Eating for Autism: The 10-Step Nutrition Plan to Help Treat Your Child's Autism, Asperger's, or ADHD: Elizabeth Strickland

Da Capo Lifelong Books | ISBN: 0738212431 | 2009-04-27 | PDF (OCR) | 304 pages | 1.31 Mb

What your child eats has a major impact on his brain and body function. Eating for Autism is the first book to explain how an autism, Aspergers, PDD-NOS, or ADHD condition can effectively be treated through diet.Eating for Autism presents a realistic 10-step plan to change your childs diet, starting with essential foods and supplements and moving to more advanced therapies like the Gluten-Free Casein-Free diet. Parents who have followed Stricklands revolutionary plan have reported great improvements in their childs condition, from his mood, sleeping patterns, learning abilities, and behavior to his response to other treatment approaches. Complete with 75 balanced, kid-friendly recipes, and advice on overcoming sensory and feeding skill problems, Eating for Autism is an essential resource to help a child reach his full potential.

Review:

Before striking out on my own in this review, I'd like to correct the misconception by D. Prince that there was "…NOTHING about problems with protein intolerance" in this book. First of all, gluten IS (or rather ARE) proteins… two of them, in fact; glutenin and gliadin. Both of these special proteins make up what we call "gluten."

The elasticity we see in bread dough is due to these proteins. There are two amino acid sequences in glutenin; HMW (high molecular weight) 10 and HMW 12. Their differences are in their repeating arrays of hexamer and nonamer amino acids. Their structure is responsible in large part for the increase in elasticity when the dough is kneaded.

While the author of EATING FOR AUTISM may not have gone into great detail about this process, I think one gets a clue about the book by its title, EATING for Autism. The book is about EATING, and it's written for the layman, not the scientist, albeit some people with these diseases and/or with gluten intolerance and other food intolerances and allergies have become experts in the field.

As far as the comment on speculation, "…a lot of un-referanced and speculation babble about autism," I think even scientists and medical experts have not nailed everything down about autism yet. There is a lot of speculation in this field for that very reason. Someone with protein intolerance or other food intolerances or allergies must rely on "speculation" coupled with their own experiences until such a time in the future when all can be known about this subject.

Having read the book, I must agree that it suffers a bit from the lack of detail about protein intolerances and food allergies. However, having tried many of the recipes myself, I must also agree with D. Prince that the recipes are excellent… and THAT'S the thrust of this book; EATING for autism, Asperger's and ADHD. Most people I've come across with these diseases have a common complaint… "I miss bread and many of the foods I can't eat on my intolerance diet. It's so hard to find anything I can eat."

It seems to me that a good cookbook addressing this problem is a godsend to most people with this problem. As a cookbook alone, EATING FOR AUTISM should help to solve some big problems for people with food intolerance issues.

I'm of the opinion that this book will help a lot of people since it is for the layman. I can't give it five stars because I believe that people who are highly informed on this subject will need to read further in order to satisfy their need for more informative and/or scientific material. All in all, however, I do think this is a very good book.

For those who want more information on the protein gluten and its subunits, glutenin and gliadin, see the REFERENCES list at: www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v7/n12/abs/nbt1289-1281.html