Autism Hope Alliance Lectures, Interviews and Educational Events
- Event: Autism Hope Summit – 2016
- Media: Audio Interview
- Host: Kristin S Gonzalez
- Guest: Tom Bohager
- Theme: Food And Tolerances And Their Effect On Behavior The Enzyme Solution
- YouTube: https://youtu.be/jvpsf8yCkxo
Kristin: Today’s title of the discussion is Food Intolerances and Their Effect on Behavior: The Enzyme Solution. Today we’re talking to Tom Bohager, who is founder of Autism Hope Alliance and founder and chairman of Enzymedica. He’s also the author of Enzymes: What the Experts Know.
Kristin: Well, I’m excited to talk to you about enzymes and the behavior, especially with those individuals on the autism spectrum. And how did you get involved in autism?
Tom: Well, about 10 years ago – maybe a little longer than that – there was a woman, a mother of two autistic children. Her name was Karen DeFelice. She passed a couple of years ago, but Karen had written a book about enzymes and autism. And in the book she had recommended our products, Enzymedica products. And so we began getting lots of calls at our office about the role of enzymes with autism and, quite frankly, we really didn’t even know how to answer them. And when we determined that it was coming from people who were reading her book, we reached out to her to get a better understanding. And eventually I met Karen not long after that original conversation. She helped really educate me on the connection between digestive distress and autism and the role of enzymes, of course, which I knew a lot about digestive distress but knew very little about autism at the time.
So, very often when someone has digestive distress, whether it’s an obvious symptom or a not so obvious symptom, one of the things that we often look to is allergies and secondarily we may be looking at food intolerances. And so it’s really important. It’s a great question, because it’s really important to understand the differences.
A food allergy, simply put, is a reaction by the body to something that we’ve consumed where the body has identified something within that food as being essentially dangerous, as being nonself, and it needs to be removed. And so what that means is, in simple terms, is that there is an immune response.
Now, in extreme cases this immune response can be life threatening. So, we might think of a peanut allergy, where there’s anaphylaxis and the throat swells and the child or the adult for that matter may stop breathing as a result of an allergic reaction. That’s an extreme. And what that involves is something called immunoglobulin E, which is responsible for an immediate histamine release to the body in this drastic reaction.
What Is Autism Series: Lectures, Interviews and Educational Events
Ocean Robbins | Dr Raphael Kellman | Stacey Littlefield | Tom Bohager | Dr Pedram Shojai | James Neubrander Part 2 | James Neubrander Part 1 | Liz Lipski Ph.D | Gay Hendricks | Choose Hope | Let’s Go Shopping | Katherine Woodward Thomas | Dr Dan Rossignol | Dr Jerry Kartzinel | Dr Dave Dornfeld | Raun Kaufman | Celeste King | Dr Anju Usman | Donna Gates | Dr Dan Rossignol | Dr Joseph Mercola