Nutrition for MS - The Wahl's 'Feed my Mitochondria' or the Jelinek Swank style diet?

Hi all

I have tried the swank style diet before and found that it helped my fatigue. I am on tysabri and have been relapse free for a while but recently my fatigue has got worse. I think it may be what I am eating and drinking and I am starting a nutritional therapy approach, but I’m not sure which to go for. The Wahl’s diet seems harder as you can’t have wholemeal bread or pasta etc.

Just wondering if anyone could share there experiences/offer some advice?

Thanks

Hi Eski

I have followed the Swank diet (for 18 months) and the Best Bet diet (which is quite similar to the Wahl diet, for five years) without seeing much benefit from either of them. I am eating more vegetables and fruit after reading about the Wahl diet (and the constipation I was heading for seems to have gone). But I can’t understand why she wants you to exclude so many things from your diet, given that her argument is that there are a load of nutrients missing from our diets. If you eat three plates of fruit and veg a day, you won’t have much room left for all the things she excludes, it seems to me. And is the odd bit of chocolate or slice of bread going to make this massive difference?

Just my view,

S

I did try a diet like this in 2006. It made a big difference to my energy levels and got rid of my cognitive fatigue. However, it was awful.

The amount of kale/greens that you have to eat is enormous and each meal takes hours to prepare and eat. At that time, ‘green smoothies’ were being touted as a cure-all to most conditions, but you need a very powerful blender to chew up kale and celery.

I ended up buying a Waring blender on ebay.com and it was sent from the US - it was a lot cheaper than the £400+ that it costs in europe, but the smoothies were disgusting. Blended cabbage is not nice. It’s just about bearable with apple and celery and spinach instead of cabbage/kale.

If I was to find myself feeling that ill again, I’d probably try it once more. You have to be feeling very bad to go this route. Fortunately (touch wood, knock 3 times etc) I haven’t been as ill as that since then. So maybe it works - but you will need a very high powered blender, a Champion Juicer (not cheap either) and a lot of patience. Still, you won’t suffer constipation!

We used to eat a large salad for lunch, with sunflower seeds and nuts and chopped raw spinach leaves and sometimes raw salmon. The biggest change is in your shopping - nuts and seeds become the mainstay of your diet and it’s easy to run out of them.

If anyone wants more info on this type of diet, I’ll happily help. It’s not a cure. I still inject Rebif and take amitriptyline for nerve pain and 4 hypertension drugs and thyroxine. It did help me a lot.

I eat paleo and after a period of adjustment you do get used to it, I love it now and never eat any rubbish.

No grains (so no bread or pasta at all, or rice), legumes, sugar or dairy.

LOADS of greens, veg, fruit, nuts, meat, fish and good fats like avocado, coconut oil etc.

I forgot to add, that I eat Paleo now. The hardcore diet was for about 5 or 6 months only and it took me 2 years to be able to look a salad in the eye again…

xx

This is a link to a presentation given by her. I think what she is doing is marvellous in that she is setting out to prove how repeatable her results are in others but it is important to realise that the diet alone was not even able to stop her MS progressing. She had to add other ‘treatments’ to stop and reverse to a certain extent her MS.

http://vimeo.com/58298773

Hi, I’d love to eat more greens but find they irritate my bladder, something to do with flavonoids I think. I’ve also noticed that if I have too much dried fruit it effects my vision. My right eye, the one with the ON becomes irritated and watery. Think that’s sugar related. Heather