Years ago, I listened to this episode of this podcast (a link to the transcript if you find Ms. Ward a little too energetic)
What I learned from this episode changed the fate of my whole family for the better. The first, and most important piece of knowledge I took away is that the Vagus Nerve is the only nerve in the entire human body that has BIDIRECTIONAL communication with the brain and is therefore responsible for at least a portion of human behavior
What I learned here helped me to develop a (fairly expensive but worth it) diet for my daughter (who is 7 years old and on the ASD spectrum) that (anecdotally) has had incredibly positive effects on her behavior, hypersensitivity, ability to focus on a task, and learning ability.
Just to make sure I wasn’t seeing confirmation bias, I DNA sequenced the before and after of her gut biome after 4 years of strictly eating like this and saw a dramatic rise in the biodiversity.
Here’s how I help my daughter to avoid (and recover from) the poison in American food that was laying waste to her gut biome and increasing the severity of her ASD symptoms (like hypersensitivity and self-harm):
- don’t eat wheat because 99.99999% of it in the U.S. has been sprayed with roundup in a process called desiccation… IMO, THIS is probably why we see such a high occurance of celiac in the US…and IMHO it is often not the gluten… it’s the roundup!
- don’t drink milk (unless it is raw milk from a Jersey cow or a goat: both of which produce A2 type milk)
- don’t eat corn because it contains glyphosate (glyphosate’s effects on human microbiota) and other harmful chemicals
- don’t eat anything unless it is officially labeled USDA Organic (though this one isn’t a silver bullet because the USDA is a corrupt organization too…I mainly just stay away from foods that are made by big agriculture like Nabisco/General Mills/etc because they own the entire chain of production and use TONS of chemicals to achieve their yield)
- don’t consume concentrated sugars and hyper-refined chemicals like HFCS
- vitamin D (a vital ingredient for the body’s macrophage production)
- eat yogurt with macrophage activation properties (gcMAF) to kickstart the production of macrophage in your gut. This one is SUPER important for reversing the effects since in my experience, it is the macrophage production that people on the ASD spectrum are severely lacking, causing bad bacteria to proliferate in the gut, unchecked.
- consume lots of different species of probiotics to repopulate your gut bacteria that has been decimated by these chemicals which act like antibiotics inside your fragile gut (the more different species of bacteria, the better)
- drink kombucha and other probiotic sodas/drinks (another probiotic that I swear by)
- consume nopale powder to fight gut inflammation /leaky gut. I learned this one from a trip to mexico where I mixed fresh nopale into the smoothie and saw massive improvements
- consume mushrooms like Organic Lion’s Mane (Hericium erinaceus) mycelial biomass & fruit body Organic Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum) mycelial biomass & fruit body, Organic Cordyceps (Cordyceps militaris) mycelial biomass & fruit body, Organic Turkey Tail (Trametes veriscolor) mycelial biomass & primordia, Organic King Trumpet (Pleurotus eryngii) mycelial biomass & fruit body, Organic Maitake (Grifola frondosa) mycelial biomass & primordia, Organic Antrodia (Antrodia camphorata) mycelial biomass, Organic Shiitake (Lentinula edodes) mycelial biomass & fruit body and Organic Himemeatsutake (Agaricus blazer) mycelial biomass & primordia because the ideal, healthy gut is actually lined with a substrate of healthy bacteria, fungus, and viruses)…there’s a powder out there but I am going to avoid linking it
- eat prebiotics (foods that good gut bacteria like to consume) while starving the bad gut bacteria that thrives in a gut environment rich in artificial sugars and over-enriched foods
I realized that the best course of action would be to give her a super healthy smoothie each day that would contain most of the elements of this diet in one dose (not the dairy parts of course). Since she is also VERY picky, I knew she wouldn’t drink it because it tasted like a salad (it even contains kimchi for their unique bacterial fingerprint!) So, I started out adding lots of honey to the smoothie and making it tasty. Over time, I progressively decreased the sweetness (eventually eliminated the honey altogether) but since it is so ingrained in her routine, she still voraciously drinks the entire smoothie…and even asks for it specifically even though it tastes horrible to any outside observer. Psychological studies (Pavlov’s dogs!?!?) helped pave the way for this. ;)
Anyway, I just thought I’d share this life-changing crash-course I took in improving my daughter’s gut biome. If this advice helps even one of you, I am honored.
ps. I have been gaslighted by other unwitting dupes in the form of American citizens when I mention it. So, please if you disagree or have some contrary information, try to be constructive instead of just attacking me.
