Dhru Purohit Show - 3 Superfoods That Support Mitochondrial Health with Dr. Terry Wahls

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

This episode is brought to you by WHOOP and Inside Tracker.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. Terry Wahls to discuss the top foods and lifestyle factors that support and damage our mitochondria. Dr. Wahls shares how she healed herself from secondary progressive multiple sclerosis using the principles of Functional Medicine. Dr. Wahls is an Institute for Functional Medicine certified practitioner and clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She is the author of The Wahls Protocol and the cookbook The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life. She has conducted several clinical trials, coauthored 24 scientific publications, and is pioneering a way to make her protocol more accessible by making it available online to the public.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Wahls talk about the damage processed foods cause for people’s health and the environment. They discuss Dr. Wahls’ story, and how The Wahls Protocol inspired clinical research that has helped thousands of people reclaim their health.  In this episode, we dive into:    - The top three superfoods that Dr. Wahls uses regularly and includes in her Wahls Protocol to supercharge mitochondrial health (2:14) - The top three foods that are damaging our mitochondrial health (19:10) - The role sugar plays in our mitochondrial health (26:10) - Lifestyle factors that help and hurt our mitochondria (27:46) - How and what toxins poison our mitochondria (31:36) - Dr. Wahls’ illness and how she discovered the role her mitochondria played (50:47) - The biggest changes Dr. Wahls made to her diet on her healing journey (1:08:26) - Remarkable stories of patients following the Wahls Protocol (1:23:21) - Who might not benefit from eating plant fiber (1:40:10)   Also mentioned in this episode: The Wahls Protocol Bristol Stool Chart For more on Dr. Wahls, follow her on Instagram @drterrywahls and through her website, terrywahls.com. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health coaching platform that monitors your physiology 24/7 and provides personalized recommendations based on what your body needs. To get yours, go to https://www.join.whoop.com and get 15% off your membership with code DHRU15. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to https://www.insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's conversation is an important breakdown of the importance of mitochondria and most importantly, three things, three superfoods that support our mitochondrial health and three foods that actually destroy and damage our mitochondria. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest on the podcast is Dr. Terry Wals. And she's here to help us understand the power of mitochondria and the daily actions that we do that both harm and help them. Dr. Terry Walls is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa, where she conducts clinical trials on all things, autoimmune and multiple sclerosis. In 2018, she was awarded with the Institute of Functional Medicine's Lioness Pauling Award for her contributions to research, clinical care, and patient advocacy. Dr. Walz has secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, which confined her to a tilt-reclined wheelchair for four years. But something magical happened.

Following something that she now calls the Walls Protocol, Dr. Walls restored her health using a diet and lifestyle program that she designed specifically for her brain, and now she pedals her bike to work every single day. At one point in time, Dr. Terry Walls was banned from speaking at the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation because her ideas were considered too controversial. A few years later, she was awarded a million dollars by that same organization that banned her to further her research in this space. Dr. Walls is the author of The Walls Protocol, a radical new way to treat all chronic autoimmune conditions using paleo principles and the cookbook, The Walls Protocol, cooking for life. Even if you don't have an autoimmune condition, the principles that Terry teaches through the Walls Protocol are something

that we can all implement and that can drastically make our life better. Stay tuned for a fascinating conversation about mitochondrial health with Dr. Terry Walls. Dr. Terry Wall is a pleasure to have you here. We're going to jump right in talking all things mitochondria. Tell us some of the top three superfoods that are out there that you use regularly as part of your program and that you consume regularly that people listening and watching today can take to supercharge their mitochondrial health and help them heal from disease, and also lose weight and have more energy.

Okay, so I'm going to start with the things that are probably the easiest for people to add to their diet. And we could start with bone broth. Bone broth, which is an ancient food that our ancestral mothers and fathers have been eating again for thousands of generations. Tremendously nourishing, filled with collagen, amino acids, great source of minerals. is easily absorbed. It will nourish your gut. It will allow you to absorb your other nutrition. If you don't have a healthy gut, you can't absorb any of the nutrition that your cells and your mitochondria need. So, you know, the very first thing I want people to do is be sure that they have a healthy gut so they can absorb their nutrition. So I want all of my patients to have bone broth

plus it's delicious. And it's actually a really great source of protein. If you look at a lot of bone broths that are out there, I know there's some brands that you're affiliated with, you look on the back, it's like 16 to 20 grams of protein for a serving. That's like incredible. It's a lot of protein. It will not spike your blood sugar. It's easily absorbed. If you're having problems with belly pain, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, bone broth will still be very well tolerated.

and it will improve your nutrition. It will improve your ability to digest and assimilate the rest of the food that you eat. So that's where I start all of my patients on bone broth. And when you're starting people off on that, and we'll get to the other two foods that you recommend here in a second, when you're starting patients off on that,

is it have as much as you want? Is it a certain amount of recommendation in a day? Well, you know, in general, People will be much more successful if you start slow and then gradually increase. Anytime you're including something new. Anything new. Start slow. Just start gradually.

So you can start with a half a cup and have it like a tea. And you just have it straight. Then if you want to get a little fancier, you could add a little coconut milk, some turmeric and have basically golden milk, which I think is totally delicious. or you could add any of the other spices that you enjoy, rosemary, thyme, basil. You could add literally any culinary spice that is part of your ethnic tradition. I like putting in cumin, for example, and it's like you get all these fantastic polyphenols from all these great spices with this incredible base, which is bone broth. Which is wonderful. So it's a lovely beverage.

It's a great thing to start your morning. with, you can sip on it during the day. Once you're comfortable with a half cup, then you could go to a cup, then when that is comfortable, you could have a cup twice a day. You could also have it as a starter before your meals. And again, this is something that our grandmothers would have traditionally done. They would have served a cup of consummate or broth prior to the meals. That was a very traditional kind of food. You know, and I have this wonderful cookbook from my grandmother in the 1930s and my great-grandmother from the 1800s. In both of those books, talk about serving broth before your meals. That was absolutely a tradition. I love that. One of the next

foods we have in our list here that you put together for me is we have fiber. Now, when people look at fiber sometimes. They don't immediately think like, wow, how is that related to mitochondria? But tell us the connection between fiber and what kind of fiber you're talking about when it relates to gut health and mitochondria. Well, you know, I'm going to take us back to our beginnings when we were all single cell organisms back in the ancient seas. And we were engulfed by the bigger organism, you know, and had the first mitochondria. And we evolve into our multi-cellular. organism. And we develop our first gut. Of course, you know, that's millions and trillions of generations ago. But when we evolved that first gut, we brought with us the microbes that

were living in the sea. In those microbes would help us digest our food. They would make some vitamins. They would eat the food that we're eating and make their own microbial metabolites that get into our bloodstream and help us run the chemistry of life. We have a very intimate relationship with those ancient microbes. They have evolved right along with us. We have a very cooperative, collaborative relationship with them. And again, if I'm going to have good health. I have to be able to assimilate the nutrition and to digest the nutrition. That means I need to have healthy microbes. My microbes, again, for millions of generations, humans were eating about 150 grams of fiber every day. Now we're eating like less than 15 grams of fiber a day.

starving our friends, we're starving those ancient microbes that co-evolved with us over these millions of years. We need more fiber so we can fertilize our good friends, so we have a healthy gut, because if I'm going to nourish my cells and my mitochondria, my gut needs to work well. So I need the bone broth, I need more fiber, so my gut can work well, and I can absorb the rest of the nutrition that I need. Great. And I have a bunch of questions about fiber because a lot of people start to include more fiber.

They have challenges. They notice that their gut can handle it. We'll come back to that in a little bit. So we'll put a little pin in that. There's so many things that you talk about. I'm like, man, we could talk about a whole, you know, two, three episodes about that. But we'll come back to fiber. The last one on the list of the top three foods that support mitochondrial health is a food

that we've talked about before. But again, I don't know if people understand how important this food is, especially when comes to your protocol, and that's organ meat. What does organ meat have to do with mitochondrial health? You know, our organs, particularly heart, tongue, liver, gizzards, are really great sources of fat-sliable vitamins, vitamin A, premade, retinol. If it's a grass-fed, grass-finished animal, it's going to have vitamin K. It will have a lot of B vitamins. It will have a lot of B vitamins. It will have coenzyme Q, creatine, carnitine, lipoid acid. So all of these, and we'll also have easily absorbed potassium, easily absorbed sodium, easily absorbed magnesium. And depending on,

the heart also has easily absorbed calcium. These nutrients are important core factors for how the mitochondria function. Our ancestors would have prized the eyes, the brains, the heart, the liver. And if there was plenty of the hunt was successful, they might have left the muscle meat behind for the hyenas and the jackals, but they would have taken the organ meat back to camp. You even notice that animals in the wild also kind of first go for the organ systems. Absolutely. They're not first going for that. I was watching a little Facebook documentary on a gentleman in Africa who has a sanctuary

for lions. And one of the things that he was talking about is that he noticed that over a period of time, because they are running this sanctuary, they were primarily just feeding the lion's muscle meat. All the lions started to develop these nutritional deficiencies. They were division in vitamin A. They're deficient in all these different nutrients. And they only found out because a vet came and looked at them and said, you know, are

you giving them organ meats or at least supplemental nutrients that are put into the muscle meat? They said, no, we're just giving them regular muscle meat. He said, that's why they're nutrient deficient and that's why their hair is falling out and that's why they don't seem like their eye health is as good. So even all animals, but I know that the idea of regularly including organ meats into our diet is tough for a lot of people, especially for people who are vegan or vegetarian. And I know you came from a vegetarian background. 20 years. You were vegan, vegetarian. I also grew up vegetarian. and became vegan for six years.

So we'll talk more about organ meat a little bit later. And obviously, people are free to respect any sort of tradition or philosophy they follow with food. But we don't want to not bring up the benefits of something so crucial. Retinal. It's very important. People know that the deeply pigmented vegetables have all sorts of carotenoids in them, polyphenols, which are fabulously good for us. But they are not the pre-made vitamin A retinol.

And we need retinol for our eyes. We need retinol for proper function and division of our cells. We need retinol in our mitochondria. And depending on your genetics, you'll either be very efficient at converting carotenoids beta-carotene into retinol, or you'll be relatively inefficient. And I tell my folks who have complex chronic disease states that they're more likely to be inefficient in that they would benefit from having some pre-made retinal. And that if they eat liver, you know, once a week, they'll get their retinal.

