Reading the Research: Movement vs. Depression

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article is an excellent reminder that sedentary lifestyles are toxic to the human mental state.  It also nearly started me off on a well-deserved angry rant, because that's what happens every time I see the phrase "treatment-resistant depression."  

Let's start with that and then move along to the main point of the article, shall we?  (As a quick reminder, autistic people have very much higher than average rates of depression and anxiety.  Myself included, naturally.)

Ready?  Okay.  There is no "treatment-resistant depression."  That is a bullshit category invented by ignorant derps wearing blinders.   What they actually mean when they say that idiotic phrase is "depression that we can't medicate away after trying dozens of pharmaceuticals."

Did you spot the key word there, pharmaceuticals?  That's literally the only "treatment" people try.  If it doesn't respond to a barrage of pills (and God save you from the side effects of all those drugs), it must be untreatable!  

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong wrong WRONG.  Ughhhh.  

Hi, I'm an autistic human with low grade depression.  It used to be a lot worse, and it used to dip into major depression when I was very stressed (like at finals time, or crunch time at work).  Then I did a few years of LENS (a type of neurofeedback), got help with my nutrition, became more active, and developed hobbies that involve being outside sometimes.  

Now I'm doing significantly better and it's not because I took some fancy new drug.  It's because I stopped abusing my body, and as a result, it and my brain are doing better.

Can every case of depression be fixed 100% by changing these things?  Of course not.  Sometimes biochemistry does need intervention.  Sometimes that means a lifetime of pills.  Sometimes it just means you need that for a few months while you do the work to face the traumas causing the depression.  However, you can definitely improve your overall health, and that means your brain will do better, too.  The severity of the depression may lessen.  You may feel better overall.

And that is exactly what this study shows.  I tend to call it movement, rather than exercise, because you don't have to go jogging or do some kind of formal exercise.  I play a freaking video game for a half hour most days, go for a walk in the park with my spouse once a week, and go outside to forage for wild food whenever there's something in season.  

I do not "go for a run" or "do this many of X exercise, this many Y exercise, that many Z exercise."  I don't go to the gym.  All of these things are valid ways to get movement into your life, but you honestly don't need to be that fancy.  Just going for a walk helps.  Especially if you can walk in a green space, like a local park or hiking trail.

My rant kind of bled into the main point here, which is that humans are animals.  If you trap an animal in a 5 by 5 space, feed it nutritionless garbage, and don't allow it to play or enjoy itself, it's going to be a miserable and sick.  If you wouldn't do that to an animal, don't do it to yourself, either.  

Because yeah, humans absolutely tend to do better when they get movement.  Maybe you won't qualify to lose the depression diagnosis, but wouldn't it be nice to feel better?

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)

Grocery Shopping on a Special Diet: The Baking Aisle + Milk and Cheese

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I'm showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what's safe for me to eat (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various "gotchas" the store tries to make you buy- stuff you didn't come for and don't need.  

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Last week was the impulse purchases on the way into the store, the yogurt, and the juice, coffee, and tea sections.  We learned that fruit juice and yogurt are a trap (check the sugar levels!), snack foods tend to sneak into every section in the store, and that the PH of bottled water varies quite widely.

This week: the rest of the dairy aisle, and then the baking aisle and friends!  Canned fruit, sugar, flour, PB&J.

It's now time for milk and its friends.  

The milk section.  All of this is moo juice.  Seriously.  I don't know how many kinds of milk a person really needs, but I once heard a guy from Europe make jokes about exactly this.  We have skim, 1% milkfat, 2% milkfat, whole milk, high protein milk, buttermilk, milk laced with omega 3 fatty acids, and "humane" (questionable) milk.  We have most of these varieties in 4-5 brands, including a store brand.  Who on Earth needs that much decision paralysis?  

By the way, I can't drink any of this or I'll have a massive mood crash.  Moving on!

Flavored milks!  Remember how I was showing you stealth sugar bombs in yogurt last week?  Yeah, here they are again.  Strawberry milk and chocolate milk are laced with sugar in order to make them craveable or whatever the word marketing firms are using these days.  

And here's the only section of use to me: the nondairy milks (part 1).  This is the refrigerated section, so everything is cold and ready to drink.  Note the variety: coconut, almond, soy, cashew, oat, and lactose-free moo juice varieties here.  There will actually be even more later, but suffice to say, no single variety has won the war for the hearts of conscientious USians.  

I personally tend to drink almond milk, mostly because I find the flavor the least objectionable.  I also like that it lasts about twice as long as moo juice.  I don't drink milk every day, or even on a regular basis, so having something that lasts longer in the fridge is worth extra money to me.  

