Is There A Cure For Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Interview With Beth Lambert: Documenting Hope: The Reversal Of Autism Spectrum Disorder

HILDA LABRADA GORE: According to official statistics from 2020, one in thirty-six children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is an epidemic of historic proportions. Author Beth Lambert, founder of Documenting Hope,¹ and her team have spent decades researching how best to help these children heal from a host of related conditions. Beth shares some of the groundbreaking results of her work, document­ed in a 2024 peer-reviewed publication about au­tism reversal in twin girls.² These successes give hope to parents who want to see their children’s health turned around. Tell us about these twins whose progress seems to demonstrate that they were able to overcome their autism diagnosis.

BETH LAMBERT: We published a paper in the Journal of Personalized Medicine. It’s a case report, which is a retrospective look at a set of twins who had “level three” (severe) autism. In a period of about a year and a half, they did intensive lifestyle and diet modifications. They also did some very intensive personalized thera­peutics. At the end of this period, they overcame many of their autism symptoms. With the Au­tism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC)³ [a seventy-seven-item tool widely used in the autism community to assess the effectiveness of interventions], the higher the score, the more severe the autism. One of the twins completely lost her diagnosis, going from an ATEC score of close to fifty down to one. Essentially, there is no autism left. The other one has dropped her ATEC score from the seventies down to the twenties or thirties. Both of them are now basically indistinguishable from their neuro­typical peers.

In partnership with this family, we rigor­ously documented everything that the parents did, in terms of the diet changes they made, the very specific types of therapies they used and which doctors they worked with. We did this be­cause people aren’t used to hearing that autism is reversible. We knew that we would get a lot of pushback on that. I had been documenting cases of autism that have been reversed for over fifteen years, but they sat in the realm of anec­dotes. When a parent gets a new diagnosis of their child having autism, they’ll say something like, “I’ve heard that autism is reversible.” The pediatrician will say, “No, there’s no evidence for that. That’s just an anecdote. That’s not true.” This study proves that’s not the case. It is revers­ible. We are working to gather as many of these kinds of stories as possible, publishing them in the peer-reviewed literature so that it becomes impossible for a physician to say that there’s no evidence that autism is reversible.

We are in the process of publishing a second paper about autism reversal with a boy who es­sentially followed Elaine Gottschall’s Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD). The SCD changes the types of carbohydrates that are consumed. Gottschall developed it for her child who had Crohn’s disease, and she had great success with that approach. I believe that Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride looked into SCD when she was developing her theories about Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS).

All of these diets—whether it’s GAPS or SCD or even a Weston A. Price diet—tell us there are many pathways to healing and recov­ery. It’s all “bio-individual.” This family chose to use SCD with their child with autism, and it had great success for them. Every person is unique. There are many ways, but all of these diets require that you eat nutrient-dense foods and take out the garbage. There is so much to be learned or taught just by letting people know that just taking the garbage out, just going for nutrient-dense food is going to make a huge impact on your child.

HLG: Many of us have experienced that when we change our diet to the nutrient-dense foods that have benefited humankind since the begin­ning of time, we feel a difference. The brain fog lifts, headaches go away, and so forth. It’s a great first step, isn’t it?

BL: Absolutely. In the stories that I’ve been documenting over the years, nutrition is always the cornerstone. It’s the foundation, and people will use other things beyond that. For autism, in particular, you’re talking about a neuro-developmental condition. Nutrition is only one piece because for that child to have had a neu­rodevelopmental condition, that meant that their neurodevelopment was interrupted. That meant the developmental trajectory they were on from the prenatal period in utero all the way through the first three or four years of their life, they’re doing all this brain development. What typically happens with autism is that brain development gets stalled, impaired or interrupted. Cleaning up the diet—cleaning the cells, detoxifying and providing nutrition to the body—is going to help that child overcome a lot of those symptoms, but sometimes they also need to go back and revisit those developmental milestones and revisit some of those developmental processes. Diet is the cornerstone, but it isn’t the only thing that can be helpful.

