Food for Aut(ies)

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My 35 month old autistic son is a challenge to feed. I've overcome a lot of obstacles and have him eating relatively well but would love to hear tips on how to expand his diet and keep him eating healthy (that don't involve covering his food with ketchup etc. ) He still eats stage 3 baby food some nights, meat and vegetables are the hardest to get in him (except for chicken nuggets), fruits and grains haven't been much of a problem. Has anyone managed to concoct a recipe for something in the cookie/bread family that successfully hides a lot of protein and vegetables in it as well? Aside from a bowl of Gerber, the only other way I can get a serving of vegetables in him is via a concoction that's 2/3 rice milk and 1/3 V8 Fusion (which is half fruit juice and half vegetable juice) with a spoonful of of Gerber green beans thrown in for good measure. My son will handle vegetables and doesn't have the gag issues some autistic children have but he won't eat them.

My mom used to hide my medicine in my applesauce. Or not so much hide, but stick it in there so I'd consume it all. Nothing wrong with that!

My Mom did the applesauce thing too. That brings back memories. I was a picky eater as a kid too, but my son has me beat by miles.

This is a common problem with a lot of kids, on the spectrum and otherwise.

My mother was never a vegetable nazi and usually made salad or young peas or canned green beans which I never had a problem with, but I do recall eating dinner at the neighbor's house once and vegetables were plain sliced zucchini with absolutely nothing on it and it was required that one eat them to get the cookie for dessert. I was slightly traumatized and avoided zucchini for years until my own mother made it in a sauce.

I eat a lot of vegetables as an adult but I usually do it Indian style without the curry. For example, I'll boil some broccoli and mash it up with a baked potato, butter, and sour cream. If you don't want to boil all of the nutrients out of it you can steam it a bit and then blend it up in a food processor (I have a little blender called the Magic Bullet which works nicely) and dump it in the potato. I also grate zucchini into pasta and the grater is such that it gives it the consistency of a sauce and you really can't taste it with the additional pasta seasoning/sauces.

You can pretty much do this with most vegetables.

I'm all too familiar with that sort of trauma, my Dad required me to sit at the table for hours until I ate liver. Many times. I don't think it's OK to do that. I never ate it, I coped by getting as much hidden in my mouth as possible, waiting until my Dad was done eating and gone excusing myself to the bathroom and spitting it out in the toilet ....

Aslo, if he ate just one or two vegetables I'd be ok with it. But he won't eat them in any recognizable incarnation. He gets them every day in some variation - steamed, raw, canned, pureed just to play with, and I'd be OK with what he's eating now except he's starting to get the gut problems associated with being an autie/aspie, and he's very much still in diapers, diarrhea and diapers aren't a pleasant mix (cloth diapers at that).

I must be in the minority, because I tolerated eating liver pretty well when I was a kid. Not loved it, but was OK with liver for dinner. My only complaint was that it tasted "chalky". Until one day when I was 7, I heard on a cooking show that liver tastes better if you soak it in milk for an hour or two before cooking it, and told my parents. They agreed to try the method, and I ate liver more willingly after that, although I still masked the taste with ketchup until my teens.

But enough about me. I recommend chili as a way of serving vegetables to your son. While the traditional Texas version contains only beef and chili peppers, most versions contain beans, and you can add vegetables like celery, tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, and cilantro. They take on the color of the reddish brown liquid, so they're hidden pretty well. In the worst case, you can puree them and mix them into the chili. Serve it with grated cheese (Oaxaca is best, but most will do) and oyster crackers, and it's an all-in-one meal. You can adjust the spiciness by varying the amount of chili peppers and/or serving with sour cream.

My son is too rigid in his preferences for something like that, I can't even change brands of baby food without him rejecting it ... it's all orange glop but somehow he *knows*. I was looking for suggestions on ways make cookies, waffles, bread ... something that he'd be comfortable with on a sensory level that has a high vegetable and protein content.

Pumpkin pancakes.
Spinach and ricotta scones.
Little pazztizzi's stuffed with 1 teaspoon of mixed pureed veg and 1 teaspoon strong cheese.
Sausage rolls with pureed baked beans mixed with chicken mince and wrapped in puff pastry.


Some ideas; to get your child into vegies, could be
Glazing oven baked vegies with honey.
Mashing vegies with a garlic and herb cream cheese.
Serving them in a dip with little crackers to dip. Eg quocamole or beetroot dip or hommous
Soft boiled egg with toast but make a butter of pureeing some sunflower seeds in a mortar and pestle.

I had bad food trauma as a kid as well. I believe it contributed to eating disorders in my 20s.

My child has never been a big fan of vegetables. Best thing I ever did was learn how to puree pizza sauce with steamed veggies. He still does not eat a vast array of different food items. He's encouraged to try all new things. If he doesn't gag on the food (a lot of food makes him ill and I honestly believe we should listen to our bodies more in this regard), I ask him to eat a very small portion of it. He's learnt how to eat quite a few new foods because of this. I also find positive peer pressure to be helpful with my son (but he's a lot older than your child). Often, if friends of his are eating something he will be more interested in giving it a go.