But I also remind them, because I have plenty of carnivore friends who eat only animal products. and they were telling their followers to have a pound of liver every day. And I have to remind them that retinol does have a toxic effect and a problem if you're, like many of our nutritional compounds. If you get too high, they can be dilatory, so if you're too low, they'll have a disease state. If your retinol is too high, you can end up with fibrosis of the liver, so you have cirrhosis. you end up with fibrosis of the lungs, with pulmonary fibrosis, you can have fibrosis of the heart. And the problem is you don't recognize that until the disease is fairly advanced.

You've now stored a lot of retinol in your fat, and now you've got a very difficult problem to treat. So there's this gentleman who's like pretty popular on social media and a lot of young people are like following him and, you know, he's kind of had a little bit of controversy. that's there infamous, I guess he would say. His name was the liver king. And he's known for having liver every single day. And if you were the doctor for the liver king, you say, hey, listen. This is going to be a problem. This is going to be a problem.

Too much of something that might be good at a lower dose that's there can actually have detrimental impact. Yeah, you know, and he won't know until the disease is really quite advanced. Because it's very difficult to use our modern test to see how far. things have developed. So if you want to know your vitamin A stores accurately, it's a very sophisticated test that the blood levels don't tell you what's stored in your fat. So one would take a radioactive isotope, so radio label retinol, inject you in it, and then let that equalize and then scan you. It's a very sophisticated test.

It's only done in a few research labs. And the result is clinically, people don't know how to diagnose vitamin A toxicity until you're sort of at the end stage disease. And part of the problem is the early deaths due to vitamin A toxicity when you take an overwhelming dose of vitamin A as in polar liver, that can kill you acutely. It's hard to do. It can occasionally happen. But the problem with vitamin A is not the acute poisoning. It's the slow poisoning from overload. So I want everyone to take vitamin A.

I want you to have liver once a week, like 6 to 8 ounces, but not a pound every day. That will come back to about you. You know, you can't talk about mitochondrial health and the benefits of it without analyzing and looking at our modern day society and looking at the things that are damaging it because our mitochondria are quite sensitive. So on the topic of foods and then we'll go into other lifestyle factors that you've written about a lot like sun exposure, light exposure, exercise, but first let's go to food. Diagnose sort of our modern day society. What are some of the top foods? Let's pick three if you can at least that are damaging our mitochondrial health.

You know, we, in an effort to deal with hunger, many, many years ago, we created this program of subsidizing corn, soybean, and wheat, so we could generate more calories, which then big food used to make a lot of processed foods out of the sugar products, the soybean products, the wheat products. And so now we have this food industry that delivers a lot of calories. that have been stripped of vitamins, minerals, polyphenols. And if we did a measurement with carbon labeling to say, you know, how much of your carbon is due to corn or soybeans or wheat, it's a stunning amount. And we should not be surprised because so much of our diet is derived. from a corn product, a wheat product, or a soybean product.

And when you're saying about the carbon, you're not talking about the environment. You're talking about literally if we could do an analysis of what your cells are made up of, we'd see that people are made up of a lot of these things that are related to? That came out of corn, soybeans, and wheat, shocking, disturbing. We should be being made up of carbon that came from a wide variety of plants. who should be made up of amino acids that came from a wide variety of sources, not just one animal. Our ancestors, again, our ancestral mothers and fathers had amazing diversity of their food sources. The protein sources, their fat sources, their carbohydrate sources.

And we have a very narrow range for our fat sources, our protein sources. in our carbon sources to our detriment. Terrible. So when you look out there and you look at soy, corn, and then what was the other one that you mentioned? Wheat. Wheat. What are some of the other derivative products that are coming from that? For example, some people say we should be a little bit worried about seed oils.

Other people say that, no, seed oils are kind of fine and it's okay to have them in your diet. What's your take on seed oils like canola oil? and corn oil, and a lot of these oils that are being derived from these top foods that are being consumed in America especially? Well, if I'd look at the ideal ratio of omega-6 fats to omega-3 fats, you know, the basic science would tell me that a ratio of 4 to 1 has the healthiest cell membrane, it has the lowest incidence of autoimmunity, has the best mood, lowest incidence of heart immunity, has the best mood, lowest incidence of heart disease. If we have diets that are high in all these seed oils,

processed foods, then that ratio, instead of being 4 to 1, is 15 to 1, 20 to 1, 30 to 1, 45 to 1. And that leads to poorly functioning cell membranes. It leads to more autoimmunity, leads to more metabolic syndrome, leads to more depression and anxiety. So simply for getting the ratios correct, I want to get rid of all of those seed oils. I'd much rather people are using monosaturated fats, lard tallow. Again, our ancestral mothers and fathers, the kinds of fats that we were using were rendered animal fats. Then we discovered olives and we had olive oil. The use of these refined oils, they're refined.

They're not cold pressed oils. They're refined using solvents. So there are solvents left in those oils. You try to reduce the solvents. You can't get rid of the hexane entirely. And when you take these seed oils and you heat them, over 180 degrees, then you're going to take some of those double bonds and move them into the transposition. And when they're in the transposition, when they get incorporated into my cell

membrane, they'll make my cell membranes less effective. When I was in medical school, we're very gung-ho on margarine, hydrogen, hydrogenated fats. That was going to be superior to butter, but we now know those trans fats mean the cell membranes are less effective. If your cell membrane is less effective, you can't get signals into the cell, out of the cell. The cells are not working very well. You have a higher rate of cancer. You have a higher rate of heart disease. You have a higher rate of anxiety, depression, a higher rate of metabolic syndrome. That's great. So it's really paying attention to that ratio. I did a test many years ago. It was one of the reasons that I at the time for me again I want people to do whatever they want stopped being

vegan is I took this test called the omega quant I'm not affiliated with them but I like it because it's an easy way it's an at home test it's a hundred bucks I recommend it to all my friends you get a test at home and you can prick your finger and it'll send it back in and they'll tell you you're omega three to omega six ratio and my ratio was really inverted because I was eating a very processed vegan diet yeah you know and certainly I I respect that there are people who are vegan, vegetarian for their spiritual beliefs, and they're deeply committed to them. And if you're doing that for your spiritual beliefs, then we need to do some testing

so I can detect what metabolic abnormalities we have and we can address them. I also point out that when you lean into all this processed vegan food and you lean into all the soy-based products, you are actually contributing to deforestation because Brazil, a lot of the drive to deforest Brazil, is to grow soybeans. If instead of trying to grow soybeans on marginal lands, we were pasturing that as part of regenerative farming, we would have less deforestation and you would have a healthier production of protein. So you talked about wheat, soy, corn. We talked about seed oils.

Let's talk about another one. What is the role of sugar when it comes to our mitochondrial health? Why do so many people talk about sugar and mitochondria and some of the damaging impacts that sugar can have? So our mitochondria can burn sugar. They can burn amino acids. They can burn fats. And people have been mistaken to think that. when I'm exhausted, I'm going to take sugar or caffeine to deal with that fatigue.

And when we take a lot of sugar, it stimulates our dopamine, we get a lot of pleasure, I get a hit, taking processed foods, I'm going to get a lot of stimulants that are added to the food to create that craving and the withdrawal. However, that drawing. insulin resistance. That drives diabetes. In the end, that's going to create more problems with my mitochondria. I'll be more likely to have a small, less effective mitochondria. If I have less insulin resistance, so more insulin sensitivity, because I have a lower glycemic index diet, so I'm eating more protein, more. fat, I'm more likely to have large, robust, healthier mitochondria.

So one of the things I mentioned earlier is that it's not just diet that can both help and harm mitochondria, it's also our lifestyle factors. For you, you say, and we're going to break down your journey a second for those that aren't familiar, haven't heard our first two episodes, but you say like fixing your mitochondria and when you stopped poisoning them was central to you getting better. So talk to us more about those other factors. separate from food that both help and hurt mitochondria? You know, probably for many of the listeners, you are poisoning your mitochondria. You don't know that, but you probably are.

I had spent far too many years poisoning my mitochondria. First, I grew up on a farm, and we use pesticides, herbicides, as part of the agricultural chemicals. and so all of those pesticides, insecticides are toxic to mitochondria. In addition, we had our own private well, and 80% of the farm wells, private wells in Iowa, are contaminated with atrazine, which is a pesticide that has been banned for decades in Europe because of its toxic effects on mitochondria. So a little kid, I'm accidentally damaging my mitochondria from the beginning. Then I had to take a bunch of antibiotics very early in life because of tonsillitis in strep throat.

Really great. I never had to have valvular heart disease, so I'm thrilled. I got those antibiotics, but recurrent antibiotics, remember I said earlier are mitochondria or ancient bacteria. So antibiotics, particularly if you have to take them long term, can be stressful for your mitochondria. Then the next problem that I had is I'm an artist. So I started oil painting when I was in high school. And I have a degree in oil painting and also did metallurgy. So now I'm exposed to mercury, lead, cadmium.

And I had years of eating lots and lots of rice, so let's throw in arsenic. And so all of those things poison the enzymes that my mitochondria use. So, you know, that's a problem. And I got into medical school. I am thrilled, thrilled to be doing gross anatomy, which is something every artist longs to do is get to go dissect cadavers. So I go back to the lab, unwrap the cadavers, and I have these beautiful notebooks of all those cadaver drawings that I did. So I probably have three to four times the amount of formaldehyde exposure of my clasmites

because I was so thrilled to be doing all these drawings, which again was stressful for my mitochondria. You really went for the whole toxic soup, huh? You were trying to see how many points you could score up in that whole category. And so in my undergraduate years, you know, I had lots of energy. I was an athlete. I did full contact, taekwondo. I competed nationally in 1978 before entering medical school. I was in the Pan American trials, a real kick-ass sort of girl.

