Multiple Sclerosis and Autoimmune Diseases: The Impact of Diet - John McDougall, MD

so dr. John McDougall invites you to come up thank you he's got a very stimulating topic for us today around multiple sclerosis and right it's not the right term MS and an autoimmune diseases so dr. John McDougall thank you thank you thank you I am honored to be here Mary and I had a tenday program scheduled during this time and the opportunity came up to visit our friends in Portland and so we cancelled the 10-day program and that was you know upon the invitation and and decided that our best energies could be spent here with some of our best friends in the country which of the folks in Portland so thank you very much it's nice to be here I also want you to know that as of last week I was awarded in medical license to practice in the state of Oregon now whether or not that means anything I can't tell you right now but I am a licensed physician in the state of Oregon I also have or again thank you very much organ you know that's why they won't let me move here as I can't pronounce the state I also have other connections here my son Craig mcdougal is a board certified internist and he works at the Kaiser Permanente here in Portland yeah and my best hope for saving this country is Kaiser Permanente I will tell you that because this is a medical organization that has the right incentives and so my son is now working at Kaiser and he has a team leader with him and I'd like to introduce and that's Kim Karlsen Kim stand up and what they would like to do is help Kaiser make a ton of money by collecting premiums and not paying them out in benefits that are particularly unnecessary so I'd really do think that this is the only organization that can move us forward is Kaiser Permanente and I have no other association with them but that's that's my as my relationship to to your fine state one other introduction I'd like to make if she's still here she certainly is I'd like to introduce my fifth grandchild my granddaughter Chloe and if there's anything you'd like to remember about me remember that I am a grandfather and by the way Chloe's mom is a board-certified family practitioner and her name is Mika McDougald MD so hello there Mika as mentioned I've been at this for 43 years I started in 19 of be 45 years I started 1968 so I have earned the right to talk to you I am a general doctor I'm a kind of a family doctor I love to take care of patients that's where I get the greatest enjoyment out of life and I'm going to talk to you about my medical practice and some research that I've gotten involved in the things that I believe to be correct fortunately what I believe to be correct is supported solidly by scientific research and logic and evidence that you can see if you just open your eyes and look there's really there's really no controversy here in terms of the truth there's a lot of other pressures out there that keep us from seeing the truth and this isn't unique to medicine and health it's about any business the energy industry for example any industry their job is to make money so when I talk about the various health issues here just like Brenda Davis did you may think that there's some terrible injustice going on and maybe even a conspiracy to keep you sick that's not true it's just business as usual that's all there are people like you and I who are trying to make a living who are trying to put their kids through college who are trying to pay the bills they just happen to be involved in occupations that are tremendously destructive to the human race and planet Earth that just happens to be the problem it's not like they're trying to hurt you these people involved in the meat and dairy industry and the oil industry etc they are sick too the men are dying of heart disease the women are developing breast cancer the children are fat and constipated their children their families are this is not a conspiracy this is just business as usual we have to find some way to make business as usual right and that's why I enjoyed starting this presentation by talking to you about Kaiser Permanente and the opportunities that are available we also have some allegiance with the Adventist Medical Center here in Portland the Adventists have been oriented since the early eighteen two healthy diets and lifestyle in fact if you ask about seventh day then it's the first thing most people think about is vegetarian eating so we have some friends here in the community and we should thank the Adventist Hospital for their support and encouraging this type of conference so let me talk to you a little bit about about the things that I've learned and how I got involved in the diet multiple sclerosis issue about nine years ago Mary and I set up a foundation it's the MacDougall research and education foundation it's a 501c3 tax-deductible foundation so I do want to point out and offer you this thought as you're saving money by being healthy as you cut your food bill from an average of fourteen dollars a day for twenty five hundred calories to about three dollars a day for twenty five hundred calories on our eating program as you go from say the cheapest food people think is available they're like fast food which is on average fourteen dollars for twenty five hundred calories a day and you switch to a starch-based plant-based diet you drop your food bill to three dollars a day for 2500 calories we've calculated this that's a savings for 11.11 dollars a day you multiply that by 365 days a year and well how much money do you have you have enough money to come to my 10 day program for free that's how much money have as you stop going to the doctor stop paying your copay for medications look at all the money you're saving as you stop all these expensive useless harmful vitamin supplements look how much money you're saving you've got hundreds and thousands of dollars you don't know what to do it send it to our tax-deductible 501c3 foundation where your dollars will go to a good cause and that is studying the effects of diet on people's health directly the effects of diet any way we set aside 501 C 3 and about about nine years ago and we didn't know what to spend the money on we started asking people our follow where's for help they started going any money we were able to raise a few dollars and I was talking to Mary about how we should spend our money and we thought about various things that we could study we can study obesity diabetes heart disease and so on these are things that are very common and Brenda Davis did an excellent job discussing the dietary implications of these diseases I suggested to Mary that instead what we do is we study the effect of diet on multiple sclerosis her response was why parents have any people with multiple sclerosis nobody knows much about multiple sclerosis everybody thinks this is really weird disease a real big mystery and you want to take and spend all the hard-earned money from our Research Foundation on studies of disease that only affects about 350,000 people in the United States and I said yeah I'd like to do that and a response was why and I said because people do not think about multiple sclerosis as a dietary disease and if we can show them the connection medical doctors and patients the connection between