🖨️ Print post
According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, in 2020, 1 in 36 children has autism spectrum disorder in the United States. Beth Lambert is an author, documentarian and the founder of Documenting Hope, a group committed to the prevention and reversal of chronic health and developmental conditions in children, including autism, ADHD, anxiety, autoimmune conditions, PANS/PANDAS, Sensory Processing Disorder, learning disorders, and more.
Today, Beth shares a groundbreaking result of her work documented in a peer-reviewed publication about autism reversal in a pair of twin girls! She discusses the changes the parents of the twins made, how the girls’ Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC) scores dropped over the course of 6 months, and much more. She explains how we can make similar changes to improve our health. Beth also goes over why her findings and research are indeed giving hope to so many parents who want to see their children’s health turn around.
Visit Beth’s website: Documenting Hope
Register for the Wise Traditions conference at Wise Traditions
Check out our sponsors: Smidge and One Earth Health
—
Listen to the podcast here
Episode Transcript
Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda
One in 36 children in the United States has autism spectrum disorder. These are the official statistics from 2020. Is there no hope to reverse this trend? This is Episode 515. Our guest is Beth Lambert. Beth is an Author, Documentarian, and the Founder of Documenting Hope, a group committed to the prevention and reversal of chronic health and developmental conditions.
Did you know that more than half of the children in the United States have at least one diagnosed serious chronic health condition? This is an epidemic of historic proportions, and Beth and her team have been working on this for decades, researching how to best help these children heal from a host of conditions.
I’m talking about things like ADHD, anxiety, autism, autoimmune conditions, PANS and PANDAS, sensory processing disorders, learning disorders, and more. Beth shares a groundbreaking result of her work, which was documented in a peer-reviewed publication about autism reversal in a pair of twin girls.
She discusses what approach the parents took, how the girls’ Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist, ATEC scores, dropped over the course of six months, and more. Finally, Beth also explains why her findings and her research are indeed giving hope to so many parents who want to see their children’s health turned around.
Before we get into the conversation, I want to invite you to the next Wise Traditions Conference. It’s going to be held in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is the conference that nourishes in every way. It is going to be from October 17th to the 19th. It is our 25th anniversary. This conference is going to be something really special.
Join us. Go to Wise Traditions to find out how to register and get your hotel and all the things because we really want to see you there. The food is delicious and Wise Traditions friendly. The talks are phenomenal and mind-blowing. The people are simply the salt of the earth. We hope to see you there.
—
Welcome to the show, Beth.
I’m so happy to be with you all. This is really wonderful.
A Groundbreaking Result: Reversing Autism
Speaking of wonderful, we were blown away when we saw that your paper was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal about these twins whose progress seemed to demonstrate the fact that they were able to overcome their autistic diagnosis. Is that right? Fill us in on the details.
We published a paper in the Journal of Personalized Medicine. It’s a case report, which is a retrospective look back at a set of twins who had level three or severe autism, who underwent, in a period of time, it was about a year and a half, where they did intensive lifestyle and diet modifications. They also did some very intensive personalized therapeutics. At the end of this period of time, these twins overcame many of their autism symptoms.
One of them completely lost their diagnosis and went from an ATEC score close to 50, which if anything about ATEC, the higher the score, the more severe the autism, she went down to 1. Essentially, there is no autism left. The other one has dropped her ATEC score from the 70s down to, I believe, she’s in the 20s or 30s right now. Both of them are basically indistinguishable from their neurotypical peers. This family, we rigorously documented in partnership with them everything that they did in terms of the diet changes they made in terms of the very specific types of therapies they used in terms of which doctors they worked with.
It was getting every little detail. The reason why we did that is because, as you were starting to mention, Hilda, that this is something that people aren’t really 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. They sit in the realm of anecdotes. When you go to a parent who gets a new diagnosis, for instance, with their children 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 that’s not the case. It is reversible. We are in the process of publishing a second paper about autism reversal with a boy who followed essentially Elaine Gottschall’s SCD-type diet. We are really 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.
Breaking Down Specific Carbohydrate Diet
You’ve thrown around a lot of acronyms and for those who are uninitiated, I would love for you to elucidate us a little bit more on them. Let’s go with the SED; that diet you said helped that boy. What does that look like?
