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The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles Kindle Edition
| Terry Wahls M.D. (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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The Wahls Protocol has become a sensation, transforming the lives of people with autoimmune diseases. Now in this fully revised edition, Dr. Terry Wahls outlines the latest research that validates the program and offers new, powerful tools to arm readers and help them achieve total health.
The Wahls Protocol comes out of Dr. Wahls' own quest to treat the debilitating symptoms she experiences as a sufferer of progressive MS. Informed by science, she began using Paleo principles as guidelines for her unique, nutrient-rich plan. This book shares Dr. Wahls' astonishing personal story of recovery and details the program, with up-to-date research she's now conducting at the University of Iowa.
Split into three different levels, this updated edition allows readers to choose the modified Wahls Diet if they're new to the regime, the Wahls Paleo Diet if they're ready to amp up their health, or the more advanced Wahls Paleo Plus Diet if they need more aggressive treatment. They can also incorporate the just-added Wahls Elimination Diet into their plan to pinpoint individual food sensitivities, so their diet is as personal as ever.
With new recipes and content on intermittent fasting and how the protocol impacts the microbiome, The Wahls Protocol is a key addition to the "whole food" revolution, and a deeply moving, results-driven testimonial to the healing power of food.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAvery
- Publication dateMarch 13, 2014
- File size12052 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“In The Wahls Protocol, Dr. Wahls provides elegant first hand validation that diet truly represents the most powerful medicine. This book is totally supported by the most leading edge research and provides a beacon of hope when compared to the ever changing landscape of pharmaceutical recommendations for multiple sclerosis.”
—David Perlmutter, MD, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Grain Brain
“Groundbreaking! Once you understand why you need to eat for health, Dr. Wahls delivers a detailed road map, guiding you step by step. This will be life changing for many. “
—Robb Wolf, New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution
“Using clear language, Dr. Wahls teaches how our food and lifestyle choices create health or disease depending on our choices. For anyone suffering from autoimmune or other chronic health problems, this book will be life changing.”
—Mark Hyman, M.D. #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Blood Sugar Solution.
“Whether or not you struggle with autoimmune diseases, I can't recommend The Wahls Protcol highly enough. Dr. Wahls provides a clear, in-depth, copiously researched dietary and lifestyle protocol to help you take charge of your health and your life. An absolute must-read book.
—JJ Virgin, New York Times bestselling author of The Virgin Diet
“Terry Wahls is a hero to many for her discovery that a nourishing ancestral diet can heal multiple sclerosis. In The Wahls Protocol, Terry sets forth a straightforward plan for achieving good health through good food. Not just for MS patients, The Wahls Protocol is a fascinating tale that proves the wisdom of Hippocrates: ‘Let food be thy medicine.’ Try it, it works!”
—Paul Jaminet, Ph.D., author of Perfect Health Diet and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Evolution and Health
“Dr. Wahls teaches you how to eat and live so that you can upgrade dramatically your brain and body.”
—Sara Gottfried M.D., New York Times bestselling author of The Hormone Cure
“Terry Wahls' new book is one of the most important books on health ever written. That's not a hyperbolic statement, just plain fact. If doctors would take this incredible information to heart (and into their practices), the health crisis in this world would be over--the cancer industry crushed and the rise in autoimmune conditions would fall. True health reform is contained within these pages. I cannot recommend a book any more highly. Bravo Dr. Wahls!”
—Leanne Ely, C.N.C., New York Times bestsellling author of Saving Dinner
“I've long recommended that anyone diagnosed with MS who is also interested in health and healing research the work of Dr. Wahls online, but the game has now changed. The Wahls Protocol will be the go-to resource for anyone suffering from MS or another autoimmune condition who is ready to fight back. Dr. Wahls outlines a clear-cut, stepped approach to dietary and lifestyle changes--supported by her extensive research and testing of the plans--that will put anyone on a path to better health. Whether you have MS or not, The Wahls Protocol is a goldmine of easy-to-follow, real-food nutritional guidelines that will leave you feeling so amazing it'll make you wonder how you ever ate any other way.”
—Diane Sanfilippo, BS, NC, New York Times bestselling author of Practical Paleo
“The Wahls Protocol is one 'ah-ha' after another of how Terry Wahls’ realizations may help you in your health journey. Not only will you be captivated by what you read, you'll also learn how to be healthier. Highly recommended.” --Dr. Tom O'Bryan, creator of “A Grain of Truth: The Gluten e-Summit”
“Terry Wahls does an amazing job at highlighting the importance of micronutrients (vitamins, minerals and essential fats) as an integral part in preventing and reversing disease. Her story is incredible and brings hope to millions needlessly suffering. The Wahls Protocol is a must read for anyone looking to reverse autoimmune conditions naturally.”
—Mira Calton, CN and Jayson Calton, Ph.D., authors of Rich Food, Poor Food
“The best treatment for multiple sclerosis, autoimmunity, and chronic disease is teaching people how and why to eat and live for optimal health. By combining the latest science with the all-important factors of nutrition, exercise, and healthy lifestyle, The Wahls Protocol goes beyond conventional treatments and empowers you with real solutions."
—Ann Boroch, C.N.C., author of Healing Multiple Sclerosis: Diet, Detox & Nutritional Makeover for Total Recovery
“Dr. Wahls engages us with her personal story of triumph over multiple sclerosis while educating us on the importance of a nutrient-dense diet for our cellular health. You will find yourself drawn in and inspired to take control of your own health as Dr. Wahls shares her experiences, knowledge, and compassion. The three levels of The Wahls Protocol provide a concrete plan—including both feasible diet and lifestyle changes—to help you on your road to recovery.” --Sarah Ballantyne, Ph.D., author of The Paleo Approach
“The Wahls Protocol is essential reading for anyone suffering from a chronic disease and wanting to regain their health. All the therapies which restored Dr Wahls to well-being are described in detail and are succinctly summarized in the appendices. The huge amount of scientific information, clear explanations, and practical advice makes this book an invaluable resource and indispensable reference.”
—Ashton Embry, Ph.D., president of Direct-MS
"Only Terry Wahls, M.D. could have written a book as important as The Wahls Protocol. Her discovery of a path to recovery from disabling multiple sclerosis after failing to respond to the traditional medical approach is not only a story of great personal triumph, but a manifesto of hope for many others with various chronic illnesses for which drug therapy has not worked. This is a book that provides a program that can be applied by anyone who is searching for solutions to health challenges."
—Jeffrey Bland, Ph.D., president of the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I used to run marathons and climb mountains in Nepal. I’ve competed multiple times in the American Birkebeiner 54-kilometer cross-country ski marathon (once while pregnant), earned a black belt in tae kwon do, and won a bronze medal in women’s full contact free sparring at the trials for the 1978 Pan American Games in Washington, DC. I used to feel invincible.
Then I developed multiple sclerosis. After decades of troubling symptoms I tried to ignore, I was finally diagnosed in 2000. By that time, the disease had a good footing in my central nervous system. My decline progressed rapidly. Within two years of my diagnosis, I could no longer play soccer with my kids in the backyard. By fall 2003, walking from room to room for my hospital rounds exhausted me, and by summer 2004, my back and stomach muscles had weakened so much that I needed a tilt/recline wheelchair. Within three years of initial diagnosis, my disease had transitioned from relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis into secondary progressive multiple sclerosis. In that phase, disability slowly progresses despite increasingly aggressive therapy. By 2007, I spent most of my time lying in a zero-gravity chair. I was 52 years old.
