For this column to really benefit to you, I must maintain perspective.

Be fiery, not fanatical. Offer options instead of absolutes. Realize that — more often than not — the over-the-top televangelist gets trivialized and turned off.

But when I read study after study that links poor diet to poor health, it’s hard not to write as if I’ll be sermonizing to save your soul come Sunday morning.

So give me a moment to wash the greasepaint from my face and change from suit and tie to T-shirt and gym shorts before we consider a study that links a confounding condition escalating at a frightening rate, autism — what’s now technically termed autism spectrum disorder — to something food manufacturers often add to packaged and processed products.

That something is propionic acid, a naturally occurring short-chain saturated fatty acid used as a food preservative and flavoring agent food. Two professors from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Saleh Naser and Latifa Abdelli, and their undergraduate assistant, Aseela Samsam, set out to understand why prior research revealed that the stool samples of autistic children contained a far higher amount of propionic acid than children without that diagnosis.

In their research published recently by the journal Scientific Reports, the three found that exposing neural stem cells to high amounts of propionic acid damaged the molecular pathways used by the neurons to send information to the rest of the body.

Now it’s not important that you understand all the science here, only its significance. Ingesting high levels of propionic acid during pregnancy possibly — dare I say probably? — means a high level of it gets passed to the fetus, which creates the aforementioned damage to the molecular pathways that send information throughout the body and that damage leads to the social interaction problems and repetitive behaviors that characterize autism.

Primarily, this finding is noteworthy because it helps make sense of why the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder has skyrocketed, increasing from one out of every 2,000 U.S. children in the 1980s, to one out of 150 8-year-olds by 2008, according to a WebMD article.

While it’s hard to establish a percentage increase in the use of preservatives during that same time period in the U.S., a significant increase is certain. Grist for the mill: A 2014 Washington Post article reported that the U.S. government had recently acknowledged and the food industry had concurred that more than half of the American meals on any given day comes from processed foods.

Additionally, the research is noteworthy for it reinforces one of the themes that drives this column: that no food is neutral. That to some degree, everything you eat helps or hurts either your fitness goals or your general health.

And if you’re the typical American, your eating definitely damages your health. A 2013 study by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, for instance, found that “Americans are sicker and die younger than other people in [the 16 other wealthiest] nations.”

One of those sicknesses too prevalent in the U.S. comes cloaked in the same aura of mystery as autism. While we’re not absolutely certain what causes fibromyalgia, we know what it creates: a body supersensitive to and racked by pain and sleep problems, both of which lead to an unrelenting fatigue that produces mental and physical distress.

A study from McGill University in Montreal published in the journal Pain this summer couples this condition that afflicts about nine million American adults to the body’s composition of gut bacteria, something determined to a large extent by the foods you choose to eat.

What makes this link seem more like lockjaw: researchers analyzed stool samples and based on what gut bacteria were absent or flourished predicted 87.8 percent of the time if the individual had fibromyalgia or not. Furthermore, the lead author of the paper, Amir Minerbi of the Alan Edwards Pain Management Unit at McGill University in Montreal, told Medical News Today that after using artificial intelligence and other techniques to rule out other variables, he and his colleagues found “that the severity of a patient’s symptoms was directly correlated with an increased presence or a more pronounced absence of certain bacteria — something which has never been reported before.”

What has been reported before and is prominent at the website of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is that “a healthful plant-based diet improves the health and diversity of your gut microbes, preventing and treating conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and inflammation associated with autoimmune diseases.”

While fibromyalgia isn’t technically considered an autoimmune disease, it often occurs in conjunction with them, so it logically follows that a healthy diet reduces its incidence as well.

In short, autism and fibromyalgia may appear to have so little in common that you would never link them together. What they do share, however, is a characteristic that seems to link many health maladies.

Eating poorly increases their incidence.