Brain Power with Dr. Eko

Ep. 09 | Navigating Autism Recovery: A Mother's Journey of Hope and Healing through Nutrition

• Dr. Hokehe Eko • Season 1 • Episode 9

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When Lori Knowles' son, Daniel, was diagnosed with autism, she found herself at a crossroads that many parents know all too well—the search for answers when the experts seem out of reach. Lori's relentless pursuit of knowledge led her to explore the uncharted terrain of biomedical treatments and dietary changes, which resulted in Daniel's extraordinary recovery. In our latest episode, we're honored to share Lori's empowering narrative, from the initial struggles of Daniel's diagnosis to the founding of New Beginnings Nutritionals, a beacon of hope for families seeking similar solace. Listen as Lori recounts the pivotal shifts in Daniel's health following the removal of gluten and dairy from his diet, and learn how carefully chosen nutritional supplements played an integral role in his journey to wellness.

For those grappling with the complexities of autism, especially the gastrointestinal battles that often accompany it, Lori provides a roadmap brimming with insights. Our discussion navigates the significance of high-dose B vitamins, digestive enzymes, and the customization of care plans for each child with autism. Lori's advice to parents centers on harnessing hope and the relentless pursuit of progress, no matter how incremental it may seem. Join us as we uncover the power of a mother's love, the resilience that turns research into recovery, and the heartfelt encouragement Lori extends to all who walk this path. Her expertise is not just a light at the end of the tunnel—it's a guide through the darkness, illuminating each step with practical, life-altering strategies.

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Dr. Hokehe Eko:

Hello listeners, thank you so much for joining us today. I have an amazing guest with me. I'm gonna be interviewing Miss Laurie Knowles. She is simply amazing. She's a parent of a child who used to have autism. She runs an amazing company called New Beginnings, and I know there's a longer list to all that she is, so I'm gonna let her introduce herself. So welcome to the show, miss Laurie Knowles.

Lori Knowles:

Thank, you so much for having me. It's good to be here. I always love talking about this subject and my claim to fame is I'm a mom who had a child who was diagnosed with autism and nowadays that 135 kids are being diagnosed with autism. So there's a lot of moms that are having to deal with this. And then in the binary, very difficult row and when you're told that your child has autism, your world just crumbles around you. And this was my fourth child, my other three child, other three first three children were typical. And Daniel, just he was like for it. He was a surprise.

Lori Knowles:

I was 39 when I had him and he just around 14, 15 months. Just lost language, fine and large motor delays, just repetitive behaviors. And I ended up diagnosing him myself on the internet Because when I took him to pediatricians they kept just singing oh, he'll help grow it, it's no, it's not a big deal. And so I realized that that's where he was most likely and I just had to. Really, I remember being depressed for a couple of weeks and then I picked myself up and said I'm going to take this negative energy and I'm gonna put it into everything that I can do to help my son and I'm not gonna accept anybody telling me that there's nothing I can do. Just put him in some behavioral programs and just accept who he is from now on. And of course I accepted who he was. Why did I love him? But he was obviously not doing well medically. He had skin rashes all over his face, he had very, very pale skin, he had big circles under his eyes, he cried constantly. He was not a happy child.

Lori Knowles:

Something was going on underneath and so I decided at that point I was going to do whatever I could to figure out what to do to help them. And I just delved in and started reading books and getting online and doing parent chat groups and went to conferences. And that's what started my whole journey. And then, after a few years with that, I ended up meeting and going to a conference and hearing Dr William Shaw, who's a pioneer in this field. He was one of the first scientists, researchers, who wrote a book on treating autism through biomedical treatment, which means dealing with underlying causes.

Lori Knowles:

So I read that book and it just changed my life. I mean I, oh my gosh, it just lit a fire under me and I went okay, now I know what to look for and what to access. It was so excellent. And then I went to a conference and I met him and I convinced him to hire me and so I started working with him when he was owner and lab director of Great Plains Laboratory. And then he asked me to start a company for him called New Beginnings Nutritionals, and we started out being a company that provided like quality nutritional supplements specifically designed for kids on spectrum. So I've been doing that for over 20 years and my son is now 25 and he's recovered and it's been an amazing journey and I love what I do and I love using my experience and knowledge to help with their parents, and I work with physicians as well who are trying to treat their patients and need some support.

Dr. Hokehe Eko:

So yes, oh, my goodness, that's so wonderful. So let's go back to when you first read the book by Dr Shaw and you realized well, this has answers. So where did you start? Can you walk us through like things that you did?

