Dr. Terry Wahls on Conquering MS: Nutrition for a Vibrant Life EP 460

Speaker A
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Speaker C
We can create a better calmed immune system, less reactive microglia, fewer relapses, less fatigue, better moods, a higher quality of life. And fortunately, my message, because I kept doing the research and publishing it as finally winning people over that diet really is important, that exercise really is important, that sleep and stress management are in that modifiable lifestyle factors are just as viable or just as critical as any disease modifying treatments. So it's certainly possible that you can have a great life. You can still be enjoying your spouse, your kids, your grandkids, even if you have a diagnosis of Ms. And there is a whole lot that you can do to support your wellness and your healing journey.

Speaker A
Welcome to passion struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles, and on the show we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions.

On Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEO's creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 460 of Passion Struck. Consistently ranked as the number one alternative health podcast, and a heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn, and discover new ways to live better, to be better, and most importantly, to make a meaningful impact in the world.

If you're new to the show, thank you so much for joining us today. Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that. We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we put into playlists to give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com starterpacks to get started. I am also so excited to announce that my new book, Passionstruck, won the gold medal at the Nonfiction Book Awards and is also recognized as an honorable mention at the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, where it was on the shortlist for the grand prize and also a finalist for the first Horizon award for best debut book.

And you can find it on passionstruck.com, amazon or wherever you purchase books. In case you missed my interviews from last week, they included the legendary Robin Sharma and Doctor Jenny Tate. In my interview with Robin, we delve into his latest book, the Wealth Money can't buy, where we discuss how to redefine success and cultivate a life of true abundance using his innovative eight forms of wealth model. In the second interview, Doctor Jenny Tates, a distinguished clinical psychologist, discusses her new book, stress resets how to soothe your body and mind in minutes, where we unravel the secrets to combating stress with 75 scientifically backed strategies that promise rapid relief and long term resilience. And if you liked those previous episodes or today's, we would so appreciate you giving it a five star rating and review that goes such a long way in strengthening the passion stark community where we can help more people to create an intentional life.

And I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback. Today on the Passion Star podcast, I had the incredible honor of speaking with Doctor Terry Walz, whose personal and professional journey is nothing short of revolutionary. A clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa and a renowned clinical researcher, Doctor Walls has transformed her life and the lives of many others through a groundbreaking approach known as the Walls protocol. After being diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis in 2000, she turned a dire prognosis into a platform for transformation, not just surviving her condition, but thriving beyond it. Using paleo principles and functional medicine, Doctor Walz developed an intensive nutrition and lifestyle protocol that catapulted her from a tilt recline wheelchair to completing an 18 miles bicycle tour.

Her journey and the lessons learned have fueled her mission to help others combat chronic autoimmune conditions. Her best selling books, including the Walls protocol and the Walls protocol cooking for life, outline not only her personal recovery, but also the extensive research and the latest developments that make her program a continually evolving success. Today, Doctor walls will share with us the core principles of her protocol, the power of a nutrient rich diet, and how anyone can harness the principles of functional medicine to reclaim their health. This episode is not just about fighting illness, it's about embracing a lifestyle that celebrates life in its fullest. So whether you're looking for ways to transform your health or simply inspired by stories of resilience and determination, this conversation with doctor Terry Walls is sure to enlighten and inspire.

Thank you for choosing passionstruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now let that journey begin. Netcredit is here to say yes to a personal loan or line of credit. When other lenders say no, apply in minutes and get a decision as soon as the same day. Loans offered by NetCredit or lending partner banks and serviced by Netcredit applications such review and approval.

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I am absolutely thrilled to welcome doctor Terry walls onto passion struck. Welcome, Terry. Hey, thank you for having me. I am so excited to have you. And I thought the best way for us to approach this was by talking a little bit about your background and then some of the research that you have underway.

Now can you start by sharing what your life and career were like before your ms diagnosis? So before entering medical school, I was an athlete. I competed nationally in full contact, respiring in taekwondo and loved it. Entered medical school and decided I shouldn't let people keep kicking me in the head or trying to anyway. So I dialed that back.

Speaker C
I did more biking, more running, long distance skiing. I had a couple kids. Things are going really great. And I'm an internal medicine physician. But then I developed weakness in my left leg.

Saw the neurologist who ordered a bunch of tests. Took about three weeks, and because it had a history of numbness and pain, electrical pain in my face, I knew that I probably had a progressive condition. And so I was secretly praying for a fatal diagnosis because I didn't want to become disabled. I learned that I have multiple sclerosis. I do my research.

I find the best Ms center in the country. I take the newest drugs. Three years later, at age 48, I'm in a tilt recline wheelchair. And fortunately, my neurologist talked with me about the Paleo diet. I switched from my low fat vegetarian diet to the paleo diet.

I continue to decline. I ask myself, am I doing all that I can? And I start reading the basic science, going to pubmed. And now I'm not a neurologist, I'm not a PhD. So this is a lot of work, sorting through all of this, but I decide that mitochondria drive disability and I create a supplement cocktail for my mitochondria and my fatigue slows a little bit.

