Can diet really improve ASD?

[Ilona33]

I heard gluten free and casein free diet can help improve the behaviour of ASD children. Anyone else heard this?

it has worked for dd1.

she is 5.7, ASD (quite severe)

we put her on a GF/CF diet when she was just under 3, following a Sunderland Urine test. Her results were inconclusive for casein, but we trialled CF and she showed a response (we have since discovered dh is dairy intolerant, and so is dd2, so it may be that rather than the processing issue which dd1 was reacting to). her results for gluten by-products were off the scale.

within 3 weeks of starting her on the diet, she showed an increase in language use (had been verbal before, but totally echolalic. she started incresing own generated language) and also started showing an appropriate pain response.

Int eh years since then, dd1 has continued to go from strength to strength, which is not to say that she isn't still severely ASD, but her language has really come on, and bottom line, she is a lot less dreamy and absent, iyswim? and has a lot more interest and ability to be interested in the world around her.

a lot of info in this book

It's worth a try imo - you have to do it strictly for 3 months before the gluten/casein fully leaves their system to see if it has made a difference. I did it with DS and it made no difference but i'm still glad I tried it. I have heard that kids with allergies/bowel probs can respond really well to this diet and ds is not affected in those ways so maybe that's why it didn't affect him.

It was totally life changing for DS2. It remains the single best decision I have ever made in my entire life.
( except possibly marrying DH and having children )

I haven't got a child with ASD, but I am interested in nutrition. There was a thread on here recently with a poster called mumslife, whose 4 year old daughter developed autism after an MMR booster injection. mumslife was told that nothing could be done. A friend told her to try a diet, I think it was "allergy induced autism diet". After 9 months her daughter had no more symptoms. mumslife cannot say if it was the diet that did it, but it is a possibility. The thread is here
www.mumsnet.com/Talk?topicid=special_needs&threadid=902844-MMR-film&pagingOff=1#18438028

I agree with nightcat that the GAPS diet (based on the SCD specific carbohydrate diet) is worth looking at. GAPS does not allow soya. GFCF is good but as far as I know, it does allow soya. Soya has been heavily promoted, and is now in practically everything, so it is difficult to avoid it, and soya milk is often recommended for vegitarians etc. However, there is much evidence that soya is harmful.

www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1173510/Why-soya-super-food-all.html
www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/jul/25/food.foodanddrink
www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=soybean-fertility-hormone-isoflavones-genistein
www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/

GFCF is the number one used diet for autism. SCD is the number two diet for autism, and GAPS is a refinement of the SCD diet.

vegetarians

Pagwatch

can you say more about how things changed on hte diet for your DS, did you take supplements as well? do you still do the diet or can you now relax it?

(friends son of 11 has recently started gfcf so very interested in how long it takes to help etc)

hi
he started at 3. He had regressed quite violently, was non verbal, agressive, not sleeping, dark circles under his eyes, up to 40 tantrums per day, very fixed, very angry, very few food choices.

We pulled dairy first. He re potty trainned withing the week. His tantrums reduced. He started talking again. He started sleeping through the night. His aggression pretty much disappeared.

He is 13 now and still gfcf. The diet has changed in that now small infringemnts make less difference and he is eating more food.

We have added supplements. Always a good multi vit and mineral mix. He has had EFAs for much of that time. We have toyed with nutritionists from time to time and some supplements help more than others.

TBH I care less now about the loss of the most severe of his ASD symptoms. He will always have severe behaviours.
To me, on reflection, I think the biggest benefit of the GFCF diet is that he stopped being in pain. He was never able to explain that he was in pain, still can't. But I know now that he was and that much of his aggression etc was as a result of being really uncomfortable nearly all the time.
I would do it all over again, even though it is a nightmare at time, because I love knowing that he feels better.
he told me once "tummy all better" and it was fab.

He is much much happier now. And the talking thing is bloody marvellous too
I hope that makes sense

BTW. It ended up being more complicated than just gfcf. He has other more severe triggers. Artificial sugars for example are hellish in their effect on him

Sorry.
He was actually worse for the first couple of weeks. He also did the refusing to eat at all thing.

I would say it took two weeks to see first benefits in sleeping and calmer.
Two months in he was a different child.

thank you. and good point about the artificial sweeteners.

not sure if you have already done stuff on retained reflexes - we did and made a sngnificnat improvement.

My understanding is that those who see the greatest improvements are with children who are at the moderate or severe end of the spectrum, and that the younger the child is, the greater the effect. Casein takes about a week to leave the system, but gluten can take several months (longer if the child is older).

My son was given a mild autism diagnosis at 22 months. We had him gfcf and also msg and aspartame free since then (those four items are the basis of the allergy induced autism diet (AiA)). He's now almost three and he has made some great progress over the last year but it's difficult to say if that's related to the diet or if he's just growing up, as his symptoms have always been very mild. I tried him with goats milk for about six weeks over christmas and I thought I detected an increase in toe walking, but it could have been my overactive imagination - the effects are that subtle with my son. We also had his urine profiled at Sunderland, and the results were inconclusive.

Sunderland autism research unit have changed their name by the way, you can now find them here:
www.espa-research.org.uk

Marilyn Le Breton's book is a good introduction to the diet:
www.amazon.co.uk/Diet-Intervention-Autism-Implementing-Practical/dp/1853029351/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s= books&qid=1269780744&sr=1-2

and she also runs a website which has a lot of resources and a forum for asking (in my case stupid) questions, although it is £2.50 a month:
www.respectrum.co.uk

I think it's certainly worth trying the diet, but but warned that a lot of the 'gluten/milk free' products available in supermarkets are not actually 100% gluten free so you might be inadvertently undoing all your hard work.