Reversing Multiple Sclerosis Using Functional Medicine | Dr. Terry Wahls

Hello, this is Dr. Mark Hyman and welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy, a place for conversations that matter. And today our guest is Dr. Terry Wahls, who's an extraordinary physician who cured herself of multiple sclerosis, which doesn't seem like a sentence you can even say, but here she is to prove it. And I can share with you that she's an extraordinary woman who's really pioneered a new way of thinking about how we treat chronic disease. She's a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa. She's the author of the WALS Protocol, How I Beat Progressive MS Using Paleo Principles and Functional Medicine. And of course, the cookbook that goes along with it, the WALS Protocol Cooking for Life, the revolutionary modern paleo plan to treat all chronic autoimmune conditions. That's a big promise. We're gonna get into that. You can learn more about her work at terrywalls.com, she hosts the WALS Protocol seminar every August where anyone can learn how to implement the protocol with ease and success. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter on Instagram and learn more about her MS trials by reaching out to her team at msdietsstudy@healthcare.uiowa.edu. And this is an important thing because we have to research these things. Now, she's basically had a story that has sort of rocked the world of multiple sclerosis, which is she was this active human who basically became debilitated from MS and was barely functioning in a wheelchair. Tell us, Terry, how you found your way to health through this approach that you call the Wahls Protocol.

Well, thank you, Mark. It's such an honor to be here with you, and I'm so glad to count you as a very good friend. I'm a academic internal medicine doc. I was very skeptical about diet and lifestyle and supplements and complementary alternative medicine. I couldn't understand why people wasted billions and billions of dollars.

I don't want to think about all those stupid supplements that just give you expensive urine, right?

Yep, absolutely. I was very skeptical, but God has a mysterious way about him or her. And so in 2000, I was diagnosed with MS. 18 years ago. 18 years ago, but in retrospect, my symptoms began during medical school in 1980 with episodes of electrical face pain. which I stoically put up with. I could figure out that they were worse with stress and gradually more frequent, more severe. In 2000, I had a weakness in my left leg, got a big workup, including MRIs of my brain, spinal cord, spinal tap, and they said, well, this is relapsing remitting MS and being like.

All- It's a very bad diagnosis.

A bad diagnosis and I looked at the literature saw that within 10 years, half have difficulty walking, needing a cane, walker, or wheelchair, and half won't be able to work due to severe fatigue. So I wanted to treat my disease aggressively. I sought out the best center doing research here in the Midwest. That was the Cleveland Clinic. Saw the best people, took the newest drugs, and within three years, I needed a tilt recline wheelchair.

Well, that's good progress.

Yeah, so I definitely was not going the right direction. And that's when I started researching. I started reading PubMed. I would begin experimenting myself. I adopted the paleo diet, basically on the recommendation of my Cleveland Clinic physicians.

Really?

So that was pretty interesting. I continued to go downhill. I took Tizanidine, continued to go downhill. I switched to Cellcept. I continued to go downhill.

These are powerful immune suppressing drugs.

Very powerful. But I was happy to take them because I knew I was headed towards becoming bedridden, possibly demented. I was having more and more trouble with severe pain that was very difficult to control. So I was thrilled to take these drugs and attempt to stave all of that off. As I read PubMed, I started experimenting with supplements and would eventually figure out that supplements targeting my mitochondria helped my fatigue somewhat, although, and I was slowing the speed of my decline. So I'm thrilled, I'm grateful, and I'm really excited about reading PubMed.

Grateful from a wheelchair.

Very grateful from a wheelchair. Very, very grateful. And then, you know, by the summer.

Of '07- We must have full person, clearly.