I'm super grateful. Then I discover studies in electrical stimulation of muscles. I add that and work with my physical therapist. Then I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine, take their course on neuroprotection. I have a longer list of supplements, which I'm happy to take.

Then I have this big aha. And I laugh. John, how long it took to have that. What if I redesign my paleo diet based on this long list of supplements to get these nutrients from the food? So I start this new way of eating.

December 26, 2007 now, at that time, I'm so weak, I cannot sit up in a regular chair. It's been years. I staff a clinic, and I'm at home in a zero gravity chair with my knees higher than my nose. I can take a couple of steps using two walking sticks. I begin to have brain fog, and my trigeminal neuralgia is relentlessly more severe.

I start this new way of eating, and it's really quite striking. Within the month, it's clear that my pain is less, my fatigue is less, my mental clarity is improving. My physical therapist says that I'm stronger. He advances my exercises. I can do ten minutes twice a day, then 15 minutes twice a day, then 30 minutes twice a day.

And then I start walking at the hospital with my two walking sticks. And then with one walking stick done with none. And then on Mother's Day 2008, I really want to try riding my bike, which I've not done in six years. We have an emergency family meeting, and Jackie tells my six foot five inch, 16 year old son, Zach, to run alongside on the left. My daughter Zeb, who's 13, to run alongside on the right.

And she'll follow. And I get on my bike, and I bike around the block. The big 16 year old boy, he's crying. The 13 year old girl, she's crying. My wife, Jackie, she's crying.

And when I relive that moment, tears can still come to me, because that's when I knew the current understanding of secondary progressive multiple sclerosis isn't complete and how much recovery might be possible after that, I keep Viking a little bit more. In October, Jackie signs us up to the courage ride 18.5 miles, and I complete that. And once again, we are all crying. And this really transforms how I think about disease and health, and it will transform the way I practice medicine, and it will transform the research that I do. Well, Terry, thank you for sharing that.

Speaker A
And I'm going to get back into your backstory a little bit in just a second. But as I was doing the research for this interview, I came across an article by doctor Sarah Ballantyne that focused on some of the research that youre doing. And in this, she mentioned that many doctors who are mainstream doctors still dismissed the impact of diet on Ms. Whats been your experience in the medical community regarding the acceptance? In 2009, when I first started giving little lectures at the organic grocery store, the local Ms chapter reached out and asked me if would I speak to them.

Speaker C
And I said, sure. So I had to get interviewed by the clinical advisory committee, who asked me what I was going to say. And I went over, that's going to tell my story and tell people to work on improving their diet and work with their personal physician. They thought that was a dangerous message. So I got banned as a speaker.

Then I got called into my office to my chief of staff's office and the head of medicine at university, and I had to explain why I'd just been banned. I learned that some of my partners were complaining that I wasn't practicing the standard of care. Now, fortunately, John, I had been mentally prepared for this. I brought with me a handful of scientific papers to explain what I was doing and why. And John, my chief of staff, said, Terry, but you have to practice the standard of care.

And so I leaned back and smiled and said, well, I certainly can, John, send out an email to all of the faculty that we have to practice the standard of care. We can't use the latest science to guide our recommendations. And I waited. And then, fortunately, John said, okay, you can do this, but you have to learn how to do this in a way that doesn't offend your colleagues and doesn't put you at risk. So he sent me to the complementary alternative medicine clinic at the university, and I learned to be much more careful to say, I'm just going to work on improving the health of your cells, and we'll just see what happens.

I'll watch your blood pressure, your blood sugar, make sure you're not over medicating. And now people were comfortable with that message. Clearly, I had to learn how to play better in the sandbox. And at first, people were very upset that I was leaning so heavily into better diet, better exercise, better sleep, as opposed to leaning heavily into drugs. And certainly the neurology in the MS community really condemned my message, condemned me.

They thought I was dangerous. And so I would just go give my lectures where I was invited and do our clinical research. Man, what an amazing story that is. So that was 2009 to 2011, where I was really being condemned. And then in 2011, we started presenting our research at scientific conferences, and gradually, my ideas, my concepts started getting credibility.

And so we've come a huge way, and we can go over that journey. I'm now being nominated for awards for my global impact, for MS and the impact of the research that we do. Yeah, that is so phenomenal. It was one of the major reasons I had you on the show, and I actually had a number of listeners who requested you to come on. Great.

Speaker A
For those who may not understand MS, or maybe themselves are listening to this because they've recently got a diagnosis of having MS. One of our best friends was diagnosed, for instance, three years ago, and I remember how traumatic it was for them when they first got that diagnosis. What went through your mind when you were first diagnosed? And what would you recommend to someone who might be watching or listening to this? So, for everyone, quickly, I want you to know that the current understanding is the immune system begins attacking the myelin, the insulation on the wiring in the brain, the spinal cord, leading to episodes of relapse.

Speaker C
Were symptoms gradual improvement? That's called the remission. About age 45, the relapses disappear, and all we have is this progressive worsening of function, worsening pain problems, worsening mood problems. It's the leading cause of early disability, early nursing home care. And so when I was first diagnosed, I went to the literature, I was looking at it, and I saw the progressive nature, the early loss of employment, early nursing home care, and I was pretty upset, very agitated.

