The importance of diet for human health cannot be overstated. Just by changing your eating habits, you can not only prevent diseases, but also cure them! This applies to almost all diseases of civilization, including the one discussed here. By virtue of my interests, I have already more than once encountered cases of people whose disease stopped or even reversed only as a result of diet.
The regression of cancerous lesions after changing to a proper diet, the complete unclogging of blood vessels in the heart or the cessation of diabetes are cases documented by medical studies, where a group of people who experimentally received dietary recommendations and a group of people with the same condition who did not follow the diet were compared. The effects were often many times better than even the most expensive, most advanced drugs. The diet can’t be patented, you can’t make money on it, and what’s worse, the patient often doesn’t want to hear about it. In the doctor’s office, we won’t get advice that will cure us, which is only partly to blame for a system that promotes those therapies that make a profit, but also largely the attitude of patients, who effectively discourage doctors from giving such advice.
Food corporations sponsor institutes that train nutritionists, with the result that dietary recommendations often coincide amazingly with a particular corporation’s product line. The best example is suggestions for the amount of calcium consumed. According to nutritionists educated at normal institutes, if we don’t eat 1000 mg a day, we will get osteoporosis and our bones will break. Getting this amount is very difficult if we don’t consume dairy products. Strangely enough, dairy and dairy processing corporations (such as Danone) are one of the main sponsors of the institutes. Meanwhile, in Japan, people consume 330 mg of calcium each day, a third of the amount recommended by our nutritionists. The result? Their bones break 3-4 times less often than ours, and are much stronger. But we won’t hear that from such a nutritionist….
One is left to rely on “abnormal” nutritionists. One of them is Dr. Dean Ornish, one of the most prominent nutritionists in the US, President Clinton’s personal physician. He had a lot of problems by trying to prove that changing your diet can HEAL. No one was interested in such research (because why should they be?), so Dr. Ornish had to sponsor it out of his own pocket. He had a hard time getting permission for such iconoclastic clinical trials, but eventually his authority prevailed. One by one, studies began to appear that made scientists’ jaws drop. Within a few years, the risk of heart attack in people who were already barely alive because their arteries were clogged by atherosclerosis was strongly reduced; they were able to give up any medication altogether. People with diabetes stopped taking medications. People with precancerous conditions had their lesions regressed, avoiding costly therapies. The common point of all these successes? Patients discontinued medications… This is why no institute teaches the methods developed by Dr. Ornish. This may sound like a “conspiracy theory,” but to me it is simply the ABCs of economics, obvious to anyone who does not live in a world of rosy fantasies and realizes that the driving force of multinational corporations is profit, not humanitarianism.
What does diet have to do with multiple sclerosis? It has very, very much. First, it is a significant risk factor. Dr. Ornish’s diet was basically completely devoid of meat and milk (in any form), and studies have shown that one of the most significant risk factors for multiple sclerosis is the amount of meat and dairy consumed. This is the troubling moment when people usually stop listening to me. It is very, very difficult for them to accept that diseases don’t “just happen.” Diseases have to be earned, figuratively speaking: very often we just dig our own grave with our own spoon. The media and the Western culture are geared to a model in which we are healthy, beautiful and young, and illness, old age and such things are something that doesn’t happen. And if it does happen, it’s certainly not our fault, and surely the gentleman in the white apron will find us the right colored pill to solve all our problems for us. In our culture running away from problems, from responsibility is a thing. But this website is aimed at adults, thinking people. I hope I can tell you straight: your health is in your hands and only in your hands. YOU and only YOU can pull yourself out of illness.
The principles of healthy eating are simple. They are trivially simple. Nevertheless, for almost all people, this simplicity is something they cannot accept. The healthiest diet is one that is completely free of meat, dairy and with as little processed food as possible. This is obvious if we look at what we are: we are actually quite clumsy monkeys. Monkeys that just a second ago on the evolutionary clock were jumping trees and eating bananas. Our digestive system is virtually no different from that of a chimpanzee or gorilla. And in fact, their food is the healthiest for us.
