Journal of Personal Science: One Child’s Autism Eliminated by Removal of Glutamate From Her Diet

Seth Roberts7 Comments

by Katherine Reid

I am a mother of five children. I live in Fremont, California. In 2009, my youngest child, who was three, was diagnosed with autism. The diagnosis came from her social and communication impairment and highly repetitive behavior. She did not play with other children. She had no imaginary play. She made no eye contact with anyone. She had no spontaneous language. She did not understand questions. Her language was restricted to repeating what she heard (echolalia). In other words, she didn’t use language to communicate. She could stack blocks for hours. She would line up toys and have a meltdown if you moved a toy out of line. Everything had to be according to her rules or she was in chaos. She had highly repetitive routines that would escalate into unrest or panic. For example, she would go to wash her hands, turn the water on, turn the water off, turn the water on, and so on. Each time through the routine she would get more upset that she couldn’t stop. These loop-like routines might last hours, typically ending because of exhaustion from crying. She also had episodes of absence (blank stares) that lasted 15-30 seconds.

My husband and I tried a number of popular therapies. We tried Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) for 3 months. She got worse; her loop-like routines occurred more frequently. We tried speech therapy for 6 months. It increased her vocabulary, but did not improve her communication in other ways. The third therapy we tried was auditory integration training. We did the full series twice, which took a total of 3 months. There was no improvement. Then she started going to a special-needs school, where each student is given an individualized program. At this point, she was 3.5 years old.

Around the same time that she started the new school, we started changing her diet. I had been looking at nutritional deficiencies associated with autism. As a result, we added green veggie smoothies (for example, kale, cucumber, cilantro, nuts, seeds, fruits, it varied with the season) to her diet, supplemented with a multivitamin, magnesium, B complex, Vitamin D3, Omega 3′s (EPA and DHA) and probiotic blends (a mix of pills from different companies, such as New Chapter and MegaFoods). Within three days, she began to look people in the eye and began responding to her name. Before the autism diagnosis, we had taken her for a hearing test, because of her lack of response to her name.

This encouraged us to think that diet was important. We eliminated gluten and casein (dairy) from her diet. Many parents had seen improvement after they made this change. These changes were often not large enough to make the children no longer autistic, but they did improve. Our daughter’s response was similar. Her social and communication skills improved, but she was still about a year behind her peers. She still had long outbursts and meltdowns. We were sure it was the new diet, not the new school, that caused the improvement because several times she had eaten gluten or casein at school by accident (e.g., pizza) and her language and behavior regressed. This happened about ten times. Twenty-four hours after these exposures, she was considerably worse. She wouldn’t be able to articulate words and her language comprehension decreased. She also became much more emotional and picky (e.g., had to take a certain route home). The regression lasted about five days.

These improvements encouraged me to read more about diet and autism. I read a few clinical studies – there were hardly any. On blogs, I read about parents’ experiences. On one blog – I can’t remember which one — I read a comment from a parent that he found that his son benefited from removing gluten and casein, and, importantly, MSG made his son worse. What idiot feeds his child MSG? I thought. I was wrong.

I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry, with an emphasis in protein chemistry, from UC Santa Cruz. I have spent 20 years conducting research and development on proteins for therapeutics and molecular diagnostic applications. Proteins are made of amino acids, the most abundant of which is glutamic acid. When a protein breaks down, glutamic acid is released. I discovered that I had been feeding my daughter plenty of glutamate. I started researching connections between glutamate and autism and convinced myself it was plausible that too much glutamate caused behaviors associated with autism, as well as other brain disorders. Suddenly I understood why removal of gluten and casein might help. Both proteins have a high glutamate content (= a large fraction of their amino acids are glutamic acid). Common types of food processing break down these proteins. For example, fermentation, ultra-pasteurization, adding acid (such as lemon juice), and adding enzymes (e.g., when making cheese) all create free glutamate.

I started looking into food labels. Glutamate can be hidden in many ways, I learned. For example, “natural flavor” may be up to 60% glutamic acid. Perhaps my daughter had a predisposition to glutamate sensitivity; my research revealed that many of us do. There are glutamate receptors all over the body, including the brain. For example, glutamate receptors in the pancreas regulate insulin secretion. To reduce the amount of glutamate in her food, I tried to remove all processed proteins from her diet. This wasn’t simple. Apple juice may have “natural flavors”. Toothpaste may have glutamate. Our new diet mainly consisted of organic vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, meat, quinoa, and rice. We stayed away from any product with processed soy, corn, or wheat (because of the processed protein). Corn on the cob or edamame was fine because they aren’t processed.

