Kelly Dorfman
When you're neurodiverse, you probably need more of some things to balance out some of these differences. So you can't just use what everybody else needs to get the same result. You might need a unique combination of nutrients to optimize your functioning. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Welcome back, everybody, to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact podcast. I have a special guest today because my guest is Kelly Dorfman, who has been a guide and an advisor to me for over 20 years now. Can you believe that? I first made an appointment with Kelly at the advice of my child psychologist when my child was 8, and then I canceled it. I don't know if you know this story, because I was overwhelmed and I had so much going on, and I knew she was going to, somebody was going to tell me I had to take foods out of her diet and I couldn't do it, and so I canceled the appointment. And then I came back about a year and a half later when it was like, OK, I really got to do this—and consulted with her. So, Kelly is here as Kelly has been for many, many years now my go-to when I'm trying to get a handle on the relationship between neurospicy quirky kids and nutrition. So Kelly Dorfman, welcome.

Kelly Dorfman
Thank you. It's good to be here, Elaine. I like neurospicy. I think we should lobby for that one. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, I use it a lot—complex kids, neurospicy kids. You're going to tell us in a second what your actual credentials are because I can never remember. Here's what I can tell you about Kelly: you might want to put this on pause a few times, slow it down, and take notes. I have never had a conversation with Kelly, ever, that I haven't wanted to go back and replay because she understands the brain's neurochemistry in a way that can explain it to you in a way that very few people can do. But she gets the stuff so well that sometimes she goes a little fast. So... 

Kelly Dorfman
I got to slow it down.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Got to slow it down. So, Kelly is an international expert in nutritional issues for what I like to call complex kids. She tends to get more complex, the complex cases she was diagnosing or identifying pandas long before anybody knew what it was. And she has her finger on the pulse of this relationship between nutrition and neurodiverse kids. How did you get started in this? Like, what's your background? 

Kelly Dorfman
Well, I'm in nutrition, obviously, but I never wanted to lose weight or do traditional things. I was always interested in unraveling puzzles. And so, I started working in a holistic doctor practice when I was 22 years old, and I got started on the puzzles early. It just suited me and Stanley Greenspan, who's a psychiatrist, as some of you may know, who started Floortime; he discovered me, he lived in Bethesda, which is down the street from where I was operating, and he just started sending me kids. And before I knew it, half my practice was kids. And then, I started a nonprofit, or co-founded actually a nonprofit, to look at nontoxic ways to address and biologically support neurodiversity. We didn't call it neurodiversity back then it was PDD and autism, but we have expanded our horizon. At this point, we were offering different ways to look at it. Dietary ways, nutritional treatments, and nondrug treatments. Not that drugs are bad, but we were looking at alternative ways when nobody was looking.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And when she said non-pharmacological ways?

Kelly Dorfman
Yeah, non-pharmacological, there's a place for medicine, but my feeling has always been that it's not the first place.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Right. Yeah, so. Well, and as someone who's worked with you a lot over the years, and you guys all know that I have had kids on medications sometimes, taking medications and not taking medications, and always on nutritional supplements and approaches and consciousness and awareness. That has been foundational to everything everyone in my family has done. So give us a little bit about your clinical background because you weren't just a nutritionist because there was something about... 

Kelly Dorfman
Well, I have a master's degree in biology and nutrition, but basically, I started in nutrition, doing a broader, and to this day, I specialize in complex cases. So, about half my practice now is kids, but I did write a book about kids, and I've seen a lot of neurodiverse people of all ages. Now, a lot of the kids that I saw 20 years ago are adults, and now a lot of adults are discovering, “Oh, the issue has been neurodiversity all along.” And so I learned a lot of this myself. I developed a lot of theory myself. There are a lot of people like me working in this field. Yeah. And you kind of learn clinically what works. I've always been interested in what's going to work, not what's theoretical. What's going to work for that child? I really believe that the parents often have pretty good ideas about what might work, and they help you a lot. So I've always learned to listen to parents, and they've taught me a lot. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So, my story of when I first met Kelly, I remember so vividly as I wrote this kind of backgrounder for you about what was going on with my kid. You know, however many couple pages and I get on the phone with her, and I don't, we don't live in the same state. So, this was long before we had ever met each other in person. Before Zoom? Before Zoom. Right. And within 10 minutes, she said, sounds like gluten. And this is long enough ago, y'all, that I said, what's gluten? And she told me, and I cried, OK, because, and I remember you saying to me at that time that it's more common in Jews of Eastern European descent, gluten sensitivity. Anyway, this is not about going gluten-free. If you want, I will put some links in the show notes to some of the articles I wrote after working with Kelly in the early years about that. But that's not what I want to talk about today. But what I just remember so vividly was that you were able to listen to all the pieces of our story that I thought were all disconnected and find the thread that linked them together.