Coffee creamer.  Yes, all four of those doors.  Once again, I don't drink coffee.  But keep in mind the sugar content of those flavored things.  Because yeah.  Sugar bomb!  (There are some dairy-free options in there if I ever decided to start making lattes and such though.)

Sour cream, cottage cheese, snacks related to both those things, and flavored varieties.  I sulked a little bit when I saw the cottage cheese.  I used to love cottage cheese.  I still do, but it hates me (dairy!), so I basically never buy it any more.  It's a dratted shame, because there's a really good waffle recipe that uses it and I miss that too.

Hey, remember the milk section and choice paralysis?  Welcome to the egg section!  We have several brands of eggs, but we also have confusing labels!  "Cage free" is supposed to mean the birds are never caged, but there's no regulation for the label, so it effectively means nothing!  Hooray...  

Please note, that doesn't mean the chickens in question aren't cage-free.  It just means I have literally no way of knowing if that's true.  And I'm not inclined to trust a major corporation with my morality.  At the moment I'm getting all my eggs from a local farm, but in times past I've bought the some of the packages on the far left.  The reason being that they have the Certified Humane label on them.

If that label is there, the animals involved with the product were fed appropriate food (chickens are omnivores fyi), had appropriate space, and were treated like living creatures rather than objects to produce profit.  I love finding this label on animal products, but it's fairly rare unfortunately.  The Certified Humane website has their standards transparently available on their website for anyone that cares to read them.  You don't need a degree in Animal Sciences to understand it, either.  I don't know exactly what a bell drinker is (some kind of water container for chickens), but I don't particularly need to.  

If this seems very small for the block cheese section, it's because this is the "regular" block cheese.  If you want the fancy block cheese you gotta go to a different part of the store, specifically the far side of the fruits and vegetables section.

Directly after the block cheese is... snacks.  Yeah.  String cheese, cheese bites, dips, cheese spread (part 1).  While the cheese itself is only bad for you because it's dairy, the stuff they package with the cheese is often a convenient hiding place for sugar or ultraprocessed garbage.  For example, crackers and pretzels are devoid of nutritional content (but boy they're cheap).  Cream cheese is often laden with sugar, never mind the bagel chips.  And of course cheese spreads often have a higher sugar content because, once again, sugar gets everywhere.

After the snacks (part 1) we get into a truly staggering number of shredded cheese options.  I had to stand a good ways down an aisle to get this picture.  You'll notice that for how big this section is, it's really only two brands offered plus a smattering of smaller ones at the right end.  The US loves its cheese, though, clearly.  

We then move to the conveniently sliced cheese, in case you wanted perfectly square thin slices of cheese.  Also for if you're too lazy to buy a block and slice your own.  I'm pretty sure most USians fall into the latter camp.  Again, I can't eat any of this because it will tank my mood faster than you can say, "But why would we eat this much dairy if it's so bad for us?"

Remember how we had snacks already?  Yeah, well.  Now it's more snacks time.  This is where the cheese section meets the meats section, so these snacks have both.  Shoutout to Lunchables, which I never buy anymore for obvious reasons but miss having sometimes.  Also?  The vast majority of USian humans do not lack for protein in our diets, so these snacks are pretty superfluous.  Moreso than most snacks, I mean.  I guess as snacks go they're at least somewhat healthier than other snacks?  At any rate, they're both loaded with dairy and the meat is likely inhumanely produced, so I just keep walking...  

Notable mention to a tiny, tiny corner between the shredded cheese and the pre-sliced squares of cheese.  This is the dairy-free section, and this is all you get.  One brand, two shredded cheese flavors, two sliced cheese flavors, and no blocks of cheese at all.  

Suffice it to say I typically shop for cheese substitutes elsewhere.

And now, the baking aisle!  Lucky number 13.  Maybe it's only lucky for me and my spouse, but I'll take it.  

I'm not sure why PB&J is a baking need, but whatever, I guess.  

Sugar and sweeteners are a special kind of hell for people who have to be careful with their bodies. There's a million non-sugar sweeteners and almost all of them are awful for you. 

So there's the classic: cane sugar.  My mother is allergic to it, which makes most of this aisle useless when keeping her needs in mind.  Mine, personally, simply revolve around not putting too much of this stuff into my system.  That's actually easier to do when you're making your own stuff, because then you literally control how much sugar goes into the recipe.  

Other options available here include your typical brown sugar (which is just cane sugar coated in molasses), corn syrups (eww...), various Stevia options (okay healthwise but not great for baking due to it not being a 1-to-1 substitute with sugar), agave syrups (fine, but only when liquid sweetener is an option), and sweetener blends.  