And, you know, during medical school, I started having less and less energy, I could not be quite as strong. And I think it was the effect of all of that damage that had been accumulating on my mitochondria. And can I pause you for just a moment? What are these different toxins actually doing? Do they make it harder for the mitochondria to do their job? Do they literally interact with mitochondria and then the mitochondria that are exposed to them, die off? Like, what are the series of things that are happening? Sure. So these various compounds minerals are really important co-factors for the enzymes that are used in the crept cycle. And could you break down the crept cycle? Because for a lot of people, that'll be new. What happens

in the crows cycle? Okay. So when we, in the cell, we can take glucose and make ATP. If you do it in the cytoplasm, we're not very good at that. But you can, and you do it without oxygen, you can make two ATP if you do it in the cytoplasm. Which is central for energy and powering everything in our body. And ATP is adenosine triphosphate. Our cells will use that ATP to drive all the other biochemical reactions that happen in life. Because in order for the chemical reactions to happen in life, there's usually a enzyme that's facilitated by a vitamin and a mineral co-factor.

and then you need to nudge it a little bit. You use the ATP to give it that nudge so the reaction can happen. And we use that to basically make the stuff that we have to make to stay alive. And life is really a series of self-controlled chemical reactions that allow us to grow and ultimately to reproduce. Beautiful. Very important stuff. So in the cytoplasm, you can take a glucose molecule, no oxygen, I can make 2 ATP.

If I have oxygen and I can put the glucose through the crept cycle through a series of steps that will be facilitated by the enzymes that exist in the mitochondria that are in the cell membranes of the mitochondria, then we can get up to 38 ATP per glucose molecule. So there's a big difference between 2 and 38. For that to happen, you need to have lots of B vitamins, you need zinc, magnesium. We can also facilitate this with the creatine, carnitine, coenzyme, Q, rival flibate. Neosin, niacin, these are molecules that are important to either making the enzymes in that pathway or shuttling in the fat or the glucose or the amino acid into the mitochondria. Where these heavy metals, lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, they compete with the

the nutritional minerals. And so the zinc and magnesium can't do their job. And the heavy metals are displacing them. And in your instance, you were getting some exposed to those, you know, you were saying like oil painting and being in medical school. But people don't have to be an artist or be a doctor to do that. It's often that many of those things are found in even a lot of the commercial cosmetics. Like if you're not buying from cleaner brands.

Yeah, yeah. Or if you're using a lot of fragrances or if you're being exposed to. Some of the things you mentioned before, even just a high dosage of pesticides regularly that you're being exposed to in your diet or eating foods that have a large concentration of pesticides. So that is one of the ways that most people that are listening today are going to be exposed. Yeah, most of you are being exposed because it's in our water. It's in our food supply. Depending on where you're getting your food, it will be in the food supply and in the water. Mercury is a byproduct of burning coal.

And the coal plants that are being burned in China, get into the air, come down in the rain across the Pacific and across the United States. So depending on the foods that you're eating, you will be at risk of some heavy metals. And our various regulations, on controlling the effluence that go into our air, into our water. Those regulations fluctuate according to government policy.

And more recently, some of these regulations have been relaxed. And so I know in Iowa, the quality of the water has sharply reduced in the last 20 years. and the I mean it's very very concerning we can also look at the number of wildfires the wildfires and the quality of air globally into the United States has been impacted by the amount of wildfires that are occurring

and just the deteriorating infrastructure you know piping and other things that have had decades of usage and have not been replaced and so you have lead, you know, lead exposure that's coming because the pipings have been, you know, kind of... It's not just Flint. Yeah. We're painfully aware of Flint, but the lead in the water system is much larger than Flint. Which is why, like, one of the best things that somebody could do today is just get like a good quality water filter at home, like a reverse osmosis or something like that.

You know, and I talk to my patients that we can start with just a pitcher that has... a filtration system that you pour your water through in the pitcher, that's very inexpensive. You can put it on your tap. You can get it under the sink with the reverse osmosis. They're also whole house water filtration systems. But I think everyone should be having filtered water. I had a kind of a mentor figure in my life many years ago who had this great phrase. He said, either you get a filter or you become the filter.

And I think that's important for people to realize that it's going to get filtered one way or another, but you don't want it to be your body filtering it out. You might as well have something else like a good quality water filter. And let me point out, Drew, that we also breathe a lot of air. And now that we have been tuned in to make our homes tighter, so the more energy efficient, we're more likely to have poor air quality indoors because of the synthetic. Components that are used in manufacturing for our homes, for our offices, because of the synthetic carpets, the synthetic building materials. It's a problem. All those parts per million, get into the air, we breathe them in. It affects cognition. It affects our mitochondrial health. It gunks up our lungs.

As you said, it's going to get filtered. Are you going to be the filter or are we going to filter first? And so again, I talk to my patients that, again, this depends on your circumstances. You can get filters that are good for your room or for your apartment or if you own your own home and you have a heating air-conditioning unit. You can get a filtration system that you can put on your, heating air-conditioning unit. That's what I've done. I have the filter replaced twice a year. And it's always very impressive, the amount of stuff that gets filtered out that the filter took out

as opposed to my lungs. It's so true. Even in the studio, there was a period of time when we were first moving in, we hadn't transported over our filters from our old studio. And I remember recording with the guest. And I just felt, I just felt like it was a whole. harder. I just felt like I wasn't as sharp. I felt like I wasn't fully there. And I wasn't even thinking it was the filter. Then the next week, we finally brought over the filters and we got them changed them out, turned them back on. We used something called Air Doctor. We're a big fan of it. And that day, that day, again, could be placebo, could be this. There's a lot of things in factors that are there, but that's my N of one experience. We turned on the filters and it's a pretty high

quality one. Not to mention the fact that we just had built this studio out. So there's a lot of volatile compounds in the air, even though we use low VOC paint, even though we use natural rugs and other stuff. Anytime you buy something new, there's always going to be waste product that's generated in air, off gassing, as you had mentioned. And so a filter has been super beneficial in that. So let's zoom out a little bit more. You were just talking about not poisoning our mitochondria, and we're going to come to your story. I keep on teasing it. We're going to come to your story in a second. Were there other things lifestyle factors, separate from environmental toxins, and that. How about exercise, sleep, other things? What did those look like on your journey while

you were headed towards your body, literally breaking down and you ultimately ending up in a wheelchair? So, you know, early in my life, yeah, I'm a farm kid, plenty of exercise, lots of sun, lots of vitamin D, go off to college. I'm not outside, but I need to exercise. So I get into long-distance running. I get into martial arts. So that exercise had a fair amount of high-intensity interval workout, which is really great free mitochondria. If you do a high-intensity interval workout, you'll stimulate your mitochondria to consolidate themselves so they're a bit larger. Is that called mitochondria uncoupling? Is that that process? Well, mitochondrial fusion. Fusion. Okay, got it. And then they will also, you'll

make more of them. So they're bigger, stronger, healthier. That is really good. And that's kind of like the beneficial stress that's there. It's like, hey, we need to rise to the occasion. And you know what? These mitochondria are not as strong because maybe they've been damaged or they haven't been taken care of. So we just need to recycle them and then... We'll clean out the old ones. We will repact them into bigger, larger, and then we'll make more of them. So it is great. But if you do it a little too hard, then that can become a problem. And so, again, I can sort of think about, you know, I like to push myself, and I probably

push myself much too hard. I was running 85 to 100 miles a week. Wow. And, you know, and I was doing that my first year of medical school. And then I couldn't do it in my second year of medical school. In retrospect, I think I did not give myself recovery time. And so hit is really good. High intensity interval training is great, but you have to be careful that you're giving yourself sufficient recovery time.

If you do not, you will begin to break down your mitochondria, and they won't be big, fat, and so plentiful. and you'll begin to feel like I'm losing ground, losing ground, losing ground. They'll be spread too thin. Literally. Wow. Absolutely. Amazing. Again, just the idea.

The next question I want to ask you goes right into this, which is that why is that modern medicine and going back to your days of learning about mitochondria back in medical school, how is it that we so overlooked the importance that mitochondria plays? with health? You know, so biochemistry, we memorize all those equations, cellular physiology, we memorize all of that stuff. What's sort of interesting, we never got taught this really basic concept. The food we eat becomes the cells we're going to have and the body we're going to have. So if you want a high-quality cell and a high-quality body, you really have to have high-quality inputs. Shocking.

Now, you know, I mentioned that I'm a farm kit. We certainly understood if you wanted to have a high-quality championship cow or pig or horse, you took very much interest into making sure you had high-quality rations. it is shocking that there was no nothing we were taught nothing about nutrition it's almost like that phrase you know i don't know who discovered water but it wasn't a fish right it probably wasn't a fish it was so obvious and in front of us but it was overlooked probably and and majorly connected to the idea of modernity right uh and modern progress and the idea of as you mentioned after the big world wars trying to feed and the depression and just thinking it's all about calories in and calories out.

And this is the modernization and we've figured out. We've hacked it as humanity. And with World War I and then World War II, we saw how powerful antibiotics were at taking people who were on the cusp of death from their overwhelming infection. And we could give them just a little bit of penicillin, a little bit of a sulfa antibiotic, and kill the microorganisms and the person would be restored to health. And so we thought that these other chronic disease states would find a magic drug that was just as powerful. And the NIH, the National Institutes for Health, was very interested in understanding physiology,

and that by understanding physiology and molecular pathways, we would be able to design these perfect drugs that would fix all of our chronic disease states. We did it before with antibiotics. we're going to do it again for every next thing that comes. For every other chronic disease. And at that same time, after World War II, there's this dramatic increase in the rates of non-infectious chronic disease states. These are the non-cimicial diseases. So there's a 400% increase, so four-fold increase,

in the rates of allergy and asthma, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, autism. I don't know what the rates are for anxiety, depression, mental health. I believe that's even fast, you know, steeper than the fourfold that we see for these other autoimmune diseases. It's truly a toxic soup that all added up together, probably came from good intentions, and then was kept alive through just profiteering, right? Yeah. profit motives, not a grand conspiracy. Most things that seem like a grand conspiracy can be simply chalked up.

There's actually a quote by Naval Ravikhan. He's like, most things that we look at that are a big conspiracy to suppress the population or do this or that are really just two things. Number one, a general sense of incompetence, like by the system often, right? The system just wasn't paying attention to it. And the second one is profit. Who doesn't like to make money? And they're not thinking that this is contributing to poor health.

so they keep that cycle going in the case of, you know, these big processed foods companies. Well, and the food tastes good. You know. And the food tastes good, too. That's an important point. It tastes good. It's cheap. The big food, which, by the way, big tobacco bought up big food.