My family convinced me I needed to stop reading the research because it was just upsetting me and that we'd go find the best Ms center and let them take care of me. Now, fortunately, along the way, I learned that there is a whole lot that we can do in addition to taking disease modifying treatments. By improving your diet, improving your sleep, improving your exercise, your stress management, we can create a better calmed immune system, less reactive microglia, fewer relapses, less fatigue, better moods, a higher quality of life. And fortunately, my message, because I kept doing the research and publishing it as finally winning people over, that diet really is important, that exercise really is important, that sleep and stress management are in that modifiable lifestyle factors are just as viable or just as critical as na disease modifying treatments. So it's certainly possible that you can have a great life.

You can still be enjoying your spouse, your kids, your grandkids, even if you have a diagnosis of MS. And there is a whole lot that you can do to support your wellness and your healing journey. Terry, I wanted to give you a little bit of background on me, because people often ask, you're not a doctor. How in the world did you get into alternative medicine and doing a podcast in this area? And it was because of me search that I did on my own battle with overcoming multiple traumatic brain injuries.

Speaker A
And I, like most people, had trusted western medicine. And after going for years and years to doctors and telling me there was nothing wrong, I eventually ran into a doctor who said, you have to understand that the medical system that we have today treats everything in silos based on protocols because of the insurance. And he told me, you've got to take charge of your own health. And so I started doing just tons of research and poured myself into what causes post concussion syndrome. And it led me to going through some alternative therapies where my brain was imaged, and it showed that I had inflammation of the brain, primarily, I'm guessing, because the amyloid plaques were built up and weren't getting discharged properly.

But I knew I had to deal with that, and a lot of it dealt with my mineral levels, the hormone levels that I had at that time. So I started changing my diet, changing the supplements that I was taking, got some professional work done on my hormones to get that back in balance. And over time, it started going away, and I started not having the cognitive fog, the memory issues, everything else that I was experiencing. But you yourself were a true believer in western medicine, and that approach as well. What shifted you?

Because I want it to be clear for the audience that you were at first skeptical like I was, but it. Was absolutely, I'm an internal medicine doc. I couldn't figure out why people would spend billions of dollars on these complementary alternative medicines that weren't validated. I was diagnosed with Ms. I did my research.

Speaker C
I found the best Ms center. I took the newest drugs. When I converted to progressive Ms, I took Midasantro in a form of chemotherapy that the package insert says 2% people will get acute leukemia each time you take it. I was taking drugs that have very toxic side effects. Then I took tizabri.

Then I switched to cellcept. And I still have very young children. My son's eleven, my daughter's eight. And that's when I'm asking myself, okay, I know how bad this is going to be. Really terrible.

I'm in the wheelchair. Clearly, I'm going downhill. Am I really doing all that I can. I could read. I could still read.

And so that's when I go back to pubmed. At first I'm looking for the drug studies, then I realized I should look for things that I can access. So that got me reading the supplement studies and developing the theory that mitochondrial dysfunction drove disability. And I would create a supplement cocktail that while it didn't completely resolve my fatigue, I felt way better taking my supplements. And so now I'm super excited that I'm learning stuff that my conventional neurologist and primary care doc don't know about.

And then I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine and they have a really great course on neuroprotection. And I have a longer list of supplements. And then I discover electrical stimulation muscles. And so I add that to my physical therapy. And I'm working very closely with physical, with my physical therapist.

And then I'm discovering the importance of stress management and I go back to my daily meditations and I am really excited about learning all that I can and experimenting on myself, testing out ideas, seeing how I feel, and realize that bit by bit what I am doing is making a huge difference. And then, John, after I have my own personal transformation, I start talking to my patients about what they're eating, what they're doing. And I get these cantankerous and delightful veterans into improving their diets, getting a step counter and keeping track of how much activity they do in a day. And I'm seeing amazing results in my traumatic brain reclining that I staffed and in my primary care clinic, people with many comorbid medical problems on 20 plus prescription meds having these dramatic improvements. Yeah, it's truly amazing.

Speaker A
As I was researching this, I listened to the episode that you did with our mutual friend, Doctor Mark Hyman. And I've had mark on the show a couple of times now, and we've really dug deep into how lifestyle changes and our overall lifestyle impact, longevity, our overall health span, et cetera. You found that it was these same lifestyle conditions that not only treat MS, but all chronic autoimmune conditions. Can you discuss how you made that leap? I did this in my clinics, I have this personal transformation and I'm staffing the primary care clinic and I have five minutes, the interns see their patients staff with me, then I go chat with the patient.

Speaker C
I have about five minutes and I get these veterans fired up about eating vegetables and exercising. And so I see people with severe fibromyalgia having their disease melt away, rheumatoid arthritis having their disease melt away. Systemic lupus, getting remarkably better. People with severe obesity, type two diabetes, losing weight without being hungry and then I've been doing that for about a year and a half, really getting these marvelous results. Then in the second year I'm doing this.

