My Son's diet

[Silvia]

I have been thinking seriouslty about it,he's used to a regular diet, and when we introduce him to new foods, he'll bite his hand until make it bleed, and throw a fit(he has a severe case of autism),he eats nurticious food, but I don't know what to do you think?

Every day he has a midnight snack(around12 to 1 am) that consists of a small fruit salad that contains, pear, apple, pineapple,peach, and watermelon, and he likes with with white cheese on top

He has eggs with bacon, sausages and a small pancake with sugar(wrong!) for breakfast, and that's everyday

Just 2 hours after having his breakfast or either he likes to white breads with nutella or a vegmite sandwich with lettuce

He will vary in lunch he doesn't have the same thing everyday, he likes spaghetti with meatballs and cheese, lasagña, chicken soup or shrimp

He likes to have youghurt an hour after lunch

And he has a jam with cheese sandwich for dinner with a glass of milk

If we introduce something other than that, he'll drive insane, we have try, we coax him to have shrimp once he accept it and we add it to his diet.
Do you think it's ok? Is it healthy enough?

[Tigergirl1980]

I don't know what to suggest if he doesn't like it when you try to give him something different.

His breakfast is not good at all and he really should not be having that kind of breakfast every day.

May I ask why he has a snack so late? It's really not good for anyone to eat food that late at night. Will he not have something more substancial at dinner? Would he get upset if you swapped his lunch and dinner around, maybe he wouldn't need the midnight snack if he had more at dinner. Maybe try giving him more fruit instead of all the sandwiches he has or would that just upset him?

[hannanat]

Silvia, I have an autistic daughter as well and I can't stress how vital adapting her diet has been in her treatment. Every single autistic child I have ever known or known of has improved with dietary changes. How old is your son? What are his dominant autistic traits? Does he have a language delay?

There are many things you can do to help him Silvia, and many of them you won't be told about by your Dr.

You can email me at . I will only have the email address posted for a short time, so copy it down if you like.

The first thing I would say to you is to cut out his milk. Substitute with rice milk. Definitely not soy. If he notices the difference try and give half and half slowly increasing the quantity of rice milk in proportion to the cows milk. Many, many autistic kids have a problem with cows milk and improve dramatically from this alone.

I wouldn't worry about when he eats - but the food he is eating is really no good for an autistic child.

[Silvia]

How old is your son? What are his dominant autistic traits? Does he have a language delay?

He's 22 months, he doesn't say a world at all, only if you can count "hmm" and "oh" or "ah" as a word, that's the only thing he can say.

Ok my first mistake,we can't have cowmilk at home as DH and DD are allergic and I just don't like it and we have soy milk, first mistake.

Something interesting, I know another autistic child but wow, I fell like a horrible mother by this, I wonder how this kid mom may be feeling, the boy only eats, french fries and Popcorn chicken from KFC and cow milk

Anyways I'll email you, thanks for giving me your address

[hannanat]

Some kids are okay with soy, Sylvia, but a lot are intolerant of it because lots of soy milk actually contains casein anyway, so rice milk is best if he'll have it. Meat and veges are good. Layla (my dd) won't eat meat, but I wish she would.

Most people who try dietary intervention for autistic kids try what they call the GFCF diet, which is gluten and casein free. This gluten is wheat products, so no bread, pasta biscuits or anything like that that is made from wheat. Casein free means no dairy derived from any animals milk, except breast milk, and even then the mum needs to be on a casein free diet. In most people, casein is easily broken down by the digestive system into peptides, but in a lot of autistic kids, this doesn't happen properly. The stuff which isn't broken down completely enters the blood stream and can have an effect on the brain similar to that of drugs. Its called the leaky gut theory and if you google it, you will come up with a lot of info. Does that make sense?

We didn't go to extremes with Layla, but cut her dairy right down and noticed a HUGE difference. I will email you back soon