Of course, we have gone a little further in evolution, and over the millennia our bodies have adapted somewhat to eating processed foods and even meat, for example, some people with ancestors from the north are unable to stay healthy without eating fish or appropriate supplements, because their bodies cannot process the fatty acids present in plants efficiently enough. A direct copy of the gorilla diet will probably not be the ideal solution, but it should be the basis. Studies in which saturated fats were experimentally completely removed from the diet have shown that in this way atherosclerosis can not only be prevented, but even reversed.
I suppose the difficulty in accepting this obviousness lies in guilt. Every piece of meat we buy contributes to the unimaginable suffering of an animal that had to be killed. We now have two options: either admit to ourselves that we kill animals, or even worse, pay someone to kill them, just so we can feel the pleasure of eating a slightly different-tasting dish, or hysterically look for excuses: because we have to, because we will get sick if we don’t eat, because we have canines, because we are made that way, because that’s the order of things, because GOD gave us animals to slit their throats… as a long-time vegetarian, I have heard this thousands of times. More than once and more than twice I have encountered hysterical aggression from parents when their daughter announces that she is switching to vegetarianism. These same parents had NOTHING against their daughter doing a diet consisting solely of cabbage. Somehow such a diet was acceptable, because even though it was meatless, there was no apparent element of “meat is unnecessary in the diet,” no this hidden attack on morality. It’s sad, really sad, that people are unable to admit to themselves that they do what they do solely for pleasure, that there is no other justification.
No, my dear friends. The only reason is that you want to eat something tasty. And very, very harmful. It’s like with a cigarette, it harms, it kills, but we do it because the desire to taste it is stronger than the behavioral instinct. The only difference is that no one tries to justify smoking with some paralogical absurdities like “after all, that’s why we have fingers to hold a cigarette in them!” (just as “logical” as “after all, that’s why we have fangs to eat meat”).
I thought long and hard about whether to write the above two paragraphs. On the one hand, they might provoke an instinctive defensive reaction – after all, everyone would like to be convinced that he is a good, moral and reasonable person – and I just wrote the opposite. In the end, I decided that it was worth it. That making things clear would allow one to look at the motives behind one’s actions and think them through. After all, there is a life, your life, at stake. The modern Western diet is basically the main reason why we die prematurely in large numbers: from cancer, heart attacks, diabetes complications or autoimmune diseases. Any way to discourage people from cultivating these “Western” traditions is good. By convincing someone to eat a good, healthy diet, I often save his life. That person could die of a heart attack a year from now, leaving a grieving family. If I take my time to convince him or her, such person can will live not a year, but maybe even several decades, giving happiness to his loved ones. As for me, this game is worth the candle. So I will persuade you strenuously to change your diet, persuade sometimes too intrusively, but from my point of view, I am saving people’s lives. Your life.
Enough moralizing, what should the ideal diet look like, according to dr Ornish? As I wrote above, it should be similar to the diet of great apes. They feed mainly on leaves, shoots, flowers, fruits, insects. Meat, if it even appears, is usually due to cannibalism. The main sources of vitamin B12 are insects and dirty water, for aesthetic and epidemiological reasons it is better to replace this with a tablet. Food should be as little processed as possible, that is, some vegetables are better eaten raw. Vegetables are better stewed in their own sauce, rather than overcooked in soup. It’s really very, very simple, we eat what we can eat without processing.
Of course, such a diet is too cumbersome and expensive, so it should be adjusted both to the wealth of the wallet and to our culinary taste. According to Dr. Ornish, the diet should contain as little fat as possible, not too much protein, but a fair amount of carbohydrates. He recommends rejecting all products that contain saturated fat in significant amounts – eggs, dairy, meat. He allows the consumption of very small amounts of lean meat or dairy. Basically, his diet is not some set of guidelines, rather a certain pursuit of an ideal. He does not say “you must not eat a single hamburger anymore,” rather “if you eat 3 hamburgers this week instead of 4, you will be healthier.”
