clear bottles from the grocery store, then you are not providing your son with the  healthiest fats.  If you are using Crisco, heaven forbid, then stop it.

Instead go to the Weston A. Price Foundation website and just start reading.  I don’t agree with everything on this site, but it is a place to begin to change your thinking about your kitchen.

Excitotoxins

I don’t have to change your thinking about sugar—you already know it is bad for you.  The problem is that a common substitute, aspartame (the stuff in Diet Coke, Nutrasweet), is an excitotoxin.  It over-activates receptors for neurotransmitters, damaging or destroying neurons.  MSG, a common flavor additive in processed foods is also an excitotoxin.  You can probably absorb the affects of the excitotoxin, and stand to lose a few brain cells.  But can your son?    I don’t know how much aspartame or MSG it takes to have a measurable effect on my daughter with Down Syndrome.  No one does.  But it is having an effect.  So in our family, we just stay away from the stuff.

Aluminum

There is strong circumstantial evidence linking aluminum with Alzheimer’s Disease.  Alzheimer’s comes early and often in DS—by middle age most people with DS also have Alzheimer’s.  There is no proof that eliminating aluminum in food and food processing will delay or prevent Alzheimer’s in Down syndrome, but I don’t want to risk it.    Alzheimer’s is a deadly enemy for our kids.  Keeping aluminum out of food might give our kids an edge.

Common sources of aluminum are your baking powder (read the label; Tone’s brand has no aluminum), the baking powder in purchased baked goods, aluminum cookware, aluminum soda cans, and cooking in aluminum foil.

Take It Slow

This post hardly scratches the surface of nutritional food preparation.  Changing out your kitchen and cooking habits is a life-long process, and won’t happen overnight.  What you should do now is begin the journey.  Your son needs you to understand nutrition, not just about vitamins, but about food.