Breakfast at the Brox home will never be a simple matter of pouring some corn flakes into a bowl and hoping the two kids don't spill their milk.

Five-year-old Tommy can have corn and milk in small doses. But 2- year-old Mary Kate needs special dairy-free formula. For lunch, they can eat kosher beef hot dogs, but pork hot dogs are out. For Mary Kate, so is cheese. She can have wheat, but for her brother, 'one crumb from a cookie with wheat in it will keep him awake for days,' their mother says.

Both kids have autism. And Kimberly Brox is one of a growing number of parents who put their faith more in strict diets and detoxification treatments than in mainstream medicine.

Brox and fellow believers - parents, doctors, nutritionists - from around the country are meeting today through Sunday in the Denver Tech Center, swapping success stories and treatment theories. One speaker will talk about mercury detoxification, another about how herbicides and pesticides might contribute to autism.

They'll hear Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the British researcher best known for promoting the theory that vaccines can trigger autism; and William Shaw, a chemist whose Great Plains Laboratory in Kansas has become a mecca for parents hoping his blood tests and hair analysis can uncover toxins and food allergies that may hold the key to salvaging their children.

Autism spectrum disorders are a group of lifelong developmental disabilities caused by an abnormality of the brain, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

People with autism vary widely in their abilities and how well they function. But many have problems communicating and interacting socially, and many crave repetition and routine.

The CDC doesn't know how many kids in the United States have autism but is compiling the numbers. Likewise, Colorado's health department doesn't track the condition but this week submitted a request for grant money to start.

European studies indicate that one in 500 children there have some form of autism. By comparison, about one out of every 800 children is born with Down syndrome.

According to some estimates, the number of children newly diagnosed with autism has skyrocketed, up from 1 in 10,000 a decade ago. But even that is a source of disagreement.

'I think people in general are more sensitive to the range of disorders that can come under the name autism,' said Dr. Paul Spragg, a Denver psychologist who works with autistic children.

There is better detection of the condition, Spragg said. 'But I'm not sure the incidence itself is going up.'

Regardless of the numbers, medicine hasn't been able to offer much help to parents of children lost in an autistic netherworld, though new therapies are developing. Spragg, for instance, works with therapists in a relatively new program to provide 'very intensive, one-on-one training' in a child's home for 30 to 40 hours a week.

It's often effective. But, he said, 'it's a lot of work, and it's very expensive.' And most of the time, insurance doesn't pay for it.

Shaw is one of those who believe that autism rates are increasing dramatically and that vaccines, food and the overprescribing of antibiotics are, if not causing it, at least aggravating the existing condition.

Most of the parents who make the nine- or 10-hour trek to his lab aren't following a doctor's advice. In many cases, they're defying it.

The lab has analyzed hair and blood samples from a thousand or so kids, including Brox's children, and found 'a lot of toxic levels of mercury and lead,' said Shaw's son, Jim Shaw.

And, William Shaw contends, those tests have turned up allergies to wheat or dairy products or both in about 90 percent of autistic kids.

Shaw blames evolution. 'These foods were introduced into the human diet in recent times, around 10,000 years ago. There is a very large number of people who have not biochemically adapted to eating these foods.'

To accomplish the digestion, Shaw claims, the digestive tracts of allergic people produce toxins that invade the brain.

Shaw's theories, and others like them, aren't embraced by mainstream doctors and scientists.

'It doesn't have the double-blind, placebo-controlled study behind it, so it's not widely accepted in the medical community,' Dr. Terry Grossman said. Grossman is a Lakewood physician who may be Colorado's only practitioner of the diet and detoxification system aficionados call the DAN method - or Defeat Autism Now.

But pure science doesn't matter much to parents such as Brox who live with their children's autism every day and swear the diets help.

The Autism Society of America is staying neutral. On its Web site, it advises that no scientific evidence backs the treatments.

This Article has been submitted by the Jeremy's Prophecy Dot Com team for informational and educational purposes. Jeremy's Prophecy Dot Com is a website dedicated to telling the story of Jeremy Jacobs, a character in the novel, Jeremy's Prophecy Dot Com.