“A framework for treating and reversing Multiple Sclerosis, Autoimmune and other Neurodegenerative Diseases”
Introduction to our Interview of Dr. Terry Wahls
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure and honor of interviewing Dr. Terry Wahls. As a patient and person, I am particularly excited when I get to meet and learn from people who have been on both sides of a problem or situation. Perhaps there is no better example than a doctor / patient, as doctors are typically not used to being wrong, and do not typically have the time to study or verify that there may be better solutions than what they can provide. Thus, the slow evolution of medicine. So, you should have already noticed a pattern in my [choice of] interviewees in that they are ever curious and adaptive, contrarian in their thinking, not willing to stop until optimal health is achieved, and quite simply looking to give their patients every edge they can get. They also do not ignore nor shun western medicine. Even Dr. Sidney Baker recently took antibiotics for Lyme disease and had surgery on his back. Everything has its place and fighting the establishment, versus embracing the valuable things it has to offer, is critical.
As to Dr. Wahls, I think that as you read or listen to this podcast, you will find you will hear some of the clearest and simplest on-target thinking about how to address not just Multiple Sclerosis, but also all autoimmune disease, and to a great extent, you will find tactics to support the body for any situation from disease to extreme high performance. More than most interviewees, Dr. Wahls is quite linear in her addressing cycling through her protocol, so she provides a great framework for building your individual routine or helping your patients build theirs. I would also suggest you go to Amazon, as the link in the show notes provide, and get her book. It is a staple for any library.
I am trying something new today. Instead of creating detailed show notes, we are providing the whole transcript with intermittent highlighting so one can skim and see where the material parts are to slow down and read and absorb. I hope to get feedback on this method, so please do not hesitate to email us at protocols@p5hv.com. And with that, here is my interview with Dr. Terry Wahls.
Transcript – P5 Interview of Dr. Terry Wahls –Recorded 10.03.17
[00:02:16] [DE] This is David Eigen here bringing you the next edition of P5 protocols and I am fortunate enough today to have Dr. Terry Wahls who is also a clinical professor of medicine at University of Iowa where she is doing clinical research primarily focused on multiple sclerosis. [and] I believe most other neurological diseases. And I want to thank you for joining me here today.
[00:02:47] [TW] Well thank you for having me.
[00:02:49] [DE] So as I mentioned before we started, the focus of P5 protocols is to get at how people can learn what they can do to help themselves as well as what paths they can find to find support, help, in their path to recovery. But also for the broader practitioner community that wants to expand the way they practice or has not historically had access to this kind of information. Obviously in this world that’s getting a little easier with books and the Internet. But I still am always amazed at how people till they’re faced with the need to change don’t typically look. So, you know what I love to start with is if you would just talk about your background, because you have one of the most interesting backgrounds. I love it when I get to speak to people who are patients also. But if you were starting with your background.
[00:03:53] [TW] So, I am a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa, very much a traditional Internal Medicine doc and for many years I could not understand why patients were wasting so much money on these complementary integrative medicines that were not properly regulated and not in my mind thoroughly vetted. So, I was very skeptical on these exotic diets, vitamin, supplements and a lot of integrative approaches. I also had been an athlete, then went off to medical school and I was a practicing physician. And then in 2000 I was diagnosed with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis.
[00:02:29] [TW] And again [I] remind everyone that I am an academic person so I was going to treat my disease as aggressively as I could. I then sought out the best MS center that I could find in Midwest which was the Cleveland Clinic. They were doing clinical research. You know when I took the newest drugs, saw their best people. And over the next three years I had just one episode relapse, a weakness in my right hand that went away with steroids. And so if I’d been in a drug trial this would have been considered a success. The problem was I’d continue to decline and I was having difficulty with my trunk muscles, I could not sit up, I needed to recline wheelchair. I took chemotherapy in the form of Novantrone continue to decline and then took the new biologic drug that we were all so excited about which was Tysabri. Continue to decline. That was pulled from the market and then I switched to Cellcept. I and continue to decline. That’s when I saw how bad things were I couldn’t sit up anymore. I was having severe fatigue. I needed to walk walking six to walk very short distances. Otherwise I had zero gravity required from which I worked at work. And another one at home or I was in bed. And that’s when I started reading the basic science, at first looking for drug studies and then it occurred to me that I should look for things I could actually access, which were nutraceuticals. And I began experimenting on myself using these nutraceuticals. I had reached the conclusion that mitochondria were the drivers of neuro-degeneration and likely were the big drivers for MS. So I then began to research what I could do to support my mitochondria more effectively, and ended up with a rich vitamin supplement cocktail which if I missed it, I could not get up and go to work. So I realized that my vitamins were really very helpful. They were slowing the speed of my decline but I was certainly not recovering. Then in the summer of 07, I discovered the Institute for functional medicine and took their course under protection, had a longer list of vitamins and supplements which I added. And then later that fall I had a new haha. I should redesign my eating plan to maximize the intake of these nutrients. That I had been taking in pill form and I’ll back up just for a moment. A year after being diagnosed I had switched from being a vegetarian which I had been for 20 years to a paleo diet as long Kidane had described it. So, a lot of meditation prayer. I went back to eating meat. But I’d continue to decline. I stayed with it because after reading the various papers and science I saw that there was a rationale and then I might. At least it was something that I was doing. So, I had adapted the period that continued to decline, added vitamins and supplements, slowed the decline. And then in the fall I redesigned my diet. To maximize the nutrients I was taking in supplement form to get that off from food. And you know the speed of my change was really quite remarkable.
