Hi Emily,
It does seem it's taking your hubby a long time to respond to the diet. He may be one of the more sensitive ones like my Jon who really need to be super strict. Jon once flared up off a cup chai tea I made for him... due to the cinnimon and other spices in it!
For these super-sensitive blokes iodine testing is a must to weed out hidden starches in places you may not have thought of. Even if the ingredients on a sauce bottle or something look OK... still test it.
Jon tried the roadback foundation antibiotic protocol on
www.roadback.org. He took 100mg doxycycline once a day on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The idea is to use low "pulsed" doses like this to stop the bugs becoming resistant to the antibiotics. And also to reduce the Herx-heimer effect that can happen when you take antibiotics due to massive die-off. Anyway, the doxy really helped Jon heaps.
However, because he was feeling so great he started pigging out on chocolate a lot and on lots of other sugary treats. He also was not taking a probiotic despite my best efforts to get him to take one. This led to a bad candida problem and he had to drop the antibiotics after 3 months.
To get rid of the candida took 9 months of a terribly restrictive diet (and you thought NSD was restrictive?! HA!) with absolutely NO sugar like not even fruit! It was a nightmare.
So if you're going to go down the antibiotic route, please be careful. Limit refined white sugar (preferably cut it out) and dont gorge out on fruit too much. Take a probiotic or make your own fermented sauercraut. Hopefully this will help keep the good and bad bacteria balanced. The good bacteria "eat" candida in the gut. If they are all killed off then that leaves space for the candida to flourish. It puts down roots that can perforate and/or damage the intestinal linining thereby making the whole leaky gut thing worse.
I hope he feels some improvement soon
Chelsea
PS: I hope little Matthew is doing well
