The Dr. Hyman Show - How This Doctor Reversed Her Multiple Sclerosis With Food And Lifestyle

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

How This Doctor Reversed Her Multiple Sclerosis With Food And Lifestyle | This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens In 2000, Dr. Terry Wahls was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. By 2003, she had to start using a wheelchair because of the progression of this disease. Conventional medical treatments were failing her, and she feared that she would be bedridden for the rest of her life. Dr. Wahls began studying the latest research on autoimmune disease and brain biology and decided to get her vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and essential fatty acids from the food she ate rather than pills and supplements. To do this, she adopted the nutrient-rich Paleo diet, gradually refining and integrating it into a regimen of neuromuscular stimulation. She went from almost being bedridden to completing an 18-mile bicycle tour. Dr. Hyman sat down with Dr. Wahls to discuss the types of plant foods, proteins, and fats that Dr. Wahls incorporates into her daily diet as well as the supplements she recommends. They also explore the lifestyle changes that she made including meditation, stress reduction, movement, and much more. Dr. Terry Wahls is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa. She is the author of The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine and the cookbook The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life: The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners a full year supply of their Vitamin D3/K2 Liquid Formula free with your first purchase, plus 5 free travel packs. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to take advantage of this great offer. Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Terry Wahls, “Terry Wahls on How She Reversed Multiple Sclerosis Using the Power of Functional Medicine” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrTerryWahls

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I restructured my diet and within a month my fatigue was markedly reduced. My mental clarity was clearly improving. In three months I get up and I'm walking with a cane. In nine months I'm on my bike and I pedal around the block for the first time in six years. And in 12 months I do a 20 20 mile bike ride with my family. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. My main goal with diet is to use food as medicine. But even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients. Our soils have become depleted and our digestive tracts just aren't working so great.

They're compromised by stress and toxins and they just can't absorb nutrients as efficiently as they should. And that's why I always use, and I recommend to my patients, a multivitamin mineral as nutritional insurance. It covers the basics for all our day-to-day body functions, all the things that we need that our food might be missing. But there are so many products out there I wouldn't go near because they contain artificial fillers or inactive ingredients and you have to be pretty picky. The one I trust and take myself is Athletic Greens. They use high quality, highly absorbable forms of vitamins and nutrients from real whole foods. Athletic Greens comes in a powder that tastes great and mixes easily with water or smoothies and specifically supports my gut health, immunity, energy, and recovery. And it's not just vitamins and minerals. It has

phytonutrient-rich superfoods and adaptogens and pre and probiotics and even digestive enzymes. I love that they add the digestive support in their powder since so much of our immune strength and overall wellness starts in the gut. It's really one supplement that covers so many bases and you'd be hard-pressed to find something else in this comprehensive form in any single other product. I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine and I love having it with me whenever I travel. I also love that it's diet-friendly, whether you're vegan, paleo, keto, dairy-free, or gluten-free. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering my audience a full year supply of their vitamin D3K2 liquid formula, free with your first purchase. Now, these two nutrients are also so vital for a strong immune system and strong bones, and many of us are not getting enough of them. I use the Athletic Greens

powder and their D3K2 formula to make sure I get extra nutrients that complement my diet. They're also going to give you five free travel packs as well. Just go to athleticgreens.com forward slash hyman to get your free year supply of vitamin D3 and K2 and five free travel packs with your first purchase. You'll get it delivered straight to your door and I promise you'll feel the difference Athletic Greens can make in your daily wellness routine. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Hyman. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kea, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Dr. Hyman frequently says, food isn't like medicine, food is medicine. and it works quicker and better than many drugs on

the market. This was certainly proven true by Dr. Terry Walls, who used the power of food and lifestyle change to treat and reverse her MS. She sat down with Dr. Hyman to tell her story and discuss how the protocol she developed is proving effective in treating a wide range of illnesses. Routinely, I'm being contacted by people who are telling me that their treating physicians had given up on them saying there was nothing that they had to offer them for a condition, which I, of course, have never heard of. And they're telling me that they've implemented the WALS protocol and that their functions are improving. I mean, it sounds too good to be true, but the truth is that when you look at

the principle of creating health, there are certain foundational concepts here, the right food, exercise, stress reduction, sleep, the right nutrients. And it doesn't matter what disease you have, because when you provide the body what it needs, it often can recover. So it's not like there's one treatment for MS, another diet for cancer, another diet for Alzheimer's, another diet for rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis. It's the same principles that you can apply to all these things. Tell us, Terry, how you kind of found your way to health through this approach that you call the WALLS protocol. So in 2000, I was diagnosed with MS. I knew I was headed towards becoming bedridden, possibly demented. I was having more and more trouble with severe pain

that was very difficult to control. Later I discovered on one of my Google searches the Institute for Functional Medicine and I took the course on neuroprotection in the midst of my brain fog. So this was a bit challenging but I got through it. I had a longer list of supplements, a little deeper understanding of the things I could be doing for my mitochondria and for my brain, and I added that.

