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Editorās Note: Ā 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. Ā 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. Itās 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, sickā¦and desperate for a real, genuine love.
Our Experience with Foster Children
The love is easy. The āsickā requires a bit more effort to overcome. Let me share our experience for the few children we are privileged to know:
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- The sweetest quiet little 1 year old comes to us and she is scheduled to have gum and teeth surgery within 6 months.
- 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!
- 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 canāt focus or follow any instruction.; ADD/ADHD.
- 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.
- One child is missing 4 permanent teeth and apparently this is becoming very common according to the pediatric dentist.
- 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 ā 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 todayā¦.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 āless than 5%ā 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, āTake him home and do your magic because he just canāt stop vomiting!ā
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. Ā They donāt 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! Ā 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 homesā¦We eat a lot of cruciferous greens and sautĆ© 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, Iāve 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 NutritionĀ 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.
Inspiring story, thank you so much.
I love this! Thank you for posting. I am a foster parent for infants. My little guy has started solids recently and I’ve wondered about making his food myself (I pay for it and time consuming to make) vs getting the free food from the state. (It’s free and convenient) I really want to give him the best as his start into this world was not the healthiest.
Looking at the links in this post, I now am very interested in home made formula!!
Hi, Lizzy. Here is a link with Sarah on the Weston A Price Foundation page for a milk formula if still bottle fed. http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/formula-homemade-baby-formula/ Solid Foods are easy once they are of age. We eat organic and very little bread, so we just blend up dinner without bread. I’ve read too many accounts of how the stomach lining is fully complete at age 3, so we would wait until 3 to introduce bread. Otherwise blend away.
You are amazing and wonderful for all you do! Go momma!
Mandy, my kids eat lots of healthy foods, but I too cannot get my kids to eat bone broth. Some tips and easy recipes would be very appreciated.
Yeah, Shelley! Just be creative. We make hamburger soup and I think the name lends to success. Add hamburger, vegetables, and voila. Pumpkin soup, pea soup, broccoli soup. Experiment with chicken and beef. Most of our children enjoy chicken best. I’ll start putting some recipes on my site for creative ideas here.
We make foods a little fun around here and that’s the way we’ve been successful.
Nice suggestions. But how do you get these children to eat such healthy food? You mentioned the 2 year old would eat nothing but processed food. Do you just let them go hungry until they eat the food served?
Sofia. You are most insightful. Yes, sort of…but I don’t have junk around the house for the most part. Sometimes I would cry and just say I’m not eating until you eat! Sometimes I would blend it up and add a little raw honey. Because our first had cancer, it created this enormous desire to help change the food taste for the children. Having my birth children sit and eat it helped a lot as well. Once they acquired the taste, they would begin to enjoy REAL food. Then behavior change. The first week is the hardest, but well worth it.
Mandy, I deeply admire your dedication and unbounding love for these children. You are giving them a chance in this world, a chance to be healthy and loved, and that can change their lives. You set an amazing example.
Sarah, thank you for posting this guest-post! So inspiring!
Now we just need a world where there are no children in need of foster care.
You are a saint.
I try and tell all who will listen about the importance of good basic nourishing food.
Are we winning the battle?
Ingrid, Thank you, but not sure about the saint!!! Sounds like you are making a difference. We are certainly winning battles every day…it’s the war I’m hoping for. š
I think as more people get sick, the wisdom begins to reveal itself.
Love your article. Really heartfelt writing. Makes me want to foster children some day soon. Many thanks.
Oh, Nancy, I was hoping for a few people to be inspired! They really are precious.
How wonderful to read about your healing work with foster children, Mandy! I hope and pray that many will be inspired by you. I have 2 friends who have had foster children in their homes, and they, too, made drastic and healthful changes in their foster children’s diets (one was a devout follower of a traditional diet as recommended by the WAPF).
An article such as this is not complete without mention of the forced vaccination and horrible over-vaccination of children in the foster-care system. It is unbelievable how many extra vaccines some of these kids have had, as if the CDC-recommended schedule as is isn’t debilitating and deadly enough! If their biological parents were on any type of state or federal aid, they had no choice but to vaccinate their children or forfeit their financial aid and benefits…no vaccine exemptions allowed for them (this is the case in CA, and I believe it is the case in most states, if not all). If parents moved around and records were lost, re-vaccinate, “just in case.”
Then, to make matters worse, foster parents have no legal rights to refuse vaccines for their foster children, and are required to take their foster children to all of those ridiculous “well-baby” visits which leave the children sick as dogs (thanks to vaccines, and prescription drugs), as Mandy so tragically describes. However, I will also say that foster parents can be creative in avoiding vaccines for their foster children. They can: insist on delaying vaccines until the child’s vaccination records are located and reviewed (medical records are not always immediately available, which can work in a child’s favor!); carefully read through all of the child’s medical file, and look for previous adverse vaccine reactions and/or contraindications to future vaccines, including family history, allergies, previous reactions, etc., then explain to the doctor why the child should not receive any more vaccines; call the child in “sick,” which many actually are, for their “well-baby” visits and tell them you’ll call to reschedule, then repeat this process as often as possible, and possibly until you adopt the child if you are doing foster-adopt; if possible, talk to the child’s biological parent(s) about signing a vaccine exemption form for their child; be creative and try to protect your foster children from further harm via vaccines! Foster children face the added insult of being on prescription drugs at a much greater rate than non-foster children…perhaps from all of the vaccines and extra-vaccines they’ve been given, coupled with a poor diet (beginning with GMO-laden formula versus breast milk), and exposure to toxins.
Great article, Mandy! Food as medicine! If only doctors understood that and acted on it, our children would be so much healthier. Good health does not come through a pill or a needle. I know you already know that š
Oh, my, thank you SO much Sarah for sharing this, & Mandy for what you are doing!! This is one of the most inspirational things I have read in a long time. Earth’s blessings to you and to those precious lives you touch. I will be forwarding your site!!
Thanks for your post, Mandy! I was wondering about the bone broth every morning – just wondering how you serve that to the kids? I have trouble getting my kids to drink broth, although otherwise they enjoy healthy foods. They are young – 3 year old twins and a toddler, so maybe it’s just age-related resistance going on, but I’d love to see them consume more bone broths.