The Dr. Hyman Show - Terry Wahls on How She Reversed Multiple Sclerosis Using Functional Medicine

Episode Date: August 15, 2018

My guest in this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy is Dr. Terry Wahls, who has one of the most incredible stories of using food to recover from an illness I’ve ever heard. Dr. Wahls is the assistant chief of staff at Iowa City VA Health Care and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa.

Hello, this is Dr. Mark Hyman, and welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy, a place for conversations that matter. And today our guest is Dr. Terri Walz, who's an extraordinary physician who cured herself of multiple sclerosis, which doesn't seem like a sentence you can even say, but here she is to prove it. And I can share with you that she's an extraordinary woman who's really pioneered a new way of thinking about how we treat chronic disease. She's a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa.

She's the author of The Wall's Protocol, How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine. And of course, the cookbook that goes along with it, The Wall's Protocol, Cooking for Life, The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions. That's a big promise. We're going to get into that. So stay tuned. That conversation is coming up next on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Tell us, Terry, how you kind of found your way to health through this approach that you call The Wall's Protocol. Well, thank you, Mark. It's such an honor to be here with you, and I'm so glad to count you as a very good friend. So, you know, I'm an academic internal medicine doc. I was very skeptical about diet and lifestyle and supplements and complementary alternative medicine.

I couldn't understand why people wasted billions and billions of dollars. You don't want to think of those stupid supplements that just give you expensive urine, right? Yep, absolutely. I was very skeptical. But God has a mysterious way about him or her. And so in 2000, I was diagnosed with MS. 18 years ago.

18 years ago. But in retrospect, my symptoms began during medical school in 1980 with episodes of electrical face pain, which I stoically put up with. I could figure out that they were worse with stress and gradually more frequent, more severe. In 2000 I had a weakness in my left leg, got a big workup including MRIs of my brain, spinal cord, spinal tap,

and they said, well, this is relapsing remitting MS. And being like... It's a very bad diagnosis. A bad diagnosis. And I looked at the literature and saw that within 10 years, half have difficulty walking, needing a cane, walker, or wheelchair, and half won't be able to work due to severe fatigue. So I wanted to treat my disease aggressively. I sought out the best center doing research here in the Midwest.

That was the Cleveland Clinic. Saw the best people, took the newest drugs, and within three years I needed a tilt-recline wheelchair. Oh, that's good progress. Yeah, so I definitely was not going in the right direction. And that's when I started researching. I started reading PubMed, I would begin experimenting myself. I adopted the paleo diet. That's basically on the recommendation

of my Cleveland Clinic physicians. So that was pretty interesting. I continued to go downhill. I took Tysabri, continued to go downhill. I switched to Cellcept. I continued to go downhill. And these are powerful immune suppressing drugs. Very powerful. But I was happy to take them because 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. So I was thrilled to take these drugs and attempt to stave all of that off. As I read PubMed, I started experimenting with supplements and would eventually figure out that supplements targeting my mitochondria helped my fatigue

somewhat. And I was slowing the speed of my decline. So I'm thrilled, I'm grateful, and I'm really excited about reading PubMed. Grateful from a wheelchair. Very grateful from a wheelchair. Very, very grateful. And then by the summer of 07... You're a glass half full person, clearly. Clearly, clearly.

You know, by the summer of 07, I was so weak I could not sit up in a regular chair. I had a zero gravity chair. I'm fully reclined or I'm in bed. I'm struggling to walk 10 feet using two walking sticks. My boss calls me and tells me he's assigned me to the traumatic brain injury clinic in six months, I'll be seeing patients without residents. And I know that of course that means...

what he's really saying is, Terry, we are done redesigning your job for you and I'll be forced to take medical disability finally at that time. So that's a difficult summer. But two months later I discover 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 it 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 uh for my mitochondria

and for my brain and i added that uh and then i had another really really big aha moment like yeah i should i should take this list of supplements and redesign my paleo diet to maximize the nutritional intake so yeah i redesign my diet you're gonna be eating paleo diet to maximize the nutritional intake. So I redesigned my diet... You're going to be eating paleo cookies all day and that's not exactly right. And that's not the right thing. 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. year now take us a little bit slower through what you did because you i did a lot the paleo diet then you

did the drugs but then you went to this neuroprotection plan uh module from ifm and you learned from there what you could do to optimize your systems so optimize my system i 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.

