Getting Back on the (Food Trial) Horse

We have some good news: sweet potatos and cauliflower are still safe!

Yay, Zac!

They’re even still safe for me! Once again, I’m having to learn all about a new food issue…salicylates are throwing me for a loop.

Remember when I ate the sweet potato and had an instant reaction? Nasty little headache and stomach cramps for hours?

Well, a friend who has recently learned quite a bit about salicylates said that sals increase in “older” foods. The sweet potatos we were giving Zac at the beginning of the re-trial (when he had sleep disturbances) were about 6 weeks old, and the one I ate was a few weeks old – and dehydrated.

Just to see if it made any difference, I got brave and cooked up fresh sweet potato for both Zac and myself. After eating a pretty good sized portion of freshly cooked, fresh sweet potato…I felt FINE. No symptoms at all.

So apparently, fresh sweet potatos are good for both of us, and old dehydrated ones are not.

Can I just say that the loss of dehydration as a source of food preserving for some foods is painful for me? I love dehydrating! Boo hoo.

And after we switched to fresh sweet potatos, Zac stopped having such sleep disturbances and immediately began eating more sweet potato.

As with any ‘new’ food, he also got more energetic, babbled more, engaged more, just did everything more.

So, whew! I’m glad those two veggies are still a part of his diet.

Oh, and you might be wondering about cauliflower, since it wasn’t officially moved to the list of “foods we must re-trial after the stomach bug“. Well, it wasn’t a questionable food, but he flat refused to eat ANY cauliflower after the stomach bug. Since he had gone so long without eating it, I wanted to not feed anything else suspect or new during the first few days we tried to get him to eat it again.

He ate it this time! I guess his appetite was just really thrown off right after the stomach bug. Poor little guy.

Since he ate it for two days with no problems, we’re moving on.

Moving on to what, though?

We had intended to re-trial pork and apricot in our post-stomach bug world, but a couple of recent developments and thoughts are changing that plan.

Pork…we love pork! Unfortunately, pork has always given Zac enough questionable symptoms (thanks to histamine) that I try to avoid feeding it to him when we’re doing a food trial. I don’t want to be confused and suspect a new food when it’s actually the pork wigging him out.

Consequently, even though pork is safe for him, he hasn’t really been able to eat much of it this year. Which sucks.

Darrel pointed out that if we intend to pick up where we left off and power through food trials (not really power through; just go from one to the next without breaks), then there really won’t BE a lot of opportunity for Zac to eat pork…so why bother re-trialing it right now?

Why not wait until we’ve got enough safe foods that our circumstances change…like I can begin working a little bit more and slowing down the speed of our food trials, so he’ll have a chance to have some “down time” between trials where he can eat pork?

I thought that was an excellent point.

So we’re holding off on pork for now.

We’re also holding off on apricot.

Not because of anything wrong with apricot, but because Zac, insatiable little chicken eater that he is, has eaten ALL of the chickens my parents butchered this summer! Seriously! My parents did eat chicken in the beginning, but when they realized how quickly Zac was eating their chickens, they stopped eating it to save it for him.

I also didn’t eat very much chicken (mostly leftovers from Zac’s dinners), which means Zac has single-handedly plowed through almost two dozen chickens since August.

Yowza!

So it seems prudent for us to get another protein for him to help alleviate some of the demand for chicken.

Which means we’re going to proceed with a salmon trial starting tomorrow.

With salmon under his belt, we can trial beef. With salmon, beef and chicken, Zac won’t be straining any particular meat source to its breaking point!

That seems like a lot of meats, and it is. While I’d love to get more veggies into his system, veggies and fruits have been very tricky for us so far.

With our particular food issues (FructMal and Salicylate Sensitivity especially) veggies and fruits may be FPIES safe for Zac, but cause other problems. I’ve already seen this play out with Jed and myself. So I’ve been trying to learn about the short list of veggies and fruits that are low in ALL of our food issues, all of which also happen to be fruits and veggies I’ve never used – and in some cases, never even heard of before! (Bok choy and Kohlrabi pop into my head.)

So I want to feed him those veggies in a trial, but I need to first learn how to prepare them, not to mention where to FIND them.

These meat trials will buy us some time for that to happen.

Plus, we’ll resume the oats trial sometime this year.

With any luck, Zac is back on track after the stomach bug from hell! (It only took two months, but really, who’s counting? Oh, right…I am.)

Let’s hope his previous food pass streak picks up tomorrow where it left off in September!

Oh, and we found a lady who sells goat milk year round! She’s 2.5 hours away from us, but at least we can make it til spring now. Yay!!

How was your weekend?