For the lattermost, the blends vary in their usefulness based on what's in them.  Most artificial sweeteners are bad news for the sensitive guts and leaky blood-brain-barriers of autistic people, so stuff like aspartame, saccharin, and sucralose are off the table.  

When I shop for sugar substitutes, I tend to buy sugar alcohols, like xylitol and erythritol, or better yet, a natural option like monk fruit sweetener.  When baking a recipe I'm willing to experiment with, I'll typically substitute half the sugar for monk fruit or a mix of these natural sweeteners.  

Notably missing here is my mother's go-to for sugar: beet sugar.  Michigan grows a crop of sugar beets, and these can be turned into granulated sugar just like sugar cane can be.  For reasons unknown, beet sugar doesn't harm my mother.  So I'll cook with that sometimes.  

PB&J. Jam and jelly are basically just flavored sugar spreads, so I avoid them.  The only exception this year was my homemade black raspberry pulp, which I used as jam.  I figured that was pretty safe since they're packed full of fiber and nutrients.

The peanut butter is almost inevitably full of chemicals and sugar, never mind peanuts being a major allergy for many people. I use sunflower seed butter when I eat this kind of food, so this entire section is pretty much ignored.  

Honey. It's delicious and I love it, but obviously it's a high sugar product. Use sparingly. Also, ideally you want to buy local (within a couple miles) honey, because that's made with local pollen and can help end your allergies by teaching your white blood cells that the pollen isn't trying to kill you.  I'll sometimes pick up a semi-local variety from here, but mostly I try to buy from neighboring farms.  

Baking supplies.  It's 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, so they're out of yeast. Again. Thankfully I have some at home.

They're also out of the largest packages of flour.  Most of the flour here is your typical bleached-to-death, glutinous white flour, bereft of nutrition.  This is the first way food goes badly wrong.  Most commercial processes use white flour when making their products, which means the results lack the nutrition and fiber that they could otherwise offer. There are some packages of whole wheat flour, at least.

It's not all wheat offerings, thankfully.  Quinoa flour, almond flour, flaxseed meal, cornmeal, hemp hearts, and coconut flour are also available here. Also, fortunately, a gluten-free option flour mix from a major company.  Oddly enough, this isn't my go-to spot for baking gluten-free (there's a different spot elsewhere), but it's at least an option.  

Canned fruit. Typically used for pie fillings and that's about it now. The industrial canning process for these destroys much of their nutrition. I had canned fruit on occasion growing up, but as I make my pie fillings fresh, there's little point in buying any.  Moving on!

Dried fruit, chopped nuts, and candy for adding to cookies and baked goods. The dried fruit is basically candy with fiber and some vitamins. The chopped tree nuts are common allergens, and also high in histamines, so best avoided. The chocolate chips and other candy, obviously, is just sugar bombs.

Marshmallows and jello. Both ultra-refined foods. Sugar and more sugar, too. Jello has been off my consumption list for years because of the gelatin, most commonly made from cow hoof or bone.  Marshmallows as well, but if you look in the lower left, there's some packages of a brand called Dandies.  Those are gelatin-free, so when I feel like a marshmallow-y treat, those are what I turn to.  

Cooking oils. More selection than you'd expect, with various kinds of coconut oil, seed and nut oils, ghee, and a truly absurd number of olive oil options. Fun fact: US regulations for olive oil are more stringent than ones in Europe, so if you want good quality oil that's sure to be actual olive oil and not flavored whatever-other-oil-was-lying-around, buy extra-virgin olive oil from California.

Premade pie fillings and crusts. In all honesty, pie filling is really easy to make, so I'm not really sure why these are sold save for the specific flavor, I guess?  At any rate, it's all sugar bombs, so we just keep walking...

Evaporated and powdered cow milks, and also milk alternatives (part 2).  Even more options!  Remember the almond milk, soy milk, and cashew milk?  You may also buy hemp milk, oat milk, flax milk, macademia milk... and even goat milk.  

Also, see those handy-grab healthy milk drinks at the top? 

Sugar bombs. Surprise!  Definitely don't give these to your kids unless you want them to have diabetes.  

Spices. There's eleventy billion of them, but at least most of them are safe. The spice mixes aren't as safe, as they may contain powdered chicken or beef or pork.  That's fine for most autistic people, but not for me. Regardless, making your own spice mixes is an adventure and cheaper to boot.

It's a bit dizzying to try to sort through this section looking for powdered thyme or what have you, but here at least, there's no sugar bombs hiding in wait.  