This was a huge shift in the family diet and was met with protest. My husband was hesitant because the advice from a team of neurologists had been to try behavioral therapy again. (ABA is one type of behavioral therapy.) They thought a better therapist might help. That was their main advice. They told us they hadn’t seen gluten-and-casein-free diets produce improvement.

In May 2010, we made the big dietary changes. After we started the new diet, my daughter never again had a meltdown. She had had one the previous week. About a month later, at the end of the school year, we were contacted by the special-needs school. They said she had improved so much that she should go to a mainstream pre-school. At this point she was almost four. Her language and social skills quickly caught up with her peers. Of my five children, she is the most social and outgoing. Today, at 6 years old, she attends a public school kindergarten. At a September 2012 parent-teacher conference, her kindergarten teacher was shocked to find out that she had been previously diagnosed as autistic.

I decided to make it my mission to educate and raise awareness of the amount of free glutamate in our food and the health ailments associated with it. The name of my mission is Unblind My Mind. More information can be found at unblindmymind.org.

Katie spoke about this at the first Make Yourself Healthy Meetup.

Sous Vide Secrets

Seth Roberts9 Comments

A few weeks ago, based on the good experiences of friends, I bought a sous vide cooker. As promised, food cooked sous vide (sponsored link) (at very low temperatures, such as 135 degrees F., for long periods of time, such as 48 hours) was excellent, clearly better than other cooking methods. For example, I made short ribs. They came out a perfect texture (slightly chewy), very moist and full of flavor. I also made eggs. At the right temperature, they turned a wonderful custard-like texture.

Sous vide isn’t new. Professional chefs have been using it for many years. The equipment has been too expensive (such as $1000). What’s new is lower prices. A friend paid about $350 for a sous vide cooker and vacuum sealer.

My brief experience suggests two conclusions I haven’t read anywhere else:

1. Don’t pay that much. I bought a Dorkfood DSV controller ($100). It turns the electricity to a crockpot on and off to maintain the right temperature. (A new crockpot is about $20. I already had two.) The controller is much better than “home sous vide” cookers (about $400) because it takes up much less space and can be used to control anything, not just crockpots. I can use it to make yogurt, for example. I no longer need a yogurt maker ($15, in China). The only problem with the Dorkfood controller is that you can hear it operate. It makes audible clicks. My crockpots and yogurt maker, which do the same thing at fixed temperatures, are silent.

2. You don’t need a vacuum sealer. You put the food in a bag, which is submerged in a water bath. Yes, sous vide means “under vacuum” but vacuum sealing may be inferior to using ordinary freezer bags, which cost less, are much easier to get, and unlike vacuum-sealed bags allow opening and re-closing. When I use an ordinary freezer bag I put the top of the bag above the water so as to not worry about leakage. My low-end vacuum sealer (Seal-a-Meal, $40) works with ordinary freezer bags, not just the special bags you are supposed to buy. I will eventually do a side-by-side comparison: cook the same food two ways (vacuum-seal and freezer bag).

 

 

Academic Job Advice: Be Able to Say Why You Study What You Study

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Recently I interviewed two job candidates for an assistant professor position at Tsinghua. I asked both of them: “Why did you decide to study this?” (this = their field of research). One had no answer at all. The other had an answer that didn’t make sense. I didn’t mean it as a tough question. If they had said “because that’s what they were doing where I got a postdoc” I would have been perfectly happy. If that were the answer, I might have asked “why does your advisor study it?” — to which “I don’t know” would have been perfectly acceptable. Of course, there are better answers.

When I was a graduate student, I read Adventures of a Mathematician by Stanislaw Ulam (a very good well-written book). One of the book’s comments impressed me: That John Von Neumann was able to distinguish the main lines of growth of the tree of mathematics from the branches. My research was about how rats measure time. The relevance to big questions in the psychology of learning wasn’t obvious. I wondered: Am I studying something important? Or something that will be irrelevant in twenty years? My advisor didn’t seem to have thought about this.

