My two and a halve year old son has some atopic exzema, mostly on his legs and buttock. I have found that it changes from time to time, sometimes dissapearing. Now I have not been able to track down what factors are responsible for this.
At home, we eat paleo/primal, but the kids drink raw milk and have some other (pasteurised) dairy products.
At the nursery, where he is 3 times a week, he eats the 'conventional wisdom health food', which probably means some vegetable oils, some pasta or rice and some bread.
Is there anybody with some experience in changing eczema with a paleo-diet? Any suggestions? My next thing to try would be the dairy, but I think this will be difficult for him. He loves his milk...
Tips would be much appreciated.
Thanks
[UPDATE]
We now have had enough time to do some experimentation, and there is a relationship between my sons eczema, grains and even his behaviour. Summer was good, except for one time when there was no fruit in the nursery, so they gave him some bread. That meant two days of bad behaviour (relatively), and a little flare up of eczema.
Now since september he goes to school, but eats at home. Still he got some eczema. We thought of a little bit of stress and maybe other unknown factors. But it got worse, and we saw the behavioural changes again. So we asked him, the teacher and his friends parents if he had been eating some cookies of bread from other kids, and indeed, he did eat them. So everybody now is very strict, since 4 days. We saw immediate improvement in behaviour and gradually decreasing eczema.
For us, the surprising part was the behavioural change. The most important change is the total abscence of tantrums and anger attacks. We think he has more appetite and eats generally better. While eating the grains in school, we noticed that at night his dipers were wet againg (he normally only wears them for security and were almost never wet in the morning).
Only problem is that we don't know how much cookies and bread he ate. That would be interesting because we would like to know if a little 'cheat' causes immediate reponse or not. Can he eat an occasional slice of birthday cake at school? That's is something to keep an eye on for the future...
(another update) The little boy is doing great without the grains. The reason for updating is that we have probably (you know how tricky interpreting self experimentation is) found a relationship with dairy, but by no means as obvious. We keep him on fairly low level of dairy intake (some yoghurt a few times a week, a daily milk at school) and that seems to be ok. But if, by accident or because of circumstances, he eats more dairy, he gets some dry patches on his legs or minor red eczema spots. Completely eliminating milk is very difficult, and for now, he is doing fine!