I get called into the chief of medicine's office and he tells me he's pulling me out of the primary care clinic. And I'm not surprised by that because how I practice is so different than my colleagues. But he really surprises me when he says, and what I want you to do is to create a clinic that you can practice medicine the way you want. And so we do that. I tell them we need to have the chief of staff and the chief nurse and the chief of the hospital approve this new clinic, which they do.

I get a dietician assigned to me, and then we go to the pain clinic, especially medicine and primary care. And my message is, send your most difficult cases, people that you can't help, but they need to know this is going to be diet and lifestyle. And so we get a few people and help them quite remarkably, and then we get a few more. And I keep having to redesign my clinic because more and more people are wanting to come, and I'm not wanting them to have to wait six months to get in. So I go from small group to large group, to classes, people that come in, and people come in with a wide variety of autoimmune problems and degenerative disease problems.

Their most common symptoms are fatigue, bright and fog. Some mental health symptoms, whether it's paralyzing anxiety or depression, and of course, pain. It doesn't really seem to matter what their underlying diseases are and usually have many diseases. Those are the four most common symptoms, and I bring them in as a group. We go through their environmental factors that put them at risk for disease, help them choose which factors are going to work on first.

And then we see them every month in group visits. And because the VA has an electronic medical record, I'm able to track what's happening as a group to their weight, their blood pressure, their blood sugars, their lab values, their glucose, their hemoglobin, I would say their lipids. And then I'm meeting back with the chief of staff, chief nurse, the chief of medicine every month to show them what we're seeing. And what we're seeing is symptoms are going down, quality of life is going up, labs are all getting better, and the prescription meds that they need to take are steadily diminishing. It really is quite remarkable.

The best treatment for complex chronic disease is addressing modifiable lifestyle factors and helping create a more nurturing environment for cellular health. And then you have to watch closely because as the cell functions improve, blood pressures improve, blood sugars improve, mood improves, and you have to adjust their meds so they aren't over medic net credit. Is here to say yes to a personal loan or line of credit. When other lenders say no, apply in minutes and get a decision as soon as the same day. If approved applications are typically funded the next business day or sooner.

Speaker D
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Speaker A
Terry, first I want to say thank you for your work that you do at the VA. As a veteran, I am so happy to hear the standard of care that we're getting. And when I go, it seems to be consistently improving. But one of the things that is so sad for me every time I go to the VA and I've had to go three weeks in a row because of some tests I'm having run. But just the other week I was getting a colonoscopy and I'm sitting in this room waiting to get the exam done.

And surrounding me are a bunch of veterans who all have tons of symptoms. I hear them complaining about them, and as I look at them, unfortunately, none of them are leading a healthy lifestyle. Most are overweight, some are talking about habitual drinking or other addictions that they have. And I just sit there and I'm just thinking, knowing the knowledge that I know that all of this could be changed if you would live your life differently. Yet it's so difficult for so many people to do because it involves change.

I'm sure you've had many veterans that you started to work with, who the last thing and other patients, the last thing they wanted to do was to change these lifestyles. So how do you sequence that? I go through and we created something called the walls behavior change model and we've published papers for that. It begins with having hope, telling my story and the story of other patients who have had a major health problem. That markedly improved with a functional medicine approach to their illness.

Speaker C
Then we have some metaphors that explain according to the audience. So I have farming metaphors, I have mechanical metaphors, I have teaching metaphors, I have language metaphors so people can understand how improving cellular health or making cellular health worse can be helpful. I mean, people generally understand that if you're going to maintain your military equipment, you have to do the proper servicing. You can't throw sand into the mechanisms. You can't pour sugar into the fuel line of any of the military vehicles.

They usually get that. And then I explained that we have to nourish ourselves the proper way. We talk about that. And then I launch into the hero's journey. And that, do they have people in their life that they care about that might be their children or their grandchildren?

It's very helpful if they happen to have young people in their life and I invite them. Do you want to be the hero who's facing difficult circumstance where success is not guaranteed and you're gonna do really hard stuff to support improving your health because you want to be there more effectively with your child or your grandchild or perhaps your spouse? Occasionally it's the dog. And through those conversations, and I admit that, yes, this is hard, the hero is facing a hard task, and we're all rooting for the hero to be successful with this hard task. Do you want to be a hero for your child, your grandchild, so you can be there more effectively for them?

And that really seems to engage my veteran population extraordinarily well. I'm glad that you're doing it through that lens, because I think that's something that would resonate with not only a veteran, but anyone understanding the parallels and the impact it can have on people that they care about. Correct. A great way to help people identify who or what motivates them is I invite them to envision their home be on fire, smoke rolling out of the window. Is there someone or something that you would rush in to go save without thinking, even barefoot, over broken glass?

And of course, it's my grandkids, my children, my spouse. Occasionally it's feeble parents. Occasionally it is the dog. If there's no one or nothing, I send that person to our talk therapist because they have to find a reason for life, because none of us can do anything that's uncomfortable unless there's a purpose for it. I think that's another poignant story and reminder for listeners or viewers to understand as well.

