Some 60 years ago, football coach Vince Lombardi stood silently for several seconds before speaking to his team. The year before, the Green Bay Packers had narrowly lost the NFL Championship, squandering their early lead late in the game.

But this was a new year, and a new opportunity. Coach Lombardi, as he faced his seasoned team of 38 players, held up a pig skin and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.”

The coach proceeded to go back to the beginning. They studied the playbook, starting from page 1. They reviewed the basics of blocking and tackling. And six months later, the Green Bay Packers beat the New York Giants 37-0 to win the NFL Championship.

In his best-selling book, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi, author David Maraniss discusses this quote that was to become one of the most repeated in the world of sports.

He took nothing for granted. He began a tradition of starting from scratch, assuming that the players were blank slates who carried over no knowledge from the year before… He began with the most elemental statement of all. “Gentlemen, this is a football.”

We too have lost site of the basics as we look for our answers to autism. After many years special diets and supplements, I was fortunate to stumble across some old medical texts on nutrition, texts that focused on the basics. And that is when I began to make real progress. Like Coach Lombardi, we need to go back to the basics to understand how to make our kids strong and healthy.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a child. This is where we begin.