HLG: I heard that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) changed the developmental milestones and removed crawling as one.

BL: Yes, they moved the goalposts. Even the CDC is now using different criteria for deter­mining or defining “normal childhood devel­opment.” What they’re doing—they’re saying that if a child never crawls, that’s totally fine and normal. If they never roll over from back to front, or if they do it later on, it’s fine. It’s not fine! They’re just moving the goalposts because they’re trying to normalize developmental de­lays. I think that’s a dangerous, slippery slope.

There are a lot of grandmothers saying, “This isn’t ‘normal’ stuff that these children are going through. My grandchildren are do­ing different things developmentally. They’re talking later, and they’re crawling later.” The grandmothers see it, and they know it because they know what normal development looks like. If you’re a new parent, you may not know that. You’re going to take your advice from the CDC or the AAP or your pediatrician, and you’re going to hear them say, “It’s normal if your child never crawls.” Not normal. Common, yes; normal, no.

HLG: What would motivate the AAP or CDC or others to move these goalposts?

BL: If I were thinking that there was something more nefarious going on here, I would say that they very well know that some of the things that we do with our infants and our children are causing developmental delays. That could be the overuse of antibiotics. It could be excessive vaccination. It could be the back-to-sleep cam­paign. It could be any number of these modern things that we do in rearing our children that are actually affecting their development. They may know that and, again, move the goalpost to try to normalize it so that everything can stay status quo; they don’t have to question the CDC vaccination schedule, and they don’t have to question these public health policies that are obviously impairing our children’s development. That’s the nefarious interpretation.

It could also just be well-meaning people who haven’t been around for forty or fifty years to have the long view, to have the historical per­spective of what childhood development looks like, and maybe they’re naive. Maybe they’re just updating the guidelines, saying, “People in the past didn’t get it right.” I don’t know what the actual reason is, and it’s probably a combination of both, but I do know that it is a huge mistake to move the developmental goalposts in order to say it’s normal for children not to talk until they’re two or not to walk until after fourteen months. That’s hurting our children.

HLG: Let’s talk about the ATEC tool and the changes in the twins’ scores. What are some of the things on that checklist that originally would have been checked “yes” that are now gone?

BL: It would be things like verbalization—a child’s ability to verbalize and to communicate verbally. Other things would be social engage­ment. A lot of times, children with autism are described as being in their own world. Sometimes, these kids will sit on the ground as toddlers or young children, and fixate on something like spinning wheels or trucks or cars and lining those things up. Those are the kinds of things that the ATEC asks about—sen­sory defensiveness or sensitivity or the sensory symptoms that kids have and their relatability to peers and adults. Also, inflexibility is very common in children with autism. That might mean, for instance, that the child is sitting on the ground, and it’s time to pick up and move to another room. That child can’t tolerate that movement or change. There are many different ATEC criteria.

In the case of the twin girls, they had mini­mal verbal capacity. They were in their own world, not engaging with peers and not playing with toys. All of that evaporated. They started playing with peers, and speaking and engag­ing with their parents and with their peers. They began playing with toys in a typical way, using their imagination. They did those kinds of things that they hadn’t seen months earlier.

The ATEC is largely administered by the parent who tracks things over time. I often tell parents who have kids on the spectrum to make sure they do an ATEC at baseline—when they get their diagnosis. As you do whatever interventions you want to do, whether those are nutrition or therapy or lifestyle interventions, do the ATEC again so that you can track changes over time and see the progress that is made.

HLG: Speaking of the parents, I can only imag­ine how overjoyed they are right now that their children are functioning in this new way.

BL: I’ve spent some time with these parents. They’re the most incredible, committed parents. They decided to roll up their sleeves and do the work that needed to get done for their family. The thing that was unique about them was they were so courageous in the face of opposition. They had their children diagnosed at Walter Reed, which is a very reputable institution. It’s not like there was a “mistake” in the diagnosis. The girls were diagnosed with “level three” (severe) autism. When the parents asked about different kinds of interventions that they could do, the only recommendation they got was Ap­plied Behavioral Analysis (ABA). There are many critiques about ABA and questions of whether it actually does more harm than good for children. (That’s a whole other podcast epi­sode we could do someday.)