Speaker A
Well, Terry, I was hoping we now might be able to move into some of the core principles of the walls protocol and how they differ from standard dietary recommendations. So standard diet has about 300 grams of carbohydrates, sweet, lots of added sugars, lots of processed food, fast food. The walls diet. I want you to have sufficient protein, so that's six to 12oz of meat, fish, eggs. You can think of that as at least two palm sized servings of meat.

Speaker C
And then if you're a man or a tall woman, it's nine cups of vegetables, three cups of leafy green vegetables, spinach, kale, salads or cooked, three cups of cabbage, onion, mushroom, family vegetables, raw or cooked, and three cups of deeply pigmented vegetables, things like beets, carrots, berries. I also encourage, but it's not mandatory, fermented foods, things like sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, fermented beverage, and organ meat. Liver once a week, fabulously good for you. And then we have ketogenic versions for those who would have reasons to be ketosis. And I have vegetarian versions for those who are spiritually committed to being a vegetarian or vegan.

Speaker A
Okay. And have you found any correlation out of autoimmune conditions to cancer patients where your diet has helped them as well? So we certainly have many folks with cancer who have discovered my work. I found it to be very helpful as you go through cancer treatments. Doing a ketosis program as part of that can reduce the side effects of the cancer chemotherapy and make the cancer more susceptible to treatments.

Speaker C
Furthermore, after completing cancer treatment, some people are left with chronic fatigue, brain fog, neuropathic pain, side effects from the chemotherapy or the radiation. And using the Walz protocol principle has greatly restored health and vitality for these folks. In fact, one of our studies right now is enrolling cancer patients here at the University of Iowa. Well, I appreciate sharing that. I have a close loved one, my sister, who's been dealing with pancreatic cancer.

Speaker A
And the doctors have really said a lot of her success and fighting it now for three and a half years has been the diet that she's gone on, which is primarily paleo. But she's also tried the ketogenic diet as well when she was going through her chemotherapy. Yeah, very helpful during chemotherapy, because the cancer cells can't burn fat, they have to burn sugar, and the rest of our cells can burn fat. And so a lower carb keto diet during cancer treatments can be very helpful. So, Terry, I wanted to ask you a little bit about intermittent fasting and how that might impact the microbiome in your protocol or outside of your protocol.

Speaker C
So intermittent fasting, where you reduce calories significantly two days a week or every other day, improves insulin sensitivity, lowers inflammation and appears to reset the microbiome into a more favorable light. I personally have done intermittent fasting for years and for a long time I just ate every other day and my weight drifted down. I was like, okay, I'm losing a little bit too much weight, so now I'm eating once a day. But, and this really is much closer to how our ancestors would have eaten. The idea of grazing throughout the day or having three meals a day is really a very recent development.

Historically, we were much more like intermittent fasting. Yeah, I've been doing it myself now for about seven years with a lot of positive benefits. However, I've been hearing recently I spoke to doctor Michael Greger and been listening to Doctor Peter Attil who are recommending against intermittent fasting. I guess the reason some people do it is going into apophagy, which would take, as I'm learning, a longer time to do that. I've heard them recommending eating more often, which kind of goes against what you're saying.

Speaker A
How do you balance between the different guidance that we hear? What I think all of us should do is you take careful notice of how you're doing with what you're eating presently. Whatever plan that is, whether it's the paleo, the keto, mediterranean, low fat, vegetarian, vegan, whatever you're eating now. And if you have a new idea to which you're being introduced that you'd like to try, go ahead and you can decide to try it. I suggest you use one of the tools, such as the medical symptoms questionnaire.

Speaker C
Score yourself now try this new intervention and try it for a month or two months. Score yourself again and look at the two scores. They're the same. Yes. No.

Was one diet better or the other? And then reflect on how you feel. This new eating pattern. I continually like doing little experiments on myself. I really recommend everyone do little experiments on yourself.

But use the medical symptoms questioner so you could get a score before and after intervention. Then you can decide what. Yep, I like how I'm feeling or I don't like how I'm feeling. And so I'm going to make another change. It's interesting because friends of mine who I'll often go to breakfast with and while I'm there, I'll just drink a glass of water or perhaps coffee often are like, how can you even do this?

Speaker A
And I said for the first few days it was a little bit difficult. But now I have no hunger at all, so there's no reason to eat if I don't feel a need to eat. And I think that's one of the biggest issues we have. I remember I just interviewed Doctor Judd a few months ago, and his research has shown that we eat more out of habit than out of need. And it's because of our emotions that drive a lot of the eating habits that we get into.

I try to just only eat when I feel the need to do so. I also love the okinawan concept of, you eat until you're 80% full. And I think that will prevent us from overeating. It will lead to healthier body weight, probably healthier blood sugar, probably healthier blood pressure as well. We over, and that creates a variety of health problems.

Terry, one thing I wanted to ask you about. I mentioned the veterans and that many of them have addictions, especially the use of alcohol. How much does alcohol consumption affect a person if they're experiencing an autoimmune condition? Well, we know that binge drinking definitely makes the conditions worse. Excess drinking, that is, more than two drinks per day for a man, more than one drink per day for a woman.