And then I had this very intensive nutrition so I ramped up my vegetables to like nine cups of vegetables a day. Which is 18 servings. 18 servings. Not the five to nine. Yeah, yeah, 18 servings and so a small amount of meat, lots and lots of vegetables. And very specific groups of vegetables and very specific groups of vegetables very specific groups very specific medicinal effects that you talked about exactly

it's all designed very intentionally around my mitochondria around detox around myelin production uh around brain structures neurotransmitters uh you know based based on science in a very methodical way. And I did all this, Mark, not to get better, because I had completely accepted what my neurologist, primary care docs had told me for years. It's a one-way street, functions once lost with progressive MS are permanently gone. So I was doing all this so I could have the limited function that I had a little bit longer and not get worse.

So I was thrilled to do all of that to not get worse. And then the other thing that's really interesting, Mark, is as I was getting remarkably better, as part of having a progressive neurodegenerative disease is you get to a point where you take every day as it comes, one day at a time, no expectations about what it means. So I'm remarkably better. I'm thinking more clearly.

My pain is gone, which is a huge deal for me. Pain is a big symptom in MS. Pain is a huge symptom. It was a huge problem for me as well. So my pain is gone. I'm walking. I'm thinking. I'm biking.

Actually, it wasn't until I biked that I realized like, you know, I think I'm getting better. Because until then, I was just taking it one day at a time. The day that I biked, it was on Mother's Day. I'm crying, my wife's crying, my kids are crying. And that's when I understood that who knew what the future would hold. That clearly neurology has it wrong. Clearly neurology has it wrong. And who knew how much recovery might be possible.

That's a very helpful story. And I think I'd love to know what exactly you're eating. People are probably listening, but what are the 19 or 18 servings of vegetables you ate? And what groups were they in? What do they do? And I think the most powerful one is all these greens. 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 uh i was very i really craved kale in a huge way but i have collards uh i would have a swiss chard um i had lots and lots of salads would have some cooked greens i was very big into cabbage family vegetables uh 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 thiol. Sulfur boosts the detox, boosts 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. Yeah, medicinal mushrooms are powerful. Very powerful. They have all kinds of amazing ingredients that aren't 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 uh 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 not those are. Those are the wrong kind of color, my friend. So again, three cups of deeply pigmented stuff.

And then fats. You know, fats have a critical role. All of our cells are wrapped in fat. They're fat wrappers, the cell membranes. And our brain 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 cosexanoic acid they need omega-6 and omega-3 fats um and so i needed to have more fat uh in 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 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. you make it and my vets would go like oh my god i mean i can eat bacon yeah that actually tastes you know sounds like it would taste wonderful so um and we have lots of avocados as well uh get into uh nuts and seeds uh and so what is remarkable was the speed at which i could see the difference

uh in 30 days so so think about it you 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.

It's cheaper than most drugs and it's an amazing substance. And when people understand it's not just calories, as we learned in functional medicine, it's information, and they can go, wait a minute, I can upgrade my biology by putting better information in. It's your body, absolutely. So besides the food, that's's powerful and the stimulation and the meditation you also probably did other things were there diagnostic tests that you did on yourself but

you discovered anything that was off or out of balance you know so into my recovery so two years into my recovery um i thought well i'm sure toxic load 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. Everything. All your metals were high.

All my metals were high. I think there were only four that were not high. I was even high in uranium, thorium, thallium. Thallium is, you know, kale is now in California, the ground has thallium in it. So we have so poisoned our soils that with many of our fertilizers are relatively toxic. So yes, unfortunately many of our foods are toxic.

And 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. How did you get rid of them all? Well, when I designed my protocol, I designed it around the detox enzymes. So, that's why I stressed the greens, the sulfur, the color.

I added in there some acetyl cysteine and some algae as well. Some binders to get the metals out and things to regulate your glutathione. And then the other thing, six months into my recovery, I was able to overcome my heat intolerance. And so I got a sauna and I've been sauna-ing ever since. Amazing. So it's basically food, supplements, electro-stimulation... And very basic supplements, B vitamins, N-acetylcysteine and algae, that's it. That's it, no vitamin D?

Well, yes, there is vitamin D in there, of course. Because there's evidence around vitamin D. Yeah, plain vitamin D and I also use sunlight. Sunlight. You know, 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 done an extraordinary thing which is you've created a model that you use to treat patients yes and to train other physicians and providers and to do research in this space and you were at the va in iowa and had done amazing work with people who

had very little resources not a ton of money couldn't do a ton of testing yeah and you know people think functional medicine is always all about testing, it's all about supplements, but you really were able to show that it really is primarily food and lifestyle and just a few basic things that make a huge difference. So tell us about what you learned in that process. So I had my personal transformation and then I started talking about food and exposures.