Clearly, clearly. You know, by the summer of '07, I was so weak I could not I didn't sit up in a regular chair. I had a zero-gravity chair. I'm fully reclined or I'm in bed. I'm struggling to walk 10 feet using two walking sticks. My boss calls me in and tells me he's assigned me to the traumatic brain injury clinic. In six months, I'll be seeing patients without residents. And I know that, of course, that means what he's really saying is, Terry, we are done redesigning your job for you, and I'll be forced to take medical disability finally at that time. So that's a difficult summer, but two months later I discover on one of my Google searches, the Institute for Functional Medicine. And I took the course on neuroprotection in the midst of my brain fog. So this was a bit challenging, but I got through it. I had a longer list of supplements, a little deeper understanding of the things I could be doing for my mitochondria. and for my brain. And I added that. And then I had another really, really big aha moment like, yeah, I should take this list of supplements and redesign my paleo diet to maximize the nutritional intake. So, I redesign my diet.

You're gonna be eating paleo cookies all day and that's not exactly right.

And that's not the right thing. So, I restructured my diet. Within a month, my fatigue was markedly reduced, my mental clarity was clearly improving. In three months, I get up and I'm walking with a cane.

You got out of your wheelchair?

I'm out of my wheelchair, walking around with a cane. And in nine months, I'm on my bike and I pedal around the block for the first time. Six years, and in 12 months, I do a 20-mile bike ride with my family.

Unbelievable. So it was a year.

A year.

Now, take us a little bit slower through what you did, because you ate-.

I did a lot.

The Paleo diet, then you did the drugs, but then you went to this neuroprotection plan. Module from IFM, and you learned from there what you could do to optimize your systems.

So optimize my system. I also add in- I added in electrical stimulation of my muscles. That was a technique that athletes have been doing for decades to speed the recovery from athletic injuries. So my physical therapist had agreed to let me add that. So I was doing that. I had gone back to adding meditation at night. So I added that back. And then I had this very intensive nutrition. So I had ramped up my vegetables. to like nine cups of vegetables a day.

Which is 18 servings.

18 servings.

Not the five to nine.

Yeah, 18 servings. And so a small amount of meat, lots and lots of vegetables.

And very specific groups of vegetables.

Very specific groups.

Very specific medicinal effects that you talked about.

Exactly. It's all designed very intentionally around my mitochondria, around detox, around myelin production, around brain structures, neurotransmitters, you know, based on science in a very methodical way. And I did all this, Mark, not to get better because I had completely accepted what my neurologist, primary care docs had told me for years. It's a one-way street. It's a one-way street. Functions once lost with progressive MS are permanently gone. So I was doing all this so I could have the limited function that I had a little bit longer. And not get worse. So I was thrilled to do all of that to not get worse. And then the other thing that's really interesting, Marcus, as I was getting remarkably better, as part of having a progressive neurodegenerative disease, is you get to a point where you take every day as it comes, one day at a time, no expectations about what it means. So I'm remarkably better. I'm thinking more clearly. My pain is gone, which is a huge deal for me.

Pain is a big symptom in MS.

Pain is a huge symptom. It was a huge problem for me as well. So my pain is gone. I'm walking, I'm thinking, I'm biking. Actually, it wasn't until I biked that I realized, you know, I think I'm getting better. Because until then, I was just taking it one day at a time.

Amazing.

The day that I biked, it was on Mother's Day. I'm crying, my wife's crying, my kids are crying. And that's when I understood that who knew what the future would hold? That clearly neurology has it wrong. Clearly neurology has it wrong. And who knew how much recovery might be possible?

It's a very helpful story and I think I'd love to know what exactly you're eating. People are probably listening, but what are the 19 or 18 servings of vegetables you ate and what groups were they in and what do they do?

Okay, so first, and I think the most powerful one is all these greens. So I was having tons and tons of green leafy vegetables. So I was probably having six to actually six to nine cups measured raw. Collards, kale, collards, kale, a little bit of spinach. I really craved kale in a huge way. But I'd have collards, I would have Swiss chard, I had lots and lots of salads, I would have some cooked greens. I was very big into cabbage family vegetables. So cabbage, broccoli, turnips, rutabagas, lots of it raw. Some cooked, but it's also very, very big into raw. Garlics, lots of garlic, shallots, onions.