And they learned that we will hire the best Ph.D. food scientists. And we will pay them great money to help design chemicals that we, that, you know, that, that will be generally regarded as safe, that we could add to the food to make the food even tastier, so the consumer will buy more of that, and that the consumer will feel uncomfortable if they're not consuming that food, so that they will crave it. And then they discover that, you know, if we begin marketing to the children, we could get the children to ask their parents to get more of these food items. And then when the children grow up to be adults, they will perpetuate consuming these foods. So we now have, you know, children, if you look at the fast food consumption in the United States,

on any given day, 37% of us are having fast food. And the younger you are, the more fast food you're having. It's 50% if you're under the age of 24. And you're likely to have all of your meals be fast food. If you do cook at home, you're probably eating a boxed meal that's already been prepared by someone else. You just open it up, put it in a pan, and warm it up. Our children, and many of our young adults, and even many of our old adults, have forgotten how to meal plan, how to shop, how to cook using ingredients.

If they cook, they're simply opening a jar or a box of processed food that someone else has already made. It's a challenging problem, and it doesn't seem like it's getting any better. A few years ago was the first year that the amount of money spending, eating out at restaurants in America, exceeded the amount of money being spent at grocery stores. And, you know, I get it. Even people who are pretty healthy, there's a push for convenience. There's more that we want to do. People are busy with their families.

Child care is an issue here in America. And, you know, women are in the workforce. And the brunt of what typically fell on for food production in the household was on the women. So everybody wants to live their lives. Everybody wants to self-actuate. And even if you're healthy, you want to go towards more convenience things. And I'm not exactly sure what the solution is. We were at an event this past weekend and there was a lot of conversations around that hosted

by your good friend Casey Means. Maybe towards the end of the interview, I'd like to talk. about, you know, what are some big picture magic wand stuff that we could do to move the needle forward. But coming back to the topic of mitochondria, I want to go to your story now. And we've set the stage a little bit by saying that understanding the role of mitochondria was central in your healing process. I showed an image in the beginning. And if you're listening on podcasts, you can find in the show notes. This is a before and after photo, one of you at your worst where you were wheelchair bound and then basically a year and a half later on where you're

riding a bicycle and you've been given this diagnosis of progressive MS and had been terrible for years and finally there was a little glimmer of hope we're going to tell that story out a little bit and some of what you went through but a big part of that was understanding the importance of mitochondria and by the way it's not just for MS and it's not just for autoimmune conditions is central for so many disease states that are out there, regardless of what people are suffering from, even if it's improving your focus, improving your day-to-day energy, improving your gut health, mitochondria is so key in that. So now, take us back to the story that you were sharing.

You were in med school. You were doing all the dissections and formaldehyde. When did you first start to notice your earliest symptoms that came from even before you noticed the diagnosis? You know, the first thing I could tell is that my athletic performance was slacking off. And I'm like, really annoyed with myself, so I push harder. And I'm losing ground. And I cannot fight as intensively.

So the first thing that falls is my athletic performance. And then I go off to clinicals. And now I can't run 100 miles or even attempt to run 100 miles. because I'm doing clinicals. And I'm exhausted, but of course everybody should be exhausted doing clinicals because at that point, you know, it was 80 plus hours of work every week. And then I start having twinges of discomfort at my temple. And they last a few days.

They were more likely to happen if I'd been under severe stress, not enough sleep. then the following year I had, it wasn't just twinges of discomfort, it was electrical in just a quick jolt of pain. And I could tell that it would be troublesome for random jolts that would be there for a day or two. nothing had any ability to cut the or turn off the discomfort. I finish medical school, I go off to residency, which is longer hours and more stress. And these discomforts are more frequent, more severe, and definitely when they come, it's electrical, quite unpleasant. but of course as a resident intern you know I could take time off you just you know

put up with it it take a lot of concentration to not grimace not grunt and not let anyone appreciate that actually I was in a whole lot of pain I finished residency I in my first year of private practice a romantic relationship of five years breaks up, that's pretty tough. So I'm depressed and stressed about that. I will also say, Drew, that your first year of private practice is often stressful because now you're dealing with the reality of private practice, which is quite different than training, quite different than what you expected. And you're like, oh my God, I spent eight years learning how to do this. I'm in this much debt to do this.

Like, oh, my God, what have I done? So it's very common for the first-year physician to go through depression and have to work through the fact that private practice is not what you anticipated. And just to clarify that, you know, I have a lot of doctors in my family and things like that. Is that the idea that, hey, I really signed up to be a doctor to make a difference and help people and you had this vision? and now in private practice you feel like you're just prescribing medicine? Well, you don't have the kind of relationship that you thought you were going to have. Because of time constraints? Because of time constraints.

Okay, so you get like on average like six minutes, eight minutes with your patient. And the amount of paperwork, the amount of support you might have or not have, it is, you're much more like a factor worker than you realized. Like, oh my God. isn't that shocking? And I have empathy for doctors because they went into this they went into this occupation to want to help people but now they feel like they're part of this factory

as you mentioned. You're sort of like a factory. And then the next thing that happens you know what I'm back to trying to exercise and so I have discovered rollerblading A roller skiing, cross-country skiing. And so it's August.

It's after work. I'm going to go out and rollerblade. And I'll do a 10-mile rollerblade out, turn around 10 miles home. And while I'm out, I didn't know, probably four or five miles. I realized that I'm blind in my left eye. Well, that's sort of upsetting. Scary. Oh, this is a problem.

and I decide that I should not rollerblade home, so I take off my roller skis, put them over my shoulder, and I walk home. I don't remember how long it took me, but it took me quite a while. By the time I got home, I could see again. So I do a neuro exam on myself, and everything checks out okay, and now I'm thinking, well, do I go in to see the emergency room now? That's going to be silly. So I go in the next day to see a neurologist.

and checks out everything looks normal. He sends me to eye. Everything looks normal. I get an echocardiogram. I get an MRI. I get anagram of my retinal blood vessels. And they decide I have a autonomic dysfunction of the retinal blood flow. And so I should not race in hot weather.

And they really didn't know. and they did not connect it to my episodes of face pain. In retrospect, between those two, you could have made the diagnosis of MS at that point. But I'm hugely, hugely grateful. They did not, because I probably would not have had my kids.

So, you know, I'm thrilled. They didn't put it together. I did figure out that if I raced, or I took a hot tub, or a sauna, I could not see very well. And so I knew like, okay, I can't race so hard anymore, and I'll help to have more moderate exercise. And I went ahead and I had my son.

I was having dinner with a colleague, and I had mentioned the fact that the color in my left eye was a little different than the color in my right eye. And she says, Terry, you're going to have MS someday. and my father died the next morning. So I forgot that comment because, you know, I was consumed by the unexpected death of my father. And then a couple years later, I had my daughter. And after my daughter was born, my face pains definitely picked up. They were getting to be more frequent, more severe.

I was on gabapentin every day. I was now sent to the pain clinic. I was sent to the Mayo Clinic because this was getting to be more and more troublesome. And so what would happen is that I would get higher doses of saliometrial. Pardon me. I would get higher doses of gabapentin and visit to the pain clinic when things turned on. And then I was on maximum dose of daily gabapentin. And still at this time, no diagnosis.

No diagnosis other than, you know, you have this trigemal neurologia. Right. And this autonomic dysfunction of the blood flow to my retina. So now 13 years after my episode of dim vision, I developed weakness of my left leg. And that is when I go see the neurologist. And he says, Terry, this could be bad or really, really bad. And so as I'm going through the world, up for the next, it takes three weeks to get the MRIs and the spinal taps and all the blood

work and a variety of things that had to happen. You know, I'm thinking about my, at that point, 20 years of worsening face pains. And I'm like, okay, I've got a progressive disease. And I also think about my father who had mononoritis multiplex, which is a progressive autoimmune disease affecting the peripheral nerves. You'd had 20 years, actually 27 years, a progressively horrific pain. And so I'm thinking, okay, my pain is going to eventually turn on permanently like my dad's. And this is going to be really terrible.

And he had motor weakness in the end as well. Something like, man, I don't want 27 more years of terrible life they saw my dad go through. So I want this to be something really terrible that's going to kill me quickly. because I don't want to be disabled. But three weeks later, I hear multiple sclerosis. My neurologist is very optimistic that things will go well. And I started on copaxone. I continue to decline within three years.

I'm 48. Now I told I have secondary progressive multiple sclerosis. I take my dysentron, which is a form of chemotherapy. It does not help. Because at the time, if I could just interject, the thinking is that, okay, your immune system is attacking your own body. How do we get your immune system to quiet down? Well, let's basically, you know, just get everything to quiet down. So that was the approach.

Right, right. And it was very potent. You know, I had neutropenia quite severe as a result of those mitazantron. And so, you know, being the firearm catholic. okay, I'm getting a lot of bang for the buck here. But, you know, I did not improve. I continued to go downhill. Then they said, well, we'll put you on Tysabry because Tysabry reduces the rate of relapse by 68%. It was the wonder drug. People were very excited. I was thrilled to be taking it. It did not help. And how does that work? What's the mechanism of that drug?

What were they thinking at the time that this drug would be able to do for you in helping you with the relapse? Well, it's a much more specific drug at a specific pathway in the immune pathway. And it is very effective. It's considered one of the most effective drugs at turning off relapsis, turning off the inflammatory component. However, now, so it did not work. They did not help.

They took me off that, put me on CELCAPT. I'm in the TITRECLECL wheelchair. my face pain is getting worse, and I'm like, you know what, I've got to be doing all that I can. I'm going to go back to reading the basic science. And at first, I'm looking for other off-label drug studies. Then I finally have the big aha, like, I should be looking for things that I could access. So I'm going to start looking for supplements. And I start reading for supplement articles.

And I'm looking at neurodegeneration because I'm thinking, Drew, I've had two relapses in my entire life. Otherwise, it's been this slow, relentless decline. And they've already told me that I'm in the progressive phase. This is not a inflammation problem. This is a neurodegeneration problem. This is a mitochondria problem. Now, at that time, no one's writing about mitochondria in MS. but I'm convinced it is a mitochondria problem.

