Discussing Autism

Now that you have gotten the handle of casein free eating (or at least started to try it out) its time to get started on the gluten free shopping, cooking, and eating. (For the record, I don’t do the cooking part unless it is from a package but I will provide you with some great sites to get some recipes.)

Our gluten free cooking main consists of mixes from the Namaste brand because they carry the best sugar free products out there. AJ loves waffles, muffins, cookies, pancakes, and pizza, but they are hard to come by in the sugar free and yeast free varieties. Even breads are difficult to find unless one has time to cook/bake shortbreads from scratch that are yeast free.

Our main issue with finding products is that AJ’s diet is very limited, as many of you may find down the road. As we started to eliminate foods we started to see more issues arise, like peeling the layers of the onion. When we removed all milk products we finally noticed the gluten. When we removed gluten we noticed the corn. When we removed corn we noticed the salicylates. It was never ending. But, the more we solved, the better he got.

Now that we have all of those things removed we now have the yeast issues and the viral issues, but perhaps that is a different post. This one is to get you started on gluten. At first I bought the book The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread: More Than 200 Wheat-Free Recipes but it wasn’t right for us because of the yeast and casein contents.

I purchased every type of flour to try to make breads and quick breads, cookies and muffins on my own. I found amaranth flour, sweet rice flour, buckwheat, quinou, and gluten free mixed flours. I tried Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free Mixes, The Gluten-Free Pantry Mixes, and Chebe Bread Mixes. We had trouble with all of them, not all of every brand but some of each brand. Many were high in salicylates like cinnamon and raisins or too much sugar.

Gluten includes wheat, barley, oats, rye, semolina, and spelt (although some can handle it).
Hidden sources of gluten.
GFCF site.
My favorite Gluten Free blog.
Allergy Grocery

TACA NOW has a great primer course on how to start the Gluten Free, Casein Free diet…and they have even laid it out for you in a Powerpoint presentation. Now, that is what I call service. It is a basic GFCF diet that does not take into account salicylates, phenols, sugars, etc until after, which is the correct way to do this. I have often mentioned these things as deterrents for purchasing certain mixes because I found, through trial and error, that they did not work for us because of the salicylates. You may find this as well…or just start with the low salicylates, ie: Feingold diet foods.

Unacceptable food list

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