anyone gone gluten free?

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Has anyone gone gluten free? I have good as identified the triggers of my allergies and it seems to be certain dairy products (especially cheddar cheese) and gluten foods (especially pasta).

What effect has going gluten free done for you. Are you more sharp? More focused and zoned? How do you organise that diet?

Thanks!

I minimise gluten and dairy. i havent gone off gluten entirely. But very very minimal intake of them. dairy is pretty well out completely. i just stopped having them years ago because they made me feel awful - just like poison. then i found out later that many people with AS have severe reactions to them.

I get really sick if i eat too much of them. foggy in the brain. i swell up, just awful and nauseous too.

I would probably feel much better for doing so - but alas, I love those types of food too much to remove them from my regular diet, even if they do bloat me and slow me down.

Great topic!

For the past few years, I've been dairy and gluten-free as much as possible. Lately, I've been very consistent with it and I feel great. My thinking is clearer and I can observe myself better and see what's going on with me more.

For much of my life, I've made lists to help me remember things. Up until recently, I've felt kind of embarrassed by it. People would joke about it, and before I knew I had AS, I thought I was just neurotic. Now I realize that the lists are essential for helping me organize my day and feel calmer. So last week, I decided to make several lists, and one of them was a list of "Foods I like to eat." It was for foods I like because they help me feel better. It's a fairly short, simple list, with no gluten, dairy, or junk food. (I used to have a list of what I *couldn't* eat and feel good, but that list got far too long!)

Then, I made a lists of things I need to do throughout the day, every day, and I put something specific for breakfast and lunch on the daily list. Like for breakfast, I have cereal, fruit, and soymilk every morning. I've learned that it's common for Aspies to eat the same thing every day, and I like the predictability of it.

I also prepare food very, very simply. I prefer it that way. If I can't see everything I'm eating with the naked eye, I tend to stay away from it.

Hope this helps...

Gluten free fall topic

I once worked in a gluten free bakery on the cookie line. The smell was s delicious as the taste was gut wrenching.

I was given a gluten free loaf of bread to sample and after 24 hours of eating gluten free I was constipated for three days.

If a person has celiac disease, allergies and sensitivities to dairy/gluten then by all means avoid them. But not me. Everything in moderation, I say.

I don't feel like crap? Plus I take approximately 1/3 less medication for the same effect. Suggesting the ability of my intestines to extract nutrients was getting hit pretty hard. I did test negative on the Celiac blood test but I didn't want to bother with the [fairly low] risk of an intestinal biopsy, which is more accurate. I know I feel a LOT better with GF, so the diagnosis doesn't mean that much to me [at this point].

I started to suspect there was a problem with food in some way. I was out on road working in relatively remote places, with crappy restaurants (plus I'm a cheap bastard at heart ), so I'd be living on almost entirely raw fruit and veggies for long periods of time. Then I'd come home and then feel like crap. I used this to start with, and kept to even a small subset of the "allowed" foods and slowly added things to my diet at the end of the 10 days, one at a time with a few days between each. About 5-6 days into the cleanse it felt like my intestines were healing (if you know that 'itchy' feeling of a wound healing?), almost coming alive as it were.

I find cow dairy is an issue too (but this might have been masked by the gluten problems prior, or maybe it was a result of the major reworking of my digestion system), as are peanuts or nuts with peanut oil on them (this might not be the peanuts themselves, peanuts are prone to a certain kind of fungus). I'm good with goat and sheep though, which is good news because I like cheese. If dairy is a problem cheese is likely to be the worst because it's so concentrated. After a few months I found I could do butter in small amounts (it's mostly fat, ghee would be fine). But I recently tried cheese in "normal" amounts again and picked up a number of pounds of weight in a couple days (I take that as a bad sign, bloating from allergic swelling). I didn't get the "spiny" feeling that I had when I first tried to reintroduce cow cheese, nor did I feel "bad" like I do with gluten. I had to go back to eating bread for the blood test after being off for some time. I felt tired and sluggish and a bit irritable. I also picked up 10 lbs very quickly, even though I kept "things flowing through the pipe" so it wasn't just a lag in getting rid of solid waste. *shrug*

