New school year

It's time to head back to school. I'm a homeschooling parent who sends her children to school in the afternoons. It has turned out to be a wonderful way to make sure core academics are covered in a solid, personalized way for each of our children and also give our children the experience of classrooms, fellow students, parties, and non-core-academic instruction by subject specialists. Going for a partial day helps my children feel privileged to be at school rather than "trapped," and they love their school and teachers. Funnily enough, they still sometimes tell me that their favorite thing about school is recess. Kids will be kids.

This year I've been asked to teach part-time at their school, so my schedule flexibility just evaporated. Mornings will be roughly as they were, but field trips won't be happening. Sigh. I'll miss them. And just when my youngest got out of diapers, too.

I'll also miss having as much time to do research. It has been great fun researching along medical/nutrition/cuisine rabbit trails and occasionally finding some real treasures of answers. This isn't the field I studied. My degrees are in math and law. Problem solving and efficient researching are valuable skills that carry over to many other fields, and having learned about the way people eat in different parts of the world has helped me see interesting connections between regional cuisines, nutrition, and human health.

Let me review some of my favorite discoveries and how they affect my life:

• Molybdenum(!) - Element #42 appears to help stop nausea/vomiting and migraines, especially if sulfiting agent-containing food and drink are avoided. Stomach bugs no longer take a week or two away from our lives when they visit our home, for powdered molybdenum glycinate has thus far proven itself very effective at ending nausea and vomiting. Even for the toddlers, so it's not just a placebo effect.

• Nutritional support of the two homocysteine-to-methionine enzymatic pathways - We keep folic acid intake low since high intake of it appears to cause a pseudo-MTHFR defect, which negatively affects the availability of MTHFR for methionine synthase. We instead consume a lot of food/drink with naturally occurring folate. We also drink glycine betaine, which is needed by betaine-homocysteine S-methyltransferase, in our milk/juices to make up for the way the western diet tends to dispose of the easily absorbed glycine betaine in cooking water. Doing these things seems to ameliorate some negative Asperger's traits in our family.

• Zinc - My husband didn't like me to cook much with onions before because of the embarrassment of the smelly gas it brought on afterward, but now that I know zinc binds with hydrogen sulfide--the most smelly element of flatulence--I put zinc in onion-containing dishes and he can handle the dishes. 

• Catalase - Out of curiosity about which foods can best combat oxidative stress from hydrogen peroxide, we regularly test for catalase activity* in all kinds of raw fruits and vegetables now as a family. I hope my children ask me for science fair project ideas because I have a lot of hands-on research questions I would like to offload on them. :) I suspect that making sure my husband and I eat active peroxidases and catalases regularly will help delay a host of aging-related ills, including heart disease, stroke, dementia, cataracts, and diabetes. We two also started sipping some catalase mixed in water yesterday to see how it might affect us. I teased my husband as I handed him his glass that "this is the water Ponce de Leon was looking for." Will the catalase water reverse any obvious signs of aging? Who knows? We're both at the stage where we consistently get some gray hairs at our temples, and gray hair apparently is a result of oxidative stress, so it's the perfect time for us to see if we can stop our bodies from sliding down the oxidative stress slope that leads to excessive cell death. Catalase turns hydrogen peroxide into oxygen and water, so I don't think we have to worry about side effects, but we'll stop our experiment if we experience any negative ones.

* That sounds fancy, but it just means putting thin slices of the produce in with 3% hydrogen peroxide from the store. Mini sweet peppers created a lovely pinkish-orange foam quite quickly, while cactus pear flesh was a rather nonreactive disappointment.