5 Reasons I Don't Use the GFCF Diet

Within autism parenting groups, I feel like I'm a member of a tiny minority. All the other special-needs parents I know are constantly exchanging diet tips for the increasingly popular GFCF (gluten-free, casein-free) diet, which is widely touted for its purported ability to reduce autism symptoms-- or, some say, "cure" the condition altogether. But despite its popularity, I won't be switching my child to the GFCF diet at any point in the foreseeable future. Here's why:

1. There's no proof that it works. The Cochrane Collaboration, an unbiased nonprofit that investigates the evidence behind health-related treatments, looked at all the available evidence for the GFCF diet for autism. They found that it's one of many very commonly used treatments for autism, but that, so far, there's not much reason to think that it works. Drawing from the pool of all available research, the organization concluded, "Current evidence for efficacy of these diets is poor. Large scale, good quality randomised controlled trials are needed."

Similarly, Elsevier published a review and concluded that GFCF diets shouldn't be used for autism: "Critical analysis of each study's methodological rigor and results reveal that the current corpus of research does not support the use of GFCF diets in the treatment of ASD."

2. I don't want to encourage an eating disorder. Autistic children are notoriously picky eaters and, in some cases, picky eating can turn into a serious eating disorder. Believe me, I've been there and done that, as a survivor of orthorexia. There's evidence that people with eating disorders have very high rates of autism-like symptoms, and even that autism and anorexia might be the exact same condition. Why take a child who is already at a high risk of developing an eating disorder and enforce an even more strict diet on them? My daughter already has her share of unhealthy behaviors when it comes to food, and I don't want to encourage food aversions or compulsions by unnecessarily restricting her list of "safe" foods.

3. There are serious health consequences of the GFCF diet for autism. GFCF diets for autism aren't risk-free; they can cause serious nutritional deficiencies. The systematic review in Elsevier found that autistic children on GFCF diets may be at a higher risk for bone problems. A GFCF diet can also lead to many deficiencies in vitamins and minerals and can lead to either severe weight gain or weight loss, both of which can be serious in children. And many people adhering to the GFCF diet develop diarrhea or constipation, which can be especially problematic for autistic kids, who are already prone to these discomforts. My daughter's picky eating has already led to some run-ins with anemia in the past, and I'm not going to chance putting her at a high risk for future deficiencies. Why chance it, especially when there's no proof it works?

4. Several healthy alternatives to the GFCF diet exist. There isn't much evidence to support the GFCF diet, but there are many other dietary changes that might benefit kids with autism. The Feingold Diet in particular, which eliminates food coloring, artificial flavor, and petroleum-based additives, is very low-risk and much healthier than the GFCF diet. Although it was created for children with ADHD, it could theoretically help autistic children, as well, and doesn't carry the same kinds of nutritional risks as GFCF diets. Does it work? Probably not. And it's certainly not going to cure autism. But if you want to give a dietary change a try, it's best to start with one that won't hurt. It's possible to switch your kids to a healthier diet without leaving the nutritional gaps associated with gluten-free and casein-free lifestyles.

5. I don't want a cure. When I hear other parents talking about "curing" their kids' autism, or the miraculous treatments that supposedly make it vanish overnight, I cringe. I don't want to change who my daughter is or separate her from her neurology. I do not want a cure for autism because I don't think it is a flaw or a defect. So, even if I knew that a GFCF diet for autism would "cure" my daughter overnight, I wouldn't pursue it unless it was a choice she made independently of me. And, considering that it doesn't seem particularly safe or effective anyway, I don't think I'm missing out on much. I'm not going to restrict my child's food intake in some desperate attempt to alter her identity.

I'm happy for now having my family follow a balanced, minimally processed diet, and to help my daughter through any struggles she has using more effective means. If you're considering using a GFCF diet for autism, get in touch with your child's pediatrician so she can help you evaluate the benefits and risks. You can make the best possible decision for your family only when you have enough information to do so.

5 Scariest Things I Saw Working at a Health Food Store

I worked in health food stores for two years. In many ways, it was good job. As someone who to this day adores healthy food and green living, my employee discount was by far the biggest perk. I was also good at what I did. I'm knowledgeable about alternative medicine (the good and the bad) and customers quickly learned that they could trust me to give them real, accurate, and safe information about the products we carried, even when that advice included, "I don't think you should buy this product," or, "You should talk to your doctor before taking this with your medication."

