Yes and no to diet. At least with my kids. The thing is that Autism is not all caused the same way with every child. The symptoms vary and the cause of those symptoms vary. For example, I'm sure my son has fragile X syndrome as the cause of his Autism. My daughter seems a complete genetic link of another kind. I say go for it and try a different diet. In the case of my son, I tried the caseine free diet (no dairy) and in his case it worked because he used to only drink milk. When I switched him to Almond milk, it didn't fill his tummy like cow milk did. So he HAD to eat the puree'd baby food I gave him or he'd starve. So, even though there may have not been the traditional casine-free results, just the change in diet helped me solve a major feeding issue. It's all worth a try. You've got nothing to lose! =)

Yes, yes, yes. This is specific to each child, but what needs to be removed are the foods your kid is addicted to. I highly recommend looking at the GAPS diet, it is a lot of work, but it aims at healing the body over a 2 year or so timeline, which increases cognitive function, decreases OCD and anxiety. For us it is beyond a God sent. Look at GAPSdiet.com and trial it for a month or more, your life will change forever! My son has been on GAPS for a year and you can look at his insane progress on my blog: www.takesatown.com

We took red dye out of our son's diet and now we see less extreme tantrums. He still has daily tantrums, but not as many of the outrageous ones. We thought that maybe it wasn't really working so we let him have it back in his diet, we quickly realized that that was a mistake! His tantrums came back full force! No more fruity pebbles or red licorice for our little man!

Neurotherapy made an amazing difference for my son. ABA and RDI are evidence based programs that also get good results with most children.

Nutritional support has led to big improvements, but while I saw a dramatic "catch-up" weight and height gain after DD went GFCF, I didn't notice a change in the rate of her improvement. She was improving before she went GFCF and has continued to improve on it. The big gains were when her DAN dr. put her on acetyl-L-carnitine, Coenzyme Q10, and DMG. Each of those led to noticeable improvements in speech and for the carnitine and CoQ10 also motor skills improvement.