Lori Knowles:

Absolutely. First thing I did is they talked about diet and that was kind of freaky because me, like most parents know whether they have a child with autism and they're super picky eaters and some of them only eat two or three things and they're not healthy eaters and it's just hard to open up their diet to other things. And what I learned was that these foods, specifically wheat and dairy there's proteins in them, One that's called gluten, inside of wheat and casein and phyto dairy. They actually have an opiate effect on the children and what that means is that they can't digest them well and they're partially digested. These proteins gluten and casein don't break down all the way and they leave a molecule that looks a lot like morphine. It's called casomorphine and gliodorphate. And when these children eat these foods, they act like they're on drugs. They're spacey. My son had his glazed look in his eyes. He didn't notice his surrounding. Another key thing is insensitivity to pain.

Lori Knowles:

So, when you're on a morphine drug, it's for pain, right. So they fall down, they hurt themselves. You expect them to start screaming and they don't. That's another sign of that. Another sign is that they only want to eat those foods and no other foods. And why is that? Because a drug addict only wants his six. He stops caring about vegetables and fruits and they just want the good feeling. And when they are sleeping through the night and they haven't had a chance to eat dairy and glue and get that fix again, they get miserable and unhappy.

Lori Knowles:

So he would wake up crying until he would eat in the morning and even after naps. That would be the scenario, and so I had to do something about that. So I said, okay, I'm going to change his diet. And so I did it all the wrong way. I just decided not to feed him gluten and dairy, but I hadn't done the planning and I hadn't gone out and bought all the foods and looked at what all that was out there. Now, 25 years ago, we didn't have as many good many healthy gluten dairy options that we, so for some.

Lori Knowles:

I remember how to panic attack was then, but then I started figuring it out, and once we went off gluten and dairy for two weeks he started talking in sentences, both sentences where he just would have one word here and there and most of each other. You know, I went in there one morning and I looked in his crib and he looked and he goes mommy, go kill those with daddy. And I went, what you know? So it just something cleared up in his brain. He started noticing things and that was the first thing I did. And people will say to me and I've done a lot of things to get him where he's at, but they'll say to me what was the most most effective treatment you did? And for me it was, for me and my son Daniel, it was the GFCF diet.

Dr. Hokehe Eko:

Okay, so can you tell us what the GFCF diet? Oh, what's he just prescribed before people who don't know? Breed, dairy break Right.

Lori Knowles:

And again, the thing that I have to tell your listeners is that, as a mom and any mom and I give in talks at autism conferences to parents for many years and I'll look at them and I'll go how many of you afraid? You know, how many of you are afraid that if you take these two foods away and this is predominantly all that your child eats that they're going to start to death and they all, just you know, we're like, yeah, that's the issue, but then all of us who end up doing it, the reality is, food is no longer an addictive thing. They start eating because they're hungry, and so what I recommend to parents is start with one thing start with dairy first, because that's a lot of dairy substitutes easier to do, and go slow with that, because the children will start feeling bad, just like when you take a drug addict off of heroin right.

Lori Knowles:

If you do it, suddenly they have withdrawal effects. Well, our kids have withdrawal effects too. And parents will say I took a mother of wheat and dairy and he started having horrible behaviors so I stopped it immediately and let's not be good for them. And I said, uh-uh, that's a good sign, right, how to use that? Their body's withdrawing on it. You can be gentle with them and you can take them off of the dairy and even like mixing the milk with the. You know, half and half, and then less milk and less milk and more.

Lori Knowles:

I recommend coconut. It's one of the healthiest milks that are out there. But there's almond and there's yeah, oh, there's a whole bunch of ones out there that are good, and I think you know I have had good luck with coconut as well, and then you can use it in the cooking and everything else, not that hard. But once you go dairy-free, then you start finding substitutes, and so Daniel loves spaghetti. So what did I do? I went to the health food store and I found a really good rice-based spaghetti and, believe it or not, it tasted fairly similar and with the sauce on it, he didn't even notice. So I was like bingo. I have one meal that I can do, you know.

Lori Knowles:

And then I took all his favorite foods and I tried to find substitutes for them. And the thing that was hard for them is that they don't like change especially children on the spectrum but you and they feel like they've lost all control. So what worked for me is that when I was trying to, first of all, sometimes they stopped eating for two or three days because they're mad, right, they're just, they're showing their own. They will not die as long as you get lots of liquid in them. They can water and they're going to fry. They eventually get hungry and they'll start eating, and so I would give him choices that would come. They would say you can have him with this, and then I would eventually know that he had a choice.