And then I had another really, really big aha moment, like I should take this list of supplements and redesign my paleo diet to maximize the nutritional intake. So I restructured my diet and within a month my fatigue was markedly reduced, my mental clarity was clearly improving. In three months I get up and I'm walking with a cane. You got out of your wheelchair. I'm out of my wheelchair, walking around with a cane.

And in nine months, I'm on my bike and I pedal around the block for the first time in six years. And in 12 months, I do a 20-mile bike ride with my family. Unbelievable. So it was a year. A year. Now, take us a little bit slower through what you did because because you ate the paleo diet, then you did the drugs, but then you went to this neuroprotection module from IFM, and you learned from there what you could do to optimize your system.

I had this very intensive nutrition, so I ramped up my vegetables to like nine cups of vegetables a day uh which is 18 servings not the five to nine yeah yeah 18 servings uh and so a small amount of meat lots and lots of vegetables and very specific groups of vegetables very specific groups very specific medicinal effects that you talked about exactly people are probably listening but what, but what are the 19 or 18 servings of vegetables you ate and what groups were they in? What do they do? Okay. So first, and I think the most powerful one is all these greens. So I was having tons and tons of green leafy vegetables. So I was probably having six to, actually six to nine cups measured raw.

Collards, kale. Collards, kale, a little bit of spinach. I was very, I really craved kale in a huge way, but I'd have collards, I would have Swiss chard, I had lots and lots of salads, would have some cooked greens. I was very big into cabbage family vegetables. So cabbage, broccoli, turnips, rutabagas, lots of it raw, some cooked, but it's also very, very big into raw. Garlics, lots of garlic, shallots, onions.

Because they have sulfur, they boost the thione. Boost the detox, boost your ability to make gamma-aminobutyric acid, intracellular glutathione, and then very much into mushrooms. Mushrooms stimulate and prime adaptive and innate immune cells. They also stimulate your ability to make nerve growth factors. And medicinal mushrooms are powerful. Very powerful. They have all kinds of amazing ingredients that are in other foods. And garlic and mushrooms are medicinal foods

across many, many cultures across all the continents. So, these are medicinal foods with a lot of ancient cultural wisdom. So greens, brassicas, garlic and onions and mushrooms. And then color. So the polyphenols are a marker for color. And the polyphenols, again, in study after study, the more color you have, the lower the rates of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancers. So, you want color.

And furthermore, blue, purple, black, a lot of studies showing you can have measurable improvement in cognition in as little as 16 weeks using just a cup of blueberries as in placebo double-blind crossover trials. That's hardly any time at all. No, that's amazing. Not Skittles though. Not Skittles.

Those are colorful. Those are the wrong kind of color, my friend. So again, three cups of deeply pigmented stuff. And then fats. You know, fats um a critical role all of our cells are wrapped in fat they're uh fat wrappers the cell membranes uh and our brain uh is 60 to 70 percent fat um so your nerve coverings which get destroyed in ms are also fat fat and they need arachidonic acid they need a cosapentanoic acid they need the fat. Fat. And they need arachidonic acid,

they need acosapentanoic acid, they need the cosexanoic acid, they need omega-6 and omega-3 fats. And so I needed to have more fat in the diet. Did you use saturated fat? No, actually I did. So I used lots of fat. So we'd have flax oil, hemp oil in the dressings that I'd use

and then we would cook in saturated fat, I'd use coconut oil, I'd use bacon fat, duck fat. My vets, because for years I worked at the vet, so I would teach the vets my favorite recipe was bacon and greens, you cook up some bacon, take the bacon out, leave the vets, my favorite recipe was bacon and greens. You cook up some bacon, take the bacon out, leave the bacon fat, dump in the greens, stir them around until they're wilted, add the bacon back. If you didn't like it, just double the bacon the next time you make it. And my vets would go like, oh my God, you mean I can eat bacon?