Everyone with multiple sclerosis has a story—the years of clues and strange symptoms that finally, in retrospect, make sense. It is in the nature of most neurological and autoimmune diseases that symptoms accumulate slowly, bit by bit, over the course of decades. This is what happened to me. As a doctor, I was compelled to find answers: a diagnosis and a cure. As a patient, I was compelled to save my own life.
Like most physicians, I was always focused on quickly diagnosing my patients, and then using drugs and surgical procedures to treat them—that is, until I became a patient myself. Conventional medicine was failing me. I saw that. I was heading toward a bedridden life. Since the beginning of our profession, physicians have used self-experimentation, either to prove a scientific point or to treat themselves when the conventional treatments were of limited value. In that tradition, and in the face of this chronic, progressive disease for which there was no cure, I began to experiment on myself. What I didn’t expect were the stunning results I got from my self-experimentation: I not only arrested my disease, I achieved a dramatic restoration of my health and my function. What I learned changed forever how I saw the battling worlds of health and disease.
More than a hundred years ago, Thomas Edison said, “The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his [or her] patients in the care of the human frame, in a proper diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.” This became my new course, my passion, and my mission. I understood health and disease in an entirely new way. I became a new person, both physically and emotionally, both personally and professionally. I also became passionately committed to helping other people become new people, too.
My Diagnosis
The stress and pressure of medical school may have been what triggered my first symptoms in 1980, years before I had any idea what they were. I would eventually call them “zingers”—intense stabs of facial pain. They lasted just a moment and would come randomly, sometimes in waves, the episodes building over a week or two and then gradually fading over the next several. They were most likely to happen during my busiest and most brutal hospital rotations, with shifts lasting thirty-six hours and allowing for little sleep. Over the years they became steadily worse, like electrical pain that felt like a 10,000-volt cattle prod sticking me in the face.
At the time, I thought the episodes of face pains were an aggravation, nothing more. I thought it was an isolated, unexplained problem—one of those medical mysteries that don’t really require solving. Even as a doctor, I didn’t think much about it. I was too busy with my own patients to dedicate too much diagnostic thought to myself. I certainly never suspected an autoimmune problem.
This was my first symptom, but it was not likely the moment when multiple sclerosis began its relentless march through my central nervous system. For at least a decade before then, probably two, my brain and spinal cord had been under siege from friendly fire—my own immune system attacking the myelin that insulated my nerves. I couldn’t feel it at first. I couldn’t feel it for years. Nevertheless, it was happening.
As the years passed, I became a mother, first to my son, Zach, then my daughter, Zebby. The rigors of parenting and full-time work distracted me, but my multiple sclerosis clock was ticking. This was a clock I did not hear, even though alarms of visual dimming and the zingers were going off. I fully expected to be an active, adventurous, vibrant woman for at least forty more years. I imagined mountain climbing with my children, even as a white-haired old grandma. I never thought my unexplained symptoms would have anything to do with something as basic as my mobility or as crucial as my thinking.
One evening at a dinner party, I was talking to a neurologist and I happened to mention that I perceived the color blue somewhat differently in my right and left eyes. Blues were a bit brighter when I used my right eye than if I used the left. She seemed interested.
“You’ll have multiple sclerosis someday,” she said. It was the first time anyone had said those words. My father died the next morning, and so her words were forgotten in the chaos of grief. Years later, I recalled those prescient comments.
The day my wife, Jackie, noticed I seemed to be walking strangely, I didn’t believe her. I didn’t even notice until she insisted we go for a three-mile walk to the local dairy for ice cream. By the time we got back, I was dragging my left foot like a sandbag. I couldn’t pick up my toes. I was exhausted, nauseated, and scared. I scheduled an appointment with my physician.
Many people who are ultimately diagnosed with multiple sclerosis go through a similar experience. Symptoms develop slowly over years, and diagnosis may take additional years once physical problems manifest and become obvious.
I spent the next few weeks going through test after test, dreading each result. Some tests involved flashing lights and buzzers. Others involved more electricity and more pain. There were more blood tests. I said little and feared much. Everything came back negative, but there was clearly something wrong with me.
Finally, we were down to the last test: a spinal tap. If there were oligoclonalband proteins (an indicator of excessive amounts of antibodies) present in the spinal fluid, then the diagnosis would be multiple sclerosis. But if this test was also negative, then I likely had what they call “idiopathic degeneration of the spinal cord” (meaning they don’t know the cause). In the long list of potential diseases I had faced, this seemed like the best option. I was hopeful.
When I got up the next morning, I knew that the results should be in my chart. I could get into the clinic medical records from my home computer through remote access. I brought up my medical record on the screen and went to the laboratory section. Positive. I stood up. I paced. Two hours later, I logged onto the system and checked again. Five times I looked up my results,
hoping they would somehow change. They never did.
It was official: I had multiple sclerosis.
My Decline
In summer 2000, I moved with Jackie and my children from Marshfield, Wisconsin, to Iowa to accept a joint appointment as assistant professor at the University of Iowa and chief of primary care at the VA hospital. I was newly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I was taking Copaxone, which my physician had prescribed for the MS, and I relied entirely on my physicians for treatment decisions. I had been trained as a doctor and conditioned to believe that doctors know best. Besides, what did I know about multiple sclerosis? It wasn’t my area. I was seeing the very best people and getting the very best treatments available, so I assumed I was doing all that I could do.
I was determined not to let my diagnosis influence my new job. I was in a leadership position with plenty of challenges, and I loved it. I enjoyed teaching, and the kids were thriving in their new home. I thought I was doing pretty well, and so did my doctors. I even began to imagine I might never get much worse. I dreamed I might not even have to confess to my children that
I had multiple sclerosis.
Then my right arm and hand became weak. My doctors gave me steroids to suppress my immune cells, and my strength slowly returned, but it was the beginning of a slow, steady decline. I could see it, Jackie could see it, and so could the kids. They’ve since admitted that sometimes it was embarrassing to have me around because I was less and less mobile. Sometimes they wished I wouldn’t attend their activities, and that made me feel guilty for wanting to be there. It was a strain on the whole family, and I felt responsible. It was all my fault. I was supposed to be the provider, and I was slowly losing my ability to manage my own body. It had been only two years since my initial diagnosis.
Then something happened that changed my life. In 2002, my neurology doctor at the Cleveland Clinic noted that I was slowly getting worse and suggested I check out Ashton Embry’s MS charity website, Direct-MS, at www.direct-ms.org. Dr. Embry is a geologist with a Ph.D. whose son has MS. Dr. Embry’s son improved dramatically by changing his diet, so Dr. Embry became an active and vocal proponent of the link between diet and multiple sclerosis. This was the first I’d heard of such an idea—or, at least, the first time I paid attention. Although it sounded a little like “alternative care” to me—and, being a conventional doctor, I didn’t put much stock into what I saw as fringe medical practices—this was a suggestion from my neurologist, so I took her seriously. I decided to check it out.
Dr. Embry’s website was full of scientific references, which I began to read one by one. The articles were from peer-reviewed journals, written by scientists from highly respected medical schools. This wasn’t “soft science.” This wasn’t “fringe.” This was legitimate research. It was difficult science, too. A lot of it was in fields outside my expertise, or it relied on basic science concepts that hadn’t been part of my medical training. I had trouble absorbing everything, and the MS-related brain fog didn’t help. There was so much new information—how did I not know about any of this? After a lot of intensive reading, I determined that Dr. Embry was not a charlatan and that maybe he was on to something. What if diet could have a major impact on MS? After years of leaving my health in the hands of doctors while continuing to decline, this idea fascinated me. I could control what I ate. It seemed too easy and too good to be true. I had to know more.