That’s a specific carbohydrate diet and that’s essentially changing the types of carbohydrates that are consumed. The specific carbohydrate diet was developed by a woman named Elaine Gottschall and she developed for her child that had Crohn’s disease, and she had great success with that approach. I believe that the specific carbohydrate diet was something that Natasha Campbell McBride looked into when she was developing her theories about gut and psychology syndrome. What I will say about all of these diets, whether it’s gut and psychology syndrome or SCD, or using even just a Weston A. Price diet, there are many pathways to healing and recovery.
It’s all bio-individual. This happens to be one case. The specific carbohydrate diet was what this family chose to use with their child with autism, and it had great success for them. Every person is unique, and every person is different. There are many ways, but all of these diets require that you eat nutrient-dense, full foods and you take out the garbage and all that thing, all those sorts of things. 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.
That is such good news. Of course, some of us have experienced this in real life, even if we weren’t ever diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. When we change our diet to those nutrient-dense foods that have benefited humankind since the beginning of time, we feel a difference and the brain fog lifts, the headaches go away, and so forth. Not that it’s a miracle cure, but that’s a great first step, isn’t it?
Absolutely. In the stories that I’ve been documenting over these 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 neurodevelopmental 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 to the first 3 or 4 years of their life, they’re doing all this brain development.
What happens is typically that brain development gets stalled, impaired, or interrupted. While cleaning up the diet, cleaning the cells, detoxification, and providing nutrition to the body, that’s 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.
Diet is the cornerstone, but it isn’t the only thing that can be helpful.
Moving The Goalpost: Developmental Milestone
When you say the words developmental milestones, I can’t help but think about the fact that I think, is it the American Council on Pediatrics changed and removed crawling as a developmental milestone? Have you heard about that?
They moved the goalposts. It’s the American Academy of Pediatrics, even the CDC is now using different criteria for determining or defining what is normal childhood development. What they’re doing is they’re saying if a child never crawls, that’s totally fine and normal. If they never roll over from back to front, if they do it later on, it’s fine. It’s not fine. They’re just moving the goalpost because they’re trying to normalize developmental delays. I think that’s a very dangerous, slippery slope.
We have a lot of grandmothers out there who are like, “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 a normal developmental trajectory 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 American Academy of Pediatrics 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.
Is this the syndrome of everybody on the soccer field gets a trophy? What would possibly possess the American Council on Pediatrics or the CDC or others to move these goalposts?
If I were a little bit more nefarious, 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 and normalize it so that everything can stay status quo, that they don’t have to question the CDC schedule, that 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 maybe haven’t been around for 40 years or 50 years to actually have the long view, to have the historical perspective of what childhood development looks like and maybe they’re naïve. Maybe they’re just updating the guidelines, being like, “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 this is a huge mistake in moving the developmental goalposts to try and say it’s normal for children not to talk until they’re 2, or it’s normal for children not to walk until out there after 14 or 15 months. That’s hurting our children.
ATEC: Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist
I want to go back to the acronym you were using before ATEC, which is the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist. You said that the twins, their numbers went down from, let’s say, 76 to 32, or you were saying 50-something to 1. That’s like amazing. What are some of the things on that checklist that originally would have been checked, yes, they have this symptom or this demonstration of a neuro disability, and that got erased?
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, they’re described as being in their own world. Sometimes, these kids will sit on the ground as toddlers or young children, and they’ll fixate on something like spinning wheels or trucks or cars and lining those things up. Those are the kinds of things that the ATEC checklist asks about, sensory defensiveness or sensitivity or the sensory symptoms that kids have.
Their relatability to peers, their relatability to adults, their inflexibility. 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 the child into another room. That child can’t tolerate that movement, that change. That’s an example. There are many different criteria on the ATEC checklist.
What you’re talking about is these girls had minimal verbal capacity. They were in their own world, not engaging with peers, and not playing with toys. All of that evaporated where they started playing with peers and speaking and engaging with the parents and with their peers and playing with toys in a typical way, using their imagination, those kinds of things that maybe they hadn’t seen months earlier.
The ATEC is largely administered by the parent and the parent tracks over time. I oftentimes tell parents who have kids on the spectrum to make sure they do an ATEC at the baseline, like when they begin, when they get their diagnosis. As you do whatever interventions you want to do, whether those are nutrition or therapy or lifestyle interventions or changes, do the ATEC again so that you can track those changes over time and see the progress that is made.