Kelly Dorfman
Well, we're a connected being. And so when somebody comes in with 20 different things, the chances that you have 20 different things is usually not the case. You might have two or three different things. So you want to look for common threads with that. And nutrition therapy really breaks down into two parts. Are you eating something that's bothering you, or are you missing something that could help you? And when it comes to neurodiversity, there's usually a little bit going wrong in both places. Not always. There is a subset of kids and adults that are neurodiverse where elimination diets really are not that helpful, although cleaning up the diet and removing junk and empty-calorie foods can be useful to just about everybody, obviously. So we can look at that in your case, and I know you've talked about this, so I guess we can talk about that, is that there was an unusually big piece in something that needed to be removed, but, and in some ways that's lucky because it makes it easier, it's just one thing. But then there's the therapeutic nutrients, and the therapeutic nutrients can be really wonderful.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Awesome. So, let's go with eating something that's bothering you for a minute because I think what really struck me about that, and again, in our case, it was both my husband and one of my kids, that there was a gluten sensitivity. When we removed it, we were doing psych ed testing. I don't know if you remember this part of the story. Oh, I do. I remember that because it was an unusual one. It was so unusual. And so we went; my kid went from off-the-charts emotional ability to within the range of normal in two weeks. And it was dramatic enough that the psychiatrist believed me. When I went to her because in those days they weren't believing us, right? And so, and I remember Kelly and my kid had not been diagnosed with autism, but I remember you saying we're going to borrow from autism protocols because in those days, there was no overlap. You weren't allowed to have both ADHD and autism diagnosed. But what really struck me about it was that it's not that eliminating food eliminated all the problems we were having.

It reduced what I came to call the toxic load. Right? When there's a toxic load on the system, when the system is fighting so hard to manage everything all at the same time, it's kind of like in our model. Y'all, we tell you to take aim on one thing at a time, because if you take aim on everything, you won't get anything done. It's kind of like that. So if the system is really reacting to one thorn that is always there, that's bothering it, that it doesn't even know it's there. When you remove the thorn, it allows you to breathe a little bit and focus on the other things that are going on. Is that fair? 

Kelly Dorfman
It removes obstacles to learning and thinking. So it's not like it's always the cure, and mostly it isn't, but if you have something in the way all the time, like you said, you call it toxic, but it's not even always. Toxic sometimes it's just some kind of biological. There are a lot of things that are unique to gluten in the neurological system. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. We have an article on the site for that too, that Kelly wrote years ago. 

Kelly Dorfman
And, well, that doesn't end. Those issues don't affect everybody. There are genetic components to that, too. So there's, you know, there's a lot of layers to it. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So, part of the nutritional, you're saying, is... the two things are looking for something that's bothering you right and removing something that's bothering you, and I just want to say like when there's a lot of things going on, as you said because that's what happened was that I had this list of eight diagnoses. I look at the psychologist again in tears. I cried a lot in those days, and I said, "Well, what do I do with this?" and she said, "You start with the metabolic." And that's when she sent me to Kelly. 

Kelly Dorfman
So, yeah, because otherwise, you're going to have to use pharmacological control. If you can get the metabolic straightened out and if you need to go to pharmacology, that goes much better. Otherwise, you constantly have these other things in the way. And you know, gluten is unusual. Yeah, that's an unusual one because it causes so many bizarre, uh, neurological issues, but even something like just too much sugar. Yeah. 

You know, like somebody who's eating Froot Loops for breakfast and, you know, and a big glass of juice and some gummies for lunch. And I mean, it could be something that kind of simple in terms of cleaning. It's not always an irritant. As it was in the case that you're talking about, sometimes it's just that the diet is so poor, that's the irritant. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So one place to look is removing some kind of obstacles that you're, you know, put it, what you're putting into your system that may not be helping you function well, right? 

Kelly Dorfman
And the cool thing about that is you didn't think something might come up, but a lot of times, parents come to me, and they already know what it is. Ah, yeah. They already know. They don't want to know, you know, they know, but they don't want it. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Because you don't want to know, it's daunting when you're already dealing with kids with all these issues and behavior problems and school problems.

Kelly Dorfman
And a lot of them are really picky. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. So, it can be really overwhelming. We can, and we'll get back to that later—the how in a second. So, let's take a quick break, and we'll be right back. 

Welcome back, everybody. My guest is my friend and my mentor and guide Kelly Dorfman. And we are talking about nutrition and kids. And we kind of set the stage. You said that when you're looking to put the puzzle pieces together, you look for common threads; one is what's bothering you that you're putting into your system, and the other is you might be missing something you need. Let's talk about that a little bit. 

