Wednesday 27 April 2011

A Sugar-Free Easter!

Easter is the first big celebration we've had to deal with on the diet. We've had one birthday so far too, but as it was my daughter's and she's 11, it passed off quietly, she was happy enough to have a trip to the cinema and a low-key family party, with banana cake! But Easter is a different story. It's basically the chocolate holiday! So how do you celebrate Easter without ANY chocolate or even any sweets?

Every year since the kids were very small, we've been having an Easter egg hunt during the Easter holidays with two of my good friends and their kids. It's a fun afternoon and the kids usually end up with a nice bucket full of the usual small eggs, kinders, cream eggs etc. I had thought we would skip it this year but my daughter insisted we should do it, as its a tradition! As a happy coincidence, it was our turn to have it at our house. Instead of chocolate eggs, the kids painted hard-boiled eggs and we hid those instead. They had great fun painting the eggs. They painted numbers on some of them and after finding them, these numbered eggs corresponded to little prizes, like balloons, bubbles, paints and little model planes.

I also made some tiny meringues using just egg-whites and honey, and we put these inside some plastic eggs kept from the past few years. We hid these and the painted eggs around the garden and the kids had great fun trying to find them. They all ended up with 4 to 8 eggs in their buckets, much less than they usually would have but the fun part was really in the hunting for them. The best part for us parents was we didn't have to worry about any of them over-doing it and being sick later on!!



On Easter Sunday, instead of chocolate eggs, we had pancakes, lots and lots of banana pancakes. These have been a huge hit in our house, and in many of my friends' houses. I've passed this recipe onto many Mums already. Its such an easy sneaky way to get banana and egg into any fussy kids. They look exactly the same as the usual pancakes, as you'll see from the photo. And they don't need any sweetener as the banana really makes them sweet enough. (Although they do taste even nicer with a little drop of honey, or a small spoon of home-made raspberry jam!)  All you do is put 1 banana (very ripe!) and two eggs into a food processor or blender and whip them up for about a minute until they are well blended. This mixture makes about 3/4 pancakes. I fry ours in coconut oil as my younger son is avoiding dairy at the moment, but they are lovely fried in butter too.  They cook much quicker than normal pancakes so you do have to watch them carefully and cook them on a fairly low heat.

As a special Easter treat for the kids, we got them two Easter bunnies!!

Saturday 23 April 2011

What's for dinner?

So, what is the Specific Carbohydrate Diet? What exactly does grain-free, lactose-free, sugar-free mean?

The basic premise of the diet is that a damaged gut cannot properly digest complex carbohydrates, so that means the only carbohydrates we eat are easily-digested monosaccarides, which are fruit, honey and non-starch vegetables. Starchy vegetables like potatoes and parsnips are not allowed.  No grains means no bread, porridge, pasta or rice. No lactose means no milk or cream but butter is allowed. No sugar means, well, no sugar! And nothing with sugar in it. So that rules out most processed food. So SCD is more of a lifestyle change than a diet. I really had to re-think my shopping list! When we started I gave away packs and packs of pasta, porridge, rice cakes, flour and sugar. Now my shelves are full of nuts, fruit, veg and honey. It's like being in a different house!

So what DO we eat?  Well, plenty actually!  Meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, nuts and lots and lots of eggs! We are an egg-mad family now! My younger son eats 4 or 5 eggs a day, as many as possible from our own back garden.

A typical day's menu for us goes a bit like this:

Breakfast: Eggs, turkey patties, nut bread with some fruit.

Lunch: Pancakes made with eggs and banana, or soup, or nut bread with jam or cheese

Dinner: Meat or fish with vegetables, but no potatoes!

Snacks can be fruit or home-made nut biscuits or cakes

It probably sounds a bit daunting but it is surprising how quickly you get used to eating differently. And children really are very adaptable. My older son actually asked me could we continue to eat the nut bread after we're finished the diet as he prefers it. They have accepted the lack of sweets and biscuits with hardly a complaint. And the best part is that they are all full of energy, and fighting fit! Most importantly of all, my younger son, who is autistic, is improving every day.

Tuesday 5 April 2011

A Little Bit of Background

Last September I was in my local shopping centre when I bumped into an old friend who I hadn’t seen for a while. He asked how I was. Now if I’d been having a good day, I probably would have said “I’m grand thanks” and exchanged pleasantries and left and that would have been that. But I happened to be having a really bad day and I told him so. I told him how my youngest child had been diagnosed with autism a year ago and how he had been particularly difficult this morning. So my marvelous friend took me to a chair and we had a long chat about it. “I have this book”, he said “about a diet that treats autism, and it impressed me so much, I went to meet the author. You HAVE to read it!”

So, a few weeks later I read my friend’s copy of “Gut and Psychology Syndrome” by Natasha Campbell McBride. The book describes a natural treatment for autism, and other conditions. It explains in detail the connection between the functions of the digestive system and the brain. It describes how gut dysfunction can affect brain function and makes the point that most children with autism also have digestive problems. And most importantly, it outlines a diet to treat these issues, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. This diet was devised in 1951 (so it’s not a new fad!) to treat Celiac disease and other digestive disorders. It began to be used to treat autism in the early 2000s.

After that I read “Breaking the Vicious Cycle” by Elaine Gottschall which gives even more detail about the diet. Elaine Gottschall used the diet to treat her daughter who suffered with severe ulcerative colitis and neurological problems. After her daughter was completely recovered, Elaine went back to college to study diet and nutrition in detail. She wrote her book in 1987. In a reprint of the book in 2003, she added a Chapter on Autism. Her book contains many testimonies from parents of autistic children on the benefits of the diet.

So, I felt in my bones, that we had to try this diet. Whether it worked or not, once I knew it was out there, I just felt we had to give it a go. So we decided that as a family, we would all do it together. And the kids managed to convince me to wait until after Christmas!! So we started our new diet adventure on the 4th of January.