[00:08:33] [TW] Within three months I was up out of my wheelchair walking with a cane. My fatigue was gone. My brain fog was gone. The pain, I have a lot of pain from my M.S., that was largely gone. At six months, I was walking without a cane, at nine months I got on my bicycle for the first time probably in about six years. Pedaled around the block. I was crying, my wife was crying.
[00:08:59] My kids were crying because I now began to wonder like now just how much recovery might be possible. And at 12 months I was able to do a 80 mile bike ride with my family. Since that time I’ve really shifted my understanding of disease and health. I’ve spent a lot more time with my patients focused on addressing diet and lifestyle integrative approach to their health. And I’ve seen some remarkable turnarounds in my clinical practice then. My chief of medicine called me and told me that he wanted me to write up a case report because it was so remarkable to have progressive M.S. reverse. And after you got that published my chief of staff and chief of medicine called me back and when me to abandon my prior research and said do a clinical trial testing my protocol and others to see if it was safe which we did. And we had such remarkable results that we’ve continued to do studies in this area and that’s where I am doing my research at present.
[00:10:23] [DE] So talk back to you. Yeah. Yeah. This is fantastic. Before we spoke that I have seen videos and when we did speak once before and I know that the recovery is fantastic and actually I’ve known a few people. And at one point in New York where the number one thing that seemed to take her down was gluten. And then I noticed other people were really the answer or certainly not the only answer. But what would I love to do is. Take a step back into early just to do what you last to understand is your research and the people that have that you helped so that I can effectively give people or we can give people a good reason to listen on before getting into the how to do it. And for those listening that will be shown to be a link to a wonderful book called was critical as well as links to research and other other materials. Dr. Walsh sight. But with your patients. What can can you tell us what kind of results. A little more specific than just general and they’ve done well you know who does well. How do they do. What is the typical length of time or range of time each patient is different.
[00:11:59] [TW] Well I want to have a comment about our research. The first thing that we studied were people with secondary and primary progressive MS. And at present, when you have a progressive form of M.S., you don’t anticipate to have functions return been lost particularly in a setting a primary progressive M.S. us and so we had a couple of primary progressive aspirations. And I have some videos of the one lady who had as severe gait and balance problems needed to have two walking sticks to walk and within three months of adopting the study protocol she came back and her fatigue was largely gone her mental clarity was greatly improved and she was able to walk without any walking sticks much about 25 percent faster than she had with the two walking sticks. And of course, that continued to improve. There are no case reports of people with primary progressive multiple sclerosis having improvements in energy, improvements in mental clarity improvements in their thinking speed and or improvements in their walking speed and balance. So that is you know so remarkable.
[00:13:32] [TW] In my clinics, we have people with rheumatoid arthritis. We’ve had people with systemic sclerosis, scleroderma, myasthenia, Parkinson’s, some early cognitive decline, early Alzheimer’s who we evaluated and use these kinds of diet and lifestyle principles and again had marked improvements in energy mental clarity reductions in pain in our folks with obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure. We could follow them with their biomarkers showing reductions of blood pressure reductions and body mass reductions in A1c, [and] see at the same time that the person needs fewer drugs for their diabetes, fewer drugs for their blood pressure. So I mean it’s it’s remarkable. So, it’s not everyone. But the biggest thing is you have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing to make these diet and lifestyle changes.
[00:14:39] [DE] So a patient comes to you. What are the you know how do you start. I mean for me intakes, tests.