But in those two years, I saw some disturbing examples of people using "natural" remedies when they urgently needed professional medical attention. Our purpose at Back From Nature is to discuss and share the ways that blind adherence to "natural" living can be dangerous. Here are some examples of what I've seen firsthand.

The Man Who Burned His Nose Off

In Fall of 2007, I met an older man who my coworkers identified as a long-term regular. He was very fond of alternative medicine and had been using it to treat conditions himself for many years, and prided himself on not seeing or trusting doctors. When I met him, he had an open, cater-like wound on his nose, surrounded by patches of black.. He explained that he was using topical tinctures of bloodroot to treat what he believed was melanoma. He had read that bloodroot destroys cancer cells. Well, that's true, but what he either did not know or did not want to accept, was that it also destroys healthy tissue, as well. What he was doing wasn't much different than slowly scraping the cancer off himself and taking the rest of his nose, too.

Over time, the sore grew bigger, then vanished under a large bandage across his face. The last time I saw him, he told me that he had decided to see a doctor because his nose was "just about gone." He said that he probably should have seen a doctor a lot sooner. The expression on his wrinkled face, with the white bandage right across the center of it, was one of utter defeat and disappointment.

If Juice Could Kill

I live in North America and have the luxury of having never actually seen someone in-person who was in a state of absolute starvation-- except one. I was genuinely shocked when I saw her walk into the store. Her face was sunken; her eyes bulging and her cheekbones and collarbone jutting out like stones. She was a skeleton covered in flesh-toned shrinkwrap. I thought to myself that she was going to ask me to help her find alternative treatments for hyperthyroidism or cancer, but she didn't. She asked me for help finding blueberry juice.

As I took her to the other side of the store, trying not to stare impolitely, she casually told me about how she had been on a juice fast for six months and felt great and highly recommended it. "I've lost so much weight," she said. When I commented as politely as I could that it might be time to end her juice fast because they can sometimes spiral into eating disorders, she shook her head and said, "My doctor tried to convince me I have an eating disorder last time I went. So I stopped going-- you know how doctors are. They try to turn it into a disease when people start taking control of their own health."

The Government

"What do you have for dextox?" he asked, looking over his shoulder. He was in his late twenties, with wild eyes that looked sleep-deprived. I talked to him about some of our "cleansing" products-- the good ones, which were really just fiber and probiotics, and the bad ones, which contained dangerous laxatives and unstudied herbs. He explained that he needed a full-body cleanse to eliminate all the poison he had been forced to take in the previous week.

What poison?

"Well," he said, leaning close to give me the details, "I saw evidence that the government is killing injured veterans to avoid paying for their medical care. I've seen it with my own eyes. I tried to come forward, and of course no one listened to me, so the government paid a doctor to tell me I was schizophrenic. Then they gave me pill bottles that had poison in them and I would't take them so they put me in a mental hospital. Now I need to detox, because I had to take them for a few days so they would let me go."

Letting MRSA Breathe... All Over the Store

The customer was a younger guy with a boil on his hand the size of a golf ball. It was a throbbing, livid red, and parts of his hand were oozing pus. I could barely stomach the sight of it even before he said what it was.

"It's MRSA," he said, "And I need tea tree oil, white willow, garlic capsules, Himalayan sea salt, and echinacea."

I stifled a gag while I showed him the products he needed, cringing in horrror as he picked up products in the store with his diseased hand. As I accepted his money at the cash register, I told him to make sure he took whatever his doctor prescribed in addition to using the home remedies, and to think about keeping the wound covered.

He said (much to my relief) that he was taking his prescription drugs, too-- but that he wasn't going to cover the wound because it needed to breathe.

I have never in my life used as much Lysol as I did after he left.

A $219 Heart Attack

I never liked selling Hydroxycut Lean, although it was our best-selling weight loss product at one point, and although it was one of the few products I got a commission for selling. It was a combination of herbs, many of them un-researched or under-researched, and included hydroxycitric acid (which is associated with liver damage) and extremely high doses of caffeine, which can cause heart palpitations and anxiety.

I was alarmed when a middle-aged man came to the register with Hydroxycut Lean with synepherine and asked me if they were safe to take together. I told him, "Absolutely not," and explained that synepherine is a powerful stimulant nearly identical to ephedrine. He asked, "So if I have high blood pressure, I shouldn't take them together?"

"If you have high blood pressure, you shouldn't take them at all," I said, worrying that I was overstepping my bounds. I glanced at my boss, who was nodding in agreement. Still, the customer went through with the purchase. I was worried for him, but thought nothing of it until he came back to the store a few months later.

