Gluten Free Diets

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I was wondering if anyone has an opinion or knows of any studies on the gluten free diet & "curing AS effect". My mom put my on a gluten & dairy free diet when I was 10 & it didn't work. She also works with kids who are sometimes on the diet & she says they always seem hungry & stuff (she's never specific & I don't really ask b/c its NMB). Anyone have an opinion on it. Please check the pole.

p.s. Sorry, their was supposed to be a "Sometimes, Depends on the Person" option. Just in case, NMB = not my business & I've noticed gluten free cookies taste really bad (I'd prefer a diet of dirt, oddly enough at least to me dirt tastes better than those cookies. )

I never thought that a gluten free diet was supposed to cure autism, but speaking for myself, leaving gluten, casein and dairy out of my diet makes me a lot calmer and more able to deal with sensory issues. But cure my AS? Not likely!

I wouldn't touch the diet with a 10-foot pole.

I think it's worth trying. You might feel a lot better on it. There is nothing bad that can come from it.

Yes, actually, something bad can come of it--if you don't balance your diet properly after you remove gluten, you're at risk for malnutrition. Not "starvation", but not getting the right nutrients. There's also the risk of getting obsessed with a "perfect diet", to the point of having an eating disorder. More generally, you will spend time and money that you could have spent on something else, and uselessly spend them if you don't need it.

The risks don't mean it's categorically bad. It just means there are risks, like there are to any medical treatment--and yes, diets count as medical treatment. And risks mean you don't automatically say, "Sure, what could it hurt?"

It doesn't work specifically for autism. It is, however, the best treatment for gluten intolerance or allergy. (Intolerance = "cannot digest"; allergy = "body thinks it's a pathogen".) If you are autistic and you happen to have either intolerance or allergy, you may indeed see an improvement in how well you cope with the world--probably because the physical discomfort of your allergy or intolerance is no longer present and you are freeing up more resources than you had before.

Eating "gluten-free" often requires home-cooking food, which is often a great deal healthier than pre-packaged food; you may get a benefit from that. But you wouldn't need to exclude gluten to eat healthier.

Most research has been coming up with the same thing, basically: Autism itself doesn't respond to a gluten-free diet; but autistic people who have problems eating gluten tend to benefit from eliminating it, just like NTs who have problems eating gluten would benefit. They can benefit more than NTs do because they are coping more narrowly than NTs are; but if they weren't gluten-intolerant or allergic to begin with, there wouldn't be any improvement.

I was on GF/CF as a child. I experienced no changes except, perhaps, a relatively short adult height due to low calcium (and a tendency to scarf good-tasting food whenever I could get it, probably a factor in my current obesity). My mother, who has celiac disease, became a great deal healthier when she eliminated gluten. If you have celiac, for goodness sakes, don't eat wheat; you'll rip up your intestine! But if you don't, it's useless bother to eliminate it--better results if you work on an overall healthier diet instead.

I was always kinda afraid of gluten because I had a friend who had celiac. It took me awhile to stop thinking of gluten as evil. It makes my bread turn out much better.

The gluten-ASD hypothesis has been thoroughly discredited. Personally, I'm allergic to gluten, but my allergy developed AFTER childhood. My first symptom occurred when I was about 20. In order to develop celiac disease, 3 things must happen: genetic predisposition, "leaky gut", and exposure. My leaky gut developed around puberty, at the very earliest. My ASD was with me from birth.

To add to the evidence, celiac disease is associated with HLA (immunity) alleles, while ASDs are associated with other genes, not yet fully understood.