Up until this past year (mine is 8.5), the only veggie he would eat "unmasked" is raw carrot or corn on the cob. He's now branched out into LETTUCES. He gets a multivitamin and mineral supplement daily and I can honestly tell you that he is very healthy physically. He's tall for his age and he's solid, more solid than a lot of his variety-eating peers. What is it that makes you worry he isn't getting enough nutrition? Is he failing to thrive or grow according to his age? Is he unwell?

my aspie and autie kids are both extremely picky eaters. with the oldest we tried to fight it for years (pre-diagnosis), these days we just try to work around it.

for protein alternatives, we offer a lot of peanut butter, cheeses, yoghurt. we do smoothies sometimes, and for extra punch you can put protein powder in those. we serve a v8 fusion style juice with dinner (great value brand), and thats pretty much the only vegies we can get the into youngest, besides pizza sauce. i do sometimes make pumpkin muffins, and those are accepted. we keep carnation instant breakfast pouches on hand, and on poor eating days he gets one of those in milk with his nighttime snack.

keep offering new foods but dont force them. when serving dinner i always ask K if he wants what we are serving, he always says no, but the offer is there. we rarely get him to try something new, last week he had whipped cream for the first time, it was always refused and gagged at before due to texture, but it was loved when mixed in with strawberries and cake. he likes canned pears, and i succeeded in getting him to try fresh pair once, and he liked it, but still says "i dont eat that" which is his common phrase for foods avoided due to texture or rigid thinking.

we had some success with foods by lying about their names, and had the little guy eating breaded chicken breast and breaded pork chops for a few weeks last summer ("giant chicken nuggets!"), and a new kind of mac and cheese (it was cheese tortellini) but he caught on and then refused to eat them. he is very adamant and controlled about names of things. for instance, he wont eat "hamburgers" but will eat "cheeseburgers" because, as he has told us on multiple occasions, "i dont eat ham, i eat cheese". but he will eat ham on pizza as long as you dont call it ham =) we try not to name new foods until he has indicated whether he will eat them or not, because often the name will turn him off.

My son is the same way; there's just no fooling him. He has the bad gag reflex that you mentioned earlier, and this is one of his biggest issues. At 5 1/2 years of age, he's still on Stage 3 baby foods, and even some of those have too much texture. He'll gag on a pea!! He's quite adept at spitting out the largest pieces and swallowing the rest of the bite. Now that takes mad skill!! LOL!!
Even his most favorite foods have to be fed to him straight from the jar. If I try to put it in a bowl he refuses to eat it. As far as getting table food in him, I've tried pureeing things like pasta into a baby food consistency and putting it into an empty baby food jar and he still won't eat it. We have a home movie of him at 6 months old, gagging on apple juice and it's been an uphill battle ever since.
But as Ominous mentioned, if your son is at an appropriate weight and seems fairly healthy and vital, I wouldn't be overly concerned about the variety of foods getting into his diet, as long as the nutrients are getting in there. If it's a real concern for you, take him to his Ped. and have him checked out, and he can advise you on what to do for added nutrients.

There was a tv show out of the UK some time ago on "picky eaters," but it was about people who have been living on one type of food for an extensive period of time because they had food issues (not related to autism specifically). They did blood work on each of the participants and even the child who would only eat chocolate (no kidding) had what would be considered "normal" levels. I apologise that I can't find a reference for this, it was some time ago and I've forgotten what the show was called. These were extreme cases, obviously, and they did state that over time this type of very limited diet would harm the children. This is why I've chosen supplementation for my child. I definitely don't push the food issue and have been taken to task for it by a number of people.

I don't push the food issue either. The last thing I want is my little guy crying at meal time. That could set you up for even bigger feeding issues. If he thinks that every meal is going to be you forcing him to eat something that makes him gag or even vomit, you may find yourself dealing with a regression rather than progress. My dinner table will always be a happy place.

Thanks, that's more along the lines of what I was talking about. I've tried (and continue to try) some of those tricks and some of those things I know he won't eat, but I'm going to look into trying something with scones! It took me 30 tries (30 days) just to get him to start eating a gummy multivitamin.



LOL! That's too funny!!

Mine will eat peanut butter and that's been a blessing. Anything with yogurt he won't eat/drink much of, cheeses he'll only take in their most unhealthy incarnations (cheese crackers or cheese doodles).




Reasoning doesn't affect my son, he rarely even responds to his own name and can't form a thought into comprehensible words. He has some words but as far as useful communication goes he's more on the nonverbal end for now and can't tell me what he wants or needs yet I think he can read some (he's read aloud whole children's books but I don't know how much is memorization and how much is reading nevertheless I know he understands a lot more than he lets on) ... His weight is on track but his height is not, none of his doctors have yet to even mention this to me. They measure him and say nothing, yet I know he's of short stature, he's well below the 0% for his age (he's almost 3 but is the height of a 24 month old), but then again at 4 ft 8, so am I and he comes off as healthy so that may be why they say nothing. Recently he's accepted some new foods that aren't doing his gut any favors, Ellios pizza, spaghetti (really he only eats a few strands), french fries ... while I'm glad he's tried and likes some new things I can tell by what I see in his diaper and by my own sensitivities to certain foods that they don't agree with his gut. He needs more good things in his diet to balance out the less nutritional things he's starting to gravitate too.



You understand! There was a stretch where I feared I'd be spoon feeding Gerber to my son while he stimmed on flash cards for the rest of my life, then one day without warning he finally used the spoon. I agree the dinner table should be a happy place, which is why I'm looking for ways to provide healthy food to my son that his stomach will tolerate and in a form that he finds agreeable. It's getting harder to get him to eat baby food these days.

Last edited by Washi on 29 Apr 2011, 12:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

Have you tried probiotics? This doesn't address the issue of what is going in but it has helped my son's digestion which would swing back and forth between diarhea and bad constipation.