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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

My opinion as an autistic person is the more people who think they’re autistic the better, it’ll normalize it and we’ll all have better lives. Look at the old chestnut: gluten. Now, because everyone thinks they have a gluten allergy, people who actually have them can eat so much more good food. That’s my hot take for today.

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I think it's actually the opposite. Because so many people think they have a gluten allergy, restaurants offering gluten-free options don't feel the need to take it so seriously.

"So what if there's a tiny amount of gluten contamination... it's not like these people are going to die, right? They're probably just on a fad diet."

Diluting the meaning of a medical condition is not a good thing.

According to my friend with Celiac, it's a bit of both. She definitely has to do more research on any new restaurant because there are a number of places out there that do not take Gluten free seriously anymore and in particular will not be careful about cross contamination even if the issue is emphasized. But on the other hand there are also many restaurants now that do have a variety of legitimate Gluten free options. So it's probably a double edged sword.

And it's not just restaurants -- the grocery stores are loaded with options that they didn't previously have.

Similarly - the keto fad has been an absolute boon for diabetics.

I have celiac. This is my experience. I am grateful for how common eating gluten free is, no matter the cause. But a lot of restaurants have started saying “gluten free friendly” instead of “gluten free”. The communities online are great and finding the best places to eat.

Grocery food is way better than it was even just 10-20 year ago. It’s great.

If that's how they treat allergens in their food then they deserve to lose their licenses.

All of my experience with working at or with restaurants suggests they deserve to lose their license, but this issue is worse than most.

heavily agree with this. completely orthogonal, but most people i know that have worked in a kitchen (myself included) have, at some point, mentioned their initial shock with how disturbingly gross kitchens are. after reading orwell's down and about in london and paris, i suppose things have gotten much better, but still, i don't think most customers understand this. he goes into some great rants about this, if it's of any interest to you.

> most people i know that have worked in a kitchen (myself included) have, at some point, mentioned their initial shock with how disturbingly gross kitchens are.

Same here, this matches my experience exactly.

Thanks for the pointer, I'll check it out!

> after reading orwell's down and about in london and paris

... which you can do here:

https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180314

... and here:

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100171.txt

... and here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121010092154/http://www.george...

Unless a kitchen is specifically set up for preparing food completely gluten free without cross contamination then there is going to be cross contamination. Most kitchens simply aren't big enough. It isn't a matter of taking it seriously and any kitchen that knows what they are doing will let you know they can't make a gluten-free guarantee.

My friend who has celiatide said his life improved when it became known and popular. Food is more available and cheaper for him. He has more options too.

My hot take: a bunch of shitty gluten free food products have displaced better, cheaper, quality food. The people who think they are gluten intolerant are worse off, the people who are gluten tolerant are worse off, and the .5% of actual celiac sufferers are better off.

Aside from the pandemic years, which are outliers, food has been consistently getting drastically cheaper for decades:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditure-seri...

What actual spreadsheet are you looking at? "Constant dollar food and alcohol expenditures, with taxes and tips, for all purchasers"? Because expenditure grew.

Look at the FAO food price index, and you see it only decreased since 2010-ish, but on average since 1961 prices grew to roughly match inflation.

https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/worldfood/images/hom...

https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/

Can you give one example?

Nobody forces you to buy the gluten-free pasta or whatever, so I can't see how things are worse for the people who neither have nor believe themselves to have Celiac disease.

Yeah, I don’t know what this is about. You can buy stuff with gluten in it. But I can kind of see it as if you had 99 things that meet your preference and 1 thing that doesn’t, then when you move to a world with 900 things that meet your preference and 100 that don’t, you see that as 9% of things being displaced rather than you having additional 801 things.

In fact, I shall call this the Percentage Bias. The Percentage Bias is when you allege displacement by looking at alterations in ratios without looking at alterations in total amounts.

It does come off as a bit kneejerk, huh. There's this like, cultural thing where folks just get mad at people who do things they don't understand, especially when they perceive it as 'dumb'.

My question to that is; why on earth do you care what other people choose to do and why? I get that there was an argument made here to that effect, but for real, nobody is suffering from other people eating less gluten. I know I'm not and I love me a good bagel.

I mistakenly thought that I was better off not eating gluten because I felt much better after going gluten free. I am now fairly sure that the real benefit I experienced came from reducing my sugar intake. Cutting out gluten tends to cut out sugar in tandem: breakfast cereal, cookies, cake, and so on. I wonder if this explains why so many people who aren’t celiac think they see a big benefit from a gluten-free diet. Lots of Americans are flirting with diabetes if they aren’t already diabetic. (And lots of sugar isn’t great for a person even if they are completely healthy.)

I'm pretty sure that's it. But good luck explaining this to a believer.

Gluten is an important dietary protein source for vegetarians and vegans.

What makes it important?

Isn't protein really easy to get from veges? Like chickpeas, tofu, tempeh, quinoa, edamame, lentils, etc

It's crazy to me how all of these examples are either legumes or legume derivatives, and the one exception (quinoa) actually isn't a very good source of protein.

Autistic persons may get complications from eating gluten, because it may not break down completely and instead forms gliadorphin (gluteomorphin), which is a morphine peptide. It causes damage to intestinal villi and reduces gut motility, hiding the damage.

That is theorised to happen to anybody, not just autistic people, and might be the cause of the IBS epidemic and so many people diagnosing themselves as gluten intolerant even if they're not full blown coeliac.

I am gluten tolerant and my life was absolutely totally unaffected.