[00:14:48] [TW] So you know for several years I was when I first came to Iowa all of my clinical time was at the Veterans Hospital. I and so when I and for several years I was in primary care and in the traumatic brain injury clinic, and so the traumatic brain injury clinic that we really didn’t do any laps. I would see people 20 minutes two times a year. And during that time period I would give them a pep talk about the impact of diet and lifestyle and it makes it to some very basic recommendations asking them to have, as an experiment, removing sugar and gluten. And ramping up the vegetables. If they’re open to it a paleo diet with lots of vegetables or if they were vegetarian began a gluten free diet with lots of vegetables. We talked about some other lifestyle interventions. Try and get all fish oil and vitamin D. And even in these clinics where I saw people just 20 minutes twice a year now. We can have some dramatic improvements in their function, a reduction of their chronic pain, their irritability, and really help some of these veterans who had been on a very sharp decline because of the Traumatic Brain Injury turn things around, save their lives, start performing well in school, and really do extraordinarily well. Then we had so much success that the chief of medicine came to me and told me that he wanted to take me out of primary care and instead have me run a clinic that would be using the concepts that I wanted to use and we called it the Therapeutic Lifestyle Clinic; and then because again there was so much demand driven by our success that I kept re-imagining how we served our patients and how we ultimately organized ourselves was a series of group visits and group classes. In the first class, people have to be referred by their primary care specialist, and we have a class that would be as big as the room that we could find at the VA. So, we had a conference room that could have held up to 50 people in it to let people come with them and their family member.
[00:17:39] And I would tell my story talk about functional medicine; we talk about epigenetic. The microbiomes, toxin exposure, stress exposures, lifestyle medicine and also the other healing stories that we observed in clinic. And we had before and after photos, and at the end, we’d invite the vets that they could you either say you know what, this is not the right time, and they weren’t ready to attack tackle diet and lifestyle. Or, they could say you know I’m ready, but I can’t commit to 100 percent 100 days because that’s what I’d ask. But I’d like to work on my diet. And we would send those folks to work with their dietician to increase the vegetables as they were willing to do so. But the folks who were willing to go all in. We asked them to commit to a hundred percent gluten free, preferably grain free. Lots of vegetables. I mean that would bring them back in for a series of group classes where they would do what we call the timeline of the illness. We do that as a group. We have some basic primary care labs, which will go over in a few minutes, and then I would perhaps personalize the diet and lifestyle recommendation based on what we found in their timeline, and whether or not they were a meat eater or a vegetarian. And then we would bring them back for group classes where they would come in about every six weeks for some labs and coaching as a group to adopt all of this that they could come with their significant other. And then we also had monthly skills classes where people could drop in and we would go over a variety of skills such as some of the resilience factors, [the story of your] illness, the Hero’s Journey. Diet classes and these were all about cooking. We learned how to make fried foods how to make sauerkraut chia pudding, grain alternatives, dairy alternatives. Then we had movement classes things like tai chi and yoga strength training. And we had a variety of stress reducing classes.
[00:20:10] [DE] And so right now if a patient comes to you, and you take on a new patient. What is your protocol for that. It’s you know it’s the intake it’s what test you are typically…
[00:20:27] [TW] So you know when they’re coming through our lifestyle class, we had this big informational class for the community and the person could decide I’m willing to do this. And when they commit that I’ll do 100 percent of the program for 100 days. And then we bring them back. The labs we get are just very basic primary care stuff. Fasting cholesterol, total cholesterol and good cholesterol, a fasting glucose hemoglobin, A1c, a B-12, folate, homocysteine, highly sensitive C-reactive protein (CRP), and a total of vitamin D level, 25 hydroxy Vitamin D level so that. People should be able to get that probably through the primary care doc. It’s not like the is more fancy sophisticated functional medicine lab set that can become quite pricey. The next thing that we were doing is what I call the timeline of the illness. And we had a lovely questionnaire that we’d go through together as a group asking about some basic questions born vaginally, or a C-section. Did you stay in the hospital longer or not. Did you get a lot of antibiotics as a child. Were you breast fed and if so for how long? What kind of toxic exposures you might have had such as a private well, agricultural or forestry chemicals, welding or soldering solvents. Then we talk about what were the time points for some major life stressors in your life. What time did they [?] start? When did they end? So we were looking at the diet and lifestyle factors that are contributing to health. We go through all of that. Then when I have those timelines made, then we talk about OK so what are the three or four big symptoms that are a problem for you, not the diagnoses. The big symptoms. And usually it’s fatigue pain brain fog. Those are the three big symptoms. And then we go back to when did they start. When were the major diagnoses. We thought some of that in and when I’ve got that time line of health and disease. Then during that. People can begin to have some ahas of the relationship between their environmental exposures and their losses that they develop, because the person if they can’t see the connections between their environmental exposures and their health, then they would have a hard time doing the things I asked them to do because I’m asking them to give up a number of addictions to sugar white flour. That can be pretty tough to let go of.
