Another View of Major Medical Problems

Please do not be turned off by the seemingly unimportant nature of the first paragraph but read on. This is perhaps an important observation concerning health for you to have heard articulated here for the first time. The story goes something like this. King Arthur was in his castle dining with all his Knights when the sound of horses' hoves was heard outside the castle. He announced to his Knights that if in the future they ever heard the sound like they had just heard they should think of horses and not Zebras.
My computer tells me that yearly over a billion dollsrs is spent on Autism research with no light at the end of the tunnel. I have to ask, is the research being invested on a zebra hunt here in the U,S? My Mother had Alzheimer's when she died and huge funds are spent to attempt unraveling the cause or causes. Are the scientists looking for Zebras? Go down the list of Autism, Parkinson's, Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy, ALS, late appearing diabetis and other problems with so far, unknown causes all because each is considered a zebra problem?
For me as a scientist who has been involved in research it seems of primary importance to examine the most obvious possibilities of causes of the above before looking for zebras. When I realized that Greyhounds did not have the dread dysplasia of all other breeds and recognized that the running exercise of the pregnant bitches when pregnant was a sound reason I concluded the Greyhoounds' exercise eliminaated the toxin(s) that caused the problem it was logical to suspect diet as the cause. Researchers looked for the genomme for the answer not thinking that that was a zebra hunt.
Granted one or more of the unsolved problems above may have predated the food
additive(s) that cause others but it seems almost crininal that food additives and combinations have not been thourghly investigated and that brings up some reasons why.
We live in a fire department culture in which we tend to treat problems as emergencies with heroic effort but if a problem takes long periods of time between cause and effect the answers may be lacking. In the case of the weed or flower in our gardens, lupine eaten at just a short period in the gestation period of a cow her calf will be born defective. If a pregnant woman takes the drug, Thalidimide her baby will often be defective for its life.
With the current situation it was in 1933 that Autism was first reported in humans and in 1935, Hip Dysplasia in dogs. The first food additive that was added in great quantity to both human and dog foods happens to be citric acid. Hundreds of thousands of metric tons each year most of which goes into food. Doesn't it seem like common sense to do long time research if only observational research? As a start have that one item removed from the diets of pregnant woman in one group of volunteers.
As a veterinarian I am confident some enterprising dog food manufacturer could actually produce a citric acid free diet and advertise it as just that, a diet to determine if their diet would be effective in the prevention of that canine problem. Even charging twice the usual cost of dog food there will be enough breeders who would be not only willing but anxious to try it on their pregnant bitches and thus to make it a financial success.
So often members of the Veterinary Medical profession have led the way for progress in the Human Medical profession as with a Dr. Salmon in salmonella and in solving the gastric ulcer problem in humans that was considered a psychiatric problem and a bacterial problem of hogs. We were right there, too. The veterinarians who proved that insects can carry and spread disease to others and orthopedic surgery are all veterinary contributions.
If the most obvious possibility is found lacking then go to the next most obvious and then come the combination's but all should be suspect before the zebras.