Unlike here:  baking mixes. Almost entirely laden in gluten, and highly processed too.  Biscuits, cornbread, pancakes, muffins, cookies, brownies, and cakes. The sugar content on the desserts is obvious, but the cornbread, pancakes, and biscuits might depress you.

Cake fixings.  Otherwise known as, "Oh look, more sugar!" Also artificial colors, which are often Very Bad News for autistic people. 

One parent of an autistic kid noticed specifically that her son reacted very poorly to the color red.  If red food coloring was in his food, it was going to be bad times after he'd eaten it.  I try to avoid them myself, just in case.  

And that's those done!  Next time it'll be the pasta and "world foods" aisle, and we'll see what a US corporation thinks represents the world... 

Reading the Research: Trans-Autistic Overlap

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article demonstrates a phenomenon I've been seeing personally for years.  That is, the likelihood for autistic people to be found in the LGBTQIA+ group somewhere.  In the group of autistic adults I frequent, gender is typically a low priority topic.  While most of the adults typically at least present in line with their physical sex, it's typically just a matter of "not weirding out the neurotypicals" or personal preference.  

I put out a post some four years ago to try to explain trans people to a broad audience.  It holds up kind of okay still, although I'm getting closer to simply saying, "yeah, she/her is just kind of wrong when talking about me, please just say they/them."  I still identify as agender, and still think you should take your gender expectations of me and throw them out the nearest window.  Also, I learned recently that dysphoria is for everyone, myself included, so that's fun.  

The researchers seem to be puzzled as to why autistic people would be so much less likely to subscribe to the traditional "two genders" system.  I'm honestly puzzled as to why they'd be puzzled.  Autistic people march to our own beats in a lot of ways.  Why would gender be any different?  Society shapes and molds biologically male and female humans toward having a matching gender, it's true...  But if you're deaf to that guidance, as you're deaf to every other kind of social learning, of course you aren't going to perfectly match the societal "ideal."  

In some cases, like myself, you may entirely reject it.  It's just another box people want to wrongfully stuff you into, after all.  I've got enough expectations on me without people demanding I wear dresses and makeup, or enjoy clothes, interior decorating, pink, and whatever else passes as feminine these days.  If other people like those things, more power to them.  I simply don't, and resent the expectations that I should.  

On a final note, it's refreshing to see Professor Baron-Cohen saying things I agree with.  I've typically disagreed with him on a lot of points.  However, improving the lives of transgender and gender-diverse people is a cause I can definitely support, and doing so will help autistic and non-autistic people.  

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)

TV Show Review: Love on the Spectrum

Wellp.  I wasn't sure this day would ever come, but here we are, and it's thanks to one of my pastors at church.  He asked me my opinion of the show in a "I want to learn more" kind of way, so I looked into, well, this.  I'm reviewing a TV show called "Love on the Spectrum."  It's an exploration of dating and love, featuring an entire cast of autistic people from the UK.  

Full disclosure?  I don't really enjoy this kind of show.  I feel like this sort of thing isn't really television material, and putting a camera on it is bound to make it even more awkward and painful than it already was.  

I am pretty sure my feelings on that latter statement are 100% accurate in terms of what happened here.  Keep in mind that most people on the autism spectrum have at least some kind of anxiety problems.  Usually a full-on diagnosable anxiety disorder.  Now put a camera on them.  Now, guess how well they're going to function?

To be fair, the worse they are at communicating, the better the spectacle, at least to a point.  In terms of understanding the real autistic humans, though, this isn't really a good way to do it.  Maybe it's the only way some people can get inside our heads?  But it makes me shake mine, frankly.  

All of this, by the way, is before we even get into the pitfalls of "dating" and the absolute poisonous garbage we're fed about there being "one true soulmate" we have to find in the nearly 8 billion humans on Earth.  

When the participants in this show were asked, their definitions of an ideal partner ranged from, "I would like the moon and the stars on a silver platter with platinum cutlery, please," to "I would like someone that cares about me for me, rather than uses me for whatever they can get out of me."  Very rarely was there a happy medium there.  Often the criteria were superficial (appearances), with no apparent understanding of what makes a long-lasting relationship work.  While they seem to have avoided participants that just scream, "I'm so lonely and what I need to fix myself is a partner!" at the camera, I still got that sense from many of the participants.

This isn't terribly surprising, to be honest.  Pop culture has no idea what makes a relationship work in the long term, because it isn't concerned with that.  It's concerned with having the most stunning, heated, passionate romance phase, and the rest of it be damned.  