You can read Ornish guidelines here:
Nutrition
No matter what main dishes are included in our diet, there must be large amounts of fruits and vegetables. Only in them are substances whose role we do not yet fully know, but which act like vitamins: all kinds of flavonoids, polyphenols, oxidative enzymes and a whole range of other chemical compounds not yet known to science. Evolution has developed in us a desire for salty and fatty things. An ape, perpetually threatened with starvation, could eat such things to survive lack of food later. But nowadays we are no longer in danger of starvation, on the contrary: we die of binge eating. Here we no longer have an evolutionary defense mechanism, we have to rely on reason and strong will. It is necessary to stuff ourselves with plants, like our ancestors.
It is very important to quiet the immune system. Anything that stimulates a part of it, stimulates the whole. If we have a throat infection, rampant defense cells can attack the brain on occasion. The same applies to allergies, allergy makes the number of inflammation initiators in the blood increase, misery is ready. Therefore, it is essential to get rid of any substances from the diet that can provoke allergies.
Perhaps a good decision would be to eliminate plants from the solanaceous family (such as tomatoes) and gluten from the diet. Elimination of these food groups improved the health of people with various autoimmune diseases, even if the patients had no apparent gluten intolerance. The problem with statistical studies is that if a method helps one person out of twenty, statistically everyone will be healthier. However, for the patients, this means that nineteen of them will tire unnecessarily, so I would not give special weight to single clinical trials in which gluten elimination gently improved health. It is possible that the effect came from eliminating white flour products, which are quite unhealthy whether they contain gluten or not. Moreover, studies in strictly controlled hospital settings did not confirm the role of gluten, so it is possible that the improvement in well-being was due to a general rejection of highly processed food, since that is what contains gluten.
When I switched to vegetarian nutrition more than 20 years ago, I did so for ethical reasons, thinking that my health would probably deteriorate. 25 years ago there was no Internet in Poland, access to knowledge was much more difficult. What was my surprise when, after a year on the diet, the problems that had plagued me for the previous 20 years gradually began to disappear – leg pains so severe that I was sometimes unable to walk, stomach pains that did not allow me to function normally, or constant colds. I was always a weak, sickly child, and in elementary school I ranked last in cross-country in gym class. In medical school, after 2 years on a meatless diet, I came in first, without any special training. I heard similar stories from many people who changed their diet after my persuasion.
To make things less colorful, I should mention the problems. Studying the health of people on pure raw food vegan diet, where only raw plants are eaten, it was shown to be perhaps even more unhealthy than a traditional diet involving meat. There were serious problems with protein, to the point that children on this diet had skin lesions, which are usually only found in famine-stricken countries, and even developmental delays:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8005079
Bone decalcification was also rampant:
https://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=486478
And there was also destruction of teeth, probably largely due to the consumption of large amounts of fruit:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9831783/
It should be remembered that raw foodists are a kind of extreme, one can guess with a high degree of probability that they did not use any supplements, and some did not use fluoride toothpaste. This does not change the fact that deficiencies on this diet are common, and mainly involve protein, as well as calcium. Don’t believe youtube videos, where celebrities tell what super healthy they are on this diet, they make fat money on telling such stories, it’s in their interest to lie, they may not tell about a health problem, and they may just order a pizza after finishing recording the episode.
Ideological vegans are often not specimens of health either, but here there is the issue of avoiding supplements, which are an integral part of Ornish’s diet. I’m sure that if one were to repeat his study, but prescribe only the diet to patients, without supplemental pills, the results would be much worse.
In summary, we keep saturated fat to a minimum, but take care of both protein and calcium, both of which are very important in multiple sclerosis. You can even go for calcium supplements and whey protein.
Finally, it’s worth adding a few words regarding lifestyle. First, breathing. It’s really worth learning to breathe properly: full, involving the diaphragm, appropriately deep. This can change one’s life in a few days, a person with severely distorted breathing does not realize it until some teacher corrects the mistakes. Then, from day to day, life becomes more pleasant. Proper breathing affects the reduction of stress, the proper work of internal organs (the diaphragm massages them, as it were, with each inhalation), the proper oxygenation of tissues. I will not elaborate here on how to learn it, there are plenty of sites on the Internet dealing with this subject.
