One food may be able to combat all four purported causal factors of autism: synaptic dysfunction, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and neuroinflammation. Research into this food-based treatment began with efforts to figure out what it is about a fever that has such a dramatic impact on children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Already, up to 1.5 percent of American children have autism, and it appears to be on the rise. What about fever’s dramatic effect? “Dramatic relief of autistic behavior by infectious fever continues to tantalize parents and practitioners,” reads an article in the European Society for Clinical Nutrition and Metabolism’s journal, adding that researchers are hesitant to test this mechanism for fear of the damaging impacts fever can have. “Yet what could be more revealing than a common event that virtually ‘normalizes’ autistic behavior for a time?” they ask.  Once it became understood that one cause of autism may …