Introduction! 30-Day Nutrition Experiment

Hi Everyone!

My name is Simona and I'm a female in my 20s living in New York and I have stuttered since childhood. This site/blog is intended to track my own personal, experimental study on the gut-brain connection and how food & nutrition might be able to help alleviate my stuttering.

I'll also share new studies on neuroscience + stuttering that I find, since it's something I am very interested in right now and I do daily searches on the topic.

Nutrition & Stuttering

First of all, I must emphasize, I am not a scientist or health practitioner in any way, and this is my own personal experience. Like many stutterers, I just refuse to wait for the science to catch up, I'm trying to be proactive and figure things out. I just want to see if a new diet that is rich with essential nutrients for the brain will help my stuttering since there are obviously deficiencies in the brain of stutterers.

From what I have read and heard about stuttering research in the past year, I believe that my brain, cells, nerves could be missing valuable vitamins and minerals that make it function properly and that maybe if it was getting what it needs, my speech-related timing, coordination, and motor function would improve.

I'm excited about the prospect of Pagoclone improving people's lives (including mine!) when it's approved by the FDA... and I'll be one of the first to try it... but sometimes medication is just a band-aid on an underlying problem. But until we find out more, I'm not at all opposed to medication that helps people speak more fluently.

My interest in the gut-brain connection was sparked by Jenny McCarthy's new book on her son's autism (Louder Than Words, 2007), which I highly recommend to anyone interested in how diet can affect your brain, speech, and motor function. She believes her son's immune system was not able to handle certain vaccines and antibiotics when he was a baby, which caused the gut flora (good bacteria) to practically disappear. Without proper gut flora, certain nutrients are unable to get into your blood and to your brain. Some believe this turns the "autism switch" on, which greatly affects the development of a child's speech and language. It's possible that stuttering could be caused by a very similar problem.

My Background

Stuttering runs in my family but I'm the only one who didn't grow out of it for some reason. As a child, I was hospitalized a few times with minor illness and was given broad-spectrum antibiotics. For most of my elementary years I had speech therapy at school for 1 hour a week, I can't say that it helped in any significant way, I still developed crutches like word substitution. Then when I was a teen I moved around a lot, but had therapy for about half the time, and sometimes I would do intense workshops/sessions on my spring or summer breaks.

I wasn't really aware of my stuttering until my parents put me in speech therapy in the 2nd grade, but they say I had been stuttering for a while. After that I realized I didn't talk like everyone else, and words became difficult to say, including my name, address, school, and anything that required a definitive answer. In school, oral reports and in-class reading became a huge source of agony, and I did whatever I could to get out of them, even if it meant sacrificing my grade--which I did often. I used to accept the fact that I didn't really have a future, and when I thought about being an adult (and still stuttering), it made me cringe. I didn't even like thinking about it. I hated answering the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" because I felt like I wouldn't really be able to do anything or live a normal life.

I miraculously made it through college and got a bachelor's. I went to a large, state school where lecture halls were 500-seaters and if the professor required a lot of in-class dialogue on the first day, I would just drop it and take another class that filled that requirement. I'm not proud of this necessarily, but the daily anxiety and torment of being forced to speak in class was too much for me to bear. I've always been a people-pleaser and tried really hard to get good grades, but I wouldn't be able to concentrate on any subject matter if I knew I was going to be humiliated on a daily basis. I also chose a major that was somewhat mathematical, so that made it easier to get through the requirements.

As an adult, I'm a freelancer with a pretty good, stable income... I feel like I'm in a positive place where I can really start reading & researching new studies and keep up with the latest.

I'm a little surprised by the lack of studies on possible nutritional deficiencies in stutterers. There was one study several decades ago that noticed offhandedly that majority of their child participants who stuttered turned out to have a magnesium deficiency, but I haven't seen or heard of anything to follow it up--or to explore any nutrient link.