Organizing the diet at home is "empty the pantry and fridge, restock from scratch". Gluten is the hardest, it is "everywhere". It'll appear off-label, as contamination or intentional, in spice mixtures. So go back to basics when stocking you spices. Labels are getting better at telling you if there is a risk of contamination. Although Rice Dream still doesn't have a warning last I saw ... they use barley [malt] in part of their processing of the rice. So don't let the "rice" part fool you.

As for dairy two things:
1) make sure you getting enough calcium, no coffee or chocolate at least 1/2 hour before or after your major calcium intake (I like quinoa myself, it's a good veggie calcium on top of being a good stand in, texture-wise, for cous-cous), these will bind to calcium and create sort of a soap that'll then pass through and down the drain
2) watch vegetarian cheese; I don't bother with it because it's very expensive, texture/taste is for crap, and some are spiked with casein anyway to help with the texture

If you don't have any other allergies/sensitivities you can get or make (I stock a range of different flours) just about anything GF except croissants and filo pastry based items. Some major grocery chains are even adding entire "Gluten Free" aisles, although these are usually a mixture of GF and food aimed at other allergens that can have gluten in them. It's also the aisle where you'll likely find vegan specific foods.

Expect the food to cost more if you want similar types of variety (rather than just brown rice 15+ meals/week). But I find I eat less, and "better quality" food, so it works out not too bad.

EDIT: Most restaurant menus are just downright depressing. I've been doing this for years now and I still can get really "down" going out with someone and having maybe one item on the list to pick from, and it's an appetizer salad. :/ But there is some improvement here, and a lot of upscale restaurants are used to making adjustments. It's still a crapshoot though. If there is a GF restaurant in your area count yourself looking (we've got one now...with fabulous dinner buns!). Then you don't have to worry cross-contamination in the kitchen.

Yes, yes, yes.

I have gone to a lot of lengths to have a good diet. I just took delivery of my own grain mill so that I can mill my own flour out of oatmeal, amaranth grain, etc. I can go into a boring level of detail that will cause you to shut down your computer, on this topic!

I can try to outline one approach, which is what I used. It won't work for a lot of people because as we know, every country/region/family has its own food culture and there are a hundred approaches to the same problem! But here is my basic progression of what I did:

Basically:

(1) go low carb diet, that is a good first step in terms of training yourself and preparing your kitchen
(2) transition to a lot of easy, raw or little-cooked food (lots of raw vegs, simple meats, lentils, soups)
(by this time you should have a really healthy diet)
(3) reintroduce carbohydrates that are easy and are low/no gluten
-- suggestion: seed pseudo-grains like quinoa & amaranth. You can cook these like rice, but use pilaf, risotto and paella recipes
these are actually quicker to cook than rice, higher in protein, contain more complete protein complex (i.e. lysine) and are superfoods
-- if you use rice, use a brown rice that is long grain/low glutinous like brown basmati or brown jasmine rice.
(4) corn tortillas instead of bread with breakfast, etc.
(5) where I eat pasta, etc. use whole grain versions of it
(6) increase asian noodles: buckwheat soba side dishes, etc. (buckwheat is also a seed grain not a real grain)

There is supposedly a really great book about how to cook low-gluten or no-gluten breads, cakes, etc. I can't remember it now, but I did a sorted Amazon search. I'd have to read over all the reviews to find it again, but you can click on the link and do that if you want. Basically, you can use other flours like rice, etc, if you add things that help the low-gluten flours form long protein chains, like egg whites, vinegar, xantham gum, etc. And these cookbooks have those recipes. I'm a bad baker so I don't use them.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

I have excluded gluten, dairy, sugar, and other things, on and off for the last 16 years, since I first discovered that food had an effect on my mental health, specifically it provoked anxiety and depression, ( and at its worst mood-disorder/manic-depression ), and my mood, weight, and general health, went up and down like a yoyo in consequence a lot.

