Is there a correlation between Autism and Sugar craving?

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I have suspected for some time that our youngest son, age 9 is on the spectrum as I suspect I am.

Generally speaking, kids like candy and sweet things. He, however, is a sugar fiend. It's as though he has a sugar addiction including sneaking sugary things we may have in the house, refrigerator, etc and being very covert about doing it. He's thin and small for his age, but otherwise he's healthy and very active.

He's in a different world in regard to his lust for sweets compared to his siblings.

No.

Agreed. No. There isn't but...

It's something you're going to want to get a handle on fast because whether he is autistic or not, addictive behaviors could be something he's prone to. It sounds like he already is. My eldest was, and still is (he's 22 now). The only way I could "handle" it was to keep sugars OUT of the house totally. No soda, no candy. Period. He did fine as long as the stuff wasn't available. If it was, he couldn't keep his hands off it. I would get it out of the house if I were you. Sugar dependency, especially if he develops it early, will eventually kill him if you don't control it quickly.

Thanks for the advice. I have an addictive personality so perhaps its genetic. We don't generally have a lot of things in the house with refined sugars but we've become more mindful of what we may have that he would find. My wife has a locking cabinet that she has started to put some of the candies and things that we do still keep in the house.

Most kids crave sugar. Nothing to do specifically with Autism in my opinion.

I believe that my nephew is autistic but he has never liked sweet things at all except for fruit. When we celebrated his 2nd birthday years ago, he barely touched his own birthday cake.

He has a very limited number of foods he'll actually eat, but he has a real fondness for Montreal steak spice.

I heard that some people with ADHD have a strong craving for sugar but others can be the opposite & not really care for it. ADHD is fairly common with Aspergers so it might be worth looking into if the kid shows other ADHD signs.

I've always wondered this myself. I always craved sweets when I lived with my parents, to the point of feeling like a crack addict when I couldn't get any. We lived in a rural area and I wasn't allowed to learn to drive. My parents would usually lock up any cookies or sweets they had but I would get them when they weren't looking anyway I would eat entire bags of cookies in one sitting if someone wasn't around to watch me and enforce how many I had. And a whole bag wasn't enough to satisfy my cravings. "Healthy" sugars like fruit didn't satisfy my cravings.

I wonder if it was a "forbidden fruit" thing because once I moved out and was practically next door to a grocery store with no one enforcing what I could have or how much, I no longer got the intense cravings. I can be satisfied after just one candy bar or even something healthy like an apple. I do always buy candy in bulk in case I get an intense craving again.

I also wonder if I just craved sugar because I was stressed all the time as a kid. My father had PTSD and Bipolar disorder. My mother refused to see a "shrink" but has all the signs of Borderline or Bipolar Disorder.