Srinika Narayan:
Hi, I’m Srinika Narayan, acupuncturist and nutritional analyst and tonight we’re going to be talking about how to prevent or reverse neurodevelopmental disorders in children. I’m lucky to have a guest here, my colleague Nori Hudson, who is an instructor at Bowman College. Nori, if you’d like to tell us more about yourself.

Nori Hudson:
Hi, I’ve been in practice since 2000, and my company is called Radiant Vitality, and I have worked with children and their families throughout my practice and profession, and I do extra research because of the special needs that they often present with, so I have a great passion to help the children.

Srinika Narayan:
So, tonight, we’re going to be discussing cases such as autism, ADHD, learning disorders and cerebral palsy and these are all in the family of neurodevelopmental disorders and the statistics show that over 15% of kids today suffer from one of these disorders, the biggest one being ADHD and learning disabilities. We’re going to give an overview of what’s going on in these disorders and while the manifestations may be different, there’s some common themes that show up in these cases and from what I have found is that there’s a lot of toxicity involved and Nori is going to be talking more about the nutritional aspect of how to help kids with these issues.

All right. Great, we can go ahead and jump on into things I find in my practice with these kids. So, one thing that comes up quite often is mercury and this is the case in all neurodevelopmental disorders, seem to have a theme of mercury going on. Not every case, but all types of these cases. How do we get mercury? How do kids get mercury?

There’s a few ways. It can be transferred in utero. If the mother has a lot of mercury in her system and she perhaps has dental amalgams that are leaking a bit, maybe eating fish, or maybe had just an existing mercury issue, it can easily get transferred to the fetus and then start affecting the brains of the fetus.

Another aspect is the thiomersal, which is found in vaccines. These days, even pregnant moms are encouraged to get vaccines and some of these vaccines contain a fair amount of thiomersal. Some contain a low amount of thiomersal, but even small amounts can be very damaging on a child’s brain. One thing I suggest to people is find out what are the vaccines actually mandated to get, and for the other ones, just skip them. Skip them in pregnancy. You don’t have to get Hepatitis B vaccine upon birth, upon your child’s birth. Skip the ones you don’t need to get right off the bat, because it’ll just go and affect the child, so might as well know which ones you have to get. You can look at NVIC.org and find out more about that.

Nori Hudson:
This is about the fish. You have to think about that a lot of parents have short time, they’re both working and they’re probably eating tuna fish and other predatory fish, which bio accumulate mercury, because, well, we have volcanic activity, we have coal burning furnaces, all of these things are raining down acid rain into the waterways and the fish bio accumulate.

In that case, if you’re eating these predatory fish, the bio accumulation of that occurs in the human being, and they know from studies, and I had a case in my practice where a mom who ate tuna had a child that was born with autism or developed autism shortly after and she connected it to her three a week tuna can consumption.

That was very concerning, because it’s not out there, it’s not on the can and it’s not something that people understand to access online. There’s a website, the FDA has a website that shows high mercury fish and you can Google that.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah, important point for sure. And even, pre-pregnancy, people who are thinking about getting pregnant, women who are thinking about getting pregnant even a year down the line, they may think, “Okay, once I’m pregnant, I’ll stop eating fish,” but if they eat fish up until that point, it’s still quite a bit in their system, so I always tell people who are thinking about having kids down the line, just be aware of the problems that mercury can cause.

Again, it’s hard to totally test for these things. You can do hair tests, but these metals don’t always show up, but using nutritional analysis, this is what comes up a good 70, 80% of the time, is mercury as the cause or at least playing a role in these neurodevelopmental issues. It’s a good idea to just be aware of it.

Nori Hudson:
There’s also hair testing and it may be a little more conventional, but in my practice, one can get non-invasive tests such as a sample of hair. There are labs that will evaluate minerals in the hair and identify whether the nutritional minerals are at right levels and also if there are toxic metals, so it’s another angle for looking at it in case somebody doesn’t understand the methodology that you’re using.