The thing is, that's not what any of these autistic people were looking for.  No one going into this (to my memory) said, "yeah, I'd just like to have some fun with new people and see where stuff goes." Autistic people, being more isolated than most, tend to fall prey to the mentality that we'll somehow be normal if we just find a partner. So there's a fundamental mismatch there between the theme of these dating shows and what autistic people actually want.

Relatedly, the participants kept going on about a wanting to find a "spark" with the people they want to date.  I'm honestly not sure what this means, but it's potentially a load of rubbish, to borrow a British phrase.  Sometimes you find that spark later, after you've become friends with a person for a long while.  I never personally experienced love at first sight, and I'm more than a little dubious that it exists, but even assuming it does, it's not an indicator that you'll be able to make a relationship last.  

My general experience with dating was typically not "I'm going out clubbing to find someone to date!"  It was more, "I'd like more friends please, and... huh, we seem to be getting on quite well.  This one is maybe dating material, actually."  Which I think is maybe an approach that serves autistic people better overall.  If you can be good friends with someone, the chances that your relationship will survive years are significantly better than, "oh, that one looks pretty and we have something in common, let's try!"

Why yes, I am rather opinionated and withering about pop culture and dating, why do you ask?  

I've been married to my spouse for nearly 4 years now (we dated for an additional 4 years prior to getting married), and at this point most of our relationship has not been the stuff the books and movies and songs all love to talk about.  It's been hard work and compromises and piles of communication and working things out.  We have a lot of things in common, and that helps a lot, but what's kept us together isn't that.  It's that we're both willing to listen to each other, value the other, and are willing to expend the significant amount of effort it takes to communicate our wants, needs, and feelings.  

Maybe that's well beyond the scope of the show, since it is a dating show.  But the name is "Love on the Spectrum," not "Dating and Maybe Marriage Proposals on the Spectrum."  

Anyway... I did not enjoy this show.  I have enough of a sense for body language and awkwardness to be made incredibly uncomfortable by the body language of basically everyone the camera was pointed at.  It was like watching awkward teenagers, only instead of a scene or two in an otherwise enjoyable movie, it was the whole thing.  I actually couldn't suffer my way through even a single episode without having some kind of distraction going so I didn't focus as much on the excruciating awkwardness.  

I actually had this same problem when watching Atypical, another show featuring an autistic person.  Though I didn't have the problem when watching Temple Grandin, the HBO movie about the famous autism self-advocate and PhD of Animal Sciences.  Is it because this show and Atypical both play up the awkwardness for the sake of spectacle?  I'm not sure.

Are the autistic people in the show genuine?  Yeah, probably.  I'd say you're getting higher anxiety versions of each of the people presented, and there's probably some "I must perform for the camera, rather than be myself," because almost all humans do that when a camera is pointed at them.  Typically you need special training to not act like an idiot when a camera is pointed at you.  However, autistic people tend to be pretty genuine overall.

My favorite moment in the series was in the 4th episode when Olivia was asked what it's like to be a girl on the spectrum.  She replied: "Extremely difficult, given that there's no girl criteria, it's only boy.  So you get assessed on how male you are."  

This is especially true in the UK, where the "hyper male brain" theory of autism is predominant.  Even in the US, though, the criteria and understanding of autism is based on our historical understanding... which is to say, mostly male children.  Autistic girls need not apply, even though we have difficulties and strengths too.  It is, frankly, quite irritating.  Longtime readers will probably recognize why:  

I am not male.  I am not particularly female either.  I am me, which is not "a boy brain shoved into a girl's body."  My gender is "bugger off with those teensy little gender boxes you want to put me in, thanks."  This isn't an uncommon state of mind for autistic people, which brings me to my next point.

Mostly, this show focused on cisgender interactions: straight male-presenting people attempting to date straight female-presenting people.  When it comes to autistic people, we tend to have more complex gender identities, and are often bisexual or pansexual.  So merely showing "apparently a guy" dating "apparently a girl" is a very specific choice on the part of the producers.  And not one that's very realistic these days.  Honorable mention goes to the single bisexual girl that went on dates with a boy, and then later a girl.  Still, that's the rule, not the exception the way they portray it.  

Also, I know this show is set in the UK, and people are predominantly white there, but autism absolutely affects people of all skin tones.  There was one autistic guy of Chinese descent in the show, and that was about it.  No people with heritages from India, the Middle East, or Africa.  This show was not a good representation of the spectrum in that regard.  That failing is pretty typical in modern media, but it still bears pointing out because hey guys, people of color exist and are relevant to these discussions!  Please stop ignoring them because it's easier to put white cis guys in front of the camera.  