"You probably don't remember me," he said sheepishly, "But I was in the area and thought I'd come by. I was in here a while back getting some weight poss products. I had a heart attack a week later. You told me they weren't safe to take together and I took them anyway."

"Oh no!" I said, "I'm so glad that you're okay. Just so I know how to get the next person to listen to me, can you tell me why you went through with buying them when I told you I didn't think it was safe?"

"I guess I thought that because it was natural, that meant it was safe," he admitted with a regretful shrug.

That's really what almost everything that's dangerous about "natural" living boils down to: the assumption that what is natural is always preferable and safe. It's an assumption that can and does kill. There is nothing wrong with health food stores and there is nothing wrong with cautiously used complementary medicine and doctor-approved home remedies, but there is something very wrong with the culture that feeds health food stores and the attitudes of the people who use them in lieu of evidence-based medicine.

Be careful. Buy your vitamins and your organic food, but don't pay for them with your sanity, your health, or your life.

Aphids and Tinfoil Hats: One Mom's Struggle with Orthorexia

Guest Post By Denise Kesler Olson

Orthorexia. It was a word I’d never heard back in early 2010 when I plopped down on the couch to watch a documentary with my husband. In many ways, I was much more naïve about everything back then, but I would not have admitted it, and I’m sure even if someone had tried to educate me about what that word meant, I wouldn’t have listened. The documentary I was about to watch that day, Food Inc, sent me hurtling down a dark hole where, let’s face it, there was nothing but tinfoil hats at the bottom. I didn’t know that at the time, however. A friend and simply recommended we watch the program on Netflix.

Food Inc. was all about how modern food companies and the processes to get food to the consumer were bad. Honestly, I can’t really remember the specifics of that particular documentary—its blurred together with so many similar-themed ones I watched---but I can remember what I took away from it: modern agriculture=bad. Organic food=less bad. You the consumer=powerless against “big food”.

I took the message to heart, and I had my reasons. I really wanted to believe that it wasn’t my fault that loved to overeat. I really didn’t want to face the fact that food made me feel powerless and out of control. I needed someone to blame. Somewhere there had to be a bad guy hurting me, and a faceless evil conglomerate of corporations became the perfect scapegoat. I had just had my third baby, and the weight I had gained with that pregnancy was clinging stubbornly to midsection and now I “knew” the reason why: Big Ag was the reason I couldn’t lose weight. Big Food was making me fat. Nature wanted me to be thin. I just needed to try to return to nature.

Over the next two years I changed my lifestyle in relation to food by slowly narrowing the foods that were “allowed”, and I did get thinner. I subscribed to a bunch of email services that delivered lists of “good” and “bad” foods to my inbox every day, along with huge lists of foods additives I needed to avoid because they were linked to all sorts of terrible illnesses and disorders. I agonized over these lists and tried to determine how to stretch my food budget so as to include more organic, miracle foods and less foods with scary-sounding chemicals. I found myself believing that the food at the store was not “safe” and only the food I produced myself was trustworthy.

Despite having a “bad guy” to blame for my unhealthy relationship with food, the guilt and fear I felt were far from abating. I felt guilty every day over not being able to provide my children “the best”. I had nowhere to store a side of organic beef. I didn’t have the money to feed them organic, local produce every day, and I worried about the pesticides and herbicides spayed on the fruits and veggies in the grocery stores. I tried in vain to find some organic wheat I could use (I already ground my own flour, but it was from conventional wheat.) Everywhere I turned it seemed my friends in the movement were doing “better” than I was. Their diets were more pure and their children were more natural. They bragged about how much they sacrificed for organic foods, and I found myself struggling within my limited budget to feed a my family.

The greatest source of fear and guilt, however, were the times when I ventured outside the food haven that I had made my home. Often, when faced with the tantalizing aromas of foods I used to eat, I caved to temptation and pigged out just as I had in the past. Overeating lead to feelings of unworthiness and calling myself a weak hypocrite. I often cried at the idea that I “deserved” to be fat, and that all the people I knew who were thin somehow tried harder and ate better than me.