Speaker C
Then you might think about how large is the beverage. We've super sized our wine glasses so that the average wine glass holds more than twice what the average wine glass would have held 20 years ago, and the average beer container is twice what it would have been 20 years ago. So we're increasing our alcohol consumption, and that increases the risk of cancers, increases the risk of liver disease, and certainly, if you have an autoimmune disease, it makes the disease more aggressive. And I've also read that it leads to a greater chance for either dementia or forms of Alzheimer's as well. Yes, certainly, alcohol is a neurotoxin.

Now, I should also note that very low levels of alcohol consumption and multiple epidemiologic studies show that to be not any worse than abstinence. So if you don't drink alcohol, fine to not drink it. If you do want to drink alcohol, limit it to a couple nights, a couple times a week for the best health outcomes. And then I'd be careful that if you're a man, that's no more than two drinks. If you're a woman, that's no more than one, and it's the old fashioned size of the drink, not the current size of drink, which is double, and we would have been doing again 20 and 50 years ago.

Speaker A
Okay. And I just wanted to ask you about a couple of supplements before I dive into some of the research studies that you're engaged in right now. The first one is magnesium. How important do you think magnesium is to our diets and our lifestyles? So magnesium and calcium are vital for our bones, vital for many of the cellular processes, and our diets are particularly low in magnesium.

Speaker C
And magnesium is the central ion of chlorophyll, much like iron is the central ion of hemoglobin. If you had your three cups of greens every day, you'd go a long way to meeting your dietary magnesium intake. But certainly magnesium is one of the very common supplements that I recommend. The form of magnesium depends on is the person constipated, or then I might use magnesium glycinate. If it's just for the brain, then we use magnesium threonate because that gets into the central nervous system more easily.

Speaker A
Okay. And another one I wanted to ask you about was copper. I understand. I've recently interviewed and read a lot of the works from Morley Robbins, and he really talks about the importance of copper and its function with ATP. How do you perceive that?

Speaker C
So zinc and copper are tied together. They get into the cell to the same receptor. We have many people that know that zinc is a very important nutrient for the brain and that many of us are deficient in zinc. And so we start taking a copper supplement and we may overshoot the amount of copper, part of the amount of zinc, and that can lead to copper insufficiency. So ideally, you measure both your zinc and your copper ratios to know, do you need zinc?

Do you need copper? Or do you take some zinc and a little bit of copper as well? Yeah, that's exactly what happened to me. I was taking a liquid zinc.

And. I overshot, and so my copper levels were very low. And so then I shifted to starting to take a zinc supplement that had copper in it to try to get both. But I'm still playing with it and wondering if I should be doing zinc at all and focusing on copper instead. Yeah, you need to be focusing on copper.

There are some kits out there where you can do a taste test for various trace minerals, and when the mineral tastes really metallic, terrible, you're probably in excess. When the mineral tastes really sweet, you're in deficiency states and you need to take that mineral. It's probably why sea salt is so tasty to us, because all of us will have some mineral which is insufficient. It can be why seaweed, it can taste so wonderful. We start cooking with it, you're like, oh, my God, that was the best soup, stew casserole when you added that seaweed.

Speaker A
And the last two things I wanted to ask you about were supplements. I was interviewing Kara Fitzgerald, and she told me that two of her most recommended things that people should be taking are beets and mushroom supplements, because we don't get enough of either one. What are your thoughts on that? So beets are a great source of dietary nitrate. And so you can take that as beets, or you can take it as green leafy vegetables, kale, collards, and that will help your body make more nitric oxide.

Speaker C
And nitric oxide depends on the having nitric oxide producing bacteria in our mouths. And if you're taking foaming toothpaste or lots of alcohol or a mouthwash, you may be killing these necessary bacteria in your mouth. So a couple suggestions. And then for mushrooms, we have many studies that have shown if you have more mushrooms in your diet, there's less anxiety, less depression, less cognitive decline, and a couple of mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, miyatake mushrooms, and lion's mane mushrooms have been, at least in animal models, associated with improved production of nerve growth factors, which would use fertilizer for my brain. So lots of reasons to be consuming mushrooms.

It's why mushrooms are a key part of the walls protocol diet. And we modified our study diet recommendations to stress mushrooms for THoSE VERY reasons. Okay. And then the last thing I wanted to ask you about are seed oils, because so much of our food is cooked in vegetable oil or things like that. How detrimental are those to us?

So when you take a oil from a nut or seed and a cold pressed seed oil, so cold pressed hemp oil, flax oil, used cold can help you get some essential fatty acids. But as soon as you heat a seed oil, you damage those double bonds, it becomes a trans fat, and now it's become harmful to you. And then many of these seed oils are manufactured using solvents, hexane, which are toxic, and then you have to get the hexane out. So a seed oil that is cold pressed, so extra virgin, cold pressed, that can be good for you. Use cold olive oil, good for you.