Lastly, the show focuses exclusively on dating between autistic people. There are no neurotypical people dating autistics at all. This is not how the real world works.  In reality there are many more neurotypical people than autistic people, and while we may find partners among our own, statistically it's likely that we will also date non-autistic people as well.  So it seems a bit separatist to me to just show autistic people dating autistic people.  

I did appreciate that they brought in various kinds of supports for the autistic people, including some kind of dating counselor, speed dating options, activities, and workshops.  The advice given seemed remarkably simplistic (find common interests, conversations should be 50-50, expand on things brought up in conversation), but I guess you have to start somewhere.  They also wouldn't show the bulk of these workshops, simply because of time constraints.  So I fondly hope the advice was more thorough than just these things, but even having that amount of help is better than, "we're going to set up dates for you and point a camera at them, have fun!"

Watch This Show If

You like dating shows and don't mind incredibly awkwardness.  This is pretty much a dating show, they just threw autism in there because it's novel and coming into the public consciousness.  This show isn't a good way to understand what it's like to live with autism, but at least the people in the show are probably fairly close to how they're shown.  Autistic people tend to be exceptionally genuine, but you only see so much of them in the context of dating.  Especially this kind of superficial dating.  I disapprove of the type of show, its definition of love, and its handling of the subjects involved.

This kind of show does not portray anything like how my dating went, as an autistic person.  Nor does it portray anything beyond the popular culture "romance" phase of relationships.  Additionally, the show pretty much only covers white autistic people, almost entirely cisgender, and almost entirely heterosexual dating.  This is not representative of the autism spectrum.  Not even in the UK.  

Basically, this is a faintly autism-flavored dating show.  Emphasis on the dating show.  It's overall positive about the participants and only slightly condescending, but as introductions to autism go, there are about a million better places to start. 

Reading the Research: Applying Big Data to Autistic Genetics

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article is a glimpse of a possible future for autism diagnostic codes and our understanding of the spectrum.

Autism is what scientists call a heterogeneous condition.  Which is to say, there isn't just one cause, and there isn't just one treatment.  Symptoms vary incredibly widely, and so do the genetics involved.  As often as not, the experiences of any given group of autistic people will have commonalities, but their specific symptoms might only have the smallest amount of overlap.  

A great deal of money and time have been poured into finding out what causes autism over the last 40 years or so.  The results have not been conclusive.  Everything from air pollution, reduced gut diversity, and the genetic history of humanity itself contributes, it seems.  There's evidence that autism has produced human specialists over thousands of years, and those specialists have been valued enough to pass their genetics on throughout the generations.  

It was hoped, with the advent of the human genome project, that we might finally understand how autism is coded for.  That hope proved futile... at least until now.  

Machine learning and Big Data may eventually provide these answers, assuming both can be harnessed.  This study is a very small example of the idea.  Basically, you get enough relevant data points (thousands of autistic people's genetics), and then you use a powerful computer find categories for you from those data points.  

The researchers in this study did exactly that, but for one very small subset of autism. If this was done on a grander scale, it's likely we could have actual categories of autism, rather than simply sorting ourselves based on symptoms.  

In all honesty, I have mixed feelings about this.  Part of the reason the autism community is a community is because we have a lot in common, including the diagnosis code.  Splitting the spectrum into dozens of microcategories seems like it might intrude on that unity and de-legitimize autistic experiences.  

However, these microcategories might also allow for more targeted treatments for specific issues.  The category these researchers found suffers from cholesterol issues.  Having that knowledge lets you know what to test for, and what to be careful of overall.  In short, having these categories may allow us to more easily and quickly reduce autistic suffering due to related medical conditions.   

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)

Grocery Shopping on a Special Diet: Impulse Buys, Yogurt, and Drinks

Welcome to a new series on life on the autism spectrum.  I've been doing grocery shopping for nearly a decade, and as my diet has needed to change for health reasons, I've noticed I have less and less of the grocery store actually available to me.  As a citizen of the United States, I have a truly staggering number of food options available to me, but if I want to function, most of them are actually illusions.  

I'd like to explore this a bit.  I'll be going aisle by aisle, probably about two aisles a week.  There are 14 aisles plus the bakery, deli, and fruits/vegetables sections, so there's plenty to talk about here.  

The store I typically go to is a hypermarket, which is to say that it is both a massive grocery store and a department store combined into a one-stop-shopping experience.  I'll be focusing on the grocery store section, since this is about food.  

Speaking of food, I should also establish my consumption limitations.  I have an allergy to casein (a protein in dairy).  Which is to say, if I drank a glass of milk, I would go from neutral-pleasant mood to angry and depressed in the span of about 30 minutes.  So most dairy products except for butter are off limits.  