As a neurotypical, I hear all the time from others (especially coworkers in the field of IT) saying they're "a little autistic", at least to me these people clearly have done some research to conclude they can relate in some dimensions to clinical autism, not a confabulation made in-the-moment as a desperate and failed attempt to relate to someone who has to actually live with ASD. It really does linger in the mind of these people and they want to let others know about this important factoid about their personality as much as any other important point about them and their past. I agree, let them have it, but we should also have a social script when talking with people who live with ASD so we don't have individuals getting upset when the goal might have actually been to be vulnerable and open to sharing about themselves.

Also, it appears all experts in the field believe ASD comes from assortive mating (people with similar genes that affect social function tend to come together). There should be resources for these people who think they're "a little autistic" and have clearly researched the topic to determine if it's safe for them to have children or if adoption is more appropriate. It's an unfortunate state of affairs but the experts are pointing to ASD as preventable, if you think you're almost on the spectrum and married to someone similar to yourself, consider researching the topic of "autism and assortive mating".

The more open we are to talking about being "almost on the autism spectrum" and the more informed we are the better we all are!

Do you mean to say that autistic people, or those with autistic traits who are not outright autistic, should not reproduce (with each other), because of the risk their children may be autistic?

That's what he is saying, yes. It's a dangerous thing to think because we do not understand if there is actually some hidden purpose to the genes that modulate autistic behavior, same with depression.

It's a strange thing to bring up after assortative mating, really. If it comes up in assortative mating it implies there is a reason for the genes to be there.

One example: In various experiments related to resource exhaustion, antisocial and/or "autistic" mice were the ones to survive the collapse of mouse society as they were more likely to not be involved over resource squabbles.

Of course, there are some people who are very autistic who do not have very happy lives, and some people who are just kind of autistic.

No personally, but I think an expert could analyze a couple for pregnancy risks and other issues at least. From what I've read in the past the risk goes up a bit, but not terribly significantly, so it's best to make people at least aware of the risks. Certainly at least not to the extent to force stop people from having kids!

I think more than a third of ASD cases were estimated be linked to assortive mating in some studies, which is still a lot of cases that wouldn't happen if we changed out dating strategies! Intuitively this will only get worse with how everyone currently dates - dating until we finds the exact perfect match for our soul. The science is still very speculative but do we want time to tell?

We know for a fact that if both of your parents have African ancestry you have a higher risk of sickle-cell anemia, and if both your parents are Ashkenazi Jews you have a higher risk of Tay-Sachs. Should they also not be allowed to have children with each other? Frankly I find the notion shocking.

There is no ethical alternative to voluntary assortative mating unless you want to legalize nonconsensual sex.

Well the other one would be forced sterilizations but that doesn’t sound a lot better.

I think all anyone is talking about here is awareness of the likelihood. Sounds reasonable to me.

I'm actually quite worried about this problem as someone who had an Asperger's diagnosis as a child. I've heard that there are medical procedures to allow one to specify which egg they want fertilized and where one can choose an egg which is certain to not have genetic disorders we can test for. Is autism something we can test for in the womb? If so, than this shouldn't be a problem for those with money (and my understanding is that the procedure I am describing costs about 20K).

More broadly, I consider autism to be a strong net negative in my life, and I find folks who really embrace Asperger's as part of their identity to be alien to me. I'd love to eradicate this condition from the earth to spare future humans from the pain that inability to socialize will cause.

I'm sure that some people who like their autism will be upset about "eugenics", but frankly, we don't have to be God damn Nazis to acknowledge that acting eugenicily is good and advocating for disgenic behavior is bad long term.

> Is autism something we can test for in the womb?

No.

> I'm sure that some people who like their autism will be upset about "eugenics", but frankly, we don't have to be God damn Nazis to acknowledge that acting eugenicily is good and advocating for disgenic behavior is bad long term.

Well you can pretty much say that Nazism is a natural, logical endpoint of eugenicist beliefs. If others decide not to cooperate in your little project of eliminating "dysgenic" traits then you'll have to compel them with force.

And thereby marginalizing a real problem.

Everybody these days is a programmer.

Everybody is an investor.

Everybody is a trader.

Everybody is an entrepreneur.

No thank you

Open the gates, I say. Everyone can be anything.

And then when everyone is everything then no one is anything.

Awesome sounds good to me. Labels don’t make the person, actions do.

Labels are what we use to categorize and assign meaning to the world, like it or not.

Think about it - without an "autism" label, how do we communicate or think clearly about research, diagnosis, treatment, and social structures to help people who suffer with this category of symptoms?

It's like talking about coding or doing math without variables, making decisions without criteria, or reasoning philosophically without definitions. Coherent thinking relies on the ability to categorize and label.

Maybe in research for disease or other things, but in my opinion labeling people doesn’t turn out well. Communist, socialist, fascist, etc. Disabled, gay, straight, white, brown, black; those labels don’t help much. Even labels like engineers vs. developers causes friction. Sure, medical doctors can use labels to separate people so that they can then investigate within a group what’s causing some disease, but a hundred years ago they used to label certain people as having a disease where today we see was incorrect, like labeling promiscuous women or labeling someone we might see today as autistic as having a problem with their brain that caused them to be inferior. You can’t always just take the rational approach that labels don’t cause real issues, since not everyone is rational. Labels cause problems when applied too liberally, and making sense of the world isn’t always necessary in that respect. We need to focus on what’s important, not always categorizing every little thing based on our idea of importance we assign to those labels. Labels have a way of sticking, and mislabeling things can’t always be corrected.

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