Use cold seed oils using that are refined, use hexane, bad for you, and then cooking with them makes the double bonds, becomes rancid, becomes oxidized and bad for you. So if you're going to cook with an oil, I'd rather you cook with something like an animal fat, duck fat, lard, tallow. If you want to follow a low saturated fat diet for your heart health, then bake, roast, steam, cook in broth, braise, and then add your olive oil afterwards. Then if you want to use flax oil, hemp oil, water oil for your salad dressing, use that cold afterwards, and that'll be fine for you. Okay.

Speaker A
Thank you for sharing that. Now, Terry, I wanted to now go into. You were gifted $2.5 million, if I have it correct, from the Carter Chapman Shreve Family foundation to be directed to investigate three different diets, a modified patheolithic ketogenic, and the USDA dietary guidelines for the american diet. Can you share more about this study and its primary goals? I'm super excited about the study because this is the longest study that it will have been done for people with MS.

Speaker C
We're comparing the ketogenic diet, paleolithic diet, and then the third arm is actually a usual diet. But we give dietary guidelines information so people can follow their usual diet or implement the dietary guidelines. They come in, we get mris at the baseline, we get fatigue, quality of life measures, mood measures, and we measure vision, memory, walking function, hand function. And we get a baseline MRI without contrast because we can use a more powerful research magnet. And then in two years, we repeat everything and include the mris.

Now, our primary outcome is change and quality of life, but we'll also have all these clinical measures, and we'll have MRI measures, so we'll be able to see how changing diet impacts all of these measures. We'll be able to see, can we get people to healthy rates of brain volume loss? Because people with MS, our brain volume is shrinking 1% per year, which is why we have higher rates of anxiety, depression, brain fog, jab loss. One of my hypotheses is that by helping people improve their diet, we will get them to healthy rates of brain volume loss, which is 0.3% or less per year. And so we are super excited about that.

We are still recruiting. We need to get to 156 people. I'm anticipating that we will get to that probably sometime in July. So we're still looking, and you can go complete a short survey@terrywals.com. msstudy that's terrywalls.com mSstudy.

You could be part of our patient registry and be informed about future studies. And if you have relapsing, remitting Ms and you're between the ages of 18 and 70 and you're willing to be randomized, you can be part of this current study. Okay. And can you just go a little bit deeper in the participant selection process? What are you looking for specifically?

So we need people between ages 18 and 70. You have to be willing to come to Iowa. You need to live here in the United States, Canada or Mexico. You must be willing to be randomized if you're on another therapeutic diet, whether it's the Paleo diet, keto diet, Mediterranean diet, you have to be willing, like, if you're randomized to the keto diet, like, okay, I'm going to do the keto diet. I'll be willing to prick my finger and we'll show you how to do that.

To test your ketones, you're willing to eat meat. So you could be randomized to the paleo or the keto diet. And you have to be willing to come to Iowa City. If you've had your gallbladder removed, you're not eligible. If you have type one diabetes, you're not eligible.

If you've had kidney stones due to oxalate kidney stones, we can't enroll you. Okay. And then for the people who are in this, compliance to these diets is going to be extremely important. How do you ensure compliance and how do you monitor it? We spend a fair amount of time training the two intervention folks on the diet to meet with their dietitians.

We give them a diet app with some recipes to help them, and then our dietitians are available for questions as needed. In the intervention group, there's an opportunity once a month to submit questions that I answer, and I create little videos that answer the participant questions in that group. Now, in the control group, the usual diet group, we give them monthly tips on how to improve their diet. We give them the resources from dietary guidelines. There's a dietary guidelines app that they can use, and we give them a monthly tip sheet.

So I fully expect all three groups will improve because we know that people who enroll in dietary studies want to improve their diet. And so again, I do anticipate that all three groups will improve. What I don't know is, will one of the three diets be better than the other? Okay. And are there key biomarkers that you're looking at and are particularly important?

So we are looking at fatty acid, how the fatty acid levels change over the study time period. We'll look at the MRI. So that's a really key biomarker. We're also going to look at something called ocular coherence tomography, changes of the optic nerve. So we'll be looking at that then, in terms of what people are eating.

There are a couple of diet questionnaires that people complete at the beginning that you end up month twelve and month 24 to help us understand how what they're eating changed over time. And there are a number of patient questionnaires. And I should also clarify that we let people know when they're coming in. The people who are most successful are those who do this as a family. If you do it individually, it's tough.

But if the family agrees that, in my line of sight, are going to be study compliant foods, and when they're away from the study participant, they can go have pizza and beer and eat the wrong foods, but don't do it in front of the participant. And also, please don't come home and say, oh, my God, that was the best pizza and beer ever had. So what I'm hearing you say is, it makes a huge difference if your pantry is not filled with a bunch of junk, causing a person to want to eat that junk. You want to minimize these temptations. So if you have to resist all day long that delicious, tasty food that you used to eat, it's going to be really hard.

But if what you do is you take it out of the house so you don't have to see it, that you send your family to the shop, you don't have to be tempted there. And if they're going to eat what they want away from you, then we see, and people are telling us is, my kids grades have improved, my spouse's blood pressure has improved. As a matter of fact, my spouse's mood has also improved. And so people are reporting their whole family's health is improving as a result of being in the study. Okay.