I also try to adhere to a low-sugar diet, and avoid ultra-processed foods in favor of whole grains.  I try to avoid food coloring.  I try to avoid high histamine foods. Lastly, I'm a conditional vegetarian.  Unless I'm quite convinced (usually by way of independently verified labels) that the animals I'm eating were treated like creatures and not objects, I don't eat meat.  

When you enter the store, the first thing they try to do is sell you extra stuff you didn't come for.  Also, because it's 2020 and there's the coronavirus and no vaccine yet, please note the very first display: masks, including child-sized ones.  

I have to pass on the chips.  I'll eat them sometimes but they're definitely ultra-processed junk food: no nutritional content at all.  You'll see this is a major trend, and also that there's literally snack foods everywhere, not just here in the impulse purchase area.

Pop Tarts.  Supposedly a breakfast food.  Ever looked at the sugar content?  I'd rather have a donut for that amount of calories and sugar.  It'd have less food coloring, too.  Ice cream cones behind the Pop Tarts.  I like ice cream but between the dairy and the sugar, it doesn't like me.  

More chips, plus adult beverages.  I guess they hope you'll want to load up on empty calories?  I'm not making Mexican food this week though, so no ultra-processed tortilla chips.  And definitely no beer.  If I'm going to have empty calories, I want them to taste good.   

More chips, though these are more tempting.  Pringles, like every other type of chip, is definitely ultra-processed.  Honestly, they're like potato sawdust mixed with sugar and salt, and then shaped into a chip form.  The result is delicious, but quite bad for you.

Behind it is salad dressing, which is a way people destroy the nutritiousness of salads...  

I don't have specific complaints against bottled water, save that you really need to know what PH it is before putting it in your mouth.  Yeah, I know, it's water, it should be 7, but that's actually not how it is.  This particular water is most likely 6.5, so slightly acidic.  On a personal note, screw Nestle for profiteering off Michigan's water while paying basically nothing for it.  

Behind the water, Chex mix (another ultraprocessed snack), marshmallows (sugar bombs!), and paper towels.  

So those are the impulse purchases and sales as you walk down to the end of the store.  Almost entirely inedible in terms of health and sugar content. But they hope you'll forget that and buy them anyway, because look! They're right there and on sale!

When I shop I always start at the last aisle and work my way forward.  It just seems the most efficient to me.  And hence: aisle 14.  

Yogurt, juice, coffee, tea, and hot cocoa.  

To my great annoyance, juice is not healthy.  It's sugar water with vitamin C.  The reason fruit is healthy is not just the vitamins, but also because of the fiber.  Y'know, the stuff they strain out to get the juice.  So what you have here is sugar water, sometimes with extra sugar, food coloring, and flavorings.  

I dislike coffee, but at least it's not flatly unhealthy.  Unless it's flavored and full of sugar...  

Tea bags and hot cocoa.  A pretty small selection, to be honest, but fortunately I know better places to shop for tea.  I like tea and hot cocoa, but the latter tends to be chocked full of sugar.  At present, I have too much of the former so I've banned myself from buying more tea until I've reduced the levels of my tea collection at home.  

The yogurt section.  Yogurt is supposed to be healthy because of the protein and fermentation process.  It can help rebuild your gut with good bacteria.  Since autistic people often lack healthy guts, this would seem to be a good food choice.  Most yogurt is made with cow dairy, but let's have a look at a random yogurt... 

Look at the sugar content! 19 grams of sugar, or basically an entire day's worth of sugar for me.  But it's cheesecake flavored, surely a nice plain strawberry yogurt wouldn't be so bad...

OH COME ON.  Still 19 grams of sugar?!

The minimal but at least slightly existent nondairy yogurt section. Mostly oat products (not gluten-free, notably) and almond or coconut milk products.  Frustratingly, these nondairy products are typically lacking in protein content.  But they do, at least, still have the fermentation process.  

However, these flavored nondairy yogurt cups are just as full of sugar as the regular stuff.  Meaning, they're no good unless you buy the giant unsweetened container and add your own flavoring. Which defeats the convenience and portability of yogurt, in my opinion...

The refrigerated "quick desserts and baked goods" section.  There's everything from single serve puddings and creme brulees to cookie dough and cinnamon buns.  Sugar, sugar, sugar...  

The only notable thing I regularly acquire here is a specific brand of premade pie crust.  It doesn't use lard, and is also twice as expensive as any other pie crust available.  That said?  Making pie crusts sucks.  The most healthy option would be to make my own using fine ground whole grain flour, but I have a marked dislike for kneading butter into flour.  So most of the time I buy these crusts rather than make my own.  