When I interviewed for jobs at various universities, no one asked me why do you study this? But it was still a question worth answering. As a grad student I had no choice. But eventually I would have a choice: I could continue to study how rats measure time. Or I could study something else. (Eventually I did change — to studying what controls variation in behavior.)

Here’s what I would say now about how to choose a research topic.

What’s best is a new method. If you can use a new method to answer questions in your field, do that. The cheaper, easier and more available the method, the better. As a graduate student, I developed a new way to study how rats measure time, which I called the peak procedure. It made it easier to determine if an experimental treatment affected an animal’s internal clock.

What’s second best is a new experimental effect. Discovering a new way to change something of interest. The bigger, cheaper, newer, and more surprising the effect, the better. Using the peak procedure, my colleagues and I discovered a large and surprising effect (at a certain time during the peak procedure, the variability of bar-press duration — how long a rat holds down the bar when pressing it — became much larger). When I first saw the result, I assumed it was due to a software mistake. It turned out to be a window in what controls the variability of behavior — an easy way of studying that. In that sense it was also a new method.

I don’t know if the two job candidates I interviewed were doing either of these two things. Maybe not. My broader point is that if you don’t have a good understanding of how to choose a research topic you will have to retreat to studying something simply because others are studying it. Which is exactly the wrong thing to do if you want to be an innovator and a leader.

 

 

 

 

The Lessons of Tisano Tea

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I was curious how Tisano Tea began (yesterday’s post) because it was an unusual product (chocolate tea). There wasn’t any point I was trying to make. At a party last night, however, I found myself talking to the daughter of a diplomat (Tisano Tea was started by the son of a diplomat). I told her the story of Tisano Tea. And I couldn’t help pointing out two generalizations it supports:

1. I’ve blogged many times about the value of insider/outsiders — people who have the knowledge of insiders but the freedom of outsiders. Patrick Pineda, the founder of Tisano Tea, was not an insider/outsider but he connected two worlds — the United States and Venezuela (in particular poor Venezuelan farmers) — that are rarely connected.

2. When people from rich countries try to help people in poor countries, the usual approach is to bring something from the rich country to the poor country. Nutritional knowledge, medicine, dams, and so on. One Laptop Per Child is an extreme example. Microcredit is a deceptively attractive example. In recent years, the flaws in this approach have become more apparent and there has been a shift toward local solutions to problems (e.g., the best ideas to help Uganda will come from Ugandans and those who have lived there a long time). Tisano Tea illustrates something that people in rich countries have had an even harder time imagining: people in a poor country (Venezuela) knew something that improved life in a rich country (the United States) — namely, that you can make tea from cacao husks. A small thing, but not trivial (maybe chocolate tea supplies important nutrients). An American desire for Venezuelan cacao husks improves life in Venezuela. Ethnic food trucks are a more subtle example. When immigrants from poor countries manage to make a living in a rich country — using knowledge of their own cuisine is a good way to do this — they often send money home. As far as I know, this possibility has been ignored in development studies.

My research, which shows how a non-expert can do research that teaches something to experts, is related to the second generalization. For example, my research on faces and mood has something to teach experts on depression and bipolar disorder. Although the term “home remedy” is standard, and lots of non-experts have improved their health in ways not approved by doctors, I have never heard a health expert show a realization that this could happen.

How Things Begin: Tisano Tea

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Tisano Tea, based in San Francisco, sells chocolate tea. It was started in 2010 by Patrick Pineda, Leonardo Zambrano, and Lucas Azpurua. I was curious about the company because I like two chocolate tea blends very much: Red Cloud Cacao (a black tea/chocolate tea blend from Peet’s, no longer available but they will bring it back) and CocoMate (from American Tea Room).

Patrick’s father was an ambassador from Venezuela. Patrick grew up in California and England and went to college at the University of East Anglia. After studying for a Master’s in Film Production from Columbia University (New York), he started working for Al Jazerra in Venezuela making documentaries. He also worked for a local TV station making segments for a children’s program. One segment was about cacao. He learned that Venezuelan cacao beans were among the most highly-valued cacao beans in the world. The cacao beans from one valley (Chuao) sold for ten times the usual price.

