Food Intolerances and Autism

I've been asked if I can explain how food intolerances can cause issues for people on the Autism spectrum. Some of you are being fed misinformation that Autism is actually caused by toxins, gut bacteria and nutritional deficiencies. While any of these can exacerbate the sensory issues associated with Autism, they are not the cause of it. Autism can NOT be cured simply by changing a person's diet or giving them a detox program. At the most, you can alleviate the symptoms if a person does have a food intolerance, which in turn can make life easier for them by giving them one less discomfort to worry about. Discomforts which could be getting in the way of their ability to learn as they grow and mature by causing a constant internal annoyance or distraction.

Here's how it works:
Some people on the Autism spectrum have certain food intolerances, the same way as some people who are not on the Autism spectrum have the same food intolerances. Each person on the spectrum is as unique as an individual who is not on the spectrum, so some have issues with certain foods while others don't. In the case of a person on the Autism spectrum, the sense of discomfort from having a food intolerance can either be enhanced or it can be less noticeable compared to people with the same food intolerances who aren't on the spectrum. If the person on the spectrum who has the food intolerance is in discomfort, then it can consume their entire lives and actually get in the way of day to day learning and coping. Remove the foods that are causing the issue, and the discomfort will also be removed which frees the person's mind up for getting on with more important things, such as life skill development.

Will removing food groups help everyone on the Autism spectrum?
No. It will only benefit those who are having issues with the food types that were removed in the first place, the same as anyone who is not on the spectrum will only benefit from having food groups removed if they are actually intolerant to the foods being removed.

Picture it this way: Person A is on the Autism spectrum and has a gluten intolerance. Person B is also on the spectrum but does not have a gluten intolerance. Giving person A foods with gluten in them is going to cause them discomfort and will probably make life a little more harder to cope with. Removing the gluten will help this person because it's alleviating the discomfort of the symptoms of being gluten intolerant. Giving person B foods with gluten in them is not going to cause any issues, so there is no need to restrict them to a gluten free diet as it will have no benefit to them whatsoever. In fact, many people on the spectrum are incredibly fussy eaters, so restricting their diet further than they already try to restrict it themselves is not exactly making life easy for anyone, especially if they don't have an intolerance to warrant the restrictions being made in the first place.

What Causes Autism?
Autism begins at the moment of conception. It is caused by physical abnormalities in the brain structure. Whilst some parts of the brain for an individual on the spectrum contain excessive amounts of grey matter, other parts are lacking in grey matter. The areas that are in excess have to compensate for the areas that are lacking. The corpus callosum is also smaller for individuals on the spectrum, this restricts the flow of information between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. On top of this, the brain cells which would ordinarily die off from lack of use as an individual grows and learns do not appear to die off so readily for people on the spectrum This means that the brain is in a current state of learning, even after a permanent connection between two brain cells has been established as the best possible combination, the redundant cells are failing to step aside. NONE of this is caused by stomach bacteria or food intolerances. NONE of this can be cured by removing food groups or toxins or stomach bacteria. The best you can do is to identify IF there is an intolerance. If there is, then by all means, restrict the foods that are causing the intolerance. It will benefit the individual by removing an internal sensory issue. If there is NOT an intolerance, then DON'T torture the person by removing something that they'll actually be happy to eat! The best way to get a person on the spectrum to learn and grow at their own pace is to ensure they have as happy and as stress free an environment as is physically and emotionally possible to give them. Causing excess stress is NOT beneficial to their abilities to cope with the world.

So what should I do to help?
If you have a person in your care who is on the Autism spectrum and they DO have an intolerance to certain foods, you can help them by getting them used to eating foods that aren't going to cause them some kind of stress. In this case, restricting their diet will be beneficial in the long run.

If they DO NOT have an intolerance to certain foods, you can help them by NOT restricting their diet, especially if it's going to cause stress by force feeding them something that they don't like because it's blander than normal.

How should I respond to fanatics?
If you find someone who insists that Autism is caused by food intolerances and gut issues, you may find yourself hitting your head against a brick wall when they refuse to believe otherwise. Some people can't help themselves and once they've made their mind up, there's no swaying them regardless of how much factual information is offered to them. Don't stress yourself out over them too much. Have your say then move on, knowing that you've given your opinion and others who might be a part of the conversation as observers have heard your side of the argument. You can't help everyone, but you can help to give input into an otherwise one sided debate, and that in itself can help people to make up their minds for themselves.