Kelly Dorfman
Well, there's a chemistry to thinking, there's a chemistry to everything you do, you raise your arm, there's chemistry to that, you think a thought, there's a chemistry to that, so that chemistry is based on components, and if you don't have them, you're not the government, you can't run on a deficit, so, you know, one of my favorite nutrients is, is a weird nutrient most people never heard of called choline. The reason I like this nutrient so much, especially in neurodiversity, is that the deficiency symptom for this, and this is a vital nutrient like vitamin C and zinc; even if you have not heard of it, the deficiency symptom is a reduced capacity to learn. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Reduced capacity to learn, but that could be a million different things.

Kelly Dorfman
Right. But the whole thing is that in order to be a vital nutrient, there has to be a deficiency symptom if you don't get it. It happens to be in this particular nutrient, the deficiency is you can't learn the same way. So, how's that for a deficiency symptom? 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That's like outrage, but so I want to be careful because we don't want a bunch of parents going out to the health food store and buying choline, right? Right. That's true. Give us some context around that. 

Kelly Dorfman
Well, it took a long time for them to figure that out because the way they figure out what a deficiency symptom is at this point, they take an animal model and starve the animal, something similar to humans as they can think of. And then they look for a symptom. So, in zinc deficiency, the animals don't grow. In vitamin C, you know, you get scurvy, and you get little blood spots from your blood vessels breaking. But in choline, they would put animals in a cage, and they would take it out, and they would watch them, and they look the same. But then it turns out that rats are pretty smart, but they couldn't learn to run through mazes. So when they took him out of the cages and actually made them do stuff, they figured out, oh my goodness. Without choline, they can't learn. They can't figure out how to do things they're very smart at doing. And that lasted their entire lives. So that's when they finally decided that's the deficiency symptom. Now, we don't want to starve, especially children, and say, "Let's see if they stop learning. If we put you in the control group, we'll put you with it." No, we don't want to do that. And so we don't even have a great idea about exactly how much you might need to prevent this deficiency.

This is the tricky part about it. So yeah, absolutely. Talk to a medical professional who understands these things and knows your child before you jump out there and make some of these decisions, but it is a nontoxic nutrient. If you take too much of the wrong form of it, you can smell like a fish. So there are forms that don't do that so much. And a nutrient in one end of the molecule likes fat, and one end likes water. So it's like the emulsifier for your body. Your brain is fatty. Your blood is watery. You need something that works as a bridge between those two substances. And phospholipids are that substance, and choline is a phospholipid. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Interesting. OK. See what I mean by saying, "You needed a piece of paper to take the notes." So your body could be missing something you need, and it could be someone.

Kelly Dorfman
That's just one example, but your brain is also made up of fat. Your brain is fat. I mean, 60% to 70% fat. There are essential fats. There are long-chain fats, like DHA, that are found in seaweed and fish. OK. And about 25% of the fat in your brain is made up of that. If you don't have enough of that, it creates a brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is a growth hormone for the brain. So you want your brain to grow. You need the right kind of fats. If you're eating a lot of bars and cookies and crackers and packages and processed food, you're probably not getting those kinds of fats that you need for your brain. Even if you're getting a lot of fat per se, you're not getting the right kind of fat. So there are all kinds of ways that you might even have a full deficiency, or you might just need more because you're neurodiverse than the average bear of a certain nutrient. So maybe an average person might need a couple of milligrams of vitamin B6, but if you're neurodiverse, you might need a lot more of that or 10 times that amount to really function at an optimal level. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. And this is when I gave a commercial for... Kids don't try this at home. Do this with a professional because one of the things I remember that we tried was one point where we went, we had one of my kids on what I would call massive doses of fish oil for years to manage anxiety. And it was outrageous how well it worked until it didn't anymore when they hit puberty, but for a lot of years, it worked really, really well. And there was another supplement we had that you called the writing pill, or we called the writing pill. I want to say it was grape seed extract or something.

Kelly Dorfman
Oh, yeah, that's for fine motor. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Is that what it was? But so there were things she understood to do to help alleviate some of the symptoms. The challenges that to round the corners, I like to say, to make it easier to learn and grow and develop. Is that fair? 

Kelly Dorfman
Yeah, I think that what you want to look at is that when you're neurodiverse, you probably need more of some things to balance out some of these differences. And so you are already diverse, right? So you can't just use what everybody else needs to get the same result. You might need a unique combination of nutrients to optimize your functioning.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And it can come in lots of forms, so having somebody really understand what that looks like can make a big difference.