So I'm reading articles about the animal models for Parkinson's, for Alzheimer's, for cognitive decline, for ALS, for Huntington's. And I'm reading basic science about mitochondria. I'm going back to my biochem textbook, like, okay. So what are the enzymes? What are the co-factors? What are the steps? and so I start taking vitamins, preotene, carotene, liposate, liposate, acolytic, coins, MQ.

And I do that for six months. And then the skeptic rears her head and says, you're wasting your money. Your own internal skeptic, your own internal voice. My internal skeptic says, you're wasting your money. And so I stopped them. And next day, I go to work, no big deal. But after 36 hours, it was really hard to get out of bed. Now, mind you, I am in a tilt-recline wheelchair.

I have a zero-gravity chair at work where I can lean back with my knees higher than my nose. I'm staffing residents. So my mind's still clear. And I'm very fortunate that I'm, you know, at the university and at the VA. but, you know, I just really couldn't get up out of bed to go to work, so I call in sick. And then after 72 hours, Jackie comes in and says, you know, honey, I think I ought to try those vitamins again. So I take them, and the next morning, I'm back to my usual level of fatigue.

I can get up and I can go to work. And then I come back and I'm like, wow, that was really interesting. You had that contrast, because it sounds like from the outside, and correct me if I'm wrong, you didn't really even notice how much better you were getting because it was slow. It was slow. It was slow. But you also weren't getting worse, but sometimes we don't know what we have until we lose it. Correct.

And I tell that story to my patients a lot that I couldn't tell that it was helping me until I stopped. And it took me 36 hours. see the difference. But at 36 hours, man, I really could not function. Now, and mind you, I'm not functioning great normally, but I was functioning way worse than normal for me. Just off of these vitamins, which again are playing a pivotal role in a whole host of things, but really supporting the mitochondria. Supporting the mitochondria. So I'm like, man, I got to try that again. So Jack and I agree that I can try it again. I'll wait two weeks. I stop the supplements. Again, it takes 36 hours to not be able to function very well. I wait,

send me two hours before I start my supplements again. And the next morning, I'm back to my usual level of fatigue. So I am so excited. Like, oh, you know, I'm figuring something out. And I'm figuring stuff out that my neurologist doesn't know, that my primary care doc doesn't know. By this time, I'm on the institutional review board, which means that I'm part of the committee that reviews research at the university. So I tell them, give me all the studies that have to do with the brain. I want to review those studies. So I'm getting more and more comfortable reading clinical protocols and reading the research. And now I'm committed, you know, every week I'm going to go looking for an article to read about the mitochondrial.

about neurodegeneration. And I'm not a neurologist. I don't have a PhD. So this is hard work for me, but I am so excited. But maybe if you were a neurologist or if you did have a PhD, you wouldn't necessarily even looked in that direction in the first place. You had the outsider, insider approach. I would never have put this together if I'd been a PhD because I know you wouldn't do this.

If I was a neurologist, I would know you wouldn't do this. Yeah, it's not going to work. you're going down a rabbit hole that's not going to lead anywhere. Now, just contextualize us at this time is the primary thing that you're doing is the inclusion of these vitamins. And of course, you can't move as much because your movement is not there. How did you made any changes to your diet at this point? Well, yeah.

So I had been a vegetarian low fat since, vegetarian since undergraduate days, low fat since medical school. And so very low fat, lots of beans, rice. vegetables. In 2002, shortly after my diagnosis, my neurology team introduced me to the work of Lauren

Cordane, and after a lot of prayer and meditation, I went back to eating meat. The following year, I needed the sort of inclined wheelchair. So I'd been a vegetarian, no legumes, no dairy, for four years. I was continuing to get worse.

I'd stayed with being a meat eater because I figured, you know, it's taken me 24 years to get wrecked my brain and my spinal cord. Who knows how long it takes to repair everything, maybe seven to ten years. So I was like, okay, I don't know. But the science seems reasonable, so I stayed with my paleolithic diet. And by the way, I was following the AIP version of that. AIP is the autoimmune.

Automine paleo diet. Yeah, got it. Okay. So, you know, no grain, no legumes, no dairy, meat, and vegetables. And then I'm reading, I'm slowly adding more vitamins. I just, in 2007, my chief staff calls me in and tells me he's going to sign me to the traumatic brain injury clinic. and then he describes the job that don't be residents,

I'll be examining the patients directly as part of a multidisciplinary team. I go home and tell Jackie and she goes, there's no way you can do that job. Because physically, I know she was right. I said, well, you know, come January, I'll either go to a clinic and I can do the job or I can't. And that was difficult because I was like, okay, I'm probably going to have to finally apply for disability. Then, I think it was the following week, maybe two weeks later, I had the study using

electrical stimulation of muscles in a spinal cord injury study, and I thought that looked really interesting. So I told Jackie I went to buy a device, she said, no, you're not doing that, but you can talk to your physical therapist. Maybe he'll do it for you. So I called my physical therapist and convinced him. He said that yes, he is with his athletes all the time. He could grow bigger muscles, but he didn't know if my brain could talk to those bigger muscles.

And I might be making things worse. But he did agree to give me a test session. He said it's going to hurt a lot, and you have a lot of issues with pain. So we did the test session. It did hurt a lot, but when it was over, I felt great. I felt the most joyful that I felt in a... very long time. And this is like an e-stem device, right? This is like a tense device. The frequency is a little bit different. You put them over the motor nerves. You get electricity, which feels like

brugs crawling on your skin at first. Then it becomes more intense. Then you feel the muscle spasm. And then while the muscle is contracting, you do a volitional contraction on top of it. and he would come in, he wanted to get as much contraction as I could tolerate. And then because you're releasing endorphins, it gets more comfortable. Every few minutes, he'd want to turn the current up and make it very uncomfortable again. So we did 10 minutes on my back, and then 10 minutes on each quad. So I had about 30 minutes of exercise. And there's modern-day versions of these devices.

You know, a lot of chiropractors use them. And just connecting the dots for our audience is the idea that by stimulating a particular region of the muscles and having that rapid contraction, you're sort of resetting up the nerves to be able to move that area correctly? You know, what happens, so we'll look at my muscles. My muscles had been doing hardly any work for a long time. So those poor mitochondria were very weak. The muscles themselves would have looked very ill under the microscope because muscles needed work. mitochondria need to do the work. And by forcing them to do work with electricity, we were revitalizing the mitochondria. We were revitalizing that muscle cell. And we also know that we were releasing

nerve growth factors locally in the muscles, and we're releasing nerve growth factors in my brain, which is why, and a lot of endorphins in my brain, which is why I felt euphoria. I think, felt had such a great mood at the end of the e-stem. Like, oh my goodness, it was striking. The cognitive effects that I had from e-stem, the mood effects I had from e-stem were compelling, incredibly compelling. So at the first couple of weeks, I would go back in, and I would get half an hour of e-stem three times a week. Then Dave found a homegoing device. a prescription device, it had me start doing the E-Stin at home and taught me how to use the device. Now, at that point, my exercise, which had been very faithful to do every day, you know, since I was an undergraduate,

but with the MS diagnosis, my exercise kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller. At that point, I had a little tiny 10-minute program that I could do. if I did more than 10 minutes, I couldn't function and go to work. So we start doing 10 minutes of exercise, and I'm doing e-stem while I'm doing my little workout. And about the same time, I discover this organization, the Institute for Functional Medicine. And they have a course on neuroprotection. And, you know, it's Catherine Wilner, J. Lombard. They're both board-certified neurologist, well-trained, I believe Jay trained at Harvard.

and so I ordered the course. And it's audio-synchronized PowerPoints, a lot of biochemistry, a lot of mitochondria. I was so excited. And the longer list of supplements. And I'm like rocking it. Yes, I want to have this big list of supplements for my mitochondria. And I'm doing my e-stem. Not a lot's happening yet.

But, you know, I totally accept that I have progressed. aggressive MS. My whole goal, Drew, is to keep what function I've got a little bit longer. That I can still use my hands, feed myself, that I could still take the few steps around the inside of my house, that I don't have to go to assisted living, I don't become a financial burden, you know, I want to keep what little function I've got going for a bit longer. That you could also be there for your partner and for your kids. Yeah, and my kids are still pretty young yet. So then I have this interesting aha moment.

And of course, now I sort of am embarrassed about how long it took to have this aha. Like, okay, so I have this list of supplements, 18, that I'm taking. And like, what if I redesign my paleo diet and I go look to see where these nutrients are in the food supply? And instead of just eating to avoid the harmful foods, I'm going to eat to eat the right foods. So, you know, that's more research that I have to do. And I start this new way of eating December 26. Now, for context, at that point, I cannot sit up in a regular chair. I can't go out to restaurants.

I can't go to movie theaters. If we go up to Wisconsin, we have to fully. recline my seat and have elastic straps to strap me in. And we take a zero-gravity chair that I sit in at our family's home in Wisconsin. And I'm having brain fog, which is why John did. And it's not to criticize John that he told me it's going to have to go to the traumatic injury clinic because it was reasonable that was I beginning to have cognitive impairment. and that I was going to have to finally quit seeing patients.

So I start this new wave eating December 26th. January comes, I got to go to the traumatic brain clinic. In the first two weeks, I just watch. It's like, okay, I should be able to do that. I'm just watching from my toiletline wheelchair. The third week, that Monday, I have to get up and do the exams, write the notes, sit down, you know, write the note, see the next person, do the exam, write the note.

And at the end of the day, it's like, well, that wasn't too bad. And that at the end of the week, you know, Jack's going, you know, that seemed to be okay, Terry. I said, yeah, maybe I can do this. At the end of the next week. So now we're five weeks into this. I'm thinking, you know, I have more energy. I think my thinking's clearer. And I want to try sitting, I want to try sitting at the table.

And so I was able to sit up in a regular chair for supper. That was a pretty big deal. Huge a deal. And so that's end of January. In February, my physical therapist says, Terry, you're getting stronger. We're going to advance your exercises. And so now I'm doing, you know, exercise this morning and afternoon. And I think it was probably the end of February.

I decided to mail a letter. So I have my walking sticks in my office, and I put a letter in my coat pocket, and I take my walking sticks. You know, and I walk down the hall, it's probably 40 yards, and I mail the letter in the mail slot. And my colleagues are like, Dr. Walls, you're walking. What happened? Quite remarkable.