I changed how I practice medicine in my traumatic brain injury clinic. I'm really focused in on diet and lifestyle. And I have to deal with physician complaints because I'm not practicing like my colleagues. So I had to meet with my chief of staff, go over what I was doing and why, bring down my papers, and get some coaching on how to document in the medical records so I could pass peer review and make sure everybody was comfortable with what I was doing.

Happy with you. Happy, so we got that. God forbid you're telling people to eat better. Yeah, so I got that down. And then because I was having such great results, the chief of medicine came in and told me he was pulling me out of primary care and would I open up a clinic where I could practice the way I wanted to practice. And I said, no, I won't do that. And here's why I'm refusing. You need to get endorsement by the

chief of staff and the director of the hospital, because we just want to be sure that they know what I'm going to do and that they approve of this. They're behind it, yeah. And so I thought that was probably going to be the end of it. Two weeks later he came back and he said, I have the endorsements, we're good. That's so great. So we got the endorsements going, and then we decided that we'd call it the Therapic Lifestyle Clinic.

So it was very clear to my referring physicians and to the patients that this was all about diet and lifestyle, that I'm not prescribing drugs. Diet and lifestyle as treatment, not just prevention. As treatment. It was therapeutic and you had to be referred in by a physician, could be for a mental health problem, medical problem. So we saw people from all sorts of issues. I met with primary care and the subspecialty clinics and said,

give me your most ill people who are willing to use a therapeutic diet and lifestyle. I'm using no drugs. It's just going to be diet and lifestyle. We did this through a series of group classes. The first class was, here's my story, here's the concepts of the therapeutic lifestyle, we talked about functional medicine, integrative medicine, diet, lifestyle, detox, mitochondria, all of that stuff. And then I invited people to either just go back to the doc and say this is too hard or I'll work gradually on my diet and then meet with the dietitians

or if they would commit to being gluten-free 100%, lots of vegetables for 100 days, they could come work with me. We'd have a group intake where I'd meet with them for two weeks as a group to sort of do their timeline of their health experiences and then they would meet with the dietician for two hours who would have a cooking class and help them reimagine breakfast and lunch and reimagine the relationship with food. Very practical.

And then we would see them once a week for a skills class. As many people as could fit in the room could come get the skills classes. And we'd have a support group of 6 to 22 people at a time that we'd see every other month. In the labs that I had, a CBC, vitamin D, homocysteine. Very basic. Fasting lipids, that was it. And the kind of supplements, B vitamins, fish oil, vitamin D.

And then I could tell people if they want on their own to go buy NAC and algae, methyl B12, methylfolate, and that was it. And before I got the lifestyle clinic going, when I was just in my traumatic brain injury clinic, no labs, I only got to see people twice a year for 20 minutes. And even in that click, we had stunning success. Amazing. So that's why... You've done research now on this. So how has the research gone and what have you learned? And can you share some of the most exciting things that you've

discovered in your research? Because this isn't just an idea or something that's on the fringe. You've actually been in a major academic center doing the hard work, proving the model and seeing extraordinary changes. So the very first thing is what we call a safety feasibility study. And I have to thank- Is it safe to eat 18 cups of vegetables? Is it safe to do a stress-reducing activity?

Is it safe to meditate? You know, and my chair of medicine, Paul Rothman, had me write a case report up from my own personal story. Then he called me back in when that was published. Okay, now we're going to have you do a safety study. And I said, well, this is outside. This is the type of research field that I'm in. Yes, I'll get you the mentors.

So he helped me with getting the mentors on board, designed the study. Then I had to get the funding. So I worked with a group of philanthropists in Canada that gave me the funding to get the safety study going. So we wrote up the protocol that copied everything that I did. The supplements, the meditative program, the exercise, e-stem, and we codified the diet. We got funding, got it through and then the clinical research unit

refused to give me permission because the diet was not safe because it excluded food groups. Like grains and beans and dairy? Yeah, right. So, it got declined. So, I was required to do a pre-study on myself to show that it was nutritionally sound. So we did that, the dietician who analyzed my diet,

who's been doing dietary assessment research for 35 years, said this is the most nutrient-dense diet I've ever analyzed. Well, anybody knows about the food groups, how that came about was as a way to sell more agricultural products, meat, dairy, grains, vegetables. Those were food groups that had nothing to do with science, that had to do with marketing. And there is no biological requirement for grains or even dairy.

