Aspergers and Diet

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First found out about the connections between diet and mental aswell as physical health 18 years ago, but it took me a long time to cut out wheat/gluten for more than a few weeks or months at a time. I have been gf for two and a half years now; sugar free ( apart from the odd accidental/minor exposure ), for nearly eight months, and I am currently dairy and coffee free again, but I chop and change on those two still.

Cutting out gluten and sugar seems to stave off the worst/deepest depressions, anxiety, and mood disorder/manic-depression, aswell as improving sleep, and making headaches a fairly rare event.

Cutting out all food opioid peptides, ( gluten and casein ), and reducing carbohydrates too, seems to improve my executive skills no end, helps me to concentrate/focus on here and now and practicalities, at the same time as caring about other people, ( previously I only used to be able to do one at a time, usually the former ), and something weird; since going gf I have almost totally stopped fantasising, whereas I was a real daydream-junkie before, ( ever since age 11 or so I spent increasingly large amounts of time lying/sitting around daydreaming long intense convoluted stories for hours and sometimes days in a row ).

Bags under eyes is one of the classic food intolerance symptoms, along with addiction/cravings for the food in question.

It takes 3-4 weeks for casein to leave the body, but up to 26 weeks for gluten ( the liver stocks it longest ), and the gliadin antibodies which react to the gliadin in gluten take up to two years to return to "normal" levels, ( which is 5-8 per unit, whereas someone with gluten-intolerance who is eating gluten will have as many as 200-300 per unit ), so the general auto-immune system inflammation which is responsible for many of the ill-effects ( eg. inflammatory cytokines produced by the body in response to disease or allergens can/do cause depression, or "sickness behaviour" ), won't disappear overnight.

Having said that when I first went on an exclusion diet the results of just 4 days "gluten and dairy and sugar and caffeine and starchy carbohydrate free" fast ( I ate nothing but a few apples the first time ), were so extraordinary that I couldn't miss them; I felt as if I had been living in a shopping centre under a building site next to an airport over a motorway for years, without realising it, and suddenly all the noise had stopped. I cried with joy, relief, and gratitude, literally.

There does seem to be some sort of overlap between the two populations, ( of autist and auto-immune disordered ). Studies show that certain autoimmune system disorders and a certain, significant, percentage of cases of autism are correlated to some extent. For instance a higher number of mothers of children with autism have celiac disease. And it is possible that food opioid peptides have more effect on certain neurological states/conditions than on others.

Ditto to others' remarks about the mood-disordering effects of sugar, aswell as dairy and gluten. And I definitely notice that I have a lot more energy and mental clarity and confidence when eating very little or no starchy carbohydrates. There are various reasons why this might be so, one of them is that carbohydrate digestion and absorption takes priority over, or perturbs, lipid metabolism, and it is well known that people on the A spectrum have "fragile" lipid metabolisms/processes, which impacts on mental/cognitive functioning, aswell as mood.

Diet is intimately linked with mood and cognitive function, and it is now known that as many as 1% of the population are celiac, ( whether GI or non-GI type ), that between 10-15% of the population have elevated levels of gliadin-antibodies, and sugar is a painkiller drug like morphine, highly addictive, and being a concentrated carbohydrate will disturb lipid metabolism.

NB. Some say that the people who experience gastro-intestinal problems, the minority of those with gluten-intolerance, are "lucky", because they tend to realise much sooner that something about their diet is harmful, whereas those with little no GI symptoms don't notice the insidious mental/cognitvie decline, or don't associate their mood issues with diet. Gluten-intolerance-induced-neuropathy is a clinically recognised problem now though.

I certainly didn't notice any of this until I was almost thirty, after hypomania and increasing depression had resulted in my crashing and burning out of regular employment/stable life of any sort and several friendships.

I used to adore sweet stuff, icecreams and pizzas, maltesers, and danish pastries and marzipan, and cheese, and chocolate and fresh crusty chewy bread, and toast and marmelade and more pizzas. Those were my favourite foods. And I was so "high"/hypo-manic, ( and hypo-alcoholic too, alcohol is jet-propelled sugar and food allergens ), that for a long time it didn't seem to matter, but then I had a massive breakdown, as everything fell apart ( my body's adaptive powers collapsed, catastrophically ); two and a half years of it, before I acccidentally read about food intolerance.

I wish I had known earlier. And I wish it hadn't taken me so long to kick them all. It was difficult because the internet wasn't around yet; there were very few books on the subject, ( Dr. Richard Mackarness's "Not All in the Mind" being one of the precious few! ), and almost everyone, friends, family and non-friends, thought that I was going mad again, that I was suffering from some sort of paranoia because I said that gluten/bread etc was at least partly responsible for my mental illness.

