The following is an excerpt from The Autism Intensive:
James Adams, PhD – How Diet and the Environment Affect the Gut Microbiome and Nutrient Status
Host: Mike Mutzel
Mike: All right. We are here with James Adams. James you’ve been a real pioneer in helping people understand some of the molecular causes, gut imbalances, and so forth. We really want to commend you for the over 35 publications that you’ve conducted in the realm of autism. I know that you are an engineer by training and you have a personal story as to how you got into autism. Maybe you can open this up with how you got into autism.
Dr. Adams: Sure. I am a PhD engineer. I am actually the chair of Materials Engineering at Arizona State University, but because I have a daughter with autism, about 15 years ago I began doing more and more research on autism. I was very frustrated that we didn’t know the causes of autism. We didn’t know how to treat it. We didn’t know how to prevent it. That was why 15 years ago, 16 years ago, we began looking at nutritional interventions. Since then we’ve been looking at many other types of interventions, of both clinical studies to see if treatments help, as well as a lot of basic research to try to understand the causes of it. We’ve made a lot of progress, although there is certainly a lot more to do.
Mike: That’s fantastic. In preparation for this interview, I was diving through some of the publications that you’ve published. Let’s start out with the gut. That’s been a popular topic up to now, and you have a lot of different nuances and information that you can share with our listeners. Maybe we can do a big global picture of what the ecological system that you found, this bacterial diversity and maybe lack thereof. Give us an overview of things that practitioners and parents should know about the bacterial composition in autism.
Read the full report here.