[00:24:00] Yeah I know actually plenty people think I’m crazy for being disciplined. So, I always like this and I just rather we set out to age gracefully. I’m amazed at how many people who won’t give it up.
[00:24:20] Well you know you probably know a lot of folks are smoking and can give up their tobacco. That’s really hard. We know all too many people who get down the alcoholism path or now down the opioid addiction path. Our brains are vulnerable to these addictions. And so I have a fair amount of compassion for these folks who do have their addiction to sugar and white flour and now videogaming in social media. That can make it very difficult because all these things stimulate our reward centers in our brain and we are wired to want to keep stimulating those reward centers. So yes that is typically it’s clearly much, much easier if I can help people see the link between pain, and, that by adapting these lifestyle changes we can reduce their physical pain, or at times emotional pain. And a big theme that I talk about is that for many folks that have come to see me they’ve been suffering for years or decades and trying conventional drugs that are very potent very powerful for many, many years and keep having to get more drugs at higher doses and new drugs. And I say well you know if you’re ready to try something different because you’ve been doing the conventional stuff for a long time, and you’re still suffering a lot. So, if we can help reduce your inflammation by taking these foods out, they are likely triggers. If you just take them out for 100 days at 100 percent then we can sort it out. Is it a trigger or not? And we can deal with some of the genetic vulnerability that your homocysteine is high. So, we know that your enzymes for managing the B-vitamins are less effective. So likely given you some more some more of these vitamins they’re necessary for how you manage the B-vitamins and the homocysteine. Could help again lower that inflammation and likely lower the pain. So, it’s really very common. You know people who are willing to do this with me, they’ll come back for the first follow up after six weeks. And, it’s very common. The pain may not be gone, but they can tell that yes the pain is loss. And it’s the first time. That the pain is less. And I tell you we have so many young men that have had their lives greatly impacted by their time in Iraq or Afghanistan, and have now chronic severe pain from the traumatic brain injuries or other trauma that they’ve dealt with, very often have erectile dysfunction. Young men in their 20s. And so you know they come into our clinic and we’d see them I would do the eval[uation] show them the link between all of their toxic burn that exposure and their weight gain their traumatic brain injuries. And get them to go grain free lots of vegetables, help them with their detox pathways. And these guys are coming back, and they can tell that there are a lot less irritable. They can tell that the severe headaches are less, severe photophobia is less. And many of these guys have developed inflammatory bowel disease as part of their military tour and they’re discovering that their symptoms from their inflammatory bowel disease is going away. And they say within a couple of months and then they come back. And they’ve got a big smile and they’re like oh my god. My love life is coming back. And they can see big changes within three to four months and they’ve been suffering often for years. Many, many years.
[00:28:50] [DE] So if I were to take your, maybe use as a guide the index from your book. You know as you mentioned early on which Sid Baker, as you know who was our first podcast, and said there’s typically at least something that shouldn’t be there that needs to be removed or there may be something missing and / or there may be something missing that needs to be added back. And maybe just go a little bit about what you focus on a lot in the book on mitochondria and bring that back in kind of explaining how this certainly works to help the body.