Dr. Embry’s website was the first place I heard about Dr. Loren Cordain. Dr. Cordain linked changes in the human diet to the development of chronic disease in Western society. He had published a number of articles and had also recently published a book for the public called The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat, which was much easier reading than the technical scientific papers.1 I began to absorb information more quickly: molecular mimicry, leaky gut, lectins, immune modulation (I’ll talk about all these things later in this book). I began to see where Dr. Embry and Dr. Cordain were going with their theories. I began to consider that what we eat has a major, rather than a minor, influence on how our bodies work.
I was particularly interested in the idea that excessive carbohydrates and sugars in our modern diet lead to excess insulin and inflammation. The evidence that the original human diet could possibly improve my MS was compelling, but switching to this kind of diet would be a major change for me. I had been a vegetarian since my college days and I loved my beans and rice.
I loved making bread. Could I really cut out grain, dairy, and legumes, the current staples of my diet?
But I wanted to arrest my disease more than anything else. I wanted to keep walking, working, and playing with my kids. I decided to try it. Meat was back on the menu, and I gave up the now-forbidden foods I loved so much. At first the smell of meat was nauseating to me. I started slowly, adding meat to soup in small amounts. With time, it got easier.
I was hopeful about this change, but despite this switch to a Paleo Diet, my decline continued. I couldn’t play soccer in the backyard with my kids without falling. I couldn’t take long hikes with the Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts.Then it became harder to take even short walks with Jackie. Fatigue became more and more of a problem. I was disappointed, at times despondent, and tears came at inconvenient times. But I was determined. Some of the entries on Embry’s website said that recovery took five years. I realized I could not expect an overnight miracle, so I stuck with the changes. Even if progress would be slow, it was still something I could do for myself, and that came with its own sense of empowerment.
Meanwhile, I rearranged my schedule to avoid walking. My doctor told me that it was time to get a scooter, and then changed his mind and suggested a tilt/recline wheelchair because of the worsening fatigue. He also suggested I try taking mitoxantrone, a form of chemotherapy. When that didn’t help, I switched to a new, potent immune-suppressing medication called Tysabri; but before I went in for my third injection, Tysabri was pulled from the market because people were dying from the activation of a latent virus in their brains. After this, my doctor suggested that I take CellCept, a transplant medicine, which would suppress my immune cells. I often had mouth ulcers after that. My skin was grayish. I started every day tired, and despair gnawed at me each night as I lay in bed. Jackie, Zach, and Zebby were my lifeline. Jackie would hold me and tell me we’d get through everything together. We often discussed our kids and how they were absorbing the ways that we dealt with what was happening. For their sakes, I didn’t want to let my discouragement and fatigue show.
Though I had resisted getting the tilt/recline wheelchair, it actually felt liberating once I had it. I was able to go outside and stroll (or rather, roll) with my family as we hiked around the county park or the neighborhood. It did make my life easier. It weakened my back muscles, however, and the more those muscles atrophied, the more time I spent in bed. I didn’t talk about it much, but I thought it likely that eventually I would become bedridden. Sitting at my desk at work was exhausting. Then I found a zero-gravity chair, designed like the NASA chairs used during space flights. When I was fully reclined, my knees were higher than my nose and gravity held me in the chair. I had one for my office and another for my home. That helped with the fatigue a great deal, but this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life. I just couldn’t accept that this was my future.
Taking My Life Back
Getting into that wheelchair triggered something. I realized that conventional medicine was not likely to stop what was happening to me. I still hoped that the Paleo Diet would make a difference, but I hadn’t seen much of a change thus far. I decided to go back to reading the medical literature. I wanted to know if there was something more, some other avenue, something the doctors had overlooked. I had come to accept that recovery was not possible, but maybe I could slow things down. I was through ceding my power to doctors and not seeing results. I needed to be more forward thinking. I vowed to research and study and exhaust every avenue, just in case there was some other answer for me out there, something that would delay a little longer the inevitable life in bed.
At first, I began to read all about the latest clinical drug trials going on, but then I realized that those all involved medications that I’d be unable to get. This kind of knowledge would only be theoretical. So I started to think outside the box. I knew how science worked—I knew that studies on mice and rats are always the source of tomorrow’s treatments, but that it’s typically years, often decades, before anything becomes a matter for a clinical trial, let alone a standard of care. This was the cutting edge of the cutting edge, so I began to look there. I wanted to know what the brightest minds were thinking and how they envisioned the future of diseases like mine.
Each night I would spend a few minutes searching www.pubmed.gov for articles about the mouse model for MS. I knew that brains afflicted with MS shrink over time, so I also began reading about the animal models of other conditions with shrinking brains. I researched Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s dementia, Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS), and Huntington’s disease. I discovered that, in all four of those conditions, the mitochondria—small subunits within cells that manage the energy supply for that cell—stop working well and lead to early death of brain cells, causing shrinking of the brain. More searching led me to articles in which mouse brains and their mitochondria had been protected using vitamins2 and supplements like coenzyme Q, carnitine, and creatine.3
I didn’t have anything to lose, so I decided to take action. I translated those mouse-size doses into human-size ones, then made an appointment with my primary-care doctor. She looked over my list and decided the supplements were likely safe. She entered each one into my medication list, one by one, to check for potential adverse interactions with my medication list. There were none. I was excited about starting my new, experimental vitamin-and supplement routine. I began to take them and was disappointed when nothing happened. After a couple of months I stopped taking them, and a few days later I couldn’t get out of bed. When I resumed the supplements, I could get up again. They were helping after all!
This was a ray of hope. Obviously, I thought, my body was getting something from those supplements that it wasn’t getting without them—something it needed.
Discovering E-Stim
Next, I discovered electrical therapy. I got the idea by reviewing a research protocol that used electrical stimulation of muscles to treat people who’d become paralyzed due to an acute spinal injury. The purpose of this therapy, known as e-stim, in the research was to maintain bone health and quality of life for these patients. Reviewing that research protocol made me wonder if the electrical stimulation might slow down my disability. I talked to a physical therapist who used this technology, and he warned me that it was painful and exhausting for the athletes who did it. He wasn’t sure if it would help me, but he was willing to give it a test session.
During my first session, the therapist had me lie on my belly and applied the electrodes to my left paraspinous back muscles. I lifted my left leg off the table and held it there as he dialed up the electrical current. If felt like bugs racing across my skin. He kept dialing up the current. The bugs raced faster. It became more and more electrical, and then painful. After a minute my therapist asked if he could turn up the current again. This is the typical procedure because the brain releases endorphins and nerve growth factors that make the e-stim more comfortable, so after a few minutes patients can typically tolerate a higher dose of electricity. When that was done, we did my quadriceps muscles on my left leg, where I suffered particular weakness. After it was over, I had completed thirty minutes of “exercise” that was more rigorous than what I had been able to do in years. I began a regular regimen of e-stim therapy.
Discovering Functional Medicine
Every night, after everyone else was sleeping, I searched the Internet, looking for more information that might help me. One night I stumbled onto the webpage for the Institute for Functional Medicine and was immediately intrigued.
Its goal was to provide clinicians like myself with a better way to care for people with complex chronic disease by looking at how the interaction between genetics, diet, hormone balance, toxin exposures, infections, and psychological factors contribute to the development of disease or the improvement of one’s health and vitality.