When they were told “There is nothing you can do aside from ABA,” these parents didn’t take that guidance from their clinicians. Instead, they kept looking elsewhere, knocking on other doors. Actually, they joined our online membership community called Healing Together.⁴ We are essentially an online support group for parents who are looking to learn how to do this work. They had joined our group right when we were just beginning and beta-testing it. We got to know them. We had opportunities to talk to them about diet and detoxification and all these kinds of things.

These parents rolled up their sleeves and decided, “We’re going to change the diet. We’re going to detoxify the home. We’re going to find all the practitioners that our children need.” They did this in a way where they let their own intuition be the guide. Rather than saying, “We need the experts to tell us what to do,” they really “tuned in” to their girls and thought about what their girls needed. They went out and found support for their children. They made it happen.

HLG: The paper that you published says that they used interventions based on dietary changes, the environment and lifestyle. What were some of the changes they made to see these improvements in their girls?

BL: Some of it was, again, focusing on nutrient density and whole foods. That was an important piece. Every food that went into their girls’ mouths was something that they knew was going to support their bodies. I re­member one of my mentors, our former scientific director Dr. Martha Herbert, used to say that children on the spectrum don’t have the ability to tolerate anything that isn’t nutrient-dense. That body needs every single ounce of nutrition that it can get because it has a lot of repair work to do. The family leaned into that and were doing things that would repair the microbiome. They gave their children a lot of fruits and vegetables, and they made sure that they were getting things like bone broth.

They were also looking to identify food sensitivities—things that the girls might have been sensitive to. There was a sensitivity to wheat and dairy, and they took those things out while the body was healing and repairing. They ate no junk food, no processed food, none of that. They just went all in on whole organic foods, which was the key that they knew their girls needed.

They also gave nutritional supplements based on using functional diagnostic tests. There are different kinds of functional lab tests you can do. Some of them are based on blood tests, but there are urine and stool tests as well that can actually help guide the kinds of supplements your child might need. You could call it “precision medicine.” You can look for nutrient deficiencies. Perhaps there’s not enough magnesium or maybe they need some zinc. Folate is another one; the type of folate matters, making sure it’s methylated. That’s an important part. Often, many kids who have autism don’t have the right B vitamins going in. Of course, those are always better to get from food, but sometimes supplements can be used to fill those gaps. Personalized nutritional supplementation was an important part for them as well.

HLG: Some kids with these diagnoses are intolerant of certain textures or only want familiar foods. I’ve heard Dr. Campbell-McBride say, “You’re the parent, you’re in charge, they will not starve. Make sure you get these foods in them.” Kudos to those parents who overcame all kinds of hurdles to make that happen.

BL: It’s repetition. I know Dr. Campbell- McBride used to say this, too. I’ve heard many people say that if you put something on the plate and they don’t eat it the first time, fine, you put it in front of them again. If they don’t eat it the second time, fine, put it again. You keep putting that food in front of them and introducing it in different ways and eventually, they’ll come around. It’s the perseverance that gets children over the hump. I’ve seen that with my own children as well. Even if they resist for a week or two weeks, you just keep going. You don’t let it bother you. You don’t want it to be a battle, but it’s the persistence and letting the children know that it’s going to still be there. “Let’s keep at it. Let’s keep trying.”

HLG: Christine Muldoon (on the WAPF board) says kids need many exposures, maybe twenty. And it’s not always just putting the food on the plate; maybe it is also the preparation or picking it out at the farmers market. Different exposures to a food will eventually win them over. Turning to the environment, what shifts did the family make to help their daughters?

