Tonya Harris, MSHN is Board Certified in Holistic Nutrition® and graduated from Hawthorn University in with a Master of Science in Holistic Nutrition. She is also a graduate of Eastern Illinois University, where she received her Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education.
As a childhood leukemia survivor and now the mother of three (one with multiple learning disabilities, including ADHD), Tonya’s path has led her to her mission of helping parents learn how both diet and common toxins in the home can affect their child’s health. Her goal is to show parents how easy it can be to have a safer, more non-toxic home through safer brands to buy, how to read product labels for hidden toxins, and how to do it on a budget. She does this through working with clients both individually and through the online program she created, “The Healthy Home Project.” She has been writing about the health implications of common chemicals in our homes and their effects on our children since 2008, and now blogs on her website at Healthy Home, Happy Family.
Tonya is also the founder of Clubs to Cure Kids and has donated over $142,000 to childhood cancer research and family support programs.
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Welcome to this Special Edition episode of the My Child Will Thrive podcast with my guest, Wendy Myers. Wendy is the founder of The Myers Detox, a detox expert, functional diagnostic nutritionist, and an NES Bioenergetic Practitioner in the Los Angeles, California area. She's a number one best selling author of, Limitless Energy, How to Detox Metals, and Exhaustion and Chronic Fatigue. She's also the host of the upcoming, The Heavy Metal Summit.
. Here is a snapshot of what you will learn today:
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Exposure to toxicants is a prominent contributor to the physiological dysfunction and resulting symptoms of many children with neurodevelopmental disorders. You have likely learned about it already, and you may already be taking steps to reduce your child’s exposure to toxicants, but what about those toxins that are already in her body? What to do before a detoxification protocol, preparing your child’s body, is just as important as the detox protocol itself.
Detoxification protocols are often recommended for our children. But before you dive headfirst into a detox for your child, you want to make sure that her body is ready for it. To prepare for detoxification, it’s crucial to support all of your child’s elimination channels, which are the organs and systems responsible for eliminating toxins from the body.
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What if someone told you that a particular type of food or food additive was causing your child’s symptoms? It could even be something as simple as the daily apple your child eats. Phenols including salicylates and other food chemicals such as amines and glutamates are compounds found in many foods and additives that could be a major contributor to your child’s symptoms. Find out How Common Foods Can Trigger Your Child’s Symptoms and what you can do to identify what foods your child should avoid.
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I’ve attended a number of different conferences and course over the years, in person and online, in a quest to learn all I can to help my daughter. This past April I attended the Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs (MAPS) conference for the first time. It was an intense three days of learning. The MAPS conference is a continuing education conference that allows medical practitioners to gain a comprehensive knowledge of the research and clinical applications in the area of biomedical treatments for special needs children, with a specific focus on children with neurodevelopmental disorders.
MAPS is a conference of clinicians and researchers who are in the trenches treating kids everyday, pushing forward what they have learned from clinical experience while being guided by research. I read a lot and have been to many courses, but I was looking for a comprehensive program where the curriculum addressed all areas of biomedical treatments and interventions currently available. That’s why I decided to go to the MAPS conference, and I was not disappointed. The depth of information and quality of practitioners and instructors is second to none. While I can’t share all I learned in one article, I will share a few points of interest that I took away from my three days there.
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When parents first learn about the potential negative effects of the exposure to toxicants and the impaired detoxification processes in their children with neurodevelopmental disorders, a feeling of dread can set in. The sheer volume of toxicants we humans come into contact with every day is enough to overwhelm anyone from taking action. Let's take a detailed look in this blog, Detox Step One: Reducing Child Exposure to Toxicants, so you can see how even small changes add up to a big impact when it comes to your child’s health.
It’s easy to get so caught up thinking about how to clear toxins from our children's bodies that we forget the detox step one: removing as many of the toxicants from their daily lives and immediate environment as possible. Our bodies have built-in detox systems, but in children with neurodevelopmental disorders, these systems may not be working very well. So reducing their initial exposure is often critical to recovery.
This is no easy feat, as I mentioned above. We are potentially exposed to tens of thousands of toxicants, very few of which have been studied to determine their effects on human health. To make matters worse, toxicants that have been deemed to be “safe” at certain levels of exposure have never been tested alongside other “safe” toxicants to determine the synergistic impact on health. These studies would be difficult, if not impossible, to conduct given the number of potential combinations of different toxicants that would need to be included. And yet we are exposed to a wide range of toxicants in combination every single day.
Toxicants can be found in the air we breathe, the soil our food is grown in, the food we eat, the water we drink and even in the mattress your child sleeps on which is why it is very important to understand our detox step one. The ubiquity of these toxicants can be downright depressing. Reducing the toxicant burden on our child is the crucial first step towards decreasing their total body burden.
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