Second, sitting. No one quite knows why, but sitting is very unhealthy. Studies have shown that the more we sit, the shorter we will live, and playing sports will not save us from negative consequences. As little TV as possible, as little computer as possible. As many walks as possible, and if we do have to sit (such as working in an office), let’s take breaks from time to time for basic exercise.
Another thing is teeth and other sources of inflammation. No problems should be allowed, any holes must be patched. The same goes for all other possible sites of infection, intestinal problems, stomach problems. All inflammation can initiate another flare-up. And I advise against relying only on medications, they all have side effects, they all just mask the symptoms. Recently, a friend with SM showed me a list of “additional” medications she takes, three of the four had effects that theoretically accelerate the development of this disease. It is necessary to find the cause of the problem, not to treat the effects. Allergic inflammatory bowel disease? Eliminate suspicious substances from the diet one by one until you hit the one causing the problem. Constant colds? We supplement with vitamin D, cysteine. Perpetually dry throat, constant infections? Maybe it’s time to install a humidifier in the room? Morning runny nose? It’s time to thoroughly clean the room, remove all dust and, far more importantly, fungi and mold. As a general rule, in the case of autoimmune disorders, the fight against fungus in the apartment should be an absolute priority. Windows should never be completely sealed.
Quitting smoking. I don’t think anyone needs to be told how important it is. But it is worth adding here that smoking is precisely one of the main causes of disease development. Smoking introduces massive amounts of heavy metals into the body. Without their removal, you can’t hope for a full recovery. In addition, inhaling tobacco smoke increases the activity of the immune system, provoking disease progression. It is not at all necessary to give up the habit completely, it is enough to replace ordinary cigarettes with electronic ones.
One last point, relaxation. Studies have shown that people who relax have a completely different level of hormones, above all, their DHEA concentration increases, which is an outstanding positive effect in people with multiple sclerosis. Stress has also been shown to have an effect on a number of conditions, for example, the rate of prostate cancer directly depends on the intensity of stress. By using relaxation techniques, it is often possible to simply avoid getting this cancer. A protective effect on the cardiovascular system has also been shown. Personally, I recommend meditation techniques, as they are probably the easiest to learn, can be performed at almost any time, do not require mobility (an important factor for people with advanced disease that prevents them from practicing yoga, for example), and probably have the highest positive effect on hormone levels of the techniques studied. Also, it makes no sense for me to try to teach someone on this site how to meditate. That’s what specialized sites dedicated to it are for, or teachers offering their services offline.
Finally, a handful of studies, since the question is always “but do you have evidence for what you write?”:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3829243/ People on a vegetarian diet had three times lower risk of multiple sclerosis, those consuming large amounts of meat twice as high. Noteworthy is the fact that vitamin B12 deficiency and low EPA/DHA fatty acids increase the risk of the disease, problems that the vast majority of vegetarians have. That is, despite the fact that they had deficiencies that in theory should increase the risk, the meatless diet protected them!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1973220
The effect of sticking to a diet that excludes saturated fat on the course of multiple sclerosis has been studied. Compared to people who did not adhere to this dietary model, mortality from complications of the disease was up to several times lower, and the progression of the disease as measured by mobility was similarly significantly slowed. In people who switched to a healthy diet at the very beginning of the disease, its progression was up to five times slower!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12591551
Patients from a previous experiment were contacted, and the risk of the disease was compared according to diet. The researchers came to the rather bold conclusion that multiple sclerosis is a disease caused mainly by the consumption of saturated animal fats.
Benefits beyond multiple sclerosis:
https://www.ornish.com/wp-content/uploads/Intensive-lifestyle-changes-for-reversal-of-coronary-heart-disease1.pdf
On a properly composed meatless diet, heart disease regressed.
https://www.ornish.com/wp-content/uploads/Intensive_Lifestyle_Changes_and_Prostate_Cancer.pdf
On an identical diet, early stages of prostate cancer regressed.