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Research opportunity: Parkinson’s disease and Multiple Sclerosis – participate in diet research

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We know that anxiety is very common in both Multiple Sclerosis/MS and Parkinson’s disease so I’m sharing this diet research opportunity in case you or someone you know can benefit.

Dr. Terry Wahls, author of The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles (and past speaker on the Anxiety Summit) shared this diet research opportunity via her newsletter: Dr. Laurie Mischley, ND is recruiting patients for this world-wide research opportunity i.e. you can live anywhere.

Dr. Mischley was so impressed with what she had observed [in her MS diet research] that she added the Wahls Diet as one of the dietary variables to her ongoing Parkinson’s study. If any of you have family or friends with Parkinson’s or MS, please encourage them to participate in one of these studies. Dr. Mischley’s studies are unique. Her team at Bastyr University is studying patients with chronic disease and assessing several variables to see if there is a common theme among those who had the best outcomes and the slowest disease progression.

The effort is minimal–you can participate from anywhere in the world by simply completing online surveys. The surveys are given every six months and include questions about medications, diet, herbal supplements, exercise, meditation, and an array of other factors.

This information will give Dr. Mischley’s team an ever-growing data set to analyze, searching for common traits among those who have the best health and function despite having Parkinson’s or MS. Your participation would be a tremendous gift to society because it would help us better understand the impact of dietary and lifestyle factors on health outcomes and functional status for those with Parkinson’s disease or MS.

We are seeing so much promising research on diet and mental health so it makes total sense to be looking at diet for Parkinson’s and MS. Here is some of the research on diet and mental health: anxiety and hypoglycemia and the Western diet and anxiety.

Without published research, clinical practice won’t change. With published research, more clinicians will be willing to utilize diet and lifestyle therapy, restoring health to more patients around the world.

Here is the link for more on the MS study and more on the Parkinson’s study.

 

The Anxiety Summit: wise words on MS, oxytocin, red meat, marijuana, mercury

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We’re in the midst of season 4 of The Anxiety Summit www.theanxietysummit.com and here are wise words of wisdom from some of our amazing speakers on MS, oxytocin, red meat, marijuana, mercury and more.

If you have joined the summit and are loving it, this serves as a nice recap, a reminder if you missed a talk and inspiration to stay tuned in for some of the later interviews. And making sure you know that each speaker has a blog with snippets and many additional resources.

And if you’ve recently joined my community for the summit a VERY big welcome!

If you have not yet signed up I hope these wise words inspire you to join us!

Here are some snippets from some of the interviews.

Multiple sclerosis and anxiety: The Wahls Protocol

Dr. Terry Wahls shares how her MS was a gift:

And it all needs to happen this way Trudy.  I had to get that disabled.  I had to be on the verge of utter catastrophe to begin to feel the effects of cognitive decline to do all this work and then feel the effects of all this healing that happens when you provide a healthy habitat for the human ecosystem and all this repair happens.  If this hadn’t of have happened I’d still be a conventional medicine doc thinking the latest drugs out of the New England Journal of Medicine were the way to go as opposed to seeing the gospel of food and sleep and movement and stress reduction.

The Link Between Low Cholesterol and Low Oxytocin

The Pitocin/synthetic discussion oxytocin with Dr. Kurt Woeller was fascinating:

And there’s a theory … that the Pitocin, which is synthetic oxytocin, which is given to women who are not naturally going into labor, it’s meant to action speed labor up. Pitocin being synthetic oxytocin may short circuit in some susceptible kids the natural production of oxytocin, therefore slowing down or turning off those areas in the brain that are normally being developed at that time, with regards to socialization.

Gluten and anxiety: the testing conundrum solution

Dr. Tom O’Bryan’s explanation of the limited gluten sensitivity testing that most people have done:

what happens when people have one of those peptides that the immune system is fighting that’s not the 33 [alpha-gliadin] and you do a blood test for gluten sensitivity.  If your doctor orders the common blood test for gluten sensitivity and it looks for alpha-gliadin and it comes back negative and your doctors says you’re fine eating wheat.  See, here’s the blood test.  Well you can get a false negative meaning it says there’s no problem when there really is because your body’s fighting other peptides of wheat.

Nutrients that Fuel Brain Power and Reduce Anxiety

Dr. Drew Ramsey talks about zinc and animal protein:

Zinc is a mineral and minerals tend to be more absorbable in animal forms.  I think a lot of people are very confused about meat and seafood and often intimidated and scared.  And then we’ve had this message to go plant based and even vegan which is not a diet that is healthy for the brain.

Dr. Hyla Cass, integrative psychiatrist covers marijuana and anxiety later in the summit:

very often people who have been smoking marijuana for a while – when they go off it they go through serious withdrawal – anxiety, insomnia, feeling really very bad. Very much like we see in movies – we understand what it’s like getting off heroin when people go through withdrawal. Very similar, it really looks similar in appearance. Not everyone does that but common enough.