It took me ages to work out what was really the most important factor; which turned out to be gluten, and I have been excluding it, completely, for 15 months now. The effects have become clearer and clearer as time has passed. I have also avoided dairy a lot of the time, but I revert to it, for calcium, for convenience, and for pleasure, every few days, weeks or months depending on my circumstances.

I tend to use rice and potatoes and corn chips ( salted/natural only because the flavoured ones, like crisps, have flour in as a "sticking" agent for the flavouring ), instead of bread or pasta etc. And it is no more expensive at all.

But it took me a long time to reach this degree of calm about it, of knowing exactly what to avoid/exclude, ( beware "hidden" ingredients; "hydrolysed vegetable protein" is gluten for instance ), and because for a long time I thought I might be imagining it; people certainly often treated it that way, as if food intolerance and exclusion was a paranoid reaction or a sign of mental illness itself.

Like others have said, the biggest effects are calmness, clarity, more stable mood, "inner peace", ( literally ! ), and healthy weight loss.

Good luck.
.

Most gluten free foods I don't like and besides, I never had a negative reaction to foods that have gluten in it. But I am staying away from simple carbs (white bread, white rice, anything white) and limiting my sugars.. and I feel it's helping in many ways.

I don't understand this... What is the connection to A.S.? I've heard of it, but the information I find on the web doesn't seem all that scientific to me.

That's a tricky one. Generally if I don't know what the word means exactly I assume the worst. I end up making more stuff from scratch. Even before you buy books there are a lot of good recipes for free out there on the internet. My wife found a English style fish batter recipe for my birthday. Lot of work but it was fabulous, it was something that I really missed. (I've lost it though, will have to find it again ).

At first I missed the beer but I guess coming on three years now I don't anymore. I just go with cider or if you really want beer there are a few GF specialty beers out there (largely rice and buckwheat based). They aren't too bad at all, a friend that is a bit of a beer connoisseur tried one and I thought it was very acceptable. Though the breadth of variety isn't there.

There are still a few things I miss. And I miss croissants, nobody has figured that out yet AFAIK. The worst thing though? No outsider rolls, or fish roe at all on sushi night. :/ The fake crab (crab flavoured pollack) has wheat in it. The fish roe is prepared with small amounts of soya sauce. Most soya sauces use wheat, though a few use pure soy bean.

P.S. At first the texture of rice flour will likely strike you as a bit "gritty". Within a few months though you'll get used to it. I don't notice it at all anymore. There is GF and then there is "damn, this is good" GF and then, like Fabio would say, there is "I can't believe this is GF". An example of the later are Gluteno's pretzels.

Er, yeah that. Well:
1) I'm not on the spectrum
2) those ideas about the opioids I too find a bit dubious, I'm not convinced of it at all
3) problems with the immune system/allergies seems to have some sort of correlation to ASC, exactly what and how and why is not clear
4) there may be , there has been one (or two?) really small scale double-blind GFCF clinical trial(s) done so far to see if there is anything that might be helpful, but those were so small as to be more proto-typing for proper trials

I did this before I had heard anything about a supposed connection with the spectrum. My kids are low-gluten diets mostly for connivence, though reduced risk of developing a sensitivity like mine later is life is also a factor. This was just something I noticed, through serendipity, in myself. It's more like a mild form of Celiac (Celias, for some reason, commonly also have problems with dairy ... a lot of GF stuff and recipes are also dairy free (and thus [dairy] CF), nut free, and sometimes egg free ). Celiac is just a specific allergic reaction that messes up your small intestine, and sometimes other parts of your body. It isn't really the opioid idea at all.

EDIT: It is, provided you watch your calcium intake, a fairly low risk thing to try. It doesn't have to cost you a huge amount of money. It's quite comparable if you don't demand you must be able to eat any type of food. Getting your kids to try it, especially "picky" ones, on the other hand can take some time and maybe a bit more cash to make it easier.