I'm really glad to see brain imaging studies that have come out in the past year, but I feel like there could be an underlying nutrient problem that is being overlooked.

I'm not saying that nutrition can cure stuttering, but I'm wondering if it could provide some benefit to my speech over time.


MY PERSONAL NUTRITION THERAPY FOR STUTTERING [EXPERIMENT]


Daily Nutrients Essential to Brain Function

daily multi-vitamin (women's once a day)

PLUS:

Probiotic
Calcium
Magnesium
Selenium
Omega-3 (fish oil-derived)
Vitamin c
Co-enzyme Q10
L-carnitine
Iodide
B-complex
Potassium ...

... the extra supplements are to fill the daily dosages recommended by Dr. Hyla Cass (Eight Weeks to Vibrant Health, McGraw Hill, 2005), many of which aren't available in a multi-vitamin.

If anyone is interested I can post the exact grams or micrograms, brand, and dosage of each supplement.

FYI, probiotics help maintain the colonies of "good bacteria" or "gut flora" that helps the absorption of nutrients and the production of essential B vitamins.

I chose Accuflora which is mainly acidopholous and it's also dairy-free. I've tried yogurt, but I really don't like the taste or texture, and I've always been a bit lactose intolerant.

In addition, I will also...

Exercise 5 times/week
They say at least 30 minutes of cardio activity almost-daily is essential for proper brain & mental function.

I will be jogging plus doing some nighttime yoga & 10 minutes of meditation when I go to bed. I used to exercise a lot, but haven't had a good routine in a few years.

Keep Food & Wellness Journal

I'll be keeping a food journal which I will post here, and also a wellness journal.

The wellness journal will track how I feel twice a day, my speech during 30 minutes of oral reading, and my emotional state.

Get Enough Sleep
I will try to get 8-9 hours of sleep every night for optimal brain function.

Eat a Good Brain Food Diet
I tend to eat a lot of starchy foods, very little veggies (I buy them but then I forget to use them before they go bad) so I'm going to focus on good brain food for this experiment and avoid anything that might contribute to candida overgrowth.

Basically, lots of veggies, nuts, fruit, whole grains (mostly brown rice), beans, and some fish and meat. I will also have green tea twice a day, which mops up free radicals, plus lots of garlic because it helps to balance good bacteria in the gut. I'm also going to be eating a lot of the 14 super foods recommended in the book, SuperFoods Rx, and they include: beans, blueberries, broccoli, oats, oranges, pumpkin, wild salmon, soy, spinach, tea, tomatoes, turkey, walnuts, and yogurt.

Reduce Caffeine Consumption
Besides my favorite green tea, I'm going to cut coffee and wine out of my diet for now. I'll see what the affect is of adding them back in later. I really love a morning cup of coffee and wine when I dine out ... so it's pretty tough to stop cold turkey around the holidays!


Duration of Experiment

I will do daily journaling here--which I think will help me stick to the schedule and take my daily brain food nutrients. I'll start off saying I'm going to do this experiment for a month, but if I'm starting to see results at the end of 30 days I will definitely extend it for 2 months.

Not a Professional Experiment

I just want to state again, this is not a professional experiment, I am not consulting with a traditional speech therapist. The incidence level of stuttering that I will report with my daily entry will be solely based on my daily oral reading (30 mins) in the privacy of my own home, plus any feedback from my significant other.

I do a small amount of mandatory talking every day in my work so I will be able to notice if my speech seems easier and more natural. My personal goal is 90% fluent speech, so the minor variances is not as important to me as feeling a noticeable gain in fluency.

Please feel free to jump in with your thoughts or comments, I would LOVE to get some feedback from anyone. If you are interested in doing a similar personal nutrition-based experiment, let me know so I can link you and other people can read about it.

Let's not wait for the research establishment to wait for grants to do more research on stuttering--let's do our own! : ) Maybe we can hit on something...

Thanks so much for visiting!

xoxo
Simona