I'm Curing my Aspergers Disease

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Oh no wonder I have autism I can't have much vitamin C cause I'm allergic to it.

Don't completely cut milk out of your diet. Rice milk is the bomb!

I'm sorry that you have to view your AS in that light. I prefer to celebrate my differences. Good luck.

Heh...I seriously doubt that changing your diet will do anything. Good luck, anyways.

I'm not one of those who's absolute about the idea that there's no cure for AS and who'd want one anyway. I think it's not so black and white as there is or isn't a cure. Nor about if it's something where a cure would be desirable.

But, here's the thing. AS is a matter of how one thinks. How one's brain works. Diet doesn't change our brain wiring. I've no doubt that diet can make a difference in mental health, including for those on the autism spectrum. (I'm not saying autism itself is a mental health issue; just that mental health interacts.) But there's a limit to how much difference it can make. And an adult with autism who wants to improve their ability to cope in this world (whether you call it personal growth, a cure, treatment, or something else) needs to do more than just change their diet. Changing the diet may be a help, but it's not a cure.

(I also think that the gluten-free, casein-free diet is not going to be helpful for most with autism, but that's really a separate issue from my point above.)

All he is going to achieve is limiting his diet of foods he probably enjoys and he still will be autistic at the end of his little diet experiment.

O.P. - This is the best one can do with this. Energy is in shorter supply due to more demands, as needed to succesfully interface an alien world. Glucose glucose; and brain glucose........

Chemicals are not going to change anatomical differences. It's life long because it has nothing to do with neurotransmitters.

For one: is a diet or chemical mediation going to cause your white matter volume to 'shrink'?

The OP might have already suffered from this. Your advice was too late to save him.

Good luck! I have been on a gluten-free diet for a over a year and a casein-free diet for three and a half months, and I have to say that the GFCF diet has greatly reduced my anxiety and depression, which in turn has allowed me to improve my Asperger's "symptoms."

There is one caveat though: I actually also have Celiac Disease and a dairy allergy that went undiagnosed for 15 years. (Celiac Disease is similar to a food allergy, but it is actually a auto-immune disorder. When I eat gluten, my antibodies attack my intestine.) All this is to say: if YOU have undiagnosed food allergies/intolerances to gluten and casein, which some researchers believe that many people with Asperger's and Autism do, then the GFCF diet will help you. If you don't, then it probably won't.

From my perspective, going all those years thinking I didn't have a problem with those foods and then being tremendously helped when they were removed, I would definitely try the GFCF diet if I were you, just to see if it would help. But you are making it unnecessarily hard on yourself. There are only two rules on this diet:

1. No Dairy (Casein)
2. No Gluten (Wheat, Barley, Rye, and Oats)

You can have almost all sodas and juices, and you can have any non-dairy milk (soy milk, rice milk, almond milk) that doesn't have the casein protein added back in. You can definitely have sugar and soy! If you need more information, there are a ton of online resources, such as GFCFDiet.com and Celiac.com.

Unfortunately, you won't notice an improvement on the GFCF diet in as short a time as 30 days. You have to try it for at least 3 months to do an accurate test. When I removed gluten and casein from my diet, I actually felt worse for a while before I felt better.

The GFCF diet didn't "cure" my Asperger's, but it has certainly helped!

Last edited by Kaspie on 29 Oct 2010, 11:48 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Newsflash: Asperger's is a disease.

I'm curing myself by banging my head on a brick wall out of frustration that I SARC/am diseased/SARC



The GF/CF is not a cure at all and my condition isn't a disease so don't insult us. Perhaps you should learn the facts from a doctor who isn't obsessed with the green stuff (money). Brains can't be rewired therefore you can't cure autism/AS. End of discussion...

yes I am in a bad mood

Actually, brains can be "rewired", at least in some cases, and with a lot of hard work. But not by diet, and it remains open for debate if, and to what extent, it's true in autism. (Though diet can affect what goes on in our brain.)

You probably got that from FOXNews.

It's not a disease.

try the diet and tell us what happens. I can tell you though that I have a severe milk allergy and because of this I have never had milk in my diet all my life except on accident (wasn't good).

I still eat gluten and soy though.

This. There's much to be said for a good, healthy lifestyle, and yes, it will make you more functional--but it won't make you less autistic. In fact, in some cases, more energy will give you more leeway to pursue special interests, to stim more obviously (if you don't have the energy to stim, you probably won't)--to look more autistic. Kids with fevers apparently look less autistic to their parents; they become more "cuddly" and stim less. The exhaustion brought on by a fever, and the reduction in autistic traits that comes along with it, does NOT mean that it's going to make you more functional to deliberately induce fevers!

Soo... yeah. You're not going to cure a thing. It'd be like me trying to cure my cat's stripes by brushing his fur: Once I'm finished, his fur will look a lot nicer and neater, but he'll still have stripes!

The way we know about is learning. If an autistic person learns how to do some skill, like say how to have a conversation, his brain will change connections between neurons to reflect that information and make that learning more efficient to apply. It likely won't be the same pattern as an NT brain because autistics are different in the way we learn, too; but the changes are definitely there just like in any other brain. (Granted, we did our experiments to figure this out on lab mice and rats, but it's safe to say that the same "changing connections when you learn something" phenomenon does hold true for humans; it's just too basic to be different in such closely related species as mice and humans.)

Regarding diets: Eliminating things that you are sensitive to makes sense; but remember that the more things you eliminate, the more danger of a malnutrition-related disease. What's even worse is that it can be hard to detect if you are in fact not getting enough to eat, because the body in a last ditch effort to give you energy to seek out food will often tap into the reserves, making you more energetic precisely because you are malnourished. (It is thought that this early-starvation-related energy is part of why anorexia exists.) There's just no substitute for learning enough about nutrition to make sure you are not eliminating anything that your body needs--including enough calories, period, for your body to use as fuel.

Remember also that our generally obsessive tendencies place us at increased risk of becoming so absorbed in a diet that we have time for nothing else in our lives. This tends to have an extremely negative effect on social relationships and school/work performance when it happens.

We've discussed this a lot on parenting. The protocol results in feeling healthier for some people on the spectrum. Feeling healthier improves many things in a person's life. Diet can be a valuable tool that will create important changes for certain individuals.

I wish you the best in your attempt to feel healthier and improve your life.

But do not confuse that with curing AS.

Actually, it's a disorder.

And you can't cure Asperger's. Stop falling for quack diets and try to get some therapy.