That actually sounds like it would taste wonderful. And we have lots of avocados as well. I get into nuts and seeds. And so what is remarkable was the speed at which I could see the difference in 30 days. Well, think about it. You took all these drugs. They didn't work. But when you use food as a drug, as medicine,

it actually worked faster and better. Very fast. And that's exactly what I saw in clinic. I was able to teach my residents in clinic as well that food is the most powerful medicine. And it works amazingly fast. Faster, better, cheaper than most drugs. Yes. It's an amazing substance. And when people understand it's not just calories,

as we learn in functional medicine, it's information, and they can go, wait a minute, I can upgrade my biology by putting better information in. Into your body, absolutely. I'll also add in there, I added in electrical stimulation of my muscles. That was a technique that athletes have been doing for decades to speed the recovery from athletic injuries. So my physical therapist had agreed to let me add that. So I was doing that.

I had gone back to adding meditation at night. So I added that back. Were there diagnostic tests that you did on yourself that you discovered anything that was off or out of balance? You know, so into my recovery, so two years into my recovery, I thought, well, I'm sure toxic load was a big issue in all of this. So keep in mind I've been walking around, hiking now, I've been biking, very little pain.

So I'm in great shape. And I finally did a 24-hour heavy metals challenge test and I was diffusely toxic in everything. All your metals were high? All my metals were high. I think there were only four that were not high. Now, the other thing that I should tell you, I repeated all of that four years later and everything is gone.

Amazing. So, who knows like how incredibly toxic I was in the very beginning. Before, right. In the very beginning. How did you get rid of them all? Well, when I designed my protocol, I designed it around boosting the detox enzymes. So that's why I stressed the greens, the sulfur, the color.

I added in there some acetylcysteine and some algae as well. Binders to get the metals out as well. And things to help regulate your glutathione. And then the other thing, six months into my recovery, I was able to overcome my heat intolerance. Yeah. And so I got a sauna and I've been sauna-ing ever since. Amazing.

So it's basically food, supplements, electrical stimulation. And very basic supplements. I mean, B vitamins, N-acetylcysteine and algae, that's it. That's it. No vitamin D? Well, yes, there is vitamin D there, of course. Because there's evidence around vitamin D. Yeah, plenty of vitamin D. And I also use sunlight. Sunlight.

Sunlight is more effective than vitamin D orally. You put sunblock on your face, but the rest of your body will definitely be a good one because you don't want to age fast. But yeah, it's powerful. I agree. So you've taken this insight that you had from your own healing. Yes. And you've done an extraordinary thing,

which is you've created a model that you use to treat patients and to train other physicians and providers and to do research in this space. So you also are exploring not just MS but other brain issues. So talk about the kind of things besides MS that you're working on and what kind of results you're seeing. So in my lifestyle clinics, again, we were able to keep track of who's coming to see us. Pain was the number one reason that people would come in.

Then autoimmunity, metabolic problems like diabetes, heart disease. In terms of the types of neurologic problems that people would come in, Parkinson's, myasthenia gravis, cognitive decline, Alzheimer's, of course, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, mood disorders. Pretty much everything for which we have very poor treatment. Poor treatments, poor treatments. And certainly what we consistently would see, some of the first things people would notice is fatigue going down,

energy going up, mental clarity improving, brain fog diminishing, irritability diminishing. Quality of life. So quality of life absolutely improving. The protocol is anti-inflammatory, it's detoxifying, it's mitochondrial boosting, it's gut repairing. Absolutely. These are all the foundations of creating health and so when you do that regardless of what condition you have people seem to get better.

You know and I'm trying to teach people that what we need to be focusing on is the creation of health, that this is your best treatment for whatever chronic disease you have. Yeah. You don't do it by treating the disease, you treat... You create health. Health, right. You create health. And the disease goes away as a side effect, I often say.

It will often diminish. There is no magic bullet when it comes to treating MS, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, or any of the other pervasive chronic diseases we are seeing so much of. Yet what you eat has the ability to program your body with messages of health. Food contains information and it has the power to prevent and reverse so much illness and disease. If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Terry Walls and the Walls Protocol, I encourage you to check out her full-length conversation with Dr. Hyman. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with your friends and leaving us a comment below. Thanks for tuning in. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's

episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner.

If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.