multiple sclerosis and diet I said people will notice I said what we're doing in effect Mary is we're taking the biggest rock we can find and throwing it the biggest picture window in town and the shattering glass will open the ears in the most deaf physician I told her that so so anyway we decided to start this project we started in 2008 the study of diet multiple sclerosis we went to organ do I get it right thank you I know you guys are very sensitive about this and that's the Oregon Health and Science University and ask them if they'd like to get involved with us and that was in 2008 the diet multiple sclerosis project started in addition to the fact that I thought I would get people's attention because they don't associate these two issues diet in multiple sclerosis I also wanted to study the effect of diet multiple sclerosis because of one of my mentors and that's dr. Roy Swank and I'm going to talk to you a bit about him but do you all know what multiple sclerosis is multiple sclerosis is a disease of great surprise you never bored if you have this disease one day you may wake up and you can't hold your urine another day you may wake up and you're blind in one eye another day you may wake up and you can't move a leg the cause of this disease is an attack on the nervous system which results in inflammation and it happens to be parry vascular inflammation it happens to her occur around blood vessels the consequence of this inflammation is that heals and it leaves scars and what you see on autopsy previously and currently on our various scanning techniques like MRIs as you see these scars multiple scars multiple sclerosis the way you make this diagnosis is you see a patient it makes no sense patient comes in and gives you this really strange history of these neurologic losses they don't seem to fit into the anatomy of what you learned about the nervous system just random attacks multiple sclerosis is is like it's like in any expert marksman closed his eyes and took a gun and shot it at the patient and wherever that bullet hit the nervous system dies and you get this various manifestations like blindness loss of function and so on that's multiple sclerosis these are the scars you can see them here in white here these are the multiple scars that you see on MRI I've had many mentors in my life I have to tell you there's very little that I do original there are people like Denis Burkitt who Hans Diehl talked about this morning I would also second that Hans steel that Denis Burkitt was the most the first person in my life that opened my eyes about diet and there are other people who helped me along the way like Nathan pretty good Dean Ornish and doctor Roy Swank he was a major contributor to my understanding the importance of diet and lifestyle dr. Roy Swank dr. Swank he lived to be 99 years old he lived here in your town in Portland he worked at Oregon Health and Science University he was the head of neurology of Oregon high at science and University for 23 years he studied multiple sclerosis patients for 50 years we started learning about multiple sclerosis and diet it's dr. Swank got a job in World War two studying the incidence disease in Western Europe and what he noticed was some of the things that Hans Diehl talked about this morning is that the death rate from heart disease dropped dramatically in Western Europe during World War two at a time of tremendous stress people were being shot gassed isolated from their families and yet the incidence of our common diseases dropped drastically heart disease diabetes and multiple sclerosis and the reason was not because of stress this was times of tremendous stress the reason was that during World War one in World War two there was a restriction rationing of food people couldn't eat all the animal foods and as a consequence they were forced to change their diet and they got healthy dr. Swank saw this during World War two and then what he did is after the war he left and went to Montreal neurologic Institute and he started studying patients with multiple sclerosis and started putting him on a healthier diet and what he did is he reported his results over the years of treating people with multiple sclerosis with the healthy diet I'm gonna share with you some of that research after a few years of Montreal Neurological stood he was invited by the Department of Neurology of Oregon Health and Science University to come here and head to the Department of Neurology which is where he spent about 40 years seeing 5,000 patients with multiple sclerosis dr. Swank he eventually died aged 99 in 2008 we became friends over the years the reason we became friends as I used to come and visit your town I would do various radio and television shows I used to be a book salesman that's how I made my living selling books and whenever I'd come to Portland I would schedule some time to meet with dr. Swank in the basement office at Oregon Health and Science University Medical School and we would sit and we talk about things we had a great time theater we became friends in fact we became such good friends that before he died we signed a legal agreement together that said that I was allowed I had the opportunity to continue to promote his work on diet multiple sclerosis in my efforts to promote his work we started this Research Foundation the 501 C 3 that you are all going to send your extra money to and and we approached Oregon Health and Science University the neurology department and asked them if they'd like to get involved with this in a diet multiple sclerosis study and because of their previous history at dr. Swank who was the head of their Department for so many years because Oregon Health and Science University is a very progressive medical institution considering the rest of the institutions across the country because of the open - of the staff we started a study on diet multiple sclerosis we initiated study in 2008 it took us a year to be approved by the Ethics Board a year for it to be determined that was safe and ethical to feed people potatoes this same board will approve drugs that kill people cost tens of thousands of dollars they will approve these drugs in hours it took us a year to get this study approved finally On January 15 2009 we got approval we started the study on diet multiple sclerosis dr. Swank he wrote a book was published when I was 12 years old it basically told you everything that you've heard today in the conference everything in Hans Diehl and Brenda Davis and I know dr. Swank knew in the 1940s and 1950s and he actually published in a book of his called a low-fat diet reasons rules and recipes and in that book published in 1959 he said go out knee and chronic degenerative diseases have been linked in the minds of both laymen and scientists for many years they saying to dig your grave with your teeth probably has its origins in antiquity but in the prosperous areas of the Western world during the past few decades the Maxima has taken on real and tragic meaning that was 1959 yeah dr. Swank do this dr. Swank's observations after the war one of the observations he made was that multiple sclerosis was rare and parts of the world where people eat a healthy diet with little meat and dairy and it was common parts of the world where people ate a lot of