[00:29:44] [DE Note: This entire paragraph is one of the most succinct and on target descriptions of mitochondria and their impact on our bodies. Too much to bold and underline, but read it!] So, mitochondria is really where this all began for me. And also take it back. So I have progressed in my math going steadily downhill. Try out to begin reading the basic science and really learning all of this stuff. And it’s not as I’m reading this I start reading basic science about Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease. Huntington’s disease. And I see that in all these diseases where you have a shrinking brain which by the way you have when you have M.S., you have a shrinking brain. That it’s the mitochondria that are sending the signals to the brain so that it’s time to die. Too early. And that’s why the brain cells are shrinking and that’s why the brains are shrinking and that’s why you have this slowly progressive nature for many of these potent neurodegenerative diseases. So they’re like OK: I know that writing about mitochondria, M.S. but I figured it’s probably the same. So, I got to figure out more about mitochondria and what can I do to get my mitochondria resuscitated. And for the listeners, the mitochondria are really ancient bacteria that about a billion and a half years ago when we had this sudden increase over time of oxygen in the atmosphere which killed off about 95 percent of all lifeforms. Then there was a fortunate mutation that led to the Krebs cycle, which left a bacteria to be much more efficient at how it utilized oxygen. So this ancient little bacteria was engulfed by a bigger bacteria and two of them developed a very cooperative relationship. Which over millions of years led to a multicellular organism which led then to animals. And you had this specializations they could have brain tissue develop and heart and different organs and muscles and bones and all of that stuff. And it all happens because the mitochondria can generate energy efficiently. And it could let that cell specialize in other work. If the mitochondria become strained because it doesn’t have all of the building blocks that it needs to run the activities of the mitochondria which are really all about generating more ATP, the mitochondria generate less and less ATP that organ tissue can’t do its job as well. And so, in our bodies the organ tissues that are most depended on mitochondria are the heart, the retina, and the brain cells. And so if you’re going to have problems with chronic pain, fatigue, brain fog, irritability, it’s probably the mitochondria are not generating energy as efficiently. And so then if you begin to look at. OK so what are all the enzymes the vitamins that cofactors that make those enzymes work really well. That was the stuff I was studying, and that was the stuff I was taking in pill form and it did help in that. I figured out that if I missed my supplements I was so exhausted just completely could not function. So, I was immensely grateful for those supplements; there was a bunch of Coenzyme Q, a variety B vitamins and different amino acids and minerals. But what’s really interesting is when I redesigned my diet to make sure I was getting all this stuff in the food supply, that’s when you know there is this really dramatic uptick in energy and recovery and function that is just continued since that point. So food is much, much more powerful than trying to figure everything out and take it in pill form.
[00:34:10] [DE] Well [almost] all of the supplements I take, I think pretty much [almost] without exception are plant based supplements as opposed to nutraceuticals; so patients, they come back in six weeks and you know part of what you’re doing is say that the treatment is also diagnostic at the same time.
[00:34:40] [TW] Correct. You know I think it’s really vital that patients understand and really understand at a deep level this connection of all these environmental factors they’ve had in their life story their health story that contribute to their health status. So, they really understand how their toxic exposures contribute, how their antibiotic exposures contribute, how their lifetime of food choices contribute. If they don’t understand that, then it doesn’t make sense for them to do make that changes that we’re going to ask them to make it so.
[00:35:25] [DE] So there’s diet and then you talk about things like electrical stimulation and exercise. What are the, maybe just go through outside of food which I think you lay out extremely well in your book. And you go over in your lectures you can find on line as well. Maybe just go over some of the other components to fully stimulate the body to recovery.
[00:35:51] [TW] Chapter 3 talks a lot about getting your life in order and understanding what is your purpose. What is it that you want your health for. What is your life’s mission? Because there’s a vast body of research that if we understand our mission and our purpose we have far more resilience for all of the health challenges that we face. And I’ll tell you that my vets taught me that this was actually one of the most popular classes that we were ever taught were all these classes about what’s your mission, and what’s your life purpose, what is the meaning of your illness. Because for people to be willing to go on this journey of redesigning their diet and lifestyle, it’s far easier if they understand how this relates to my purpose of for example wanting to see my children graduate from college, wanting to play with my grandchildren, because now I have meaning and desire to want to make these changes. So my patients taught me that that’s one of the most important things that we do so we do that very early on in our first meeting with these folks is to help them get in touch with their purpose and the meaning of their experience. Then, the next big, and we talk a lot about diet. We also talk about stress. In that we need stress; stress is vital so we can have strong bones strong muscles. We have to learn pay attention. We have strong brain. But we also have to have a period of relaxation every day so that our cells can go and that maintenance and repair cycle. And so we talk about stress reduction or relaxation phase, and what are the various ways that people can create this relaxation phase. And what is it that they’re going to do. What works for them. And of course we have a lot of folks who like hunting and fishing and gardening just being outside or foraging and we also have some folks who like freewriting, journaling meditation, mindfulness, yoga. So there are a variety of ways of doing that. It just needs to be something that is meaningful for that person. And we talk about sitting being the new smoking that the more time we spend sitting the more inflammation we have in our blood vessels and our brain and our body. That being stationary is a problem that we want people to get up to stand up to move around to walk. We talk about a variety of ways that people can begin to add movement into their into their daily life and their bodies.
[00:39:02] [DE] As you said that early noise in the background but I just raised my desk and stood up, so.