Yes. And so once we finally got permission, then I was required to have a safety report that I would fill out back to the IRB, the Institutional Review Board, after we did the first 10 subjects. And that worked out really, I also know I had money to do 20, but you know, that worked out very well because we had great success with the first 10. So I went back to my Canadian philanthropist and I said, you know, we had such great success. How do you feel about getting MRIs on the next 10?

And he said, yes. So we have those MRIs. As a matter of fact, we showed those results on those MRIs earlier this week here. I was able to show that brain volume is protected by following the Walsh protocol. Was the myelination improved? Well, in the brain of MRI patients with MS, you see the white lesions, white matter lesions, right? We analyze total brain volume and for disability, brain volume is much more strongly associated

with disability than whether the white matter lesions or acute lesions. So we're mostly very, very curious about what happens with brain volume. You know, and originally I was really disappointed because we still had brain volume loss overall for the group, but brain volume loss in progressive MS occurs much more rapidly, two to three times as rapidly in progressive MS than it does in healthy aging. We're able to show that our brain volume loss was less than even healthy aging. So we're protecting our brain to extraordinary levels in that first study.

And so we'll be submitting that for publication in a journal. So we're very excited for that. We had remarkable reduction in fatigue, remarkable improvement in quality of life. In the neurological symptoms? In the neurological symptoms. We're also able to show that in half of our folks, we had remarkable improvement in gait,

which is remarkable with progressive MS, because none of them should have improved. And the fact that we had clinically meaningful improvement in gait in half was really quite remarkable. Then the next study that we did was a randomized study, which is a weightless control. So we did just the diet in relapsing remitting ms folks they came in we did assessments we randomized them to either get trained on the

diet or to wait for 12 weeks and then get trained on the diet and again we're able to show that fatigue went down quality of life, and motor function again improved. And now we have a study funded by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society comparing the low saturated fat diet and the Walsh diet. Because the Swank diet was a low fat diet. Very low fat diet. That was recommended for MS patients. Only by Dr. Swank. The conventional neurologists for a long time have steadfastly held

there's no scientific prospective study that has shown diet has anything to do with MS. Now, fortunately, as they're being understood, the role of diet has on epigenetics, on the microbiome, that conventional neurology is catching up to us and saying diet does matter. Yeah, yeah. They are catching up. It's amazing that food is the single biggest information input we have to our bodies every day.

It controls every function of our biology and yet how could it not be connected to our health? You know, it is so challenging to do good dietary studies, because if you do a food-based intervention study, supplement studies are easy, that's like a drug study, but if you do food, now if I'm going to do it well, I have to convince you, Mark, to give up foods that you love, start eating foods that you don't like, you don't know how to make,

get your family to do it with you so you can sustain it. And there's a real art to train you to be willing to do that. And then another art to measuring what you actually did. This is complex research to do. It's expensive to do, far more expensive than drug studies. So that's one of the reasons with this so little research. Yeah, that's true.

So you also are exploring not just MS, but other brain issues. Yes, yeah. 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 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. Now because the VA has electronic medical record, I was also able to get my quality improvement people to do some analysis for us. We were able to show that the hemoglobin A1C was coming down, the body mass index coming down, blood pressure coming down. At the same time that the number of medications was coming down as well.

And the pain medications coming down and the narcotic use coming down. So, you know, incredibly exciting stuff. Very, very gratifying. And then, you know, in the thousands of followers that i have you know routinely i'm being contacted by people who are telling me that they're 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 walls protocol and that their functions are improving.

And so then I'm Googling like, so what are these conditions? And some of them are autoimmune, some of them are neurodegenerative. And very consistently, it's a similar pattern that I see. Energy is improving, mental clarity is improving, pain is diminishing. 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. And depending on the person that, yes, you may still die from your cancer, you'll have a higher quality of life,

you may still die from your Huntington's, but you'll have higher quality of life. You may still die from your Huntington's, but you'll have higher quality of life. And what you may discover is that your previously untreatable problem that your physicians say, I don't have anything to offer you, you may discover that it can be stabilized. The steepness of the decline can be slowed. Or to everyone's amazement, you may discover that you in fact are slowly but steadily improving. Like you. Like me. So how many stories do you hear like your story where someone really was in a wheelchair and they get up and they're good and they're riding their bike 20 miles? You know, just today I've had several physicians tell me that they've had a gentleman from Hungary said that he had people coming to him in the wheelchair who's out running marathons. Unbelievable.