Lori Knowles:

He would choose one of the other ones, and then and then he started doing that and that's how we got him into eating more and more things. So we found out the ones that worked and eventually it just became our routine and so, anyway, that was huge and I really encourage parents to do it, if they haven't, and because I told myself my kid keeps eating these foods, it's harming him, it's harming his brain and it's keeping him from learning in school. There's brain fog, it's affecting the gut, the GI tract negatively. Those obiots are going into the brain, affecting the language of what he started being able to understand and speak for the first time. So that was just so important.

Lori Knowles:

So I said to myself mom, these foods are poison for him, I can't give them. And it gave me the courage to go out there and really do my research and do the cooking and spend the time to get him eating these foods, the right foods, and getting the bad food out of his diet. And it was miraculous. I mean, the teachers were like what's going on? What are you doing with them? No, it's a different child.

Dr. Hokehe Eko:

So oh, wow, that is so wonderful. I love how you made the point of counteracting the thoughts that moms have Like, oh, he's not gonna eat this, they don't like it. We don't wanna force them and we don't want to make them more unhappy than they are already. But if you remember, moms and dads, that the foods are poison and you definitely don't wanna be giving your kids poison, then it helps.

Lori Knowles:

No, that's right you know for the whole you go through. It may be a hard, few weeks, couple months, but it's you're talking about the rest of their life, right and for ability to learn and a brain fog lifted up. You started noticing, you started talking, you started interacting. If we had not removed that food, those foods, from his diet, he never would have done those things. So it was worth those panic attacks that I was having. It was worth the stress. But nowadays there are so many good gluten free options out there and so many good dairy free options that you can buy coconut yogurt, you know. You can buy chicken nuggets. That you know. And I also recommend now knowing what I now know is that organic if you get only for it or your child on the spectrum, do organic, because they spray them spoons that aren't organic with chemicals that pretty much destroy the good bacteria around your energy eye tract. So it is just do organic whenever you can, especially with those foods that are known to be the most full of, you know, chemicals.

Dr. Hokehe Eko:

Yes, absolutely. That's such an important point and I always point out to parents make sure you're reading the labels. Even with the gluten free and the dairy free, read the labels. If you still have more than 10 ingredients, you can't understand half of them. You probably shouldn't be eating it still. So we're trying as much as possible to go towards whole foods, which means shop in the outside of the supermarket where there's like the fruits and the veggies are, because it's better for your child to eat an orange than to drink the juice. Right, because you're right.

Lori Knowles:

The sugar, and so I focused on healthy meat and vegetables and I had to really. So I did some other tests. See, we thought it was a gluten case and three diet, but my son, dana, was full of yeast, two or three harmful yeast strains, as well as two or three harmful bacteria strains. Hins tests on his GI tract showed what a mess he was, and so we had to start working on that his gut. So we had to start chilling the bad and putting in the good, and so we were using different medications and herbal treatments that were supplements to help heal the bad stuff, and we were doing probiotics, which is the good bacteria, it's what's found in yogurt, but if they need a lot stronger ones that are in pill form. So we started doing that and that was a really, and I took a while because Daniel it's interesting Daniel used to be constipated constantly and she had a big one, yes, but when we removed wheat and dairy, the constipation completely went away, because the opiates attach to the receptors in the gut and slow down the motility.

Lori Knowles:

When you take pain relievers, painkillers, opiates, what do you do? You get constipated, and that's what happened. He ended up going from constipation to diarrhea. He took probably a year easy, with a lot of treatments to work on his GI tract to get his bowel movement stormals. If your child doesn't have a bowel movement, that's normal. That's an indicator of their shell. I always ask parents how's this poop? They look at me like what? No, I got no, I know how your poop is I get the look.

Dr. Hokehe Eko:

I actually take two drawing pictures. Does it look big? Does it look skinny? No, the little little pains.

Lori Knowles:

Are they gooey? Do they smell horrible? All of that is important. Then the last piece, that really we did a lot more of the things. But the other thing I want to talk about is a nutritional supplement, end of it. They are so starving their brains are starving because of how they eat and also things that are in their GI tract are not always absorbing well, that they need the extra nutritional support.

Lori Knowles:

Going on a good multivitamin that's designed for autism I'm sorry, but a dummy vitamin at your grocery store is not going to do it. They need higher doses. They need higher doses of B vitamins. They need 15 milligrams of B6, not one which you find in a gummy vitamin. Their brains need it. You have to find a really good supplement regimen for them, eating with the multivitamin. Often digestive enzymes are really helpful for them. That was a huge thing for my son digestive enzymes. He started gaining weight and that color and his skin came back really made a difference. That was one of my favorites for him.

