Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Autism is a complex neurodevelopmental condition that affects millions of people worldwide.
It is characterized by difficulties in social interaction, communication, and repetitive behaviors.
Although autism is becoming more widely recognized, there is still a lack of understanding and awareness surrounding the condition.
As a result, many individuals and families affected by autism struggle to find the support and resources they need.
Why Not Me The World podcast aims to bridge that gap by providing valuable information and insights into autism, fostering empathy and understanding, and promoting acceptance and inclusion.
Nashville based Music Producer Tony Mantor explores the remarkable impact his guests make by empowering their voices in spreading awareness about autism and helping break down the barriers of understanding.
Join Mantor and his guests as they delve into the world of autism and mental health to explore topics such as diagnosis, treatment, research, and personal stories.
Together, we can create a more informed and compassionate society for individuals with autism.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Emma Textra: Transforming Health Challenges into Holistic Advocacy – Supporting Neurodiverse Adolescence Through Nutrition and Natural Interventions
What happens when a corporate professional turns a personal health crisis into a transformative journey of healing and understanding?
Join us as we explore Emma Textra's remarkable story, where her corporate acumen meets her passion for holistic health to better support her autistic son. Emma's shift from conventional medicine to embracing dietary changes, nutrient therapy, and supplements is a testament to the power of addressing the whole body.
Her insights and experiences uncover the intricate connections between physical and mental health, offering a new perspective on managing Asperger's and ADHD.
The teenage years are challenging for any parent, but when your child has neurodiverse needs, the stakes are higher.
Emma shares the effective interventions that have helped her son navigate adolescence, from the use of probiotics and supplements like True Hope Empower Plus to the transformative effects of neurofeedback on social skills. She opens up about the unique challenges brought on by the social isolation of COVID, and how tailored strategies, encouragement, and social skills classes have played crucial roles in building her son's confidence and independence.
Her story is one of resilience and hope, offering invaluable insights for parents in similar situations.
Emma's dedication to understanding the root causes of health issues goes beyond her personal story.
She advocates for natural health alternatives and emphasizes the importance of nutrition, exercise, and a holistic approach to mental health.
Drawing from her book, "How to Be a Healthy Human," Emma sheds light on the impact of toxins and pharmaceuticals on our well-being, urging a shift towards identifying root causes rather than just treating symptoms.
Her journey serves as a guiding light for anyone looking to explore natural methods for supporting behavioral and mental health challenges, especially in a world filled with environmental toxins.
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intro/outro music bed written by T. Wild
Why Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
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. 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 Mantour. 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 passion lies in 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.
Speaker 2:No, it's great. I love what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much. I really appreciate that. Tell me what you do, how you apply it and how it turned to help your son.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was initially in the corporate world. I'm an actuary by background. For those that don't know what I'm, I'm very good with data and risk. I actually wanted to be a doctor when I was in my teens. My father taught me out of it, so I went into the corporate world, but I've always been very interested in medicine. I'm in the corporate world, working with employee benefits and pension plans and healthcare plans as well, and I ended up focusing on healthcare plans. But 15 years ago my son was diagnosed with Asperger's 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 the overarching healthcare system in this country.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2: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. We had all these shots up to age five when he was finally diagnosed. But Eva, 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 at 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.
Speaker 2:Two and three, he was obsessive, compulsive. He would freak out. He was very smart but he would freak out at the smallest thing he could figure out. If we drove home, if we went somewhere and then we drove home and 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.
Speaker 2:He was pretty hard on his younger brother. He had a brother two years younger and so that was pretty hard. And then just having a problem in school. 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 her mass burgers and the ADHD as well.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:For me. I always wanted to know why what's going on. There's a reason, because at the time the doctors all just 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 actuary and very comfortable with data, I just started reading and I just started researching.
Speaker 2:A mom at the school 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 leave, and I'm like I've got to get to the bottom of this. What's going on.
Speaker 2:So I started researching. I got to a phenomenal doctor which maybe some of your listeners are familiar with Dr Jerry Kartzenal. 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 methylating properly. So he was on tryptophan. He had terrible bathroom habits.
Speaker 2: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 happen 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 he'll be 20 in January. So in those two months I was researching everything and 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.
Speaker 1: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 doctors preach, yet with the food, the supplements, all the changes you made, it worked for you. What were some of those changes?
Speaker 2:We did so many things. There's never a silver bullet and every child and person 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 19, nearly 20, he's completely, really careful with his gluten. So we removed gluten.
Speaker 2: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 brain so they literally get addicted to the casein protein in milk. So we cut out all dairy. 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.
Speaker 2:His microbiomes. We 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 supplements, but this is absolutely phenomenal. It's called True Hope. Truehopecom 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. We put it in rice milk. But Power Plus has been phenomenal to this day. Now he's on an adult formula that's like a once a day capsule formula and he could tell if he's not taking it in a few days. He can immediately tell. So that was absolutely critical.
