Is My Child With Autism Too Old For Dietary Interventions?
Pamela Ferro is the Co-founder of Hopewell Associates, a nurse owned and operated practice for adults and children with neurodevelopmental mood, thought, and behavioral disorders. Pam also founded the Gottschall Autism Foundation to provide learning opportunities in a community college setting for young adults with ASD. Pam is widely recognized as being the leading authority on the utilization of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) in children and adults with autism and has treated over 200 children with ASD using dietary interventions like the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, most of whom have made tremendous strides. These include for some, recovering lost language, or speaking for the first time, improving health, learning, and function. Some of these children no longer meet the diagnostic criteria for ASD. She has co-written a book, entitled The SCD for Autism and ADHD: A Reference and Dairy Free Cookbook For the Specific Carbohydrate Diet
We are very excited that Pam will be joining us as a contributing blogger to Caleb’s Cooking Company, sharing her insight and wisdom as to how diet and nutrition affect behavior, moods and cognition. This blog is written by Pamela Ferro.
More than ever, families of teenagers, and adults with autism spectrum disorders are asking the question, “Is my child too old for dietary interventions?” What we are talking about is essential medical care for sick children, and adults, and whether a person is 2 or 72 years of age, addressing the underlying medical problems to improve the health of the child or adult and facilitating development.
People with autism often suffer with constipation and/or diarrhea and other painful and debilitating bowel problems. Unfortunately, gastrointestinal problems are still unrecognized and untreated in this population.
This may be especially true in older children or nonverbal individuals whose GI pain and malnutrition may express itself as a “behavior problem,” such as:
- poor sleep
- tantrums
- self injury
- obsessions
- compulsions
- or aggression
Behavior may become more violent and self-directed as the child gets older, but the treating professionals may be more apt to discount this as “acting out behavior” or long-term maladaptive behavior that they feel is part of the psychopathology of autism. More often than not, those sorts of behaviors can usually be traced back to an injured intestine.
We now have well-documented substantiation from gastroenterologists Dr. Timothy Buie, Dr. Harland Winter, Dr. Rafail Kushak1 and Dr. Karoly Horvath2. They have all found inflammation, maldigestion, and malabsorption in children with autism, as well as intestinal brush border enzyme deficiencies, which is probably one of the most important findings, that potentially validates dietary intervention.
This demonstrates that those impacted by this problem do not have the necessary enzymes available or accessible for proper digestion and absorption of various foods.
In essence, there is an inability to digest certain foods and maintain the integrity of the gastrointestinal system. The inability to properly digest foods has a dramatic and far-reaching negative impact on all bodily processes, and, therefore, on how a person thinks, feels, and functions.
In her revolutionary book Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet, author, researcher, and scientist Elaine Gottschall quotes Gee, a 19th century English pediatrician who stated:
“What you cannot digest does you harm.”
Her work was originally written to address the gastrointestinal maladies of Colitis, Crohn’s Disease, and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Knowledgeable parents recognized the striking similarities between these bowel disorders and the serious bowel problems that many of their children had with diarrhea, constipation, alternating constipation and diarrhea, gas, bloating, exceptionally foul smelling stools, and even the presence of undigested food in bowel movements.
Elaine herself answered the call of the autism community for teaching, information, and help. At age 81, she began traveling to the United States to attend autism conferences and speak with groups of concerned and overwhelmed parents, teaching them the principles of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD). This was the very diet that 50 years earlier saved Elaine’s own four-year-old daughter from having surgical removal of her colon with a resultant colostomy for severe bleeding and ulcerative colitis.
Elaine not only recognized the common digestive and bowel problems of inflammatory bowel disorders and autism, but also recognized some of the same psychiatric-like symptoms common in both. She often told the story of her young daughter crying and screaming at night in bed, not only from burning pain and discomfort, but from what Elaine described as “psychic seizures” in which her daughter would be terrified and experience a feeling of the walls of the room literally closing in on her and potentially killing her.
Elaine dedicated her life to finding the source and cure for her daughter’s colitis and bleeding and found 93-year-old Dr. Sidney Valentine Haas of New York City who taught her the basic framework of the diet that he was using to treat people with severe bowel disorders.
What are you feeding this child?
The first question he asked her was, “Mrs. Gottschall, what are you feeding this child?” Elaine reports that they discussed food issues, and he briefly told her about the need for people with serious bowel disorders to follow what has evolved into the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.
The eating program healed her daughter, ended her bowel problems, ended her psychiatric-like symptoms, and allowed her to lead a normal life.
Much of Elaine’s work translates directly to the inflammatory bowel problems that people with autism experience. In addition, the diet is further customized, (SCD-DF), a dairy free version of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, in that people with autism initially have difficulty digesting the dairy products (cheese, butter, and 24 hour homemade yogurt) that is allowed on SCD.
The implementation of dietary interventions with teenagers and adults with autism may be a bit more challenging than with very young children, and potentially initially more socially isolating; however, it is well worth the effort to ensure its success.
If you enjoyed this post, then subscribe to our blog to stay tuned, as we will be featuring a series of posts from Pam and her colleague Raman Prasad (co-author of The SCD for Autism and ADHD Cookbook). They will be writing on various topics, including: The Gut and Behavior, Leaky Gut and Malabsorption, How to Care for Mom on the SCD-DF Diet, and more.
Caleb’s Cooking Company sells frozen fast food for kids that is not only organic and gluten free, but is grain free and has no artificial ingredients, added sugars or GMO’s.
We fill a gaping hole in the food industry created by exploding pediatric autoimmune illnesses and allergies by making food for children that they love, (pizzas, chicken nuggets and enchiladas), but that is healthy, whole, healing and convenient for parents.