Because they have sulfur, they.

Boost the detox, boost your ability to make gamma-aminobutyric acid, intracellular glutathione, and then very much into mushrooms. Mushrooms stimulate and prime adaptive and innate immune cells. They also stimulate your ability to make nerve growth factors.

Yeah, medicinal mushrooms are powerful.

Very powerful.

They have all kinds of amazing ingredients that aren't in other foods.

And garlic and mushrooms are medicinal foods across many, many cultures across all the continents. So these are medicinal foods with a lot of ancient cultural wisdom.

So greens, brassicas, and onions.

And then that, good, color. And then color. So the polyphenols are a marker for color. And the polyphenols again, and study after study, the more color you have, the lower the rates of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancers. So you want color. And furthermore, blue, purple, black. A lot of studies showing you can have measurable improvement in cognition in as little as 16 weeks using just a couple of blueberries as in placebo double-blind crossover trials. That's hardly any time at all.

No, that's amazing. Not Skittles though.

Not Skittles.

Those are colorful.

Those are the wrong kind of color, my friend. So again, three cups of deeply pigmented stuff. And then fats, you know, fats have a critical role. All of our cells are wrapped in fat. They're fat wrappers, the cell membranes. And our brain is 60 to 70% fat.

So your nerve coverings, which you get destroyed in MS, are also fat.

Fat. And they need arachidonic acid, they need eicosapentaenoic acid, they need docosahexaenoic acid, they need omega-6 and omega-3 fats. and so I needed to have more fat in the diet.

Did you use saturated fat?

You know, actually I did. So I used lots of fat. So we'd have flax oil, hemp oil in the dressings that I'd use. And then we would cook in saturated fat. I'd use coconut oil, I'd use bacon fat, duck fat. My, that's because I For years I worked at the vet, so I would teach the vets. My favorite recipe was bacon and greens. You cook up some bacon, take the bacon out, leave the bacon fat, dump in the greens, stir them around till they're wilted, add the bacon back. If you didn't like it, just double the bacon the next time you make it. And my vets would go like, oh my God, you mean I can eat bacon? That actually tastes, you know, sounds like it would taste wonderful. And we have lots of avocados as well, get into nuts and seeds. And so what is remarkable was the speed at which I could see the difference in 30 days.

So it was- well, think about it, you know, you took all these drugs, they didn't work. But when you use food as a drug, as medicine, it actually worked faster and better.

Very fast. And that's exactly what I saw in clinic. I was able to teach my residency in clinic as well, that food is the most powerful medicine. And it works amazing better and cheaper than most drugs. Yes.

It's an amazing substance. And when people understand it's not just calories as we learn in functional medicine, it's information. And they can go, Wait a minute, I can upgrade my biology by putting better information in.

Into your body. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So besides the food, that's powerful, and the stimulation and the meditation, you also probably did other things. Diagnostic tests that you did on yourself, but you discovered anything that was off or out of balance?

So into my recovery, so two years into my recovery, I thought, well, I'm sure toxic load was a big issue in all of this. So keep in mind, I've been walking around, hiking now, I've been biking, very little pain. So I'm in great shape. And I finally did a 24-hour heavy metals challenge test, and I was diffusely toxic in everything.

Yeah.

Everything.

All your metals were high.

All my metals were high. I think there were only four that were not high. I was even high in uranium. Thorium, thallium.

Thallium is, you know, kale is now in California, the ground is has thallium in it.

So we have so poisoned our soils that with many of our fertilizers are relatively toxic. So yes, unfortunately, many of our foods are toxic. And now the other thing that I should tell you, I repeated all of that four years later and everything is gone.

Amazing.

So who knows, like how incredibly toxic I was in the very beginning.

Before, right.

In the very beginning.

How did you get rid of them all?

Well, when I designed my protocol, I designed it around Bucill, the detox enzyme. So that's why I stressed the greens, the sulfur, the color. I added in there some anacetyl cysteine and some algae as well.