BL: There were a lot. I think they generally shifted toward all of the things in their life be­ing more natural, as much as possible, which we always advocate for. That would mean spending more time outside. The family made an effort to get outside in nature, get sunlight on the skin without sunscreen but also get rid of anything in the home that might contain toxic chemicals. That could include soaps, shampoos, dishwash­ing detergent, laundry detergent and toothpaste. They did an overhaul on all the things in the home environment to make sure that there wasn’t anything synthetic. The idea was to get all the synthetics out and get as close to nature as possible. That means spending more time in nature whenever possible, using natural light whenever possible instead of LED, halogen and fluorescent lights, and using incandescent bulbs, for instance, which are hard to get.

We try to get as much natural light as pos­sible and fresh air, using an air filter in the home to try to get the chemicals out because we live in a toxic soup in the modern world. There are so many chemicals in and around us in the average American home. Even when you think you’re in a pretty clean home—or let’s say you buy clean, organic home care products—your sofas and mattresses probably have flame retardants. Innumerable toxic exposures are in every corner of every home. It requires an overhaul in the home to get as many of those out as possible.

HLG: When my kids were little, I let them sleep in their dad’s t-shirts when everyone recom­mended flame-retardant pajamas. It was so much better for them to be in breathable cotton than in something that had been sprayed. Who knows how that would have affected their hormones?

BL: I, too, remember being the crazy one in my home when people would give my kids these cute, fuzzy, flame-retardant pajamas as gifts. I would say, “No, sorry, those are going out of the house.” I wouldn’t let them wear them. I took a stand on that—I looked crazy but that’s the thing we have to do until the rest of the world wakes up to just how much toxic exposure there is in our day-to-day lives.

HLG: I think we don’t realize the impact of the toxic soup that we’re swimming in, even in our homes. We don’t stop to think how our environ­ment or diet are contributing to that.

BL: What’s really wonderful about this family’s journey—but truly with most families I’ve in­terviewed or talked to who have overcome some chronic health condition with their child—usu­ally mom and dad get better, too. Mom might have eczema, and dad might have rheumatoid arthritis, or dad’s cholesterol is high, not because of what he’s eating but because of the inflam­mation and the stress in his life. All of that stuff comes back in line when they start doing this as a family. The families who are making three different meals for different members of the family probably don’t do as well as the families that all go in together and decide to make these diet changes and lifestyle changes together. It’s a whole family healing together. It’s really beautiful when a family decides to commit to it.

HLG: How is “lifestyle” different from the environment? What other changes might this family have made that we haven’t yet addressed?

BL: “Lifestyle” is the big, all-encompassing word for describing how we’re living in the modern world, and how that is out of sync with nature. An example might be circadian biology and circadian rhythms. In the modern world, we live with artificial lights and devices that we think are normal. This is the type of change you can make very easily by just following the rhythms of nature. When it is dark outside, we’re winding down; we’re going to sleep. When it’s light outside, we’re outside; we’re doing our activity, we’re eating within that window when it’s light out as people have done for thousands and thousands of years. That’s the lifestyle stuff—less screen time, less time on devices, less artificial light, more sleeping when it’s dark out.

Movement is another category of lifestyle. The Western world is so sedentary. Just thinking back to basic movements that people would have had one or two hundred years ago—that people have had for thousands of years—and just having that activity in your life, again, that is getting back in alignment with how our physiology has evolved over millennia.

I remember after the twins’ family had gone through this process with us where we were documenting their recovery story, the mother sent me a video of the girls playing outside. There were these little sawed-off logs, and the girls were jumping from log to log to log outside. I thought, “That is the lifestyle intervention right there.” Those kids were playing on logs the way that kids would have played on logs four or five hundred years ago. That is the natural movement that those kids need, and it is helping them to thrive.

It was such a beautiful visual for me, one that encapsulates the changes. That is so simple, too. There’s nothing complex. They didn’t go for some fancy ten-thousand-dollar new technology to change their brainwaves. No, they went outside and played the way that kids have done from time immemorial. I know it sounds like an oversimplification. These kids didn’t recover just by playing on logs, but it was a mindset shift for this family to do things that they knew were in rhythm and bal­ance with nature.

HLG: Some families rely on screens to pacify or engage and communicate with their autistic kids. How did this family deal with screens?

