Emma Textra: Transforming Health Challenges into Holistic Advocacy – Supporting Neurodiverse Adolescence Through Nutrition and Natural Interventions

Welcome to Why Not Me the World? Podcast, hosted by
Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World.
Emma Textra joins us today bringing her expertise as a
global health consultant and independent health researcher. Her passionized and
empowering companies and individuals to comprehend the essential elements of
health and well being. She will share her personal experience
of collaborating with her autistic son to improve his health
through a holistic approach incorporating food, medicine, supplements, and nutrient therapy.
We are excited to have her share her story today.
Thanks for coming on and it's great.
I love what you doing.
Thanks so much. I really appreciate that. Tell me what
you do, how you apply it, and how it turned
to help your son.
Yeah, I was initially in the corporate world, I'm an
actuary by background. For those that don't know what, I'm
very good with data on risk. I actually wanted to
be a doctor when I went on in my teens.
My father taught me out of it, so I went
into the sort of the corporate world. But I've always
been very interested in medicine. I'm in the corporate world
doing working with employee benefits and pension plan healthcare plans
as well, and I ended up focusing on healthcare plans.
But fifteen years ago my son was diagnosed with Aspergers
and ADHD and everything changed from that moment. But I'm
still in the corporate world. I do corporate consulting, but
it really changed really my focus. My focus is now
more on healthcare and mental health as well, but to
the overarching healthcare system in this country.
That's great. What were the symptoms that your son had
that led you to believe that something just wasn't right
and you had to find out what was going on.
So he was my first child. I didn't know anything
at the time. I was doing everything the pediatrician was
telling me to do. Everything was conventional medicine. I mean,
had all these shots up to age five when he
was finally diagnosed, but even six months old, he wasn't thriving.
He was throwing up a lot. He had a lot
of stomach problems. He seemed to be developing normally other
than the stomach problems. He was put on medication like
six months old that already was causing problems for him.
He was having a lot of ear infections and just
generally wasn't healthy. Two and three. He was obsessive, compulsive.
He would freak out. He was very smart, but he
would freak out of the smallest thing. He could figure out.
If we drove home, If we went somewhere and then
we drove home, I took a different route, he would
freak out. He was that smart. If we went outside
of our front door and instead of going straight to
the driveway, we say, hey, let's go down the street
a little bit, he would freak out. He was pretty
hard with his younger brother. He had a brother two
years younger, and so that was pretty hard. And then
just having a problem in schools. He was in kindergarten
and it was actually the school that said, you've got
to get him evaluated because he's disruptive in class. So
that was what led me to get him diagnosed. We
saw a child psychiatrist or psychologist. There was a series
of visits, and I knew the writing on the wall.
I've always been fascinated by autism. Even as a teenager,
I was fascinated by autism, so I knew. But then
I got the one inch thick diagnosis that she put
the label on him Assbergers and the ADHD as well.
Okay, when you got the diagnosis, how did that change
your life? I mean, you already knew something wasn't right,
so really it doesn't change, but yet it has changed.
What did you do in changes that you thought would
really help your son?
Moving forward to me, I always wanted to know why
what's going on. There's a reason because at the time,
the doctors always wanted to put him on drugs and
that's not going to lead anywhere. It just seemed wrong
to me. And so from going back to my interest
in medicine and my background as being an actually and
very comfortable with data, I just started reading and I
just started researching. A mom at the school that had
took me aside. Her son had been diagnosed at age
three with full blown autism and he was now eight
and had lost his diagnosis. He was practically normal. So
she took me aside and she started indoctrinating me about
the problems with conventional medical care and the doctors don't
really understand autism, and these are the things you need
to do. And so I ended up taking two months
off work, two months unpaid life, and I've got to
get to the bottom of this, what's going on? So
I started researching. I got to a phenomenal doctor, which
maybe some of your listeners are familiar with, doctor Jerry Cartsonal.
He used to have a practice here in southern California,
just down the road from me. So we got there
and he started educating me and explaining what was wrong
with conventional medical care or the toxins that these kids
just can't handle, just the food allergies. So we removed
gluten and dairy right away, got him on a lot
of supplements, so he wasn't methihlating properly. So he was
on a trip to fan. He had terrible bathroom habits.