After the birth of my fourth child, there came a point that I consider to be the lowest point of my orthorexia and food paranoia. I often relaxed and de-stressed in my garden planted with expensive organic seeds. I took a lot of care to make sure it was weeded and healthy, and, of course, I never treated the plants or soil with any pesticides or herbicides. I found the work relaxing and rewarding. That winter, there was an invasion of aphids that attacked my pumpkin plants. I researched online and tried every sort of “natural” method I could find to cure them, but it was all in vain. I went out faithfully each day and washed the aphids off the leaves of the pumpkin plants, but the excess water did not drain well in the clay soil in which they were planted. These tedious efforts only efforts only served to weaken the plants with overwatering. I tried a soapy solution, but it built up residue on the plants large leaves and caused the hot sun to burn them more easily, all without ridding the plants of aphids for very long. Finally, I realized the whole thing was hopeless. Devastated and feeling like a total failure, I shut the door to my backyard, and vowed not to go out until all the expensive heirloom pumpkin plants were dead. I could not enjoy my garden any longer. I didn’t “deserve” it.

It was by accident that I finally saw my orthorexia for the unscientific paranoia that it was, and it took a terrible life event to do it. When my youngest child was three months old, he was hospitalized for a serious illness. Although he eventually recovered, the repercussions for our family were enormous. You see, despite my devotion to all things natural when it came to food, I had a secret. I had continued vaccinating my children on schedule. I had decided that I would simply forgo “new” vaccines since I had been fine without them. Many of my friends who shared my “food values” often shared information on social media about the dangers of vaccination, but I could never bring myself to believe their line of reasoning. After the illness left my son unable to be vaccinated for a short time, I began to appreciate the need for others to be vaccinated in order to protect him. I began to think of what a miracle modern medicine had been in my family, and—for the first time ever—I began to really care about vaccines. In fact, I cared so much that I began to argue with my friends who were against them, especially online.

Because of these arguments, I began reading everything that the pro-vaccine community had to offer. I also began to notice a pattern: none of the people who were knowledgeable about vaccines were afraid of conventional produce. In fact, the same sources that were providing me great ammunition when debating those who were against vaccinations, often had articles that were in support of GMOs. At first I resisted this information with the justification that “we couldn’t agree on everything”, but slowly those walls began to come down. I realized that I did not really have the higher ground in accepting science. Here I was begging friends of mine to agree with the mountain of evidence that vaccines were safe and effective, but I was in denial when it came to the scientific consensus about food additives and GMOs. I also sheepishly realized that I never bothered to fact check the fear-based agenda that I had bought into and built my life around.

I learned some important truths when it came to food once I finally started to look at the credible research. I’ll share them below.

1. The companies that produce food for mass consumption do make plenty of products with flaws and junk foods are definitely unhealthy. But they aren’t unhealthy because of additives. They’re unhealthy because of the fat, sugar, and salt content.

2. Clinging to an idealized version of the past will not help people get the healthy food they need today. Foods need to be grown in large quantities and preserved. There is no way of getting around that.

3. Most of the foods we eat today are not “natural” at all. They were developed by humans to taste good to humans. It is wrong to say that they are perfect the way they are because they way they are has changed. It is not wrong to try to improve a food’s usefulness to humans.

4. Reducing the use of pesticide and herbicide, as well as monitoring their impact on the environment is important, but paranoia about synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is not helping. Many organic pesticides are broad spectrum pesticides and actually damage the environment more by killing more insects than just those destroying the crops.

5. Letting my pumpkins die rather than treat them with judiciously used pesticide was a waste of the human controlled resources (such as water, seeds, and fossils fuels to ship seeds and pump water).

It has taken me a little while to completely let go.  Now I recognize that what happened to me happened because of a combination of factors (such as a natural fear of contamination and the persuasive story-telling in those scary documentaries), but at the heart of the situation was the fear of being overweight and unattractive. I was afraid of desiring food too much, so I had been choosing less desirable food on purpose to stay thin. I’d had an eating disorder. It might have been a more socially acceptable eating disorder. But it was an eating disorder. It was othrorexia. Nature didn’t want me to be thin; the code she’d left in my DNA wanted me to eat freely when food was available. I had bought into the idea that it was the end-all be-all for me.

I know at this point there are some people who think that I was “healthier” when I was obsessed with food because I was thinner, or that I’m just trying to justify being fat. That’s not true. My mental heath matters, and so does yours. Those who are orthorexic have poor mental health.

If you are showing orthorexic behaviors right now, I’d invite you to take a closer look at the reasoning behind your choices. Ask yourself, is the real issue for me my weight or appearance? Am I afraid of being “contaminated”? Do I feel out of control around certain foods and believe them to be evil or bad? Would I still choose to eat this way if my weight would stay the same no matter what? Am I enjoying life or am I busy being paranoid about food?