This was exactly what I had been searching for since I’d hit the wheelchair. The institute had textbooks, conferences, and continuing education courses for physicians and other health care professionals. One course captured my attention immediately: Neuroprotection: A Functional Medicine Approach for Common and Uncommon Neurologic Syndromes. I ordered it and began studying, night after night. Although it was difficult at first, that functional medicine course taught me that I could improve the condition of mymitochondria and my brain cells. It gave me an entirely new way of thinking about brain health and how it relates to whole-body health. Although it wasn’t the way I was trained, it made sense to me. It was all logical and scientifically supported, so it resonated with me as a doctor, but it also fit into the context of my experience as an MS patient.
I also understood that it was likely that I had a genetic vulnerability, or several, that had increased the likelihood that I’d develop multiple sclerosis. I finally had a much deeper understanding of the significance to the brain of leaky gut, food allergies, toxins, mitochondria that were not providing enough energy for the cell, neurotransmitter problems, and the impact of having inefficient enzymes for the metabolism of B vitamins and sulfur. Based on what I now knew, I had a much longer list of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, antioxidants, and essential fatty acids that I understood were helpful for mitochondria and brain cells. I finally understood why my brain was on fire, under attack by my immune cells, and I also had some ideas about what I could do to cool the fires of inflammation that were raging there. My worldview was changing. I immediately began to plan and implement lifestyle changes that went far beyond anything I’d been doing before. The seeds for the Wahls Protocol, although not yet named, were sown.
But how would I do it? I had a long list of nutrients, but was I really going to take huge fistfuls of pills every day? And would that even work? The Paleo Diet suggested that food was the best source, but many functional medicine concepts relied on supplements. Our Paleolithic ancestors didn’t take supplements, obviously. The Paleo Diet had taught me to eliminate certain foods but didn’t necessarily tell me how to get the precise nutrients I now knew I needed. Functional medicine helped me to determine what nutrients I needed with their list of advised vitamins and supplements to take but didn’t necessarily tell me how to get them.
If I could get those same nutrients I was taking in pill form from the food I was eating, I reasoned, those nutrients might be more effective than the synthetic versions of the nutrients I was taking. In addition, I might also pick up many additional compounds—maybe thousands of compounds—that had yet to be named, that contributed synergistically to the effectiveness of a particular vitamin or supplement because they existed along with the nutrients in the original package. (Most vitamins in nature are actually a family of related compounds that are all biologically active in our cells.) I realized that I needed an eating plan specifically designed to maximize my mitochondrial and brain function—an eating plan that went beyond anything I’d already encountered. It would incorporate Paleo principles, functional medicine concepts, and my own research. Maybe that would jump-start the changes in my body I desperately wanted to see and feel.
I stared at my new list of the nutrients functional medicine suggested I needed for better brain health and wondered: Which foods contain these nutrients? I had no idea. I showed my list of nutrients to my registered dietitian friends, but they didn’t know where to find those things in the food supply, either. Next I went to the health science library. I couldn’t find any answers there, and so I went back to the Internet and began searching once again. With more work, I finally developed a long list of new foodstuffs to add to my diet that seemed to match up nutritionally. I began to add these to every meal.
That’s when things really began to change in my brain and body.
Generating the Proof
I was just about to start a new position as the primary care doctor for the polytrauma unit, treating veterans with head injuries. It was a job I wasn’t sure I could do, and Jackie and I both wondered whether the hospital had assigned me the position in order to force me to face the fact that I could no longer work. Instead, I surprised everyone, including myself. After just three months practicing the new diet, gradually increasing my e-stim exercises, and practicing daily meditation and a simple self-massage, I could walk between exam rooms using just one cane. After six months I could walk throughout the entire hospital without a cane. But it wasn’t just my body that had changed. I experienced and saw the world very differently. The old me—the conventional internal medicine physician—had been struck down like Paul on the way to Damascus. The old me, who had relied on drugs and procedures to make my patients well, who had been made progressively more feeble by my illness, had been replaced with someone who understood intellectually and physically that disease begins at the cellular level, when cells are starved of the building blocks they need to conduct the chemistry of life properly, and that the root of optimal health begins with taking away the things that harm and confuse our cells while providing the body with the right environment in which to thrive. I finally understood what I had to do to provide my cells with all the building blocks of life they needed to heal. I was doing it, and it was working.
This completely altered how I practiced medicine. I began teaching residents and patients in our primary care clinics how to care for themselves in a way I had only just discovered as optimal, using diet and health behaviors for diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, mood disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, and traumatic brain injury instead of relying only on drugs. The residents learned that diet and lifestyle are powerful treatments, often as effective, if not more so, than drugs. The patients in the traumatic brain injury clinic were also eager to learn what things they could do to speed the healing of their brains. In patient after patient, I watched symptoms and the need for drugs decrease as diet and lifestyles improved.
The many people I helped notwithstanding, however, anecdotal evidence wasn’t good enough for me. There was no question that the medical establishment wouldn’t believe, let alone endorse, my protocol without a clinical trial. I felt compelled to apply the same rigor to my own work that I had required when researching what to do for myself. I needed definitive tests to determine whether this would help others. I decided to begin the long, complex, and expensive process of doing a clinical trial to prove that my new protocol didn’t just work for me—that it would work for anyone with a similar affliction. That meant designing a clinical trial, writing the grant, securing funding (in a world that funds less than 2 percent of grants), and getting my study approved by the Institutional Review Board (the committee that oversees research at the VA and university). In less than eighteen months, I achieved the seemingly impossible. On October 6, 2010, we enrolled our first patient.
In fall 2011, a group organizing a local TEDx talk asked me to submit a proposal to speak. For those not familiar with TEDx, it is an offshoot of TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. This is a set of nonprofit conferences on a variety of topics that are filmed and available for public viewing on the Internet. TEDx is similar. Conferences are organized locally but are also available to view for free online, and speakers are not paid. Millions of people view the TED and TEDx talks, however, and many have gone viral. I would have eighteen minutes to tell my story and explain how I designed a diet specifically for my mitochondria and my brain. I agreed.
In my TEDx talk, I explained the specifics of my intensive nutrition plan, and I challenged people to become ambassadors for their mitochondria and to eat for health. At the end of November, that TEDx talk, “Minding Your Mitochondria,” was placed on YouTube. It spread into the Paleo community, the MS community, and the functional medicine community. Within a year, that lecture had more than 1 million views. I’d touched more lives than most physicians or scientists will touch in their lifetimes. I felt like I was helping to change the world for the better, and that was exhilarating, but I wanted to do even more.
My mission was never clearer. I needed to continue to do the research so I could reach my physician colleagues and eventually change the standard of care. I needed to continue to teach the public because I believe the public will soon be far ahead of the medical community when it comes to understanding the power of food to reclaim and maintain health.
The next step was to write this book.
Meanwhile, I’ve expanded the lab, we have additional studies under way, and our preliminary results continue to be very exciting. We have submitted the first study’s safety data. Once that paper is published, we will work out our next papers, which will describe in detail the outcomes data, specifically showing changes in fatigue levels, mood, thinking, and walking ability. We have several other trials in the works so we can continue to refine and improve and disseminate information about the limitless potential of this lifestyle.
I still have multiple sclerosis, but now I also have my life back.