meat dairy here's the worldwide distribution of multiple sclerosis you see in wealthy parts of the world like the United States Western Europe Australia New Zealand Saudi Arabia etc or people have a lot of money they can afford all this rich food all this meat and dairy and so on what happens is they develop this disease and in parts of the world where people eat a starch-based diet a diet centred on rice corn potatoes beans peas and lentils multiple sclerosis is rare to non-existent dr. Swank he told me a story one time we were sitting talking this basement office and he told me a story about how in the 1960s he was invited to China to see multiple sclerosis patients in China and the Chinese government was able to find five patients with multiple sclerosis dr. Swank told me he says I don't even think they had multiple sclerosis but of course China is a whole different country now isn't it in the last 20 years the instance diabetes has gone from 1 percent to 12 percent in China when you see this initial data that multiple sclerosis is common in certain parts of the world uncommon in other parts of the world's one of the things that's noticed in what I was taught and what any of you who are medical doctors I would guess who were taught to or dietitians as you were taught that this geographic distribution of multiple cirrhosis suggests I don't know what does this suggest maybe it suggests some mysterious things like for example multiple sclerosis is rare on the equator where there's lots of sunshine and as you go north and south multiple sclerosis becomes more common actually it wasn't that kind of electromagnetic radiation that we were taught about when I was young and in medical school that could be the possible cause of multiple sclerosis I thought we weren't really taught this but I thought this I thought maybe multiple sclerosis was due to some type of magnetic field change because as you move north and south it becomes more common and what I knew back then was that you had the North and South Pole many fields yeah that's what I thought and that kind of magnetic radiation is some of the things that people still suspect may be involved in the cause of multiple sclerosis but the more common theory now is that multiple sclerosis is really due to wait a minute what if did you say vitamin D okay excuse me I thought it was sunshine oh yeah what what what the thinking is or should be is that multiple sclerosis is rare around the equator because of sunshine and as you move north itself multiple sclerosis becomes more common because the less sunshine but that's not what you told me you just told me the problem is vitamin D and the way to solve the problem is to take vitamin D supplements didn't you tell me that that's what you're thinking I know you were alright but there's one other thing that happens here and I just showed you a couple slides ago as you move north and south what happens to people's eating habits yeah yeah people around the equator eat starch based diets rice corn potatoes beans peas lentils as you move north and south they rely more upon animal foods now you see that here there's the worldwide consumption of meat the same pattern as multiple sclerosis here's the worldwide consumption of dairy products same patterns multiple sclerosis excuse me folks it's the food yeah that's why people get this disease and heart disease and diabetes and obesity and so on it's the food it's not diet lifestyle and I want to make it absolutely clear it is not diet lifestyle it's the food and it is a distraction when people talk about diet and lifestyle they talk about diet lifestyle so that says to the person who's listening well I don't really have to deal with the diet I'll deal with the lifestyle I'll do a little extra walking what else get a less stress no no it's the diet it's the diet it's the food all right let me talk to you about how autoimmune diseases occur to get an autoimmune disease if you thought about autoimmune diseases in the past what I remember thinking about autoimmune diseases myself and what I was taught probably in high school certainly medical school is this is the situation where the body attacks itself autoimmune disease the body attacks itself and I would think how stupid to the body to attack itself why would it do that does it make any sense for the body to attack itself well the recent attacks itself is a consequence of injury to the body and I'll show you how I believe it works and the scientific research is solid supporting this mechanism and probably most of you know this already the first thing you have to do to get the body to attack itself is you have to damage the barrier between the body and the outside world and the connection between the outside world and the inside of the body is with a one-layer cell one layer of cells in the gut it's a single layer what you find here you have the intestinal contents that's where the partially digested food throws through the gut and to get into the body you have to go through this one cell layer there's one layer of cells sing clear cells and once it goes through the single layer of cells that you see right here then whatever nutrients or other substances get through the single layer cells now it's into the body can be picked up by the veins and carry throughout the rest of the body but it has to go past this one barrier and this barrier is very smart this got barrier so smart that it can distinguish between harmful proteins like those in viruses and bacteria and necessary proteins that the body absorbs to supply as protein needs it can make that distinction that allows cell layer is so smart that it can increase nutrient intake based upon its needs let's take a nutrient for example iron some of you learned this in medical school and Dietetic school that when your iron deficient say you had a bleeding problem what happens is the gut gets very aggressive at absorbing iron and picks up extra iron from the gut and meets the iron needs now that's important to get extra iron in but what if your iron sufficient what do you have plenty iron in the body and you eat a diet with plenty of iron in it sufficient iron and you have sufficient iron in the body the gut has to make a decision to keep that excess iron out of the body because they've been allowed it in what would happen is you get iron deposits throughout the body a condition called hemochromatosis your spleen liver would get very sick and you would die so that one cell layer makes that discrimination that one cell layer also discriminates for example with calcium if you eat a lower calcium diet and there's no such thing as a too low calcium diet you know that right there's never been a case of dietary calcium deficiency ever reported on any natural diet ever in the world in other words nobody has developed a disease ever due to too little calcium in their diet under any natural circumstances that's because there's plenty of calcium in the food and oranges rice corn it's loaded with calcium you may build horses and elephants with that amount of calcium so what happens is that a body makes a decision with that one cell layer to absorb sufficient calcium to meet its calcium needs if you do things that may seem foolish to this audience and that is you take calcium pills or