And then, in April, I am going to go meet with my chief of medicine at the university. And this is something you do every two years. Now by this time, I've been walking around the VA hospital without walking six. But, you know, going to my boss at the university campus, I'm going to go down a hill, up a hill. You know, it's maybe a half mile. And like, that's too far. So I'll take my scooter. And I swapped out my toby-clined wheelchair for a scooter, which I hadn't been using for quite a while. So I was like, okay, it's too far out of walk. I'm going to take my scooter. I get in my scooter, and it dies going up the hill.

So I have to disengage the scooter. I push it up the hill. And then at the entrance, they offered a call the patient mobile and asked how long that will take. They said, well, probably about 20 minutes. So, oh my God, I'm already late. I'll just leave my scooter and I'll keep going. So I get to Dr. Rothman's office. I'm not quite late. The secretary shoes me and she's berating me for being late. I'm apologizing, explaining that my scooter died.

And so Dr. Rothman says, oh, so you had to wait for the patient mobile. I said, no, I push it up the hill and I walked over. He goes, you what? So I show him my electrical therapy device. I explain what I've done. He tells me that this was the best thing that you. he could have ever hoped for. And then he wants me to write a case report.

And that's, well, on myself. He said, yeah, work with your treating medical team, your physical therapist, but this is what I want you to do. And so we got there written up. He then talked with me and said, I want you to do what we call a safety and feasibility study, see if others with progressive MS can implement what you did. Do you hurt anyone?

Is it safe? And what's the effect size? And again, I said, you know, that's not the kind of research that I do. I do diagnostic error research. I'll get you the mentors. What you have done is quite remarkable. He literally saw the magnitude of it because this is somebody who previously had seen you and knew you at your worst. He knew me at my worst.

He saw this amazing recovery. He was a rheumatologist. So he knew autoimmune disease very well. And, you know, fortunately, he got me the mentors. It took me about a year to write the protocol very clearly what I had done, what we do for this study. I had reached out to Ashton Ambray in his nonprofit, gave him. us a little seed money. The manufacturer of the electrow therapy device that I used gave us 20 devices that we could use and the supplies. And one of my mentors had a PhD student. She would use the

study as her thesis. And we launched that study. And it was stunning. So we have people with primary and secondary progressive MS. The average level of disabilities between Kane and Walker. They have a severe level of fatigue at baseline. And they eat a standard American diet. You know, like one servings, one and a half servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Five servings of grains in dairy a day. A lot of fried food,

lot of processed food. We get them to basically adapt the walls diet very successfully. Begin a meditation program, begin an exercise program, begin doing electrical stimulation of muscles. And we have a remarkable reduction in fatigue severity, remarkable improvement in quality of life. If you're overweight, you lost weight very rapidly. As a matter of fact, I had to do safety reports. I have to do safety reports for all of my studies because people who are overweight lose weight very rapidly no one to date has ever become underway. Half of our people had remarkable improvement

in their walking function, which is remarkable because if you have secondary primary progressive MS, you anticipate a 10 to 20 percent worsening of gait every year. Yeah, you don't see people get better. People don't get better. You see them get maybe a little less worse. It slows a little bit, sometimes medication, but you don't see people get better.

And the fact that we kept this group of 19 who finished the study as a group stable is stunning. And that half of them had clinically meaningful improvements in gait remarkable. And how long was that period of time, that they were on the walls protocol, the diet? 12 months. Okay, so it was a year that you were seeing them. This was a year. And so I still do clinical trials. I still go around the state recruiting,

so I give these little lectures in communities around the state. So I run into our former city participants. It's so much fun. So it's 10 years after the fact. I'm sort of like at a revival meeting. These former participants stand up, they tell the attendees their experience and how our work has transformed their lives.

And then they'll say, and you know what? if I slip up and I stop doing the diet my fatigue is back my walking goes to pot and so this is what I'm doing forever it's a lifestyle now it is a lifestyle it is their life so a 70 year old lady

is in the senior band and she goes to the band it does some dancing the other lady that I've run into she is still working part time. She has grandchildren that she plays with and hikes with. She takes her dog on five-mile hikes. It, you know, and it is, it is fun. Like, we're at a revival meeting and they are preaching to the choir. They're very fun to watch. Through the program, you're literally giving

people their lives back. Absolutely. I want to zoom out for just one second. I know you're still telling your story, but just so that we have a container for the audience, you know, you're working with people that have this diagnosis of progressive MS. But this is fast forwarding a little bit, but just so people can follow along, even if you don't have MS, what you're later finding out is that this protocol that addresses the root issues that are going on with mitochondrial health, gut health, nutrient deficiencies, inflammation. It's not something that was only designed to fix MS, people who have other conditions also saw some pretty radical transformations. Can you list off some of those ones that are out there?

So what happened? The VA saw what I was doing. I ultimately got pulled out of the primary care clinic, the traumatic brain injury clinic, to create my new clinic, the therapeutic lifestyle clinic. And for that, they said you can do things the way you want to do them, which was basically the Wallace Protocol, although I knew not to call it the Walls Protocol in the VA clinics. But we went to, especially medicine, the pain clinic and primary care,

and I said, give me your most difficult cases who have pain, fatigue, brain fog, that you can't help. We're going to use diet and lifestyle and just give us your toughest cases. We got a few, had great results, then we got a few more, then we had a deluge. and so I kept having to redesign how I ran the clinic because I didn't want people to have to wait. So we went from small group appointments to large group appointments to basically classes. The kinds of problems that we saw

were people who had crying diseases, usually multiple crying diseases. They were often disabled, living on food stamps. Their chief complaints would most consistently be fatigue, pain, brain fog. And then they would have diabetes, obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, systemic lupus, psoriotic arthritis, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury. So a wide variety of problems.

And we treated them basically by fixing their mitochondria. We'd give them a pretty basic supplement cocktail around the mitochondria. we would give them basically the Walls diet. We had a meat-eating version and a vegetarian version for them. We would teach them shopping strategies, meal planning strategies. And remember, these people living on food stamps in rural Iowa, rural Missouri, shopping in small grocery stores in rural Midwest. And they're exhausted.

and they had tremendous success. People would come in, their energy is improving, their mood is improving, their mental clarity is improving, their weight is coming down, their blood pressure is coming down, their blood sugar is coming down. We are simplifying their medications. And I'm giving reports back to primary care, to specialty medicine, the pain clinic, every six months with what we're seeing, what we're doing. then I'm doing reports to the hospital administrators with what we were doing and the success we're having. Now, at that time, you know, starting going back to like our three foods that were pretty central because you mentioned that one of the things you did, which really helped you is that you asked

yourself, okay, I'm taking all these supplements, but where are these supplements found in food? And one of the highest concentrations was in things like organ meat, which was, which was, was on our top three list of foods in the beginning, bone broth, fiber, organ meat. Now, for these individuals, I can imagine, you know, individuals that you mentioned rural Iowa, food stamps on the lower rung of the economic spectrum. Were you including things like organ meat or was it like if you can find it? Like, how did you handle that? You know, in Iowa, there's too many deer. A lot of communities have forest hunts and will have venison in the lockers. So we talk about going to your local community in seeing if you can get some venison or talking to your hunting friends to see if

can get some venison. And we encouraged heart and liver once a week. We talked about getting the bones and hooves and making bone broth. We also talked about the importance of fiber. We would teach people how to make sauerkraut in kinchi. And we would talk a lot about green leafy vegetables, cabbage, onion, mushroom family vegetables, deeply colored vegetables. And I tell them, you know, the goal is nine cups a day. Right. And they're like, surely about nine cups a week. No, no, no, the goal is nine cups a day. And they would, they would get there. And what were you finding that there was their primary source? Because again, shopping and what's available to them. What were some of those, you know, how would they typically get to that

nine cups? What were some of those vegetables that were becoming the basis of that? Cabbage. Cabbage? So cabbage is plentiful and is fairly inexpensive. And one of your favorite snacks is purple cabbage. I see on Instagram all the time. And the other thing we talk about is how easy it is to grow kale collards. That if you have access to sunlight and dirt, that these leafy greens make all of this so much more affordable. We would talk about foraging. We live in a rural state. A lot of these people still have their rural roots.

Getting them outside to forage, we talk about dandelion greens. Quit spraying your yard and eat those dandelion greens. One of the things that we would do, Drew, is we would pass around a dandeline leaf and a kale leaf and have everyone chew that up and agree how incredibly bitter that is. And then we would make cooked greens. And we have to sort out if pork was going to be okay. If it was, we'd make bacon and greens. If pork was not okay, then we would saute in ghee and have a non-pork, non-bacon based. And then we'd pass it.

on the greens. And they're like, wow, actually, that's pretty tasty. But it was a big aha moment. If they could experience how bitter the food was and how it could become delicious, now it's way easier to think about nine cups of vegetables. And we explain the recipes. Here, it's very simple. You take some thick bacon, fry it up to the desired level of dundness. take out the bacon, chop it up, leave the bacon fat in the skillet, add your chopped greens, stir until it's wilted just a bit. And if it's downline greens, it'll maybe be 30 seconds. If it's kale or collards, it might be a minute or two. Add the chopped bacon back in and serve.

If it's not delicious, double a bacon and try again. And my vets are like, well, actually, that does sound pretty good. I explained that when we took fat away from the vegetables, then the bitterness comes through and you don't want to eat them, your kids don't want to eat them, and it's a big fight. If you put the fat back, that masks the bitterness. If they still feel it just a little bit bitter, add some basalmic vinegar or apple cider vinegar or lime juice, a favorite vinegar, and that'll bring the pH down, that will get rid of the bitterness, and that will make this much more delicious.

And as you mentioned, if people don't eat pork and they don't eat bacon, they can easily just do that with a little bit of ghee. Correct. And then put in some chopped vegetables or mushrooms or things like that. So we have the vegetarian version of that meal, and we have the pork-based version of that meal. And all of this is, again, you saw such a drastic change for yourself, and you are thinking at the recommendation,

and really the encouragement and the push of your mentors to say, this is rare. How do we help other people? And you're going out there and saying, give me your sickest. You put them on this program, but you're trying to have them do these crucial steps because this isn't about willpower. Food is so addictive and processed food is so addictive that if it's on willpower alone, everybody eventually will fall off the bandwagon. This is about this has to taste and feel good if people are going to keep it up.

