We started our son Charlie on the gluten-free casein-free diet over nine years ago, when he was two years old. After several years of faithfully adhering to it, with the rationalization that “since Charlie can’t say how he feels when eats wheat and dairy, we’d best just keep him off them,” wheat (not dairy—-milk products remain to be avoided) is slowly reappearing in Charlie’s diet and it’s been no big deal. Especially after Jenny McCarthy made claims of seemingly miraculous improvements for her son Evan on the diet, people have been wondering, and debating, its effectiveness. The University of Texas …read more

There was a time (mercifully brief) when Charlie would only eat chocolate chip cookies. This was back in the spring of 1999: We had just taken him (permanently, though we did not yet know it) out of daycare, where he was known to “carbo load” on biscuits, pancakes, and the like. We were living in St. Paul, Minnesota, and, while Charlie had yet to receive his official diagnosis of autism, Jim and I felt quite certain that this was inevitable and had already begun to read too many books and looks at too many websites. We had soon discovered the …read more