Parents question concerning dairy and gluten free diet

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Perhaps it would help to plot what he eats visually on a large graph, to help spot correlations with his health.

He used to like rice. Now almost all the basic stuff in food has gone. It’s now down to mashed potatoe. He wants that for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner etc. Can’t get enough of it. At least it’s something. I don’t know if your diet consists of asian food, but the asian kitchen is just adorable with all its dishes – I don’t know if I’d put grilled meatballs in there?? Same with Indian food. Not a lot of gluten and dairy at all in those dishes.



I know there’s a lot of awful information out there. I’m considering myself smart enough to be able to shield off that kind of BS. However, there’s always someone out there willing to try so it’s a good thing to constantly try to inform people. Just last week Amazon had to withdraw a book on how to ”cure autism” because it contained information which I believe was that bleach cure method.
There are also numerous videos on youtube with autistic people talking about lifting some fog from their mind by changing their diet. I’m not looking so deep into all of that bio-med and diet as my wife is. I’m not sure what celiac disease is to be honest.



Yes, we are giving him some vitamins to keep him on track. It became apparent that something was missing from his diet when he constantly got sick.



It’s just crazy how some people can be so highly regarded and seen as experts when there’s no one out there who knows the full solution to the autism question. They call themselves doctors. One thing that I believe is one of the most desperate attempts are the DAN!-doctors. Those bio-med suppliments and checklists should be put in the same category as bioresonance therapy – absolute garbage.








I think this is the answer that I should try to get across to my wife…



I consider myself NT but I’m not sure at all. I’ve been having these kind of feelings about being different since 1996 when I was chatting on the internet (mirc) and I noticed I just couldn’t keep a conversation going – at all. This became a big issue for me and I’ve always kept my ears open to learn from people around me. The frustrating thing is I can’t find the strategy to make it work. I just get exhausted from having to small talk. I get nothing out of it at all, however I can enjoy hearing others do the talking. And then I did this Rdos test (I belive that’s the name for it?) and ended up with something like 114p for AS and 106p NT. I asked my wife to do the test and she did. As she did the test she was making remarks on how many things were typical for me. Then as she showed me her results I understood that my results were not just a little bit off – they were awfully off. Her results were 8p AS and like… I don’t remember but 180p NT probably. My profile is a crap AS person and a crap NT person…

Went a bit off topic there, but I really enjoyed reading your post. Especially about the stims. Some stims are for fun? That’s really cute. I think I have found a stim that I haven’t been aware of. My jacket has rubber zippers on the pockets and not long ago I noticed they had lost their pathern because my fingers had been constantly rubbing them whenever I was wearing that jacket. Perhaps I should post a picture to show how ridiculous it is. I am not aware of that I’m doing it before I start thinking about it. Then I’m at it again just a couple of seconds later. Like a tic.





One of his cousins (supposedly NT but his half brother is the one who’s probably ASD) is in a picky period now. My little brother was the same with eating. It’s so easy to forget or just see what you have infront of you. Sometimes I just don’t know what a ”normal” child is suppose to do. And most of the times I think the NT children are the ones with the mental problems. My boy never touches any other kid or make trouble. The other kids are in his face and one is constantly bulling the others. I even found one of the kids, one who is completely nuts, in the process of strangling another kid one day when I came to pick up my boy.

I hesitated to post, because I've never tried gluten/casein free myself (it always seemed too difficult).
But this funny thing happened to me recently, thought I'd share for what it's worth.

I was trying to eat healthily so I started eating more whole grains, like wholemeal bread and brown rice. Just got chronic diarrhoea, painful joints and low mood for my trouble.

Read this book by Dr Grundy(?) called the Plant Paradox, about the problem with lectins(?) And an article about how glucosamine supplements bind gluten before they can pass through the gut and cause trouble.

So I axed the whole grains, went back to white bread, took a glucosamine tablet, and that straight away cleared up the diarrhoea Still got a painful tendon in my foot, though, so...

I would hate to have a gluten free or dairy free diet imposed upon me, especially because it has become some kind of fad among hipsters.