drink classful the mouth what happens to the one-cell air makes a decision to keep that extra calcium out of the body if it wasn't able to make that discrimination that extra calcium would go into the body you develop soft tissue calcification your kidneys your heart other organs have become calcified you die okay the point being is this is a very important barrier that makes some decisions unconsciously of course that protect us and keep us in good health if this layer gets damaged then what happens is we get into a situation where things get into the body that aren't supposed to be in the body you develop a leaky gut you've heard that term leaky gut all right you develop a leaky gut once you have passed the barriers the body say the respiratory cells that has a layer of discrimination or the GI cells that I just show you a layer of discrimination what's this something gets into the body that's not supposed to be there the body launches its second defense which is the immune system like for example you've got a virus that gets through your respiratory tract or your GI tract it gets through this one cell layer of discriminating cells and now it's floating around the blood and what the body has to do now is deal with that foreign substance in this case proteins the viral proteins so the next line of defense is the body the body produces antibodies it's lymphocytes produce antibodies that are directed to that particular protein foreign protein that got the body in this case a virus and the antibody response is very specific these antibodies produced by the lymphocytes are very specific to deal with this sequence of amino acids and this viral coat of this particular protein it's like a lock-and-key this is why influenza vaccines are so ineffective is when you get flu shots you're given a you're given proteins from viruses that attack people last year the year before the year before that and these proteins that are given to you in your flu shots they induce antibody production specific to those particular virus that occurred in those particular past seasons but we don't know whether or not the next is going to be one of the past if it's a new virus what happens is there's no protection from the flu vaccine all right the point I'm trying to make is as a lock-and-key type of relationship you get a foreign protein into the bloodstream the body makes antibodies specific to that particular sequence of amino acids on that particular protein so it can destroy the virus other foreign proteins getting the body besides viruses and bacterias and so on food protein if you have a leaky gut like beef protein can get into the bloodstream so now you've got a foreign protein floating around the blood beef the body recognizes this is foreign like a virus coat or a bacterial cell wall and it makes antibodies to that beef protein very specific those antibodies to that particular sequence of amino acids on that particular beef protein or pork protein or dairy protein dairy protein gets into the body the body gets through that gut that leaky gut the body makes antibodies to the dairy protein attacks that foreign protein in the bloodstream and gets rid of that foreign protein like would a virus etc all right the problem occurs here this is how you get autoimmune diseases is in the effort to defend itself against these foreign proteins the body makes antibodies that attack the melv protein but they're not just specific to the milk protein they cross react with proteins in our own body it's a process called molecular mimicry molecular molecules mimicry copy the body produces antibodies against this foreign protein milk but it finds similar sequences of amino acids on the human tissues in the body and so because of this cross reactivity it's trying to attack the milk but it finds similar sequences of amino acids on other tissues like for example the pancreas and as a result looking for these foreign proteins this calomel protein it finds similar sequences of amino acids on in this case the beta cells of the pancreas that produce insulin and these antibodies specifically produced to deal with this sequence of amino acids finds the same sequence of amino acids that's found on dairy in the beta cells of the pancreas this by the way it was published in 1992 in the New England Journal of Medicine they'd identified 17 amino acids in a sequence that's present on beta casein and also present on the surface cells of the insulin producing cells of the pancreas so what happens is the child usually child in fact half the people get type 1 diabetes are under 18 half our older 18 what happens is the person consumes the commo because the gut is injured because that one lining is injured what happens is that column L protein can get into the body the body makes antibodies that calomel protein those antibodies are not specific they cross react through a process of molecular memory they find the same sequence of amino acids on the insulin producing cells in the pancreas that's how you get type 1 diabetes now how did that say a layer of cells get injured it gets injured by the typical American diet it gets envisioned injured by environmental chemicals again by viruses it gets injured by drugs like non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and what happens is it injures that one cell layer that one cell layer goes from here to here one cell layer you can recognize this just remember the time you drank a hot drink and you burnt the inside of your mouth and you looked inside and you saw this denuded area of cells that's that one cell layer it hurt terrible worse than you ever expected then just that little burn but you've lost that single layer of cells and these cells they become denuded ineffective you develop the leaky gut and that's caused by various things that we come in contact I do want to mention there's one other common condition which is talked about a lot these days and that celiac disease people with celiac disease they develop a leaky gut as a consequence of gluten which is from wheat barley and rye and people with celiac disease have a very high incidence of multiple autoimmune diseases because they have this injury to that one cell layer all right so that's how you get typical autoimmune diseases you enter that one cell layer foreign proteins get into the bloodstream the body produces antibodies to those foreign proteins unfortunately there are similar sequences of amino acids present on your own tissues and those tissues can be tissues of the joints colon pancreas kidneys skin all kinds of tissues and as a result you get these autoimmune diseases like ankylosing spondylitis Crohn's disease dermatomyositis type 1 diabetes various kinds of inflammatory arthritis multiple sclerosis - Evi gravis psoriasis rheumatoid arthritis thyroiditis it just depends upon where this cross reactivity takes place and you can destroy the cells of the skin the pigment cells you can destroy the neurologic cells and so on as a consequence that's how you get autoimmune diseases but when it comes to multiple sclerosis you have to cause one further injury you see the barrier to the outside world when it comes to the nervous system there are two barriers one is the gut which I just talked to you about once the foreign protein gets into the