A lot of these kids. Sometimes the focus is on
their behavior or their mental health issues, but it's a
whole body problem. The brain is just another organ and
just because your symptoms happened to be emotional or behavioral,
it's still something physiologically wrong with you, and so you've
got to heal the body. We got started on the
pathway of healing my son. He's doing phenomenal now, by
the way, at age. She'll be twenty in January. So
in those two months I was researching everything, all different
kinds of therapies. Between the ages of five and eight,
we did so many different things to improve his behavior,
but his health, his overall health.
I would say, when you say health, you're into food,
you're into supplements. What did you do far as that goes,
that made a difference. It may have not been mainstream
like some dogss preach, yet with the food, the supplements,
all the changes you made, it worked for you. What
were some of those changes.
Which did so many things. There's never a silver bullet,
and every child in a personally is different, so you
have to experiment and change lots of things. For him,
gluten was huge and is to this day. And when
he was a rebellious teenager and started eating gluten again,
it became a problem again. And now finally it's come
full circle and age nineteen nearly twenty. He's completely really
careful with his gluten, so he removed gluten. Dairy was
another one. This kid at five years old was addicted
to milk, and this is how you can tell it's
going to be a problem in their brain. It forms
like an opioid in the blain, so they literally get
addicted to the casin protein in milk. So we cut
out all dairies. I was experimenting with rice milk and
almond milk. That did make a difference for him, and
it improved his stomach problems. And if you improve the stomach,
it's going to improve the brain. So it definitely improved
his mental health as well his microbios who were taking
a lot of probiotics and to this day very careful
taking daily probiotics. There was a phenomenal supplement. I wouldn't
normally recommend an actual company, one particular brand of subplots,
but this is absolutely phenomenal. It's called True Hope. Truehope
dot Com is the company True Hope, and they have
a product called Empower Plus and it is just vitamins,
but it is all for the brain. They have done
clinical studies on their particular formulation. The way they've put
it together. It's very absorbable by the body. For young kids,
they have it in a powdered form. He's put it
in rice milk. But power Plus has a bit phenomenal
to this day. Now he's on an adult formula that's
like a once a day capsule formula, and he can
tell if he's not taken it in a few days,
he can immediately tell. That was absolutely critical. But then
we did all sorts of other things. He would wear
pants even if it was pouring with wayne and freezing cold.
Refused to wear pants, was in shorts and t shirts
all the time. And so one of the things that
helped some of those sensitivities was occupational therapy. We had
a special occupational therapy somebody who specializes in things like autism,
and so he found that when he works out his muscles,
it calms him down. To this day, he's a gym rack.
He has to go to the gym every day. There's
a five year old he couldn't sit skill in school,
and so the teacher would know if he was like fidgeting.
He go and take these books to the office and
they'd give him a big pile of stack of books
to go and take to the office and it would
calm him down. We had fidget toys that we're bringing
back lots of memories now, but the fidget toys all
sorts of different things that he could do with his hands.
He had one that went across the legs of his
chair for his feet. These kinds of things would really
calm him a little bit. We found those kinds of
things we ended up doing neurofeedback. I don't know if
you've had other guests that have talked about neurofeedback, absolutely phenomenal.
Neurofeedback is basically retraining the brain. He went for about
a year twice a week and he would sit in
front of a computer for two to three hours and
they had these electrodes on his head and I think
he had to move characters and make them do things.
But it rewired his brain. That was a game changer,
particularly his social skills. I saw in the first six
months that it improved his social skills. He could hold
eye contact a little bit. After that, there was a
lot of one on one training as well. Somebody says
hello to you, say hello, pack things like that. But
neurofeedback was phenomenal. I'd say occupacial therapy, neurofeedback, supplements, food
with some of the main things.
Now, when the teen years hit, it's tough on neurotypical,
let alone neurodiverse. You're doing all these changes, You're changing
the food, you're doing all this. How was his teen years?
Was it rough for you like everyone else?
It was tough. It was super tough. I won't kill you. Yeah,
So he was rebellious. He became rebellious a little bit.
And of course he was coming of age during COVID. Fortunately,
he was in a school that they ended up staying
in school that there was some restrictions and requirements, but
he was staying in school. But that really set him
back at school. When he first started high school, he
didn't have a single friend. He would have his lunch
at the back of a building on his own. Then
he'd come home and spend his day in front of
a computer. He had organization issues too when he was
a teenager. We'd get into what's going to work for him.
