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Comment by lymeeducator | Hacker News Reader

My young son, now 7 (no stutter), did stutter at age 4 and had some level of anxiety. My wife and I discovered that he has an allergy to annatto, a natural seed used for orange dye & nutty flavor, that triggered the stuttering. The stuttering was likely due to slight inflammation in his brain. In this case, slice of organic American (orange) cheese caused him to stutter within 10 minutes. Then we could tell when he had goldfish crackers for snack at school (dad, they weren't purple crackers, they were orange -- said with a strong stutter). His stuttering disappeared within a couple months of removing annatto foods from his diet. What about the annatto ~triggered inflammation, we do not know (I have an idea, but it's pretty hard to test).

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Oh wow, incredible comment. I looked this up and apparently allergies are pretty strongly linked to stuttering. It's a connection I'd never assume to be possible.

As someone who sometimes has weeks of cluttered speech, and weeks where I'm perfectly fine, I'm now wondering if diet could be a contributing factor.

I get the stutter when Im anxious. I get anxious typically when I dont get enough me time. Regular doses of solitude keeps my stutter away.

Food allergy is one of the reasons I theorize many people find different seemingly unrelated symptoms disappear when either fasting or on a low carbohydrate diet (even things like seizures).

It alters your diet so dramatically and greatly reduces the types of processed foods you can eat.

I try to dry fast for 15 - 20 hours 1/day per week. I can't really do that for my son and do not recommend it for most children.

This is really fascinating thanks so much for sharing. How did you discover the allergy if the only effect was stuttering?

We noticed he was more tentative and starting to stutter around the winter holidays, but could not figure out what the pattern was. Then one early evening before dinner we gave him a slice of organic, orange American cheese (milk, salt, enzymes, annatto). He started stuttering shortly thereafter. He'd had ice cream the previous day with no issues. Then we noticed it after mac'n cheese. Upon reflection, his grandparents brought cheddar duckies to snack on during the holidays. At that point we started eliminating it and did not notice a stutter. Sometimes after pre-school, when he was stuttering, I asked him how his <non-orange> crackers were and he would always say "orange" crackers. We avoided anything obviously "orange" and the problem went away in a number of weeks. It popped up again while eating chicken tenders (cheap ski lodge food) and then we started noticing that the breading in many packaged chicken tenders had annatto for color. The same with cheap vanilla ice cream. He's all good now though -- we were lucky.

Amazing! Congratulations on spotting it. How old is he now? Does the annatto affect him still?

Do you know if this is known in the scientific community? I am not a speech language researcher but I’ve never heard of allergy induced stuttering but the inflammation hypothesis really strikes a chord.

He is 8 now and minor amounts of annatto, by accident, do not seem to trigger it. We taught him what to look for and avoid anything orangish in color without asking us. I do have a friend whose nephew throws up when he has annatto, but I haven't come across the stuttering connection. I should amend my comment above, we ruled out dairy as a cause given the milk, yogurt, kefir as well.

Yeah annatto seems to be really problematic for many people.

Ruled out as causes of the issue or excluded from his diet?

We try to exclude it from his diet and minimize it in the house, although he's shown no serious anaphylaxis from it. Typo above, he is 7, not 8. At some point trials for food additives would be helpful...for everyone. I certainly cannot speak to all of the stuttering scenarios, but avoiding a few is better than nothing.

Fascinating. I also had an allergy to “orange” colored foods as a kid, but it looked like asthma, not a stutter. However, the very worst was orange soda, which was hospitalizing. I wonder if there was any relation to your son’s stutter.

Possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartrazine - a common food colouring with a history of possible adverse effects.

This sounds like something that should be followed up with placebo experiments.

For sure, but how would that be possible with NIH human experimentation guidelines?

Take a bunch of people and remove annatto from the diet of half of them. For the annatto foods or their placebo substitutes, grind up and dye the food so the eater can't distinguish from placebo.

> I have an idea, but it's pretty hard to test

I'd be intrigued to hear more about your theory

Neuroquant imaging filters for MRI are supposed to detect changes like this, but are quite expensive and not readily available. The pediatricians shrugged their shoulders. Functional medicine doctors would be more willing to pursue this approach (they like data). The trick is finding the root cause of the swelling, which is usually an immune response to a protein it does not like and wants to isolate. I am unaware of other locations in my son's body that become inflamed by Annatto, his stutter was/is the first notable symptom.

Is it the Annatto itself that collected in my son's brain/frontal lobe and triggered inflammation? A brain scan at that time would probably help shed light.

Was something else there that Annatto reacted with/killed and my son's system inflamed due to the residual proteins (it's used as an anti-parasitic in native cultures - and yes, herbs can cause a die off as most lyme+ patients have demonstrated repeatedly - and I will get forehead pressure from a die-off, my son might be similar in that regard)?

In short, there's not enough data or an easy way to gather it.

Not entirely relevant so I apologise but your situation reminded me of the "inflamation theory of disesase":

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3492709/

"Inflammation has long been a well-known symptom of many infectious diseases, but molecular and epidemiological research increasingly suggests that it is also intimately linked with a broad range of non-infectious diseases, perhaps even all of them"

It's relevant. Mycotoxins (mold produced), and metals can also cause inflammation. In general, it's the immune system trying to sequester or isolate foreign material.

Wow, I stutter, and have forever, and did not consider it an allergy..

My way of treating it, hat, has been successful was psychedelics.

Interesting.

Can I ask what did you try? I've stuttered all my life and have recently come across the potential of psychedelics.

LSD and Mushrooms. They work wonders, I'd start with microdoses, though a good plateau trip works for years after.

Microdoses and an introduction to the culture of these chems, there's ever more material of these online, then, 15 years ago when I first experimented and that's both exciting and sad because if you were to rely solely on social media/reddit/twitter ancedotes you really won't get the full package.

I'd look at forums, erowid and published research journals for the full picture. :)

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