I'm like, well, I'm not doing that yet, but I'm hoping. That's so amazing. It's so powerful. And multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease. So you're focused on the neurologic stuff and the pain stuff, but how does this apply across autoimmune disease? And what are the ways in which that it can be used to help with that you know certainly this has been very very helpful

for Hashimoto's thyroiditis and we've had people with rheumatoid arthritis who were severely disabled have resolution of their pain and marked improvement in function. I've had people with psoriatic arthritis, again, marked improvements in function. People with psoriasis marked resolution of their skin problems. So, certainly this is a great approach for somebody with autoimmunity. And people with diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure. I've had folks with heart failure who were told that they're going to be needing a heart transplant. Transplant, yeah.

And what happened? Well, their ejection fraction keeps improving. That's how much blood their heart can pump, which goes down with heart failure. Yeah, it's impressive. Yeah, I keep telling them, you know, you got to be eating liver a couple of times a week, heart once a week.

And... 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. Like it's the same principles that you can apply to all

these things. You know, when I was first changed how I was practicing medicine, my colleagues, my chief of staff was calling me up saying, you know, Terry, your colleagues are saying you're using the same treatment for everyone. You just can't do that. i said that john i said well i think we all have mitochondria i think we all have liver kidneys brains we all have cells we all we need to provide the building blocks and so i'm just trying to create health yeah and we'll see what happens yeah and you don't you just follow those principles of functional medicine and it just you're like okay i've never seen this disease before and yet... Well, just see what happens.

Yeah, it's powerful. And I think that I want to sort of get in a little bit into the diet again because you said you came into this through the paleo track and then you sort of modified it to add a ton more veggies, which I sort of jokingly call the pegan diet, which is basically very local. But one of the principles, if people aren't aware of what a paleo diet is, is it removes grains, beans, and dairy.

So why would you remove those foods? Yeah, and I want to clarify for your audience, the paleo diet did not fix me. Supplements did not fix me. So I'd been vegetarian 20 years, lots of grains, beans, legumes, and it was a lot of prayer and meditation, but I went back to eating meat. And I had lots of meat, I was still having eggs, had some vegetables, and I continued to go downhill, I added the vitamins and supplements,

continued to go downhill, albeit more slowly, and my energy was better when I took my supplements. Very, very grateful. And then when I had my longer list of supplements, thank you, Catherine Wilner and Jay Lombard, I appreciate all you've done for me. Those are neurologists that focused on functional medicine and repairing the brain. Then when I said, okay, where is all this in the food? And I redesigned my paleo diet.

This was all about ramping up these vegetables. So now my amount of meat is really pretty modest. I have two palm sizes of meat, one to two per day. So that's six to 12 ounces of meat per day. And then, you know, nine cups to 15 cups of vegetables per day. Now, we weren't talking about the microbiome back there in 2007, but what I was doing was really ramping up my microbiome as well. I was ramping up my ability to detoxify

and I was ramping up the enzymes involved in protecting my mitochondria and making the detox pathways more effective, intracellular glutathione more effective. And so it was providing that structure. You went to the pharmacy, that's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, that's why I call this the doctor's pharmacy because it's really about how to use food as medicine and that's what you did.

And so the reason to remove the beans, grains, legumes has to do with something called lectins. And again, this depends on your genetic predisposition and I think I probably am one of those people who are vulnerable to lectins that I probably have a severe inflammatory response. If I have gluten or dairy or eggs, my face pain triggers and I have horrific incapacitating levels of pain in 6 to 24 hours. I don't get you off the gluten.

They'll get me off the gluten. Now, I can have hummus on occasion. So, occasional use of hummus is fine. Eggs would get me into big trouble. But is it the lectins? I mean, are there other inflammatory things in those foods? Because like when you cook, for example, beans and grains properly, you can reduce... You can reduce the lectins, you can soak them, sprout them overnight, you can reduce them.

And so in my book, I did create a protocol for vegetarian and vegans. Because I do think it's really important to recognize that you have people who are spiritually very committed to being vegetarian, vegan, and so I wanted to be sure that I could help them do that in a way that's very optimal. And in my clinics, even at the VA, we have vegetarian and vegans that I would help. There are some people who do thrive on that diet and other people don't. And I think you really have to pay attention to your body instead of a dogma or a belief. Yes. And I think your body is going to tell you what works and what doesn't.

