gluten for punishment

As I mentioned earlier we are on the gluten free casein free diet. I first heard about the diet watching Jenny McCarthy on Oprah. I was skeptical but I was also exhausted. We were 2 months away from having our official diagnosis after a year of waiting lists for hearing, psychological, and speech assessment.

When I heard about the diet I thought "well if it does work then great, if it doesn't then we'll be exactly where we are right now so we might as well try it". I began researching about the gluten & casein free diet and found that absolutely everything Alden ate had at least one of them in it. I went to TACA (you can find a link in the sidebar) and hand-wrote three college ruled pages of safe foods, I also gave a copy to my in-laws since they are our sitters when we go out on the weekends. Luckily, our families were willing to go through the steps of eliminating gluten & casein from Alden's diet with us.

Armed with that info we went to Wal-Mart (we didn't have a health food store anywhere close by at the time) and stocked up on safe foods. We jumped in with both feet and pulled all the gluten & casein containing foods cold turkey. Within a week we were noticing small differences, within a few weeks other people were noticing. The changes in our case were rather drastic and immediate which was just proof that we were doing something right.

I know some people who have tried the diet with absolutely no success, I know others who have had minimal success, and luckily we were in the group that had major success with dietary intervention. The fact is that absolutely every child is different, and what works for one child isn't necessarily going to work for another.

A lot of people do have success with the diet, according to a report a few weeks ago 1 in 5 children on the spectrum are using some form of dietary intervention. The same report said there was no proof that the diet works. I say that numbers don't lie and it's obviously working for a lot of people. It's not like we don't have other things we need to spend our money on like speech, physical, and occupational therapy.