blood the body makes antibodies against this foreign protein these antibodies can't affect the nervous system unless they cross one more barrier and that's called the blood-brain barrier between the blood and this final fluid is a barrier called the blood-brain barrier so not only you have to have the injury to the gut to get multiple sclerosis where the foreign protein gets into the bloodstream the body makes antibodies but those antibodies produced against that foreign protein have to get into the nervous system by damaging the blood-brain barrier and here's what dr. Swank thought caused the damage of the blood-brain barrier he published a paper in circulation in 1954 describing what he believed to be the problem right here in Portland he did this research and I just want you to read the title it's called intravascular aggregation and adhesiveness of blood elements associated with alimentary like pea Mia you all know what that means well you do you really do intravascular aggregation and adhesiveness of blood elements well cells red blood cells white blood cells platelets etc the aggregation of these elements caused by gut fat elementary like emia and what dr. Swank said is this has an effect of the blood-brain barrier and he's published the results in the American Heart Association Journal circulation now what he showed is that you remember I told you this is a peri vascular disease that occurs around the blood vessels these inflammatory attacks that you get multiple scrot so what he showed is in his research he showed how you injured the blood vessels and how as a result you destroy the blood-brain barrier and things leaked out you know these antibodies can get into the nervous as he showed that 1954 dr. Swank did early in the 1550s because we became interested in fat and this disease we started studying the effect of fat on the circulation we were using dogs and humans and hamsters at that time and what we found was after three hours after alive but a fat meal you'd find the red cells started to cantata and in the hamster he could where we studied their lives of collation you could watch the circulation slowing down sometimes stopping bark period and so we began to think in terms that this abnormality in the plasma which we had become suspicious of being present could be an estate that there must be something in the which is missing an MS or which is abnormal illness which prevents is clumping and that this clumping in an acid causes damage to the capillary system of the brain and in mr. Frye's what we know as a blood-brain barrier okay that's what dr. Swank showed 1950s in his animal experiments this is the blood elements the blood cells flowing through the blood of this case it happens to be a hamster cheek pouch so you see the rapid flow of blood and then what happens is they feed this particular animal feed them fat I know this is a violation of animal rights but they did fat the fat coated the blood cells and now the blood cells they stick together the reason they stick together is naturally blood cells they have a to repel each other they have a negative charge and when they hit they bounce off each other but when you feed the fat what happens is the fat coats the red blood cells and it prevents them from repelling each other and they adhere together and they form this sludging phenomena that I just showed you and this sludging phenomena lasts for about 10 hours now that's what dr. Swank showed in hamster cheek pouches but the same thing has been shown in human beings like for example dr. Friedman's work that was published in the same journal Circulation back in the 1960s dr. Freid Modi did as he took in this case a fireman took multiple subjects published in the journal Circulation set up an experiment where they could look at the circulation directly and that's to look in the conjunctiva or the whites in the I set up the microscope took this gentleman and several others in the experiment and fed him one meal one high-fat meal the meal happened to be 67% fat this one meal consisted of two eggs four strips of bacon milk cream bread two Pat's of butter and if you ever eat that okay this man had one meal one meal this is the conjunctiva of the eye you see the the large amount of circulation here prior to the meal he was fed this one high-fat meal and you see the dramatic reduction in circulation that took place in four hours I want you to note this is animal fat we're talking about when they did the experiments that were published likewise in a major medical journal using vegetable fat the sludging was more severe and more prolonged using vegetable fat than animal fat all right so let's see if I can put this whole together again so what happens is you eat these proteins animal proteins in this case what we're talking about beef protein dairy protein etc the gut gets damaged either because the drugs or viruses or chemicals or whatever it gets damaged you develop a leaky gut now the animal protein gets into the bloodstream the body makes antibodies to the animal proteins maybe dairy in fact in the animal experiments what they find is that a protein on beta casein a milk protein causes the production of antibodies to the beta casein the milk protein that then have the the ability to attack the proteins of the nervous system and so these antibodies that are produced in the bloodstream they go into the nervous system and they attack the myelin sheaths through the nervous system which is the hallmark of multiple sclerosis okay because of molecular mimicry this cross reactivity and when you destroy the myelin sheath the proteins over the nerves what happens is the nerves don't function well and that's how you get ms I learned this this this philosophy from dr. Swank many years ago I met several patients along the ways of his and patients that were not directly his patients but learned about his particular approach like for example this lady donna mcfarland she was told she had some of the worst multiple sclerosis her neurologists - ever seen and here she is 20 years later with dr. Swank doing wonderful and then I met this lady this lady Deb tist sac she was kind of interesting story she developed MS in 1991 the area of dysfunction was in her inner ear she developed extreme dizziness vertigo got so sick she couldn't go see the doctor she finally got well enough to go see the doctor about a month later her husband took her in to see the doctor the family doctor said this is far beyond anything I can take care of you must see a neurologist she went to see the neurologist the neurologist checked over called her husband into the room sat down with two of them and told her you have multiple sclerosis Deb and what this means he turned around to a blackboard not a great bedside manner turned around to the blackboard drew an axe here and said this is where you are now in terms of function in five years is where you're going to be in a wheelchair and in ten years here which is going to be bedridden or dead and Deb said I think there's something I can do better she became semi-vegetarian mm started our diet in 2001 and she stopped multiple sclerosis in 2002 now how do we know she stopped the multiple sclerosis in 2002 because she got cereal MRIs and our MRI showed like for example this one compared