Speaker A
And then one last thing I want to ask about the study is you're looking at both clinical outcomes and patient reported outcomes. How do you balance the two types of data, and why are they both crucial? Well, I think it's critical that people get to report these more global quality of life mood. And so that is patient reported outcomes. And as a matter of fact, that was our primary outcome.

Speaker C
But then we also want to have the harder data. Clinical measures, walking function, hand function, test of working memory. And when we report this in our manuscripts, we'll have many manuscripts that come out of this data. And so we'll be having manuscripts that focus on the patientreport outcomes. We'll have manuscripts that are focused on the clinical outcomes, and then we'll have blood biomarker manuscripts.

And it's going to be super exciting to have our MRI outcomes as well. Yeah. So, Terry, this builds upon previous research and work that you've done. Can you share any preliminary insights, or perhaps if you don't have those expectations based on your previous studies. There are reasons to think that the ketogenic diet may have better outcomes, but there's also reasons to think that the paleo diet will be superior.

In the network meta analyses comparing all the diet studies that have been published, as of May 2021, the Paleo diet was the most effective for fatigue and quality of life. Better than mediterranean, better than low saturated fat, better than ketogenic. Now, it may be that the ketogenic group just needed larger numbers. Time will tell. From a mechanistic standpoint, there's evidence to suggest that the brain does not metabolize glucose as well in the setting of MS or the setting of severe psychiatric disease.

And so you can bypass that problem by having a ketogenic diet because the brain would use fat for its metabolism. Time will tell. This is going to be really exciting to see what we find in the comparison of the Keto group, the pedigree, and the usual diet group. Yeah, it sounds extremely interesting. I can't wait to have you back on the program after you complete it so you can discuss the results.

So here's the timeline. If we finish your enrollment on July of 2024, follow people for two years, that means we'll have all of our data, hopefully by September of 2026. We clean the data, analyze it in the beginning of 2027. I'm presenting it at the various scientific conferences in 2027, our manuscript squad in 2028. So we'll have our date there.

But I'm still writing up our manuscripts from our wave setting, so I can come back and talk with you about some of the other more recent manuscripts while we're waiting for 2028. Okay, that sounds great. And Terry, I just wanted you to plug your book a little bit. If I have it correct, it originally came out in 2014, and on Amazon alone, it's got over 6005 star ratings.

So we updated it in 2017, we updated again in 2020, and I'll probably have to update it again. This is basically the protocols that we've used in our research. I review the research on diet and lifestyle and the many things that we can do to support better brain health for people with an autoimmune condition or a mental health condition. The book is the walls, a radical new way to treat all chronic autoimmune conditions. And you can learn more about all of that at my website, terwalls.com.

and I'm also going to pitch my instagram doctor, Terry Walsh. That's drtarywalls.com, because there you get to see what I'm eating, doing, how I'm living my life, and what are the various other tools and supplements that I'm using to support my own healing journey. Well, thank you for sharing all that. I'll make sure the book is in the show notes. We love to have the books of our guests featured in the show notes.

Speaker A
The last thing I wanted to ask you is the primary purpose of this show is investigating the power of intentionality and how we live our lives. How much do you think our intentions factor into positive outcomes in the way we lead them? Everything begins first with a thought. Everything begins first with a thought. And you can't make change until you first have the desire to make the change, that you can't go forward without first having the thought.

Speaker C
Unfortunately for me, I had two young kids. I wanted to keep doing the best that I could. I had remarkably improved. But because I let go of the future, I didn't know what any of that meant until that day I got on my bike. But now, all of you listening, I want you to know that no matter what your physicians have told you, that there's nothing more that they can do.

There's always stuff that you can do to support your healing journey by working on improving your diet, your self care routine. And what you may discover is that your mood is better, you have more joy, and your whole family will have a better mood and more joy. Yeah, and I would just end that with in my own journey. And what I've learned on this podcast is so often we go about approaching the symptoms that were feeling instead of looking at the underlying cause and dealing with the whole apparatus that's causing the symptoms in the first place, which the vast majority of the time gets down to your lifestyle choices and how you're approaching your diet, your exercise, your sleep patterns, those types of things. Well, Terry, thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker A
You can touch on that if you want to. It is vital what we do, creating health or disease, depending on our choice, the more you can step by step create a little bit more health, you will have more vitality. Well, Terry, thank you so much for joining us. It was such an honor to have you. Thank you, John.

Speaker C
Love what you're doing as well. What an incredible honor that was to interview doctor Terry Walls, someone who this community keeps asking for me to bring on the show. And I wanted to thank Terry and Avery book's privilege and honor of having her appear. Links to all things Terry will be in the show notes@passionstruck.com dot please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. You can find our videos on YouTube at both our main channel at Johnr Miles and our clips channel at Passion Struck clips.

Speaker A
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Dr. Terry Wahls on Conquering MS: Nutrition for a Vibrant Life EP 460

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1: Introduction

2: The Wahls Protocol

3: Overcoming Challenges

4: Broader Implications

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