BL: I know screens were not a major part of their life but I don’t know whether they went 100 percent off. As you mentioned, a lot of families rely on screens. The thing is, especially with kids with autism, there is a behavioral component. The reason there’s a behavioral component is usually because there’s something about their physiology that’s “off.” For instance, their neurotransmitter production is making them have to move in ways that are not what we want to see in an average classroom. That can be because the microbiota are “off” in their gut. There’s this whole physiology that’s out of balance, yet these kids are asked to sit quietly in a classroom. They’re asked to comply with social behaviors that are expected and typical. The devices help them do that. It’s anesthetizing with a device. The devices anesthetize all of us. That gets behavioral compliance and conformity, but it doesn’t address the root causes of their symptoms.

HLG: In 2020, they said one in thirty-six children were diagnosed as having an autism spectrum disorder. That number has grown steadily over the past twenty years. Tell us more about the numbers.

BL: When I started this work in 2008 or 2009, the number of children with an ASD diagnosis was one in one hundred fifty. The best data that we have go back to 1970, and that was one in ten thousand. There are some studies that put it at maybe two in ten thousand, but it was exceed­ingly rare. In 2024, the CDC put it at one in thirty-six children,⁵ and then [in October 2024] JAMA Network Open published a paper with updated numbers, putting it at one in thirty-three.⁶ I actually think it’s even higher than that. A lot of these studies are with eight- to twelve-year-olds. They miss the kids who are under eight.

We don’t have a really good handle [statistically] on how many kids have autism, but I’ll tell you how we do have a good handle on it. Every­body knows somebody. Everybody knows multiple kids with autism, yet somebody my age, I did not know one child in my elementary school who had autism. People will say, “That’s because we didn’t call it ‘autism.’ We called it something else.” True, but I also did not have one child in my elementary school who had the stereotypical signs or symptoms of autism. There was no hand flapping, there was no echolalia [repetition of words or phrases], there was none of the stereotypical stimming [self-stimulatory movements or behaviors] that you see, that are observable features of autism. I think there are many people who would acknowledge that as well. Now, there are some people who will say, “I knew somebody. My brother had autism when I was growing up.” It was there, but it was one in ten thousand. I assure you, it was one in ten thousand.

HLG: It’s such a different landscape now. This is why your work is more important than ever. Tell us more about Documenting Hope. Are you going to come out with a movie?

BL: I have enough footage to make a documentary film. I just don’t have enough money to finish it. We have over one hundred hours of footage. I started this work by trying to document on film what I knew to be true, which was that these kids were reversing their conditions. It wasn’t just autism. It was rheumatoid arthritis and severe eczema, life-threatening food allergies, asthma and ADHD. I had all these stories of kids who have gotten better, and we were capturing some of this on film. That documentary will happen at some point.

We are basically in a place where we’re always looking for funding, but we also have a bunch of research studies now, so we don’t just have the stories to tell. We have the science and the evidence behind the stories, and we want those two things to come out si­multaneously. We just published one paper, and we have a second paper coming out (the SCD case). A third paper that we’re working on in collaboration with a functional medicine clinic in the Philippines is documenting what happens when you use a functional medicine approach for children with autism. Of course, their ATEC scores come down, and we’re documenting that.

We have two more retrospective case re­ports that we want to do on PANS (pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome) and PANDAS (pediatric autoimmune neuropsy­chiatric disorders associated with streptococ­cal infections) with a Lyme component. These are children who are developing typically, and maybe around age seven or eight, all of a sudden, something happens. The parents describe it as the kids suddenly “going crazy.” They develop what could only be described as psychotic be­havior, severe anorexia and tantrums. They have memory loss, bedwetting and regression in all kinds of developmental ways. They have OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] and severe tics. All of a sudden, these children develop this behavior that’s not characteristic for them. They’ve never had it before.