And binders to get the metals out as well. Things to help regulate your gut.

And then the other thing, Six months into my recovery, I was able to overcome my heat intolerance. And so I got a sauna and I've been saunaing ever since.

Amazing. So it was basically food, supplements, electrolyte simulation.

And very basic supplements. B vitamins, N-acetyl cysteine, and algae. That's it.

That's it. No vitamin D. Well, yes, there is.

Vitamin D there, of course.

Because there's the evidence around vitamin D.

Yeah, plenty of vitamin D. And I also use sunlight.

Sunlight.

You know, sunlight is more effective than vitamin D orally.

You put some black on your face, but the rest of your body will definitely be a good one because you don't want to age fast. But yeah, it's powerful.

I agree.

So you've taken this insight that you had from your own healing. Yes. And you've an extraordinary thing, which is you've created a model that you use to treat patients and to train other physicians and providers and to do research in this space. And you were at the VA in Iowa and had done amazing work with people who had very little resources, not a ton of money, couldn't do a ton of testing. And, you know, people think functional medicine is always all about testing, it's all about supplements, but you really were able to show that it really is primarily food and lifestyle and just a few basic things.

Very basic.

Make a huge difference. So tell us about what you learned in that process.

So I had my personal transformation and then I started talking about food and exposures. I changed how I practice medicine. In my traumatic brain injury clinic, I'm really focused in on diet and lifestyle and I have to deal with physician complaints because I'm not practicing like my colleagues. So I had to meet with my chief of staff, go over what I was doing and why, bring down my papers, and get some coaching on how to document in the medical record so I could pass peer review and make sure everybody was comfortable with what I was doing. Happy with what I was doing. Happy. So we got that.

God forbid you're telling people to eat better.

Yeah, so I got that down. And then because I was having such great results, the chief of medicine came in. and told me he was pulling me out of primary care and would I open up a clinic where I could practice the way I wanted to practice. And I said, no, I won't do that. And here's why I'm refusing. You need to get endorsement by the chief of staff and the director of the hospital because we just want to be sure that they know what I'm gonna do and that they approve of it.

They're behind it, yeah.

And so I thought that was probably gonna be the end of it. Two weeks later he came back and he said, I have the endorsements. We're good. That's so great. So we got the endorsements going and then we decided that we'd call it the Therapeutic Lifestyle Clinic. So it was very clear to my referring physicians and to the patients that this was all about diet and lifestyle, that I'm not prescribing drugs.

And diet and lifestyle as treatment, not just- As treatment. Prevention. Therapeutic.

It was therapeutic. And you could come, you had to be referred in by a physician. It could be for a mental health problem, medical problem. So you saw people from all sorts of issues. I met with primary care in the subspecialty clinics and said, give me your most ill people who are willing to use a therapeutic diet and lifestyle. I'm using no drugs. It's just gonna be diet and lifestyle. We did this through a series of group classes. The first class was, here's my story, here's the concepts of the therapeutic lifestyle we talked about, functional medicine, integrative medicine, diet, lifestyle, detox, mitochondria, all of that stuff. And then I invited people to either just go back to the doc and say, this is too hard, or I'll work gradually on my diet and then meet with the dieticians, or if they would commit to being gluten-free 100%, lots of vegetables for 100 days. They could come work with me. We'd have a group intake where I'd meet with them for two weeks as a group to sort of do their timeline of their health experiences. And then they would meet with the dietician for two hours who would have a cooking class and help them reimagine breakfast and lunch and reimagine the relationship with food.

Very practical.

And then we would see them once a week for skills class, as many people as could fit in the room could come get the skills classes. And we'd have a support group of six to 22 people at a time that we'd see every other month. In the labs that I had, a CBC, vitamin D, homocysteine.

Very basic.