While making the segment, he met cacao farmers. He discovered a group of cacao farmers whose beans had been organically certified by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) due to local NGO sponsorship (the NGO paid for it). The farmers saw it as free training. The organic certification took lots of paperwork to maintain. The farmers had hoped that the certification would allow them to sell their beans at a premium. However, after four years, this hadn’t yet happened. At the end of each harvest, they’d had to sell their beans at the conventional (non-organic) price.

This struck Patrick as an opportunity – a niche (organic) within a niche (Venezualan). In the US, there was a growing demand for organic products. The co-op grew about 16 metric tons of organic cacao beans each year. In 2009, with the financial help of his older brother and friends, he bought 10 metric tons ($40,000). A month earlier, he hadn’t known that chocolate comes from cacao.

He soon realized there was a problem: How to get it out of the country? If taken straight out, the government would fumigate it and it would lose its organic certification. It would have to be processed in Venezuela. There were several cacao processing plants in Venezuela but to them 10 metric tons was nothing. Patrick finally convinced one of them that organic might be the future. He taught the employees how to process the beans organically while learning it himself. After that it was relatively easy to get the processing plant certified organic.

During processing, 12% of the weight is “lost” in shells that are normally discarded. Patrick took the shells with him back to America hoping he could do something with them. In Venezuela, he had met an indigenous tribal community that drank tea made from cacao shells as remedy for asthma and to sooth coughs. He looked academic journals for other uses. He eventually found about 120 published papers. The shells had been used as toothpaste and to increase the Vitamin D content of milk by feeding them to cows. The only common uses, it turned out, were as fertilizer (due to the nitrogen content) and animal feed (due to the fiber and Vitamin D content). Neither use was high-price.

What about tea? Patrick sent samples to his partners. They were unenthusiastic. “This tastes like grass. Why would anybody drink tea from a by-product?” However, he was selling chocolate butter and nibs online. With each order, he included an 8-ounce pouch of cacao shells with instructions how to brew the tea. His customers – at least, some of them – were enthusiastic: How unique, how great, they emailed him. A German woman said she hadn’t drunk such tea since World War II ended. During World War II, cacao shells had been added to tea to extend it. His customers wanted to buy more.

He convinced his partners to go to a trade show. In 2010, they went to Expo West, a natural and healthy food product show in Anaheim. Out of all of their products, the tea got the most attention. It won Best in Show for tea. Out of about 500 new products, it was one of four that won Best New Product of Show. People from Twinings Tea and Stash Tea complimented them on their product.

After the trade show, Patrick decided the tea was a good concept and decided to make it a separate brand. Dark chocolate without the guilt. No sugar, no caffeine. He launched Tisano. The name comes from tisane (herbal tea in French) and artesano (artisanal in Spanish).

When I tasted Tisano’s chocolate tea, it tasted very familiar. That’s because Tisano’s cacao shells are the cacao shells in both American Tea Room’s CocoMate and Peet’s Red Cloud Cacao. There is no doubt that Patrick has created a new niche within the American (and maybe world) tea market: chocolate tea. I don’t know how well CocoMate is selling at American Tea Room but I decided to buy it after smelling maybe 40 teas. At Peet’s, Red Cloud Cacao sold surprisingly well and they will bring it back seasonally.

Teeccino Tasting Notes

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I started drinking lots of tea when I started the Shangri-La Diet. The diet made me crave food with smell, which tea provided. I started chewing gum, too, but that was less enjoyable, maybe because I never became a gum connoisseur.

I recently learned about Teeccino coffee-substitute “tees” (brewed like tea) from Patrick Pineda of Tisano. They resemble Pero but with more flavor and variety. I really liked the first two flavors I tried (Vanilla Nut and French Roast) so I wrote to Teeccino asking for samples of all the flavors. In addition to no caffeine, Teechino drinks are high in inulin, a soluble fiber.

Here are my comments on the samples.

Dandelion Dark Roast. Similar to French Roast (relatively strong coffee taste) but more earthy-tasting. Maybe that’s the dandelion.

French Vanilla. Strong vanilla taste. Too much like vanilla for me, I want something more complicated.

Caramel Nut. Halfway between caramel and burnt caramel, which I like. As complex as French Roast.

Mocha. Excellent. Complexity of coffee plus complexity of chocolate.

Chocolate. Like mocha, except darker coffee flavor.

