Now that he is older, John is willing to run some controlled experiments for us. He has salad almost every day at lunch, so that is no longer a variable. And I'm talking about a rather spartan salad with no dressing. You have to admire this kid! Anyways, one day he had his salad as usual, then a grilled steak and potato for dinner. We're talking about a small potato; it's a pretty low carb meal. Throw in some peas and a pad of butter, and that's it for the day. But he had a lot of steak, two large pieces. The next morning he was an animal, crawling around the floor and trying to bite me. This was almost as bad as the oatmeal cookie experiment, although there was no smell. The butyric acid was gone, but the monster remains. I decide then and there that beef is a problem, and glutamates may not be. Sure, hotdogs and brats contain msg, but they also contain beef. Every meal for the past month that had glutamates also had beef. In fact he's never been without beef for more than a couple days in the past 7 years. It's just not something I had considered. We decide to remain low carb, and withhold all the typical allergens: beef, pork, chicken, shrimp, eggs, cow's milk, wheat/gluten, corn, oranges, strawberries, tomato, spinach, soy, and of course peanuts.
This strategy lasts for about a day, then I have a sense of deja vous. For years I suspected this food and that: perhaps wheat, perhaps corn, etc. Getting nowhere, I looked towards food groups: cereal grains, tomato potato, etc. Finally I began to look at the structure of the carbohydrate molecules. I can't afford to spend another 3 years traveling down a similar path. He doesn't react to beef. If he did, I surely would have seen it in 7 years of analysis. It's just not that simple. He reacts to protein, or one of the 20 amino acids. Let's just jump right to that conclusion and save ourselves a couple years of heartache.
We begin a low protein diet, so low that it scares me. It helps a lot, but he can't live on it forever. The <pku kids>, who are in a similar situation, order special protein without the offensive amino acid. Is John in a similar situation? Is he in fact a pku child? Or does he react to a different amino acid, and if so, where am I going to buy protein without the troublesome component?
More questions. Is this unrelated to his carb sensitivity? Does he even have a carb sensitivity? If not - if everything is based on a metabolic reaction to protein, then what happened to the butyric acid? Where did it go? I seem to have nothing but questions.