And there are people who do not do as well eating the paleo diet. Because people say meat is inflammatory. Well, I think a diet that is... Many of my paleo friends, whom I love dearly, eat meat and very few vegetables. And I think they're going to get... that's a problem. I think that can be inflammatory. And I would much rather have, moderate the meat and do some intermittent fasting and

have more vegetables with them. I love the nine to 15 cups of vegetables. Cups, not servings, cups. That's right. 18 to 30 servings of vegetables. And I think it seems overwhelming, but it's not that hard. One, because one, there's almost no calories in them yes two they're delicious and you can eat a lot and get full I mean I literally will binge on veggies I'll make three or four side dishes of veggies to you

know the the protein's a side dish yeah you know and at at the VA, I tell people, I don't want you to be hungry. So, you know, it's two palms of meat and then as many vegetables as you're hungry for. And it's fine to have fat, to have plenty of olive oil, flax oil, walnut oil, hemp oil. But there's no need to be hungry. If you're still hungry, eat more vegetables. And do you find that the patients who are vegan or vegetarian do as well in terms of the recovery from autoimmune or MS? Potentially, yes.

There are some folks who really need to figure out how to address the B12 issues and may have some issues with lectins. So sometimes it can be more challenging. But the vast majority of folks, the vegans and vegetarians I can work with and do very well. So what have you learned through this journey of your own health and then treating these patients, building these programs, writing the WALS protocol, hearing feedback? What is sort of the surprising things that you've learned that work or maybe that don't work, things you've had to

change or rethink? What have you learned? Over time, I've come to appreciate more and more the importance of personal resilience, of understanding what it is that you want your health for, what is your personal mission, why is it you're doing this. Meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose and connection. Because I have to connect to all of that to have you to be willing to do the hard work that it takes to sustain

the diet and lifestyle changes. I've also come to appreciate that this is a family intervention, not an individual intervention. The families who do this together are very successful. The person who does it alone, with their family not supportive, not eating and doing the diet and lifestyle with them

will struggle. It's all about community right it is about community and family powerful and that's how your groups are so successful because people do it together so one last question if you were queen for a day and you could change anything in health care food medicine what would it be to make the world a better place oh absolutely I would reach out to our children. I want our children to learn how to cook. I want all of our schools to grow gardens. I want to have home ec and to teach kids to cook beginning in first grade.

I want to teach to have our churches. Teaching kitchens in every school. Kitchens in every school and in every church and every synagogue, every mosque, every temple. We need our families to be cooking and eating together as a family and eating lots and lots of vegetables. I love that. That is a great vision. I think we need to understand that cooking is a revolutionary act, that it will help us take back our food from the food system. The convenience is killing us and that we need to reinvent how we think about food because one,

it's pleasurable, it's fun, it's delicious, and it's easy and it's cheap to cook your own food if you know what you're doing. By teaching people how to cook, we made it affordable for people with food stamps. If we're going to create an epidemic of health we have to teach our young people and all of our current families to cook again and that you can adopt the walls protocol on food stamps but you'll have to learn how to cook absolutely that was what i saw with this family in south carolina where i went down as part of the movie fed up and they lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability a family of five morbidly obese diabetic renal failure on dialysis hypertension pre-diabetes almost diabetes in this 15 year old kid and they didn't know how to cook they had two

generations of that family that didn't know how to cook I showed them how to cook one meal gave them a little guide on how to eat well for less. And it was one of the worst food deserts in America. And they lost 200 pounds in the first year as a family. The son gained a bunch of it back because he went to work at Bojangles. And then he got himself together and he lost 140 pounds and he's now going to medical school. So it's, uh, it can happen. It can happen. It can happen. So thank you so much for showing us that one person with determination and courage can go up against a system that doesn't support what they're doing and can actually make a real difference and change the world.

And it's inspiring for all of us, not just your own recovery, but what you've shown can be done with a little bit of grit and determination. So thank you, Dr. Walls, for being on The Doctor's Pharmacy, a place for conversations that matter. Hallelujah. Please leave a review or comment. We'd love to hear from you, and it matters. Also, if you like this podcast, share with your friends and family and subscribe on iTunes,

and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy, a place for conversations that matter.