| Answer: | Paediatrician Mary Megson from Richmond, Virginia, believes that many autistic children lack vitamin A. Otherwise known as retinol, vitamin A is essential for vision. It is also vital for building healthy cells in the gut and in the brain. There is no real doubt that something funny is going on in the diges- tive tracts of autistic children. Could this be related to vitamin A deficiency, she wondered? The best sources of vitamin A are breast milk, organ meats, milk fat, fish and cod liver oil, none of which are prevalent in our diets. Instead, we have formula milk, fortified food and multivitamins, many of which contain altered forms of retinol such as retinyl palmitate, which doesn' t work as well as the fish or animal derived retinol.
Dr Megson wondered what would happen if these children weren' t getting enough natural vitamin A. Not only would this affect the integrity of the digestive tract, potentially lead- ing to allergies, but it would also affect the develop- ment of their brains, and disturb their vision. Both brain differences and visual defects have been detected in autistic children. The visual defects, she deduced, were an important clue because lack of vit- amin A would mean poor black and white vision, a symptom often seen in the relatives of autistic kids.
If you can' t see black and white, what you lose is shadow. Without shadow you' d lose the ability to per- ceive three-dimensionality and, as a consequence, you can' t make sense of people' s expressions so well. This might explain why autistic children tend not to look straight at you. They look to the side. Long thought to be a sign of poor socialisation, it may in fact be the ' best way they can see people' s expressions because there are more black and white light receptors at the edge of the visual field than in the middle! They are trying to compensate for the fact that their whole visual world is fragmented snapshots.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding. Dr Megson has reported rapid and dramatic improvements in autism simply by giving codliver oil containingnatural ,unadul- terated vitamin A. Often she has seen results within a week. Here are some of the comments her patients have made after cod liver supplementation. ' Now I know where my fingers are.' ' Now I can see my arms at the same time I see my fingers!' ' My box is getting bigger
every day. Now I can see emotion on the faces on TV' |