He can make some of his own decisions. What's going
to work with him in terms of keeping track of things.
Is it an app on a phone? He got a
phone when he was twelve. Is it a notebook? Is
it sticky notes? But he figured out what was going
to work for him. So he would have this little
teeny tiny blue notebook that he would take everywhere, and
if there was something he was supposed to do, he
would write it in this notebook and that really helped
for him. But his social skills really tanked for the
first two years during COVID. That was a real problem.
I think they're old enough as teenagers to understand they're different.
We have a lot of very honest conversations about what
do you struggle with and how things are for other people.
And they don't pick up things by osmosis like neurotypical teenagers.
They don't just figure out how to do things. And
if people are playing soccer, they don't just start playing.
I spend a lot of time with him figuring out
strategies and very good rule follower. So if we could say, hey,
if somebody says this, then do that. If there's five
kids over there playing soccer, just stand there and they'll
ask you to join. We had some very specific strategies
that helped a little bit. We went to another class,
we went to a social skills class. He went into
also phenomenal, So a lot of kids on the spectrum
and there was like a coach and she would talk
to them about teenage topics and how to engage other
teenagers in conversation. That was helpful. He did that for
about six months. When his younger brother started high school,
he was a junior and his younger brother's very social.
His younger brother said, hey, I'm going to go to
the prom. You should come to the prom with me. Yeah.
I don't want to push him too much, so I
left it up to him, but I encouraged him. I said, hey,
it'd be really good if you go to the prom
and you try and talk to somebody. And when we
did some strategies, we worked through some strategies and he
went and got chatting with a girl that kind of
started everything for him. And yeah, he didn't know what
to do when she texted him. I had to help
him with the text. She says this, well, maybe you
could say that. So there was a lot of handholding
and coaching. But then through her he met some guy
friends and he was actually doing pretty well. He had
some friends who accepted him, very social guys because he
was into the gym that that was something they had
in common, so they started going to the gym together.
He gradually came out of his shell, I would say,
but then he becomes a rebel and then he wants
to go out on his ownly gets a car when
he was sixteen. He's actually a very good driver. We
don't want to take his vitamins, didn't want to eat
what he should eat, and so that had its own
set of challenges. Teenageers were a little tough.
Teaching a fifteen or sixteen year old neurotypical child to
drive can be very, very rough. I was with him
when he started.
He's extremely smart, and one of his talents is spatial awareness.
As bad as he is at certain things, he has
amazing spatial awareness. He's an engineer studying aerospace engineering, so
he just knows where things are and it came very
easily to him. So actually the driving wasn't too bad.
He's in the same speed freaks, so the impulsiveness with ADHD.
He's had so many speeding tickets he actually lost his
driving license for a year. But actually the teaching wasn't
too bad. He's a rule follower, so he knows what
the rules are and enough to pass the test. And
he was great because he's so talented and very spatially aware.
He's actually a very good driver. As his hobby now
he races cars and loves his cars and pulls cars
apart and puts them back together again. Yeah, that wasn't
too bad.
How old is he now?
He'll be twenty in January.
I understand he's going to college out of state.
He's away from home. Really, yeah, I was super nervous,
but he's done. Really, he's got some new challenges there college.
We talk about that because when they're in your home,
you put bumpers around them. So there were certain things,
very clear schedule. I had a cooked meal on the table.
I made his lunches, he made his own breakfast, He
did his own laundry his last couple of years and
became independent that way. And I taught him how to cook.
But there was his own new challenges. When you get
out into the real world and he's living out of state,
you don't have those bumpers anymore. Things are coming at you.
He's at a major four year college, he's trying to
get an internship. Is a sophomore now, and he's really overwhelmed.
He struggled a bit this first semester of his sophomore year.
Freshman year was easy for him because he's so smart.
Sophomore year, first term, a lot of anxiety again, health
problems were coming back in because of his stress. He
hadn't been staying up on his supplements and his routine
hadn't got to the gym. Some things were coming back
that you tend to forget about because when you get
in a routine and everything's running smoothly, then they get
thrown into the real world and they've got to find
new routines and new way of dealing things. We've had
a whole set of coaching that's gone on this last semester,
but I think on the hurble, I've been incredibly proud
of how he's managed himself.