Fasting lipids, that was it. And the kind of supplements, B vitamins, fish oil, vitamin D. And then I could tell people if they went on their own to go buy NAC, an algae methyl B12, methyl folate, and that was it. And now, and before I got the lifestyle clinic going, when I was just in my traumatic brain injury clinic, no labs, I only get to see people twice a year for 20 minutes. And even in that clinic, we had stunning success.

Amazing.

So that's why- you-'ve done research now on this.

So you had it, how has the research gone and what have you learned? Can you share some of the most exciting things that you've discovered in your research? Because this isn't just an idea or something that's on the fringe. You've actually been in a major academic center doing the hard work, proving the.

Model and seeing extraordinary changes. So the very first thing is we call a safety feasibility study.

So, and I have to- Is it.

Safe to eat 18 Is it safe.

To eat all these vegetables?

Is it safe to do a stress-reducing activity?

Is it safe to meditate?

You know, and my chair of medicine, Paul Rothman, had me write a case report up from my own personal story. And then he called me back in when that was published, okay, now we're gonna have you do a safety study. And I said, well, this is outside, this is the type of research field that I'm in. Yes, I'll get you the mentors. So he helped me with getting the mentors on board. design the study, then I had to get the funding. So I worked with a group of philanthropists in Canada that gave me the funding to get the safety study going. So we wrote up the protocol that copied everything that I did. The supplements, the meditative program, the exercise, e-stim, and we codified the diet. We got funding, got it through, And then the clinical research unit refused to give me permission because the diet was not safe because it excluded food groups.

Like grains and beans and dairy.

Right, so it got declined. So I was required to do a pre-study on myself to show that it was nutritionally sound. So we did that. The dietician who analyzed my diet who's been doing dietary assessment research for 35 years, said, this is the most nutrient dense diet I've ever analyzed.

Well, anybody knows about the food groups. How that came about was as a way to sell more agricultural products, meat, dairy, grains, you know, vegetables. Those were food groups that had nothing to do with science, it had to do with marketing. And there is no biological requirement for grains or even dairy.

Yes. So once we finally got permission, then I was required to have a safety report that I would fill out back to this IRB, the Institutional Review Board, after we did the first 10 subjects. And that worked out really, I also know I had money to do 20, but you know that worked out very well because we had great success with the first 10. So I went back to my Canadian philanthropists. I said, you know, we had such great success. How do you feel about getting MRIs on the next 10? And he said, yes. So we have those MRIs. As a matter of fact, we showed those results on those MRIs earlier this week here. I was able to show that brain volume is protected by following the Wall's protocol.

Was the myelination improved? Well, in the brain of MRI, so we're basically seeing the white lesions, white matter lesions, right?

We analyzed total brain volume and for disability, brain volume is much more strongly associated with disability than whether the white matter lesions or acute lesions. So we're mostly very, very curious about was what happens with brain volume. Originally, I was really disappointed because we still had brain volume loss overall for the group, but brain volume loss in progressive MS occurs much more rapidly, two to three times as rapidly in progressive MS than it does in healthy aging. We're able to show that our brain volume loss was less than even healthy aging. So we're protecting our brain to extraordinary levels in that first study. And so we'll be submitting that for publication in a journal. So we're very excited for that. We had remarkable reduction in fatigue, remarkable improvement in quality of life.

In the neurological symptoms.

In the neurological symptoms. We're also able to show that in half of our folks, We had remarkable improvement in gait, which is remarkable with progressive MS because none of them should have improved. And the fact that we had clinically meaningful improvement in gait in half was really quite remarkable. Then the next study that we did was a randomized study, which is a weightless control. So people, we did just the diet in relapsing-remitting MS folks. They came in, we did assessments, we randomized them to either get trained on the diet or to wait for 12 weeks and then get trained on the diet. And again, we were able to show that fatigue went down, quality of life improved, and motor function again improved. And now we have a study funded by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society comparing the low saturated fat diet and the Wahl's diet.

Because the Swank diet was a low fat diet.

Very low fat diet.