Srinika Narayan:
By the way, I use muscle testing or applied kinesiology to figure out what’s going on. You brought up toxic metals, yes there are other toxic metals that also affect children and adults, but metals such as titanium, or copper, or aluminum, these are also ones that show up secondary to mercury, but they do show up and they do get in the brain and cause problems.

These kind of metals are actually quite resonant with electromagnetic frequencies such as cellphones or wifis, so it makes people electrically sensitive and as you know, the brain is a very electrically sensitive organ, so it’s easy for things to just go awry even with small amounts of these metals in it.

In that case, I tell people be aware of using aluminum cookware, aluminum anti-perspirants. There’s titanium dioxide in medications and what it does, it makes the pill smooth, basically, but it is a toxin, so I advise people, try to be minimalist on medication. Just use what you really need to, but be aware, each time you’re putting medication in your system, you’re generally putting titanium dioxide in there.

Nori Hudson:
Even sunscreens can have titanium dioxide and people consider that safe. It’s even in some of the better quality ones, but again, it can get into the body.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah, nano particles of it can just be absorbed, basically. So, other than prevention in terms of actually pulling some of these things out, be it mercury or toxic other metals, you do have to work with a professional to do that, but some basic nutrition things you can start doing it on your own on a base level, generally, I tell people, start with the liver. It’s a very safe place to start. Nori will talk about some foods very helpful for just cleaning out the liver.

In terms of herbs that can be used, certainly milk thistle, dandelion, burdock root, if you can incorporate some of these into a tea, into your child’s diet, it can start cleaning out the liver, which in turn, sends a signal the brain, “Hey, it’s okay to start letting go of some of the toxins in it.”

Nori Hudson:
Yeah, liver foods are interesting. Most people do eat a fair amount of them if they’re eating a whole food diet, but unfortunately, you may need more because of the child’s additional needs. So, some of the foods that I focus on is to get brassica family or the cabbage family, broccoli, cauliflower, even arugula might be all right, bok choy and just head cabbage making up cole slaw.

Others are citrus fruits, so lemon juice, orange juice, things like that, or whole fruit would probably be better because you’ll get the fiber. I would add radishes and burdock is a great root to add as well and beets. And then, leafy greens, because we don’t ever get enough of those. Again, there are some ways to sneak them into the child’s diet. One of the recipes that I think you will be posting is called beet slaw, and it’s been kid tested and it’s an imminently friendly, they all like it. It’s bright red and it’s got carrots in it as well and coconut flakes.

Srinika Narayan:
Yum.

Nori Hudson:
And walnuts.

Srinika Narayan:
Oh great. Do you sometimes suggest just juicing these vegetables to get them in more in the raw form or do you suggest more cooking the vegetables or a mixture of both.

Nori Hudson:
That’s a good question. I think most of the time, it’s better to have them cooked, maybe [inaudible 00:09:39] more information to the child. You know beta carotene is bound up in the fiber of the carrot, so it doesn’t release very much when it’s raw, however, when it’s cooked, it releases way more, and it needs to be with fat so it’s much easier to dose it with fat for the beta carotene to be utilized.

Srinika Narayan:
Okay, cooked carrots with fat.

Nori Hudson:
Yes, with butter.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah.

Nori Hudson:
Or olive oil or something like that. And also, children tend to not have the best digestive capacity under the age of 12. Their hydrochloric acid doesn’t kick in until around puberty at the robust adult level, and so I think generally cooked foods is a better model for them. You can also sneak in the food a little more easily when it’s cooked, because you can camouflage it and say, “It’s spaghetti sauce,” as an example.

Srinika Narayan:
Okay.

Nori Hudson:
But the [inaudible 00:10:27] is an exception.

Srinika Narayan:
Okay, great, wonderful. Another thing I’d like to talk about is electro magnetic frequencies. These are invisible, so most of us don’t realize these things are really much stronger than we think. This includes cell phones, this includes wifi routers, smart meters, which in the past five years have gone up on every home, apartment building. These are PG&E’s meters that read the electricity for the house and send out signals twice a minute to PG&E about how much electricity’s being used, but the point is, it’s done wirelessly and through this very, very strong current.