Speaking of the parents, I can only imagine how overjoyed they are right now that their children are functioning in this new way.
These parents, I’ve spent some time with them. They’re the most incredible, committed parents. They really just decided to roll up their sleeves and do the work that needed to get done for their families. The thing that was really unique about them was they were just courageous in the face of opposition. In other words, they were told 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.
They were diagnosed with level three or severe autism. When they asked about different kinds of interventions that they could do, all they got was ABA. ABA stands for Applied Behavioral Analysis, and there are many critiques about applied behavioral analysis and does it actually do more harm than good for children. That’s a whole other episode we could do someday. These families, when they were told that there was nothing you can do aside from ABA, they didn’t take that guidance from their clinicians.
They instead kept looking elsewhere and knocking on other doors. Actually, they joined our community. We have an online membership called Healing Together where 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 beta-testing it. We were just beginning. We got to know them. We had these opportunities to talk to them about diet and detoxification and all these kinds of things.
These parents rolled up their sleeves and they were like, “We’re going to change the diet. We’re going to detoxify the home. We’re going to find all the practitioners that my children need.” They did this in a way that they let their own intuition be the guide. Rather than saying, “We need the expert to tell us what to do,” they really tuned in to their girls and they really thought about what their girls need. They went out and found that support for their children. They made it happen. They did it.
Filling The Gaps On Nutrient Density And Whole Foods
I’ve read some of the summary of the paper that you submitted, and it said that they used interventions based on dietary changes, the environment, and lifestyle. You already talked about nutrient density and the SCD diet, although I guess the SCD diet was related to the other boy who’s had his diagnosis reversed. Talk to us about these three things, diet, environment, and lifestyle. I know you can’t get in-depth in every little area, but what were some of the changes they made to see these turnarounds in their girls?
Some of it was just, again, focusing on nutrient density and whole foods. That was an important piece in understanding how much that was. Every food that went into their girl’s mouth was something that they knew was going to support their bodies. I remember one of my mentors and our former scientific director, Dr. Martha Herbert. She 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 really leaned into that and were doing things that would repair the microbiome. They give their children a lot of fruits and vegetables. They made sure that they were getting things like bone broth and they were really looking to identify food sensitivities, things that they might’ve been sensitive to. That would be, for instance, wheat.
There was a sensitivity to wheat and dairy, and they took those kinds of things out while the body was healing and repairing. It was no junk food, no processed food, none of that. They just went all in on whole organic foods, which was key, that they know their girls need. They also supplemented as well. They 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 you can do as well that can actually help guid. You could call precision medicine.
They help guide what kinds of supplements my child needs. You can look for nutrient deficiencies. There’s not enough magnesium on board or maybe they need some zinc. Folate’s another one. The type of folate, making sure it’s methylated. That’s an important part. Oftentimes, for many kids who have autism, they don’t have the right B vitamins that are going in. Of course, those are always better to get from food, but sometimes supplements can be used to fill those gaps as well. That was an important part for them as well, personalized nutritional supplementation.
What I thought you were going to say earlier is sometimes these kids with these diagnoses on the spectrum are very intolerant to certain textures or they only want these very familiar foods. I’ve heard Dr. Natasha 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.
It’s repetition. I know Natasha Campbell-McBride used to say this, too. I’ve heard many people say that you put something on the plate and if they don’t eat it the first time, fine, you put it 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 persistence and the perseverance that really gets the 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.
Christine Muldoon, who’s on the board of the Weston A. Price Foundation says your kid needs a number of exposures, maybe like twenty exposures. It’s not always just the food on the plate. It’s maybe the preparation or going to the farmer’s market and picking it out. Different exposures to it will eventually win them over. I think you’re right. I wanted to ask you now about the environment. What little shifts did the family make or big shifts to help their daughters?
Going Natural: Detoxifying Your Environment And Lifestyle
There was a lot. I think they generally shifted towards, which is something we always advocate for, but shifting all of the things in their life more to natural as much as possible. That would mean spending more time outside. The family made an effort to get outside, get sunlight on the skin without sunscreen, to be outside in nature and surrounded by nature, but also in the home, getting rid of anything in the home environment that might have toxic chemicals.