Your Story
It will take many years and millions of dollars for us to do clinical trials that can prove that the Wahls Protocol is effective for multiple sclerosis and other chronic diseases. I am busy writing and submitting grants to conduct those studies. In the meantime, I invite you to read my book, take my story to heart, and talk to your family and your physician about the protocol. Because here’s the most important thing I want you to realize: Your doctor cannot cure your autoimmune disease. Your medication can only ease your symptoms, sometimes with side effects that make you feel even worse. But this is not the end of the story. The power of healing is within you. All you need to do is give your body what it needs and remove what is poisoning it. You can restore your own health by what you do—not by the pills you take, but by how you choose to live. When you eat and live in accordance with the needs of your cells, your body can finally concentrate on healing, and that is when the dramatic changes will happen for you.
The purpose of my years of self-experimentation was to determine exactly what the body needs to fight back against autoimmune disease. The result is the Wahls Protocol: a systematic and aggressive intervention into your body’s downward spiral. It is a mending of your broken biochemistry that comes not from your doctor or your pharmacist but from you, making changes that are entirely under your control. It is a restoration of your body’s healing power generated by altering what you eat and do each day. You don’t have to wait until all the proof comes in and is vetted by the medical community. You don’t have to wait until a “food prescription” becomes part of the standard of care in your conventional doctor’s office (which I believe someday will happen—it is the only rational course). You can have this information right now. Food is the bedrock of health. Our food choices can either lead to disease or create health and vitality.
As you implement the Wahls Protocol, you will likely begin noticing that your thinking is clearer, your moods are better, and your energy is coming back. Those over their ideal weight will find that their weight normalizes without hunger. In my clinics, when people come back in three months, everyone who has fully implemented the diet has begun noticing all these things. For the next three years, I typically see my patients “youthen”—they look younger and younger each time I see them as their cells revitalize and their bodies become healthy once more.
If I can rise up from a tilt/recline wheelchair by changing the way I live my life, consider what the people you love, your community, your country, and the world would look like if everybody began eating and living to optimally fuel their cells. We could restore health and vitality to the world and dramatically lower the cost of health care, saving billions of dollars. What choice will you make? How will you choose to live the rest of your life? With disability? Or with vitality? It’s all up to you.
Reprinted by arrangement with Avery, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Terry Wahls, M.D., 2014.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.Product details
- ASIN : B00DMCJOW8
- Publisher : Avery; 1st edition (March 13, 2014)
- Publication date : March 13, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 12052 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 555 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : B089F494W9
- Best Sellers Rank: #60,709 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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About the author

Terry L. Wahls, M.D. is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City. In addition she is a clinical researcher, studying the use of diet and lifestyle interventions in autoimmune and other chronic disease states. Diagnosed in 2000 with Multiple Sclerosis, Dr. Wahls became a proponent of integrative and functional medicine, which helped her create an intensive nutrition, lifestyle, and neuromuscular electrical stimulation protocol that would treat the severe disability caused by her MS. She has made it her mission to spread the word about The Wahls Protocol and her own inspirational story of recovery through her TEDx talk, which has received more than two millions hits.
She is the author of The Wahls Protocol: How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine and the paperback, The Wahls Protocol A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles and the cookbook The Wahls Protocol Cooking for Life: The Revolutionary Modern Paleo Plan to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions.
You can learn more about her work from her website: www.terrywahls.com. She is conducting clinical trials testing the effect of nutrition and lifestyle interventions to treat MS. She is also committed to teaching the public and medical community about the healing power of the Paleo diet and therapeutic lifestyle changes to restore health and vitality to our citizens and hosts a Wahls Protocol® Seminar each August. Follow her on Facebook (Terry Wahls MD) Follow her on twitter at @TerryWahls. Follow her on Instagram at drterrywahls.
Learn more at her website www.terrywahls.com about The Wahls Foundation, and Wahls Protocol® Seminars. Dr. Terry Wahls lives in Iowa City, Iowa with her wife. Her son, Zach Wahls, is the author of the bestselling Gotham book My Two Moms.
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It's so well done. The content is great and it's been so finely edited that it reads very well too and gets right to the point with no waffling. A lot of information is condensed into a very short space. It's an enlightening and inspiring read with just the right amount of facts and personal information about the author.
There are three levels of the Wahls protocol. The Wahls Protocol, Wahls Paleo and Wahls Paleo Plus which is the most strict and is for those that are the most ill. I'm only really a supporter and recommender of the third level of the protocol, Wahls Paleo Plus.
The other two protocols contain things like soy milk and yogurt and cheese (ugh!), soy flour, potato flour, packaged gluten-free foods such as crackers. Many allowed foods are extremely high in carbohydrate and anti-nutrients and very low in nutrients. This seems to be because the author is trying to make the programs easy to adjust to for those coming off a very junk-filled diet, which makes a lot of sense from that perspective and from the point of view of getting subjects in a study to adhere to the diet properly which is more likely if it contains a more of the foods they are used to.
But from a purely nutritional standpoint it's really not ideal. I and many ill people I know would be a lot sicker, fatter and have blood sugar all over the place if we ate the estimated 244 grams of carbohydrate on the Wahls Protocol, or even the estimated 178 grams of carbohydrate on Wahls Paleo. I doubt I was even eating anywhere near so much carbohydrate even before I went on a lower carb diet to treat diet-related insulin resistance issues and weight gain from same. One listed breakfast contains two whole cups of sweet fruit in it, a massive amount to eat at one sitting. The book also (bizarrely) claims that all three Wahls Protocols will improve blood sugar numbers. In my opinion for some of us at least this is only true for the ketogenic (or near ketogenic) Wahls Paleo Plus program.
Wahls Paleo Plus includes nutrient dense foods such as 6-12 ounces (180 - 360 g) of meat daily (some as organ meat and some as wild caught fish), coconut oil and milk in abundance for high ketones, 6-9 cups of vegetables daily depending on your size (and less than this if you're a very petite woman) mixed between greens, high sulfur veggies and colourful veggies, seaweed or algae eaten daily, cultured foods eaten daily such as homemade coconut yogurt or sauerkraut, up to 4 ounces (120 g) of soaked and sprouted or dried nuts and needs daily, up to 1 cup of fruit daily with berries and other low carbohydrate fruits preferred (as part of your 6-9 cups), plus olive oil, ghee and animal fats as desired.
The high amount of ketones produced from MCTs in coconut oil mean you can eat more vegetables and still stay in a ketogenic state. Roughly just over a third of daily calories are to come from coconut oil: 4-6 tablespoons of pure oil or the equivalent in coconut milk. The diet is roughly 65% fat by calories.
Wahls explains that Paleo Plus is a modified MCT ketogenic diet. Ketogenic diets have been shown to be beneficial for many types of neurological and other diseases and are very safe. Switching over form a sugar burning metabolism to a fat burning metabolism can take 3-6 weeks however, and can make you feel awful at first. Some recommend making this change gradually, while other find it easer to just get it over with and jump right into it (as I did). Once you're keto adapted the mental clarity and extra energy it brings you is pretty amazing, as is the loss of the need to eat quite so often. Fat is a slow burning fuel, while sugar burns fast like kindling, as nutrition expert Nora Gedgaudas has explained.
Wahls recommends doing urine ketone strips to measure your ketosis but adds that blood ketone tests are far more accurate. Some blood sugar monitors can also take ketone test strips and will give you a ketone measurement using just a drop of blood. To be in ketosis numbers should be between 0.5 and 3. It's so great to see an extremely specific and detailed food plan for serious disease so we can make sure to get every benefit out of our diet that we possibly can. The information was so helpful, even though I was doing most of the recommendations already.
Wahls also supports ideas such as:
* Supplements can in some cases be helpful, but they can never replace a nutrient dense and healthy diet. A proper diet must always come first. Foods contain many beneficial cofactors and other compounds not included in supplements and many that we have not yet even discovered or named.
