How to Help Your Autistic Child with Nutrition

First, I want to say that this is a speculative article.  I have no training in medicine or pharmaceuticals, and while I used to be a teacher, I never worked with autistic children.  But this also means that I have no vested interests, so I might be able to take a more objective view.And I see that the recent epidemic of childhood-onset autism is mirrored by a similar epidemic of attention deficit disorder.  And since scientific studies have shown that food allergies can cause ADD/ADHD, food allergies might also be a cause of childhood-onset autism.

More specifically, in 1974 Dr.Benjamin Feingold, a pediatrician and allergist, published Why Your Child Is Hyperactive, which presented a program to identify and remedy food allergies in children.  If your child has a food allergy, you already know it can cause dangerous physical problems.  What Dr. Feingold discovered was that food allergies could also cause mental problems.  He also discovered that chemical additives could have the same allergic effect.  

Although Dr. Feingold's studies were about ADD/ADHD, in many ways autism is the opposite side of the same coin.  Hyperactive children get too excited, while autistic children become too withdrawn.  Furthermore, children are developing autism after they start eating solid food.

I was born in 1950 and grew up before preservatives and food additives were commonly used.  There were also few fast-food restaurants, and we kids didn't have much access to heavily sugared and caffeinated drinks.  So while we could be squirrelly, no one I knew ever exhibited the kind of ADD/ADHD symptoms I saw when I was teaching in the 1970's and '80's.  And I never heard about any child having autism.

I seriously doubt that brain chemistry can change so radically in less than thirty years, so the cause is probably environmental.  And what has changed the most in our environment since 1950 is the quality of our food.