to 2000 the multiple lesions in the brain described above are slightly smaller and do not show any interval increase in size so I'm running into these various patients I have a friend called dr. Roy Swank who has studied 5,000 people over 50 years using diet to treat multiple sclerosis that's where my level of interest was there is no other option than dietary change I'm not going to go into the discussion of drug therapy of multiple sclerosis but I can just tell you it's criminally expensive extremely ineffective and relatively toxic there's no other option what happens to these people who have multiple sclerosis even under the best drug therapies available drug therapies which by the way cost fifty five thousand dollars a year just for the medication not the needles not the sponges not the syringes just the drug is forty five to five thousand dollars a year with the best therapy available what happens to somebody with MS is half the patients within ten years are unable to walk unassisted wheelchair-bound bedridden or dead and those are the results nobody likes to talk about these grim results but that's the truth so we need to look at this from another point of view desperately to help these people dr. Swank he developed a swank diet right here in Portland Oregon and what he developed was a low saturated fat diet down here you know what saturated fat is industry uses the word saturated fat to confuse you you know what saturated fat is saturated fat is meat dairy and eggs so he developed a divided that was low in saturated fat low in saturated fat in other words very low in animal food intake he used some vegetable fat and he fed him starches vegetables and fruits dr. Swank found that a difference of eight grams of saturated fat it's hard to relate to as an e cramps etc eight grams of saturated fat resolved in a three-fold increase in the chance of dying of multiple sclerosis and he published that in 1998 grams of saturated fat what's it eight grams of saturated fat increases the risk of dying of multiple sclerosis threefold eight grams of saturated fat one sausage he grams the saturated fat eight grams of saturated fat I'm not saying and I'm saying or eight grams of saturated fat or eight grams of saturated fat one piece of cheesecake is eight grams of saturated fat his research shows you increase the risk of Dyna multiple sclerosis threefold all right now dr. Swank he started the studies on diet and MS as they say they involved over 5,000 patients 50 years of study the results have been published in The Lancet the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition the archives of Neurology all of our major medical journals related to this he's had an opportunity to publish in most of them and what he found a summary of his research dr. Swank said on the SWAC diet you the relapses of MS remember the multiple attacks decreased by 70% in the first year of treatment then after the first year there were continued improvements about 5 percent fewer relapses per year and for the first 16 years of treatment with a low-fat diet the rate of exasperation declined by 95 percent remember with the best therapies available the best drugs that have cost a forty five to fifty five thousand dollars a year result in half the people in big trouble within ten years and yet he showed the risk of of getting a big trouble is less than five percent over a period of thirty four years of study these patients were placed on diet beginning actually in December of nineteen forty and as I saw patients they were adamant through the years one of the first things we noticed was a marked decrease in the evasion per year per patient during the first year there was about a 70% reduction exacerbation and in the next two years about five percent each and we published our first paper long about this time at which point there was an enormous it decreased in exacerbation rate we've continued to follow the diet for 16 I mean follow the exacerbation rate for 16 years ting down to a level which was about reduction of at least 95 percent and stayed down there during the 16 years and has continued to be that way so you have a rather drop in exacerbation rate and followed in by a very low level of debt of exacerbation going on for years okay so here I have a halt its information the fact that Ms is a terrible disease yeah the treatments are horrible and criminally expensive dr. Swank tells me that a healthy diet will make a difference in MS patients a huge difference we have this a small bucket of money not very much as a matter of fact when I went to Oregon Health and Science University with the idea that we wanted to do a diet and MS study and I told him how much money we had to spend on it they kind of laughed it was about the much about as much money as you use to study whether or not you do a study on a medication but they said that they were willing to do it they didn't think we'd end up getting any good results or very many good results they said to get any noticeable results you got to get people to follow the diet a hundred percent we had to show a 90 percent reduction in disease severity during our one year term it says you're not going to be able to do this I said you know we've got to start someplace we've got to start some research to just get the discussion going dr. Swank has been basically forgotten so let's put together a study and they were very willing to help and over the past three years they've made great effort great sacrifice to get this study done so the requirement was I had to get people to follow the diet 100% and the benefits had to be a hundred percent it says you're not going to show any benefits it's okay so we started this one two year dietary intervention randomized control blinded study all the education was done at my program in Santa Rosa California remember I had to get them to comply the biggest problem the biggest hurdle was going to compliance half the people are prescribed drugs don't take the drugs so I insisted that we educate them at our Center that's all we did we didn't touch the data afterwards or before they collected all the data analyzed all the data so here's what we have we have this randomized trial we could only afford 60 people some were put in the diet group some were put in the control group they're asked not to change their diet everybody stayed on the same medications no medication changes few people quit the study on both groups 26 completed the study in the diet group 27 completed it in the control group and we start we finished the study in March 2013 education is done at my clinic people eat all they want of a starch-based diet no animal foods no oils the diet is based on the fact that the traditional human diet is starch based when you look around the world where you find that all large successful populations of people have lived on diets of corn rice potatoes sweet potatoes beans peas and lentils until they became wealthy the Incas and the Aztecs lived on corn the Asians lived on rice people in the Middle East that used to be known as the breadbasket of the world the diet of the human being is based on starch so that's the program that we run that's what we fed them we fit them starch starch more starch stir the starch starch that's the diet starch and some fruits