It turns out that it is inflammation in their brains. This is diagnosable through various kinds of functional lab tests. Although it really is still a clinical diagnosis, there are all kinds of tests that you can use to identify what’s go­ing on with these children physiologically. I’ve documented kids recovering from these condi­tions. Often, there’s an infectious component. It might be one of the Lyme factors like Borrelia, Babesia, Ehrlichia, Anaplasma or Mycoplasma. There are all these infections that get into the brain, and the body tries to regulate that and address those infections. In doing that, it ends up attacking the brain tissue, which causes the inflammation and the behaviors that we see in PANS and PANDAS.

We have two retrospective cases of kids who have recovered that we want to publish in the literature; we’re looking for funding to get those published. When somebody goes to their doctor with a sudden onset of PANS or PANDAS, the doctor, first of all, may not even know what it is. They might put these kids in a psych ward in the hospital because they don’t recognize it and don’t know what to do with it. If they do know it’s PANS or PANDAS, they’ll put them on antibiotic after antibiotic, which does not offer a good outcome. It results in a downward spiral of health problems because antibiotics can be so destructive. We hope to do more of those kinds of case reports. We have another research program that we’ve been work­ing on for a couple of years that we’re continuing to push as well.

HLG: Do you get naysayers? Do people say, “You’re giving people false hope because the cases and stories you’re telling are the excep­tions, not the rule”?

BL: We absolutely get naysayers. When we published the paper on the twins, it was picked up by tons of media outlets. We did not expect this at all. We have two main studies, the CHIRP Study⁷ [Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention] and the FLIGHT Study [Facili­tated Longitudinal Intensive Investigation of Genuine Health Transforma­tion],⁸ which is our main research platform. On the side, we wrote this case report. It was literally something on the side. We did it in the extra hours, nights and weekends, and we collaborated with some people. When we published it, we did not expect the media to go bonkers. We got tons of people who wanted to interview us, and a lot of it was the conserva­tive media, interestingly. We also got international press. Our principal investigator was just inundated with emails and phone calls from people wanting to know more about the autism case.

A lot of the feedback was positive: “This is terrific. Are there more cases like this? How do we learn from this?” However, there was also a backlash. For instance, the UK Autism Society—which is an organi­zation that tries to advocate for and promote the rights of people with autism, which I think is a wonderful thing to do, it’s a wonderful orga­nization—they found it very insulting and absolutely offensive that we would even talk about reversing autism, because there is a conception that autism is genetic, it’s brain-based, there’s nothing you can do about it, and we should accept and embrace the people who have it. Of course, it’s true that we should accept and embrace people who have autism and do everything we can to help support them and make their lives as easy as possible and integrate them and make them feel included, but not at the expense of ignoring their medical issues.

That’s what often happens. People say, “If you have autism, we want to include you.” They don’t ask about their health and their medical symptoms. What happens when you do ask the question, “What are your medical symptoms?” is that you hear about gastrointestinal pain, chronic diarrhea or chronic constipation, or terrible headaches. If you start ad­dressing those symptoms from a root cause perspective, like changing the microbiome through diet, etc., all of a sudden, those symptoms of autism get less severe and start going away.

How do you reconcile those two things that say, on the one hand, “somebody with autism has this condition and we must include them and embrace them,” but on the other hand, when we address the medi­cal symptoms, those symptoms that “define” them go away? That’s a very confusing situation for people to deal with. Autism is caught and wrapped up with identity and identity politics, which I think is a bit of a dangerous slippery slope because, again, while we want to embrace every person’s unique individuality and neurodiversity, we also want to treat their medical issues. If we happen to resolve some of the features of autism by treating medical issues, we’re going to do that. People will ultimately have less suffering and fewer challenges.

HLG: Anxiety and depression have become more accepted socially, but does that mean don’t try to alleviate the suffering and address what’s at play? Maybe the anxiety has to do with what’s happening in the body.