It’s a good idea to know where these smart meters are. I have seen them cause problems in kids and adults, time and time again, whether it’s sleeping problems or behavioral problems, ADD for sure, it’ll exacerbate any kind of autism. They’re really toxic. So, find out where the smart meter is in your house. It’s oftentimes outside the house on the perimeter of the house or in the garage and see. Is it below your child’s bedroom, or outside your child’s bedroom.

If you live in an apartment building, there’s going to be several of them, all hanging out in one place and you want to know where they are so that you can block them if necessary. There’s things out there, smart meter guards that you can buy, but it’s just helpful to know, because if it is outside your child’s bedroom, that is going to be bothering them until they are out of the house. So, know about that.

Nori Hudson:
Even just having high energy utilities or, a refrigerator on the other side of the wall where your child’s sleeping. I’ve seen a child who was on the other side of a flat screen TV, have difficulty sleeping, and just by moving the bed to another wall, the child no longer woke up with nightmares.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah, right, right.

Nori Hudson:
Simple things. You don’t think that it’s going to make a difference, but then it does.

Srinika Narayan:
High voltage, yeah. Another thing would be your router. How close is it to your child’s bedroom and to make sure it’s not right on the other side of the wall and to consider putting a timer on the router, so that it goes off at night. Nobody needs it at night. It comes on in the morning. You can always override it if you need to, but it just lessens the EMF blanketing the house, at least at night, when people are trying to sleep and their nervous systems are trying to regenerate.

Another thing, iPads. I see kids playing with iPads right on their lap, and it’s got a lot of electro magnetic frequency, usually on an iPad, the wifi is on, so at least that, if you can switch it off, that will help, but also train kids to keep an iPad on a desk vs. right on them I know one child was, she wasn’t growing, it’s not a neurodevelopmental disorder, it’s just she wasn’t growing fast and we did the testing and figured out it’s electro magnetic frequencies that are bothering her ovaries.

I asked about the iPad and the parents said, “Oh she loves that iPad. She plays with it all day.” Okay. Play with it, but put it on a desk, it’ll make such a big difference.

Nori Hudson:
Now, in a 2015 study, that the amount of screen time appears to correlated to a 33% surge in the teen depression now. Of course, there’s a lot of lost sleep that occurs by having your electronics next to your bed, but to of course, see that large surge in depression in the teens, in just the course of five years is scary.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah. With teens, oftentimes, they have cellphones, the parents give them cellphones. In schools, a lot of times, they actually allow cellphones. I didn’t know this, but I had a teen patient come in a few weeks back and he was getting attention, a new attention disorder, basically. He didn’t have it before.

When I did the test, it was cellphones. So, I asked, “Okay, are you keeping your cellphone on at night,” sure enough, he was, in his room, so I told him switch that off and I said, “Okay, where is it during the day. You’re at school, so you probably don’t have it.” He said, “I keep it in my pocket,” and they allow kids to keep the cellphones with them to use as a calculator or what not, but the cellphone being on in a pocket is just on his person.

Nori Hudson:
On them.

Srinika Narayan:
Exactly. So, be aware of not keeping it right on your system, because then you’re just bathing in it, basically.

Nori Hudson:
Absolutely. I know in middle school, they can open carry, as they say.

Srinika Narayan:
Open carry, right, right.

Nori Hudson:
But in elementary school, they have to put it away or they lose it.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah. Elementary school they would have cellphone. So yeah, that’s a bit one that shows up for all these neurodevelopmental disorders. The brain, very sensitive to all kinds of electrical changes, basically. And, let’s see. The other big thing I see are chemical additives, so these are neurotoxins, basically, so this can include things like artificial sweetener, food dyes, flavor enhancers, MSG, they’re all kind of designed to get in your system and excite the system and make you like the food more, make you like the flavor more.