and vegetables no animal products no oils do you like this picture yeah you like this why do you like this is why do you when you look at this you think comfort food pasta comfort food you have a very positive reaction to this the reason is is because this is your food this is what human beings are supposed to eat and I always have eaten and tell me they became wealthy and when they started eating like kings and queens they got fat and sick like kings and queens so we feed them a starch-based diet okay Mary and I basically live on rice and beans three or four times a week that's our diet so that the treatment for multiple sclerosis involves no omega-3 fats no vitamin D pills no vitamins of any kind no other therapy except for a change from your calorie source of meat and dairy to a calorie source of starch that's all we did the results and I can only show you the results we have available there's still more to be published but here's what we found out so far first of all we attained dietary compliance that has never been heard of before I didn't get a hundred percent to the people to follow the diet a hundred percent we got 80 percent of people to die follow the diet 100 percent these are our results this is based on proof food frequency questionnaire I have nothing to do with gather analyzing the data the results are the control group continue to diet of about 40 percent fat the intervention or diet group got their fat intake to 15 percent and followed on average a fat intake of 50 15 percent for a year no similar adherence to a diet has ever been studied in and no foul will be published soon so we didn't do 100% but we did 80% we had an average weight loss remember this is unrestricted eating you can eat as much as you want these are results that I'm allowed to release to you now average weight loss was from 181 to 171 otherwise they lost on average 10 pounds and a few people who took a few people out that were obviously non-compliant and the average weight loss was 19 pounds he did as much as you want is that important well yes ms is directly to tie to obesity we know in several studies have been published recently that overweight people a higher risk you get an MS in this small study of patience of girls 18 to 11 to 18 years of age overweight overweight girls scuse me oh wait girls had a risk ms that was about 50% greater if you were moderately obese the risk was even higher and very obese girls had four times the risk of you getting multiple sclerosis than tremor girls a bigger study bigger study just published shows that the risk of creating multiple sclerosis and women is twice as high and wove await women is supposed to treat the term women so it's important to be trimmed the other thing we found that I can tell you about is we found a reduction in cholesterol levels this is the control group you see their cholesterol when they started it was 186 when they finished it was 180 so they eat a little bit better during the one year period of time those are the people asked not to change their diet you can see similar results with their bad cholesterol and triglycerides and so on they stayed about the same the control group the diet group however got a drop in cholesterol from 178 to 159 they got a 19 point drop in cholesterol maintained over a year this rivals statins treatments okay the control group the average cholesterol was 186 dropped to 180 our intervention group the average cholesterol started at 178 drop 19 points was maintained for a year is that important well studies have been published over the last several years say yes a purses cholesterol level is directly related to the severity of their multiple sclerosis you find that every increase in cholesterol level is associated with more lesions more scars on an MRI scan you find that disability scores are associated with high bad cholesterol and total cholesterol and you find that new lesions are more common to people with high cholesterol high bad cholesterol you have more atrophy of the brain the conclusion is is that in early multiple sclerosis your cholesterol your bad cholesterol etc are important in terms of the inflammatory activity of multiple sclerosis here's a general overview of what's going on this is again established study recently published on 9,000 people which show that those people who have no vascular comorbidity that means they have no high blood pressure no high cholesterol no history of artery disease their chance of living without disability is 19 years those who have comorbidities in other words have high cholesterol high triglycerides history or vascular disease their chances of living without disability is six years less this is a disease not just of attacking the nervous system but of general health people with MS died 7 to 12 years earlier than the average population so improving their general health is of paramount importance which we have established that we are able to do with the diet study we've we accomplished over the last year we accomplished and are in the process of reporting an average total drop in cholesterol of 19 points drop in bad cholesterol of over 17 points and a ten to nineteen point pound weight loss here are some results that we have from our clinic that I'd like to share with you again we're in the process of publishing this is on 1,700 people this is one week changes in their cholesterol and one week they drop their cholesterol on average 22 points sorry 22 points on average in one week seven days that rivals any statin therapy that you can show me people who had higher cholesterol they got even better drops this is one week results you started with a high cholesterol your drop in cholesterol in seven days was about over 40 points this is diet this is it has nothing to do with change in medications weight losses we've accomplished her and the process of reporting right now our average weight loss and overweight women ad limit of eating you get to eat as much as you want three or four times a day you can go back to the buffet table the average weight loss is 3.1 pounds in seven days and minutes 3.6 pounds in seven days these are cold morbidities I'm talking about remember the researcher just showed you in the difference of being disabled whether or not you have comorbidities you have high cholesterol whether or not you're sick your chance of being disabled for multiple sclerosis here's our drops in high blood pressure that occur in seven days and people are taking off their blood pressure medications tremendous drops all right so we have all this information that suggests that people with multiple sclerosis should change their diet there's no reason not to it cost nothing there are no adverse effects it improves their ball move it's there's everything positive about and I asked dr. Swank why don't why don't people comply and our last is together in 2004 he said you know most people in this country expect to be cured by a pill and to have a cure that is almost instantaneous with the low-fat diet that people actually have to work to get better and half to cure themselves he said one problem is culture we are a meat and potatoes society most importantly there is an economic problem there's really not much money in a diet nutrition has not been taught in medical school for many years