Most people, including health care professionals, don’t put much thought into food or nutrition. When they think about food, it’s usually about how it tastes, looks, smells, or feels in their mouths. Typically the focus of family gatherings, holidays, and parties, food gives us a reason to get together and socialize. We don’t often stop to consider what it actually does in our bodies. But when you have a child with autism or a related disorder, it’s critical to understand that food is more than just something that brings us pleasure. What your child eats can have a major positive or negative impact on his brain and bodily functions. Therefore, it’s important for you to know exactly how food impacts your child. Both you and your child’s health care team need to recognize that without proper nutrition, your child will not function at his full potential and will not fully benefit from his therapy sessions. Following are just a few examples how a poor diet can negatively affect your child:

Brain development and function. Your child’s brain is highly dependent on the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fatty acids, and calories found in food. For instance, if your child is not getting enough of certain key nutrients, it compromises his neurotransmitter production, the synthesis of his brain’s myelin sheath, glucose oxidation, and his visual and cognitive processing. If he’s consuming too much sugar and artificial additives, it can compromise his brain function and contribute to behavior and learning problems.

Detoxification processes. Your child must consume zinc, selenium, magnesium, beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin E, and choline to help his liver naturally rid his body of harmful neurotoxins like mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, dioxins, PCBs, pesticides, and solvents. Exposure to these neurotoxins can damage your child’s brain and central nervous system, which in turn could cause him to have a lower IQ, learning disabilities, attention deficit, hyperactivity, impulsivity, compulsive behavior, aggression, violence, speech difficulties, memory impairment, motor dysfunction, developmental delays, and mental retardation.

Gastrointestinal (GI) health. The GI tract is highly dependent on the amino acid glutamine and requires a constant supply of vitamins and minerals for normal bowel function. If your child has nutritional deficiencies, it can impair new cellular growth in his gastrointestinal tract, which in turn compromises his ability to absorb the nutrients he consumes in foods. When this occurs, it makes other nutritional deficiencies that impact the brain and body even worse.

Immune system function. Our immune system relies on vitamin C, vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin D, B vitamins, iron, selenium, zinc, and bioflavonoids to function at its optimum level. A poor diet puts your child at greater risk for developing allergies as well as frequent ear infections, acute and chronic illnesses, and upper respiratory infections. If your child is continually fighting off illness, he will inevitably miss school and therapy sessions, which will further compromise his response to treatment.

Erythropoiesis. Erythropoiesis is the process by which red blood cells are produced,usually in the bone marrow. Red blood cells are the vehicles that transport oxygen to  our brains and throughout our bodies. Key nutrients that support this process include iron, vitamin B6, copper, folate, vitamin B12, vitamin C, and vitamin E. Dietary deficiencies in these nutrients can cause anemia, which can lead to irritability, headaches, loss of appetite, lethargy, hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and poor school performance.

Nutritional Problems are Common with Autism. A large percentage of children with autism, Asperger’s, PDD-NOS, ADD, and ADHD struggle with one or more of the following nutritional problems:

• poor diet
• nutritional deficiencies
• feeding problems
• food allergies
• food intolerances
• chemical sensitivities
• gastrointestinal disorders
• exposure to neurotoxins
• frequent illnesses and infections
• negative drug and nutrient interactions

Children with autism also often have dysfunctional immune systems and inadequate detoxification processes. These nutritional problems place a huge burden on your child and are slowly eating away at his health and ability to function to his highest potential. In fact, I’m amazed that many kids with autism and nutritional problems are able to function at all, much less go to school, sit still, focus, process information, learn, and participate in therapy sessions. As each of your child’s nutritional problems is treated and resolved, his health and behavior will improve. Your child will function better and respond better to all facets of his treatment.

NUTRITIONAL INTERVENTIONS USED TO TREAT AUTISM
If you’ve already begun investigating nutritional interventions as a way to help treat your child’s autism, you probably know that there are many different ones out there, such as restrictive diets, high-dose vitamins, supplements, and more. What you may not know is that specific nutritional interventions are usually designed to target specific issues a child may have, such as improving cognitive functioning, or treating physical problems like food allergies, GI disorders, and immune and detoxification system dysfunction. Here’s a list of the most common nutrition interventions used in the autism community:

Diets

• Gluten Free Casein Free
• Elimination/Challenge
• Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD)
• Rotation
• Antifungal
• Feingold

Basic Nutrition Supplements

• multivitamins and minerals
• essential fatty acids

High-Dose Vitamins

• vitamin B6

Nutrients, Herbs, and Nutraceuticals

• probiotics
• antifungals
• digestive enzymes
• amino acids
• dimethylglycine (DMG)
• trimethylglycine (TMG)
• coenzyme Q10
• phosphatidylcholine
• bioflavonoids
• proanthocyandins
• N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC)
• alpha-lipoic acid (ALA)
• antioxidants
• pyridoxal 5 phosphate (P5P)
• carnosine
• carnitine
• glutathione
• vitamin B12

Many of these nutritional interventions are controversial, and the medical community doesn’t encourage parents to try them because there’s little science-based research available on them. In fact, most of the current research on nutritional interventions to treat autism is anecdotal, which means it’s based on nonscientific observations or studies. In the medical world, only double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials can prove the effectiveness of a proposed nutrition theory (i.e., Can a gluten-free, casein-free diet improve autistic symptoms?). There are several reasons for this lack of scientific evidence in the area of nutritional interventions:

Scientific studies are extremely difficult to perform. Getting approval for and performing human studies, especially on children with developmental disabilities, is a huge challenge. A scientific study on the effectiveness of a gluten-free, casein-free diet, for example, would require gathering together a group of hundreds of children diagnosed with autism and making sure all of their treatment approaches remained consistent while changing just one variable—their diet. The study would need to be conducted blindly, without the children, parents, therapists, and investigators knowing which group of children in the study are on the diet and which are not. The complexity of conducting this kind of scientific-based research study is prohibitive, so anecdotal based research is conducted instead.

Research in the area of autism is fairly new. It was only in December 2006 that the U.S. government finally recognized autism as a national problem and authorized $1 billion of federal funding for autism-related research. However, conducting science based research studies takes time. It could take another ten or even twenty years for the medical community to agree on the interpretation of the results of these studies and apply them in the real world of treating children with autism. If you have a child diagnosed with autism today, that’s simply too long for you to wait.

Funding is scarce. Lack of private and federal funding is the primary reason why so few science-based research studies have been conducted on nutritional interventions. Of the $1 billion the federal government has made available for autism research, none of it is designated for nutritional interventions research. As long as funding for research on nutritional interventions remains scarce, lack of scientific evidence will continue to be an issue. It’s important to remember that just because most of the research on nutritional interventions is anecdotal instead of scientific, that doesn’t mean that they don’t work or shouldn’t be considered when creating a treatment plan for autism. Hopefully, adequate funding will become available in the near future that will enable us to conduct science-based research on nutritional interventions that anecdotal evidence suggests is effective in reducing the symptoms of autism. This will help cement nutrition therapy’s place as part of mainstream autism treatment.

SOURCE: Eating for Autism: The 10-Step Nutrition Plan to Help Treat Your Child’s Autism, Asperger’s, or ADHD

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