And it has to be a family. intervention. So another thing that we did that was brilliant was patients came with their family. And we explained that this is a family intervention, that when you're eating with a patient, everything that's on the table is food that's good for the patient. When you're eating away from the patient, if you want to eat something else, fine, eat it, but don't come home and talk about it. and that we have the conversation about disease processes, how these things work, we pass around the really bitter vegetables. So everybody eats the really bitter vegetables.

Everybody eats the delicious coach greens. Everybody also eats the delicious green smoothie. And, you know, sometimes we let people bring in their kids so that children can see that, yes, other kids eat this stuff. And yes, this bitter food can become delicious. That made all the difference in the world. And about how much fiber are you having people have quantity-wise? So you're saying like nine cups, if you turn that into grams, like what would that be?

You know, I think rather than talking about a specific gram, let's talk about what we need to see. Yes. I think we have to check the microbiome every single day. And there's the Bristol stool chart, you know, one to seven. which shows like the composition, we'll link to in the show notes, but it shows the composition of like, what does your poop look like? Yeah, you know, it's very helpful. Are you constipated? Do you have diarrhea? It's a very useful research technique to have that numbers one to seven.

Patients don't get numbers one to seven, but they do understand the terms, are you pooping rocks? Are you poop in dry, prickly logs? Are you poop in smooth logs? Are you poop in snakes? Are you poop in pudding? or are you pooping tea? And we're all sort of giggling. And I say, okay. Now, the perfect poop is a snake, but if the snake is getting into your pants, it's no longer perfect.

I want you to have easily past bowel movements that you can control. If you're poop in pudding or tea, we have to back off in the fiber. And you need more bone broth and all of your vegetables are going to have to be cooked, souped and stews.

If you're pooping rocks, or prickly logs, you need more fiber. And you need more raw foods, more fermented foods. And we probably have to think about adding more chia seeds, more resistant starch into your diet. Now this becomes functional. And now people have something that they can track. And people love coming to clinic and talking about their snakes and comparing snakes or, you know, saying that they're back to the rocks and they got to work on getting some more fibrin.

That's a really easy to measure thing because if you think about it, like you see animals in the wild, like when they need to poop, they just poop. They don't need to, they're not constipated unless maybe they're in a zoo setting and they're eating sort of like in a natural diet. And that's how we were meant to be as human beings. Correct. We should be, you know, if you look at. Humans that are still hunter-gatherers, they're pooping big poops every time that they eat. With the exception, if you're in a society that is consuming only animal meats, so in the Arctic during the winter, when there's no plant material,

and you're eating only animal products, then constipation is a big deal. On the other hand, is constipation a problem if it's like minus 90 out and whiteouts and you're in your snow cave and going out and pooping a lot outside? Maybe it's a pretty dangerous thing. So I don't know. Maybe constipation was a okay thing if you're in the Arctic in the winter. Yeah. Now, we mentioned this at the beginning. I'd love to come back to it.

I know we're kind of towards the end of the story, but just worth teasing out. On the topic of fiber, you mentioned you have friends that are carnivore, right? Then you have primarily a carnivore diet? How have you seen who can handle more fiber and how have you seen how certain amounts of plant fibers can actually be aggravating somebody? How have you balanced that out and what have you seen from your own experience? So there's a big debate in the carnivore world that their perception, the various compounds, that are in plants are poisonous. And they feel pretty strongly that plants make these compounds basically as insecticides to keep away the insects. And by the way, you and me, and they're

relatively toxic. Plants don't want to be eaten. These are their defense mechanisms. Incorrect. And I agree with the carnivores. These are their defense mechanisms. They are also the hormetic stress that help us run our biochemical problems. processes more effectively. And so my carnivore friends love hormetic stress when it comes to high-intensity interval training. Sauna. Sauna.

Ice baths. They totally get that hormetic stress is really good. And they get that fasting is really good. And they forget that plants can also give us hormetic stress, which is why, you know, I'm so fond reminding everyone that you want to have. lots of diversity in your plants, and ideally diversity in your animal sources of protein as well. Because there are lectins in all living tissue, whether it's plant-based or animal-based. And if we have diversity in those food sources, those little poisons are not going to be a problem.

We know that I love kale. I think kale is a really wonderful food. But if I ate kale every day, day in and day out, the toxins in that kale would eventually accumulate and my health would decline. I had a best friend of mine that did that for years. He didn't really grow up eating a lot of vegetables. And then when he kind of switched his diet and at one point in time became like a raw vegan, he learned how to make like a kale salad.

Like I showed him like, hey, listen, you can make a kale salad. You can make it really enjoyable. You could put a little bit of cold pressed olive. olive oil, organic olive oil, you had a little sea salt, lemon juice, you massage it together, and you kind of wilt it down. At the time, we didn't understand that cooking is actually another important process to sort of help make it easier to digest. He ate only a kale salad for years, and then one day he was visiting me here in California,

and he had just incredible what he thought was back pain. And then he couldn't figure it out, he was just laying down, he was like, I'm not sure. Then he went back home, he got checked out by the doctor, and they were like, you have a massive kidney stone. And we think, you can't know for sure, but that all that, you can't know for sure, but that all that Cale has been known to, if you just eat kale day in and day out, that could contribute to a kidney stone. Correct, correct. Diversity is key. Diversity is key. Diversity is key. For you, especially at where you're at right now, do you still include nine cups of vegetables a day in your diet?

You know, I probably less. Over time, I became lower and lower carbs, so I am much more ketogenic. although what I really do is I go between a ketogenic and a higher fat diet so that I, a little bit higher protein, higher carb diet to have metabolic flexibility, because I think that's what our ancestors really did. You worked incredibly hard to get your food, so you're in ketosis, probably on the basis of exercise. You have successful gathering or hunting, bring back the food. the social compact for the ladies was we cooked for the guys the guys ate first and we got the food

but we all had plenty of food for a couple of days so that's the refeed probably higher in protein and lots of fiber and lots of greens color and root fibers then we have to go out and get our food and again we're going to be in ketosis on the basis of exercise so I I like to think that that's what I'm trying to do is maximize my metabolic flexibility. I will be in a ketogenic diet and then a lower carb diet. I want to make the observation. I now know that my early antibiotics before the age of three meant that I probably have a overabundance of Canada albuacans in my gut. And so as over the years...

Which is a particular group of bacteria, bacteria strain? A particular group of yeast. Yeast. Sorry, I meant yeast. My apologies. Yeah, because the antibiotics kept suppressing my bacteria so the yeast could bloom. And because your microbiome is set by the time you're age three, my microbiome is set to want to grow too many Canada albuacans. So, in fact, I've come to realize that my mood is much happier. if I have a lower carb diet. And so, you know, for years, I did a ketogenic diet with only probably about four to six cups of

non-stargey vegetables, in very few root vegetables, very little fruit. I now will probably do four to five cups of vegetables, high fat, followed by a little higher protein, still relatively lower carb, because I recognize that my mood is much better if I don't feed all of that candida alvacans. I also will take some herbal supplements to try and keep the candida at bay. That's great. I mean, people are continuously following along with your journey, so they're always curious about how it evolves over pretty time. And I should make the observation. I realize that ever since I was an adolescent, I have struggled with depression. It has been a huge challenge for me.

One of the things I discovered is that exercise helped me out a whole lot. When I couldn't exercise, that was very difficult for my mood. And now that I could exercise, that's very helpful. Now that I put together, for me, a lower carb diet means that I have much less trouble with depression. I was telling you that I want to introduce you to a gentleman who was just, just on this podcast, the episode will have been out by now, Dr. Chris Palmer, and through a hardcore ketogenic diet that still has a lot of vegetables inside of it, low-carb vegetables, exactly how you're eating and saying you're eating. He is suppressing and having seen remissions

of depression, of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia where patients were on medications for 30 plus years. It's quite amazing the work that he's doing out there in Harvard. And I feel like, the two of you are super sympathetic and I want to connect you, but that just goes back to your point that there's something that's there. And does that mean that a long-term ketogenic diet is right for everyone? No, because your big thing is you're all about personalization based on your situation. Absolutely, absolutely. The more, if you're not, for instance, depressed or maybe you don't have an autoimmune condition, you may benefit from just cleaning up your diet, getting rid of the processed foods, having some more vegetables, including some of these superfoods that you'd throw in at the beginning,

the fiber, the bone broth, you know, a little bit of liver if you eat those foods. And that could be enough because your basis between your gut bacteria, your exercise, your toxic load, may not be as worse as somebody else. Correct. You know, and I think of my level one diet is basically a gluten-free Mediterranean diet. Yeah. And for many, many of my veterans, they did great on a level one diet. And we have others who we need to put in more of a ketogenic diet.

Totally. You really want to pay attention to what are their risk factors, how are they responding. And I start with the simplest dietary intervention. And we progress if they're not getting the results that they're looking for. But we also progress at the pace that they and their family are willing to go. Yeah. Well, you're one of the few in the space that has really, through your work, and the clinic that you were involved in and founding your own clinic has done research on your methodology.

