Everything we were given was aimed at his brain.

For four years we did what we were told. Doses up, doses down. Therapy on Tuesdays. Two elimination diets that I ran like a lab technician. Every single thing we tried worked on his head.

And none of it touched the rest of it. The stomach aches nobody could explain. The dark circles he had had since he was six. The sugar runs at two in the morning. Every doctor filed all of it under the same three letters.

So I started reading at night, after he was asleep. Not blog posts, the actual papers. I went in looking for something about focus and I came out somewhere else entirely.

About 90% of the body’s serotonin, the thing that runs mood, focus and sleep, is not made in the brain. It is made in the gut.

The two are wired together and talk to each other all day. And a gut that is inflamed does not make it, and does not absorb the zinc, the magnesium or the iron you are trying to give a child. Every supplement I had ever bought him had gone into a gut that could not take any of it in.

That was the night it stopped looking like a brain problem to me.

I went looking for something built on that, in doses meant for a child. It did not exist. So I built it with clinical herbalists and functional medicine pediatricians, on one rule: nothing goes into a formula unless there is research behind it.

That became Gut Balance.

Parenting a kid like ours is hard enough. I hope it gives your child what it gave mine.