Donna’s Blog

I’ve just been reading a fascinating new book called The MS Recovery Diet by Ann Sawyer and Judith Bachrach. In their book, Ann and Judith talk about a specific diet that has helped many patients with MS to recover. To find out more about the diet and how it works, I asked Ann to answer a few questions for us.Q. What is the MS Diet?
A. The main principle of the diet is that food (also illness, stress, fatigue) activates the immune cells that start the cascade of events that lead to MS symptoms. Food doesn’t cause the disease as such, but fuels the disease process after it manifests. This can be stopped by not eating those foods which overactivate the immune system and, just as important, by eating foods that help the body repair, restore and recover.

The first step is to stop eating the trigger foods that activate the disease process. Reduce intake of saturated fats, most importantly animal and dairy fats. Keep to less than 15 grams per day- and sugar in great quantities. There are five food groups to which people with MS are found to be most often sensitive. These are gluten containing grains and wheat, dairy, eggs, legumes and yeast. Each person has a unique food sensitivity profile, which can include foods not among the usual suspects. Digestive tract health is crucial so use caution or cease to use: tobacco, caffeine, NSAIDS (aspirin, Tylenol), antibiotics, antacids and alcohol as they can be damaging to the digestive system.

It is very important to be well nourished with nutrient dense foods. The following will help to heal the digestive system (leaky gut) and speed recovery: lean protein, vegetables/fruits, foods rich in antioxidants, raw foods for enzyme support and probiotics. Drink plenty of water; get sunshine (vitamin D) and exercise. As time goes on you can reclaim movement, sensations, your cognitive abilities, and full energy.

Q. What would a typical day’s food choices look like for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
A. Dinner can be a chicken or fish, steamed vegetables, a salad and potatoes. Lunch might be a salad with some protein and roasted root vegetables such as turnips, parsnips or rutabaga, or other fillers (sweet potato, taro root or celery root). Breakfast reflects the greatest change from the usual diet. Breakfast can be soup, leftovers from dinner, baked sweet potato, along with some protein like turkey bacon.

Q. How can the diet be implemented simply?
A. The fastest and most effective way, for the first several months, is to stop eating the five usual suspects as well as limit saturated fat and sugars as described above.

The initial healing will have its ups and downs. The return of your ability to do more will happen step by step at first and setbacks happen easily due to stress and fatigue, or if you come down with a virus. Don’t be discouraged. Keep following the diet. When subtle changes in symptoms can be discerned and you feel better, you can begin testing foods to see if they are triggers for you. As you continue to progress, you will refine and individualize the diet for your healing. Begin to exercise more as your healing becomes more solid and permanent.

For the best healing make sure you eat enough nutrient dense foods with an emphasis on protein and vegetables. Keep stress to a minimum. Remember that sleep and rest are treatments. When you have a return of energy or abilities, don’t overdo it. You still need to use your body’s energy to continue to heal.

Q. For whom will it work?
A. A good research study has never been funded to explore all the aspects of this dietary treatment, so we don’t know for sure. However the recovery diet seems to work for everyone who really follows and works with it. How quickly improvements are seen is highly variable. The road is bumpy, but if you stick with it and listen to your body, you will heal and recover. It takes time, persistence, patience and determination.

When I set out to write THE AUTOIMMUNE EPIDEMIC I had — as many of you know — deep personal reasons for doing so. Like the hundreds of you who have written to me since THE AUTOIMMUNE EPIDEMIC came out, I suffer from a range of autoimmune diseases, including Guillain Barre Syndrome (GBS), small fiber sensory neuropathy, thyroiditis and others.

In 2005, when I found myself paralyzed for a second time from GBS — unable to move much more than my head, unable to reach out and hold my young son or daughter, I had many long months to think. I was struck by the fact that I was lying just a few floors away from where my own father had died in 1972 — 33 years earlier — from what would certainly now be diagnosed as autoimmune disease. My dad checked into the hospital to have part of his intestines removed — for an inflammatory bowel disorder. He was also on heavy doses of steroids for what was very likely rheumatoid arthritis (though we wouldn’t have known to call it that at the time). A few hours after his surgery, his surgeons realized that the steroids were causing the surgical sutures to dissolve. There was nothing to be done. He never came home.

There one day, playing checkers and taking us out for a sail, then ripped away from us, a young father of four — at the age of 42.

Thirty-three years later there I was — paralyzed by a neurological autoimmune disease — with my own two children at home, and told I might never walk again. Every fiber of my being wanted to get up and walk out the door of that hospital, raise my young son and daughter the way any other mother might, love them, tie their shoes, smooth back their hair, dry their tears, play checkers and chess, toss the football, go for a jog beside my kids on their bikes, or even just stand at the sidelines of a lacrosse game and cheer – all the things my dad just didn’t get a chance to do for very long with me.

I’m walking well now, after a long haul. Like many of you, I have good days and bed days; a kind of mercurial up and down that most autoimmune disease patients know all too well. And even on the best of days it’s a little like having the flu by seven p.m. I know, from the hundreds and hundreds of letters and emails that you’ve sent me, that you know how that feels, too. Like all of you, I am continually searching out — and implementing — ways to become as healthy as I possibly can.

And that’s what THE AUTOIMMUNE EPIDEMIC has really been about: helping you, the patients, to understand both what goes into your “barrel” to play a role in triggering autoimmune disease – and what you can take out of that barrel to help ameliorate disease and move toward your optimum level of health and well-being.

There are so many of us out there searching for these answers. Rates of autoimmune diseases have tripled in the last four decades and 1 in 9 women (and 1 in 12 Americans) can now expect to have an autoimmune disease. Indeed, a woman today is 8 times more likely to have an autoimmune disease than breast cancer.

In listening to your “Letters from the Autoimmune Epidemic” you seem to be particularly interested in sharing your ideas and insights about what works and what doesn’t in terms of helping you move toward wellness.

It is my deepest hope that this site will become a place where we can all support, educate and help each other.

I urge each of you to post your story — your “Letters From the Autoimmune Epidemic” — below.

What has given you hope? What helps you on the road to health and what do you need to avoid? We can all learn from your observations.

The registration process allows you to maintain as much privacy as you need.

Working together, perhaps we can make sure that we all get to be the active, vibrant parents and spouses and friends — or kids-growing-up-to-have-normal-lives — that we long to be. Isn’t it time we raised our voices in unison to make change happen? Let’s raise our collective voices — now.

My father would have loved to have had that chance. Let’s not waste it.