That's just so good to hear. Now, you said he
had some challenges with all the different supplements and food.
Did he realize while talking with you, even though he's
going through the stress of attending college, did he realize
part of that learning process is he had to get
back into his comfort zone so he could move forward.
Yeah, that's exactly what happened. They've got to learn through experience.
Right.
He finally admitted, you know what, I can't eat gluten.
It messages with me really bad. So he is so proud.
He cooks for himself. Now. Last year he was in
a dorm and he ate the canteens and stuff. The
food was really terrible, so it was tough. But now
he's got his own little kitchen. He's become a cook.
He texts me, Hey, Mom, do I use olive oil
or coconut oil on this? And he's making really amazing food.
He's really decided to stick to being gluten free. He's
still working all the dairy a little bit. He still
does dairy and now and then when he was really
going downhill, he's out a racing heart and a lot
of physical problems. He phoned me. I talk about this
in my book. Actually, Mike Kid has taken no medication
in fifteen years since he was diagnosed. We've gone completely
natural and it's turned him around and he's super healthy,
no medication whatsoever. But I was worried with him going
to college and there's all these kids taking Rittlin and
adderall as these focus drugs. I got that phone call
a few weeks ago, Hey, mom, I think I neede
adderall I'm I working. He's just tried to stay calm
and not freak out because he's also still a little rebellious.
He's going to do the opposite to whatever I push
him off. So it's like, oh, really, why do you
think that is? And is why I can't focus? And
all the kids can stay up all night studying on it.
And so we talked about it. We talked about all
the downsides of amphetamines, and we just were very carefully
educating him because he is so smart. He really appreciates
learning about things. So we just very calmly talked it
through and other strategies that he could work on instead
of just jumping to the pill. So really back on
his supplements, I say, you have to take them every day.
Taking them once a week or twice a week is
not going to do it. You've got to really put
them somewhere that you're not going to forget them. So
both that he's in power plus that he takes it's
a multivitamin and his probiotics are absolutely number one. And
then other things. He takes some zeolites, a spray that
helps with detox of heavy metals. So a lot of
these kids can't detox very well. Just living life. It's
in the air that we breathe sometimes, and so just
getting him back on that routine. And he's been very
open to it now because he really recognizes it. And
then he also recognizes he has to get to the
gym every day, and even if he doesn't feel like it,
even when it's oh, I've got too much homework to do.
You take that thirty minutes and get yourself to the gym.
Those heavy weights will calm your brain and help you
focus better. And I think he's just more open to
it now now that he's past that rebellious stage. I'm
going to do the opposite to what Mom says. He's
now I think I'm more now a coach. He sees
me as a coach and a help than a hydrant.
Now you'd mentioned you've written a book. Is this a
book about food and supplements and how it will help
maintain a healthy lifestyle for everyone.
I ended up leaving my corporate job last year because
with COVID and everything that went down with COVID, it
really showed me that conventional medicine is just going in
the wrong direction and people don't realize that I'm part
of a very large church and there's so many kids
in this church and adults with autism that are their
parents don't even realize how critical food and lifestyle can
be to their overall health. And said, I've got to
speak out. I've got to write a book. It's not
a silver bullet, and everybody is different, so you've got
to really understand all the background. And I think through
all the educating of my son and friends and everything
that's gone down the last few years, I wanted to
write this book. Ultimately, yes, I wanted to help parents
of kids who are having these struggles because my heart
is with kids, especially boys. I was a Boy Scout leader.
My younger son is an Eagle Scout, so I was
working a lot with teenage boys. I just have a
heart for them. Sometimes their parents just focus on the behaviors,
training the behaviors, maybe punishing them or encouraging them, and
don't realize that the health of the whole body is
going to impact those behaviors and the mental health. So
I took the time out. I wrote the book. It
has nine chapters, it was meant to have ten, with
a whole chapter on kids, but the book got too big,
So in this verse book, I cover all the foundations.
