It's like kids who only play indoors and don't come in contact with natural viruses and bacteria that they could develop immunities to.
I read this as “Children benefit from healthy eating and family life being prioritized…”
Interesting story. Glad for that family.
My cousin and her husband were older when she had her son, who is autistic. They addressed his food allergies and he is in multiples therapies and Special Olympics. THey also live in a big city with lots more opportunities than out here. He has done far better than predicted in life.
Bump
This is one of the reasons why there are so many more children displaying "autism" today than there were in our grandparents' generation. Foods sold in mom'n'pop farm stands and even in grocery stores until the late 50s thru the 70s were likely to have come from local farms, and was only available in its natural local season. The interstate highway system wasn't even built until the Eisenhower administration (construction began in 1956). If a small-time farmer couldn't afford expensive chemical treatments, whatever produce survived with his/her traditional farming techniques, so much the better—his produce was effectively "organic"!
After the post-WW2 rise of large refrigerator trucks and planes, industrial food production, hybridization and "food chemistry," most of our non-perishable food was laced with multiple additives, and may have been stored for long periods due to shelf-life additives, and much of our fresh produce was grown with a variety of herbicides and growth stimulants, or flown in from other regions or even other countries with a dizzying array of differing waters, soils and local allergens. Even farm soils became depleted of essential minerals from overplanting, synthetic fertilizers and machine harvesting.
The other important thing about local foods is that nature itself has ways to deal with allergens -- for instance, local honey is a known help in reducing pollen-caused respiratory symptoms, because bees have already digested and "treated" the local pollens.
The article makes many mentions of getting the parents "engaged" in the process of finding the best practices for their particular child. Isn't it amazing how strident feminists overlooked the previous millenia or mothers' and grandmothers' wisdom in observing their children closely and finding what worked for each special individual. Even Einstein did not begin speaking until he was six years old. Today, such a child would be negatively labeled and put through a gauntlet of expensive medicalizations of his unique attributes.
Maybe Einstein discerned the intellectual level of those around him and had little to say until he had developed a large enough vocabulary to defend his futuristic points of view! Only partly kidding...