wahls protocol Archives - everywomanover29 blog

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.

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

I mentioned that we’ll both be presenting at IMMH/ Integrative Medicine for Mental Health in Washington DC in September.

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.