BL: There has been a well-intentioned movement of neurodiversity and trying to be as inclusive as possible. However, when you do not address people’s real medical issues because of the inclination to embrace neu­rodiversity, you’re missing the boat on allowing that person to be the best version of themselves. You’re missing the opportunity for them to overcome some of their most challenging symptoms. I’ve talked to adults with autism who started doing biomedical work for themselves. They will tell you, “I was not happy when I had all of those sensory issues. I couldn’t stand being in crowds because of the intensity of the noise and the light.” When they fixed their gut and healed their microbiome, that sensitivity came down. Do you think they wanted it to come back? No, they didn’t.

HLG: After all the years of working in this space, what has been a surpris­ing result of the research and studies that you’ve conducted? Something that you didn’t expect and made you happy?

BL: If I go back to where I was fifteen years ago, one thing that negatively surprised me was the resistance. In other words, I came out doe-eyed and a bit naive at the beginning of this work, saying, “We can heal these kids! We can do it. Look at Dr. Campbell-McBride. Look at all these great people who have this awesome information.” In 2010, I published a book called A Compromised Generation: The Epidemic of Chronic Illness in America’s Children,⁹ thinking that people would respond with, “High five, let’s do this, let’s go. Let’s heal all these kids.” The resistance has been surprising. People are stuck in the Western medical paradigm, thinking that there’s a pill for every ill and that modern technological science is going to solve this. Whereas I’m saying, “No, let’s get back to the basics, get back to nature.”

Something that surprised me on the positive side is just how impor­tant the role of the parent is and particularly the intuition of the parent. I wasn’t clued into that when I was researching my book in 2008 and 2009. I was really into the microbiome and the biochemistry and tweak­ing the body to get back into balance, but I wasn’t focused on the vital role the parent plays in a child’s outcome. Fast forward fifteen years, and I think the single most important piece of the entire equation is the parent or the parents’ role. Not only that, but it’s their role in using their own internal guidance and their intuition in choosing the interventions that are appropriate for their child. We live in a world where information is exploding, and there are a million different options. Parents wonder, “Should my child take an antioxidant? Do they need glutathione? Should they take methylated B vitamins? Do they need B12?” There’s so much information out there. For the average parent to be able to navigate that— when they don’t have a PhD or an MD and they’ve never been through something like this before—it’s a lot to ask of that parent. The parents who are most successful are the ones who just quiet the noise, go inside and figure out what their gut tells them. Those are the ones who have had the most profound impact because they listen to that inner guidance, and they always know what to do.

HLG: If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend?

BL: Throughout the day, you make choices. There’s “this choice or that choice,” whether it’s the food you’re going to eat in the next minute or the way you’re going to spend the next five minutes. The way you move through an increasingly complex world is to have every choice you make be one that is guided by, “I’m going to go with the more natural thing. I’m going to go with the thing that my great-grandmother might have done. I’m going to go with the thing that sits in ancestral wisdom.” Lean into the “natural” in all things, whether it’s products, food or how you’re spending your time. That is the one thing that I think shapes the whole healing journey. You lean into nature. If you find yourself with symptoms or challenges, sit back and say, “How am I living that is different from my great-grandparents? What can I do to get closer to the way that they lived?”

REFERENCES

1. https://documentinghope.com/
2. D’Adamo CR, Nelson JL, Miller SN, Rickert Hong M, Lambert E, Tallman Ruhm H. Reversal of autism symptoms among dizygotic twins through a personal­ized lifestyle and environmental modification approach: a case report and review of the literature. J Pers Med. 2024 Jun 15;14(6):641.
3. https://autism.org/autism-treatment-evaluation-check­list/atec-development/
4. https://documentinghope.com/healing-together/
5. Maenner MJ, Warren Z, Williams AR, et al. Prevalence and characteristics of autism spectrum disorder among children aged 8 years – Autism and Developmental Dis­abilities Monitoring Network, 11 sites, United States, 2020. MMWR Surveill Summ. 2023 Mar 24;72(2):1-14.
6. Grosvenor LP, Croen LA, Lynch FL, et al. Autism diag­nosis among US children and adults, 2011-2022. JAMA Netw Open. 2024 Oct 1;7(10):e2442218.
7. https://documentinghope.com/the-chirp-study/
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This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2025

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