* Getting evaluated for potential food allergies, toxic load issues and more personalised nutritional needs by a practitioner of functional medicine is a very good idea. The Institute for Functional Medicine can help you find a provider in your area.
* Drugs are not the answer. Let food, good wholesome food be thy medicine.
* "Between the unexpected, unpleasant events in our lives and our response to those events is a space, and in that space we have a choice in deciding what our response will be. We can either give up or get up each day and do our best."
* "Epigenetics is how your environment talks to your genes. Our cells are capable of reading the state of our environment and activating or deactivating genes. This means that, based on the choices we make, we can turn on genes for health or turn off those health-promoting genes. In other words, it is your health behaviours such as diet and activities, that determine whether the health-promoting or the health-robbing genes are active. For some conditions, such as cystic fibrosis or hemophilia, our genes are an important factor, often the cause of the disease. But for the obesity, heart disease, mental health and autoimmune epidemics that are driving up the cost of health care in the U.S. and around the world, there are no single genes that are the culprit. Instead, for each of these problems, multiple genes are involved, and they interact in a complex way with the environment."
* We need to stop blaming our genes for our illnesses and work on making the best of the 70% that is under our control.
* "Yes, it does cost more to eat vegetables. But you will pay the price either way--for food that restores your health and vitality or for doctor visits, drugs, surgery and loss of work due to health problems."
* "Functional medicine is really looking at health of the cell. And what can we do to help the individual make the environment for their cells, an environment for doing the biochemistry life more ideal. So that comes down to the fruit you eat or do not eat, the quality of the air you breathe, the water you drink, the toxic load that is in your body is a result of the exposure you had over a lifetime because if you couldn't get the toxins out the day you were exposed to them, they get parked in your fat and did you know that your brain is 70% fat? So if you can't get the toxins out you had today with your whatever your exposure was, you're parking it in your fat and your brain which is going to create havoc over time."
Hard to argue with any of that! I agree with all of it. Most of the above are quotes from Dr Wahls, from her many websites. Functional or holistic medicine just makes so much sense. It treats the actual cause of diseases, rather than just blindly drugging everything and focusing on endlessly chasing and minimising symptoms.
There are 3 basic principles of the type of medicine discussed by Wahls and others in this same field:
A. Get the good stuff in. Give your body the fuel and tools it needs to work at an optimum level. Good food, nutrients and all the proper vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Make sure you aren't deficient in any of the major nutrients as the different nutrients all work together.
B. Get the bad stuff out. Make sure your body can detoxify out all the toxic substances and toxic by-products of bodily processes properly. Stop as many toxins from getting in in the first place, and do things which aid detoxification to get rid of the ones you have.
C. Reduce your body's total load. The total load concept is that lessening the body's overall burden/work and stress level in one area, will improve health generally and improve the body's ability to heal because the body's total load (or burden) is lessened. Fixing one problem frees up bodily resources that can be then be used to help other parts of the body function getter or to heal. In other words, you need to look at the body as a whole in order to heal, and not just the one part of the body that is generating the most symptoms.
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A special note to M.E. patients on the Wahls protocol:
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis is a neurological disease similar in some ways to MS, which also causes demyelination and mitochondrial dysfunction as well as significant vascular and cardiac issues.
For those with my particular neurological disease, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, it is important that activity levels be kept always within very strict limits, or else relapse will occur. (Death is also a risk in M.E. if overexertion is severe. This is not about symptoms or feeling fatigued, but a problem of cardiac insufficiency, reduced circulating blood volume and POTS and so on which is serious and non-negotiable. Overexertion always causes a worsening of the disease.) But of course activity levels can and should be raised slowly to keep in line with health improvements in M.E. - this is something that happens naturally anyway.
For those unfamiliar with the disease, many M.E. patients are housebound and almost entirely bedbound (and far too ill to use wheelchairs for even small periods of time in a day or week) and limited with even basic communication and reading; which is also part of why I am trying hard to summarise the work of Wahls for them as much as possible. Daily stretching, balance work and cardiovascular exercise is probably a great recommendation for almost everyone but should be omitted by M.E. patients unless they can do this without becoming more ill or symptomatic. The advice on pushing through symptoms is also not relevant to M.E. patient as many are severely ill due to doing exactly this for many years.
Also, Wahls says: 'It is common to have some level of detoxification (more fatigue, headache) in the first week which resolves and then improves markedly by week two.' I would say that for M.E. patients this statement is not quite right and is an enormous understatement. M.E. patients will often have quite severe healing reactions to supplementation and changes in diet. These can be severe enough to make a patient no longer able to feed themselves or do other tasks of daily living, as well as leave them in agony. They can also last FAR longer than just a week!
It is important for anyone ill to make the dietary changes gradually, and for patients with M.E. this caution should be taken very seriously. Jumping in with both feet too fast could leave you very very ill for months afterward. Healing reactions are a good sign that healing is occurring, but need to be controlled so they don't become overwhelming. Switch to the full Wahls Paleo Plus diet over a few months at least. Slowly but surely is the way to go! Improvements will almost certainly be slow too, so patience is necessary there as well, especially when the illness has been severe for many years or even several decades or more.
M.E. patients will also often do far better eating cooked veggies rather than raw, which can be too difficult and painful for us to digest and may not cope at all well with prolonged fasting. (For more M.E. patient-specific tips and cautions see the HHH and HFME websites.)
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This diet is described as an MS diet, but really this diet is the diet we have all evolved to be best suited to. All of us need such a nutrient-dense and low-toxicity diet, and so I hope people with all sorts of diseases look into the Wahls diet and not just those with neurological diseases. The diet can also help where there is not yet a correct diagnosis. We all need the right amounts of the nutrients that enable healing, no matter what disease we have.
For some people following this diet plan will be enough, but for others a higher level of intervention will be required in addition to the diet. The first step toward healing has to be an excellent diet and good gut health, combined with minimising toxin exposures. If more help is needed then, as Wahls explains, it is best to see a Functional medicine expert so that it can be determined what extra supplements or other supports you may need. The key is learning about your own 'biochemical individuality.' There are so many tests now which can be done to determine where your detoxification pathways are failing, which nutrients you need more of or have problems utilising or why your gut is still not functioning right.
For those that can't find or can't afford to see a Functional medicine expert, or cannot see any medical expert due to being housebound etc., an excellent companion to Wahls book are the books by Functional medicine experts such as Dr Sherry Rogers. Dr Rogers tells you exactly which tests may help you, how to treat more complex gut problems and how to go about following a more intensive detoxification regime involving a detox cocktail and FIR sauna use. Dr Rogers books are to some extent `do-it-yourself' health books but ideally Dr Rogers recommends that you get well with the help of a qualified practitioner that will be able to order the appropriate tests for you, and also help you interpret them.
Dr Sherry Rogers writes in `Detoxify or Die',
`I have to laugh when people ask me if I do alternative, herbal, acupuncture or holistic medicine. 'No,' I reply. 'We do state-of-the-art medicine. In other words, we find the biochemical, nutritional and environmental causes and cures rather than blindly drugging everything. Sure, herbs are gentler, safer and more physiologic than drugs and holistic medicine attempts to incorporate many diverse modalities, etc. But there is no substitute for finding the underlying biochemical causes and cures. This is real medicine. This is where medicine should and would have been decades ago, if it had not been abducted by the pharmaceutical industry.'