[00:39:06] [TW] All right good man. You know that it’s so important to begin moving now that we have people who are so ill that when they are moving when they do their work out it’s like a two minute workout. I was so ill that a 10 minute very gentle workout was all I could do; if I did 12 minutes I couldn’t function for two days. So, we have to take people where they’re at. And begin to slowly and methodically increase that; and depending on the circumstance we might be able to use electrical stimulation of muscles or we might not. And again that would depend on the individual.
[00:39:53] [DE] And are there any foods that you would automatically add in your book like MCT oil or other things that you would suggest up front.
[00:40:09] So I would automatically add this radical food group known as vegetables. Many of my Vets, probably true of many gentlemen in the U.S., it is the meat sugar white flour and potatoes. And they think of potatoes as a vegetable. And so it’s been so long since they’ve had any vegetables. We have to help them understand how critical these vegetables are inhaling it and increasing the vegetable intake. And also for people who are willing to eat meat we’re very fond of having liver on the table a couple of times a week. I’m incredibly fond of having a heart on the menu as well and it’s actually, heart is so delicious. Heart is like filet mignon. It’s muscle meat. It’s incredibly good. Great source of mitochondria. So it’s milder than liver. It’s really very very delicious.
[00:41:20] [DE] And is this all recommended from grass fed animals?
[00:41:27] Well so again what I was taking care of my Vets, most folks I saw had been on disability for a long time but I able to work they’re on food stamps and so people started out getting conventional meat. They’re getting canned vegetables. We’re working with them to figure out how to implement this on food stamps. But I will also talk about the importance of improving the quality of the food they eat. And so over time it’s very typical that our Vets would figure out how to get start getting organic food into their home and they would grocery shop; they would hunt; they would fish; they’d go to the farmers markets. You know my vets taught me that if you go to the farmers market and you walk around. Figure out who’s got organic produce you could go to that farmer and negotiate with them what’s the best price they could pay at the very end of the farmer’s market when it was closing up, and the farmer was going to take everything home. And so that meant that some people were able to get everything that was left for that farmer at a very reasonable price just before the farmer will have to take it back home again. So people would start we could start out with just do the best you can according to the resources that you have. And if you’re on food stamps, you know maybe it is canned food frozen food. But even my folks on food stamps often begin to figure out how to get more organic food onto their plate by the end of the first month.
[00:43:30] [DE] And. OK. So. And what about vegetables in terms. You know organic now and this is where change matters is that the impact to your in your gut.
[00:43:46] [TW] So and you know again we will take our patients where they’re at, if they’re on food stamps or not. But we certainly talk about how as soon as you can afford to go organic do that cause you want to decrease your pesticide use, your decrease your exposure to round up because these pesticides herbicides and antibiotics in your meat and hormones in your meat all have an impact on your microbiome. That’s the bacteria in our bowels that help digest food and so doing make small molecules so I’ll get into our bloodstream and impact the health of our brain including our mood, including our neurotransmitters. And so this is, the quality of the food that you eat is so important. We also talked a lot about diversity. We have a goal of having 200 different plant species that you consume in a year. And I talk about you know having to think of food in three big categories as in greens as in sulfur rich and deeply pigmented.
[00:45:05] [DE] So if you could walk us through the timeline of a typical patient when they first come in you know the next six 12 to 18 months and what you hope to see.
[00:45:17] [TW] [DE – Two case studies worth reading!] So I’ll take it through to people that I have in mind a person with diabetes, high blood pressure, bipolar and some psychiatric issues comes in. Gets educated around all of this. We do a timeline and matrix, checked their labs, starting on some B vitamins and fish oil vitamin D, and put them on a diet, and a low glycemic index diet. He comes back after the first month and tells us he’d like to do a ketogenic diet, he’d like to get better control of his diabetes. We put him on that. And within six months, he’s off his diabetic meds, his high blood pressure meds, his psychiatric meds, he’s fine the best that he’s felt he thinks in years possibly decades. Within 18 months, he’s lost over 100 pounds. His blood pressure is normal. His blood sugar is normal and he is, he thinks the happiest he’s been in many, many years. We have another lady with rheumatoid arthritis who we put on a low glycemic index diet. Hers is a little bit different because of the rheumatoid arthritis. We also take her off of nightshades, so no tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers, in addition to our usual paleo diet and she loses about 60 pounds. Her pain melts away. So, she’s off pain meds. She then is off blood pressure meds. Her arthritis is inactive. And after about a year she decided that she wanted to go off the biologic drugs, and she told her rheumatologist that she was going off the biologic drugs because she was doing so well and they were nervous but she was able to go off and in fact continue to do very well. She went to see her daughter and her daughter did not recognize her in the airport because Mom had lost weight and looked healthy instead of sickly.