You are going to get a lot of flak for posting this, and I’d suggest removing it.
A lot of adults living with Autism, particularly those who grew up in the shadow of the vaccine scares of the late 90s are told that autism is something wrong with us that needs to be “fixed”, rather than a part of who we are, and something to manage.
We are offered and sold products and cures, often by people who do care (in the case of many, parents and family) that ultimately don’t work. For many of the people reading this, you’ve added another entry to the long list of things they’ve been told will “fix” them.
Please be mindful of the fact that autism as a whole is still not very well understood by the medical community.
I’m glad that your daughter is doing better.
But given that even the researchers you mentioned don’t fully understand this relationship themselves, I would suggest that providing a list of foods and why they fix specific problems is not a good thing, and you’re doing harm by posting it.
You do not know for sure the relationship between those specific foods and behaviour withr regards autism. At this time I’d imagine there’s not a research organisation that does.
I would encourage the mods to remove this post.
I’m afraid you lost me at “raw milk” - I’ve only ever seen that endorsed by people with very unscientific beliefs as it’s not considered safe for human consumption.
Meh, raw milk is fine if it’s fresh and has had a proper cooling chain before consumption, the problem with and reason for the recommendation against raw milk is primarily when considering it as a commercially shipped product that is several days old and may have an unverifiable cooling chain.
It’s perfectly fine if you have a local rancher, in the region of Germany life has dragged me too, we have a local farmer compact that sells milk directly from the holding tanks for €1/L, it’s always fresh and cooled because it’s part o the same supply chain as the pasteurized milk.
You’re going to ignore all of my other good advice because you’ve been brainwashed about milk? Don’t follow the raw milk advice. 🤦🏻
PS. My daughter doesn’t even drink raw milk. I use it to make the yogurt down the page a little.
I’m going to ignore all of your advice because you prioritise a dangerous fad over avoiding a genuine risk to your child’s health, and I’m not interested in doing the research to find out whether the rest are similarly problematic.
a dangerous fad
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
What dangerous fad are you talking about? Did you know that mother’s breast milk contains milk and (at the beginning of an infant’s life) it contains colostrum? Is that a fad as old as humanity? Did you know that yogurt is made with raw milk? Cheese is too. Those must be fads.
ps. if you hate milk that much, there are milk-free alternatives like Bravo that will suffice. I don’t even give my daughter raw milk. I make yogurt using that raw milk. When she drinks any milk, it is oat milk.
Me: Here’s a few things I do (none of them even slightly harmful) to help my daughter.
You: One of those things is something that the FDA told me not to agree with due to 100 year old science that hasn’t been revisited. It must ALL be wrong.
Me: Ok, well there are alternatives if you’re scared of raw milk (which is, by the way, the main ingredient in ALL yogurts and cheeses in the entire world). For example, my daughter drinks oat milk. The only time she consumes raw milk is when I use it to make yogurt.
You: How dare you!
while the blanket distrust of “raw” milk is a bit silly, unless you are actually getting the milk from the farmer directly it just means that it will have a higher bacterial load. Factually, there is no nutritional difference between “raw” milk and pasteurized.
Tho I do congratulate you for both using the naturalism and modernism fallacy at the same time, Milk its consumption, storage, stability, etc… has been an issue before humans built the first settlement, and just because scientific studies are “old” doesn’t make them wrong.
And i very much agree that you are following a fad here, from a fad food label that is mainly the US army of a large French food conglomerate…
There is indeed a relation between food and behaviour. In fact, I’d argue that there is a connection between food and practically everything else. That is because food is very much central to every animal alive.
Food can act like medicine. That is a proverb from china thousands of years old, but it is true. Food contains all kinds of things that can have an effect on animals, including vitamins, fiber and many more. So it is in fact certain that the food does have an effect on your daughter.
I’d argue, however, that the food is healthy in general, and that has nothing specifically to do with Autism. If it helps, that’s good. I’d bet more on it being a coincidence though.