So give us the latest update. The last time you were on, you kind of gave a summary of the work that you'd done up until that time. What's the latest update on the research as it comes to looking at MS, as looking to the Walls Protocol, and what it can do for people? So we're up to our eighth clinical trial. That's huge. Congratulations. Very exciting.

we've got 24 scientific publications that we've published on the various studies that we've done. The most recent completed study was the parallel group comparing the low-fat swank diet to the Walls elimination diet. And we're able to show we had a 12-week observation period, show that fatigue, quality of life and function is stable. Then you randomize them to the swank or the Wall's diet. fatigue reduced for both groups. So that's great. The fatigue was more reduced in the Walls Group than the Swank Group, in quality of life, improved in both groups. But again, it was more improved in the Walls Group than the Swank Group. I think the take-home message is the Standard American Diet is not going to help you. If a low-fat diet speaks to you, by all means, do that, get rid of the added

sugar, processed foods, and that'll be very helpful. If you're open to doing the Wall's diet, I think you can be hopeful that you'll have even greater reduction of fatigue and an even greater improving quality of life. We have two more studies that we're getting ready to analyze the data. One is a look at people who are newly diagnosed with MS, who declined taking drug therapy, and then people who were newly diagnosed who are just getting standard of care. drug therapy. And we started that just as the pandemic is going to start, so we had a switch from an in-person visits to a virtual study. We are cleaning the data, we'll be analyzing and comparing, because this was a non-randomized study, it was people who chose to not take drugs

or chose to take drugs. And the question is, can the people who didn't take drugs do just as well with diet and lifestyle as the folks who took drugs. I don't know that answer, but when I come back next time, I'll be able to tell you. Well, it's exciting because I think we're so lucky for so many drugs that we have. And you talked about the history of antibiotics. And there's a big question and a review today of do in some instances drugs not make a difference or even worse, do in some instances do they make it worse to recover, especially when people are leaning into these lifestyle and dietary changes. And that's a good question because I think

previously people would have said carte blanche, you always need the drugs, don't get off your drugs. And of course, people need to make that decision with their physician. It's so contextual, so personal. But especially in the category of mental health, there's now really strong evidence that's there that in many instances, long-term usage of psychiatric drugs for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. we had on Robert Whitaker, who's the author of a book called Anademy of Epidemic, the data started building up bigger and bigger that these drugs were causing more long-term damage than harm because they were attacking the mitochondria. There's a problem.

Inadvertently. And it really is just a matter of if at the end of the day the goal is to help patients, we should be willing to question the status quo so that we can further contextualize and personalize. It's not go on drugs, it's not go off drugs. it's that when are they helpful, when are they harmful? The other question is, could diet and lifestyle do just as well as drugs? Right.

Maybe, maybe not. But this will begin to answer that question. That's great. I'm so happy that you guys are doing that. Then the other study that we're doing is we have an online program that teaches these concepts, the autoimmune dimension master course. and we took people with MS who were randomized to get access to the course or to wait 12 weeks and get access to the course. And we are measuring the change in fatigue, quality of life, and dietary intake.

So we'll be looking at that. And is the idea around that that, look, there's not enough doctors, you don't have enough appointment slots, you barely see people directly right now because you're primarily focused on the research, the way that it should be. So could even online protocols help that have some level of, you know, access and information, could they be helpful, at least more helpful than what we have right now? Which is nothing. Yeah, which is nothing. Yeah. That's a great question. So we're excited about that. And another thing I'm very excited about, we have a long COVID clinic. and we have that physician has just joined our team

and we're going to add the long COVID population. So those people have persistent fatigue, brain fog, anxiety depression for more than six months after their initial COVID diagnosis. We're going to put them through this and we'll see what happens. So I'm very excited about that. It's truly amazing. You know, we need people at all levels to make progress. We need folks from the inside that are doing these incredible studies like yourself.

We need educators from the outside. We need people to create recipe books. Like, we got to just hit it from all different angles. Absolutely. Because that's the only way that you truly have a true cultural shift is that now people think that this crazy idea. I mean, you literally, I have mentioned this in intro, you went from being banned from the National MS Society to a few years later being given a grant for a million dollars to fund your

research. And what happened in that time, you didn't stop and you showed what was possible. Absolutely. And that is huge. And I just want to acknowledge you for that for a moment, because you're an important pillar of started with MS, but now going even further of who knows all the different functions and diseases and symptoms that we can improve by following something like the Walls Protocol. Now, we have a very exciting study that my postdoc fellow, Tyler Titcombe, did. He looked at the dietary intervention studies done in the study of multiple sclerosis that looked at either fatigue or quality of life.

And so he's completed that analysis, very exciting stuff, that was submitted to neurology, and that's been accepted. He's working on page proofs. He and I were talking about that this morning, and I'm very hopeful that when that paper comes out, he'll be interviewed, hopefully, by NPR and a whole bunch, he'll get a whole bunch of press. Because no surprise, diet really has a huge impact on both fatigue and quality of life. Yeah. Even if you don't have a diagnosis and our hope is that everybody that's listening today,

even if you don't have autoimmune condition, even if you don't have autoimmune condition, even if you don't have MS, even if you don't have Parkinson's and some of these other diseases that the Walls Protocol has have a bunch of case studies of improvement on. Eating this way is the best way to prevent those things from happening in the future. And on top of that, it's not just about the future. You get more energy now. You get more mental clarity now. You have the ability to focus now, which means more time for all the things that you love in your life.

Think about the things that you love in your life. Think about the things in your life that deserve the love. love and attention. Maybe it's writing a book, starting a new business, volunteering at your local church, mosque or synagogue or temple, whatever it is, spending time with your grandkids, spending time with your husband, your wife, whatever. When you feel good, you have more energy to do all those things. I should tell you that our vets made the observation. Because we had young men and young ladies in the Ichmach brain injury clinic who had lost their love life, who had lost their sex life who had lost libido. And as we put them through the program, you know, blood pressure

is coming down, blood sugar is coming down. But the men are coming back with a big smile because like, oh my God, you know, my friend is back. I'm getting, you know. They're back to having that morning erection. They are so excited. Which is a perfect sign of vascular health, nitric oxide production, all those things. If you're, men, if you're listening or women that are listening, that I have a partner that's a man. If your partner does not have, if your man in your life does not have erection in the morning, that's a sign that maybe the diet needs to be cleaned up.

Yes. And the Walls Protocol could be a big part of that. Would be a big help of that. And then let me tell you about the eighth study, the study that we're recruiting for right now. Yes, please. So this is, we'll be, I think, the largest and longest dietary intervention study

that's been done in the setting of MS. We'll be comparing a ketogenic diet, a Wall's elimination diet, and a usual diet. Like a standard American diet. Well, people eat whatever they're eating now. Whatever they're eating. Got it.

So if they're eating, whatever dietary pattern they're eating now, they get to continue. They will come in at time zero for MRIs and measurements of walking, hand function, vision function, working memory, and we'll get measures of their mood, fatigue, quality of life. They'll come back at three months for some repeat blood work. Then they'll come back at 24 months, and they'll get all the assessments again, including the MRIs. The MRIs will not

have contrast in them, but their research MRIs, so it's a much bigger magnet, so we can still see do you have enhancing lesions or not. And we'll see, did your brain volume change in that two-year period? The primary outcome is what effect does diet have on quality of life at six months. The secondary things that we're looking at are walking hand, vision, and brain volume change. One of my hypotheses, which I'm very excited about, is improving your diet, can get your brain volume loss back to healthy aging. Because you see, if you have MS, the average brain volume, loss is 0.7 to 1% per year. Wow.

Healthy aging is 0.1 to 0.3% per year. So if you have MS, your brain is shrinking at three times the speed of a healthy adult. If I can get brain volume loss to healthy aging through food, that is phenomenal. And I want to make the observation that we know people who do dietary intervention studies who volunteer are not like the average American. They have agreed to say, I want to work on improving my diet. I'm willing to do a ketogenic diet. I'm willing to do the paleo diet. And in my consent, I have to describe both diets. Yeah. So in the control group, we know full well that the control folks, many of them will decide I'm going to follow, I'm going to attempt to follow one of these diets

because I got a terrible disease and I want to do better. So we have a, we have a lot of, a variety of ways that we'll be measuring what people are eating so we know what the control group is really eating. It's quite possible that I won't be able to see a difference between the three groups because I know that all three groups will improve. It's possible that keto may improve the most. It's possible that paleo may improve the boast. It's also possible that all three it will improve in a fairly equivalent fashion. If what I, and so that would be quote a negative study. But if what I'm also able to show that brain volume loss is now for the first time,

the same as healthy aging, that will have huge public health implications for everyone with MS and for everyone who wants to have a healthy aging for their brain. Because is it correct that we don't have a single drug right now that can stop brain volume loss? None. None. So now we have a dietary lifestyle approach, which not only makes your whole body healthier, but has no side effects. That could potentially, we'll see through this what you're doing, potentially help out with brain volume loss.

The side effect that I anticipate, I will have to, and this is what I've had to do for every one of my studies, people lose weight, lose weight rapidly. If you're overweight, you lose weight without being hungry. And we watch that. So far, no one's ever become underweight. And I predict that I'll be telling my safety committee, you know, every six months, all of our weight loss data. And I fully anticipate. The side effect will be, if you're overweight, you'll get back to healthy body weight. Which there are people that are hoping for that side effect.

Yeah, it's a pretty good. Yeah. Terry, that's a great review of the literature. the studies that you guys are working on, the trials. Let's talk to people a little bit as we wind down here about just your ecosystem. If they want to get started down this pathway, they want to try on the walls protocol, whether they have full-blown autoimmune or a diagnosis of one of the disease states that we mentioned earlier or whether or not they just want to maybe have that side effect of losing some weight,

having better cognitive health. Where are the places that you've set up with your team for them to get started down that path? Well, the first thing you could do is go pick up my book, The Walls Protocol, and the Companion Cookbook, Walls Protocol, Cooking for Life. Great place to start. Then it could come to my website, Terrywalls.com, and there we have a whole bunch of resources to help you. We've got a Walls diet app that will give you recipes to get you started. we have a Walls Protocol mobile app which has taken the, it was a 112 different discrete action steps that you could begin tracking and following to help you implement those habits.

Then we have the online program that we talked about, the autoimmune intervention mastery course. we a couple times a year will run the radical health upgrade which is a coaching program that involves me and my staff and we have a limited private practice and so we've got all of that information again on my website terry wales.com beautiful terry if there's a final words of wisdom message for anybody that's out there that's suffering that feels like they've hit rock bottom they're not sure how to move forward but you know they're listening to this interview, they're hearing your story, they feel hopeful. What do you want to leave that person with? You know, if I can come back to the point where I can bike, hike, and jog in my neighborhood,

then they can have hope to. Do this as a family, sit down with your family, agree what you're going to add to your diet, where you're going to reduce, where you're going to eliminate, and just begin gradually making your changes, one small, achievable. step at a time. If you need help, reach out. We'd love to give you a hand. Incredible. Dr. Terry Walls, thank you for being on the podcast. It's always a pleasure to have you here. Please come back any time and give us the latest updates. Your story is truly inspiring for everybody listening. Thank you.