I've been given gluten free cookies on occasion at someone's home and they were all, without exception, pretty bad. Not once did I want a second cookie and mainly just ate the first cookie to be polite.

While I don't eat cheese, I do like to use milk and butter in my cooking.

I suspect that both could gluten-free and dairy-free could work but only by sticking to foods that just don't have gluten or dairy products in them. But that would be a rather limited and boring diet.

For example, Indian food uses ghee which is a dairy product. Chinese food uses breading for some items but would otherwise probably be your best bet.

The worst, I think, is to try to replace dairy products or gluten products in your food. The reason those are used in the first place is that they work very well.

Unless there is a very specific medical condition requiring one to avoid gluten or dairy products, trying to follow some popular fad diet is just plain stupid.

I ran out of lactaid about 8 months ago and didn't bother to get any more. I need to eat less ice cream anyway so now I just limit myself to about a scoop which I can handle.

One of my favorite deserts is a lime sherbet with sliced strawberries. For that, it needs to be a pretty strong lime taste. It works great with Kemp's lime sherbet but not much with Blue Bell's lime sherbet.

How is it good judgment to suddenly put a kid on some fad diet to try to solve some problem totally unrelated to that diet?

Hint: any time someone suggests a fad diet, punch them in the nose as hard as you can. Maybe they will get the message.

It isn't just autistic people who say that. Lots of NTs who have decided they are gluten sensitive say the exact same thing.

It goes back to what I wrote earlier: if your child happens to be gluten sensitive, eliminating gluten will help him by making him feel better. If he isn't gluten sensitive, it won't do a thing. This isn't unique to ASD.

I also want to emphasize how much doing the wrong thing can backfire. I know more people who can't eat soy than I know who cannot have casein (from milk products). Be mindful that in following off the shelf advice you aren't actually making your child sicker.

Celiac disease can be medicially diagnosed. It runs in our family, but my ASD son does not have it. Both him and my husband ARE, however, sensitive to soy.

As normal as it is for kids to narrow their food choices at your child's age, it could also mean he instinctively knows some of these substitute foods make him feel bad.

I used to remove grease soaked batter off fried chicken. Someone pointed out to my parents that that was a very healthy eating habit.

It's good judgment because it won't kill him like a bleach bath would. So many reports saying food and the gut COULD have something to do with autism and how it develops. I'm not totally convinced there's any connection but my wife has a feeling there could be something and wants to explore the field. If you think about it there are plenty of things you could eat or drink that would have an effect on your brain.

However, I'm not totally convinced about it and I feel it's limiting us a lot in life - and we shouldn't be trying to limit ourselves as we already have a lot to deal with. That's the way I feel about it right now. I am also scared that I might ruin something we've started by wanting an easy way out. So I started this thread to see if any parents out there could tell me their experience. I didn't want to ask people who had already bought into the idea.

What I can understand from all the things being written here now is that gluten/dairy-free diets only helps with the medical condition of allergy and not autism - and that kind of answer is actually quite comforting.

If you have autism you may be able to draw correlations based on memory. Some of us can do that. But, normal people either can't remember, or introduce unwanted bias into their recollections, so they need objective records.

And, please remember this is your child, not a science experiment. Its just as likely that a gluten-free, dairy-free and a whatever else free diet can make an already difficult situation for the child, an even worse one.

In a recent episode of Big Bang Theory Leonard realized that his childhood was a series of science experiments.

I don't have a great working memory as described by some folks here. I can however remember absolutely stupid details that has nothing to do with the big picture. One example would be a classmate shows up 8:52 for a class that starts at 8:00. For some reason I just remember that irrelevant time he shows up. I later hear him say that he has two options, take an early bus and wait for an hour at school before class starts or grab a later bus and show up late for class. The following week the teacher asks if anyone knows where that guy is I just say straight out: - he will show up 8:52. Of course he shows up 8:52 and all of a sudden I am Nostradamus himself
But yeah, I don't think I could do that stuff out of memory. Can hardly even remember what I ate - or if I ate at all.





He's not a science experiment I am just doing whatever I can to help him reach his full potential.