Yesterday, four days after it was put up, a PETA ad was pulled from its spot near the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ. It didn’t show a grotesque photo of a butchered animal or a monkey in a research lab. It showed bowl of milk and cereal next to the tagline: “Got Autism? Studies Have Shown a Link Between Cow’s Milk and Autism.”

New Jersey has a higher autism rate than any other state in the U.S. (9.9 per 1,000 compared to the 6.7 per 1,000 national average, according to CDC estimates). As I wrote about this summer, some new research has shown that children with autism seem to improve when they go on wheat-free or milk-free diets.

So why did Lamar, the advertising company that was hosting the billboard, pull the plug? Company representatives stated that after reviewing the copy internally it was decided that the ad was “inappropriate.”

They’re right. It’s inappropriate for two reasons: it makes a fraudulent claim (“studies have shown”); and it makes light of what is for some people and some parents a devastating condition.

I went to the PETA website/blogs to follow up on what studies they were talking about. On their blog, they site one 13-year-old Italian study and parent testimonials; on their website, they site the same Italian study, and “one study of 20 children” (they give no citation) that found “a major reduction in autistic behavior” in kids put on a milk-free diet, and even more parent testimonials.

Oddly enough, PETA failed to cite some of the new, peer-reviewed research that’s looked at milk-free diets and autism. With a quick PubMed search, I found half a dozen published just in the last year—most of those showing evidence against the milk-autism hypothesis. (The latest was published in September in Archives of Disease in Childhood.)

Even the studies that PETA’s talking about only show that the behavioral symptoms of some children with autism improve when they stop drinking milk. They present no specific biological mechanism for why this may be the case, and they most certainly have not shown that milk causes autism.

I’ll end now on the second point about the billboard’s inappropriateness: suggesting that avoiding cow’s milk will “cure” autism is extremely insensitive to those who are born with this condition. As Marc Rosen, a man with autism, wrote today in a letter to the Newsday editors:

PETA’s scare tactics will cause uninformed people to place reckless blame on parents and autistic kids, as well as trivialize the very real problems we face…Taking milk out of our diet may help our digestive systems, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are autistic. We’re just extremely different, for reasons still not well-understood.