Welcome Here
Support for parents of kids who are probably living on fewer than 10 foods and desperately deficient.
Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash
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Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
This newsletter is about toddlers, children and teens (“kids”) who have a severely avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) associated with Autism. For many kids in my clinic, this usually means they repeatedly eat a limited range of processed foods and have extremely rigid food preferences. Almost none eat any fresh vegetables, legumes, fruits, seeds and nuts in their daily routine - ever.
If this is your child, you are in the right place.
Most of these kids are at a satisfactory weight and height; they eat sufficient amounts of their 5-10 preferred processed foods. Only about one-third will experience chronic malnutrition and very poor growth. However, they all suffer from hidden deficiencies that silently impair physiological systems essential to daily functioning, learning, development, and health. Unfortunately, the long-term consequences are substantial and typically become increasingly obvious as they reach their teenage years and early adulthood.
This type of severely restrictive eating is not simply ‘picky eating’. And this type of eating is rarely responsive to feeding therapies. It cannot be fixed simply by exposure strategies like food chaining. I don’t think I can remember a single case in my clinic where food chaining or any other food-exposure therapy has worked. Trying to increase or expand the intake of real foods is nearly impossible.
A ‘food first’ approach doesn’t work. That’s why this newsletter is all about taking a ‘nutrition first’ approach. Severe ARFID with Autism is long journey of restrictive eating. We can’t wait 10-20 years until a child develops their capacity to get all their essential daily nutrients from a wide range of healthy foods. Instead, using evidence-based approaches, we need to get specialist nutrition products into their everyday routine. It is extremely important to get essential nutrients every day during the developmental years. Brains and bodies cannot develop or function properly without essential nutrients every day.
We need to work within (not against) their serious sensory sensitivities and profoundly rigid preferences to get these essential nutrients in each day. That is what the Nutrition Rescue approach is able to do for more than 80percent of all the kids that present to my clinic (i.e. for all those who don’t need tube feeding); and my clientele represents the most affected kids in Australia with very severe ARFID and complex Autism (what I call high severity “ARFID-ASD” – an informal term I will continue using for convenience).
How we use the Nutrition Rescue approach to get essential nutrients into these young people is what I will share in this newsletter, podcasts and Learning Labs (webinar workshops for parents).
Autism may not be a ‘disability’ for all, but for some – and certainly for all the kids in my clinic – it creates significant levels of disability that have severe impacts on daily functioning, development and health outcomes. Just ask any of the parents in my clinic. The daily impact in their lives is very high.
Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
Michael
Consultant Paediatric Dietitian