The butter section is over complicated but at least it's all safe for me to eat. 

Some people with dairy allergies can't do butter, which makes margarine and other options more valuable.  There's also ghee, which has had the proteins removed... but we'll see more of that later in the baking aisle.

The entire cream cheese section is right out. Even if it wasn't dairy, it's full of sugar.  

And that's the first installment of this trip through the grocery store.  Let me know what you think.  I'd originally envisioned doing this grocery store trip in a single post, but it took me so many pictures to just get through the first few aisles that I realized no one would want to read such a long post.  

Next week: the baking aisle and the rest of the dairy section!

Reading the Research: GI Misery

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article discusses the effects of gastointestinal symptoms on children.  The more GI issues (trouble swallowing, constipation, diarrhea, bloating), the more likely the child will have sleep issues, self-harm tendencies, focus issues, and higher rates of aggression and restricted/repetitive behaviors.  Can we all guess why?  Good, good.

This is one of those studies that you kind of have to shout "well DUH" at.  It's good to have the connection between GI distress and "challenging behavior" validated empirically, but I don't think it's quantum physics/brain surgery/rocket science to say, "if human A is suffering lots of misery on a regular basis, their whole life will be affected negatively."  

The study does at least note that autistic children are 2.7 times more likely to suffer these issues than typically developing children, and that half the tested autistic children had frequent GI issues.  That's a lot, particularly since the sample size was over 250 autistic children.  

The study also rightfully notes that GI symptoms are very treatable, and the results can truly be life-changing.  Now, keep in mind the best treatments for these issues can be expensive.  We're talking a fecal transplant from a good quality donor.  This is one of those things insurance should cover, but generally refuses to because their business is taking as much money as possible and spending as little as possible in return. 

The last thing to note here is that the study was specifically on little kids.  So here's the song and dance one more time: Hey y'all, KIDS GROW UP.  If these problems aren't caught and treated young, they can and absolutely will persist into adulthood.  Then instead of angry preschoolers, you have angry adult humans, some of whom can't vocalize their suffering in a way that is easily recognized as "I need help with my GI tract."  So you get holes punched in walls, and "challenging behavior" as caregivers often term it.  

This is one of those things you want to rule out in cases like that, because sometimes it literally is as simple as "ease the suffering, 'challenging behavior' ceases."  For further reading on this subject (and aggressive autistic people in general), please consult this excellent post.

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)

Book Review: Life, Animated

 Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, by Ron Suskind, is a "my family's story with autism" type book.  While there is a small mountain of these, this one is remarkable for the particular path the autistic person took.  Most of these stories have been about "Aspergers" type autistics.  That's me, and that's most of the people I know.    

Owen Suskind, on the other hand, fell into the most dreaded variant of autism: regressive autism.  That's the one where the child seems to develop normally until a certain point, and then loses developmental progress.  They stop talking or lose tons of vocabulary, their motor skills deteriorate, they stop conveying emotion through body language...  It's a parent's worst nightmare.  Many of these children backslide all the way to being nonverbal, and that's exactly what happened with Owen.  

Most of the stories of this type of autism offer hope in terms of alternative communication devices, finding new ways of listening and seeing from a very different perspective, and above all, an ongoing struggle to thrive in a world not made for humans so different from the norm.  In some ways, this particular story is similar to those.  

However, unlike most of those stories, and thanks to his parents' willingness to incorporate their child's special interest, a literal village's worth of people and support staff, and far more resources and privileges than most families with autistic people have access to... Owen was able to master words, learn to see things from others' perspectives, become independent, and even start dating.  You are brought through the process of all of these developments.

It's a particularly engaging, well-written story, likely because the author's journalism experience is extensive.  Suskind really brings you into the headspace of each family member, including Owen, as much as possible.  You experience the struggle of the parents, the mixed feelings of Walt (Owen's brother), and grow to understand Owen just as his parents do, over time.    

This is probably the best written "my family's experience with autism" account I've ever read, and I've read a hill of them at this point.  When reading these accounts, you always have to keep in mind that the adage about meeting autistic people also applies to their families.  Every family's story will be different.  I just wish every family had the kind of resources and privileges the Suskinds had for this journey.  

Read This Book If

You want to better understand how autism can affect a family (and have a guaranteed happy ending), or want an example of how to channel a special interest (in this case, Disney movies) into helping an autistic person engage with the real world.  The Suskinds are a privileged family in a lot of ways, but their struggle is no less real or valuable for that fact.  What they managed, together, shows what could be done for every autistic person, and the good that might result.  (There is also a documentary, for people who prefer video to books)