Diet and AS - gluten/milk free approach?

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Anyone try any diet changes? Just looking into everything right now for my teenager. She did have a milk allergy when she was a baby which I read is very common among Aspies. Thanks!

I apparently had a mild lactose intolerance when I was a baby/small child but it was nothing serious. I certainly don't have it now as I treat cheese in particular as a staple food. I have heard that it can be common among Aspies but am not quite sure whether it is true. But then I also have IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) which may have caused my mild intolerance to milk and cheese in the first place, something else that I have heard is more common in Aspies.

Don't have any allergy's, but really looking at a diet for anyone can benifit someone but really you want to go to the people who know about it, to select a diet that probably best to go with that person.

I've never had a milk allergy. I've had friends ask me when i was little if i did.

I do wonder if people who are lactose intolerant know they can each cheese. All cheese is lactose free. Just ask Alton Brown.

So far as diet goes, its important to remember that every child is different. Some children are gluten and casein intolerant, though many are not. We ourselves and our three children(all AS) are not.

For further reading:
http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=297&a=3368

In conjunction to attention to diet, all children on the spectrum benefit from structured routine and consistent aproach across all settings.

As IBS was mentioned, I'll post further on this under a new thread and will apologise in advance if IBS has already been covered elsewhere.

Best Wishes

tried the gfcf diet here~only person it made a difference for was me....evidently, i don't digest lactase very well at all

I'd like to try it. When I was a child I had several food allergies, including wheat. I don't think I would have the will power to stick to such a diet for very long tho, I love fast food. Also, I have looked at the gluten free items in the health food secition of the grocery story and they seem fairly expensive. I also have yet to find a substitute for milk that I like, I have tried soy milk and recently rice milk but I prefer the taste of cows milk. I read somewhere that ultra pasturized goat milk is ok to drink on a casin free diet, has anyone else heard this?

And finally, I live with my parrents who would probably think I was nuts if I suddenly stopped eating most foods.

I'm starting to find I get tummy cramps after eating ice-cream or some kinds of yoghurt but I can still drink milk. Not sure if that means lactose intolerance or not.

I just tried the diet myself for awhile and I'm debating whether to continue with it. The biggest problem is that it's very hard to stick to all the time (to be a 'purist') especially if you eat out a lot. For a lot of people though, from what I've read, it's definitely worth the effort because the benefits can be phenomenal.

For me, I'm trying to figure out if it was actually working. I thought I was seeing great results at first - better eye contact, more sociable, talking more... but then I cheated on the diet too many times and my functioning went back to where I started. A few ups and downs like that... then I noticed I was seeing the positive results at times when it didn't make sense because I hadn't been following the diet very closely, and other times when I was following it I wasn't getting results within the 'usual' time frame. Then I started to wonder, is the positive stuff really from the diet? Or is it just a normal cycle that I previously (pre-diet) wrote off as good days and bad days? I'm thinking that might be it, so I think I'm going to abandon the diet for at least a couple of months to see if I keep getting days with the same increase in functioning and that'll answer the question.

But that's just me. I'd say go for the diet if you're willing to put a reasonable amount of effort into it and see what happens. Who knows, it might end up being the best thing that ever happened to your daughter.

That is definitely NOT lactose intolerance as those 2 dairy items are 2 of the lowest in lactose. I'm sorry to say that that's exactly how my milk allergy started out. I was allergic to milk starting when I was ~18-19 years old. Now for some reason, my milk allergy has disappeared. I think maybe my last pregnancy did it. Hormone surges can cause changes in allergies. I will be 30 in 2 days. After 11 years of not eating/drinking dairy products, I have to say the smell and taste of milk is horribly disgusting to me. I do like yogurt and cheese, though. Ice cream even tastes gross to me.

I am the food allergy queen. My only food allergies are milk and eggs myself (and not really milk anymore, but still eggs) but my kids and nephews have/had tons of food allergies. Well, 2 of my kids did/do. My oldest had a bunch, but outgrew them all (thank God!) He is an aspie (not yet formally diagnosed.) My middle NT son never had any allergies, and my youngest 15 month old, who also shows signs of being an aspie, has a TON of food allergies. But NOT milk, interestingly enough. And while he IS allergic to wheat, he is not gluten intolerant or allergic to gluten, just wheat. He can even have spelt, which is a species of wheat (in the US we have bread wheat, Triticum aestivum, and pasta wheat, T. durum, but spelt, T. spelta, while closely related to bread wheat, is less common.) He is also fine w/ the other glutenous grains, barley, rye, oats. I carry epi-pens for the baby's peanut and possibly nut allergies. He had a severe reaction when he was a few months old after his brother ate a peanut butter sandwich. We don't have nuts in the house anymore and no one in our family eats them outside of the home either.