For me, the cost was too high. I still tend to overeat when I am happy and relaxed. I still have to work to keep my weight within a healthy range, but I can do so using an evidence-based approach to food. And while it might not be as romantic, it is certainly more fun. (Because cake.)

Orthorexia: When "Healthy" and "Green" Become a Disease

One of my most painful experiences with “crunchy” living, and one of the reasons I’ve largely left it behind, was because of the hell I went through due to a little-known, yet very common, eating disorder: orthorexia. Orthorexia is when “healthy” or “green” diets go too far, and become serious compulsion.

Let me be clear here: eating healthy is not a disorder. Being conscientious of how your diet affects the planet is not an eating disorder. Orthorexia is when a well-meaning person starts out eating healthy but eventually becomes so obsessed with their dietary choices that it becomes incapacitating or injurious. I consider myself very lucky that I not only recovered from orthorexia (and can now shamelessly eat a Snickers) but that I got treatment and help before it harmed my children.

My struggle with orthorexia began when I was 18 years old and decided to switch to a vegan diet. Many people are able to eat a vegan diet without it becoming a problem for them at all, but I’m not as lucky. Because I suffer from clinical anxiety with features of OCD, veganism quickly turned from a conscientious diet to a serious eating disorder. Nothing passed my lips without careful consideration of how it impacted my health, the safety of animals, and the planet we live on. I would wring my hands over unsustainable packaging and panic over accidental ingestion of trace amounts of dairy.

Paradoxically, my strict all-natural vegan diet caused me to gain massive amounts of weight while also causing me to suffer from serious nutritional deficiencies. My weight skyrocketed by nearly fifty pounds in six months—quite a bit for my naturally small frame—but I felt weak and sick. I shivered constantly and felt nauseated and exhausted. Blood work later showed that I was perilously anemic from deficiencies in iron and B12, two nutrients that are often lacking in a strict and unsupplemented vegan diet.

At my doctor’s insistence, I went from vegan to ovo-lacto-vegetarian, but my food-related compulsions just changed form instead of going away completely. Over the course of the three years that followed, my fears and fixations related to food became even more intense and pathological. Everything I ate had to be organic and “natural,” and while I’d eat animal products, they unnerved me. This was also—unfortunately?—the time during which I gave birth to my daughter and breastfed her.

She was very healthy from birth and thrived on my breast milk, but it came at my expense. Because organic, natural foods cost 4 times the competition, and because I refused to eat anything that didn’t fit those criteria, it meant that I went hungry more often than not. A rational person who eats a healthy diet knows that it’s better to have a balanced meal that might contain MSG than to eat nothing at all, but “rational” was no longer part of my lexicon. So, while orthorexia had initially caused me extreme weight gain, it made a U-turn and caused just the opposite: extreme weight loss.

When my daughter was a year old and I was breastfeeding her despite being dangerously underweight myself, I stepped out of bed one morning and heard a crunch, and felt agonizing pain in my foot. It swelled to the size of a softball and I went to the emergency room, where I was informed that I had broken my foot and that my bones were extremely thin and brittle. I was only twenty-two but I had osteoporosis caused by breastfeeding while suffering from malnutrition. And that wasn’t all. The hospital scale said that I weighed a frightening 101 pounds, at 5’6” tall. If I didn’t get a handle on this, it could kill me.

I eventually got better, thanks to a combination of counseling and medication. It turns out that “Big Pharma” and their evil plot to treat me for anxiety and OCD features, wasn’t actually such a bad idea after all. Human bodies are remarkably adaptive. My bones are now healthy and strong and I had no nutrition-related complications while pregnant with, or breastfeeding, my son. despite my previous run-ins with malnutrition. I have been a healthy weight for four years. It’s still a bit of an effort—when I’m stressed, I sometimes don’t want to eat anything but organic salad—but I am, overall, recovered from my experience with orthorexia.

There’s nothing wrong with being conscientious. A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains is the cornerstone of good health. And, of course, it’s important to be aware of how your dietary choices impact the environment and the welfare of animals. I’m still glad to say that I minimize the amount of cruelty involved in my diet and that my food choices have the lowest possible impact on the planet while also meeting my nutritional needs. But I’m even more glad to say that I’m done prioritizing the ethics of my diet over the ultimate goal of keeping myself healthy and sane.