We have been dairy/casein free for about 2 1/2 months, gluten free for 2 months and soy free for 5 weeks.
Other "biomedical stuff we have done: Multivitamins with zinc, B6, etc.
Calcium/Magnesium supplement. Cod Liver oil. Using safflower
oil/sunflower oik instead of canola. Omega 3 fortified eggs. Nitrite
free meats.
Now, these intervention may make a difference in some kids but for DS
it hasn't made a bit of difference. It's hard to put in all of this
work without any return, but I will continue the diet for another
couple of months and if I don't think it's helped I'm going to stop.
But I have picked up some good eating habits. For example- why do so
many foods have 20 ingrediants - half of which I can't even pronounce.
Eating organic foods and foods without artificial flacvors, colors and
preservatives is generally healthy and I will continue that part of the
diet.
[QUOTE=andysmama]I am thinking of changing my sons diet. What has worked and what has not??? Any suggestions[/QUOTE]
I would recommend taking all dairy out of his diet first. We saw a regression with our son at first and then we saw a huge improvement in behavior. We then took gluten away and this helped as well. Gluten is much more difficult to eliminate. You can go to gfcf.com to find out what foods are gluten free. Also, some fruits have a high phenol content and this caused our son problems as well. Apples, grapes (especially red) are two that we limit our son's ingestion of.
Also, for eye contact problem, I would highly recommend Omega Brite (www.omegabrite.com) which are essential fatty acid capsules. These are very high in EPA. I hope this helps. Oh, I would also, recommend finding a good DAN! (defeat autism now!) doctor to help with biomedical interventions
All we've done so far is remove dairy from our son's diet. His eyes no longer look like a raccoon's and he no longer has bright red cheeks. Also, he seems to be more 'with it' than he'd been prior. he makes lots of eye contact (with us) and is more interactive. I should say, though, that we removed the dairy in coincidence with starting ST and OT ... so not sure if his social changes are due to the dairy or the therapy! It's an easy (and fairly cheap) thing to remove, however.