That was recommended for MS patients.

Only by Dr. Swank, the conventional neurologists for a long time have steadfastly held there's no scientific prospective study that has shown diet has anything to do with MS. Now fortunately, as they're beginning to understand the role of diet has on epigenetics, on the microbiome, that conventional neurology is catching up to us and saying, diet does matter.

Yeah, yeah.

They are catching up.

It's amazing that food is the single biggest information input we have to our bodies every day. It controls every function of our biology, and yet how could it not be connected to our health?

It is so challenging to do good dietary studies because if you do a food-based intervention study, supplement studies are easy. That's like a drug study. But if you do food, now, if I'm going to do it well, I have to convince you, Mark, to give up foods that you love, straight eating foods that you don't like, you don't know how to make, get your family to do it with you so you can sustain it. And there's a real art to train you to be willing to do that. And then another art to measuring what you actually did. This is complex research to do. It's expensive to do. far more expensive than drug studies. So that's one of the reasons with this so little research.

Yeah, that's true. So you also are exploring not just MS but other brain issues. So talk about the kind of things besides MS that you're working on and what kind of results you're seeing.

So in my lifestyle clinics, again, we were able to keep track of who's coming to see us. Pain was the number one reason that people would come in. Then autoimmunity, Metabolic problems like diabetes, heart disease. In terms of the types of neurologic problems that people would come in, Parkinson's, Myasthenia Gravis, cognitive decline, Alzheimer's, of course, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, mood disorders.

Pretty much everything for which we have very poor treatments.

Poor treatments, poor treatments. And certainly what we consistently would see, some of the first things people would notice is fatigue going down, energy going up, mental clarity improving, brain fog diminishing, irritability diminishing, quality of life. So quality of life absolutely improving. Now because the VA has electronic medical record, I was also able to get my quality improvement people do some analyses for us. We were able to show that the hemoglobin A1C was coming down, body mass index coming down, blood pressure coming down, at the same time that the number of medications- Was coming down. Was coming down as well. And the pain medications coming down. And the narcotic use coming down. So, you know, incredibly exciting stuff. Very, very gratifying. And then, you know, in the thousands of followers that I have, you know, routinely I'm being contacted by people who are telling me that their treating physicians had given up on them, saying there was nothing that they had to offer them for a condition, which I of course have never heard of. And they're telling me that they've implemented the Wahls Protocol and that their functions are improving. And so then I'm Googling like, so what are these conditions? And some of them are autoimmune, some of them are neurodegenerative, and very consistently, it's a similar pattern that I see. Energy is improving, mental clarity is improving, pain is diminishing.

The protocol is anti-inflammatory, it's detoxifying, it's mitochondrial boosting, it's gut repairing. Absolutely. These are all the foundations of creating health. And so when you do that, regardless.

Of what condition you have, people seem to get better. You know, and I'm trying to teach people that what we need to be focusing on is the creation of health, that this is your best treatment for whatever chronic disease you have.

Yeah, you know, throughout the disease, you.

Treat You create health.

Health, right?

You create health.

And the disease goes away as a side effect, I often say.

It will often diminish. And depending on the person that, yes, you may still die from your cancer, you'll have a higher quality of life. You may still die from your Huntington's, but you'll have higher quality of life. And what you may discover is that your previously untreatable problem that your physicians say, I don't have anything to offer you, you may discover that it can be stabilized. The steepness of the decline can be slowed. Or to everyone's amazement, you may discover that you in fact are slowly but steadily improving.

Like you.

Like me.

So how many stories do you hear like your story where someone really was in a wheelchair and they get up and they're good and they're riding their bike 20 miles?

You know, just today I've had several physicians tell me that they've had Jelena from Hungary said that he had people coming to him in the wheelchair who's out running marathons.

Unbelievable.

I'm like, well, I'm not doing that yet, but I'm hoping.