They already kind of have a straight shot right into the nervous system, right into the brain. The problem is, they are toxic. So, of course, read labels, that’s what I tell people and know that piece of gum isn’t quite as innocent as it looks. It might be tiny, but it’s packed with all kinds of bad things, food dyes, usually artificial sweetener, flavor enhancers. Candy, of course, same thing. And packaged foods in general. Kids like chips and a lot of these other things that it may not exactly say MSG, but it tends to have MSG in some form. There’s hundreds of ways that MSG can be … they call it other things, hydrolyzed yeast and all kinds of other names. You don’t know that it’s MSG, but you can pretty much assume that if it’s a packaged food, it probably has some form of MSG in there.

Same with beverages, they don’t always say flavor enhancer, these things can go under natural flavors. Natural flavors mean unnatural, by the way, but sometimes they don’t even say that and they can carry it.

Nori Hudson:
There’s a website you can go to called truthinlabeling.org and it’ll list all the pseudonyms, because the industry’s gotten smart. They know people are keyed into looking for the MSG and so they’re making it autolyzed yeast extract or natural flavoring.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah. So, that’ll help. And, of course, just a rule of thumb, packaged goods, whether it’s foods or drinks, tend to be problematic.

Nori Hudson:
Definitely. High fructose corn syrup has mercury in it.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah.

Nori Hudson:
How many people know that? And yet, it’s still out there in the market.

Srinika Narayan:
Right.

Nori Hudson:
And a little bit is very, very potent and powerful as you were talking earlier.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah, exactly. It’s the things we start to do every day. It may be a sort out high fructose corn syrup, but if you get in the habit of doing it every day, that little bit of mercury is coming in every day. Of course, the high fructose corn syrup itself is problematic.

Fish oil supplements. It may be controversial, but what I have found is that fish oil supplements tend to have small amounts of mercury in it, even though they say it’s been screened and this and that. It tends to have small amounts of mercury. People tend to take that, not just as needed, they take it every day. It starts to show up after a while as being problematic. I know, ironic.

Nori Hudson:
Yes, they’re trying to do the healthy thing.

Srinika Narayan:
Yep. Exactly.

Nori Hudson:
Do you have some examples of someone who was helped with cerebral palsy, for example, by your screening process.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah sure.

Nori Hudson:
… understand what’s the underlying cause.

Srinika Narayan:
I used to think cerebral palsy, it’s what they say is, it’s oxygen deprived in child birth or in utero and the brain has been deprived of oxygen, but what I have been finding is actually thiomersal has played a role actually.

Nori Hudson:
Oh, that’s terrible.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah, and they’re not actually for sure that it is oxygen deprivation, it’s just thrown out there as a theory. Sometimes they do brain scans. They don’t even necessarily find something off in terms of cerebral palsy. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don’t and it’s really just diagnosed based on motor coordination type of things, so this theory is thrown at us, this is what’s happened, somehow there’s been oxygen deprivation, but what’s actually going on is quite possibly very different. So yeah, just slowly starting to work on pulling mercury out of the system has been helpful.

It can be helpful in very mild cases. They can come back. I wouldn’t just think of, it’s a done deal, CP, okay, that’s it, oxygen deprived …

Nori Hudson:
Work with it.

Srinika Narayan:
Exactly. So, there’s actually things that can be done. Same with autism, same with all of these things. People get this diagnosis and just assume that’s that, we just manage, but actually there’s things we can do to start bringing it back. A lot of it is heavy metal detox, but a lot of it is talking about things were talking about reducing certain foods, chemical additives, EMF exposures and also, from a nutritional standpoint, I know blood sugar plays a big part in these issues.

Nori Hudson:
Well, at Bowman College, they have some models that are very helpful for us. One of them is called the health hazards model. I mention to you, and although we don’t know how much genetics plays a role, what happens to the genetics is epigenetics is even more important and the five elements that we consider that might be part of that is malnutrition, so not eating the right amount of nutrition, addictions, which may be eating too much of the wrong food and too little of the right, stress, which can undo everything nutritionally, toxins, which we’ve been talking a lot about today, and trauma, so adverse childhood events.