Speaker 2:But then we did all sorts of other things. He wouldn't wear pants even if it was pouring with rain 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 rat. He has to go to the gym every day. As a five-year-old he couldn't sit still in school, and so the teacher would know if he was like fidgeting hey, 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 have fidget toys and 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.
Speaker 2: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 back, things like that. But neurofeedback was phenomenal. I'd say occupational therapy, neurofeedback, supplements, food were some of the main things.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:It was tough. It was super tough, I won't kid 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 coming of age during COVID. Fortunately he was in a school that they ended up staying in school. There were some restrictions and requirements, but he was staying in school. But that really set him back 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.
Speaker 2: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 12. Is it a notebook? Is it sticky notes? 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.
Speaker 2: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 their difference. So we had 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. If people are playing soccer, they don't just start playing.
Speaker 2:I spent 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.
Speaker 2: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. I didn'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.
Speaker 2: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. Or she says this, 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, and because he was into the gym, 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 own. He gets a car when he was 16. He's actually a very good driver. He didn't want to take his vitamins, didn't want to eat what he should eat, and so that had its own set of challenges. Teenage years were a little tough.
Speaker 1:Teaching a 15 or 16 year old neurotypical child to drive can be very, very rough. How was it with him when he started?
Speaker 2: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 frame. So the impulsiveness, the 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. It's 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.
Speaker 1:How old is he now?
Speaker 2:He'll be 20 in January.
Speaker 1:I understand he's going to college.
Speaker 2:Out of state. He's away from home.
Speaker 1:Oh really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2:He's 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 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 whole I've been incredibly proud of how he's managed himself.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2: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 messes with me really bad. So he is so proud he cooks for himself now. Last year he was in a dorm and he ate at 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.
Speaker 2:Still working on the dairy a little bit. He still does dairy now and then, when he was really going downhill, he's had a racing heart and a lot of physical problems. He phoned me up. I talk about this in my book. Actually, mikey has taken no medication In 15 years since he was diagnosed. We've gone completely natural and it's turned him around and he's super healthy no medication whatsoever.
Speaker 2:But I was worried with him going to college and there's all these kids taking Ritalin and Adderall as these focus drugs. I got that phone call a few weeks ago hey mom, I think I need Adderall. I'm like what he 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 on. So I was like, oh really, why do you think that is? And it's why I can't focus, when 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.
Speaker 2: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 this Empower Plus that he takes it's a multivitamin and his probiotics are absolutely number one.
Speaker 2:And then other things. He takes some Zeolite, a spray that helps with detox, 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 when he doesn't feel like it, even when he's oh, I've got too much homework to do, you take that 30 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 rebellious stage, that 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 hindrance.
Speaker 1:Now you'd mentioned you've written a book. Is this book about food and supplements and how it will help maintain a healthy lifestyle for everyone?
Speaker 2: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. I'm part of a very large church and there's so many kids in this church and adults with autism that their parents don't even realize how critical food and lifestyle can be to their overall health. And I 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 youngest 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 mental health. So I took the time out, I wrote the book.
Speaker 2:It has nine chapters. It was meant to have 10, with a whole chapter on kids, but the book got too big. So in this first book I cover all the foundations. The first half 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. I have 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 age three and never have known it.
Speaker 2:And then I also cover infectious disease. 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. Our 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 like autoimmune 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 I'm 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, so zero to 18. And then I cover a lot of the 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.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's the second book. What's the title of the first book that you wrote?
Speaker 2:It's called how to Be a Healthy Human what your Doctor Doesn't Know About Health and Longevity.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I lay out I've got a whole chapter on the conventional medical industry a little bit of the history. A hundred years ago nobody trusted doctors. When doctors disagreed, there were lots of different kinds of doctors 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, explained how we got to where we are today.
Speaker 2: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 and 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 amphetamine to help them focus. But then you've got to understand the downsides. 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 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 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 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 going to just automatically improve the brain health.
Speaker 2:Now, somebody who's autistic, had an autistic diagnosis, isn't necessarily going to become completely neurotypical. That's their personality. My son now I don't know that he'd 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. It's 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 as 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 10 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 EMDR there's lots of non-pharmaceutical options that you have for mental health issues.
Speaker 1:This has been interesting. I love talking about food and how you can eat healthy with natural supplements. I think that is something that everybody needs to read and learn because it can affect and help all of us. So, with that said, I really appreciate you coming on and talking about it.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: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 enjoyed bringing it to. You may be a guest on our show. One more thing we ask tell everyone everywhere about why Not Me, the world, the conversations we're having and the inspiration our guests give to everyone everywhere that you are not alone in this world. Bye.