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Hi,
I've been enjoying reading postings from you all for about three months
now, but I haven't written anything till today.  It seemed appropriate
to do so now, this month being the second anniversary that my ten-year
old autistic son has been on a gluten-, casein-, and sugar-free diet.I
am happy to report that he gained 20 pounds in the two years, when
typically in the past he gained at most 2-4 pounds a year.  We haven't
found the diet to be the nightmare that I anticipated.  Andrew is
incredibly catholic in his tastes and cooperates fully, and of course
this helps tremendously.

We celebrated the anniversary with a delicious (but of course expensive)
gluten- and dairy-free pie from the Natural Feast Corporation which I
highly recommend.  The crust is composed of rice, tapioca and potato
starch flours which is so delicious that I had to limit how much my
daughter (who has no digestion problems) ate.  For your information four
of their pies are dairy free, two are  not.  I think they're located
here in Massachusetts, but they have a toll-free number
(1-800-748-2772).  I'm not sure how they ship them since the pies are
frozen and uncooked, but I pass this information on anyway for all of
you who like yummy desserts.

For those of you with autistic children, I'd like to suggest that you
consider some other tests that our holistic doctor suggested.  She
wanted to get assessments of Andrew's vitamin, mineral, and amino acid
profile.  Of all of these the most interesting results came from the
latter test which showed that Andrew had enormous deficiencies in over
half of the twenty or so amino acid, and interestingly, all of them were
the essential amino acids (i.e. the ones you get from diet, the body
can't make them).  He now takes two daily supplements (branched chain
and free amino acid capsules) and when we repeated the amino acid test a
year later he was well within the normal range.

I'm happy to expand on any other findings we've had for the subset of
you interested in food intolerances and autism, a most intriguing topic.

Harriet Barnett
MIT
Cambridge, MA
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