By Oliver Dowding.

Last weekend I went to an event run by Treating Autism. Recently there’s been some fascinating research delivered by the Johns Hopkins University in America. This showed some very impressive early results using broccoli sprout juice with autistic people. This spurred me on to attend the event they were holding a few days after I read of the research. I was just able to get a ticket as 350 places had been sold out.

The problem is immense, and listening to some of the speakers suggests that we haven’t been approaching it properly. Ignoring diet and nutrition at all stages of our lives has consequences, they are much more severe for pregnant women and children in their first three years of life. It illustrates that unfortunately many people have no/little awareness of this, the consequences being felt in some cases for an entire lifetime thereafter.

The three big take-home points, as I saw them, were simple. The new human being requires the mother (it can’t be the father!) to develop a healthy foetus, and in particular what is known as the human biome. You didn’t know what that is? No, nor did I until Sunday! This is the bacterial community, of which every adult has about 1.5kg, which reside in your guts, devouring everything you feed them in order to deliver you all the compounds and more which keep your body in top shape and delivering top performance. Compromise this biome, and you compromise your life, or in this context the baby’s future life. It takes about three years for this biome to fully form, and thereafter it changes little through our entire lifetime. That’s why it’s so crucial to get it right in those first three years. It’s not a practice run!

If you want to see a moving graphic of the biome, it’s here.

Firstly, ensure that your diet is of the highest calibre possible. Clearly for some people affordability is an issue, but a future child’s life suggests that diet should become the most important part of our expenditure. Ideally the entire diet from pregnancy onwards needs to be organic, especially for the ingredients likely to have the most unpleasant “extras”.

Oliver Dowding
Email: info@tonicattack.com

If you want to see a moving graphic of the biome, it’s here.

Clearly for some people affordability is an issue, but a future child’s life suggests that diet should become the most important part of our expenditure.