That's so amazing. It's so powerful. And multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease. Yes. So, you're focused on the neurologic stuff and the pain stuff, but how does this apply across autoimmune disease? And what are the ways in which it can be used to help with that?

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

That's how much blood their heart can pump, which goes down with heart failure, yeah. It's impressive.

Yeah, I keep telling them, you gotta be eating liver a couple times a week, heart once a week. and...

I mean, it sounds too good to be true, but the truth is that when you look at the principle of creating health, there are certain foundational concepts here. The right food, exercise, stress reduction, sleep, the right nutrients, and it doesn't matter what disease you have because when you provide the body what it needs, it often can recover. So it's not like there's one treatment for MS, another diet for cancer, another diet for Alzheimer's, another diet for rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis. It's the same principles that you can.

Apply to all these things. You know, when I was first changed how I was practicing medicine, my colleagues, my chief of staff was calling me up saying, you know, Terry, and your colleagues are saying you're using the same treatment for everyone. You just can't do that. And I said to John, I said, well, I think we all have mitochondria. I think we all have liver, kidneys, brains, we all have cells. We all, we need to provide the building blocks. and so I'm just trying to create health and we'll see what happens.

Yeah, and you just follow those principles of functional medicine and it just, you're like, okay, I've never seen this disease before and yet.

We'll just see what happens.

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

See, yeah, so and I want to clarify for your audience, the paleo diet did not fix me. Supplements did not fix me. So, I'd been a vegetarian 20 years, lots of grains, beans, legumes and It was a lot of prayer and meditation, but I went back to eating meat and I had lots of meat. I was still having eggs, had some vegetables, and I continued to go downhill. I added the vitamins and supplements, continued to go downhill, albeit more slowly, and my energy was better when I took my supplements. Very, very grateful. And then when I had my longer list of supplements, Thank you, Catherine Wilder and Jay Lombard. I appreciate all you've done for me.

Those are neurologists that focused on functional medicine and brain health.

Then when I said, okay, where is all this in the food? And I redesigned my paleo diet, this was all about ramping up these vegetables. So now my amount of meat is really pretty modest. I have two palm sizes of meat to one to two per day. So that's six to 12 ounces of meat per day. And then, you know, nine cups to 15 cups of vegetables per day. Now, we weren't talking about the microbiome back there in 2007, but what I was doing was really ramping up my microbiome. as well. I was ramping up my ability to detoxify and I was ramping up the enzymes involved in protecting my mitochondria. And making antioxidants. The detox pathways more effective, intracellular glutathione more effective. And so it was providing that structure.

You went to the pharmacy, that's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. That's why I call this the doctor's pharmacy because it's It's really about how to use food as medicine. And that's what you do.

Yeah. You know, and so the reason to remove the beans, grains, legumes has to do with something called lectins. And again, this depends on your genetic predisposition. And I think I probably am one of those people who are vulnerable to lectins that I probably have a severe inflammatory response if I have gluten or dairy or eggs. My face pain triggers and I have horrific incapacitating levels of pain in six to 24 hours.

That'll get you off the gluten.

That'll get me off the gluten. Now, I can have hummus on occasion. So occasional use of hummus is fine. Eggs would get me into big trouble.

But is it the lectins? I mean, there are other inflammatory things in those foods. 'Cause when you cook, for example, beans and grains properly, you can reduce the lectins.

You can reduce the lectins. You can soak them, sprout them overnight, you can reduce them. And so in my book, I did create a protocol for vegetarian and vegans. I do think it's really important to recognize that you have people who are spiritually very committed to being vegetarian, vegan. And so I wanted to be sure that I could help them do that in a way that's very optimal. And in my clinics, even at the.

VA, we have vegetarian and vegans.

That I would help.

There are some people who do thrive on that diet and other people don't. And I think you really have to pay attention to your body instead of a dogma or a belief.

Yes.

And I think your body's gonna tell you what it works and what doesn't.

And there are people who do not do as well eating the paleo diet.

Because people say meat is inflammatory.

