So-- does this explain why I feel better when I eat my own cooking-- including questionable meat, eggs left out over night, and salad that has been sitting on the counter (with ranch) for 18 hours, but tend to get more autistic when I have to eat out of my mother-in-law's perfectly sterile, no-leftovers-allowed-past-the-next-day kitchen??
I wonder if going to Costa Rica and pouring myself a big old glass of water could be the cure I've been looking for...
Seriously, I am not being entirely tongue-in-cheek. Unless an individual happens to be seriously immunocompromised, human beings WERE NOT MEANT to live in a stringently clean, antiseptic environment. That's a myth, something that came about with the ad culture in the 19-teens and 19-twenties.
I wonder if that has something to do with why they say that kids who go out and eat dirt, have pets, et cetera are "less likely to suffer from autism spectrum disorders." I always figured that "suffer" was the operative word-- they were equally likely to have them, but more likely to learn to cope. Maybe they're less likely to GET them in the first place. I seriously wonder.
My father and at least one cousin on that side are assumed to have Asperger's, and I have no reason to question that assumption. They grew up running through the neighborhood, running through the woods, et cetera (as did I, at least on the weekends-- and I craved it the way a man with scurvy craves OJ) and they turned out to be basically functional, employed, HAPPY people. My maternal grandfather and a couple of his siblings are assumed to have had Asperger's (I believe correctly, since a couple of my GenY cousins are confirmed)-- and they grew up doing housework and going to church and worrying, a great deal, about What People Will Think. They were also basically functional and fully employed-- but they were "more autistic," and FAR LESS HAPPY, with many more comorbid mental health issues (and unhappy wives, and awful tempers).
Correlation does not imply causation; there are all kinds of possible causative factors there. In the meantime-- Aspies and auties, come over to my house. I'll make up a multiprobiotic casserole, and then we'll all go out and eat a peck of dirt.
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"Alas, our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar." --TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
10 Dec 2013, 2:37 am
