We tried the Gluten Free Casein Free diet for 8 months.

Daniel has been given the diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorder since he was 15months old. He is now 30months old – just over 2years. When we received this diagnosis we did what I am sure any loving parents would do, we researched morning noon and night the best things we could do to help our child in any way in bringing him out of the insular trance he seemed to spend most of his time in. I am fortunate in that I am a fully qualified nurse working for the NHS and I have a BSc Degree in Health and Social Care from the Open University. I am therefore no stranger to research within the healthcare setting.

We found the GF/CF diet kept coming up and found the in depth research document that was carried out by members of the Sunderland University in the UK. They make their document free to download and free to print, so any parent or carer or organisation may download this interesting, objective and factual document. Follow this link if you are interested:

http://www.espa-research.org.uk/linked/sunderlandprotocol.pdf

We followed the advice and sensibly introduced this diet to Daniel, keeping a food diary and looking for improvements. Now I should tell you, that running concurrently alongside this issue is the fact that we believe Daniel may have other underlying issues such as Organic Brain Damage brought about by clinical negligence at the time of birth. Therefore one could arguably question whether this diet is indeed pertinent and whether he would show any benefits if his problems stem from brain damage of some sort.

Still, we gave it 8 months and seemed at first to get some good results. But it is difficult to tell if those improvements would have come about anyway. And recently he has really been going off his food, not wanting to eat anything and only drinking soy milk. We were very worried about him. He has lost weight. We did try re-introducing gluten and casein a couple of months ago and he seemed very miserable and unwell and slept even worse than usual, so we took it to mean the diet was working. But I wanted to give it one more go. So over the christmas period we re-introduced these baddies again and waited with baited breath!!

He is like a different boy! I think he had gotten bored with the restrictive foods I was offering him. I did try very hard to give him good variety, but there is no getting around it, it is very difficult to make the food exciting when you cut out such a large food group as all mammalian milk. You would be suprised what foods contain even traces of the stuff and therefore are on the ‘Bad’ list!! Daniel is now eating full fat creamy yoghurts and loving it! Yes, his eczema has come back. But I have found a really good cream to combat that. I get it in Holland & Barratt and it is Bio Active moisturiser with Manuka Honey – which is used in many expensive healing supplements within the NHS including Manuka Honey dressings etc. This honey has wonderful healing power and is clearing up the eczema already. I think his eczema is linked to the gluten. I will watch this space as gluten is a lot easier to eliminate than milk.

So we have yet to monitor Daniel’s progress, and to see if he continues to thrive off the diet, and I will keep you informed.

I am not saying I am not an advocate for the diet. Far from it. I just don’t believe all Daniel’s problems stem from Autism alone, and therefore he is a complicated little character. Indeed our paediatrician was very unhelpful and not a fan of the diet at all. She advised us against it and tried to blind us with science by hiding behind the old faithful ‘there are no Randomised Controlled Trials to say that this diet is a success’. Be wary of any doctor telling you this. If you want to try it then you should give it a go. The reason there are no RCTs is that they are funded by drug companies, and no drug company will fund a huge RCT they are not going to get any financial benefit from, as we are talking about food here and not drugs.

Anyway, I will mull over this more at a later time. Hope you find some of my insights of some use.

I have to collect Daniel from nursery now.

Sally www.digbyandsprout.co.uk