OT: What is lutein? Sara's Diet? (not techy)

[Guest guest]

In 1995, at about the same time that GFCF diets were being

introduced,

wrote about 'Sara's Diet' on the internet - in those

days there was no GFCFKids list - just Sts. Sara's Diet is based

on the discovery by that most autists are intolerant to

lutein.

Although her discovery was only partly due to the work of Rosemary

Waring on Phenol-Transferase Deficiency, the two ideas became

confused, and people such as Shattock and described

Sara's Diet as a phenol-free diet, others called it a low-salicylate

diet, and others called it a pigment-free, or white diet. Just to put

the record straight once and for all, Sara's Diet is a LUTEIN-FREE

diet. You can get the whole lutein-free Sara's Diet free on our

website which you will find at

http://www.saras-autism-diet.freeservers.com/

As 's work indicates, removing just casein and gluten will not

work for many children. Despite initial improvement, you know that

your children are still not well - they get red splotches on their

face, they are still hyperactive, they have yeast overgrowth, bad

breath, irritable etc. etc. Children on a lutein-free diet are none

of

these things. We have heard from parents and met children who have

been GFCF for many, many months, with no visible improvement. One of

these was Amy Holmes, Now a DAN Doctor from Louisiana. She described

her son as 'still horribly autistic' after 6 months GFCF. These

parents then turn to 's book, and it says 'maybe phenol' is

a problem. They try taking out apples and bananas. It doesn't work.

They try megadoses of supplements - it doesn't work. They try

antifungals - it works for a few weeks, then they regress. Then they

turn to us. Unfortunately, we travel a lot, and haven't been online

enough to rectify this continuing misunderstanding.

So we have written a book which will be available soon, called 'The

Power of Exile - Autism, a journey to recovery'. It is 440 pages

long,

and goes deeply into the biology of autism, deeper than anything you

have read before. Autism is complicated. It is not simply the result

of a vaccine reaction, or simply genetic, or simply a yeast problem.

All these things can be found in autism, but autism itself is an

immune system alteration in the womb caused by a response of the

developing immune system to lutein pigment crossing the placental

barrier. The story of how Sara recovered, and the stories of the

other

many hundreds of children who have recovered using Sara's Diet make

for exciting reading.

We are available online to answer questions, either onlist or

privately, but our main work now is establishing our autism center

here in South Africa.

and Max Desorgher

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Lutein is a pigment which is derived from chlorophyll b (green plant

pigment). Lutein is the pigment which protects the plant from

pesticides, too much sunlight and stress The more stress the plant is

under the more lutein it produces. We only know that a pea is green

or

a banana skin is yellow. Our eyes do not tell us how strongly

concentrated the pigment in the plant food is so sometimes we can get

a lot of lutein from a glass of orange juice and sometimes very

little. Lutein is the pigment in the follicle from which the egg is

produced in the female ovary. It is a pigment which protects the eyes

in a normal human. Lutein is utilized by cytochrome P450 enzymes

which

result in the manufacture of such things as folic acid, NADPH and

binding of vitamin A. Lutein plays a role in the regulation of

serotonin. Lutein can be manufactured in the human body from other

substances and by many types of gut flora where needed. Lutein

hormones protect granule cell function. The chlorophyll in some

supplements shich come from algae or ocean is not the same

chlorophyll

as found in land plants.