still isn't there there's no course in any medical school that I know of including Loma Linda that is dedicated to diet therapy they may talk about biochemical changes that occur based on nutritional changes they don't talk at all about how to treat people with diet no medical school I'm aware of in the country teaches what the human being eats and what all you ought to do in a human being is sick all right and then I asked dr. Swank I said why don't up people at the multiple sclerosis society why doesn't the average neurologist tell a patient you know you ought to change your diet it's not going to hurt you it's going to cut your food bill just makes sense we know that people who are sick have more risk of being disabled it just makes sense why don't knowledge estándar multiple sclerosis society to tell people that and we were sitting in his basement office one day he right here at the Oregon Health and Science University in the mid 90s and he said to me Oregon thank you and he said to me as far as the MS Society is concerned John they don't mention it because they didn't discover it it wasn't their research dollars that found this treatment so they're not going to tell anybody I discovered it in my small office here in the basement of the medical school it's called NIH not invented here if we didn't invent it if we didn't invent it it excuse me this is just business I'm not talking to you about a conspiracy what business would you invest in that takes and promotes things that would be a lost here to your investment makes no sense at all so we started to study this randomized control trial we have more results to publish I would say what we've accomplished so far is exceptional we have shown that people will change their diet and will maintain a healthy diet for a year period we've shown permanent changes in weight and cholesterol levels period these are permanent changes we know that the general health of a person is extremely important when it comes to multiple sclerosis we still have other results to publish but that's where we are to date and I think we've accomplished a lot thank you very much okay ah we're running just a tad late but we're going to take two questions and I invite you to we'll have that right there and right here but while those questions are being asked stand up please or at least I invite you to stand up I'm not going to tell you that's it mine's short when are you moving to Oregon so again when are you moving to Oregon what am i warming to Oregon ah it's a possibility we have we have every reason to come to your fine state and if there was any move Mary and I were talking about this today if there is any move that we were ever going to make it would be here because we have family here we have so many friends at such a friendly environment it not only makes sense I have a license so it's a possibility my question is not really short so if you can't answer all of it but I've been curious and hearing about autoimmune diseases for a while especially leaky gut how is the liver and hepatic portal system involved in this phenomenon are GMOs involved in this phenomenon and does cancer increase in autoimmune patients due to the inflammatory response which does promote certain growth of certain cancers so those are all good questions I don't I don't have good answers for them as far as the involvement of the liver and the kidneys the whole body's involved but I would like to reflect on GMOs for a minute I probably shouldn't yeah I probably should I gave iviva lecture ten days ago on and I risk losing your friendship don't do it okay Han said don't do it I'm going to do it Hans no no good all right yeah Hans I've got to do it yeah I will risk it if I've got you just quit okay III I'm concerned about the distractions that are going on today and the distractions that are going on are gluten-free low-carb and GMOs okay these are distractions that are keeping us from changing the health of people on this planet the health care system and saving planet Earth and I will tell you why it's a important to put these distractions in their proper perspective gluten is the rage 30% of the customers are out there trying to buy gluten-free cookies cakes and candy bars the consequences they're gaining weight and they're not getting healthy and they're missing the mark the mark is the animal foods the animal foods are killing people and planet Earth 1% of people have a problem of celiac disease 1% of people or less have wheat allergies 1% of people have gluten sensitivity maybe but half the people are dying of heart disease 80% are overweight or obese if we put our attention on on gluten-free as opposed to the problem which is the animal food consumption livestock consumption we've missed an opportunity it's the same thing with GMOs they sound terrible they're frankenfoods but there has never been a case ever reported of GMO disease has anybody seen GMO disease has anybody seen a patient cured when they went from GMO corn to GMO free corn any you have where you find it for me because I can't find any cases nor can the World Health Organization nor can any other organization that is weighed in on this this sounds terrible GMO sound terrible but they're not the problem right now maybe 50 to 100 years ago they may be the problem but excuse me we have to deal with right now right now we're facing decisions that will make a difference for my granddaughter and my children you know livestock's long shadow is huge it's destroying planet Earth and if you're focusing on a theoretical possibility the other frankenfoods it's unnatural to take up with genes from one kingdom to another it sounds horrible but it's not the problem where we need to put our attention right now is on what's killing ourselves and planet Earth which is the animal food consumption excuse me I'm not here to win a popularity contest that's why I think we need to get things and the other thing the other thing that it's distracting us from getting problem solved here in terms of health healthcare and our environment is the low carb movement the low carb movement is well you know it's it's terrible it's a you know all the stories you know about the environmental destruction from eating all of the animal foods you know about the health problems we've talked about them here and yet there's this huge low-carb movement going on we need to take and stop our discussion about diets and improving health etc away from low carb away from gluten free away from GMOs and focus them on the problems if we really want to change things I want to change things okay that's what I want to do I want to see a difference and we have to do it now we can't do it later Thank You Hans for letting me say that

Channel: Northwest VEG

Views: 133,697

Keywords: John, Nutrition (Medical Specialty), food, Doctor, Autoimmune Disease, vegetarian, Therapy, Veganism (Diet), diet, vegan, Disease (Organization Sector), Pain, Health, Vegetarianism (Diet), conference, Multiple Sclerosis (Disease Or Medical Condition), Cooking, Medicine (Field Of Study), Health Care (Issue), Portland (City/Town/Village), Fibromyalgia (Disease Or Medical Condition), ms, Diet (Website Category)

Id: fmZdI8jinIw

Length: 65min 26sec (3926 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2013