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gluten-free forever?

I'm curious as to whether or not the casein and gluten-free diet is one that needs to be adhered to for the entirety of a person's life who has autism and has found it to help? What happens if my son's autism improves because of this diet but he goes back to consuming casein and gluten some day? Will his autistic symptoms reappear or have they been cured?
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Avatar universal
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My boy is on digestive enzymes and he can pretty much eat any kind of food. We use Tri enza, u can buy them from a healthy food store in America, here in the Uk we can only get them online. Good luck!
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127529 tn?1331840780
I just thought I would come back and update. Although my son seems to be fine with some products with gluten in we found that dairy has had a really bad effect on him. Two weeks after re introducing the dairy it was like we had drugged him. He couldn't focus, was rocking, having angry out bursts, couldn't concentrate...the list goes on.
We removed all dairy and casein from his diet again, two weeks later he is doing much much better. His OT told me it was like working with a different boy. He was doing everything she asked, concentrating, tidying up after himself. It really is amazing how the inability to process and digest a food properly can have such an astounding  and detrimental effect; and how removing it it can completely change a person.
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127529 tn?1331840780
We did gluten and casein free too, twice.
The first time we did it for four months, initially we did notice some improvements in attention, focus and ability to learn, but my son hated most of the gluten and casein free foods available to him, he practically lived off meat, rice pasta vegetables and fruit, sounds healthy enough but he lost a lot of weight, he was very skinny to begin with so we reintroduced some of the food with gluten and casein, with out much of an effect. It must be noted that he also started some extra speech and occupational therapy on top of his regular Autism intervention therapy at the same time so the improvements may have been due to that, we will never know.
When he moved schools to start grade one we saw some significant regression, after one pretty bad weekend we decided again to try the diet, this time he was completely gluten and casein free for six months. This time we did not notice any big changes in him and as he settled into school things got better. Again weight became an issue, he lost 5% of his body weight during that time so we slowly re introduced some foods back in, so far we have introduced just one brand of whole wheat bread, carrot muffins, the plain goldfish crackers, cream cheese and one brand of yogurt, we waited two weeks between the reintroduction of each food.
I am also now very very careful to check that foods have no artificial color or flavor, as we found that he was particularly agitated after eating orange cheese and cheese flavored gold fish crackers, I am convinced it was the orange food coloring. It has been almost two weeks since we re introduced yogurt and he is starting to develop dark circles under his eyes, I am going to wait a while longer before anything else is added to his diet, I think maybe he has some type of dairy intolerance.
A lot of the time it is trial and error finding out what/if anything is making things worse, but you really have to stick to something for quite a while to really see if there are any benefits to doing it.
Good luck.
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Avatar universal
Personally, the gluten and casein free diet did nothing for us.

However...

I know several parents who have put their children on the diet, and reintroduced the foods later. Some had reactions again, so they had to stay gluten or casein free for a while longer, but many of them have actually been able to eat normally eventually... I guess their tolerance for the food improved?

Sorry it's not first-hand experience, but I do know lots of people who did the diet for a while then had no issues upon re-introduction.
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