Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

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faeriechangling

>Go gluten-free and casein-free. That's eliminating wheat and dairy in your diet. Both of these turn into a form of morphine in the body. Look up glutomorphine and casomorphine. A slightly easier diet to stick to than keto. This cured my aspergers.

This cure for Autism is broadly related to the leaky gut hypothesis of autism, rather infamously propagated by Andrew Wakefield in the 90s more generally and Jenny McCarthy more specifically went after gluten/casein in the 2000s. PETA made an infamous ad saying that milk causes Autism [1] because milk has Casein. This is to say that enough noise got made about this specific claim it got researched a bit.

Generally this diet has specifically been studied for autism treatment and the efficence of it's efficacy is very lacking for me [2][3]

This all being said, this doesn't necessarily mean that nobody can benefit from a casein or gluten free diet, there's simply insufficient evidence to say that people who avoid milk and bagels are autistic less often/less autistic.

[1] https://www.dairyreporter.com/var/wrbm_gb_food_pharma/storag...

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-019-04266-9

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7651765/

The problem with those studies is that a Gluten free or a gluten and dairy free diet is not enough to actually treat "leaky gut" or similar issues. It's a bit like saying you can fix an ecosystem by removing two invasive species from the environment. Sure, it might work, but it's such an oversimplification that the results will appear random, or, "inconclusive."

Studying diets is notoriously difficult, and rarely done in a helpful way. Everybody has a different internal ecosystem -- as well as different dietary stimulus, even if they're following the same diet. This makes it incredibly difficult to draw broad conclusions based on controlling just one or two dietary factors.

This is rather unfortunate -- because the right dietary treatments can be truly transformative for many people, for a variety of conditions. However, because of the difficulty of proving this scientifically, such treatments are ignored by the medical community, leaving patients to figure this avenue of treatment out on their own.

The answer, in my opinion, is massive funding -- the kind of funding that can compete with billion dollar drugs (such as Humira). However, that's really not going to happen. Oh well. Sorry for the rant!

They have done studies that showed that it "helped" about 60% of the time (sorry I don't have the reference). "Helped" is a far weaker term than cured. I've read some of McCarthy's books and this is often the first thing to be tried. Often there is a long path to finding a workable cure for a specific person.

I went GFCF for other reasons (IBS and excess mucus production) and was surprised when my Asperger's started to go away. My personal theory is that the small, but frequent, morphine effects interfere with learning. When you take that away, low level learning can begin again.

I was "face blind" (i.e. didn't automatically recognize familiar faces) and didn't pick up on social cues. Both problems when away after 6-12mo on GFCF. A lot of social awkwardness comes from not picking up on these fundamental inputs.

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