A good health history can at least elucidate which of those might be laying a role, but to get to the underlying issue, take some additional sleuthing and you can save a lot of money by having a person who does the nutrition testing, such as you have helped me in my practice to identify things without having to spend lots and lots of money going from this lab to get this panel and this lab to get this panel. It’s a really hard amount of work for the parent who’s already overwrought working with a child with some disability.

Srinika Narayan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), a lot of work and a lot of money. Yeah, definitely. There’s things people can get started on right away, which is just working with diet and starting to eliminate some basic things. Trying to eliminate sugar, which I know is not the easiest thing with kids, but hypoglycemia plays a big part in terms of mood swings, or the ability to even learn something or brain fog.

Even as an adult who’s not diagnosed with anything, we know when we’re hungry or our sugar is off. It’s just hard to take in information. It’s hard to take in sensory things.

Nori Hudson:
That’s an interesting point. One of the links that I’m fond of is called fifty conditions that mimic ADHD. You can just put that in your search engine and the number one is the hypoglycemia. Often children might have a standard American breakfast, which would be a one ounce bowl of cereal, where it might give them one gram of protein, which is not going to take long to get combusted and used, and then also two percent milk, which has been endorsed by the USDA as the go to for children at two and older, so they don’t get fat, which again, is a misunderstanding, and some orang juice, so it’s a hypoglycemic nightmare and the kid, by ten o’clock, you can’t think straight. You can’t perform well and then maybe the teacher calls and says, “I think Johnny may have an attention problem.” No, he just didn’t eat enough food with good protein and fat to keep him going through the day until he got to lunchtime and refueled.

Srinika Narayan:
Right. It’s not ADHD, it’s simply lack of a nutritious breakfast, basically. In terms of fat, there’s so many, it’s so controversial, fat, but our brain loves fat, correct?

Nori Hudson:
Well, it supposedly, by dry weight, mostly fat and we do need it. In fact, DHA, which is an essential fatty acid, is the major player in keeping us smart. That’s how we came out of the trees and managed to do all the great things we’ve been able to do compared to the apes, and cooking. I think cooking had a big role as well. But yeah, we have to eat fat and the myelin sheath. You were talking earlier about electro magnetic frequencies and the sensitivity.

I had a client who was eating a low fat diet and I believe that that might have contributed, although we don’t know yet, to her sensitivity to EMFs, because the nervous system is like an antenna, and it’s reaching out and getting information from all of these antennae and cellphone towers and perhaps getting so sensitized to it, that it’s hyper alert.

She was feeling fatigue and brain fog and just wiped out and getting terrible headaches in this particular part of her brain. All of that, I hope, can be helped by eating a higher fat diet, which thankfully, she was willing to embrace.

Srinika Narayan:
So it can act as a buffer, you think. Yeah.

Nori Hudson:
I think you’re right, but also as satiety for the fact that your stomach takes a lot longer time to let the fat leave than something like a box of cereal.

Srinika Narayan:
Right, right, yeah. The brain likes fuel.

Nori Hudson:
It does like fuel.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah. Makes sense. And in terms of gluten. I want to talk a little bit about gluten, because it does show up, not all the time, but often in terms of a food sensitivity for people with neurodevelopmental disorders or kids with neurodevelopmental disorders. Can you say just a little bit more about, do you generally advise people off the bat, probably a good idea not to do gluten products or wheat products specifically or …

Nori Hudson:
Yeah. This is a very controversial, there are lots of varieties of why people can and cannot handle gluten. The latest research actually says that it might be the fructans, which is an element of the grain that’s causing IBS like symptoms. It’s not the gluten itself, and they actually did a very elegant study to tease that out.

Srinika Narayan:
Oh. Wow. All this time, it’s all about gluten. I haven’t even heard of fructans, actually.

Nori Hudson:
Well with small intestine bacterial overgrowth, people are encouraged to go on a low five map diet, which is an acronym for fructans, oligosaccharides …

Srinika Narayan:
Oh yes, right.

