Dr. Terry Wahls
If you were diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), you would want all the resources Dr. Terry Wahls had at her disposal.
MS is a degenerative neurological autoimmune disease. The body’s immune system literally attacks it’s own nervous system. As the disease progresses, the victim slowly loses the ability to move.
Dr. Wahls is a licensed internal medicine doctor and has access to the top specialists in the country. After her diagnosis in 2000, she traveled to the Cleveland Clinic where she saw the best doctors and took the latest drugs.
None of the drugs worked.
Her condition steadily deteriorated and by 2007 Dr. Wahls required two canes to walk and could no longer support her own weight while sitting in a chair.
Dr. Wahls began to experiment on herself.
She found promising research on mice and, with the help of the doctors she was seeing, she converted the mouse size doses of supplements into human size doses. The deterioration slowed.
Change your food. Change your health.
Dr. Wahls focused her attention on the sub-cellular chemical reactions occurring in the brain and in mitochondria. She came up with a list of vitamins and minerals to fuel those chemical reactions. She did more research and came up with a list of food which provided the nutrients she was after and many more. She ended up with a diet which focused on meat and vegetables and avoided sugar, seed oils, eggs, dairy, beans and grains.
If you watch her TEDx talk, Dr. Wahls is understandably passionate about a hunter-gatherer approach to eating, it literally saved her life. Four months after starting her modified paleo diet to heal her body and electrical muscle stimulation to regrow muscle, Dr. Wahls was walking without a cane again. Nine months after starting her diet she was able to complete an 18 mile bike ride.
Paleo is one approach. “What should I eat?” is such a tough question because we all respond to food differently. I’ll talk more about Dr. Wahls later, but in the next installment I’d like to introduce you to a man who beat cancer eating a diet containing three of the big paleo forbidden foods: beans, grains and dairy.
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Notes:
9 June 2015. Changed “Recovery through food” to “Change your food. Change your health.” based on a reader question on the list of specific nutrients Dr . Wahls developed. Her improvements were due to additions and subtractions to her diet.
MSdiscovery.org article – Does diet matter