That could be 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 that was synthetic. The idea is to get all the synthetics out and get as back as close to nature as possible. That means spending more time in nature whenever possible, using natural light whenever possible instead of LED lights, halogen lights, and fluorescent lights, and using things like incandescent bulbs, for instance, which are really hard to get.
Get all the synthetics out of your environment and get back as close to nature as possible.
We try to get as much natural light as possible, fresh air, using the air filter in the home, and those kinds of things to try and get all 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 we think we’re in a pretty clean home or let’s say you buy clean, organic home care products, your sofas were sprayed with flame retardants and your mattresses probably have flame retardants in them. It’s in every corner of every home that there are innumerable toxic exposures. It’s an overhaul basically in the home to get as many of those out as possible.
That’s literally what I wrote down. It was like a toxic overhaul. I remember when my kids were little and I felt like I was a bad mom because I would let them sleep in their dad’s t-shirts when I knew everyone always recommended flame retardant pajamas for your children. I’m so glad that I didn’t give in to that. I was just doing the easy thing, but actually, it was so much better for them to be in breathable cotton for goodness’ sake, than in something that’s been sprayed. Who knows how that would have affected their hormones?
I actually remember being the crazy one in my home when people would give my kids these cute, fuzzy, flame-retardant pajamas to my kids as gifts. I would be like, “No, sorry, those are going out of the house. I wouldn’t let them.” I looked crazy I took that stand on that, 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 the day-to-day of our lives.
Even as you’re mentioning these dietary shifts and these environmental shifts, I was thinking, how wonderful for any of us to make those choices. I think we don’t realize the impact, as you were saying, the toxic soup that we’re swimming in, even in our homes is having on our health. We just think, “I have a low-grade headache. I always get a headache this time of day.” We don’t stop to think how our environment is or how our diet is contributing to that.
The thing that’s really wonderful about this family’s journey, but truly most families that I’ve interviewed or talked to who’ve 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 the family probably don’t do as well as the family that all goes in together and decides to make these diet changes and make these lifestyle changes together. It’s a whole family healing together. It’s really beautiful when a family commits to it and decides to do that.
You mentioned lifestyle a second ago. How is that different from the environment? What other changes might they have made that we haven’t yet addressed?
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 and all these kinds of things 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 devices, less artificial light, more sleeping when it’s dark out, those kinds of lifestyle things.
Movement is another category of lifestyle. We are such a sedentary society. The Western world is so sedentary. Just thinking back to basic movements that people would have had 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and people have had for thousands of years, and just having that activity in your life, that is getting, again, 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. Mom sent me a video of the girls outside and they were just playing outside and they were jumping from it. There were these little logs that were just hot sawed-off logs, and the girls were jumping from log to log to log outside. I was like, “That is the lifestyle intervention right there.” Those kids are playing on logs the way that kids would have played on logs 400 years ago or 500 years ago. That is the natural movement that those kids need and is helping them to thrive. It was just such a beautiful visual for me to encapsulate the changes.
They’re so simple. There’s nothing complex. They didn’t go for some fancy $10,000 new technology to change their brainwave. 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 by just going to play on logs, but it was a mindset shift for this family to do things that they knew were in rhythm and balance with nature.
When you’re mentioning jumping from log to log, it makes me think of that video game Frogger. I know, because I’ve seen it, I have a friend who has a son who’s autistic, how much some of these families rely on screens to pacify or engage and communicate with their artistic kids. How did this family deal with screens? I feel like that’s a modern intervention and I don’t know if it’s good or bad or somewhere in between.
I don’t know the full picture on screens for them. I know screens were not a major part of their life. I don’t know if they went 100% off but I know that that was not a big part of their life. 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. It’s like, for instance, that the neurotransmitter production is making them have to move in ways that are not what we want to see in an average classroom, for instance.
That is 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 do that. The devices anesthetize all of us. That gets behavioral compliance and conformity, but it doesn’t address what are the root causes of their symptoms. It’s an anesthetizing us by a device.
The Growing Numbers Of Children With Autism
I can see why that’s needed when I look at the autism statistics. In 2020, they said 1 in 36 children was diagnosed as being on an autism spectrum disorder. That number has grown steadily over the past twenty years. You tell me a little bit more about the numbers.