Original. Excellent. Weaker coffee flavor plus fruity complexity.

Almond Amaretto. Wonderful combination of coffee flavor with nutty almond/amaretto flavor.

Java. Rounded coffee flavor.

Chocolate Mint. Enough mint but not enough chocolate and coffee.

Southern Pecan. Delicious. Pecan and coffee flavors well-balanced. I wonder: What does Northern Pecan taste like?

Maya Chai. Tastes like chai. I would prefer, in addition, a dark coffee taste.

The Power of Lassi, an Underappreciated Fermented Food

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Lassi, you probably know, is an Indian drink made from yogurt. It is rarely sold outside Indian restaurants and supermarkets. However, last week at Whole Foods I saw a product called Pavel’s Pro Sea Salt Lassi Yogurt Drink, so new it is not yet on the company website. I have no idea why Pro is part of the name. I bought a bottle. I was surprised how good it was.

I tried making it myself. I found I could easily make better lassi than Pavel’s by optimizing the amount of salt, adding an optimal amount of sweetener (xylitol – Pavel’s lassi was unsweetened), and flavoring it, for instance with vanilla.

Yogurt companies of the world (except maybe Pavel’s) seem to have failed to notice that lassi is a very unusual food. It provides pleasure in eight ways: (1) satisfies thirst, (2) creamy, (3) frothy (if you shake the bottle before drinking), (4) salty, (5) sour, (6) sweet, (7) complexity (yogurt alone is slightly complex, vanilla increases complexity) and (8) flavor novelty (if you vary the flavor). To a small extent, (9) it satisfies hunger and, if you’re hot, (10) cools you off. It’s also (11) very convenient — easier to take a swig of lassi than a spoonful of yogurt — and (12) very healthy. I can’t think of another food with twelve strengths. My friends’ pizza provided pleasure in ten ways but wasn’t convenient or healthy. There are several similar yogurt drinks in other cultures, such as doogh, perhaps because lassi has such a high benefit/cost ratio.

To make lassi, mix 3 parts yogurt with about 1 part water, add sweetener and salt and flavoring to taste, mix. I’m going to try adding cardamon and maybe replace the water with tea, to increase complexity.

 

Next Meeting of Make Yourself Healthy Group

Seth Roberts1 Comment

The next meeting of the Make Yourself Healthy Meetup group will be May 23 (Thursday) at the Telegraph Ministry Center (5316 Telegraph, Oakland). Social time will start 6:30 pm, the meeting proper at 7:00 pm. It will last about 2 hours. Admission is $3, payable at the door, to cover the cost of renting the space. The first speaker will be Robin Barooah, who will tell how he cured his RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury). The doctors he saw were no help.

 

 

How Much Benefit from the Human Genome Project?

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Ten years ago researchers finished the first sequencing of an entire human genome. To mark the anniversary, Eric Green, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, spoke to an unnamed reporter at the New York Times. Here is the final question of the interview:

What about the naysayers who [say], “Where are the cures for diseases that we were promised?”

I became director of this institute three and a half years ago, and I remember when I first started going around and giving talks. Routinely I would hear: “You are seven years into this. Where are the wins? Where are the successes?”

I don’t hear that as much anymore. I think what’s happening, and it has happened in the last three years in particular, is just the sheer aggregate number of the success stories. The drumbeat of these successes is finally winning people over.

We are understanding cancer and rare genetic diseases. There are incredible stories now where we are able to draw blood from a pregnant woman and analyze the DNA of her unborn child.

Increasingly, we have more informed ways of prescribing medicine because we first do a genetic test. We can use microbial DNA to trace disease outbreaks in a matter of hours.

These are just game changers. It’s a wide field of accomplishment, and there is a logical story to be told.

There you have it. The head of the Human Genome Project, a very big deal, says in an oblique way that the project has had little practical benefit so far. Note the present tense: “We are understanding cancer”. Nothing about decreasing cancer. In a short discussion of benefits, he mentions microbial DNA. In a short discussion of benefits, he says, “We are able to draw blood from a pregnant woman and analyze the DNA of her unborn child.” Genetic tests of fetuses are not new. I think he means that the number of rare genetic diseases that can be detected has increased (by how much?). Well, yes, not surprising. It is an increase of something that was already happening and helps only a tiny number of people. Not a “game-changer”.