Following a super-high-quality diet is also the foundation of Dr Rogers' treatment plan and so starting with the Wahls diet (which is the best there is, along with Primal Body-Primal Mind) and then moving on (if necessary) to follow Dr Rogers' advice on advanced detoxification techniques just makes so much sense. The best book of hers to start with is Detoxify or Die. It is just brilliant and very easy to read as well. It has so much good information and support for sauna use and so much more. Her book 'The Safe, Effective Way to Prevent and Heal Chronic Gastrointestinal Disorders' is also excellent.
In addition to books by Dr Sherry Rogers I'd also recommend books and articles by Dr Lawrence Wilson (particularly his book on sauna use), Dr Klenner, Dr Abram Hoffer, Andrew Saul, Sally Fallon and Mary Enig and any and all of the vitamin C and orthomolecular experts such as Linus Pauling and Dr Thomas Levy. Other excellent books on diet and nutrition (with huge amounts in common with the Wahls diet) include the BRILLIANT Primal Body-Primal Mind by the also brilliant Nora Gedgaudas as well as books on the GAPS diet for the treatment of dysbiosis and a diet-based plan to heal the gut.
Gut health is so important and if gut health is poor, then your body can't properly use all the wonderful nutritious food you are eating. Many of us need to heal the gut first of all, and this may at first involve supplements such as Betaine HCL, enzymes and probiotics, as well as dietary changes, as these books explain. All of these books, along with Wahls book, are far more than just standard Paleo diet books.
Combining the excellent Wahls diet with the advice on detoxification by Dr Rogers (including the use of an FIR sauna and a daily detox cocktail and 'oil change' nutrients and digestive supports) has seen me finally start to slowly improve my health since 2009. I'm slowly improving month by month from a very severe neurological disease - thanks in part to the work of Nora Gedgaudas, Dr Wahls and Dr Rogers, and others like them - that has left me housebound and almost entirely bedbound for many years. I have been housebound and almost entirely bedbound (and far too ill to even use a wheelchair, or even the phone) for over 10 years and I got ill when I was just 19. Getting slowly worse and worse year after year was terrifying, especially when I was so ill and disabled already.
I wish so much I had had this information early on in my disease, rather than coming to it more than 10 years in. Healing is so much easier the earlier you start it.
I wont know how much of my damage is irreversible until I improve a lot more (a LOT more I hope!) and find out where I plateau. But for those that have been ill 'only' 5 or 7 years or less, or that are not severely ill, I do think these approaches could be curative or very close to it. At the very least they will undo as much damage as can be undone which is what this book very sensibly promises.
My big dream is to get to a 30% function level, where I can live independently.... I'm still so far away from that currently, but I am at least making slow but sure progress now! Being able to cook a little this last few years after 8 years or more not being able to even make myself a cup of tea has been just so wonderful. Cooking myself an egg is a joyful experience! It is so wonderful to now each month be getting small UNsymptoms and UNdisabilities!
I have learned so much about health that I would never have known if I had not become so ill and been forced to learn it!
The basic information in this book is wonderful, though I'm admittedly not a fan of high fibre supplement recommendations (as the GAPS diet book explains, many of us get far worse gut issues with extra fibre and can benefit a lot from lower fibre foods), outdated information about how raw vegetables are easier to digest than cooked ones and come with their own enzymes which do some of this digestion for you (actually cooked foods are *far* easier to digest than raw!), a fairly low salt diet and no guidelines on making sure to get a healthy minimum amount, or recommendations of iodised sea salt and not unrefined sea salt. Gut and sugar issues are barely mentioned and the supplements section is very minimal and basic while many alternative therapies such as Reiki and acupuncture are recommended.
A high dose calcium supplement is recommended despite most good nutritional experts saying calcium tablets are not needed almost ever and can be harmful. No warnings are given on supplements which can often be poorly tolerated and need to be started carefully at lower doses such as NAC and silymarin. No information is given on sulfur food sensitivities or the need many have to take supplemental HCl to digest protein. The book also doesn't specify to only buy B complex vitamins that don't contain synthetic folate or the inferior form of B12. Only the basic B12 test is recommended along with a small dosage of methyl B12 which is a strange omission considering how inaccurate the B12 test is known to be (you can test high and actually still have a serious B12 deficiency causing demyelination!) and how many people have B12 deficiency causing demyelination misdiagnosed as MS or at least coexisting with MS. Again, this is a diet book only primarily.
The Wahls diet is said to be useful for patients with diseases other than Multiple Sclerosis, and it certainly is. But this book contains a ton of information which is heavily based on the symptoms and other characteristics of the MS patient and may not fit those of us with other neurological or autoimmune etc. diseases quite so well. Symptom checklists were very MS-based and many symptoms and issues seen in non-MS diseases were not mentioned. A fairly high degree of functioning is also assumed throughout, as is illustrated in the extensive Wahls diary instructions and the information on demanding daily stretching, balance and cardiovascular exercises and advice to push yourself to do things and to keep working. Issues with an inability to stand long to prepare food (for example) and hypoglycemia are not really even discussed. The book aims to get through a lot of information in a short time and to be primarily about detailed dietary information and about MS so this is not even really a criticism, just an observation. It's totally fair enough it's an MS based book as the author has MS after all. For non-MSers you just need to skip certain sections and do some extra reading elsewhere on some issues is all.
I bought the hardcover edition as I read a review saying the Kindle version didn't display the tables at the end of the book well. It's a very well designed hardcover. The smaller size makes it easy to read and hold and the typography and book design is excellent inside as well. There is no small unreadable type or text too close to the spine of the book so you can't read it without cracking the books spine. The small case study or facts boxes scattered throughout the text are easily defined from the main text, not too long and although printed sometimes in (annoying to read) italics still quite easy to read. I can also loan this hardcover version out to friends, which is another huge reason it's better than a Kindle edition as well. (Kindle titles should be far more loanable!) Get this hardcover edition I say, it's better than the Kindle version and also the earlier paperback edition of the book that came out a few years ago too. Much more polished. I give it 4.5 stars.
The Wahls Foundation is a nonprofit organisation raising funds to do research on this diet. Buying this book helps fund their research. Reading more of her ideas online is so helpful. I'd highly recommend watching all her free videos online (watch out for the loud sound on some of them - ouch!), plus her Facebook page and blog and website. They are all so helpful.
Dr Wahls is the real deal and is clearly motivated by a genuine desire to help ill people improve their health. I wish her and her Foundation all the best and thank them for all their wonderful work. This is real cutting edge medicine.
Wahls explains it takes 1 year to replace all your skin cells, 1-3 years to replace the cells in the liver and kidneys, 15 years to replace heart muscle cells, and 7-10 years to replace myelin. No drug will ever be able to do this for you and only you can do it for yourself. So why not get started rebuilding yourself today!
Best wishes for future health to anyone nutrition-nerdy enough to read this far!
Jodi Bassett, The Hummingbirds' Foundation for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and Health Healing & Hummingbirds
Overall, I found that a slow and careful read of this book is worthwhile. The text has a substantial amount of information to glean, and I took many notes. I not only learned the perspective of this author through the book, but I became aware of many keywords that have given me inroads into other research and reading -- things like "leaky gut" and "mitochondria" and "ketogenic." This book is very comprehensive and thorough; it's the work of a very committed, generous medical doctor who desperately wants to help others. In a word, she's a crusader for a whole new approach to treating MS.