Last edited by DwightF on 19 Dec 2008, 5:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Ah, so the special diet doesn't really affect your understanding of social cues or anything. That just sounded like magic to me. The special diet is for people with gastrointestinal and allergy problems and those problems are common among people on the spectrum. Is that correct?

Feeling like crap affects my giving a damn about social cues. I find I'm a bit grumpy and down. And bloated (I pick up near 10lb weight within a few days of having a slice of bread). That's just short term. What it is was doing to me nutritionally long term? I'm not going back to find out.

It seems to be important for at least a few. If you are struggling with dealing with the world as it is, any problems compounding that aren't going to help. Especially if you don't have a good self-awareness of your body or communication skills to tell someone or ask for help. So I find it plausible in that way. Also, in reverse, state of mind affects your digestion system. If you are in constant state of anxiety you don't digest very well, so you end up with a spiral down. More things that are plausible in my mind.

I've seen at least one case, a former classmate of my son, go near catatonic with the apparent cause being consumption of dairy earlier. It was well beyond any placebo effect I'd expect, even a by-proxy placebo effect. And his parents are pretty well grounded too. *shrug* I think it's an interesting avenue to explore.

As an added bonus paying attention to what you eat tends to mean you make healthier choices. That can't be a bad thing.

P.S. There are indeed those that claim "gluten/casein cause autism, come be cured!" Such as every AS's favourite bimbo celeb. Don't count me on that bus.

I just severly cut back on gluten. I went from sandwiches to grilled chicken salads, for example. I felt better, more alert, etc...
Today, I still have very little gluten, I feel a LOT better.

This is a big topic, since food allergies are one of the environmental triggers for autism. I was food allergy tested three years ago by Dr. Daniel Dantini (you can find him if you Google "food allergy test"), and have followed a food exclusion diet for more than 90% of that time. Since I have stopped eating the things that my body reacts to, I have become more focused, energetic, and emotionally stable.

I can tell that the food allergy diet is working because with the beginning of the holiday season, I have been eating some foods that are bad for me. I notice that when I eat these foods, I start getting stressed out a few hours later. I have a much greater tendency to rock, flap my hands, and bite my hands and arms when I have eaten food that I am allergic to than when I have eaten food that I am not allergic to.

My food allergies are more complex than just gluten/casein sensitivities. I am actually more allergic to potatoes and cabbage than I am to milk products, and I feel more spacey/anxious/depressed when I eat these foods than I do when I eat bread and cheese. This is why it is important to be food allergy tested with a comprehensive IgG blood test that checks for delayed food allergy reactions, because the foods that you are allergic to may not be the "typical" foods that other people are allergic to.

For instance, I am very allergic to milk, but not at all allergic to rice. My boyfriend (who also has Asperger's) is very allergic to rice, but not at all allergic to milk. Even though we are allergic to very different foods, we have very similar reactions to them (we both get spacey/anxious/depressed). However, if we were following a traditional gluten/casein-free diet without knowing the specific foods we're allergic to, we would have only partial success in moderating our allergies.

For example, if we both eliminated wheat and milk, I would get better because I am allergic to both of these foods, but my boyfriend would not get better, since he is not allergic to wheat or milk. Further, following a traditional gluten/casein-free diet, we would not necessarily know that we are both also allergic to corn and soy, which are common wheat/milk substitutes.

Following this logic, I would eliminate wheat and milk, which I am allergic to, and substitute corn and soy, which I am also allergic to, meaning that my net allergic response would remain the same. My boyfriend would eliminate wheat and milk, which is he is not allergic to, and substitute corn and soy, which he is allergic to, meaning that his net allergic response would increase.

Again, this is why it is important to find out the specific foods that you are allergic to and to eliminate those foods from your diet. As prevalent as gluten/casein sensitivities are, gluten-free/casein-free is not a one-size-fits-all diet.

My $0.02.

~ Caterina