A good site for anyone thinking of checking out the gluten connection, aswell as other dietary factors, is at: http://sites.google.com/site/jccglutenfree/ and its sister-site and forum at: http://www.glutenfreeandbeyond.org/forum/

Last edited by ouinon on 01 Jun 2010, 1:35 pm, edited 3 times in total.

The "Autism cure" diets don't work at all.

I was forced to go through it at Summit Camp, and all it did was cause severe bowel movements and weight loss.

PS. I forgot to say: I too have noticed that eating dairy increases catarrh production. No doubt about it!

Hi Ouinon,

Thats an interesting post.
The problem is this...
If I am intolerant or sensitive to certain foods it sounds like it takes along time of abstinence
to really know for sure.

I probably could force my self to live of apples carrots , brown rice and some good quality meat and fish for a couple of months but I would suffer badly.

The smell of the pizza shop and the site of somebody else eating chocolate would drive me crazy.

It would be great if I could get scientifically tested for the intolerances first so I knew what to target.

Do you know if this is possible ?

Thanks,

Mark.

you can test for allergies, but i'm pretty sure the only way to test for intolerances is via elimination diet.

You can get testing now for certain types of food intolerance, eg. some, but not all, of the gliadin reactions, but an "elimination diet" is still the most comprehensive, if often confusing, ( precisely because of reaction-time-lags etc ), way to see what you individually can/do tolerate.

... However you have already identified the foods that you need to target! :lol ( And your descriptions of reactions after "accidental" short fasts of those foods, or sudden/increased exposure to them, seem to confirm which ones ). ...

Food cravings/addiction/longings are an incredibly reliable way of pinpointing problem foods. And you picked on pizza shops and chocolate, so I would say that you might want to try eliminating gluten, dairy, and chocolate, ( and if you have a generally sweet tooth, sugar too ).

NB. And although you won't see the full effects of excluding them for weeks/months or a year or more, you will know, within 5-10 days, if it makes a difference, because it takes an average of 5-7 days to clear a food completely from the intestinal tract.

A friend of mine who is beginning to try this says that he notices a lifting of mood within a week of cutting out gluten. So did I; it was almost like changing my personality; old friends remarked on it. And yes, I suffered from withdrawal, it's one of the reasons that I kept going back to gluten, sugar etc.

PS. I totally sympathise with the frustration, even despair, of accidental exposures: it used to drive me nuts. But my body does seem to have acquired a less hair-trigger response to small quantities, and I have gradually learned what to avoid.

.

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Didn't work for you. It's a YMMV thing. Personally, I find my body much happier without wheat and dairy, etc.

There's loads more stuff you can eat. Fruits, nuts, eggs, potatoes, legumes, beans, lentils etc.

sensational76 wrote:

My hangover starts halfway through my second drink. I have never thought of it as an aspie thing though - until just now. In my uni years I noticed that my buddies could cope with and recover from their hangovers much better than I. I am hypersensitive to pain (an aspie thing) and often pass out if I stub my toe. Maybe that is why my hangovers seem to be worse than everyone else's - I just cant cope with the headache, the sensitivity to light & sound and the nausea like NTs can.

It gets worse as I get older. The last time I went out and had some beer (which I knew better because it has gluten) it took me a week of exhaustion, agoraphobia, and massive diarrhea to recover. Just not worth it to me any more.

I have to be careful which wines I choose because the histamines in some (created by preservation methods) give me migraine-level headaches. I find I'm usually safe with organic wines that say "no sulfites" on the label.

I used to be able to drink beer and any old wine but not now that I'm older. I've read that food sensitivities can get worse with age because continued exposure to the implicated substances increases the damage and lowers the body's ability to tolerate and repair.

I've never bothered with special diets, the only "problem" I've really had which one of those could apparently change is my ears going red, and not only am I unsure if that even still happens, but I don't care enough to change my diet because of it.

I didn't have any problems with food at age 15, either. I hope you don't develop problems as you age. I did. I used to be able to eat pretty much anything. Now I'm much more limited.

I hope not! I like my food!

Severe bowel movements were the withdrawal symptoms meaning it was working,

Unless you were at Summit Camp for 18 months you didn't do the diet correctly,
It's a scientific fact that it takes 18 months for anti gliadins to return to a normal level.

You can't have an opinion unless you've done it for at least 1 year.

Exact same, it kicked in when I turned 18.