Glutamate and Autism

On Age of Autism today,John Erb has a very good post on the role of glutamate in vaccines, and in food in the form of MSG, and autism. Specifically the rapid brain growth seen in children like my Chandler and his big beautiful giant head. Everyone in the vaccine debate needs to read it, along with the information Carol Hoernlein has posted on MSGTruth.org.

I left this in the comments section:

How odd is it.... and it is odd.... that pretty much everyone in any health debate in this country, whole heartedly agrees that the western lifestyle and diet is ruining the health of Americans and is doing the most damage to American children.

Yet when you start to parcel out what specific substances might actually be doing the damage, big obvious compounds known and sometimes even specifically used to have neurological and immunological impacts, (mercury, aluminum, glutamate, etc.) suddenly no one wants to investigate?

Truly odd.

I have a very clear memory of watching tv with my mother around 1976 when we saw a commercial for Accent Flavor Enhancer - "Brings Out The Flavor Of Food!". I must have said something to the effect of, 'hey mom... lets get that." (apparently I was a foodie from quite a young age). She explained that Accent was not a spice mix that actually makes the food taste better, but a chemical called monosodium glutamate that acts on your brain to make it think the food tastes better, and that we couldn't buy it because it gave her those horrible migraines that sent her to bed for days.

So I have known since I was seven that glutamate was a psychoactive substance that was my super mom's kryptonite, but even after 30 plus years of full knowledge that this stuff does things to people's brains, and even though it is ubiquitous in our society, we want to avoid looking at the actually damage it is doing in the brains of our beautiful babies?

I am all about the mercury theory, but just as we don't know what these vaccines are doing in combination, we don't know what these vaccine ingredients are doing in combination.

We cannot ignore logical lines of causation inquiry to promote another. We need to know the whole truth.

I will be interested to know Mr. Erb's plan of attack against MSG and how we can be of service.

I think this might be a fight my mom is interested in too.

On my posts on Genetically Modified Foods and their inflammatory properties, I asked the question, 'does the Specific Carbohydrate diet work for Chandler not only because it removes sugars that feed intestinal yeast, but also because it removes GMO's that potentially damage the GI track create inflammation'.

I can ask the same question about glutamate. Does the SCD work for Chandler because the restriction of processed foods from his diet (along with abstaining from vaccines) has cut off sources of glutamate to him?

Have I mentioned that one of the things that has given Chandler such a boost in the last two months is that we started giving him GABA, which has a positive impact on overly glutamated brains?