Casomorphins – breakdown products of casein, a milk protein with opiate-like activity – can help explain why autism symptoms sometimes improve with a dairy-free diet.
In my last video series on autism and nutrition, I did spoke about the benefits of broccoli sprouts, but the most common educated Nutritional and dietary interventions in autism and diet include variations of gluten-free and casein-free diets. Why?
In the 1980s, a team of distinguished Norwegian researchers developed reported a strange finding. They compared the urine of children with and without autism in the hopes of identifying differences that might provide clues as to the cause of autism. As you can see at 0:42 in my video Cow’s Milk Autism and Casein, a urine profile shows Spikes for each of the various components. Usually the peptide region of the urine is pretty calm. Peptides are like little pieces of protein, and normally we shouldn’t be peeing out a lot of protein. But there were all sorts of peptide spikes in the urine profiles of children with autism.
That difference raised a question: “Can the pathophysiology” – that is, the dysfunction – “of autism be explained by the nature of the urine peptides discovered?” But first: “Where? to do did the peptides come from? ”They didn’t know, but there was a clue: Most parents of children with autism reported that their children’s disorder worsened when exposed to cow’s milk. In fact, two proteins – gluten, a protein in wheat and casein, a protein in milk – break down not only into peptides, but also into exorphins.
Exorphins, opioid peptides derived from dietary proteins, “are called exorphins because of their exogenous form [that is, from outside of the body] Origin and morphine-like activity ”, as opposed to endorphins, which are morphine-like compounds that we produce in our body. Maybe some of these food peptides represented a new class of hormones?
Well, was that the children? to pee out? Apparently because some of these peptides had opioid activity. Perhaps the researchers were on to something.
Two types of opioids were used found in milk: casomorphins, “due to their morphine-like activity and their origin – they are fragments of milk protein b-Casein “and the actual opiate morphine. It seems Be real morphine in milk. That can not be a coincidence. “It’s difficult too believe that these or other types of opioids found in milk cannot have any physiological or nutritional significance. ”When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. “Morphine and the opioid peptides can too to have plays an important role in the mother-child bond mechanism, as infants can be “addicted” to their own breast milk. ”But what about milk from another species?
“Human milk is differs significantly from other mammals’ in that it has the lowest casein content. In addition, human casein is a distinctly different protein in terms of its sequence of amino acid building blocks.
As you can see in mine at 3:40 Video, human breast milk has over 15 times less casein than cow’s milk and differs in its amino acid sequence by about half, making it breaks into peptides differently. “Twenty-one peptides have been identified from cow casein proteins,” including several casomorphins, compared to only five active peptides identified in breast milk and only one casomorphin. In addition, “these” [casomorphins] from beef casein are stronger than b-Casomorphins from breast milk. “At 4:08 in mine Video, see a graph of opioid activity, where lower means stronger stronger. Was bovine casomorphine shown significantly stronger than the weak opioid peptide from gluten, a substance that is more comparable to the casomorphine from human breast milk.
Indeed if you do expose human nerve tissue to bovine casomorphine; in terms of epigenetic changes, changes in gene expression, it acts more like morphine than the casomorphine from human breast milk and not only provides “a molecular justification for the recommendation of breastfeeding vs. [cows’ milk] Infant formula ”, but also a possible one Explanation why “casein-free, gluten-free diets” were reported to alleviate some of the gastrointestinal inflammatory and behavioral characteristics associated with autism … “
“What is good for the goose may be good for the ganter, but what is good for the cow might be good harmful to humans. “
This article discusses the first video in a series about the role of gluten and dairy free diets in the treatment of autism. Stay tuned for the other five videos in this six-part series:
My previous series on autism was about the amazing story of broccoli sprouts being tested for the treatment of autistic boys. See:
Stay tuned to all of my autism related videos Here.
You may also be interested in these videos on milk and infant and infant health:
In health,
Michael Greger, MD
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