The first half it explains toxins and what they're doing
to our bodies, and nutrition, how we need nutrition in
our bodies. The second half I call implications, and I
go through different types of health issues, like a whole
chapter on mental health and how the brain is connected
to the rest of the body. If you've got mental
health issues, there's probably a physiological root cause, and I
lay out what some of those could be, even a
head injury falling off your bike. You could have a
concussion at aged three and never have known it. And
then I also cover infectious disease, and I really go
back to the background. I cover a little bit of
the childhood vaccine schedule and the problems with that. But
in the context of overall bacteria and microbes, we need
our microbiomes that help our brains function. The microbiome and
the bacteria in our guts are creating neurotransmitters. So if
you kill off the bacteria in your gut through too
many antibiotics or other toxins, you are going to affect
your brain health. So chapter on infectious disease chapter on
chronic disease, so things are also immune conditions, diabetes, heart disease, cancer,
mental health, and then aging. It got so big I
was like, okay, but I want to cover about kids.
So actually writing a second book, a follow up book
that is all about the kids. So back to fertility
problems because so many people nowadays have fertility problems just
zero to eighteen, and then I cover a lot of
their health implications for kids. I call it how to
raise a healthy human to thrive in a toxic world.
So that's what I'm working on now.
Okay, that's the second book. What's the title the first
book that you wrote.
It's called How to Be a Healthy Human What your
Doctor Doesn't Know About Health and Longevity.
Okay, Now that talks about health and natural foods and
how they work to keep your body healthy so to
keep the toxins out where you can maintain a healthy
lifestyle moving forward.
Absolutely, And I lay out of their whole chapter on
the conventional medical industry a little bit of the history.
One hundred years ago, nobody trusted doctors. When doctors disagreed.
There are lots of different kinds of doctors and naturopaths
and integrated doctors and the homeopaths. A lot of them
had the same education, learning about the body and how
it works. But what happened with the American Medical Association
where they came from. Explain how we got to where
we are today. I call it the rise of the
drug makers pharmaceuticals. A lot of that came out of
byproducts of the oil industry. Yes, there are some phenomenal
drugs that have been created, like human insulin. It saves lives, undoubtedly,
an EPO so if you've got anemia, to enable the
blood to create red blood cells. So there are certain
life saving pharmaceutical products, but for every one life saving product,
there are hundreds that probably do more harm than good.
They might address a particular symptom, so if it's focused
in our ADHD kids, give them an unfitamine to to
help them focus. But then you've got to understand downside.
The advertising of the medical industry will tell you all
of the things this is going to attack them, But
people don't realize that our bodies are one holistic symptom
and it's all working together, and if you address just
one symptom, you're going to end up unbalancing the body.
Somewhere else. If you block a process or block an enzyme,
you're going to create ill health somewhere else, and there'll
be a side effect. The pharmaceutical industry will say, Oh,
don't worry, we've got another pill for you to address
that side effect. And it's not getting anybody any healthier.
So what I'm trying to educate people on is to
look for the root cause, and especially in mental health.
So the whole chapter on mental health, there is a
root cause. It's not just that they were born this
way or it's just the way it is, and we've
got to just train them on different behavior. And I
appreciate those therapies that will help our kids operate better
in the world, But there are a root cause, and
don't just focus on the behavioral or emotional symptoms. Focus
on whole body health. When you focus on the whole
body health, especially the gut health and are they sleeping well,
are they eating nutritional food, it's gonna just automatically improve
the brain health. Now, somebody who's autistic had an autistic diagnosis,
isn't necessarily gonna become completely neurotypical. That's their personality. My son. Now,
I don't know they did even get a diagnosis if
he was looked at today. He's a quirky introvert at
this point. He's honest about it when he goes for jobs,
not on his resume. But I would hope that when
he's going for jobs and he gets to know people,
he can explain that he operates a little bit differently
and don't be offended. He's very blunt, extremely truthful, and
can be a little offensive sometimes because people get to
know you. I think it's good to talk that way.
My book has lots of ideas to try. It explains
how things work. It explains the different root causes on
mental health. I have at least ten different modalities you
can try that are natural approaches to mental health issues.
Some of them from nutrition from the microbiome to things
like neurofeedback, which is phenomenal. There's lots of non pharmaceutical
options that you have for mental health issues.
This has been interesting. I love talking about food and
how you can eat healthy with natural supplements. I think
that it's something that everybody needs to read and learn
because they can affect and help all of us. So
with that said, I really appreciate you coming on and
talking about it.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's been my pleasure. Thanks for taking the time out
of your busy schedule to listen to our show today.
We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we
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