Well, I think a diet that is, many of my paleo friends whom I love dearly eat meat and very few vegetables and I think they're gonna get that's a problem. I think that can be inflammatory and I would much rather have moderate the meat and do some intermittent fasting and have more vegetables with them.

I love the 9 to 15 cups of vegetables.

Not servings cups.

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

Yeah. And at the VA, I tell people, I don't want you to be hungry. So it's two pounds of servings of meat and then as many vegetables as you're hungry for. It's fine to have fat, to have plenty of olive oil, flax oil, walnut oil, hemp oil. But there's no need to be hungry. If you're still hungry, eat more vegetables.

And do you find that the patients who are vegan or vegetarian do as well in terms of the recovery from autoimmune or MS?

Potentially, yes. There are some folks who really need to figure out how to address the B12 issues. and may have some issues with lectins. So sometimes it can be more challenging, but the vast majority of folks, the vegans and vegetarians I can work with and do very well. So what have you learned through this.

Journey of your own health and then treating these patients, building these programs, writing the walls protocol, hearing feedback? What is sort of the surprising things that you've learned that work or maybe that don't work, things you've had to change or rethink?

What have you learned? Over time, I've come to appreciate more and more the importance of personal resilience. of understanding what is it you want your health for? What is your personal mission? Why is it you're doing this?

Meaning and purpose.

Meaning and purpose and connection. Because I have to connect to all of that to have you to be willing to do the hard work that it takes to sustain the diet and lifestyle changes. I've also come to appreciate that this is a family intervention, not an individual intervention. The families who do this together are very successful. The person who does it alone with their family, not supportive, not eating and doing that lifestyle with them will struggle.

It's all about community, right?

It is about community and family.

It's so powerful. And that's how your groups are so successful because people do it together. So one last question. If you were queen for a day and you could change anything in healthcare, food, medicine, what would it be to make the world a better place?

Oh, absolutely. I would reach out to our children. I want our children to learn how to cook. I want all of our schools to grow gardens. I want to have home ec and to teach kids to cook beginning in first grade. I want to have our churches- Teaching.

Kitchens in every school.

Kitchen in every school and in every church and every synagogue, every mosque, every temple. We need our families to be cooking. and eating together as a family and eating lots and lots of vegetables.

I love that. That is a great vision. I think we need to understand that cooking is a revolutionary act, that it will help us take back our food from the food system. The convenience is killing us and that we need to reinvent how we think about food because one, it's pleasurable, it's fun, it's delicious and it's easy and it's cheap. to cook your own food if you know what you're doing.

By teaching people how to cook, we made it affordable for people with food stamps. If we're going to create an epidemic of health, we have to teach our young people and all of our current families to cook again. And that you can adopt the walls protocol on food stamps, but you'll have to learn how to cook.

Absolutely. That was what I saw with this family in South Carolina where I went down as part of the movie Fed Up and They lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability, a family of five, morbidly obese, diabetic, renal failure, on dialysis, hypertension, pre-diabetes, almost diabetes, and this 15-year-old kid, and they didn't know how to cook. They had two generations of that family that didn't know how to cook. I showed them how to cook one meal, gave them a little guide on how to eat well for less, and they lived in one of the worst food deserts in America, and they lost 200 pounds in the first year as a family. The son gained a bunch of it back, cause he went to work at Bojangles and then he got himself together and he lost 140 pounds and he's now going to medical school. So it's, it's, it can happen. It can happen. It can happen. So thank you so much for showing us that one person with determination and courage can go up against a system that doesn't support what they're doing and can actually make a real difference and change the world. and it's inspiring for all of us, not just your own recovery, but what you've shown can be done with a little bit grit and determination. So thank you, Dr. Walls, for being on the Doctor's Pharmacy, a place for conversations that matter. If you've liked this podcast, please subscribe, leave a comment, a review. We'd love to hear from you. Makes a difference for us and share this with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter and social media. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hallelujah.