What is the Gluten-Free-Casein-Free Diet: Should I use this diet on my child?

In recent years, many families would wonder how they could best support their children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). For instance, some parents believed that children with ASD needed to be on a certain diet in order to decrease their ASD-like behaviors. This diet was referred to as the Gluten-Free-Casein-Free diet, where children with ASD needed to refrain from incorporating those foods into their diet. This diet primarily consisted of eating foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, legumes, seeds, meat, fish, and gluten-free grains like corn, rice, and quinoa. However, there was no direct proof that following this diet would actually decrease ASD behaviors in young children. Therefore, in 2015, Kelly Barnhill (a nutritionist focusing on the GFCF diet) had major breakthroughs in literature around this diet for children with ASD. She found that more research was needed to fully identify groups who would and would not respond to GFCF diets. Currently, despite previous studies, there are still no conclusive results that determined a correlation between a GFCF diet and behaviors related to ASD. However, there are many theories/studies that have been done to better understand this correlation. 

Therefore, should this diet be recommended to children with ASD?

• At this time, more research is needed to fully determine if this diet can help reduce behavioral symptoms of children with ASD. 

• Similarly, more randomized trials are needed to gain scientific and clinical knowledge about this topic and diet.  

• Finally, there are limitations in sample sizes where the majority of the studies include smaller sample sizes rather than larger ones. 

In conclusion, as clinicians, we cannot recommend this diet at this time given that we should align with current research findings, which basically show that results are inconclusive. Instead, we can provide families with the appropriate resources to determine if they would like to move forward with this diet for their child.

Author: Nayeli Dominguez M.S., CF-SLP