When I started this work, it was like 2008, 2009, the number was 1 in 150 children had an autism spectrum diagnosis. The best data that we have goes back to 1970 and that was 1 in 10,000. There are some studies that put it at maybe two in 10,000, but it was exceedingly rare. In 2024, the CDC put it at 1 in 36 children with autism, and then the JAMA Network Open published a paper where with updated numbers, it put it 1 in 33.
I actually think it’s higher than that. A lot of these studies might do 8 to 12-year-olds. They miss the kids who are under eight. We don’t actually have a really good handle 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 that 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 that had the stereotypical signs or symptoms of autism. There was no hand flapping, there was no echolalia, there was none of the stereotypical stimming that you see that you can, that are observable features of autism. I think there are many people that 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 1 in 10,000. I assure you, it was 1 in 10,000.
Documenting Hope: Future Studies On Reversing Conditions
It’s such a different landscape now. This is why your work, Beth, is more important than ever. Tell us more about what future studies hold for Documenting Hope. Are you ever going to come out with that movie, or have you? Did I miss it?
No, we have over 100 hours of footage. You’re absolutely right. 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 these kids who’ve gotten better, and we were capturing some of this on film. I basically have enough footage to make a documentary film. I just don’t have enough money to finish it.
That 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. As you know, we just published one paper, and we have a second paper coming out. This is the SCD case. We have a third paper that we’re working on in collaboration with a functional medicine clinic in the Philippines, which 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 and PANDAS with a Lyme component. This is a case of PANS and PANDAS. For people who don’t know that, it is an autoimmune condition. It’s sudden onset. That acronym stands for Pediatric Auto Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome. The other one is associated with streptococcus, a type of bacteria. These are children that are typically developing and that maybe around 7, or 8 years old, all of a sudden something happens.
The parents describe it as the kids go suddenly crazy. They develop what would only be described as psychotic behavior, severe anorexia, tantruming. They have memory loss, bedwetting, and regression in all kinds of developmental ways. They have OCD and severe tics. These kids all of a sudden develop this behavior that’s not characteristic of them. They’ve never had it before. If so, it turns out it’s 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. Now, I’ve also documented these kids recovering from these conditions. Oftentimes, there’s a component where there’s an infectious component. It might be one of the line 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 tries to address those infections. In doing that, it ends up attacking the brain tissue, which causes the inflammation and the behaviors and the things that we see. That was PANS and PANDAS.
We have two retrospective cases of kids who’ve recovered from that, that we want to publish in the literature and 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 will, 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.
Antibiotics can be so destructive.
If they do know it’s PANS or PANDAS, they’ll put them on antibiotic after antibiotic, which does not give a good outcome. It’s a downward cycle and spiral of health problems because as you know, antibiotics can be so destructive. We hope to do more of those kinds of case reports. We have a whole other research program that we’ve been working on for a couple of years that we’re continuing to push as well.
Beth, do you get your share of naysayers, people who are like, “You’re giving people false hope.” It’s not just real hope; it’s false hope because your cases and the stories you’re telling of these families are the exceptions, not the rule.
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 study and the flight study, 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 that wanted to interview us, and a lot of it was conservative media, interestingly. We also got international press and our principal investigator was just inundated with emails and phone calls from people wanting to know more about the autism case. A lot of positive, a lot of like, “This is terrific. Are there more cases like this? How do we learn from this?” However, there was also a whole backlash where, 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, that’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 happens oftentimes. People say, “If you have autism, we want to include you.” They don’t ask about their medical health and their medical symptoms. What happens when you do ask the question, “What are your medical symptoms?” “Gastrointestinal pain. I’ve got chronic diarrhea or chronic constipation, or I’ve got these terrible headaches.” 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. Their symptoms of autism start going away. How do you reconcile those two things that say, on one hand, somebody with autism has this condition that we must include them and embrace them but when we address our medical symptoms, all 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 little 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 challenges and less suffering.
I’m thinking about how anxiety and depression, they’re more, I guess I would say, accepted socially, which I think is good. We’re talking about it and we’re not trying to hide these things. Does that mean we’re not trying to alleviate the suffering of that person and address what’s at play? Maybe the mental imbalance or the mental anxiety has something to do with what’s happening physically in the body.
I think that the problem is that there’s been a whole movement of neurodiversity, and I’m trying to be as inclusive as possible again. That is good and well-intentioned. When you do not address people’s real medical issues because of the inclination to embrace neurodiversity, you’re missing a 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 have started doing biomedical work for themselves. They will tell you that 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.
