There’s some good news for one 3-year-old born mute: with the help of a little cream cheese, she can talk. The girl, Fields Taylor, suffers from an extremely rare genetic disorder, Glut 1 deficiency, that has only occurred in 26 people in the U.K., her native country, which has a population of 63 million people. The disease disables the brain from gaining energy through glucose, but after three months of being on the high-fat Ketogenic diet, the child is for the first time saying the words “Mum.”
“The amount of Philadelphia she goes through is mad but worth it. It really has been our saving grace. She loves the stuff and piles it on crackers,” The Mirror quoted her mother Stevie as saying.
“The first time I heard Fields say ‘Mum’ it was just wonderful.”
She apparently goes through four containers of the cream cheese a week. “I didn’t really believe that something so simple as changing her diet could make a big difference,” her mother said. “It’s just fabulous to know that she does have a voice inside her and we can finally communicate.”
The cream cheese trick is unlikely to work on the much more common disease autism, a spectrum disease which leaves some of those who have it noncommunicative for life, and which has inspired many desperate parents to try all sorts of diets – low-gluten, etc. – to try to get their children to speak. Having disabled children is one of life’s more heart-breaking situations, toppled only by losing your children to death.
But Taylor’s mother feels as if she’s gained more of her daughter, found her voice, and this from feeding her a diet that manages to feed her brain. Glut1, or Glucose Transporter Type 1 Deficiency Syndrome, being as rare as it is, doesn’t get the medical attention that more popular disorders gets, so when something like this manages to work to turn a child’s life around, we have reason to celebrate.