Kelly Dorfman
It can make a difference, and if you're always stuck, if you're getting a lot of good therapy, if you're getting a lot of good coaching. And you're still not making progress; maybe it's time to look at what the chemistry is that you're putting all this on. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
One of the things we teach in our model is about looking underneath what's underneath. We're always looking at what we see, what we think is on the surface is the problem. And usually, what's really happening is underneath that. And so, both metabolically and behaviorally, you really have to look underneath. Absolutely. To get a better sense of what's happening. OK, we could go on and on. I'm going to put lots of resources in the show notes for people. So definitely, if you're not one who typically goes to the show notes, you're gonna want to go to this for this one, I promise. But, Kelly, tell people how they can find out more about you. 

Kelly Dorfman
They can go to my website, www.kellydorfman.com, or they can check out my book, which is still in print. It's called Cure Your Child with Food. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And I have a secret for y'all about Cure Your Child with Food, and there's a chapter in that book about one of my kids. So, I won't give any more of that away than that... 

Kelly Dorfman
But they're not named with your name. So, yeah. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
No. Well, it was a particularly unusual circumstance in those days, and it was so early in that realm, and it's hard to believe it's 23 years ago, 20 years ago since then, so... I know that is hard to believe time flies. It does. OK. So, we kind of looked at both what's bothering you and what you might be missing. Some of the common threads you're talking to are an audience of parents of neurodiverse, neurospicy kids, or young adults. Anything else you want to share that we haven't hit on or anything you want to highlight?

Kelly Dorfman
Well, you want to follow your instincts. I think this is very, very important. I think that when parents get quiet, and they really think about it, they actually have a sense. Sometimes that, this is like you said, you knew you weren't ready, which is fine, but you knew. Yeah. That's a level. And so I would say most parents are there that they know at some level, maybe you're not ready, and that's fine, but when you're ready or when you can, when you can get yourself to that place and listen to that, you might be really surprised at how right you are. I mean, I find that parents can mostly help me if they don't even know the direct answer themselves.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I had a beautiful opportunity to present at a medical conference with Dr. Thomas Brown. If I've ever fangirled over any researcher, he would be the one, he's the one who researched the executive function, the six areas of executive function that we teach all the time. He asked me to look at my caseload and do some case studies. And what was really striking, what came out from it, besides several articles and all kinds of things, was two things: one was recognizing that it was being in a community of parents, it was having a provider, a coach that helped me be able to identify for my clients when their kids were outside of the realm of typical when it came to neurotypical. Neuro atypical, right? Like I'm the outlier, the really complex kids to be able to know when to send them back for further diagnosis because they were working with me and I had enough framework, I could see when this is not just your run-of-the-mill anxiety or ADHD, something else is going on, right?

To reinforce your point, their instincts. That was really powerful. The other thing I realized was how the ways in which the medical community is underusing parents as a guide. Yes. When it comes to diagnosis and treatment of really complex kids, because parents really do understand the beauty for us in our world, coaching allows you to slow down and pay attention to what's really going on so that you can listen to your voice, so that you can recognize when, "Wait a minute, I really get something here, and I really do want to get people to listen to me." Because sometimes as parents, we have to do that. Absolutely. Yeah, so I really appreciate that recognition that, as parents, your instincts really make a difference because you know these kids better than anybody else. 

Kelly Dorfman
It's true. It's absolutely true. And I've always found that the parents know it's just me helping them figure out what they know so I can tell them.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. Different sides of the same coin. Yeah. Kelly, thank you. It's been wonderful to have you here. I have one more question for you. Do you have a favorite quote or motto you want to share with the community?  

Kelly Dorfman
Oh, a favorite quote or motto. I think one of my favorite mottos is, "To learn to listen to yourself at the deepest level and trust that." And I think as parents do that, they come to a place of peace with whatever the situation is. Sometimes, there's not an easy answer, or sometimes, you have to live with things that you would prefer not to live with. But that comes to that quiet space, which is really helpful, and learning to trust that there's peace in that and that can be very helpful. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That's beautiful. Thank you. I couldn't agree with that more. And it can be so hard to do in the frenzy of parenting. It is so hard. Just remember to slow down and take the pause. You know, in coaching, one of the first things they teach us is the value of pause. 

Kelly Dorfman
Yeah. Right. Maybe that's the quote, "The value of pause. Take a breath."

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Love it. All right. My friend, thank you. Thank you for everything you've done for hundreds of thousands of kids around the world and for the support you've given to me, my community, and my family over the years. I'm very grateful. 

Kelly Dorfman
Oh, I'm delighted to be here, and it's good to see you again, Elaine. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, I do as well. To those of you listening, check in with yourself. A perfect opportunity to slow down and ask yourself, "What's your insight that you're taking away from this conversation? What's the one gem or awareness that you have that you want to bring forward with you into your week?" I know what we were talking about, but what were you becoming aware of in this conversation? And as always, thanks for what you're doing for yourself and for your kids. At the end of the day, you make the most profound difference in their lives. Take care, y'all.