With that said, I found that reading this book involved a good deal of sifting. By this I mean that I found I had to really sift through this passionate book in order to find what might work for me. This is true with most of the other books I've recently read about treating MS with diet/exercise/lifestyle changes, so it's not really a comment that is unique to this book, but my main point here is that Terry Wahls has a very firm position that she's extremely zealous about. I don't blame her: according to her story, she really turned her physiology and psychology around. She's not reserved about the claims in this book in any way. She isn't reserved about her position. She's a downlight proselytizer for her diet and approach to living. I really appreciate that energy and passion, but at the same time, I think that, as a reader, you have to take some of what she says with a grain of salt and approach her proselytizing with a tad of skepticism. For me, this is because I'm not Terry Wahls and I think my road through MS will have to be my own.
In this set of descriptions and reactions, I'm going to address various points and themes in the book, then wrap-up with some of my overall reactions.
' Key Ideas in the Book: Eat nutrient-rich foods, eat your nutrients (instead of getting them via supplements), don't even think about being a vegetarian, and question everything traditional medicine has told you about MS and your body.
' AUDIENCE, or "Who is this book written for?": While Wahls says that the book is intended for a very broad audience, including those with most forms of auto-immune diseases and even just those looking to lose weight and "get healthy," it's clear throughout the book that the intended audience for the book is people with Multiple Sclerosis who are quite sick. To be even more specific, the presumed audience is people with MS who are quite sick, probably on some form of medication(s), and don't have a great diet and/or exercise regime. In a nutshell, this is who Terry Wahls was herself, before her miraculous recovery. Before she started to research diet options for her own self experiments and self treatment, she was a mess. This book is about cleaning up that mess and breaking out of the doldrums many suffer in.
As someone with MS who is actually doing quite well (few permanent disabilities so far ... knock on wood!), has always eaten well, and follows an active and steady exercise routine, I found the book wasn't really written with me in mind. That is 100% okay and I'm glad that Wahls has addressed the book to those with MS who are really in need of a serious intervention. However, my point about audience is that while this book can function as a useful resource for many folks with all kinds of auto-immune disorders and all levels of health and wellness, you'll have to sort through the book a bit if you're not in the "target audience" group. Wahls pretty much assumes that her reader eats refined sugars, a lot of carbs, and is on the meds. If you're not, and if you don't have MS but some other disease, you'll still find a lot of value here -- you'll just have to do some sifting.
' So, What's Her Diet/Protocol?: You really have to read the book to get a full sense of the diets she is advocating for here. She offers three diets, really, though says many times that the third and most extreme one is the best for fighting disease. In a nutshell, the diets are all about eating large quantities of nutrient-rich veggies, fruit, meats, and other foods (coconut milk, seeds, nuts, etc.). At the third/highest level of her diet plan, you're eating two meals a day and maintaining a low level of measured and tracked ketosis. Wahls is very particular about her diets, suggesting very specific volumes of foods. She treats food as medicine, so her specificity is not surprising. My own personal belief is that these diets can be tweaked and adapted by individuals (like me!), but I'm not sure she would be so elastic and flexible. She's really a strong believer in the science behind these three very particular diets.
' Her Research Plan: As I noted above, her plan as of 2014, is to conduct more research to see if her diet (the third stage of her paleo regime, to be precise) can have a clinical impact in an actual research population. Those findings are still not published, so this book is based mainly on her own experience or "researching on herself," as she calls it. Note that she does have a bit more than that to go on, in that she works with patients and often sees great improvements.
' Cult of Personality: Throughout the book, short vignettes from "Wahls Warriors" appear. These are positive accounts by folks who have followed versions of the Wahl's Protocol and seen various forms of improvement. These are inspirational tales and, for me, one of the most compelling parts of the book. However, there is something just a tad odd that Wahls works to develop such a cult of personality around herself and her name throughout this book. These adherents to her plan are "Wahls Warriors" in a way that seems to me to deprive them of some of their agency. With the Wahls plan, as I see it, you're either on the bus or off the bus -- and while it's a compelling lifestyle plan, I'm not sure I want to be deemed one of her adherents simply if I follow all or some of her suggestions.
' Exercise?: A section of the book is devoted to stretches and physical exercise. This is a comprehensive book to be sure. Those with limited mobility will gain a lot from the suggestions for active movement in this book. If you work out regularly at a fairly high level, this exercise section will not be that helpful. It's a set of rather rudimentary suggestions.
' Electronic Stimulation: Wahl benefited a great deal from Electronic Stimulation, and devotes a section of the book to that treatment approach. For those with serious muscle decline, this will be a useful section.
' Meds: Wahls gives some mixed messages on the topic of meds. Her own story is that she stopped taking the meds when the diet really started to work for her. Part of her heroic and amazing tale is about getting away from the meds, and she's eager to point out that MS medications can quite a bit of harm to your overall system and wellbeing. However, she also goes to great lengths to suggest that readers continue to follow the advice of their doctors. This makes sense, as she'd be crazy to give overt medical advice in a book like this -- "Quit your Copaxone today!" -- but the mixed messages are somewhat odd. In my own experience, my MS doc thinks the Wahl's Protocol is "unproven" and dangerous to rely on exclusively. So I think it might be challenging to do both: the meds + the Wahls Protocol. In reality, I think you might have to drop the meds to see if the diet is really working for you.
' Is it Paleo?: Yes, it most certainly is, and Wahls is an advocate for the typical rationales behind the paleo diets that are faddish now. However, her diet is paleo with a twist, in that it's all about maximizing nutrition. Where as most paleo diets are about losing weight and getting jacked with muscle, this one is about eating nutrient dense food. That is a key difference.
' Functional Medicine: As Wahls makes clear, she became an adherent of Functional Medicine en route to developing this radical new dietary treatment regime for MS. Note that some of the key principles of Functional Medicine are very much alive in Wahls's book and ideas. The first is the idea that most if not all people should avoid gluten. The second is that many people suffer from "leaky gut." Wahls is a big proponent of Functional Medicine, so those interested in this book will likely be interested in other books in that area of knowledge.
' Vegetarianism?: Wahls describes how she used to be a vegetarian and in part blames that diet on her contracting MS. She also blames her stressful time in med school and as a resident (little sleep, long hours), just to be clear. Her problem with vegetarianism is simply that she doesn't see how you can get enough protein and nutrients when suffering from MS and eating a vegetarian diet. Note that she has an egg allergy so does not include eggs in her diet plans, so vegetarians may find a way to include eggs in their own versions of her diets. She's also wary of beans, non-organic tofu, and seitan -- some of the protein-rich staples of healthy vegetarian eating.
' Toxins and Organics: Wahls is keen to point out how toxin avoidance is key, as is detoxing, if you want to get healthy. She has entire chapters on these topics.
' Stress Management: Wahls is also detailed in her efforts to help her readers de-stress. She has many useful ideas on this topic, including everything from meditation to bathing in epsom salts.
' Recipes: Note that the bulk of this book is about food, so it makes sense that she would conclude the book with many recipes. The ideas are great and fully coincide with what she's advocating for in the rest of the book. Note that Wahls is a proponent of the Vtamx blended smoothy, so many of those recipes are included.
' Final Thoughts: As I said in the beginning, I learned an amazing amount from this book. Simply put, it's changed my life. And as someone with MS, I even hope that it's saved my life (in terms of quality). However, I worry a bit that it's too one-size-fits all and too inflexible. There are many people out there doing well with MS, and they seem to be doing slightly different things. So I think taking the wisdom in this book with some grains of organic sea salt would be a good idea.
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This product was not given to me as part of any promotion. I bought it after doing some comparison shopping and this is entirely the result of my own opinions and use of the product.



