[00:47:54] So you know it’s certainly very, very common that after 12 to 18 months, pain is markedly less if not resolved. The person’s weight, pretty typically, we see people getting back to their weight that they had in their early 20s. And we typically see people needing lower doses of medications. It’s not uncommon for people to come in 15 to 20 prescription meds. So I would say people are definitely on fewer drugs, lower doses to get entirely off meds is a multi-year project. But you can be very, very optimistic that in 12 to 18 months the medication list has been simplified the medication doses reduced. And sometimes people can get very close to being entirely off of everything.
[00:49:01] [DE] You know what’s interesting to me is you know when you’re listing things and different diseases then you wind up disease being a clinical diagnosis, but diseases that you treat. They all kind of fall into the autoimmune spectrum. And when I look at people who are practicing similar types of medicine, even for cancer, there seems to be really dramatic overlap between all of them.
[00:49:35] [TW] You know when I was first you know having my transformation in 2009 I’m now primary care. Talking about diet and lifestyle. And I was doing this in my traumatic brain injury clinic, some of my partners would get really upset with me. It’s like you know Terry, you can’t treat every disease the same way. And you know my response to be like well we all have mitochondria. We all have cells. I’m really focused on just creating the healthiest environment I can for the person cells through nutrition and lifestyle. Now fast forward it’s 10 years later. And these same folks who had a hard time understanding how I could use essentially the same protocol or very close to the same protocol across many disease states are coming back saying. I get it. It really can be that simple. We have to optimize the environment for that person and we do that with diet and lifestyle. So, you’re always going to tell folks stress reduction is always going to be good. Vegetables are always going to be good. We have to take out nitrates. Or you may want to put some on a ketogenic diet versus a low glycemic index diet. So, there is some personalization but the big picture concepts are you always want to nutrient dense diet. You always want a stress reducing practice; you always want to gradually increase movement; and you want to reduce toxin exposures according to what people are able to do financially. That those are consistent concepts that we can implement for everyone.
[00:51:31] [DE] It’s… You actually just answered my question, which really, it’s multi-part, a little more than I would have asked for the top one or two, but what are the things you would recommend people do first and foremost, you pretty much just answered that. So, you’re looking at it from, to summarize, for nutrition adding what you need getting out what you really need, should exercise to stimulate the central nervous system etc. and you have the a great list of basic exercises you can recommend. Just out of curiosity, anything like high intensity interval training once people are really coming back?
[00:52:23] [TW] Oh yeah. You know this is one of the wonderful things about getting to be at the V.A. It’s a lot of these young men and women who were deployed. So, they’re in their 20s coming back and they’ve had a big setback with their traumatic brain injury. But they’re still young. So, I often as they begin to recover, you know in their biking, or the training, take walks. I continue to have that conversation. Would they be interested in high intensity interval training? We also talked about something called the seven minute workout, which is for people who are trying to tell me they don’t have time. I send them to the length of seven minute workout and say you know just start doing this it’s not going to take them on and you can decide if you’re really fragile that instead of doing seven or 10 burpees, you just do one or two of each one of these exercises in the full circuit then gradually increase it as you get stronger. You know my daughter was something that she didn’t have time to work out so I I showed her the same amount work and we did it together and she’s like oh my god this is this is really hard. And so she’s now become a huge fan of that seven minute workout. And it’s a lovely high intensity interval training program for so great.
[00:53:57] [DE] Well, is there anything we missed, you which I took a little bit of a stress management.
[00:54:05] [TW] You know one thing that we didn’t really clarify in the diet is I am very keen that there are things to remove that people need. And I encourage folks to remove them for 100 days so you can figure out is this an issue for you; gluten containing grains, so wheat, rye, barley and many of the ancient grains have to come out, and if the person is willing to go grain free I think that’s better. I also have them remove dairy, because if you react abnormally to gluten, there’s an 80 percent probability that you will also react abnormally to the proteins in dairy, so that takes out milk, cheese, yogurt, everything but clarified butter. And then the third most common food sensitivity is eggs. So you have people take eggs out as well. After 100 days, they can put it back. If the person has night has rheumatoid arthritis, or inflammatory bowel disease, I also take out the nightshade family, potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers.
[00:55:18] [DE] And, with something like eggs, do you discern between pasture raised eggs versus.
