Wouldn't all of the autism cure cranks out there have gotten actual results other than dead children if this were true? Digestion and diet have kind of been a fixation for them along with them along with chelation - anything to avoid the heritability elephant in the room.
Diet itself seems pretty heritable, at least for children. Up to a certain age, we generally eat what our parents tell us to, and that is generally pretty similar to what they're eating.
It is environmental however and mutable. Wouldn't that imply that if the then the bad old day practice of 'take the developmentally disabled kid from her mother because she is clearly to blame - and into an institution' would have had a positive impact.
There should be ample opportunities for diet to change even earlier on - incidents that seem like they should add up to documented evidence if there was something there. I mean even with a case with complications like scurvy - the vitamin C couldn't be measured and it was there in fresh food but not most preserved food and why citrus were the examples that could retain it. Of course there was also some astounding utter refusal to learn there.
> Wouldn't all of the autism cure cranks out there have gotten actual results other than dead children if this were true?
Probably not; systematic empirical investigation isn't exactly their thing, so even if their intuition (or deflecfion, depending on how you look at it) was in the right neighborhood (diet and digestion if gut bacteria offer some real help), doesn't make it particularly likely that they’d stumble on to the right thing.
