My question is; Is there any updates that you’ve seen to this? My son has been recently diagnosed with HFA and my wife has been reading all the woo out there. I’m trying to sway here away from all of it. I’m glad to have found this, but it is a couple years old. Any way you could revisit the information or help point me in the right direction?

I have googled and searched pubmed for articles and found two (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16555138 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12168688).

Thanks for all you and your cohorts do.

Questioning everything is fine. I’m not trying to be dogmatic… we just have to look as plausibility in science. We don’t have unlimited resources so we have to look at most plausible and helpful avenues with a greater priority. Diet has been looked at, and there just doesnt seem to be anything there. I’m not sure what the rationale for removing casein or gluten anyways, it appears to be grasping at straws.

The “studies” you point to are very weak. They are either basic research only and/or not designed to address the question. Not one is double-blind which is very important to determine a real effect for a study addressing dietary interventions. A review saying ‘more research is needed’ is not evidence… they use that type of statement in accupuncture studies. Just like a lot of research into things that don’t work, the better studies show no effect.

I’m not philosophically opposed to diet affecting autism, its just not very plausible and the evidence is just not there. If better evidence comes along I’ll be all for it. It would be a relatively easy and inexpensive intervention. I just don’t see it happening.

I am always very fascinated at the acrimony risen by certain subjects ventilated on this forum. CCbowers response to my reflection is charcteristic of it. Instead of trying to out forth a scientific rebuttal it assumes a very minor study is the last and almost godly word on the subject. A very dogmatic and unscientific response that is just the mirror image of how dogmatic believers in the paranormal etc etc react.

Science does not advance due to preconceived notion of what is right and wrong, but by questioning everything. Even purported notions of scientific truth. Especially questioning results in such a complex field as environmental effects on human health. A questioning that goes both ways instead of just faithfully following party lines. And reading this forum always reminds me of how easily one could fall in the trap of superbia.

Anyhow, dietary hypotheses are anything but disproven. There are myriads of studies going proving this and that (see PubMed) and the twin study i refer too was the main point, not whatever ccbowers chose to cherrypick and create a response to. Main point because the study did not show any genetic or epigenetic causality. Which is extremely interesting as MS research is then back to square one: the environment. And as the MS debate around diet is similar to that about ASDs it is relevant to make that point.

Follows some randomly chosen recent diet – autism studies coming indicating dietary effects:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20406576 (24 month study of 72 children)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20048083 (expert consensus on gastrointestinal disorders in ASDs)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19917213 (review of dietary intervention in autism, concluding we still do not know enough)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20190967 (an extremely interesting article on the metabolic regulation of adenosine and ketogenic diets and the “therapeutic implications … to acute and chronic neurological disorders as diverse as brain injury, inflammatory and neuropathic pain, autism and hyperdopaminergic disorders.”)

I’m not sure what this sentence means. Do you? THis is not the only study on this topic, and so far there is no compelling evidence of a relationship between diet and autism. It is to the point that perhaps we should stop looking at this since there are other potentially more fruitful avenues to pursue.

We don’t find out about the truth about the world by just asking people what they think. We control varables and testing conditions to ensure that our results are not due to biases or other variables. Just like we don’t test the efficacy of medications by asking people if it worked for them, we shouldnt do the same for somehting like diet. Popular opinion is not how science works.

“Hypothetically it could also have consisted only of children not affected by diet. ”

So somehow there are children who would benefit from diet yet were sytematically excluded from the study? What is your evidence for this? If none, then appear that you want it to be true, and are coming up with a rationale that is unrelated to any evidence. If there is a subset of the population that could benefit we should be able to see this, and have a rationale for why this subset is different. But we have no evidence for any of this, and just speculating based upon nothing.

Why do people have such attachements to certain theories? Is it wishful thinking or something more?

http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Nutrition/Diet/can_autism_diet_help_autistic_children_2105100646.html

I think the phrase is supposed to refer only to those people who use “alternative” treatments for autism.

There is no autism “community.” Those of us intimately involved with the disorder are as diverse as any other group of randomly-selected people. The anti-conventional-medicine crowd hijacks the phrase in an attempt to show that everyone with autism in the family is on their side. Skeptics should be careful not to fall into that trap.