Recovering the Health of Foster Children

Editor’s Note:  I recently met Mandy Lee at the Wise Traditions Conference in Indianapolis. She shared with me her passion for foster children along with her simple, effective, and highly successful protocol for helping them return to vibrant health once they come to live in her home.  I was so moved by her work that I asked her to share her story with all of you.

I hope you find it as inspirational as I did!

The Beginning

As a child, I spoke often of adopting children. While in college, my volunteer time was spent helping orphans. But when my husband and I went to adopt, we were thrown a curve ball. It’s another story that you can read about fully in [our book] or briefly on our [About Page].

Suffice to say we landed in a foreign world of fostering children that could not stay in their birth parent/s home. The reasons vary; but 90% of these parents are addicted to drugs and have fallen into a pattern of domestic violence.

We are shocked at what these orphan children have experienced in their lives. We have now fostered for 5 years and have had over 7 children come through our home and stay to be a part of our family for a while. One has passed away with cancer and one has been adopted. A couple of children just stay a day or so because they are able to return home quickly.

Each foster child is so incredibly unique, beautiful, challenging, sick…and desperate for a real, genuine love.

Our Experience with Foster Children

The love is easy. The “sick” requires a bit more effort to overcome. Let me share our experience for the few children we are privileged to know:

1. Our very first foster son has major behavioral issues. He throws things, scratches faces, and only wants processed food. We get him cleaned up and his behavior improves enormously, but we discover that he has a very bad cancer! Oh, he is 2 years old!
2. We receive a sweet little 9 month old girl who has drugs in her system. She needs a detox, to get it out of her system.
3. Next we are asked to take a 3yr old and an 18 month old; they are half sisters. These two are so precious, but they have horrendous allergies to foods. Namely watermelon.
4. The sweetest quiet little 1 year old comes to us and she is scheduled to have gum and teeth surgery within 6 months.
5. An amazing little girl is full of life but she goes through food like she has a tape worm eating everything. She literally ate 3 adult size portions for every meal, and she is 1 year old. I struggled with allowing her to eat what she wanted. It was unbelievable!
6. Once we get a call to take a little girl that needs a place until a judgement is made. She has been hit by a car in her driveway and arrives from the ER. There are bandages on her head, yet she refuses to sit down and is climbing the walls. She can’t focus or follow any instruction.; ADD/ADHD.
7. Then there was this girl who has an incredibly small stature. She is below the 3% range for her age group and at 4 years old she appears as a 2 year old.
8. One child is missing 4 permanent teeth and apparently this is becoming very common according to the pediatric dentist.
9. Another girl is missing an ovary and her other ovary is not developed properly. At a young age the hormones are affecting her health.

Just in case you are wondering, we have a really clean diet! We know local farmers that are organically minded, and we do not eat any processed food – except for the occasional bag of delicious nonGMO, organic chips with fermented salsa!

Many times I have wondered if all these sick children we foster is a coincidence or if this is just the population of children today….and I wonder if these foster children are more sick than the children that belong to a loving family. Based on our short experience of the last 5 years, 100% of foster children are sick!

In 1992, approximately 31% of children had a chronic illness (source).

Today the number has skyrocketed to 1 in 2 children with a chronic illness according to the CDC and research through the Documenting Hope organization. Society should be screaming at these numbers!

We certainly are!

The Encouraging Part

The most wonderful news is that there is hope. Although there are around 500,000 children in the Fostering System in the USA and 10 million worldwide, we have had tremendous success with our few children.

Therefore, I know that others could help themselves and these children! By following a real food diet like the one presented in Nourishing Traditions and the Weston A. Price Foundation, we have seen improvement for 100% of our children.

Although our first foster child died of cancer in his lungs which was a side effect of chemotherapy, he still had unprecedented recovery in between treatments. His original cancer was in the spinal ganglia and kidney. We had no choice in his treatment because he still belonged to the State. The chemo provided a “less than 5%” chance of survival due to his type of cancer. But our real food diet and juicing provided the quickest recovery. After his third round of chemo, we even had the oncologist say, “Take him home and do your magic because he just can’t stop vomiting!”

Because of our experience we feel so compelled to share our story and encourage you to change your diet if not for you, then for the children who live under your roof.  They don’t have a choice!

And we are hoping to inspire others to help these children. We Got Real! Real food, that is! We eliminated almost all of the processed foods that provide only convenience but not much nutrition. We want every child and family to live a full life. It is possible because we have seen the impact and live it!

All of our children improve, avoid surgery, recover from allergies within a year [except 1 who had chemo]. It is possible to reverse many diseases!

It literally takes just a couple of weeks to turn around many ailments. Children heal very rapidly if only given the proper nutritional support!

In two months we notice tremendous benefits to both physical and emotional issues. And within a year, all of our foster children are nearly completely healed!  Amazing! Some of the chronic issues are still being worked on, but the battle for health is a world of difference once we put this bit of effort into it.

Here is our protocol for recovering the health of the foster children that come under our care:

• Drink a glasss (or more) of clean filtered water first thing in the morning,
• Enjoy bone broth {almost} every morning,
• We eat real nonGMO food, both raw and cooked,
• We make a vegetable juice for a natural detox,
• And something we see missing in many homes…We eat a lot of cruciferous greens and sauté them,
• We eat grass fed, organic beef, chicken and we love wild caught salmon,
• We always have some sort of fermented food or beverage every day {and strive for every meal}.

This blog has some great videos and guidelines for all of our family practices. Not only can we restore the health of hundreds of thousands of foster children but of every family. We are constantly learning and striving to achieve better health. We are always learning! As a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, I’ve learned that:

Knowledge and Application = Success

All it takes is two weeks to see a change; in behavioral and physical improvements. AMAZING! There is nothing more exciting than the power to see a child free and capable to be all he/she can be!

Keep Fostering Nutrition in mind for your family and loved ones if fostering children is your calling. And please remember the orphans who need a loving family which is also nutritionally minded.

More Information

Feeding an Adopted Baby Without Commercial Formula