The Vital Role Of Parents In A Child’s Outcome
I imagine they didn’t. I only have two more questions to wrap up and the first is this. After all these years of working in this space, Beth, what has been a surprising result of the research and studies that you’ve conducted? Something that you didn’t expect and almost just popped out of nowhere or that really surprised and made you happy at the same time.
If I go back to where I was over fifteen years ago, one thing that negatively surprised me has been the resistance. In other words, I came out doe-eyed and a little bit naive at the beginning of this work being like, “You guys, we can heal these kids. We can do it. Look at Natasha Campbell-McBride. Look at all these great people out there that have this awesome information.” I published a book in 2010 called The Compromised Generation, thinking that people would be like, “High five, let’s do this, let’s go. Let’s heal all these kids.”
The resistance has been very surprising. I did not expect that. People are really stuck in the Western medical paradigm that there’s a pill for every ill, and modern technological science is going to solve this. Whereas I’m like, “No, it’s get back to the basics, get back to nature.” Something that’s been surprising to me on the positive side is just how important the role of the parent is and particularly the intuition of the parent.
That was something I wasn’t clued into in the beginning when I was researching my book again, now we’re in like 2008, 2009, I was really into the microbiome and the biochemistry and the tweaking the body to get back into balance, but I wasn’t really tuned in to the role of the parent and how much the parent played a vital role in that child’s outcome. Fast forward fifteen years, and I think the single most important piece of the entire equation is the parent or 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. If we live in this world where information is just exploding and there’s a million different things, like, “Should I take an anti-oxidant? Do I need glutathione? Should I take methylated B vitamins? Do I 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, they’ve never been through something like this before, it’s a lot to ask 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 that have had the most profound impact because they listen to that inner guidance and they always know what to do.
The parents who are most successful are the ones who just quiet the noise and figure out what their gut tells them.
Lean Into The Natural
Those are really encouraging words here as we start to wrap up. Thank you so much for sharing that. Both the hard stuff, but also the good stuff about the parents’ role. Now I want to pose to you the question I love to pose at the end. Beth, if the reader could just do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?
I think it would be in every choice you have throughout the day, and there are two choices. There’s this choice or that choice, whether that’s the food you’re going to eat in the next minute, whether it’s the way you’re going to spend the next five minutes. If every choice you make is one that says, “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 like sits in ancestral wisdom,” that is the guide. That is the way that you move through an increasingly complex world.
It’s just lean into the natural in all things, whether it’s products, whether it’s food, whether it’s how you’re spending your time. That is the one thing that I think shapes the whole healing journey. You just lean into nature. If you find yourself with symptoms, you find yourself with challenges, you have to 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?
Thank you so much on behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Beth, we’re grateful for your time.
Of course.
—
Our guest was Beth Lambert. Visit her website, Documenting Hope to learn more. Now for a recent review from Apple Podcasts. Linda Berniak had this to say, she gave us five stars. “Family Health Bible, a trusted resource of helpful information. If we can’t figure it out ourselves, we always go to the Weston A. Price Foundation.” Linda, thank you for this review. You, too, can leave us a review. Just go to Apple Podcasts, give us as many stars as you want, tell the world why you love the show. Thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.
About Beth Lambert
Author, educator and former healthcare consultant, Beth Lambert has monitored and documented the escalating rates of childhood chronic conditions for 15 years. Her first book, A Compromised Generation, provides a thorough analysis of the origins of this modern health crisis and documents how modifications to environmental and lifestyle factors can profoundly influence health outcomes, including full disease reversal. Beth is also the co-author of Brain Under Attack: A Resource for Parents and Caregivers of Children with PANS, PANDAS, and Autoimmune Encephalitis.
Beth is the Founder and Executive Director of Documenting Hope, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that focuses on root cause healing solutions for children’s chronic health and developmental issues. Documenting Hope conducts independent research studies that examine the cumulative impact or “total load” of environmental stressors on children’s health and their mitigation through personalized and systems-based treatment approaches. Beth is the mother of three children and is passionate about raising awareness about the connection between daily choices, human health, and planetary health.
Important Links
Episode Sponsors
🖨️ Print post
Leave a Reply