BTW, only aged cheeses have no lactose, pp who said all cheeses are lactose free. Soft cheeses, like mozerella, cream cheese, brie, etc, etc still have a lot of lactose. My dh is lactose intolerant, and believe me, it's a problem when he eats pizza!

By the way, when I was figuring out which foods my nursing baby was allergic to in the beginning, I went completely gluten and casein free for at least a month. I did feel like I felt better, more alert, more at ease in public, but I didn't feel like the difference was major enough to stick to a GF diet once I found I could eat barley, rye, etc, without it affecting the baby.

Last edited by wendytheweird on 19 Dec 2006, 10:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

Oh, another thing I wanted to mention is that I went to a doctor for my stomach problems when I first started having my allergy issues. THe first doctor I saw said I was lactose intolerant, which became obvious to me that I wasn't shortly after once I started reading more about it and the fact that the lactase pills didn't help me. The second doctor told me I had IBS. But I quit eating milk and egg and all derivatives and my symptoms disappeared. I later tested positive at the allergist's. My sister was also told she had IBS when it was actually food allergies.

Something for those of you w/ IBS to think about and look into.

We tried the GF/CF diet with our son when he was five. It didn't really seem to do much to improve his problems at the time. We changed to enzymes, and used them for about three years. We thought that they seemed to help, but it's really hard to know what helps, and/or if it's just a placebo effect.

This is all great information. I could always take my daughter to an allergist and have the testing done so I wouldn't be guessing if a milk allergy is there. When she had colic at 2 weeks old and while I was nursing, I went on a total milk/whey free diet and her colic stopped in one week. I think I went overboard drinking milk when I was pregnant and after my child was born. Had her tested again she was about 2 and she seemed milk allergy-free.

We eat a very healthy diet now, weight is normal but do drink lots of milk, and eat moz. cheese sticks, lots of yogurt so it would be hard to stop all that. Oh yes and whipped cream last night on pumpkin pie!

I don't even know if an allergy is there now but this whole thing about allergies and AS interested me. So many web sites mentioned the pattern of teens with AS often had a mill allergy in their infant years.

Just so you know, allergy testing is not all that accurate. It's especially inaccurate in kids under 4, but for adults, false positives and negatives are common. I sometimes test positive for my allergies and sometimes I don't. THey always bother me, though. My oldest son tested negative to everything including soy. He had an anaphylactic reaction to soy once, so I don't trust allergy tesing at all. The best way to find out if you are allergic to a food is to cut it completely out of your diet for a minimum of 2 weeks (read labels carefully) then try a bit of that food and see what happens. Keep a food diary during the process to write down what she ate, how much and how she felt for the next week or so. My infant takes 5 days to react to wheat, so it's not always an immediate reaction. His wheat allergy is not likely an IgE allergy so it will probably not show up in testing. Allergists only test for IgE allergies, and there are plenty of other types of allergies. IgE allergies are the ones that are life threatening that you hear about, but other types can cause more mild symptoms, like GI upset, eczema, sleep disturbance, mood problems, etc.

I thought I had lactose intolerance when I was a teen, I had severe nausea with ice cream and diarrhea with milk. But after a while realized it was milk fat and excess of any animal fat that I can't handle. I don't know if it's gall bladder "thing" or what. I don't have the reaction to ice cream anymore but it does set of cramps. I was raised on 2% milk and can't drink whole milk without getting a lot of gas and "hyperactive" bowels. Cheese and yogurt don't bother me at all.
I eat a very rich, fattening diet and my cholesterol is great. So, I probably just flush all that stuff out.

I would like to try the diet on my 3 year old (as yet undiagnosed but is looking AS like his 6yr. old brother). but I don't know what to feed him!! !! Going casein free seems do-able (is that a word??) but I don't know how to go gluten-free!! !! I have been checking the labels and even the rice milk has traces of gluten in it and supposedly even a trace is harmful. Also, how can you go without bread??? My kids LIVE on PB&J! Also, does anyone know about the red dye??? I have heard that it is bad in the autism/AS kids. My 3yr old does seem to have a problem with that. A LONG time ago we started to give only apple juice because anything red made him sick! He has a VERY sensitive gut!