Autism: It May Be Treatable With Diet

Method of Organization: Topical Order

Specific Purpose Statement: To inform my audience of what Autism is and how it can be treated with diet.

Central Idea: Autism is a developmental problem that can be treated by a simple change in diet.

Autism: It may be Treatable with Diet

Introduction:

I. There is a nation wide epidemic spreading the country like a wildfire. According to the Centers for Disease Control in 2003, one in every 166 children is born with it (Neimark, 33).

II. According to the Autism Society of America website, Autism is a developmental disability that affects the normal functions of the brain like how to socially interact and communicate. It affects each person differently, which makes it such a unique disorder.

III. My brother David has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, and it can be quite a struggle for him and for my family and I everyday. There are many ways to treat autism as simple as a change in diet. According to Michelle Cheney, the author of Climbing Out Of Autism One Bite At A Time wrote “certain foods and non-food substances substantially aggravate autistic characteristics and that recovery is possible simply by avoiding these triggers (Cheney, xiii-xiv).

BODY:

I. A simple change in diet may help some children lessen the severity of their autism.

A. Autism is a developmental problem, which has many characteristics that can be easy to notice.

1. My brother, David, always liked things to be the same and would get very upset with a change in routine. Also, when he was younger he would throw terrible tantrums and break things. Autistic children, like my brother, tend not to be very social and so they live in their own little world, making it difficult for them to interact with other people. And if they were to talk to someone, most likely there would be little or no eye contact. Lastly, some other characteristic of autism I saw in my brother years ago was that he lacked a sense of danger. My brother liked to go through railings. First he squeezed under them when he was a baby, climbed over them as a toddler, and went through them in front of the Children’s Museum!

2. Unfortunately, Autism isn’t thought of by many as a real topic of concern, as it is poorly funded. Leukemia, which only affects 1 in 25,000, gets $310 million in funding and Muscular Dystrophy affects 1 in 20,000 and gets $175 million in funding but Autism, which affects 1 in 150, only gets $15 million in funding (Jepson, 43).

B. But how does a child get autism?

1. There is no one single cause of autism, but mercury is an agent that is commonly discussed. In Changing The Course of Autism, Bryan Jepson wrote about a study published by Sallie Bernard, Chair of the Board of Directors of Cure Autism Now, which gave out facts about how mercury is related to autism. Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative, was first introduced in the 1930’s and shortly after the first cases of autism came up in 1943. As more and more mercury was put into the preservation of vaccinations, more and more cases of autism came up (Jepson, 117). The debate about the effects of thimerosal has been going on for quite awhile now. Back in 1988, Congress introduced a new piece of legislation called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) and more than 5,000 families filed claims with them over what they alleged were side effects from the vaccinations that their children had received (Sugarman)! There was also a study in England where researchers looked at the rise of numbers of atypical autism (according to the OSF website it is also known as Asperger’s) and core autism (basic autism) once the MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccination was introduced in 1988 (given to children) as demonstrated by this graph. There is quite a relationship between the two (Jepson, 67-68). The problem seems to be the thimerosal preservative, the combination shots and the quantity of shots at an increasing the early age when the immune system of certain babies can’t detoxify or handle the negative side effects of the shots. Individually, each of the actual diseases вЂ" measles, mumps and rubella вЂ" is capable of causing symptoms similar to autism (Jepson 84-86).

2. Asperger’s Syndrome is a milder version of autism, which is what my brother David has. David’s autism used to be more severe. However, don’t think that it’s not a problem. Children with Asperger’s aren’t fully unsociable like those with autism; they may just not know how to interact, therefore being a little socially awkward. Also, children with Asperger’s may be very good at remembering some sorts of information. For example, my brother could memorize the names and numbers of all of the 150 PokÐ"©mon, and