Dr. John Dempster, co-host of the Mental Wellness Summit discusses mercury as a neurotoxin in his interview later in the summit

So I kind of want to shed some light on some of these areas and how it can affect anxiety directly. One of the big areas is mercury itself is a neurotoxin. So how does that impact our biochemistry and our physiology? Well what it’s going to do it’s going to start to disrupt on an endocrine and a neurotransmitter level some of our pathways. And one of the big pathways is actually the glutamate connection and the glutamate pathway. And glutamate is something that’s known as an excitatory neurotransmitter and this is something that if we have too much of it or it’s not being reuptake properly in our synapses we start to exhibit different types of symptoms of anxiety. And of course that’s just one possible trigger for anxiety.

You can see a list of all the speakers and topics here on the master speaker blog.

You can sign up here: season 4 of The Anxiety Summit www.theanxietysummit.com

If you missed any, not to worry, we’ve decided to do an encore day with ALL the speakers. We don’t want you feeling stressed or anxious about missing out – not on a summit on anxiety!

The Anxiety Summit – Multiple sclerosis and anxiety: The Wahls Protocol

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Terry Wahls_Anxiety4

Dr. Terry Wahls, MD, author of The Wahls Protocol, was interviewed on the Anxiety Summit by host of the Anxiety Summit, Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution.

Multiple sclerosis and anxiety: The Wahls Protocol

  • A move to diet and lifestyle research
  • Recovery from MS with functional medicine and the Wahls Paleo™ diet
  • MS and anxiety: myelin damage, medications, GABA and glutathione
  • The Wahls Paleo™ diet
  • Organ meats and a ketogenic diet

Here are some snippets from our interview:

Here are some gems from our interview, starting with a quick overview of the Wahls diet (which is based on Paleo principles:

My focus is ramping up the vegetables and the target is nine cups because I’m a tall lady, six foot tall.  And if you’re a petite female or a very petite man it might be six cups.  It should be equally divided between dark green leafy vegetables like spinach, kale.  Sulfur containing vegetables, in particular the cabbage, onion and mushroom families because of the medicinal qualities of those three food groups.  And then deeply pigmented stuff – carrots, beets, peppers, berries.  And I’m really looking for all the colors, particularly blue, black, purple.

Dr Wahls shares how her MS was a gift:

And it all needs to happen this way Trudy.  I had to get that disabled.  I had to be on the verge of utter catastrophe to begin to feel the effects of cognitive decline to do all this work and then feel the effects of all this healing that happens when you provide a healthy habitat for the human ecosystem and all this repair happens.  If this hadn’t of have happened I’d still be a conventional medicine doc thinking the latest drugs out of the New England Journal of Medicine were the way to go as opposed to seeing the gospel of food and sleep and movement and stress reduction.

So my kids still sort of wish I’d never gotten MS and that I was still as vigorous of an athlete as I once was.  But Jackie and I are like, you know, it all had to happen this way.  And the gifts that I’ve received from it happening this way are really quite profound.

Here is Dr. Wahls’ feedback on benzodiazepines:

very, very strong for addiction potential.  And then once you’re on them getting off them is a very complicated process because if you suddenly stop you can have withdrawal problems that can become life threatening.  So one has to be very gradual, very slow in the reduction phase.  It’s certainly very important, very worth doing.  The best bet is to never get on that stuff and to use dietary and lifestyle environmental approaches first.

My blog has plenty of information on benzodiazepines.  Here is the most recent one – Benzodiazepines: informed consent? Your support is needed.   I encourage you to search the blog for additional information.

Here are some of the studies we discussed in the interview:

A recent study in the Journal of Child neurology included 140 children 5-18 years of age. The paper, Behavioral Symptoms in Pediatric Multiple Sclerosis: Relation to Fatigue and Cognitive Impairment, found that 

Although the type of clinical problems varied across participants, attention problems, somatization, and anxiety were found to be most common

In another recent study Anxiety, depression and fatigue at 5-year review following CNS demyelination 

Of the 236 cases, 40.2% had clinical anxiety, 16.0% had clinical depression, and 41.3% had clinical fatigue.

Dr. Wahls is the author of The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles  

wahls book cover

Here is the digital gift: Food for Thought

I mentioned that we’ll both be presenting at IMMH/ Integrative Medicine for Mental Health in Washington DC in September – here are the details

If you are not already registered for the Anxiety Summit you can get live access to the speakers of the day here: www.theAnxietySummit.com

Missed this interview or can’t listen live? Or want this and the other great interviews for your learning library? Purchase the MP3s or MP3s + transcripts and listen when it suits you.

You can find your purchasing options here.: Anxiety Summit Season 1, Anxiety Summit Season 2, Anxiety Summit Season 3, and Anxiety Summit Season 4.