Lori Knowles:

You need to get the testing done and then you need to give them the supplements and they start to get better, one at a time. But it takes a mom that is going to do it, no matter how hard it is, and is going to stick with it and do what a doctor tells them to do. They go to a state, find a doctor like you. They are so less because regular pediatricians don't know this out there and they will say stay away from this, this is not true. The gluten and dairy is good for your child. They don't know. They don't know when they think they do, and that's just sad part and they're pushing parents away from getting real help from their child. You got to find a doctor like you who's self-indulgent and done and is doing the research and knows the research. And then you listen to them and even if it's hard, you do it and make sure your family around you makes sure you have it in your IEP that they can't eat these foods because they will be sabotaged at school. We'll be given it to by the teacher, the substitute, the aide to next to them, put it in the IEP and you have to make sure grandma and grandpa or on board too, all right, you give them a talking to.

Lori Knowles:

No, I know you feel bad that poor Johnny doesn't get to have cookies all the time. You know it's just. You have to be 100%. You have to do this because this is what got my son Daniel recovered, and he is 25 today. He graduated from college. Took me nine years of intense treatment doing this, staying on top of him, nine years, for me to finally realize he's recovered. He actually had NIH take away his diagnosis. He was in a study in NIH and they said this child is no longer on the spectrum and he graduated from KU. He works in IT, he lives on his own, but it took a mom being serious, and you've seen it in your practice too. Right, the moms that are on board are the ones that get the best results and nobody can promise that every kid's gonna happen. It's gonna be a Daniel, right.

Lori Knowles:

But, unless you go and you do everything and you look under every single rock, looking for whatever issue that your child may have and every child with autism is different, Some with more issues, some with less. But you've got to go after them and you have to be patient and you have to stick with it. Then you start peeling the layers of the onion off that are causing the autistic symptoms and they get better and better and sometimes you can get a Daniel and you have to have that help, but being absolutely persistent as a parent and that's the key. That's the key With the doctor.

Dr. Hokehe Eko:

My goodness, I don't think I have anything else. That was, oh my goodness, parents. I hope you can hear Miss Lori's heart. She's a mommy, she's done it and, yes, it took nine years, but it happened. And so that's the first thing I always tell parents yes, you have this diagnosis. That sounds devastating, but there is hope. We just need to start somewhere. There is hope. Don't give up hope, and so I hope that all of you listeners wow, this has been so wonderful. Thank you so much, miss Lori, for caring Daniel's story And-.

Lori Knowles:

Can I say one more thing real quick? Yeah, if you go to my website the website, as I said I run a nutritional supplement company for children and we have a lot of supplements specifically for autism and it's it's wwwnbnuscom. If you go there and look under the resources tab, you can see me giving a presentation of everything I did for my son to help him recover from autism. It's under resources and it's called a compelling story of recovery. So that would be a good place to look at to see everything I did, because we just talked about a few today.

Dr. Hokehe Eko:

Wonderful. Yes, we will definitely share that to everyone. We'll have that on the podcast description. Thank you so much. And yes, you mentioned you didn't mention the name of your company New beginnings nutritionals, new beginnings nutritionals, nbnuscom.

Lori Knowles:

We are you and again, I answer parent questions directly. If you email us and ask a question, I will get back to you. We are all about helping. It's not about making money and selling. It's about supporting and hand-holding and helping parents find hope for their children.

Dr. Hokehe Eko:

That's what it's about. Yes, absolutely, and I can attest to that. I've been using new beginnings for my patients and it's been so helpful to them. And yes, I called your office and you spoke to me. Like and most a lot of companies you call, you may not speak to the owner right or the higher-ups, so I was really thankful and you agreed to come on the podcast. So thank you so much for sharing your story and for sharing how parents can get more information about how to help their children. Is there any? Is that one last thing you'd like to share with the parents? One last takeaway Just don't lose hope.

Lori Knowles:

Don't lose hope and stay away from negative people and do your research, because there's a lot of things out there and new things coming every day that are making a difference. So, no matter what age it is that you're starting this with your child, go in and get started, because even it's just one thing at a time, it's better than doing nothing.

Dr. Hokehe Eko:

Yes, absolutely right. So thank you again, Ms Laurie. My pleasure, Good to have you. Thanks for inviting me. All right, I cheer and until the next episode. Thank you everyone for listening.