About Our Family
Jane Casey’s Kitchen is a community-based, holistic cooking and kitchen consulting business based in Portland, Oregon.
I learned at a young age when I cooked for my family that I could improve everyone’s mood to one of absolute joy with my delicious homemade food. I worked my way through college working at different restaurants in Minneapolis. I am proud to say I won my first recipe contest at the Trump Tower in Chicago a few years ago for my submission of grass-fed beef tacos with goat cheese and chipotle creme fraiche!
My life has dramatically changed in the years since my kids were born. At age two-and-a-half they were diagnosed with PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified) which is a warm and fuzzy term for Autism. The boys’ have recovered from Autism after many years of working on their digestive system with very specific healthy foods and with different bio-medical treatments. It has been a long journey for my family especially the kids.
Their recovery from Autism has been one of trial and error. Our journey was made easier when I discovered that the more I worked on improving my family’s diet giving them the types of foods their grandparents generation ate, the more verbal they became…language was now a part of their lives. Now my kids never stop talking, and even more important, they eventually lost their Autism diagnosis.
Why do you think our grandparents all gave their kids cod liver oil, chicken soup and sauerkraut? They were and still are superfoods, which are essential for good digestion, a strong immune system and an efficient detoxification system as well as oil for the brain. Our gut or digestive system is directly related to the functionality of our brain.
But most people with kids with learning issues do not know this. Working on the digestive system is the single most important thing about healing your child from Autism or improving your own overall health that I will share with you repeatedly using different foods and essential oils.
While traveling on the road toward healing the kids, we discovered that our boys had what was called Dysbiosis. This is simply an unbalance in the digestive tract or gut. This was all so confusing nine years ago when we began on our journey to heal our boys from Autism, but what we’ve found out is that many people on the Autistic spectrum have some form of Dysbiosis even if it is not evident.
Anyone who has faced the challenge of raising a child with special developmental needs know that life becomes about day to day survival. Many of us are stuck in grief and sadness that runs so deep that we are unable to break through it and go on. It becomes difficult for many of us to even consider adding a special diet to our load of never ending responsibilities. Steve and I were told that our kids would never talk or live a ‘normal’ life. But people do recover from Autism. It is a disease not a disability.
My point is, regardless of cause, wouldn’t any medical condition benefit from improved diet, nutrition, and detoxification? Of course the answer is yes. The Autism Research Institute has amassed plenty of medical evidence proving that changing the diet, improving nutrition, and enhancing detoxification pathways can really help. It has documented case reports of thousands of children who have recovered using these bio-medical strategies and who no longer have autistic like symptoms.