Having said all this, I'll most likely be trolled by anti-vaccer fanatics and food intolerance fanatics after they've read this particular blog post. My policy on trolls is to not feed them no matter what they say. So if anyone wants to get on their soap box and tell the world how much of a horrible person I am for writing this blog, do so with the knowledge that I don't really care what you think or say. I'm happy with my post just the way it is and it won't be changed because of some cyber-bully trying to force everyone to follow their own wildly inaccurate misinformation.

Life before and after Asperger's

For those of us who grew up in the decades before the 90s, the diagnoses of Asperger's just didn't exist when we were kids. I sometimes wonder how different life would have been for me or my brother had we actually had some early intervention in our younger years.

I was always labelled the shy one, or known as the quiet weird kid at school. I wasn't shy, I was just incapable of communicating most of the time. If I was asked a question, my brain would find a dozen ways to interpret it, so I'd have no way of knowing what the correct response would be. I couldn't process an answer if I didn't know which way I was supposed to process the question in the first place. My brain still does this so I'm often giving answers to a completely different yet similar question to what I've been asked, which usually just confuses the person who asked the question in the first place. Sometimes I have to clarify what the question is actually about before I can answer, which further confuses the person who has asked it as they don't see the multiple ways of interpreting it the same way as I do. The person who's asked the question might think I'm trying to complicate things, when in reality I'm trying to simplify things before I can begin the process of formulating an answer for them. Having grey matter distributed unevenly throughout the brain can cause a lot of complication for otherwise normal thought processes. The extra brain cells in some areas can mean extra possibilities for some thoughts, while the lack of brain cells in other areas can mean less possibilities for other thoughts. I'm not shy, I'm just confused a lot as my brain inputs information and then has trouble understanding how to process it. This can make life very difficult at times, especially in social situations where you're expected to have immediate responses during conversation. I've overcome a lot of the social issues as I've grown older and the extra neural connections have finally decided which combinations work best together, but I'm still uncomfortable in front of new people and feel out of place when there's a conversation happening that I am physically incapable of keeping up with due to all the extra thought processes happening in my scone while everyone else happily moves from one topic to the next.

Asperger's sux at times, and I'll always be stuck with it. Those who know me well actually like my company. Those who don't know me will either get to know me and my eccentricities as a good thing, or just decide I'm a weird person they'd like to avoid contact with at all costs. Either way, I'm happy to be almost 48 years old with the worst of the mind hurdles behind me. I've found a group of people who are comfortably happy to be associated with me and who I'm comfortably happy to be associated with. Most of them live in Facebook land, which is a bonus because we don't have to make actual eye contact to converse with each other and I actually have time to think before I put my two cents into the conversation. I have met one or two of them, which went well because we all knew what to expect from each other after having gotten to know each other in thought over quite a good amount of time. I even got engaged to one of them last year after our brains slowly fell in love via Facebook interactions over a number of years. We now raise our own blended family together.

Having a house full of people on the Autism spectrum has had its head banging on the wall moments for us at times, but that's another story altogether. We have a happy family, and that's all that matters. We have happy children who live in an age where early intervention and extra support in schooling is now a reality. They still have trouble understanding how to process the world, the same as us. But they're no longer shunned as weirdos or just fobbed off as being shy. We're the strange, eccentric family that lives in the middle of the street that doesn't interact with their neighbours. We aren't being snobs by not interacting with you. We're just not capable of knocking on your door and introducing ourselves as easily as you might be able to with us. That's the other thing about Autism and Asperger's, we aren't always capable of initiating the contact, but we will actively make an effort to join in if we have a friendly invitation and don't get fobbed off as weirdos when we do go out of our way to make that effort.

We now live in a society that supports people on the Autism spectrum and my kids are growing up with the security of being accepted for who they are. It's also helping us oldies to accept who we are, after years of not knowing why we were different and why we couldn't interact the way the other kids at school did.

Our kids will always have their Autism and Asperger's, but luckily they won't have to go through all the crap that we did in our younger years.