Our Food And Autism....

The autism epidemic continues to rage.  The most recent numbers indicate that 1 in thirty-eight boys have autism.

Many have been asking, why?  What is driving this?

Many have speculated on a link between vaccines and the preservative, thimerasol.  While I believe adding mercury-based anything to our vaccines is a REALLY bad idea, I don't see any solid evidence that it is causing autism.

There is also a suspected link between vaccines and the use of stem cell lines originating with aborted babies.  Many of the commonly required vaccines contain measurable amounts of human DNA/DNA fragments as a result.  I DO believe this is a possible contributing factor.

I have my own hypothesis regarding the explosion in the incidence of autism, as of today now estimated by the CDC to be 1 in 38.

Autism has been around for generations. The term was first used in 1911, but the incidence was historically very low; in the 1970s and '80s, the incidence of autism was roughly 1 in 2,000. But something happened around that time that appears to coincide with the explosion in the incidence of autism we have witnessed since then: the development and use of recombinant bovine growth hormone (RBGH). Development, marketing and use of RBGH went into overdrive during the 1970s and '80s in order to increase beef and milk production; an uncle of mine used it on his cattle farm before dosages were standardized. If a little was good, then a lot of it must have been even better. It brought on earlier sexual maturity, meaning cows could begin breeding and calving at an earlier age, it increased milk production, and it enabled cattle to pack on muscle at an accelerated rate, meaninng that heavier cows went to market. The use of RBGH led to the development of the mega farms that have become so common - assembly line techniques applied to the beef and milk industries.

Only one small problem: while the FDA signed off on the use of RBGH in 1993, NO LONG TERM HUMAN SAFETY STUDIES WERE EVER CONDUCTED.

I believe that the overuse of growth hormones, particularly RBGH, plays a major role in the widespread onset of autism, taking a condition that was once quite rare and turning it into the epidemic we are witnessing today. Moreover, I believe the effects are CUMULATIVE. Individually, each cow receives only small (microgram) dosages of RBGH. Multiplied over the millions of cows that receive it each year, however, that amount is magnified by many orders of magnitude. This is on top of the hormones infants receive from their mothers as they ingest breast milk and produce naturally. Science has confirmed that onset of puberty in humans has been accelerating over the years, now occurring in girls beginning at age 10 and in boys at about age 11. While many in the medical and scientific communities put this down to better nutrition, I believe the overuse of RBGH is ALSO having an effect. We administer it to animals (on top of what their own bodies already produce) in order to accelerate biological development. What if the increased amounts aren't being metabolized by cows as completely as they are supposed to and are instead passed on to humans through the milk we drink and the meat we eat? We would then be ingesting hormones on top of what our bodies already produce, resulting in hormone overloads that are passed from generation to generation - cumulatively.

I have suspected a link between RBGH and autism for many years, but what really solidified it in my mind was a conversation I had with a graduate of Michigan State's animal husbandry program.

One of the things they study? 

The use of RBGH in cattle. 

As she and I conversed, I began to lay out my hypothesis; she immediately caught on to the direction I was going and broke in with information I did not previously have. 

She explained that, in addition to all the effects I listed earlier, RBGH was used to achieve another objective: making cows more docile and easier to handle. She explained that RBGH accelerates brain growth for the first 2-3 years - and then brings it to an abrupt standstill. In cows, this makes them docile and easier to handle. In humans, however, the results could be very different. I know that, in my own son, I watched impressive development for approximately the first two years of his life, at which time it all came to a screeching halt.

I fully understand that all I have is conjecture, but the overall effects and timing of those effects associated with the overuse of RBGH is too much for me to ignore, as is the increase in the incidence of autism when correlated to increased use of RBGH in the farming industry.

The problem is this: IF scientists were to ever seriously study this potential link and establish its validity, they would refuse to do anything about it, because doing so would mean that our entire food processing and distribution system would have to be completely dismantled and rebuilt from top to bottom.