[00:55:27] [TW] So in that first hundred days, I take them out because until you take them out, you don’t know if you have a reaction to them. After the 100 days, you want to take them back in, the pasture raised eggs are much, much better. And if you can find someone who is raising chickens among them run around that’s better. yet there are a lot of communities I would say been one of them. People have chickens in town can’t ever use it. But you can have chickens. So there are more people raising chickens for eggs and the chickens can actually be sort of a fun family pet as well. It’ll be of the most expensive eggs but also some of the most delicious eggs you’ll ever have if you get to have eggs from pasture chickens that you’ve grown in your own yard. They can be a very fun family project.
[00:56:27] [DE] It’s the thing I find with home raise chickens, a lot of times people want to feed them grains as well soyou just need to make sure you don’t give them grains.
[00:56:38] [TW] You don’t get into that. You know there are these roving chicken coops that you put in and just sort of roam around your yard. If you don’t roam around you yard people start using grain instead of letting them have the grass and crickets.
[00:56:57] [DE] Alright. What about just lastly. I think one thing that you do talk about is sleep. Where do you put that in your importance.
[00:57:09] So while we sleep, that’s when a lot of the toxins are removed from the brain. That is when we do a lot of detoxifying in our liver. That is when we do a lot of manufacturing of hormones. And so if there’s not enough sleep all of those important things are compromised. And so sleep is important. Earlier in my life, I know I’m easily activated so that I often would not get much sleep and I thought that was fine because I had a lot to do in life. I’ve now since learned that seven to nine hours is really much much better. And so I’m much more consistent about going to bed as a usual routine same time that I go to bed same time that I get up and I’m far more consistent in the seven to eight hours of sleep every night which is much better. If you want to increase your inflammation increase the probability of obesity of mental health problems of heart attacks of strokes. Then you shorten your sleep if you want to be lean. Have a good brain and live a long time. Make sure you have seven or nine hours of sleep every night.
[00:58:32] [DE] That’s my goal. If my kids would let me go to bed early. I’ve always been early to rise. It’s a lofty goal that I rarely achieve.
[00:58:44] [TW] It takes a while. It took me a while to get everything reset it. And so one thing I’d like to do is take a Epsom salts bath and read a few minutes before going to bed. And so actually I take a cold at Epson salts bath with ice in it and I go off to bed that cold bath. And then I tell you that are some of the best sleep that I get.
[00:59:15] [DE] I had not heard the cold version. That’s interesting. Well this has been great. I am going in the show notes to link-out and touch base with you as well to make sure that we have a good supplement list.
[00:59:33] [TW] So on top of things like this, let me pitch for the show notes. I’ll give you links for our clinical trial. We have a couple of studies that we’re doing with Bastyr, where they have some lovely diet questions for people with Parkinson’s and with M.S. So, there are three studies that are love to see you linked in your show notes. And then, every summer in August we have a seminar where we have hundreds of people come to Iowa to learn more about the protocol we have clinicians that come in stay and get trained and get certified in the Wahls protocol and so that’s something that we have every August that the people want to learn more they certainly come spend a few days with us.
[01:00:28] And I will of course I believe you have a good resource for people that have been trained already, and in your neighborhood so we’ll make sure to link to that as well. I really appreciate your time today. This is great. And I think this is the beginning of several conversations and we our path will overlap. We’re certainly seeing the world in similar ways. And I thank you for your time.
[01:01:02] [TW] Thank you very much. The pleasure is mine.
Biography
Dr. Terry Wahls is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa where she conducts clinical trials. She is also a patient with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, which confined her to a tilt-recline wheelchair for four years. Dr. Wahls restored her health using a diet and lifestyle program she designed specifically for her brain and now pedals her bike to work each day. She is the author of The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine, The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles (paperback), and the cookbook The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life: The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions.
You can learn more about her work from her website, www.terrywahls.com. She conducts clinical trials that test the effect of nutrition and lifestyle interventions to treat MS and other progressive health problems. She also teaches the public and medical community about the healing power of the Paleo diet and therapeutic lifestyle changes that restore health and vitality to our citizens. She hosts a Wahls Protocol Seminar every August where anyone can learn how to implement the Protocol with ease and success. Follow her on Facebook (Terry Wahls MD) and on Twitter at @TerryWahls. Learn more about her MS clinical trials by reaching out to her team MSDietStudy@healthcare.uiowa.edu.
Clinical trials her team is participating / links to our Nations MS Society funded research:
Two studies in Bastyr University that are asking patients with MS or Parkinson’s disease about whether they are following the Wahls diet. These studies are based upon surveys that are completed every 6 months and do not require visits to the study site.
Multiple sclerosis
Parkinson’s study
http://bastyr.edu/research/studies/complementary-alternative-medicine-care-parkinsons-disease-cam-care-pd
