Chris Kresser: Amber asked, “I see on your website you don’t see children under [age] 2. What’s your reasoning for this particular age cutoff? Do you run the full blood work panel on kids that young?”
I think for infants, there’s just a lot more considerations for care, and I don’t have pediatrics training. A lot of the testing is not possible. You can’t do breath testing with a 2-year-old either, but a lot of the testing is not only not available or not feasible because of the age, But a lot of it hasn’t been validated in kids who are that young. If a child is exclusively breastfed and certainly, they’re not swallowing capsules, a lot of the treatment interventions are challenging. It’s an area that I think requires specific expertise [from] someone that’s really focusing on it all the time, and that’s not me. I just don’t feel that that’s a population I can serve as well as I would like to [and] as high as my standards would demand. I do full blood panels on young kids, typically not down to 2, 4, or 5 years old, yes. [For] kids younger than that, I tend to be more selective and choose tests to run based on what’s going on.