Nori Hudson:
Fructans is what’s playing an interesting role for some people. And they weren’t actually sensitive to the gluten, but they were sensitive to the fructans. Besides that, there are other aspects of gluten. It’s in every meal, for most people. It is also not organic for many people and the glyphosate, which is a residue from Roundup, can actually be a severely endocrine disrupting chemical in the body and change the bacterial colony in the gut.

It’s antibacterial, but not only that, because the energy’s generating organelles in every cell are bacterial in origin, those mitochondria, it can affect our energy production. So, it’s pretty amazing, just the glyphosate angle. Then, William Davis, in his book, Wheat Belly, he’s a cardiologist, so he’s very much interested in this angle. He said that often people are eating hybridized wheat, and we haven’t changed quickly enough to enjoy it and digest it.

Einkorn is something he can tolerate, which is an old version wheat, but the other kinds of wheat that are newer, which were made to accommodate the machines that had to harvest it, are not as kindly, and we’ve had response to it. So, going to Europe, some people have said, “I ate everything and I was fine …”

Srinika Narayan:
And I come home …

Nori Hudson:
All the time. I’m terrible. I have terrible sickness.

Srinika Narayan:
Spelt is an older form of wheat.

Nori Hudson:
And kamut.

Srinika Narayan:
And kamut, right, right. Okay. So, possibilities to try instead of.

Nori Hudson:
Instead of, but I don’t always go there. I look at the diet frequency. If someone is eating it all the time, or they’re saying, “I love my bread.” You have a sense that there’s some possible addiction allergy thing going there, and they’re getting a kick from the gluteal morphins, which are substitutes for our own endorphins, and make you feel slightly less bad when you eat it, so you want more of it.

Srinika Narayan:
Okay. This is how it works. It’s not just the carb aspect.

Nori Hudson:
No.

Srinika Narayan:
Okay, so addictive in other ways. Okay.

Nori Hudson:
Yeah. And dairy also could be another factor, like [inaudible 00:28:43] this could take the place of our own endorphins, so all these big words, but it just means that our food can have profound effects, not just on our energy, but our brain and our ability to focus and concentrate on things that we are asked to in school.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

Nori Hudson:
It’s a good question though.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah.

Nori Hudson:
It’s not really a slam dunk.

Srinika Narayan:
Yeah, exactly. Oh, well great. Anything more to say, one thing I just want to say is reiterate, there are ways to really try to prevent these things from happening and prevention starts not just in pregnancy, but even pre pregnancy, to start thinking about these things, and then once … there’s also ways to start reversing them, so I always tell people, don’t be married to a diagnosis. Don’t think it’s a done deal.

Once you can figure out what’s behind it, you can start reversing it. Even if you can’t figure out what’s behind it, there’s so many things you can do with diet and balancing blood sugar, taking a few inflammatory foods out that can do a lot for a kid.

Nori Hudson:
Yes. I think it’s important that we keep looking upstream for underlying cause, otherwise, we are just doing paleo [inaudible 00:30:02], maybe taking digestive enzymes thinking, “Oh well, I’ll be able to handle that gluten, or give my son a medicine,” which, by the way, will camouflage the child’s inattention and they may not learn from the experiences that they’re having in school.

I really encourage parents if they have the time, and maybe they don’t, and the patience, or someone to hold their hand through a process of unfolding the underlying issue, the real story, the back story, because you’ll get the more durable solution if you do rather than just as Srinika says, you don’t want to be wedded to one thing. Just be an open minded person in helping your child and I’m sure you’re the advocate for that child in getting well, fully well, realizing their full genetic potential.

Srinika Narayan:
Thank you so much Nori. Great. To learn more about us and our practices, for me you can go to srinikahealing.com and Nori, you’re at …

Nori Hudson:
Radiant-vitality.com.

Srinika Narayan:
Great, and we’ll put on the beet slaw recipe on the Facebook page. Thank you very much.

Nori Hudson:
Thank you.